CHAPTER THREE
The Religion of Archaic Rome
Christopher Smith
The obscurity surrounding early Roman religion is profound. Writing about ancient
religious experience is difficult in itself, but especially in the case of early Rome, in
the absence of any substantial written record, and with a scattered and incomplete
archaeological record, it is bound to be a task fraught with uncertainty and doubt.
There is no doubt, however, that the subject has been, and continues to be, attract-
ive to scholars. Rome has been considered to be a society whose religion is so static
and whose customs so conservative that one might have hoped to find the traces of
the earliest forms of Roman religion in present practice, and Rome has also been
regarded by some as peculiarly bound to its religion, so that some facts of unusual
value ought to be concealed within the origins of its practices (e.g. Fowler 1911;
Ogilvie 1969).
Neither of these views would command much support today; Roman religion is
regarded as dynamic, and scholars tend to eschew grand claims about the Roman
identity (Beard et al. 1998). Nevertheless, we have to make some sense of the evid-
ence that survives, and this is particularly the case because the history of early Rome
has received so much attention of late that it is now appropriate to reconsider the
religious aspects, in light of the kinds of arguments that are currently mounted in
support of a degree of optimism in relation to the possibility of recovering some
kind of narrative, or at least some degree of understanding of the structural under-
pinning of archaic Roman history (Cornell 1995; Forsythe 2005).
We should briefly reflect on the history of scholarship in this area. Roman reli-
gious practice was of interest to antiquarian scholarship in the Renaissance and
Enlightenment, but largely in matters of detail (see chapter 2). The point at which
historians started to take the early myths of Rome more seriously was when these
began to be scrutinized for their historical accuracy and deconstructed according to
modern, skeptical, and analytical methods; the pioneer in this area was Niebuhr, who,
early in the nineteenth century, began to analyze in detail the foundation stories and
early myths (Niebuhr 1828–32).