Religiöse Geheimniskommunikation in der Mittleren und Späten Römischen Republik : Separatheit, gesellschaftliche Öffentlichkeit und zivisches Ordnungshandeln
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Abstract
In Mid-Republican Rome religion was an important field for the exclusive formation and institutional regularization of a distinct civic ideology. The Senate and Roman citizenry determined which cults were organized by the state, regarded as a genuine part of Roman culture or marked as foreign. Potential for conflict arose above all with religious groups who acted outside the civic organization. Such groups created 'separate' spaces for action by coding their practices as religious by the means of secrecy, and thuis sealed themselves off from external normative claims. In exemplary studies of the cults of the Mater Magna, the Bacchanalia affair of 186 BC and the representation of separate religion in Plautine comedy, Thomas Blank examines how this "esoteric-exoteric communication" (communication that makes deliberate use of both the inclusive and the exclusive effects of secretive comunication) triggered or influenced conflicts that arose around the presence of such separate religious groups in Rome. The secret proves to be both an instrument for establishing religious identity and a point of attack for its external contestation. The practice of esoteric-exoteric communication created spaces not only for self-separation but also for the external defamation of separate religion, precisely because the groups themselves kept the performance of this closure observable and present.