Polymnia. Studi di Archeologia n.10

The contribution examines the role played by the collegium of XVviri s.f. in overcoming moments of crisis through the introduction of foreign deities, such as Asclepius, Mater Magna and Ceres, among the sacra populi Romani. Their task, after admitting the new divinity in the Roman pantheon, was to control its worshipers: they had to protect the respect of the mos maiorum.

This paper tries to analyse synthetically the local origins and the romanised development of the cult of the Matronae. We explain its organisation in the civitas Ubiorum, then in the colonia Agrippinensis (CCAA) in Köln, and also propose to understand which function the Matronae exercise, and in the other hand, the Matres at different levels of civic protection.

Dès son arrivée à Rome, la Mère des dieux a fait l’objet d’un double culte: l’un officiel célébré par les autorités romaines selon leurs propres rites, l’autre toléré et célébré par un couple de prêtres phrygiens venu spécialement à Rome pour continuer à rendre un culte à la déesse selon leurs propres coutumes. Si nous ignorons tout de ce culte phrygien, nous sommes, en revanche, beaucoup mieux renseignés sur le culte officiel romain et sur son organisation. Cette étude s’interroge sur le rôle exercé par le collège des quindécemvirs dans l’organisation du culte métroaque notamment à travers l’élection des prêtres et prêtresses de la déesse et des autres acteurs cultuels, ainsi que dans la participation de ce collège à certains rites.

The period when Egyptian cults first appear in Rome is generally considered as being relatively late. However, a re-examination of the available data (literary, epigraphic and archaeological) in the light of the earliest relationships between Rome and Ptolemaic Egypt, allows us to reconsider this position. Various documents attest the presence, both at Rome and Ostia, of such cults from at least the 2nd century B.C., naturally in a private setting. This is the case of the temple of Isis Capitolina, built on the Capitolium at latest at the end of this century. As regards the creation of an official cult, there is no reason to dispute the precise indications of Dio Cassius, who records the foundation at Rome of a temple of Isis and Serapis, probably that of the Campus Martius, by the triumvirs in 43 B.C.

Until recently, there has been a tendency to view learned Latin poetry of the late Republican period as a chapter of Hellenistic poetry, a perspective which has overshadowed the role played by such poetry in bringing about the more specifically Roman developments of this tradition. As a case study, this paper proposes a focus on Catullus’ poem 64, a small-scale epic poem (epyllion) in which the conciliation of differences – existential, religious, cultural, linguistic, stylistic – is thematised, and is thus refracted throughout the many layers of the text itself. From a standpoint located at the heart of a present age ‘of iron’, devoid of justice and of the gods, stems the yearning for the opposite condition, which the poem’s narrator identifies in Greek myth and, more precisely, at the heart of the heroic age. The narrator’s utterance is a sort of poetic ritual which, availing itself of a number of Greek models and of procedures acquired from other genres (the cult and rhapsodic hymn in particular), seeks to evoke the gods, summoning them to become manifest for men to behold again as once in the theoxenic age, which had been inaugurated by the marriage of a mortal man (Peleus) with a goddess (Thetis). This attempt is, to all intents and purposes, a failure: the bride does not appear and the Olympians, just like the images of a lectisternium, cannot transcend their mere ‘presence’ at the wedding itself. The structure of the text, moreover, suggests that the Greek model adopted by the narrator in order to explain the story is unfit to fulfil its purpose precisely on account of its being traditional and schematic. Such a failure, however, itself represents the deep and authentically innovative significance of this poem, whose influence on later poetic production is incalculable. What it reveals are the true, difficult conditions which were to enable Greek myth to once again become the object of narratives in the ‘modern’ Roman context. Indeed, had these problems not become the focus of awareness and of accompanying reflections on poetic form, the poets of the next generation would never have been able to give rise to a wholly Roman production of the long-form epic poetry stemming from Homer.