burial is the commonest and most significant aspect of the archaeological record for
Latium, the area surrounding Rome, between 1000 and 500 bc, with Osteria dell’Osa
being the most extensive necropolis yet excavated (Bietti-Sestieri 1992).
This introduction has outlined two problems. First, different traditions of scholar-
ship have led to radically different interpretations of the early religion of Rome;
second, the gulf between the approaches driven by literary texts and those inspired
by archaeology and archaeological theory is wide. To bring these together is a
substantial and perhaps impossible task; I will simply outline the major elements
of available evidence, before indicating a particular way in which archaic Roman
religion can be located in wider discourses of political structure and narrative.Ancient Sources
Early Rome might be thought to suffer from a lack of written evidence. No nar-
rative history exists, even in fragments, from a period earlier than the second century
bc, and our earliest continuous surviving narrative of Rome comes from a political
treatise, the Republic, by Cicero in the middle of the first century bc, some five
hundred and more years after the events it describes. Moreover, it is not at all clear
that there was anything before the third century bc, either in Latin or in Greek. The
first history of Rome by a Roman, Fabius Pictor, was written at the end of that cen-
tury, and the stray comments in the fourth-century bcGreek historian Theopompus
about the dining habits of the Etruscans do not clearly betoken a wider and more
substantial treatment of central Italy. It is tempting to believe that substantial
accounts were written by the Greeks in Campania (the region to the south of Latium),
but it is merely an optimistic guess. Even if such accounts did exist one would not
necessarily find them of substantial use for writing the religious history of Rome,
just as one would struggle to write an account of Greek or even Athenian religion
relying solely upon its historians.
The gap between the composition of histories of Rome and the events which they
claim to describe is long, and the development of specialized accounts, which we
loosely describe as antiquarian, comes even later. The key name here is Varro, who
was writing toward the end of the first century bc, but whose works are sadly mostly
lost. Inevitably, one must ask whether the historical or antiquarian authors had any
reliable information from which to create their accounts, and whether and how any
such information could have survived from the earliest periods of Roman history.
In addition, we must acknowledge that a persistent interest in making their past
justify or condemn their present made Roman historians and antiquarians of the late
republican and early imperial periods both indefatigable researchers, and unreliable
ones. The desire to discover the past, and to present it in a highly wrought fashion,
was given added impetus by the claimed connection of the Julii (the family to which
Julius Caesar and Augustus Caesar belonged) with Aeneas and therefore with the
earliest history of Rome. Virgil’s epic poem, the Aeneid, and Livy’s history reflect
this obsessive interest in and reinvention of the past, and they were in turn com-
mented upon right into late antiquity. The distortions of the late republic and the
The Religion of Archaic Rome 33