RITUAL AND MYTH
Like all aspects of Roman culture, Roman mythology was a complex and complicated amalgam, including Italic traditions as well as borrowings from Greek myth. The subject of myth and mythology in Roman religion is, however, a question of much scholarly controversy.
When taken to extremes, one branch of modern research totally denies the significance of myth, while the other branch focuses one-sidedly on mythological speculations, searching for the “personal beliefs” of the ancient Romans. A more balanced viewpoint recognizes that even though there was some interaction between myth and ritual in Roman religion, myth generally played a rather marginal role (cf. e.g. Beard et al. 1998; Rives 2007). Obviously, this does not mean that myth had no significance in Roman culture. On the contrary, it was a vital element in the Graeco-Roman artistic and literary representations of the divine world. And some of the most important myths (such as the stories about Aeneas, Numa or Romulus’s foundation of the city of Rome) established a mythico-historical link between the past and the present, thereby constructing Roman identity. However, myth was originally a fluid and flexible oral tradition, and did not constitute a set of authoritative beliefs or accounts of the divine world. Ritual behaviour, and not belief, was the touch-stone of Roman religion, and what a person might, or might not, believe about this or that god was largely a matter of personal taste and inclination. Consequently, when dealing with religious beliefs in the Roman world, it is necessary to specify whether the context is ritual, mythical or philosophical, since a Roman might well have different (and sometimes mutually contradictory) beliefs in different contexts. The misleading tendency to identify religious faith, feelings and sincerity as the “real” core of religion is a Christian prejudice, and therefore irrelevant in a pre-Christian Roman context.
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