Or, if we compare two types of religion, to proceed with great caution, knowing that in matters of religion we are all of us directly or indirectly formed by 1,600 years of Christian thought. We are thus concerned with a method whose relevance extends beyond religion and reaches all other aspects of ancient culture. It calls for caution and the deconstruction of all modern interpretations before returning to the ancient sources.
It has been possible to exaggerate this affirmation of otherness, and it is appropriate to criticize such excesses. At the end of the nineteenth century and start of the twentieth, a certain number of historians of religion were already affirming the alterity of the ancients, when explaining their religious behaviors in light of practices observed in Africa or Australia. Their approach was tied to a grand objective: as philosophers, sociologists, or historians, they aimed to explain the birth of religion. Such was the aim in philosophy, as in sociology or history. The sociologist Émile Durkheim, like the philosopher Hegel before him, or his contemporaries, the so-called Cambridge ritualists5 and the historian William W. Fowler,6 sought the origin of religion or, at least, of particular religions. The comparativism practiced by Durkheim and Fowler did not differ on this point from the explicit approach of the Romantic philosophers. Notwithstanding numerous useful observations, regarding, for example, collective behavior, their interpretations often resulted in theories of historical evolution necessarily oriented toward Christianity. The celebrated essay on sacrifice of Henri Hubert and Marcel Mauss is a case in point, as a comparative analysis of sacrificial rites in many types of religions issues in a Christian theory of the rite.7
All this is well known. Why, then, this return to an already old method of the history of religions, which was applied under the name of religious anthropology and taught in handbooks and monographs, and which appears to be a scientific achievement? It is of course entirely normal for a given mode of explanation to be criticized, not least one that is today more than fifty years old, if one refers to the works of Louis Gernet, Georges Dumézil, Marcel Detienne, or Jean-Pierre Vernant. Their works, and those they inspired, may contain errors and distortions, notably in their use of structuralism, which is often difficult to handle. The problem is rather that the objections now made to their work do not themselves seem relevant to the data at all and appear merely to recycle very old methods of explaining religious alterity in terms of our own religious categories, instead of seeking to understand it in its historical context.
The topic has not only general relevance. It applies also to a specific concept, that of the religion of the city, called polis-religion by those who criticize it. In the pages that follow, I will try to deconstruct this new theory, being unable to criticize ancient religions as the deconstructionists imagine it: one still awaits from them a convincing reconstruction of the religion of the ancients.
To speak frankly, opposition to the model of civic religion has gone on long enough and, at its basis, it consists always of the same arguments, dressed in new clothes. Already in 1912, in the introduction to the second edition of his handbook, Georg Wissowa responded to a critique that had been directed at him on the occasion of the first edition of his book, published in 1902.8 Although the author of this review—in all likelihood Ulrich von Wilamowitz-Moellendorff9—recognized the value of the work, he found Wissowa’s presentation excessively juridical: it exteriorized religious concepts and forms in conformity with the point of view of pontifical law; and it betrayed an obvious lack of sensitivity toward religiosity.
In point of fact, Wissowa’s handbook was an important watershed in the historiography on Roman religion. It is not, however, in its historical perspective that Wissowa innovated, because the first part of his book, which his correspondence reveals to have been finished in about 1890, is relatively disappointing. Overall, that part makes only small advances beyond earlier manuals, apart from corrections to references. On one hand, Wissowa finds himself still under the influence of Hegel and his historical dialectic, and on the other, he is indebted to the Romantic notion of popular religion, of Volksreligion, as a pledge of authenticity. He therefore seeks to distinguish in the tradition between that which is originally Roman, which belongs organically to the religion of the Roman people, and that which comes from outside, from Greece. As it happens, Wissowa’s inquiry was less a frantic search for prototypically Roman elements than a reaction against the indistinct commingling of Greek and Roman elements in contemporary treatments of ancient sources, such as was then the rule: Jupiter was Zeus, and Minerva Athena. Basically, Wissowa did not want to speak about Roman religion while citing Greek myths, as one still did in his day. From this point of view, he recovered a more correct picture of Roman religion. Nevertheless, it is true that Wissowa exaggerated in his approach, to the extent that he admitted that there had already been a mixture of “typically” Roman and foreign elements in the reign of King Numa, shortly after the foundation of Rome. Here one sees clearly the influence of Romantic Volksreligion, the religion of the people, a concept dear to Herder, who was followed in this by Hegel.10 I will not dwell on the influence of these theories, to which I drew attention twenty-five years ago.11 A second disappointing aspect of the first, historical part of Wissowa’s handbook rests in his acceptance of a dominant theory of his day, according to which Roman religion had entered a state of decadence by the dawn of the empire, at the start of our era. This understanding was shared in that era by all specialists and also recalls features of Hegelian dialectic, according to which ancient Rome was characterized by a very impoverished degree of religious thought and at the same time by a fervent religiosity, which was prepared to accept any religious novelty. At the time, religious renewal took the form first of the so-called oriental cults, which were thought to prepare the way for Christianity. Thanks to the opening of the Mediterranean world by the Romans and their deep but “empty” piety, Christianity realized at last a union between the sensual and ecstatic piety of the Orient and the naïve but cool piety of the Greek variety. Apart from technical details, this entire part of Wissowa’s handbook is therefore unsatisfactory, because the dialectical model that undergirds it has long since been abandoned, even if elements that supported that model have not themselves in turn been abandoned by all scholars, as we shall see.
However, Wissowa’s book also contained a second part, which seems to correspond to the term Kultus in the title [Religion und Kultus der Römer (Religion and Cult of the Romans)]. Just as he finished the historical portrait, around 1890, Wissowa had discovered that this way of studying Roman religion could no longer suffice. At the request of Mommsen, Wissowa was reading the proofs of the second edition of the first volume of the corpus of Latin inscriptions, the one that contained the Roman calendars.12 In doing so he realized that one could not continue to write religious history by confining oneself to speculation about archaic rites whose names are written in big letters on the calendars, relying on the similarly speculative interpretations of poets and mythographers. He appears to have realized that there existed an entire other part of Roman religion that had theretofore escaped study, that of the festivals and rites of the supposedly cynical and decadent era, which were also recorded on the calendars.13 A second influence confirmed him in this discovery: his reading of the volumes of Mommsen’s Römisches Staatsrecht (Roman Public Law), which had appeared at regular intervals during the early part of Wissowa’s labors.14 It was at this time that Wissowa decided to devote more attention to rites, to all rites, and not just those of the archaic period, as well as to Roman sacred law. These studies, which took ten years to complete, effectively shape the second, most innovative part of his handbook, which has ever since constituted the foundation of all expert study on Roman public cults.
As it happens, it is precisely this part of the book that shocked, and not the historical one, which was extremely conventional, as I have emphasized. The common reproach was that he had reduced Roman religion to cult, and public cult at that. In so doing, ran the critique, Wissowa’s manual came to describe collections of priestly rules, of festivals conducted by magistrates and the elite, but presented nothing truly religious. One detects in this reproach the odor of secularist criticism against small-minded, small-town religion of the sort that Mommsen had identified with Rome in its decadence: a religion of a people devoted to (one might even say “lost in”) the counting of rites to be observed and benefits sought and received, but deprived of true religiosity. We will return to this point, because the attack is in itself revealing. Let it suffice for now to study Wissowa’s