Ramblings of a Uni student in Religious Studies
09-August-2025
on Roman Religion and Cultural Amalgamation
one idea that I find really interesting is that (early) Roman culture and religion could arguably have been a multicultural amalgam!
here's a passage I've highlighted from ''Religions of Rome: Volume 1, A History'' by Mary Beard, John North, & Simon Price
... Recent work, particularly in archaeology, has cast doubt on the idea of an early, uncontaminated, native strand of genuine Roman religion; and it has suggested that, rather than seeing pure Roman traditions gradually polluted from outside, Roman religion was an amalgam of different traditions from at least as far back as we can hope to go. Leaving aside its mythical prehistory, Roman religion was always already multicultural. (Beard, North, Price, 1998, p. 12)
and this tendency to absorb other cultures can also be tied to Rome's founding myths when Romulus accepted people from diverse backgrounds (like slaves and fugitives) when the City was still new and growing
Note: Livy (in Ab Urbe Condita, Book 1) and Plutarch (in Parallel Lives, Life of Romulus) have mentioned this when retelling the early history of Rome and Romulus
[online versions/translations are available via ToposText!]
Romanization / Syncretism of Foreign Deities and Cults
throughout history there have been clear examples where the Romans also absorbed (through Romanization) other foreign cultures by directly accepting foreign deities and cults: like the Mystery Cults of Isis (Egypt), Kybele, a.k.a. Magna Mater (Phrygia), Mithras (Persia); or by Syncretism of a Roman deity with a local foreign deity: like Jupiter Dolichenus (with a Hittite-Hurrian deity, from Doliche, in Roman Syria)
Evocatio
an example of how foreign deities could have been accepted into Roman culture and religion was Evocatio, a war strategy and ritual performed by Roman generals to 'persuade' a foreign deities to abandon the settlement and people they were protecting and be welcomed into Rome instead
one historical (and well-known) example is the evocatio of Juno Regina from Veii, an Etruscan city in 396 BCE (Beard, North, Price, 1998, pp. 34-35)
I was supposed to read ''Connecting Isaic Cults'' by Tomáš Glomb, but apparently the Muses really wanted me to brain dump my ideas and possessed me into writing this
