Chapter 9 Flashcards
So Jupiter has a special attendant to announce callers and another one to tell him the time; one to wash him and another to oil him, who in fact only mimes the movements with his hands. Juno and Minerva have special women hairdressers, who operate some distance away, not just from the statue, but from the temple; they move their fingers in the style of hairdresssers, while others again hold up mirrors.
Augustine, The City of God VI.10: This offers a glimpse of the richness and variety of the private worship that might be devoted to the traditional pagan deities. It suggests that the elite literary sources may well offer an impoverished picture of the religious experience of ‘ordinary Romans’– and that the association of traditional deities with personal concerns may well have extended much more widely than the areas of trouble and illness attested in the inscribed vows. It is likely that Seneca is attacking the excessive attachment to religious practices, the mark of the superstitious person. Physical touch of statues seems to be avoided (but must sometimes have been inevitable- when statues were created, cleaned, and perhaps restored and repainted. We don’t know the procedures used in those cases). Also the expectation that the gods would “show up.”
Listen to this, Africanus, and it will make you even keener than you are to defend the Republic: all those who have protected or assisted the fatherland, or increased its greatness, have a special place reserved for them
in heaven, where they may enjoy perpetual happiness. There is nothing on earth more acceptable to the supreme god who rules the whole world than are the gatherings and assemblies of people joined together by law, known as cities; it is from heaven that the rulers and preservers of the cities come, and it is to heaven that they eventually return
Cicero, On the State VI.13: This does not necessary make these
statesmen gods in the full sense, but it certainly makes them close to gods (especially to Epicurean gods, who don’t need and are unaffected by human worship). Becoming a god was eventually possible for Roman emperors (and their family members) which fits with Euhemerist interpretations of the gods.
After this, when the burial and the usual rituals have been carried out, they place the image of the dead man in the most conspicuous position of the house, enclosed in a wooden shrine. This image consists of a mask that reproduces his features and complexion with remarkable faithfulness. At the public sacrifices, they display these images and decorate them carefully. On the deaths of distinguished family members, they take the masks to the funeral, worn by those who seem to have the closest resemblance in point of size and gait … When they reach the rostra, they all sit in order on ivory chairs.
Polybius, The Histories 6.53: Polybius emphasizes the social effects of aristocratic Roman republican funerals as a source of Roman strength and continuity; it forms part of his wider attempt to explain Rome’s success in war against the Hellenistic kingdoms of Greece and the Near East. These are specifically elite practices (only men who had been elected as Roman consuls had these masks- they represent select ancestors only, not all the family’s ancestors and certainly not every family’s ancestors). The masks were probably made of coloured wax. (They would have represented these men in their political prime- they weren’t death masks created at the moment of death. Masks were displayed in the atrium of the house.
