bodies or, for that matter, individuals; second, the problem of historical change in
the conceptualizations that restrained or promoted the spread of Roman religion;
and third, the devising of frameworks within which to compare religions that spread
with those that don’t.
I have concentrated in this chapter upon civic religion – upon the religious prac-
tices and institutions performed by elected or appointed magistrates and organized
through public law. According to Roman lights, this was Roman religion (Ando 2003:
1–3, citing earlier work; Ando and Rüpke 2006). The practices of individuals,
families, and genteswere held specific to them, and formed part of private practice.
What we tend to call “state” cult was, for them, “Roman,” precisely because it was
shared: participation in it – one’s stake in its validity, performance, and outcomes –
was entailed by membership in the Roman community.
It follows, then, that the practices of citizens abroad, whether that of individuals
or expatriate communities, might and almost invariably did share in central philo-
sophical, theological, and practical aspects of Roman civil religion, but at the same
time they were not expected to do so. They were not understood to be organized
in any fundamental or necessary way according to Roman principles, or supervised
by Roman priests, or performed by Roman magistrates. That they were a mechan-
ism by which Roman practice became familiar to non-Romans must, of course, be
true; but that history must be separately unfolded.
Second, the changes adumbrated above in the ideology of colonization and in the
public law framework of municipal autonomy took place alongside changes in reli-
gious thought and practice. These are significant in themselves; together, they also
form a significant index of developments in the ideology of empire itself. At one
point, for example, the poet Virgil describes a battle between Octavian and Mark
Antony as mirrored by a battle in heaven between the gods of Rome and those of
Egypt (Virg. Aen.8.675–713). In the same era, Livy ascribed to the early fourth-
century leader Camillus a speech deploring the possibility that the Romans might
desert the recently sacked city of Rome and decamp to the recently acquired and
significantly undamaged city of Veii (5.51– 4). The passage was no doubt influenced
by contemporary rumors that Mark Antony wished to make Alexandria rather than
Rome the capital of the empire. But there is more, for what Livy through Camillus
insists upon is the peculiarly Roman nature of a religion that can be practiced only
at Rome itself.
By the high empire, many Romans looked back knowingly on that earlier preju-
dice against Egyptian cults (see most pointedly Servius on Virg. Aen.8.698). They
also wrote histories of Roman expansion, and of cult practice in that period, in which
Rome had systematically brought all the gods of the empire to Rome (see e.g. Min.
Fel. 6.2ff.). On the one hand, these histories reflect a substantial expansion in the
capacities of Roman self-understanding, and provide one measure of the greater
cosmopolitanism of high imperial culture. On the other, it is not so obvious how a
religion in the business of importing the gods of others might then conceive the
exporting of its own.
This is not to say that some specifically Roman cults and ritual actions did not
spread under the empire. The most obvious examples of them are imperial cult and
444 Clifford Ando