of buildings in the Forum including the Regia (which contains two small shrines to
Ops and Consiva, very old agricultural deities), the domus publica, and the house of
the Vestals. We have yet to be certain of how the story should be told, but one ver-
sion would argue that the rex sacrorumcarried on the priestly roles of the king, at
first in the Regia and next to the Vestals who may well have been very closely tied
to the kings. At some point, the pontifex maximusdisplaces the rex sacrorumand
takes over the domus publicaand responsibility for the Vestals. It is notable that the
rex sacrorumretains the duty of announcing the fixed feriae(the ones we noted as
written in capital letters in the calendar). At least some of these changes represent
the restructuring attendant on the removal of the king and the creation of the repub-
lic; the Regia receives a major overhaul at the end of the sixth century, but retains
that final form for centuries thereafter. What the new republican situation seems to
have achieved is a diffusion of religious power, a situation which thus makes any
individual’s position stand out less from those of others, and which introduces vari-
ous balances. The flamines, rex sacrorum, and augures, who advised on the auspices,
thus shared a complex pattern of religious rites and prerogatives, whilst the magis-
trates preserved the right to take the auspices. The king may have controlled Roman
religion, but he was supported and perhaps to a degree constrained by others who
had religious responsibility; over time the diffusion of responsibility represents a
continuation of a process (Cornell 1995: 239 – 41; Beard et al. 1998: 1.54 – 61).
Earlier we expressed radical doubts about our ability to tell a coherent story of
Roman religion, and those doubts must not be forgotten. Reconstructions like
the ones we have discussed depend on complex associations of bits and pieces of
topography, ritual, archaeology, and narrative, all from different periods, and none
intended to tell that particular story. However, it should be clear that the problem
of early Rome is not the complete absence of evidence but the difficulty of fitting a
mass of disparate evidence together coherently, when there is clearly much still miss-
ing. One can take a position of radical skepticism, and more often than not what
this means is that the archaic period is written off as unknowable and all innovation
and change is attributed to a later period. This is, it seems to me, unnecessary, for
if there are assumptions and guesses which need to be made for the archaic period
they may at least proceed from an attempt to understand what the sources tell us,
and may derive some corroboration from the archaeological record.
Religion and the City
The study of archaic Roman religion is dominated by the figure of Dumézil. His
many studies and the great synthesis translated as Archaic Roman Religion(Dumézil
1970) are remarkable works of scholarship, but hardly trusted any more. Dumézil
started from a belief that one could extract a core Indo-European tripartite struc-
ture (warrior, farmer, priest) from a careful re-reading of the sources. In some ways,
his approach owed something to a belief first that the sources had to be decoded (a
good structuralist belief, but also derived from the distance between the sources and
the events they describe), as well as to earlier accounts of Roman religion which had
40 Christopher Smith