Leadership in the renewal lay, of course, squarely with the emperor.^4
Horace was as close to a government spokesperson as one could get, and
we may be sure that he here reflects Augustus’s agenda. To confirm it, we
need only look at the emperor’s own political testament, the Res Gestae Divi
Augusti,with its heavy emphasis on temple building and reconstruction
(see, e.g., F.C. Grant 1957, 169–72, where it appears first among a number
of documents that well illustrate the “Augustan Restoration” on pp. 169–
214). Reform was necessarily top-down. In this, as in other episodes of
pagan renewal, for example, the almost single-handed efforts of the emperor
Julian to reform paganism, in part along Christian lines, by injecting a
measure of pastoral care (cf. MacMullen and Lane 1992, 266–73), there is
simply no room for a “sect” or sect-like group, still less one recruited dis-
proportionately from the proletariat.
And what was the attitude of the lower class to reform? For our final
example, let us listen to a voice calling from the crowd for a change of
heart vis-à-vis the official gods and their worship. It is a fictional voice,
but it comes from Petronius’s Satyrica,one of the few sources where we
can have some confidence that we are hearing the authentic cadences of
the non-elite. The speaker is Ganymede, a freedman dining with his peers
(some are well off, others less so, at least to judge from their complaints):
Whatever is to happen if neither the gods nor man will take pity on
this town? As I hope to have joy of my children, I believe all these things
come from heaven. For no one now believes that the gods are gods.
There is no fasting done, no one cares a button for religion: they all
shut their eyes and count their own goods. In old days the mothers in
their best robes used to climb the hill with bare feet and loose hair, pure
in spirit, and pray Jupiter to send rain. Then it used promptly to rain by
the bucket...and they all came home wet as drowned rats. As it is, the
gods steal upon us with woolly feet because we are sceptics.^5 So our
fields lie baking. (Petronius, Sat. 44.16–18; trans. Heseltine)
It is a classic statement of problem and solution as seen by the com-
mon man with a maudlin hankering for the good old days when religious
action, sincerely undertaken, got results: (1) no rain, (2) pray, (3) rain; the
gods used to be on side and now they’re not. From our perspective, what
matters is that the misfortunes are public, and likewise their remedies.
The Religious Market of the Roman Empire 2514 On the Augustan reforms, see now Beard, North and Price 1998, 167–210. Whether the
religious crisis was real or a politically convenient fiction or a bit of both, the actions taken
were real enough and the underlying assumptions were widely shared.
5 The precise significance of the gods’ pedes lanatosis unknown, although the sense is clear:
the gods are as careless of humans as humans now are of the gods.