religion, Roman
religion, RomanThe history of Roman religion might be said to begin with Varro's Human and Divine Antiquities (47 BC), of which the second half, 16 books on Divine Antiquities, codified for the first time Roman religious institutions: priests, temples, festivals, rites, and gods. This work, which may have had the unsettling effect of enabling people to see how imperfectly the existing system corresponded to the ‘ideal’, was extremely influential on traditionalists, and provided ammunition for Christians such as Augustine in the City of God. Nineteenth-cent. scholarship on Roman religion, in attempting a diachronic history down to the age of Varro, assumed an ideal phase, in which religion was perfectly attuned to the agricultural year, from which republican religion was a sorry decline: politics increasingly obtruded on religion, and scepticism was rife. This decline model, which underlies the...
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