Like the god Janus, it looked in two directions at once: back to existing traditions
and forward to the future; we can see in retrospect that the foundations for many
religious developments and practices in the empire were laid in the Augustan age.Some Fundamental Aspects of Continuity
and Change
“Continuity and change” or “tradition and innovation” are perspectives that apply
to just about all manifestations of Augustan religion, as was rightly seen by J.
Liebeschuetz (1979: esp. 55 –100). Before we take up particular topics, however, it
is important to call attention to two underlying and connected developments.
During most of the republic, religion had been solidly in the hands of magistrates
or priests who, for the most part, came from the aristocracy and staunchly resisted
any attempt to diminish their power by admitting others to the club. It is telling
that the admission of plebeians to the highest political office, the consulship,
occurred a full 67 years before plebeians were granted access to the pontifical and
augural colleges (Lex Ogulnia, 300 bc). That meant anything but parity: to the end
of the republic, membership in these colleges remained a closely guarded aristocratic
prerogative, and broader participation remained minimal. Characteristic of the
Augustan age, the change that comes about at the end of the republic and solidifies
under Augustus is not political, but cultural. Most of the members of the priestly
colleges in Augustus’ time continued to be aristocrats, but the real power and con-
trol over religion and the calendar now flowed from professional experts, such as
the polymath Varro, because they had the power of knowledge. The phenomenon,
which pervades all areas of Augustan culture, has been fittingly called “the Roman
cultural revolution” (Habinek and Schiesaro 1997; Wallace-Hadrill 2005) in con-
trast to the narrowly political view of the Augustan transformation that forms the
basis of Sir Ronald Syme’s classic The Roman Revolution(1939).
One key area was control over the calendar. More is involved than a mere reckon-
ing of time: “Calendars belong to the most important instruments of a society’s
temporal organization” (Rüpke 1995a: 593). In Rome, the calendar determined the
flow of public life and, through the annual fasti, marked identity by singling out
individuals for the offices they held and their activities. There was a great deal of
latitude for those who knew how to handle such matters or, at any rate, handled
them. They were, of course, members of the nobility and they often proceeded at
will. The calendar reform of Caesar marks the arrival of expert professionals. They
bring their knowledge to regularizing a haphazard system, and they are employed
and appropriated by the new leader of the state. The process continues under Augustus
with the additional dimension that, like control over the calendar, fastiare not a
privilege any more that is limited to the aristocracy, but spring up all over for local
festivals, magistrates, and functionaries, including freedmen and slaves. In Andrew
Wallace-Hadrill’s succinct formulation: “In slipping from the nobility, Roman time
becomes the property of all Romans” (2005: 61). Far from being isolated, this
occurrence is part of a broader phenomenon: one of the defining aspects of the
72 Karl Galinsky