Urso, will have granted the magistrates the power to fix a religious calendar – to
decide, in other words, what gods would be honored publicly, and when – in accord-
ance with a majority decision on the part of the council.
Third and last, the worship of certain gods and performance of specific religious
actions were stipulated by Rome. We have already seen that the charter set aside
certain days “for the sake of honoring the imperial house.” In addition, it orders
magistrates to swear their oaths of office (separate oaths were taken when entering
and exiting public office) “openly in an assembly, by Jupiter, the divine Augustus,
the divine Claudius, the divine Vespasian Augustus, the divine Titus Augustus, the
Geniusof Imperator Caesar Domitian Augustus and the dei Penates,” that they would
act, or had acted, in accordance with the law and in the best interest of the town
(lex Flavia municipalisch. 26; cf. ch. G, 59, 69, and 73). The insinuation of a divine
role for the deified and current emperors is scarcely surprising. But the presence of
the dei Penatesis; all the more so, the absence of the Capitoline triad. Regarding
the last, our analysis is hampered by the absence of an immediately contemporary
colonial charter; the absence of the triad there would be even more surprising. As
it stands, we cannot fix an explanation along a range, one pole of which attributes
the absence precisely to the municipal rather than colonial status of the town, and
the other to the replacement of the Capitoline triad by the imperial house. The first
explanation esteems the conservative nature of Roman public law, and relies upon
the fact that municipalities, no matter how many Roman citizens they contained,
were nevertheless not wholly and integrally subsumed within the populus Romanus.
The second points us toward that moment, visible in Christian martyr acts, when
Roman magistrates might say to Christians: “We, too, are religious. Our religion is
a simple one: we swear by the Geniusof our lord the emperor and we offer prayers
for his health, something that you, too, should do” (Passio S. Scillitanorum3, 14;
cf. Tert. Apol.24.9; see Ando 2000: 385–98; cf. Rives 1999).Reichsreligion
The presence of the dei Penatesin the municipalities of Spain causes some surprise,
for two reasons. First, the Penates were understood to be the household gods of
Aeneas, which he transported from Troy to Rome. By that standard metonymy which
identifies the household of the king with the polity he rules, the Romans came to
regard Aeneas’ Penates as the common and peculiar gods of the populus Romanus.
Their implication in Roman political mythology, and in particular in that reasoning
which viewed the power of the consuls as directly continuous with that formerly
exercised by the kings, was so great that no magistrate with imperiumwas held to
be legitimately installed in office until he had first sacrificed before Vesta and the
Penates. For that reason, we might have expected the Penates to appear in oaths in
colonies, but not in a notionally alien community – except, perhaps, as an index of
just how Roman such communities in fact were. The second reason to be surprised
at the Penates’ presence in Spain is that we know where they were, and that was
not in Spain. They were in Lavinium (Thomas 1990; Scheid 1993; Ando 2003: 220 –1,
229–30).
440 Clifford Ando