Review Article 1:Rev Art 09/10/2009 14:55 Page 171

REVIEW ARTICLE

Evidence and Orthopraxy

clifford ando

J. SCHEID, QUAND FAIRE, C’EST CROIRE. LES RITES SACRIFICIELS DES ROMAINS.
Paris: Aubier, 2005. Pp. 348. isbn 2-70072298-1. €26.00.
In the volume under review, Scheid organizes several new papers and revises a number
previously published in order to present a detailed portrait of sacrificial practice at Rome,
as well as an analysis of its logic. The result is an important book in a number of respects.
It provides a clear statement of Scheid’s methods in the study of ritual; it gives a compel-
ling account of public sacrifice and commensality; and it extends the insights thus gleaned
to non-public rites at Rome, particularly funerary banquets. To students of Roman
religion in particular, it offers the opportunity to consider a number of developments in
Scheid’s own work and in the field more generally since he made his initial sustained
contributions to the study of ritual and Roman religion over a quarter century ago.1
Besides an introduction and conclusion, Quand faire, c’est croire contains nine chapters
in four parts, each part with its own introduction, and eight appendices. The parts concen-
trate on Roman sacrifice; sacrifice according to the so-called ‘Greek rite’; sacrifice in
private contexts (both domestic and funerary); and commensality, among human partici-
pants and between humans and gods — in the latter case, the question being how they
understood and performed the division of meat. The appendices provide French transla-
tions — often enough with Latin original, but never Greek — of the most significant
evidence for various phenomena discussed in the text. Notably for those without easy
access to Scheid’s edition of the Arval acta, this includes long selections from that text; as
well as extended passages from the acta of the Secular Games (and from Zosimus’ report
on the same); the instructions on sacrifice provided by Cato — and these are compared
with the Arval evidence in a chart; as well as comparisons between the Parentationes and
funerary honours for Lucius and Gaius Caesar; and evidence for the sacrificial banquet.

orthopraxy and its attestation

Part 1, ‘Facere. Le sacrifice, rite central de la religion romaine’, contains two chapters —
one new, one revised. The new chapter, ‘Sacrifices selon le rite romain’, offers a reasoned
reconstruction of votive and regular sacrifices, following above all the data recorded in the
acts of the Arval Brethren. As such, it condenses arguments set forth in detail in Romulus
et ses frères (1990), Part 3. The reconstruction has two objects: the actions themselves
taken in the course of a sacrifice, together with what we might term their immanent mean-
ing. By immanent meaning I intend such understandings of the importance and effects of
any given action in its place within the ritual as one would need to adapt that ritual to the
contingent circumstances of a particular performance; or likewise such understandings as

1
Scheid himself offers invaluable insight regarding his intellectual formation and current endeavours in an
interview conducted with Philippe Matthey, ‘Entretiens avec John Scheid’, Asdiwal 2 (2007), 125–30.

JRS 99 (2009), pp. 171– 181. © World Copyright Reserved.

Exclusive Licence to Publish: The Society for the Promotion of Roman Studies 2009
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one might glean from observing multiple iterations of a ritual, asking why and how some
aspects changed and others did not.2
Scheid himself terms such understandings of ritual ‘leur sens implicite’, over against
those second-order, self-consciously interpretive understandings that featured prominently
in ‘la vie intellectuelle extra-religieuse’ (278–9). At stake in this distinction is an interpre-
tive principle operating in some relation to a rule of evidence. Given that the Romans
themselves describe the performance of rites as essential, and that no such claims are ever
made in antiquity for aetiological myth or theological speculation at Rome, Scheid under-
stands Roman religion to consist narrowly in the rites themselves. As a consequence, in his
view ‘les sources précises’ from which one might legitimately reconstruct ‘le détail de la
pratique’ are documentary records of actions taken, above all the acts of the Arval Breth-
ren and those of the Saecular Games. Scheid’s valuation of ‘le sens implicite’ is thus an
attempt to distinguish inferences and conclusions based on documentary sources from
those that draw on literary sources placed (in his view) in a heuristic position vis-à-vis both
practice and the rules that governed it.
So described, Scheid’s method would seem to encounter a number of difficulties not
sufficiently confronted in these pages. The most significant arise very precisely from his
sources. A very great deal of what we think we know about practicalities of Roman ritual
and their maintenance across time derives from Scheid’s work on these two bodies of acta,
either on the acta themselves or on other, less fulsome texts, whether narrative or lexico-
graphical, read in light of the acta.3 But we also derive from these texts not a little of our
confidence that Roman religion was orthoprax. For that reason Scheid owes us — we owe
ourselves — a fuller acknowledgement that these texts find their origin in a performance
tradition (in the case of the Secular Games) and an institution (in the case of the Arval
Brethren) whose agents were committed to textualization and ritual conservatism in equal
measure, nor were those commitments unrelated. That is to say, an Arval magister’s claim,
‘We depart in no way from earlier ordinances’ (quoted by Scheid, Quand faire, 282) is not
a piece of evidence autonomous from the ritual punctiliousness observable in the protocols
of the Brethren: rather, recorded on stone twice in the same words a quarter century apart
in the acta themselves — on the latter occasion uttered immediately after a slave had read
from, or simply displayed, the codices on which decisions of earlier Arvales were recorded
(CFA #65, l.14, from 109 c.e.; #75, ll. 11–14 from c. 134 c.e.) — the claim amounts to an
interested commentary upon the multiple commitments that led to the taking up of
textualization and other systems of memorialization and knowledge-production by

2
The term and definition are my own; for a formulation along the same lines by Scheid see, e.g., 184: ‘Rappelons
encore que dans une religion ritualiste, les gestes et les comportements construisent des représentations et des
énoncés sur le système des choses et des êtres, énoncés qui, à la manière des actes performatifs, pouvaient devenir
une réalité dans la conscience de ceux qui célébraient ces rites et de ceux qui y assistaient. Et comme toujours dans
la reconstruction des énoncés formulés par des gestes (de surcroît transmis par des sources indirectes), tous les
détails sont importants.’ (‘Recall again that in a ritualist religion, gestures and deportment constitute
representations and statements concerning the system of things and of being, statements which, in the same manner
as performative acts, could become a reality in the consciousness of those who were celebrating and those who were
attending the rites. And as always when reconstructing statements made through gestures (and especially those
transmitted by indirect sources), all details are important.’)
3
By ‘less fulsome’ I intend both more narrowly lexicographical sources such as Festus/Paulus, Nonius Marcellus,
Isidore, Donatus and Servius, as well as leges arae. Much light is shed on the religious terminology and ritual
background of statal and private acts referred to simply in passing by Livy, Terence and Seneca in particular.
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evidence and orthopraxy 173

religious authorities, statal and otherwise, in the late Republic and beyond.4 More on this
below.
Another feature of Scheid’s method is necessarily implicated in his reliance on docu-
mentary texts. Scheid is a superb philologist and epigrapher, and Quand faire bristles with
readings of difficult and often lacunose texts, especially of Cato and Festus (see, e.g.,
132–41 on Cato, De agricultura 132). But his focus is nearly always on individual lexemes:
some at least of these were no doubt terms of art in a discourse of ritual at Rome, and yet
there are multiple ways we should wish to assess the stability of their meaning across time;
and likewise, stability of meaning along one or more axes in what was presumably an
increasingly rarified language might well be construed in multiple ways. But the inter-
pretive model espoused by Scheid, which might seem particularly vulnerable to criticism
on this level — resting as it does upon the gathering of lexical evidence, often mere
phrases, sentences or explanatory asides, authored in widely discrepant contexts — largely
precludes the mounting of any defence against such criticism: rather, stability of meaning
is discovered or assumed because it would seem essential to an orthopraxy; and texts read
and often emended in light of those arguments are then taken to attest the orthoprax
character of Roman religion.
Scheid’s arguments and assumptions in this arena puzzle not least because he is also a
superb historian, and in particular because he allows on occasion that available data are
insufficient to sustain the extraction of geographic and chronological patterns of signifi-
cance: for example, ‘la variété des rites funéraires ne sera pas prise en compte non plus.
Ceux-ci changeaient de famille en famille, de nécropole en nécropole, de cité en cité. Il ne
sera pas d’avantage question de l’évolution de ces rites. Car avec un documentation aussi
lacunaire et mal connue, pareille reconstruction est, pour l’heure, illusoire’ (163; cf. 183, ‘il
existait un très grand nombre de variantes dans l’acte sacrificiel, mais le principe fonda-
mental et premier était celui que nous venons de donner. Il résidait dans la construction de
la différence et de la séparation entre êtres différents, tout en soulignant leur association
dans le monde’).5 And yet, the same data, derived from ‘des nécropoles romaines ou les
musées d’Italie’, do in his view display an ‘élément constant’: ‘jusqu’au ve siècle avant notre
ère, les tombes étaient remplies de vaisselle de table’ (161). Quite apart from the statistical
problem whether data too lacunose to submit to reasoned exploration of their variety can
nevertheless be taken as significant when testifying unanimously, Scheid here (and else-
where) begs the question, what permits extra-Roman evidence to be understood as Roman
or invoked to shed light on some putative Roman religion. It may well be that no norma-
tive answer to this question is possible, though I would not wish to exclude from con-
sideration the problem that much of the evidence now available post-dates moments when
the Romans made distinct, ideologically-motivated claims to the Romanness of Italy and

4
On the function of (epigraphic) textualization in Roman religion see especially M. Beard, ‘Writing and ritual: a
study of diversity and expansion in the Arval Acta’, PBSR 53 (1985), 114–62; and R. Gordon, ‘From Republic to
Principate: priesthood, religion and ideology’, in M. Beard and J. North (eds), Pagan Priests: Religion and Power in
the Ancient World (1990), 179–98. See also J. Scheid, ‘Rituel et écriture à Rome’, in A.-M. Blondeau and K. Schipper
(eds), Essais sur le rituel II, Bibliothèque de l’École des Hautes Études, section des sciences religieuses 95 (1990),
1–15; M. Beard, ‘Writing and religion: Ancient literacy and the function of the written word in Roman religion’, in
Literacy in the Ancient World, JRA Supplement 3 (1991), 35–58; J. Scheid, ‘Les archives de la piété’, in S. Demougin
(ed.), La mémoire perdue. À la recherche des archives oubliées, publiques et privées, de la Rome antique, CNRS —
Série Histoire Ancienne et Médiévale 30 (1994), 173–85; J. North, ‘The books of the pontifices’, in C. Moatti, La
mémoire perdue. Recherches sur l’administration romaine, CÉFR 243 (1998), 45–63; J. Rüpke, ‘Acta aut agenda:
relations of script and performance’, in A. Barchiesi, J. Rüpke and S. Stephens (eds), Rituals in Ink (2004), 23–43;
and C. Ando, The Matter of the Gods (2008), 72–5.
5
‘The variety of funerary rites cannot at present be taken into account, either. These change from family to
family, from necropolis to necropolis, from city to city. Nor is it a question of their evolution. With such lacunose
and poorly-known documentation, complete reconstruction is, for now, elusive’ (163). ‘There was a great number
of variants in the sacrifical act, but the fundamental and first principle was that we have to give. It lay in the
construction of difference and separation between different beings, while stressing their association in the world’
(183).
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offered nakedly imperialist as well as juridical claims to the reach of Roman religious
authority.6
There is, of course, the further, related problem that Scheid often employs Roman in
precisely its juridical sense: Roman religion is the religion of the populus, the community
of citizens (see especially ‘Numa et Jupiter ou les dieux citoyens de Rome’, Archives de
Sciences Sociales des Religions 59 (1985), 41–53; and Religion et piété à Rome (2nd edn,
2001), 47–76; see also ‘Les activités religieuses des magistrats romains’, in R. Haensch and
J. Heinrichs (eds), Herrschen und Verwalten. Der Alltag der römischen Administration in
der hohen Kaiserzeit (2007), 126–44, where the definitional problems surrounding ‘public’
and populus are explicitly confronted (128) and Scheid’s position defended by careful
reconstruction of the religious activities of holders of imperium); knock-on consequences
for distinctions in his work between Roman and Italian, public and private, and so forth,
follow upon this usage. This is a problem not because it is imprecise or historically invalid.
Rather, it is so because on this issue, as on ritualism, a problem of definition operates a
priori to preclude an overlap of inquiry between Scheid and his (liberal-democratic) Anglo-
phone interlocutors in particular, with their work on ‘Religions of Rome’ and so forth:
(unreflectively) viewing political identity as non-comprehensive, they do not scruple to
disarticulate religion from other forms of ethical, ethnic, political, and cultural belonging
as objects of analysis or components of identity. Scheid, by contrast, educated and work-
ing in France (but born in Luxembourg), is far readier to understand such constituents of
identity as entailments of citizenship.7 The two traditions would appear not to agree —
nor even to agree to disagree — on the cogency of studying at one go all the contingently-
agglomerated religious phenomena attested at Rome, or of isolating those embracing, even
merely ideologically, citizens alone. One consequence in Scheid’s work is a relative unin-
terest in the Romans’ own growing awareness that the porousness of the Roman citizen
body perforce destabilized the ontological status of Roman religion itself.8 More on this,
too, below.

6
Among a large recent literature see O. de Cazanove, ‘Some thoughts on the “religious Romanization” of Italy
before the Social War’, in E. Bispham and C. Smith (eds), Religion in Archaic and Republican Rome and Italy
(2000), 71–6; idem, ‘I destinatari dell’iscrizione di Tiriolo e la questione del campo d’applicazione del
senatoconsulto de bacchanalibus’, Athenaeum 88 (2000), 59–68; C. Schultz and P. B. Harvey, Jr (eds), Religion in
Republican Italy, Yale Classical Studies 33 (2006), especially the essays by F. Glinister (‘Reconsidering “religious
Romanization”’), V. Livi (‘Religious locales in the territory of Minturnae: some aspects of Romanization’),
P. B. Harvey, Jr (‘Religion and memory at Pisaurum’), and A. Cooley (‘Beyond Rome and Latium: Roman religion
in the age of Augustus’); and C. Ando, ‘Diana on the Aventine’, in H. Cancik and J. Rüpke (eds), Die Religion des
Imperium Romanum (2009), 99–113.
7
One might understand the problem thus: the political identity of citizens of liberal-democratic states is
established by their interpellation as rights-bearers. In such systems, fundamental binding aspects of communal
culture such as religion and often even language are understood not simply as non-statal — the object of individual
choice, while communities of individuals like-minded in respect to religion are constituted as private at law — but
those choices are often protected through precisely the state’s guarantee of individual right. Scholars whose self-
understandings are formed by their constitution within such states are predisposed to understand individuals as
more completely atomized and to view a wider array of constituents of identity as objects of choice and negotiation.
Citizens of republics, on the other hand, are bound to each other and the state by networks of entitlements,
obligations, and cultural commitments communally understood and jurally defined as entailed by citizenship. These
might be debated and revised in the public sphere, but they are not subject to individual negotiation at the same
level. It is the co-existence in France of Republican citizenship and individual rights that gives French jurisprudence
on the law on persons its distinctive flavour.
8
There are two significant exceptions to this claim: ‘Cultes, mythes et politique au début de l’Empire’, in F. Graf
(ed.), Mythos in mythenloser Gesellschaft. Das Paradigma Roms (1993), 109–27 (translated by P. Purchase in
C. Ando (ed.), Roman Religion (2003)), and ‘Aspects religieux de la municipalisation. Quelques réflexions
générales’, in M. Dondin-Payre and M.-T. Raepsaet-Charlier (eds), Cités, Municipes, Colonies. Les processus de
municipalisation en Gaule et en Germanie sous le Haut Empire romain (1999), 381–423. The former is concerned
with Roman attempts to devise rituals by which to reify and articulate in gesture on-going anxieties about the
(increasing) internal heterogeneity of the Roman community; the latter studies the reception and practice of Roman
religion in communities of Roman citizens notionally autonomous at the level of public law — in what were, in
Roman terms, the borderlands of Roman religion.
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evidence and orthopraxy 175

To get some sense of the difference in analytic perspective instantiated in the national
traditions under discussion, compare the textbooks of Mary Beard, John North and Simon
Price (Religions of Rome (1998)) and James Rives (Religion in the Roman Empire (2007))
with that of John Scheid (La religion des Romains (1998), translated by Janet Llloyd as An
Introduction to Roman Religion (2003)) or, for that matter, that of Jörg Rüpke (Die
Religion der Römer: eine Einführung (2001), translated and edited by Richard Gordon as
Religion of the Romans (2007)). Beard, North, Price and Rives, though concerned betimes
to distinguish a specifically Roman religion from religions practised by non-Roman
peoples within the Empire, nevertheless ultimately concede primacy to a normative, analy-
tic conception of religion, on the one hand, and to the fact of Empire, on the other. With-
out specific defence — perhaps of the form, ‘these cultures and not others were ultimately
embraced by the empire by virtue of sufficient similarity along some axes, religion
included, so as to enable mutual recognition’ — the rationale for studying all forms of
religion practised within the Roman Empire would seem to rest upon one or the other or
both of two propositions: that the Empire was eventually endowed with a cultural koinê
that embraced specific tenets or presuppositions of religion, or, more problematically, that
the Empire became important in the history of religion when it enabled the spread of
Christianity. But the latter, essentially Providentialist claim, made already in the second
century c.e., is in its strong form patently falsifiable: the Empire was not the world, nor
did Christianity spread first (uniformly) within the Empire before spreading without. Such
claims for the religious-historical importance of the Roman Empire were made initially to
justify a form of domestic religious politics and later to mobilize certain practices at the
level of imperial foreign policy. Debunking them would seem an important task for
scholarship on religion in Late Antiquity, but it has not figured large in that field. Rüpke
is alone among those employing ‘Roman’ in a non-juridical sense in mounting a defence,
in material, economic and demographic terms, for the political-geographic boundaries he
sets for his inquiry.
That said, even treating Republican (textual) evidence, and without drawing any broad
methodological conclusions regarding the Romanness of Italian religious traditions before
the Social War, Scheid has elsewhere shed remarkable light on Roman religion, and
especially Roman religious law, by adducing the evidence of leges sacrae from altars
initially constructed on peregrine soil (Scheid, ‘Oral tradition and written tradition in the
formation of sacred law in Rome’, in C. Ando and J. Rüpke (eds), Religion and Law in
Classical and Christian Rome (2006), 14–33; see also ‘Le délit religieux dans la Rome
tardo-républicaine’, in Le délit religieux dans la cité antique, CÉFR 48 (1981), 117–69). In
any event, our ability to write a history of Italian religion should be significantly enhanced
by the on-going project ‘Fana, templa, delubra. Corpus dei luoghi di culto dell’Italia
antica’, on whose board Scheid serves (volume 1 for Regio I, ‘Alatri, Anagni, Capitulum
Hernicum, Ferentino, Veroli’, edited by S. Gatti and M. Romana Picuti, was published in
Rome by Quasar in 2008).
Of far greater moment, the cogency of Scheid’s method and conclusions, and indeed his
overall portrait of Roman religion, may soon be tested against evidence for the religious
life of Roman colonies as never before, with results that may recursively affect our under-
standing of religion at Rome itself. For in addition to the remarkable, fragmentary lex
sacra discovered at Carthage and published by Lilliane Ennabli in 1999, Sergio García-Dils
de la Vega, Salvador Ordóñez Agulla and Oliva Rodríguez Gutiérrez have announced the
discovery of a cult building in the forum at Astigi, constructed shortly after the colony’s
foundation under Augustus, that housed in some fashion inscribed protocols for religious
actions taken there.9 Scheid’s lament regarding the limited survival of texts attesting ‘la
séquence des gestes sacrificiels’ may perhaps be assuaged.
9
L. Ennabli, ‘À propos de Mégara’, in S. Lancel (ed.), Numismatique, langues, écritures et arts du livre, spécificité
des arts figurés. Actes du VIIe colloque international sur l’histoire et l’archéologie de l’Afrique du Nord (1996),
193–210; S. García-Dils de la Vega, S. Ordóñez Agulla and O. Rodríguez Gutiérrez, ‘Nuevo templo augusteo en la
Colonia Augusta Firma Astigi (Écija–Sevilla)’, Romula 6 (2007), 75–114, at 106–8.
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religion and religiosity

Needless to say, a number of Anglophone scholars in particular, even those who concur
with Scheid in viewing Roman religion as orthoprax, part company with him in their
estimation of the place of interpretation in religiosity at Rome. To state the matter as
baldly as possible, these argue that far from having elaborated an understanding of Roman
religion on the basis of all the evidence (whatever that would mean) and then developing
a rule of evidence on the basis of that understanding, Scheid has brought to bear upon
Roman material a dogmatic view of orthopraxic religion. From this perspective, Scheid’s
rules of evidence effect an a priori exclusion from the history of religion of much of what
was very precisely religious in the (intellectual) life of Romans.10
Another way to think about the distinction drawn by Scheid between the religious and
extra-religious, and likewise about the conversation between him and his interlocutors,
would be to frame the problem in cognitive, epistemic or ontological terms. At what point
in the passage from acts and the rules governing them to reflection on the meaning of acts
do we pass from the fundamental knowledge — the technological savoir-faire — necessary
to the continuance of praxis to individual, metaphysical, and existential speculation so
removed from praxis as to be a gloss upon it? Is there such a point? Scheid obviously
answers the latter question in the affirmative. Indeed, he has done so for many years, com-
mencing perhaps with an essay also carrying the title ‘Quand faire, c’est croire’, written
with Marc Linder and published in 1993 (Archives de sciences sociales des religions 81,
47–62) and continuing with ‘Religion romaine et spiritualité’ (ARG 5 (2003), 198–209) and
‘Les sens des rites. L’exemple romain’ (EntrHardt 53 (2006), 39–71).
Despite this continuity, three notable changes across this period are: first, the
definitional framing of Roman religion in relation to concepts like foi, croyance, and more
recently spiritualité; second, a shift from the exclusion of metaphysical speculation
(‘renvoyé dans l’espace privé, le savoir des raisons ultimes des choses n’est ni essential ni
contraignant du point du vue religieux’: Archives de sciences sociales des religions 81
(1993), 4911) to the bracketing and containment of peculiarly ancient forms of religious
speculation such as aetiological myth (ARG 5 (2003), 207; EntrHardt 53 (2006), 54–60,
speaking of ‘explications et justifications situées à l’extérieur du rite’); and third, the
striving after a model and language that might describe the diffusion of agency and
responsibility in rites as well as the location of authority in knowledge-construction and
its transmission (see now especially, ARG 5 (2003), 207 and Quand faire, 275–9, describing
Roman religion variously as ‘collective’ and ‘institutionnelle’, and in particular ‘la règle’ of
rites as ‘une construction humaine appliquée au mystère des relations avec les immortals’,
‘a human construction applied to the mystery of relations with immortals’).
About these developments in Scheid’s work I offer two reflections only. First, they have
been provoked by scholarship on Roman religion written simultaneously with his own and
by readings performed by Scheid on further orthopraxic religions. Where Roman religion
is concerned, the interlocutor most often identified by Scheid is not unexpectedly Mary
Beard, whose remarkable article on the Parilia gets due recognition in these pages. I note
in passing that Beard, too, articulates her agenda in terms of rules of evidence: literary

10
To clarify, I might gesture at three prominent and quite distinct reactions to interpretive models (like Scheid’s)
that understand religion as embedded and consequently assign (great) heuristic value to inferences from statal ritual:
in addition to Mary Beard’s essay on the Parilia, consider J. North’s ‘The development of religious pluralism’, in
J. Lieu et al. (eds), The Jews among Pagans and Christians in the Roman Empire (1992), 174–93; and W. J. Tatum’s
‘Roman religion: fragments and further questions’, in S. N. Byrne and E. P. Cueva (eds), Veritatis Amicitiaeque
Causa. Essays in Honor of Anna Lydia Motto and John R. Clark (1999), 273–91. Beard, North and Tatum, each in
her or his own way, foreground the interpretive, affective and cognitive acts made by (or assumed to have been made
by) individuals, whether as viewers of (state) ritual or practitioners of domestic cult: more than that, for on varied
grounds each understands those acts as essential components of a phenomenology of Roman religion.
11
‘Restricted to the private sphere, knowledge of the ultimate reasons for things was neither essential to, nor
restrictive of, a religious outlook’.
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evidence and orthopraxy 177

sources should be understood in the first instance as products of the time when they were
written and not naïvely mined for data regarding the time periods they purport to describe;
‘all interpretations of a ritual offered at any given time are naturally valid testimonials to
. . . the range of interpretations of that ritual at that time, and in aggregate to the vital place
of speculation in the stance of individual Romans toward their religion’ (The Roman
Triumph (2007) offers a splendid introduction to Beard’s method and the fruits it can
bear). I note, too, that if less in his own work, then in his work as an advisor Scheid has
bridged some of the gap between himself and Beard: Francesca Prescendi’s fine thesis,
Décrire et comprendre le sacrifice. Les réflexions des Romains sur leur propre religion à
partir de la littérature antiquaire (2007) embraces in two parts both a normative recon-
struction of Roman sacrificial rites (along with a Roman vocabulary for describing such),
and an exploration of Roman literary accounts of the origin and meaning of a sacrificial
rite’s constituent elements. That said, Prescendi organizes her review of the exegeses
offered in the ancient world following the order of appearance of any given gesture within
the overall rite (18–19). This is not, I would stress, an unknowing stance: it follows upon
an assumption that the rite was historically stable and may — indeed, should — at the
level of analysis be regarded as ontologically distinct within the historical contingencies of
a cultural system from the interpretive and cognitive stances of the rite’s participants and
viewers.
In other respects, like others in the field, Scheid has moved in recent years away from
attempts to distinguish Roman religion radically from Christianity — asserting, e.g., that
‘faith’ and ‘belief’ were not constitutive categories in Roman religion, but at the same time
describing features of Roman religion as direct analogues to those things (‘la croyance
romaine était avant tout un acte’; Linder and Scheid, Archives de sciences sociales des
religions 81 (1993), 50) — and towards description in light of second-order categories
derived through a more robustly comparatively enterprise (Scheid cites in particular work
by André Vauchez, Yeshayahu Leibowitz, and Caroline Humphrey and James Laidlow; cf.
Scheid and Jasper Svenbro, ‘Le comparatisme, point de départ ou point d’arrivée?’ in
F. Boespflug and F. Dunant (eds), Le comparatisme en histoire des religions (1997), 295–312).
My second reflection on these developments in Scheid’s work is the simple observation
of at once an impasse and an agenda in scholarship. For once articulated in terms of funda-
mental definitions — what is Roman religion and what counts as evidence for it? — the
frameworks of Scheid and his interlocutors would not seem to permit much more than
parallel play. That said, provoked in part by disquiet at just this impasse, a number of
individuals — notably Andreas Bendlin, Corinne Bonnet, Jörg Rüpke, and Greg Woolf, as
well as John Scheid himself — are now working, and betimes collaborating, on research
into the place of the individual in the religions of the Empire, within a number of distinc-
tive interpretive frameworks.12 What is more, this work is taking place alongside quite
fascinating debate in Judaic and Christian studies on the rise in Christian and Hebrew
literature of the third to sixth centuries of very precisely an understanding of religion as a
distinctive and disembedded component of identity (see Stuart Miller’s review article,
‘Roman imperialism, Jewish self-definition and Rabbinic society’, Association for Jewish
Studies Review 31.2 (2007), 329–62; cf. Brent Nongbri, ‘Dislodging “embedded” religion:
a brief note on a scholarly trope’, Numen 55 (2008): 440–6; and Clifford Ando, ‘Cities,
gods, empire’, forthcoming).

12
Several of the above are collaborating in a DFG-funded Kolleg-Forschergruppe, ‘Religiöse Individualisierung in
historischer Perspektive’, housed from 2009–2012 at Max-Weber Kolleg, Universität Erfurt. Scheid is treating the
topic in his lectures of 2008–2009 at the Collège, ‘La religion, la cité, l’individu. La piété chez les Romains’. Bendlin’s
arguments must for the moment be accessed in ‘Looking beyond the civic compromise: religious pluralism in late
republican Rome’, in E. Bispham and C. Smith (eds), Religion in Archaic and Republican Rome and Italy (2000),
115–35; ‘Sünde’, Handbuch religionswissenschaftlicher Grundbegriffe 5 (2001), 123–34; and ‘Gemeinschaft,
Öffentlichkeit und Identität: Forschungsgeschichtliche Anmerkungen zu den Mustern sozialer Ordnung in Rom’, in
U. Egelhaaf-Gaiser and A. Schäfer (eds), Religiöse Vereine in der römischen Antike. Untersuchungen zu
Organisation, Ritual und Raumordnung (2002), 9–40.
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178 clifford ando

The definition offered above of a ritual’s immanent meaning is intended both to antici-
pate Scheid’s second chapter and to gesture toward further problems of historical method.
For Scheid turns in his second chapter away from the recuperation of an ideal sacrifice to
the study of innovation within a single ritual, that of Dea Dia, across a century and a quar-
ter, based on particularly detailed accounts in the acts of the Arval Brethren from 120, 218
and 240 c.e. Here Scheid argues at once for two things: (a) the existence of an underlying
set of (Dumézilian) rules governing the organization of ritual action; and (b) the continu-
ing vitality and intelligibility of those rules, as attested by the internal coherence of their
manipulation across time. (Those suspicious of Scheid’s language, to the effect that the
‘sens implicite’ of Roman rites lay in their reification of ‘une sorte d’énoncé fondamental
qui concernait le système des choses, qui rappelait le statut respectif des mortels et des
immortels’, ‘a sort-of fundamental statement concerning the system of things, that calls to
mind the respective status of mortals and immortals’ (278), would do well to read this
chapter, for the ‘system’ he unpacks is stunning both for its simplicity and for the elegance
of its actualization in ritual practice.13)

toward private religion

The chapters of Part 1 together crystallize a number of difficulties of method within

Scheid’s practice and common to much work in the history of religion: how, when and
whether to universalize interpretations based on those rare documentary texts that record
actions in extenso; and how to justify the use of other sources, occasionally widely separ-
ated from those documents in space and time, to flesh them out. As I have stressed, these
difficulties seem to me particularly acute when one seeks to demonstrate consistency of
practice, on the one hand, and the intelligibility of innovation, on the other.
Scheid is, of course, himself aware of these difficulties. He resolves them, insofar as he
does, through demonstration. For in Parts 2, 3 and 4 he turns first to a second ritual whose
performances were recorded in acta, namely, the Secular Games; next, to the logic of
private rituals, both those described by Cato the Elder and those attested in Roman funer-
ary practice; and finally to public banqueting. In all three cases, Scheid has occasion to
revisit earlier work. In the case of the Secular Games, one question at issue is the meaning
and scope of the term(s) for the ‘Greek rite’ (cf. HSCP 97 (1995), 15–31); regarding sacrifice
and banqueting, the issue is the publicness of sacrificial banquets and, by analogy, the
necessity of sacrificial ritual in acts of slaughter for consumption (see especially ‘La sparti-
zione a Roma’ (‘Les Romains au partage’), Studi storici 25 (1984), 945–56; and ‘Sacrifice
et banquet à Rome. Quelques problèmes’, MÉFRA 97 (1985), 193–206). On the latter issue,
Scheid mounts a spirited defence of his long-standing positions: first, that commensality,
however attenuated, was perhaps the principal mechanism by which rituals conducted by
magistrates before audiences of limited scope were made to embrace the wider community;
second, that slaughter of animals for consumption had to take the form of a sacrifice (see
especially 252, discussing the use of katathuein at Appian, BC 3.198: is it metonymic for
butchering, or did the Antonian forces actually ritually slaughter all cattle before salting
the meat?); and third, that through the complex transmission and reduplication of both
material goods and ritual forms, private dining enacted and so inscribed in the domestic

13
An English translation by Philip Purchase of the first published version of this chapter may be found under the
title ‘Hierarchy and structure in Roman polytheism: Roman methods of conceiving action’, in C. Ando (ed.), Roman
Religion (2003), 164–89.
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evidence and orthopraxy 179

sphere the pre-eminently social-theoretical postulates of Roman public cult. As Scheid
concludes, ‘manger était, à Rome, une activité éminemment religieuse’.14
Where private religion is concerned, Scheid discovers in Cato a sequence of gestures and
verbal formulae homologous with those performed in public banquets of gods with
mortals (see, e.g., his conclusions at 141). He introduces this section with a statement of
method, confronting the difficulty that Cato’s evidence is far earlier than that for public
banquets: ‘il ne doit pas non plus y avoir d’ambiguïté sur la relation historique entre les
prières de Caton et celles des arvales ou des quindécemvirs de l’Empire: les rites publics de
l’Empire ne “descendent” aucunement des rites catoniens. Ils participent de la même
culture religieuse, et prouvent, précisément, qu’entre rites publics et rites privés,
domestiques — du moins dans une grande famille —, il n’y avait pas de grande différence’
(129–30).15 As a provisional conclusion and hermeneutic principle, at once extrapolated
from a body of evidence and redeployed upon it, the statement is true enough — so long
as Scheid concentrates upon rituals conducted by heads of household in aristocratic
families. But the difficulties with this proposition are several; I focus on three. None, I
stress, are fatal; but each deserves far fuller articulation and consideration than it receives
in this volume. First, it is Cato himself, in a long chapter of normative injunctions phrased
in imperatives or exhortative subjunctives, who urges ‘scito dominum pro tota familia rem
divinam facere’, ‘let it be known that the master performs rites for the entire familia’ (De
agri cultura 143; cf. Varro, Ant. Div. fr. 85 Cardauns (ad Nonius Marcellus Book 11 s.v.
conmunitus 510M = 810L): ‘etenim ut deos colere debet conmunitus civitas, sic singulae
familiae debemus’). That is to say, the evidence studied by Scheid is delivered to him by an
aristocrat, one in a series of such, who saw religion as but one among many arenas in
which the structures of authority and gestures reifying the same within the household
should be homologous with those operative at the level of the state, indeed, should exist in
a fractal relationship with them. Curiously, Scheid himself has argued that certain forms
of domestic/familial and magisterio-sacerdotal power were understood in Roman
antiquity as kindred in extent and expression, notably in the authority to put persons in
power (and animals) to death, but he derives from that earlier conclusion no hermeneutic
of suspicion that the representations otherwise offered by patres/patresfamilias might be
interested (‘L’animal mis à mort. Une interprétation romaine du sacrifice’, Études rurales
147–148 (1998), 15–26).
Second, it may be particularly common in religious studies to articulate analytic claims
in respect to diachronous evidence over against some postulated synchronous culture —
and who knows, such claims may prove valid there more regularly than elsewhere — but
they should always arouse suspicion.16 In this case, it turns out that the Romans themselves
began to offer normative statements differentiating private from public cult at that
moment when they began to worry that private cult was an avenue by which the stability

14
Scheid has provided a further statement of his position in this matter in ‘Le statut de la viande à Rome’, Food
& History 5 (2007), 19–28. Alas, he does not there respond to the detailed scrutiny his arguments receive in the same
volume from Nicole Belayche, ‘Religion et consommation de la viande dans le monde romain: des réalitées voilées’,
Food & History 5 (2007), 29–43. Belayche focuses on several problems: the lack of evidence for ritual slaughter in
the private sphere, which is part and parcel, she argues, of the silence of extant evidence regarding banal ritual
gestures of all kinds; the existence of meat derived from the hunt (and so not ritually slaughtered) in butcher shops;
and the religious status of meals at which meat ritually rendered profane was then consumed. See also Valérie Huet’s
essay in that issue, ‘Le sacrifice disparu: les reliefs de boucherie’, Food & History 5 (2007), 197–223, which points
out that images of butchering in commercial contexts focus on pigs and the carving of them, not on their ritual
slaughter, but argues that the iconography of butchery developed to advertise the skill of the butcher, not his piety.
15
‘There need be no ambiguity about the historical relationship between Cato’s prayers and those of the Arvales
or quindecemviri of the Empire: the public rites of the Empire did not “descend” from Cato’s. They participate in
the same religious culture and demonstrate precisely that there was no great difference between public rites on the
one hand and private or domestic rites, at least those of a great family, on the other.’
16
This is a difficulty of method in respect to evidence that I have attempted to describe more fully in a review of
E. Meyer, Legitimacy and Law in the Roman World. Tabulae in Roman Belief and Practice (2004): Classical Journal
100 (2005), 413–17.
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180 clifford ando

of public cult was being undermined.17 Consider the second law offered by Cicero in the
draft constitution contained in De Legibus, which urges as follows (2.19): ‘Separatim nemo
habessit deos, neve novos neve advenus, nisi publice adscitos. Privatim colunto quos rite a
patribus <cultos acceperint>.’ ‘Let no one have gods separately, either new or foreign,
unless they have been recognized publicly. Let them worship in private those whose
worship they have duly received from their ancestors.’ Latent in these clauses are potential
ruptures at several levels. First, Cicero does not explain the difference between ‘having a
god separately (separatim)’ and ‘having a god privately (privatim)’, but it is clear that he
recognized the potential for individual (as opposed to private) action to affect state cult. It
is precisely that possibility that he seeks to foreclose. At the same time, the public recog-
nition of a deity might seem to hold out the possibility of obligating or affecting
individuals in their private practices, and so raises the question how the commitment of
individual citizens to civic cult was conceived. What is more, the city of Rome regularly
acquired new citizens and resident aliens, to say nothing of slaves, and immigrants of every
legal status tended to travel with their gods (for Roman anxieties about just this problem
in subsequent generations see Tacitus, Ann. 2.85.4 and 14.44.3). What happened when that
which was duly handed down was foreign or new?
A third difficulty with Scheid’s reliance upon Cato in discovering private and public
sacrifice to participate in a singular and homogeneous ‘culture religieuse’ is this: for all
that Scheid takes on board contemporary anxieties with the models of civic religion
dominant in the study of classical religion over the last quarter century (a project
undertaken in far greater detail in the lectures at the Collège than in this volume; and for
what it’s worth, I share many of his misgivings that these criticisms often miss the mark),
his own model has little room for rites practised outside the normatively-sanctioned spaces
of the state or household — those which occurred, in Cato’s language, iniussu domini aut
dominae (without the command of the master or mistress) — and so Scheid provides no
mechanism to account for their far more remarkable homologies with state cult. In his
recent study of Pompeian households with double lararia, for example, John Bodel argues
that the reduplication of cult — once in an architectural niche with penates, once in a
painted niche without — ‘suggests . . . a functional division between the ideologically
comforting — and legally pragmatic — concept of the unified household and the more
socially plausible reality of multiple “households” within the house’ (‘Cicero’s Minerva,
Penates, and the Mother of the Lares: an outline of Roman domestic religion’, in J. Bodel
and S. M. Olyan (eds), Household and Family Religion in Antiquity (2008), 248–75, at
265). Having stressed at this moment the separateness of these cult sites, Bodel goes on to
urge the high probability that the master of the household was involved in the devolution
of familial cult within the familia. Correct this may be, but what is wanted is a model that
reaches beyond the aristocratic household in at least two directions, to its satellites, as it
were, among the recently freed, and beyond, to those existing not in legal or blood
relation, but one of cultural and social observation and mimesis. What such a model
properly elaborated in relation to evidence would show, is that the material, verbal, and
gestural cultures of cult were yet another arena in which practices developed and sustained
by the élite to distinguish itself were learned, adapted, and manipulated in less rarified, less
expensive forms by precisely those for whom they were performed, but who were imagined
within élite circles and depicted in élite representations not as learners or practitioners in
their own right but merely as audience. The technologies of cult thus made their own
contribution to the ‘cognitive homogeneity’ that Nicholas Purcell has identified as
fundamental to the ‘astonishing solidity and longevity of Roman imperial society’
(‘Literate games: Roman urban society and the game of alea’, Past & Present 147 (1995),
3–37; see also Gordon, op. cit. (n. 4); and Rüpke, Religion of the Romans, passim but
especially 12–13, 254–7).

17
This problem is treated at length in the introduction to C. Ando and J. Rüpke, Religion and Law, to which essay
these remarks are indebted.
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evidence and orthopraxy 181

Extended consideration of Scheid’s method in the study of private religion thus returns
us to the problems of rarification and textualization and of the ontological stability of
Roman religion in the face of demographic change articulated above. These might in
closing be reframed by asking whence the normative power of Roman state cult as
reconstructed by Scheid derives. To put the matter thus, is to accept its historical influence
on non-state practice, but likewise to foreground certain problems of performance and
representation in the ancient world, and of selecting and evaluating evidence and
modelling culture in the modern, that with fuller articulation might make for richer
dialogue between Scheid and his readers. Engagement with Quand faire, c’est croire would
be a fine place to begin.

University of Chicago
clifford.ando@uchicago.edu