COLE, Spencer Cicero, Ennius, and the Advent of Ruler Cult at Rome
The late Republic,
long considered a period of decline and disuse in Roman religion,
is now being reexamined as a phase of consequential innovation and
experimentation. As political revolutions were transforming Rome,
Cicero and Varro were developing the
first systematic analyses of Roman religion and demarcating
religion as a distinct field of inquiry. Since critical religious
discourse was in its formative stage at this relatively late point
in Roman history, the writings of Cicero and his contemporaries
were in a privileged position to validate, establish, or occlude
the vast range of practices that made up Roman religious life. It was during these pivotal
decades that Cicero
produced his seminal treatments of apotheosis.
In this paper, I will examine how Cicero
uses Ennius in his De Re Publica
to present apotheosis as Roman tradition.
As Laelius
notes in the De Re Publica,
archaic Roman history was fragmentary even for republican Romans: sed obscura est historia
Romana (2.33). Cicero's
De Re Publica is itself one
attempt to fill the void Laelius
laments. The De Re Publica,
like Varro's Antiquitates
Rerum Divinarum, is not a passive curatorial
gesture, but an act of Roman self-definition triggered by social
crisis. Throughout the De Re Publica,
Cicero calls on the
cultural authority of Ennius to give his
archaeology of early Rome,
including his presentation of the apotheosis of Romulus,
a patina of tradition. In
the Tusculan Disputations, Cicero
even posits Ennius as the conduit for
early oral traditions about the divinity of Romulus:
Romulus in caelo cum dis agit
aevom, ut famae adsentiens dixit Ennius
(1.28). Enlisting Ennius
in the De Re Publica project was
doubly advantageous- he could not only be summoned as the singer par excellence of the mos maiorum
but he had also translated Euhemerus'
work on the apotheosis of primitive kings for a Roman audience. In the late Republic,
according to Cotta in the De Natura Deorum,
Ennius was still considered the ranking
Euhemerist at Rome: quae
ratio [apotheosis] maxime
tractata ab Euhemero
est, quem
noster et interpretatus
est et secutus praeter ceteros Ennius (1.119).
In the surviving
sections of his De Re Publica, Cicero
appeals to Ennian precedent twelve times. Cicero
has the interlocutor Scipio establish Ennius'
Annales early in the first book as a
sanctified source of republican archival information. Scipio cites Ennius
alongside the Annales Maximi as authoritative in his
own time (dramatic date 129BCE) and thus helps consolidate the
poet's symbolic status as multi-purpose spokesman for old Rome. Evidence found in the Annales and the Annales
Maximi, Scipio claims, enables us to
pinpoint the day of Romulus’
apotheosis (1.25). Scipio
gives Ennius credentials that might impress some of Cicero’s
late republican audience by connecting Ennius
to not only the Annales Maximi
and the traditions of republican religion but also to currents
of superstition-fighting Greek rationalism.
How Cicero
shaped his account of Romulus’
apotheosis, the primary Roman precedent for a mortal attaining
divinity, was crucial for legitimizing or discrediting deification
as Roman custom and therefore had major implications at a time
when Roman statesmen like Pompey and Caesar were flirting with
divine status. Later
on in the first book of the De Re Publica,
Scipio quotes Ennius in a passage that
enlarges on the divinity of Romulus
(1.64) and offers crucial support for Scipio’s account of Romulus'
deification at the beginning of book 2.
Since no Roman had been officially deified since Romulus
(if at all), Cicero is
using a hallowed voice of tradition to help sanction bold late
republican innovation.