Roman Religion: Every Father a God

Religion, in the modern sense, is confessional, based on the assent or “belief” of certain dogmas. Individuals who hold agreement between these dogmas are said to be of the same religion. Religion is a matter of choice, a label and an identity. Fundamentally, religion is an element of a person or even perhaps of society.

This, to the pre-Christian Romans, would be absolute nonsense. “Religion,” to the Romans was the cultivation, the tending, of the gods. Just as a field needed to be tended to yield a good harvest, the gods needed to be tended to yield a good life. To the Romans, the veil between the human and the divine was thin. The gods were anywhere and everywhere. Jupiter, Optimis Maximus, may have been Rome’s highest god, but his temples and alters were not the most widespread nor the most common.

That distinction belonged to Vesta, goddess of the hearth whose rites were found in every Roman household. Her omnipresence owed itself to the fact that Vesta herself was a liminal goddess to the Romans. She was both a fully personified goddess and the flame of the household hearth itself. Her authority and the prayers and rites offered to her were deeply intertwined with the authority, prayers and rites offered to the Lares and the Penates, the little gods of the household or place, who were none other than the sacred dead. The Manes. The ancestors of the family itself.

Death, to the Romans, was not the passing between worlds. At least in the earliest and most common understanding of the afterlife. It was rather, the passage of one state into another. From being a creature of flesh and blood, into one of spirit and shade. But the shades of the dead still very much remained on the earth. And like anything else living, they had wants and needs. Meat and wine were offered up to the grave and hearth, not because of ritual prescription, but because the dead hungered and thirsted. What ritual provided was a means for the dead to consume what was offered up.

But what ritual? What means?

For the Romans (indeed for many more than just the Romans), what ritual, what rites and hymns to sing before Vesta and how and in what manner to make offerings to one’s Manes was passed down from father to son in an unbroken chain. Every man was a priest and every head of house, chief priest. The gods whom they nourished, none other than their fathers and grandfathers.

And just as Jupiter would strike down Rome for failing to provide him his proper due, so too would one’s own forefathers strike out against the living family for failing to provide their due.

Common was the belief that when the rites of the dead were not respected, when the forefathers not fed and nourished, did they suffer mightily as shades. Just as the living suffered in times of famine, so too did the dead suffer when offerings were not forthcoming. But unlike the living, who had recourse to their own bodies to secure food, the dead had none but those of their living descendants. If offerings were not made or the rites improperly performed, the manes would grow angry and restless and cause calamity on the living until what was theirs by right had been offered. By the same token, if the dead were satisfied and at peace, then they would protect the living, granting them boons if for no other reason than selfish self preservation.

This was the basis of a family’s Pax Deorum. Every man, a priest. Every forefather, a god.

Family was more than a matter of life and death, it was a matter of eternity. Poor and pitied was the man who had no son. Without a son, who would inherit the priestly office and ancestral rites of the family? Who when the father passed on would make offerings and libations to feed and nourish him in the afterlife? A daughter? Impossible, for she was destined to journey to another family, and take part in their rites and make offerings to their ancestors. One person could not serve two sets of masters.

A man with no son was destined for an eternity of torment. One method the Romans found to avoid such a horrific fate, was the principle of adoption. Among the moderns, the child is the primary beneficiary of adoption. They receive the option of a better and fulfilled life. As such, the child is often adopted as young as possible.

Utterly backwards for the Romans. Adoption was primarily meant for the benefit of the parent. To adopt a son was a grave matter. The adopted son would become a member of the parents ancestral priesthood and abandon totally the rites of his birth family. His new father’s forefathers would become his forefathers. His gods. His previous father’s forefathers would become alien to him and they to him. The son, now newly brought into the family and the priesthood of that family would be responsible for his fathers (and his father’s father and so and so forth) eternal rest.

Is a great wonder then, why the Romans so often adopted adults as their children? One needed to be certain, that when natural means had failed, that an adopted child would have the diligence to fulfill the duties and rites required of him.

It is not often said, but perhaps this is what passed through Caesar’s mind when a young Octavian managed to join him in Spain. Caesar perhaps saw not great ambition, but great piety. A man who would doubtless ensure that his grave was well tended.

The conservatism of Augustus has often been decried a figleaf. A smokescreen for tyrannical rule, but there was genuine love of the mos maiorum in his legislation. When Augustus passed his various moral reforms to promote the birth of children (sons) and to punish the celibate, he did not do so purely from abstract notions of economic and military readiness. He did so out of a right and just fear of the gods. With the end of a lineage, came with it the end of the peaceful rest of uncountable manes. Their familial halls empty, their tombs untended, the maleficent gods could very well lash out at the Roman people for their impiety.

Piety too, was perhaps the driving factor for Marcus Aurelius to declare his son Commodus as heir. For pious moralists, adoption was a last resort. A measure to ensure a happiness and peace as a shade. To adopt another man as a son when one still had sons still living was close to sacrilege. Antonius Pius had no living sons when he adopted Marcus Aurelius and Lucius Verus. Nor did Hadrian when he adopted Antonius Pius. Nor Trajan when Hadrian’s adoption was declared. Nor Nerva when Trajan was made son and heir.

Many moderns think that had Commodus been sidelined with an adopted son, then perhaps the Golden Age of Rome would have continued. Foolish. The Will of the Dead was not something to trifled with. The influence the manes was profound.