dinner parties in honor of the goddess. While welcoming the goddess to Rome
and allowing for her traditional forms of worship, the Romans created another set
of rituals to be practiced in her honor; these parallel sets allowed the Romans to see
“Roman” practices and “foreign” practices set side by side, even as the cult itself
was made part of the “Roman” system of worship.
Similar issues appear in the most famous religious incident of the Roman repub-
lic, the measures taken against followers of the Bacchic cult in 186 bce. In that year,
rumors of criminal activity and sexual debauchery among the followers of Bacchus
led the consuls to seek out the perpetrators; eventually over four thousand people
throughout Italy were executed (Livy 39.8 –19). Many features of this episode
remain obscure, because Livy, our sole literary source, has included many details unlikely
to be true in an effort to portray the repression as a reaction against the sudden
infiltration of too many Greek elements into Roman worship. His presentation is
enough to alert us that questions of the “Romanness” of religious practice were still
live issues in Livy’s day, nearly two hundred years later. But it is unlikely that the
senatorial reaction of 186 was motivated by anti-Greek sentiment; the cult had had
worshipers in Italy for many years prior to 186 and Greek elements continued to
find a home in Rome even after this date. More to the point, Bacchus continued to
be worshiped after 186; we are fortunate enough to possess a copy of the senate’s
decree relating to this incident, and that decree makes no effort to ban the worship
of Bacchus entirely, only to specify the conditions of worship (see Beard et al. 1998:
2.290 –1 for a translation of the decree). Many hypotheses have been advanced con-
cerning both the worship of Bacchus and the senatorial reaction, ranging from the
ways in which this cult may have represented a social, economic, and/or political
challenge to the Roman state to the senate’s fear of allowing members of a religious
group to swear allegiance to each other, or its desire to extend its control of reli-
gion over all of Italy. What is most striking about the decree may be the similarities
to the treatment of the Magna Mater, ranging from the people who may and may
not serve as priests to the places and manner in which the cult rituals may be per-
formed. Rather than the repression of a conspiracy, the Bacchic incident may reveal
the concern with ensuring a “Roman” form of worship for a Greek cult.
Similar concerns with Romanness can be seen in religious practice as well as in
the response to individual foreign traditions. In the third century the Romans began
to refer to the practice of sacrificing with a bare head as being Graeco ritu(“accord-
ing to the Greek rite”) (Scheid 1996). In Roman practice, the pontifex maximus
sacrificed while pulling the hem of his toga up over his head; Roman emperors in
general, and Augustus in particular, would come to portray themselves in this fash-
ion. The curious feature of this terminology is that the “Greek rite” was not used
for all Greek cults; Aesculapius, for instance, imported directly from Epidaurus in
293 bce, did not fall into this category. Nor was the Greek rite used only for Greek
cults, for it was applied to the ancient cult of Saturn. Several elements may be seen
at play here, including the desire of the Romans both to emphasize the presence of
Greek elements within their religious system and to draw a clear distinction between
Greek and Roman styles of worship. As the Romans came to dominate the cultur-
ally separate Greek world, their religious system responded to the needs of the
64 Eric Orlin