The Roman Calendar and Roman Priesthood
We have already stated that no literary accounts have survived from this early period,
but there is one kind of evidence which may indeed preserve detailed and vital infor-
mation that predates the republic, and that is the Roman calendar. The calendar is
preserved in a number of ways. There are inscribed or painted versions, for instance
a first-century bcversion from Antium, and one from the beginning of the first cen-
turyad from Praeneste, with learned commentary believed to come from Verrius
Flaccus. Ovid’s Fasti, a substantial poem giving highly sophisticated accounts of the
festivals, is also a vital source, but the advantage of the calendars is that they pick
out a set of festivals, identified by the use of capital letters, none of which can be
demonstrated to be of republican date, and which exclude a number we know to
be republican (e.g. the festival of Apollo, whose worship at Rome did not begin
until the fifth century). This evidence has been pushed too far. The calendar was
said to have been fixed by the second king of Rome, Numa, but that is no more
valuable as a statement than that Rome was founded by Romulus, and it has recently
been argued that the function of the creation of the calendar was more political than
religious (Rüpke 1995a). Without a written calendar, power lies deep in the hands
of the religious elite of Rome; indeed the sources tell us that the ritual cycle was
originally simply announced by the priests, so the fixing of the calendar deprives them
of a specific task. However, there seems little reason to doubt that the calendar pre-
serves a degree of accurate information about a sequence of festivals which are of
great antiquity, and it is tempting therefore to look at the way that the year is shaped
around agricultural festivals, and to see how narratives can be constructed around
their juxtapositions and coincidences (Scheid 2003: 41–59 identifies as instances two
great cycles of agrarian and civic festivals). It should be noted, however, that many
of these associations are observed by modern scholars, rather than commented upon
in antiquity.
We have indicated that priestly and political offices were closely related, and that
a cycle of public feriaeexisted, but it remains to say more about the role and devel-
opment of these offices in the regal period. There was no single order of priests, but
rather a mixture of different ways of organizing the public religion of Rome, and
characteristically the Romans allowed these different ways to co-exist whilst their rel-
ative importance shifted (Scheid 2003: 129– 46). It is usually believed that the ear-
liest priests were the flamines. The flamen Dialis, the priest of Jupiter, labored under
a remarkable number of prohibitions and duties, and only the Vestal Virgins were as
constrained. The major flaminesof Jupiter, Mars, and Quirinus had to be patricians.
Twelve so-called minor flamineseach dealt with the worship of a single deity.
At some stage the pontificesbecome more significant. Also originally patrician, with
a chief priest or pontifex maximus, their role in law and in advising on the perform-
ance of public and private ritual placed them increasingly at the center of Roman
life. Another figure in this picture is the rex sacrorum, sometimes called the rex
sacrificulus, whose role is obscure. However, there may be a way of discerning a
glimmer of what was happening in the later sixth century. The clue is the complex
The Religion of Archaic Rome 39