Religion in ancient Rome: what did they believe?

“We Romans,” claimed the great orator Cicero in a public speech, “are not superior to the Spanish in population, nor do we best the Gauls in strength, nor Carthaginians in acumen, nor the Greeks in technical skills, nor can we compete with the natural connection of the Italians and Latins to their own people and land; we Romans, however, outstrip every people and nation in our piety, sense of religious scruple and our awareness that everything is controlled by the power of the gods.”
Cicero is hardly the only politician – ancient or modern – to have asserted that his people have a special relationship with the divine, but it is certainly striking that the evidence from Rome in his time (this speech was delivered in 56 BC) does reveal an incredible intensity and diversity of religious activity. The Romans lived in a world crowded with divinities, and they communicated with them almost constantly. Indeed, the following snapshots from Rome in the age of Cicero can show us just how the gods and their worship were woven into almost every part of the social fabric in the booming imperial capital…

Triumph in September

In late September 61 BC, the Roman general Pompey returned to Rome following conquests in the eastern Mediterranean and the Middle East to celebrate his third and – although he did not yet know it – final triumph.
Rich treasures and a very large number of captives were paraded through the packed streets of the city; the general himself wore the cloak of Alexander the Great. It was, according to the later historian Appian, a dazzling celebration.
The culmination of this pageant was a sacrifice of white bulls to Jupiter Optimus Maximus – roughly ‘Jupiter the best and greatest’ [the god of sky and thunder and the chief deity of Roman state religion] – at his temple on the Capitoline Hill in the heart of the city.
In making this sacrifice, Pompey thanked the god for his support of Rome and demonstrated the supposed connection between the gods and the military success of Rome.

A letter to the underworld

This next snapshot takes us beyond the walls of the city and out to the graveyards north of Rome. A woman scratches prayers on lead sheets at night, begging the underworld gods – Pluto, Proserpina and the three-headed dog Cerberus – to dismember her enemies: Plotius, Avonia, Vesonia, Secunda and Aquillia.
If the gods fulfil her wishes, she promises them a sacrifice of dates, figs and a black pig. To seal the prayer, she drives a nail through the lead sheets and buries them in a tomb – the conduit to the gods of the dead.
This appeal to the gods to harm enemies was a curse. Cicero was not thinking of this sort of thing when he proclaimed the piety of the Romans in 56 BC, but the principles underlying these prayers to the underworld are the same as those in the stories of Pompey and Sulpicia: the Romans communicated with the gods in prayer and sacrifice to maintain their favour and to seek advantage.

The gods of Rome

At the centre of Roman religion were the gods themselves. For us, this is one of the hardest things to understand about religion in ancient Rome. After all, few people believe in Roman gods, and we live in societies where scriptural monotheism [the belief in a single, all-powerful god] or atheism are the most common understandings of the divine.
For the Romans, though, there were many gods and little fixed doctrine. Although the Roman state focused on a few important gods, like Jupiter, Juno, Mars and Apollo, for individuals there were countless possibilities, including exotic gods like Serapis [a Graeco-Egyptian god] and Isis [the patroness of nature and magic, first worshipped in ancient Egyptian religion]; and more homely deities like Mater Matuta [an indigenous Latin goddess] and Silvanus [a Roman deity of woods and fields]. The absence of scripture or a church orthodoxy allowed for a certain flexibility in how Romans thought about these gods.



For an educated few, the gods were also subject to philosophical speculation. Sceptics maintained that the gods were unknowable but that cult should be maintained anyway. Epicureans denied that gods worth the name would be amenable to human sacrifice and prayer, but accepted that they did exist, while Stoics insisted that the world itself was divine and that the many gods were a manifestation of that ‘world spirit’. It is, however, very difficult to find Roman sources that demonstrate atheism or strict monotheism.
We can imagine that a Gaul or Greek or Carthaginian, let alone a Jew or an Indian, might protest Cicero’s claim that the Romans were the most religious of ancient peoples. Nevertheless, the Rome of Cicero’s time was truly a place where the gods were a common and meaningful presence in the lives of people – ordinary, like Sulpicia and the curser in the graveyard, and extraordinary, like Cicero himself and Julius Caesar.