THE NATURE OF THE EVIDENCE
Greek and Roman literary sources provide a good deal of information about the non-Roman religions in Italy, but often adopt a rather peculiar perspective. In one famous passage, for instance, Livy describes a gruesome Samnite ritual used to raise a so-called Linen Legion against the Romans (10.38):
A space, about 200 feet square, almost in the centre of their camp, was fenced off and covered all over with linen cloth.
In this enclosure a sacrificial rite was conducted, the words being read from an old linen book by an aged priest, Ovius Paccius, who announced that he was taking that form of rite from the old ritual of the Samnite religion. It was the form which their ancestors used when they formed their secret design of wresting Capua from the Etruscans... At first there were some who refused to take this oath; they were massacred beside the altar, and their dead bodies lying among the scattered remains of the victims were a plain hint to the rest not to refuse.What Livy says in this account is contradictory, and he seems to lump together different practices in a highly coloured and negative account of Samnite ritual. He describes the human sacrifice practised by these enemies of Rome in order to present their actions as impious and deserving of their subsequent defeat (Oakley 2005: 381; De Cazanove 2007a: 44). Other literary accounts of Italic rites also tend to focus on the mythical and sensational. Strabo (5 4.12), for instance, describes the foundation of the Samnite people by a ver sacrum, a “Sacred Spring”, a ritual in which all the infants born in a particular year were dedicated to a god and were pledged to leave the community once grown. Our surviving literary sources, furthermore, although relying on earlier work, date from the late first century BCE or beyond. There are no eyewitness accounts of Italic religion in action; all are written from a Roman point of view (even if the author is a Greek like Strabo).
The result is that, as in the account of the Linen Legion, it is often difficult to distinguish the genuine from the fantastic.Yet scholars have argued that the detailed nature of Livy’s account of the initiation rite may be a genuine memory of Samnite practice, reflecting the precise layout of real Samnite sanctuaries, and drawing on records preserved in earlier antiquarian sources (Coarelli 1996; Tagliamonte 1996: 183-4). For all its salaciousness, Livy’s description highlights a Roman recognition (or assumption) that Samnite religion essentially operated within familiar or semi-familiar boundaries. It had priests; sacrifices were performed; the oath was held sacred. The priest who takes the oaths reads from “an old linen book”; this may be Livian fancy, but there is no reason to assume that the Italic peoples did not have some sacred texts, and actual linen sacred texts survive from an Etruscan context (the Liber Linteus Zagrabiensis). The existence of sacred texts on linen is also mentioned in a letter written in 144-5 CE by the future emperor Marcus Aurelius, describing a visit to the Hernican town of Anagnia (M. Cornelius Fronto Epistulae [Letters] 60.10).
Scraps of genuine information undoubtedly survive in our written sources. Some authors, particularly antiquarians and grammarians of the late Republic, were interested in collecting and organizing what was, even then, often obscure religious material. Varro, for instance, gives a list of Sabine divine names in his work De lingua latina [On the Latin Language] 5.74. Some knowledge seems to have survived centuries after the “Romanization” of the Italic peoples. Marcus Aurelius, in his letter to Fronto (mentioned above), recalls asking a local the meaning of an inscription on the city gates: “Flamen sume samentum”. He was told that samentum was an old Hernican word for the skin of a sacrificial victim, which the flamen (priest) was required to draw up over his apex (a priestly cap) when entering the city - tiny but enlightening details about how priests might dress and act in an Italic context.
The letter also demonstrates that it was possible for technical terms (like samentum) to survive language change (cf. other words such as lepista or struppus: Adams 2007).Archaeological and epigraphic evidence, much of it uncovered in the past few decades, have become key to understanding Italic religion. The strengths and weaknesses of both, however, need careful evaluation. Archaeology has provided copious material remains of Italic cult places, and of the objects that were left there. These “votive” items, dedicated to the gods, most commonly consist of bronze and terracotta figurines of humans or deities (early on, also schematic sheet metal figures), miniature and full-size pottery vessels, and coins. Animal statuettes may have been offered as a substitute for the living sacrificial beast, or else symbolized a request for the gods to protect and increase the stock, or permit a successful hunt. Wooden statues and herms have been preserved in the sulphur pools of the Lacus Ampsanctus in Lucania (Isayev 2007: 36 n. 164), suggesting that wooden votive items were once present in other Italic sanctuaries, but have not survived. No trace usually remains of objects in precious metals, nor of perishable offerings such as food and drink.
This kind of material helps reveal the desires and hopes of worshippers. From the fourth to the first century BCE, the dedications of thousands of anatomical terracottas (human body parts and internal organs) suggest that well-being and fertility were important concerns for the Italic peoples, as also for the Etruscans and Romans, although various other meanings can also be ascribed to votivetypes such as hands, heads or feet, for example symbolizing prayer, or giving thanks for a safe journey. There is no evidence for actual “medical centres” within a sanctuary context, and health and well-being seem to have been within the remit of most deities, with only a few “specialists”. One such was Valetudo, known from an inscription from Castelluccio di Lecce in Marsian territory (Vetter 1953: 228 e-f), and also popular at Bevagna in Umbria.
The offering of votives was clearly a major element in Italic religion. It is not uncommon for dedications to be made in vast quantities, indicating the wide popularity of a particular cult. For example, 1800 bronze figurines were found in the sanctuary of Monte Acuto on the border between Umbria and Etruria; a thousand coins were recovered from Rossano di Vaglio in Lucania. More rarely, items of high prestige have been found, such as the “Mars of Todi”, a magnificent bronze statue of a warrior making a libation of the late fifth century BCE, dedicated at the sanctuary on Monte Santo outside Todi. These objects too were left as gifts to the gods, and are occasionally inscribed with words to that effect: the Mars of Todi was “given as a gift by Ah. Trutitius, son of Al” (Rocca 1996: 111-16). Offerings seem to have been on display in a sanctuary, before (sometimes many years after their original dedication) being gathered up and buried in what are known as “votive deposits” - to clear the sanctuary and/or to protect the offerings from being profaned. Varro (cited in Aulus Gellius 2.10) records chambers for offerings, known as favissae, underneath the Capitoline temple at Rome.
Often votive deposits represent the only traces of a cult site; and in some cases of “sporadic” finds of merely one or two votives, we cannot be sure of the existence of a cult site at all. Large numbers of cult sites, especially in the more remote areas of the Apennines, seem to have been open air and never monumentalized, or at least any evidence has now vanished. Turf altars, for example, would leave little trace. At Monte Ansciano outside Gubbio (Umbria), excavators discovered a modest stone platform (Malone & Stoddart 1994: 145), but elsewhere such simple structures may go unnoticed. Many sites were not built up until the Roman period, although they may have been endowed with altars. In some cases there are remains of monumental sanctuary structures, including, in the most spectacular examples, grand theatre-temple complexes (on Pietrabbondante and luvanum, see below).
Usually the remains are in a poor state of preservation owing to destruction, for instance as a result of the Punic, Social or Civil Wars of the late third, second and first centuries BCE, or neglect, as a result of changing religious practices with the Hellenization and Romanization of Italic areas, and then their ultimate Christianization. Better preserved examples, such as Rossano di Vaglio in Lucania, are more common in extra-urban or rural areas, where the site has not been built over, than in city sites where continuous building activity has obscured or damaged earlier structures. Most likely to survive are the stone foundations, tiled roofs and terracotta architectural decoration, the latter being particularly useful because it is rarely found in association with anything other than religious buildings, and provides iconographic evidence of the builder’s ideological concerns. Tiled roofs and architectural terracottas come into use from the fourth century BCE in most Italic areas (Torelli 1999).The chronological distribution of this archaeological evidence is also problematic in some ways. Certain periods are generally very well attested, particularly the Hellenistic era when monumental remains and epigraphic evidence are found together at sites like Pietrabbondante. However, the poverty of evidence from before the sixth century BCE (when, for instance, the deposition of votive bronze figurines really takes off) is unlikely to indicate that until then religious activity was non-existent; rather, it becomes archaeologically visible at that time. Similarly, the disappearance of evidence, such as particular types of votives, may often be due to a change in practices of deposition rather than the abandonment of a cult site.
Italic inscriptions have been catalogued by Vetter (1953), Poccetti (1979) and, most recently and comprehensively, Rix [1997] (2002) and Crawford (2011), with a corpus of illustrations of the texts. Although the epigraphy is very patchy in its geographical distribution, it remains extremely useful for our understanding of how the Italic peoples viewed their own religious world, and includes some very substantial, although rare, ritual texts.
The most famous example is the Iguvine Tables, a set of seven bronze tablets (I—VII), inscribed in the Umbrian (I-Vb 7) and Latin (Vb 8-VII) alphabets found at Gubbio (ancient Iguvium). The former date to the late third to second century BCE, the latter to the early first century BCE. As the longest surviving sacred texts from classical antiquity they are of exceptional importance. They describe the cycle of rituals regularly undertaken to protect the community. The two main components are the piaculum, the offering or atonement ceremony (Via 1-VIb 47 = la-Ib 9), and the lustratio, the lustral cycle undertaken to purify the city and its inhabitants (VIb 48-VIIa = lb 10-44) (Prosdocimi 1989: 478-80). This involves a large cohort of gods, some of whom (e.g. Jupiter, Mars) are familiar from Rome and other Italic societies, some of whom (e.g. Holo/a, Hondo/a, Torsa) are not. Some rituals which appear on the Tables are obscure, perhaps even totally (Wilkins 1994), but a number are recognizable from Roman parallels, such as prayer, the taking of auspices, the lustrum and even the instauratio - the obligation to repeat an incorrectly performed rite. The Iguvines seem to have had priests equivalent to the Roman and Latin flamines, their own name for whom was arsfertur, and colleges or “brotherhoods” (cf. Rome’s Arvai Brethren). The Tables thus indicate strong similarities between the religious practices of the Italic peoples (at least in a communal and urban context) and those of Rome. Furthermore, key elements of worship such as sacrifice (whether animal sacrifice, or the offering up of, e.g., cakes) are clearly common to all the Italic peoples.Other major epigraphic texts, though still informative, are much less detailed. The Agnone Table, one of the longest Oscan inscriptions, was found at a mountain sanctuary in Samnium (Vetter 1953: 147), and is now in the British Museum. This small bronze tablet, inscribed on both sides, may date from just after the Roman conquest (ca. 250-second c. BCE). It prescribes sacrifices to a group of fifteen gods associated with Ceres. The Rapino Tablet (Vetter 1953: 218), from the Grotta del Colle, details a religious “law for the Marrucine community”. There are many other more minor dedications in the Italic languages, which were eventually replaced by Latin in the first century BCE. Most date from the second century BCE, only a few from the fourth and third centuries BCE, and hardly any from the archaic and classical periods, with the notable exception of some South Picene examples from the first half of the fifth century BCE (Marinetti 1985). The dating of the great majority of our epigraphic material to the Hellenistic period means that the societies they document were already coming under the increasing control of Rome. Their interpretation is thus bound up with the controversial debate about the Romanization of Italy.
Ancient religions were communal religions. In public cult, the magistrate or priest normally performed the ritual act, with the people as observers; in private cult, worship again often took place in groups, whether encompassing the family or extending to include co-workers or a neighbourhood. The Iguvine Tables aside, we know almost nothing about priests and priestly colleges in an Italic context. However, the inscriptional evidence, much of it late, shows magistrates performing religious tasks, as at Rome, as representatives of the community. The lex aedis Furfensis, for example, records the dedication in 58 BCE of the temple of Jupiter Liber at Furfo (a vicus in the territory of the Vestini) by two men, Lucius Aienus and Quintus Baebatius; Laffi (1978) suggests that one is a priest, and one a magistrate, as at Rome, on such an occasion, the priest would pronounce the ritual formulae, which the magistrate would then repeat. There were also other cult administrators and attendants, for whom the evidence is again mostly late, such as ministri and magistri, who belonged to lower levels of society (freedmen, for example). Large sanctuaries must also have possessed guardians and lesser personnel, although again the evidence is minimal.
There is also some sparse evidence for calendars by which the religious year was organized. The dedication of the temple at Furfo is precisely dated to 13 July 58 BCE, but the month is given not only in Latin (Quinctilis) but in its old local form, “mense Flusare” (= mense Florali, “in the month of flusa”), also attested not far away at Scoppito, near L’Aquila (Vetter 1953: 227). The usage of the old form at this date may be no more than antiquarianism (Adams 2007: 72-3), but it implies the existence and importance of local calendars, punctuated by festivals and other ritual events. Most of these are completely unknown, but the grammarian Festus reports the name and rationale of one such festival among the Faliscans: it was called the Struppearia because on that day the people customarily wore wreaths (struppi) on their heads (Festus 410.6L).
The source material for Italic religion is therefore variable in quality and quantity, but now quite diverse, with new archaeological and epigraphic evidence continuing to add to our picture. It is clear that there are some typical if not entirely distinct features of Italic societies’ religions. This makes for an interesting and in many ways still embryonic area of study, although in recent decades more work has begun to be carried out (e.g. Prosdocimi 1989; De Cazanove 2007a).