praesentia numinis part 2 : objects in roman cult

clifford ando

The University of Chicago

This essay continues an inquiry commenced in Asdiwal 5 (2010), pp. 45-731. In this part, I take up the most famous Roman ritual in which humans feasted gods, namely, the lectisternium. I do so not to comment directly on its connection to other rituals in which banquets were served to gods, such as the epulum Iovis, nor to reflect on the religious character of Roman dining. This last has been a special theme of the research of John Scheid, and that work has on the whole been very well done, the cogent dissent of Nicole Belayche notwithstanding2. Rather, I focus on the lectisternium in order to raise the question how the presence of the gods was marked in the ritual, how, in other words, one knew in material terms that they had come to dine. I do so in order to suggest a number of related conclusions in respect to Roman religion, which I state here briefly and upon which I will elaborate by and by, and to which I return again in conclusion. First, I suggest that the function of religious art in ritual contexts at Rome was not to represent a god. The works of art in question regularly were ‒ indeed, nearly always were ‒ figurative. But they were nonetheless not iconic. We must abandon frameworks for understanding cult objects at Rome that assess them and their function in light of theories of representation or along some index of iconicity : they did not uniformly function, nor were they consistently or even regularly understood, as either resembling gods as they actually appeared or as isolating and representing visually some quality of any given god. We should not confuse the problematics of reference with those of resemblance, nor resemblance with figuration.

1 For kindness and patient instruction, I offer thanks to Sylvia Estienne, Richard Neer and Verity Platt.

asdiwal n° 6 / 2011