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How did religion affect the lives of ordinary people?

For the Romans, religion was a very important part of their lives. It influenced everything they did, from whether they left their houses that day or not, to whether or not they went to war.
The beginnings of roman religion can be traced back to their belief in ‘numina’, spirits and powers that surrounded everything and everyone. As the Romans began to conquer and explore, they adopted the religious practices and deities they came across, leading to a vast number of gods and goddesses for every conceivable circumstance and a collation of many different cultures, practices and traditions, all with the common factor of having been adopted into the roman system of religion.

The roman view of religion was quite different to that of our own.
‘To the Romans, religion was less a spiritual experience than a contractual relationship between mankind and the forces which were believed to control people's existence and well-being.’ When engaging with a particular deity, the Romans viewed it much like we would a modern-day business pact, with give and take on both sides, and in giving prayers and sacrifices, the Romans reaped the benefits believed to be offered by that particular deity.
This was a typical expectation by the Romans, even though it sometimes caused problems, as the rituals used in the sacrifices were very specific, for example, in live sacrifices, the practice was to offer female animals to goddesses and male animals to gods, so if the gender of the deity was unknown this sometimes made it difficult to observe the ritual correctly, and doing it wrong meant that one would have to begin all over again. For this reason the prayer often included: 'whether you be god or goddess' and in this way correcting the ritual and pleasing the relevant deity. Not every prayer required a live sacrifice, this was fortunate as there was a prayer for almost every occasion, but prayers generally involved a sacrifice involving a symbol of life, which could be bread, milk, wine, or cheese. The sacrifice also depended upon the kind of ritual being practised, as two clear strands of religion were practised. There was a state religion, dealing mainly with political, military and countrywide festivals, and a private religion, which dealt with religion in the home, fields and family.

The state religion was very grand and demanded ceremony and was carried out by ‘pontifices’, and overseen by the ‘pontifex maximus’. Sacrifices were very elaborate and almost always animal sacrificed. The Romans were so superstitious about everything, that they checked the intestines of any animal which was offered to a state god or goddess (Jupiter, Saturn, Venus, Mars, Minerva, Vesta, Diana, Hercules, Mercury, and Apollo) were checked to ensure that the animal was healthy and fit for sacrifice, and problems, and a new animal would be slaughtered and the ritual begun all over again. Whilst the priests were the perpetrators of the rituals of state religion, everybody attended and took part: parades were help, and people offered their own prayers to the gods.

Household religion was a much less grandiose affair, but just as complex and at least as important to the Romans. Household religion was overseen by the head of the household, or the ‘pater familias’, but he was assisted by the whole family. Each household had its own protecting spirit, or ‘Lars Familiaris’, which in agricultural families was also responsible for the fields. Also found in the household was the ‘genius’ which was representative of the manhood of the household, and was usually represented by a snake. This spirit was associated with the head of the household, and primarily his ability to father children. Each morning, the Roman family would gather at the ‘lararium’, which contained its own ‘lares’ and ‘penates’. Their substance would depend upon the wealth of the household. The lares were symbolic of the families dead ancestors, and the penates supposedly looked after the pantry and its contents. The family would then gather at the hearth, and they would pray and offer sacrifices to the household gods.
There were many, many household gods and goddesses, one of the most important of these was Janus, the god of doorways, who was said to have had two heads, one looking in each direction as he guarded the passageway of the door itself. This was, however, by no means the only god who was involved in a roman doorway, there was also Careda, the goddess of the hinges, Forculus, who was the god of the door leaves, and Limentinus, who was the god of the threshold. Just by knowing this information about the religion surrounding a typical family door, we can see that it is very complex.
Another important goddess was Vesta, goddess of the hearth. Prayers were said to Vesta every day and she was especially important to the women, as it was their job to tend to the hearth, and to ensure that a fire would always be burning in the hearth, just as the eternal flame burned in the temple of Vesta in Rome. As well as daily prayers to Vesta, a sacrificial portion of each meal would be offered to her.

Vesta also had significant importance in state religion, so much so that she had her own priesthood of priestesses. These six young women were known as the vestal virgins, and their duty was to maintain the eternal fire in the temple of Vesta. They were chosen between the ages of six and ten years of age and would serve ten years as novices, learning their duties, and the skills involved, followed by ten years of service in the temple, and finally ten years of teaching the next set of novices their duties. The vestal virgins were held as sacred people by the Romans. If you were to injure one of them, you would be put to death, if you were being put to death, however, and saw them, you were pardoned. The young women themselves were held as sacred, and thus were treated with the utmost respect and regard, but this came at a price. If a vestal virgin broke her vow of chastity she would be beaten and then buried alive, and whipped if she allowed the fire in the temple to go out.

The Romans’ lives revolved around religion and superstition, there were many different offices of priesthood, known as collages. Already mentioned are the pontifices, but there was also the college of Augurs, which had 15 priests who were responsible for interpreting omens of the lives of the powerful. It was their decisions which decided whether or not a person would leave their house that day, or if they would ride into battle. The ‘quindecemviri sacris faciundis’ were 15 priests whose main duty was to look after, interpret and guard the Sibylline Books. They also looked at any new gods which were introduced into roman religion. The college of ‘epulones’ was responsible for overseeing the numerous festivals held as part of Roman religion. Festivals held by the Romans included: the ‘liberalia’ (17th March- the roman calendar began on the 15th March), honouring the god of fertile crops, the ‘fordicia’, held on the 15th April, four days later on the 19th of April, a big festival was held to celebrate Ceres, a goddess associated with agriculture, this included a ritual march round fields to purify them. The biggest festival of all however was Saturnalia held on the 17th of December, which became a time of partying throughout the empire, and there is strong speculation that this is what eventually became the Christian celebration of Christmas.

To summarise, religion for the Romans was an integral part of everyday life for them. They did not have a separate religion to the rest of their lives, like today. For them everything had a spiritual side to it, even as minute a thing as opening a door, and their ‘side of the bargain’ meant that they must observe the practices, rituals and traditions of that particular action or that decision, otherwise running the risk of angering the gods, which would bring down all kinds of bad luck. Religion for the Romans was as much a private affair as it was a public one, and so much of their time was spent following and observing its rules, that it could conceivably be said that religion was the life of the Roman people. It affected everything they did, as a person and as an empire, and as far as they could see, their fate was quite literally ‘in the hands of the gods’.










Bibliography

Information was gathered from the following sources:

http://abacus.bates.edu/~mimber/Rciv/religion.htm
http://www.classicsunveiled.com/romel/html/religion.html
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