Augustus

Gaius had been taught to understand the importance of religious ritual; he would grow up to become a devout and superstitious traditionalist. For the Romans, religion had little to do with individual spirituality or with theological doctrine; rather, its task was to ensure that the gods were not offended and that their intentions were identified and publicized. The chief mechanism for these purposes was a complex web of rituals, including animal sacrifice.

It is hard to exaggerate the centrality of the ceremonial killing of animals to Roman religion. Animal sacrifice was a common feature of daily life, the means by which anyone could give thanks to the gods, ask them for a favor, or find out what their wishes were. Domestic animals—lambs, or young steers, or chickens—were killed in large numbers, their throats slit with a special knife and their blood gathered in a shallow dish for pouring on the altar. The meat was cooked, formally offered to the relevant god, and then eaten. Altars swam in the detritus of death.

Religious ceremonies had to be conducted with absolute accuracy; if a mistake was made or if there was some interruption—for example, if a rat squeaked or a priest’s hat fell off—the entire procedure had to be repeated.

In the earliest times, the Romans were animists; that is, they believed that numina, spirits, lived inside all natural objects—trees, rivers, dwellings. As time passed, they settled on a list of named deities, who looked and behaved like humans. Most of them were taken to have counterparts in the gods and goddesses of ancient Greece. Rome’s Jupiter was the same as Zeus; Juno, Hera; Minerva, Athena; Mercury, Hermes; Venus, Aphrodite; Mars, Ares; and so on. Apollo was the same in both languages. As the Republic’s horizons expanded, equivalences were found with the deities of other, non–Greco-Roman cultures.

There were few corners of a Roman’s life—whether public or private—that were not governed by ritual. Every home had a shrine to its lares and to its penates, the deities of the household stores.

In public life, a priest-king, the rex sacrorum (literally, “king of holy things”), performed sacrifices that had once been the king’s duty. Beneath him there were two colleges of priests—the pontifices, or pontiffs, and, in second place, the augurs. There was no separate class of “religious” specialists, like vicars or bishops; all the priests (except for the rex sacrorum) were practicing politicians.

The pontifices decided the dates of annual festivals and kept a record of the major events of every year, the Annals. Some days were believed to be lucky (fasti) and some accursed (nefasti). Public business could be conducted only on a lucky day, and the pontifices decided which days fell into which category.

On major public occasions, the augurs took the “auspices,” a word that originally meant “signs from birds.” The augur searched for signs in the song or flight of birds, in thunder and lightning, or in the movement of animals, which he would then interpret. Portents could also be detected by consulting the Etruscan priests called haruspices, who examined the intestines of sacrificed animals for anything irregular or unusual. Finally, public records were kept of prodigies, extraordinary natural or supposedly supernatural events, which could range from a temple being struck by lightning to “blood” raining from the sky.

At one end of the Forum stood the circular temple of Vesta, goddess of the fire on the domestic hearth. In the temple, a sacred flame burned; in the large building behind it lived the Vestal Virgins, noble-born women sworn to chastity, who tended the flame. And adjacent the Domus Publica, Public House, was the official residence of the chief priest, or pontifex maximus (a title to be assumed centuries later by the Roman Catholic pope). He was the Vestals’ guardian and the chairman of the college of pontiffs.

The current pontifex maximus was Julius Caesar. There was a vacancy in the college, and it was surely at his instance that his great-nephew was appointed to fill it on the day of his coming of age, a high honor. Immediately putting aside his brand-new toga virilis, Gaius assumed the garments of priestly office—a conical hat made of undressed leather, and a red-striped toga—and then conducted a public sacrifice for the first time in his life. Although the procedure was familiar, the strain on him will have been intense. Animals do not always behave predictably and, of course, every detail of the ceremony had to be correctly observed.

Gaius then made his way up the winding road that led from the Forum to the Capitol, Rome’s citadel, where a great temple of Jupiter stood. Chief of the Olympian divinities, Jupiter was, above all, the god of the civic community, into which he welcomed the new citizen.