>>>>In the 50 years that followed the defeat of the Carthaginians in 201 BC, the Roman
Republic became an empire, a powerful political hegemon that dominated the Mediterranean.
This transformation brought with it social and economic changes within the society of
Rome that would destabilize the traditional system of the mixed constitution, of the Roman
Republic itself. Let's look at some of the controversies that witnessed the changes in
Rome in the 2nd century BC, first a religious one and then an economic one.
In 186 BC the city of Rome itself witnessed an extraordinary episode that we know as the Bacchanalian conspiracy.
We know about these events mostly through the history of Livy, the great Republican
historian whose history is our main source for the story of Rome in its early years.
Livy describes in great detail the events of this year -- 186 BC, which saw the Roman
state react swiftly and severely against what it perceived as illegitimate religious change.
In 186 BC the consuls, the high magistrates of the Roman state, learned of a new religious
cult that had begun to spread throughout the city of Rome, a kind of religious cult centered
around the worship of the god Bacchus: the Greek Dionysus, the god of wine, god of madness,
god of ecstasy. In this year, the Roman consuls learned that the worship of this god Bacchus,
Dionysus, had spread in a religious movement throughout the city of Rome, across the cities
of Italy, and that he was worshiped in ecstatic rituals, principally at night. Now in this
year the consuls would discover this new religious cult, would ban it by law, and would declare
execution for those who violated the law. In other words, they would declare the death
penalty for certain kinds of religious acts. This is not only an episode that reveals a
great deal about the transformations in the city of Rome in this period, but it also raises
fundamental questions about the nature of republicanism and its relation to religion.
But to understand why the Bacchanalian conspiracy is such a problem for the Roman state, we
need to understand some things about ancient paganism. The Romans in this period are polytheists,
that is, they worship many gods. Ancient primitive polytheism is actually the far more common
kind of religious system in the ancient world. Judaism, a monotheistic religion, is the sole
exception in the broader Western Eurasian world in this period for worshiping one God,
and Christianity does not yet exist -- nor, of course, does Islam. So the Romans worshiped
many gods and their gods are part of nature. Their gods exist throughout the natural world.
Jupiter, the Greek Zeus is the god of the sky, the high god, the king of the gods. He's
the god of thunder and lightning, and so the Romans have truly countless numbers of gods.
Gods that watch over for their safety, gods that protect them, gods that provide for them.
Ancient polytheism is closely connected to agriculture. This is an agricultural society
and it worships traditional agricultural gods, gods who ensure that the cycle of the seasons
goes on, gods who ensure that it rains, gods who ensure that the harvest will be good,
gods who ensure the fertility of fields and of families. Ancient polytheism is close to
nature. It's also very different, in many ways, from what we think of as Judaism and
Christianity. Ancient polytheism is a religion of the state. The Roman people worship the
Roman gods, and this is very different from our modern conception of religion as somehow
a matter of private belief. For the Romans, religion is not principally about belief.
It's above all about ritual. It's above all about cult. It's about the maintenance of
traditions that honor the gods and maintain the peace between the city and the gods, that
maintain what the Romans call the "pax deorum," the peace with the gods, that keep the Romans
in good stead with the divine powers that rule the Earth. And so ancient polytheism
isn't a matter belief, it's a matter of action, and it's above all a public system of religion.
We think of religion as very private, it's somehow individual conscience; it can even
be impolite to ask people about their private beliefs. But for the Romans, religion isn't
a private affair at all. Religion is fundamentally public. It's something that is part of the
state. It's part of the common life; it's part of the Republic. Think of a few ways
in which this manifests itself. One of the ways that the public nature of ancient polytheism
manifests itself is that the Roman people worship the Roman gods. Now individuals may
have private household gods, ancestors, what the Romans called "Lares" where they worship
individual dead ancestors as part of their household religious cult. But the high gods
are worshiped as an act of state by the Roman people, collectively. Priests are in many
cases actually elected offices. The high priest, the pontifex maximus, is an elected office
of state. So far from their being what we think of as a separation between church and
state, there's absolutely no separation between church and state. The religion is simply part
of the state's normal activities. The high priest is an elected office. The college of
priests that rule over the various Roman cults are part of the Republic itself. The temples
all across the city of Rome aren't like our churches or synagogues or mosques--private
buildings. They're public buildings. They're just as much public buildings as the courthouse
is in our own society. So religion and the state are completely intertwined. They're
part of the traditions that the Roman people maintain in order to maintain the favor of
the gods. The Romans think that one of the causes of their success is that they are favored
by the gods, precisely because they punctiliously maintain the rituals that keep the gods happy
with the Roman state. And so religion is a public part of the life of the city, and it's
the way that the state ensures its well-being and ensures that it is given the favor of
the gods, both in its agricultural system and in its military affairs. And so the Romans
take new kinds of religious or devious kinds of religious movements very seriously, as
an offense against the public order. And so in 186 BC when it comes to the awareness of
the consuls that there's a new cult that exists outside the traditional set of rituals of
the city, that is, in fact, practiced at night, and that involves what the Romans consider
very strange kinds of ritual practices that involve drunkenness, the use of wine, this
is the god Bacchus, and as well kinds of disordered sexual activity. The Romans believed that
the Bacchanalian kind of religious worship involves all sorts of ecstatic sexual practices
that are part of the religious rights. And so in various ways, the practices that are
part of this cult, which involve for the Romans, deviant sexual practices in which women are
given certain kinds of religious prominence that are outside the traditional Roman mainstream,
in which there is drunkenness, and which is happening under the cloak of darkness in the
middle of the night, and which is involving various elements of society that somehow destabilizes
their traditional social hierarchy of Rome and mixes slaves and freed persons and citizens
and aristocrats in ways that are untraditional for the Roman social order. All of these contribute
to the sense that this religious cult is a force of destabilization. That it's somehow
dangerous, that it's somehow--it jeopardizes the Roman social order, and jeopardizes the
favor of the gods that the Romans work so hard to maintain. When the consuls become
aware of this religious practice, they take swift action. They investigate to find out
what's happening and how widespread the cult is, and they issue a law valid for Rome and
in fact all of Italy, that bans any involvement in this ritual cult, and that does so under
severe penalties for those who are involved. And in fact we hear that thousands of people
are eventually executed. Now, for us, this kind of action would seem to violate the most
basic tenants of religious freedom--free exercise of religion and disestablishment of church
and state. But in fact, the Romans don't have a First Amendment, they don't have the Bill
of Rights like we do. And they don't have disestablishment, that is, the idea that the
state can't be part of the religious worship of the people. It's precisely the opposite.
Paganism, ancient Roman polytheism, is an established religion. It's part of the public
structure of life. And so this raises basic questions about the nature of law and justice
and about the meaning of Republicanism as a kind of political ideology. Is our way of
organizing rights, in which individuals have free exercise and in which there is no establishment
of church and state, is that just or is that simply our cultural convention? Were the consuls
right to put down a deviant, in their mind, religious movement in 186 BC, or is that somehow
fundamentally unacceptable? Should people across all times and places
be allowed to worship as they wish?