A comment about Roman religion

Flamen Dalis - a priest of Jupiter

Every Roman was a priest, a prophet and a king in his own home.  He was a priest and called to live in accord with the gods - that meant he had to be moral and seek the harder right over the easier wrong.  To do otherwise is to invite a curse on him and whom ever he came into contact with.  

Romans worked hard to live pious lives.  You hear that over and over again in the lives written by Plutarch and the works of Virgil.  The word sacred comes from the latin word sacer.

The Roman pagan ethos was fertile ground for the Christianity that would ripen there.

The Greeks and proto-Romans have been in contact with each other since the Greek colonization starting in the 8th century BC.  This is incidentally when the Phoenicians - the mythical Queen Dido -  established the city of Carthage.

The Greeks influenced the proto-Romans whether they be Latins, Etruscans and Umbrian or Italiac peoples.  And the Near Eastern peoples of the Levant and modern day Iraq influenced the Greeks.   There is evidence that Ishtar is Isis and Isis is Aphrodite (Julius Caesar's great great great granny - Venus goddess of love.)  That is not clear what is clear is that these peoples traded amongst each other and that ideas as far away as the Indus river valley influenced the Greco-Roman world.

They did not worship astrology.  Worship is when you sacrifice something to a deity.  Religion, as it is today, the nexus of science, politics, philosophy, trade and culture.  The word culture derives itself from the word cult.  Priests studied the stars and astrological charts in order to give farmers accurate information about the seasons and when to have feast days. Politicians who were also priests interpreted star charts and delayed political votes to garner the opinions of the Gods.  These priests had intramural debates amongst themselves.  They organized colleges of priests and developed a hierarchy.

Omens factored into their lives.  Astrology, dreams, the auspices these are the communication that occurred with the physical world and the mystical world of beyond. 

If the omens were bad, someone else would take them until they were good or they went somewhere else.  It did influence their decisions as prayer does today.  They also prayed.  

Here is a picture I took of the Getty Villa a replica of the destroyed villa in Herculaneum, a neo-Greek playground in the Campagnia province for the Rich and Famous.  Think Roman Vegas!

The Romans had a personal relationship with the gods.  They refer to them often.

Polytheistic religions tend to be additive.  When two civilizations meet their gods would marry each other.  They would conquer peoples who had different gods and the conquered peoples gods would find their way into the public square as one generation would be raised by the enemy in the form of a slave.  They kidnapped gods.  They invited gods into their cities which the Romans did with Venus Eryx when Hannibal threatened to annihilate Rome.

They didn't make these gods up like the god of finding lost stuff or the god of the nice smelling latrine.  These gods were either historical persons who achieved greatness like Hercules or the twin horsemen deemed to the Dioscuri (Castor and Pollux) in resisting Tarquin the Proud.  Or they were foreign gods who gave the Romans favor like the Temple to the Unknown God.  

Caesar worship was a crass political calculation as Julius Caesar was the most crass politician in the history of the Republic.