The Roman Festivals of the Period of the Republic: An Introduction to the Study of the Religion of the Romans by William Warde Fowler

The Roman Festivals of the Period of the Republic: An Introduction to the Study of the Religion of the Romans Reviews

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  Toviel

  ROMAN FESTIVALS OF THE PERIOD OF THE REPUBLIC is a book that attempts to define pre-Hellenized holidays and festivals of Rome, particularly in how they changed in relation to the urbanization and expansion of the Roman Republic. Fowler does his best to reconstruct the lost religious calendar, and provides in-depth analysis of every holiday’s purpose, practice, and principle in context of the Roman Republic at large. He also includes extensive information on the temples of Rome, along with their related cults and deities. The key word here is “attempts”—at the time of writing, no pre-Julian calendar had been rediscovered since the fall of Rome, and the few trustworthy sources, such as Varro and Ovid, should be taken with a grain of salt. However, Fowler's extensive research and analysis makes the most of the material at hand.
  
  The book is typical post-Gibbon fair: Fowler collects established Ancient Roman sources and contemporary commentaries thereof on the topic, and proceeds to wildly speculate about it. That in of itself is not insidious, as it is the nature of historians to re-evaluate and revise their subject matter. As time progresses and source materials are challenged or discovered, it’s especially common for this to happen in the study of Roman history. Fowler himself is quick to note changes in both historic trends, such as the differences between Imperial philosophy and the more rustic beliefs preceding it, and in trends amongst his colleagues. He freely admits when there simply are no answers to some of the questions asked about Ancient Roman religion, no matter how convincing scholarly speculation may seem.
  
  Due to its age, the book becomes an interesting snapshot of 19th century scholarship—opinions on some topics, e.g. those regarding the Roman New Year, are presented are radical, while modern scholars (or Wikipedia aficionados) would look at such declarations as traditional fact. Fowler criticizes many fads amongst his Gilded Age contemporaries, which helps shed light on the haphazard nature of the study the ancient world. Only the study of archaeological evidence escapes Fowler’s notice, presumably because professional archaeology had only just evolved beyond grave robbing at the time of writing.
  
  However, the lack of primary sources available turns the venture into a joke. Numerous religious dates and associations are often too vague to be of any use, while Fowler pushes his interpretation of pre-Hellenized gods to the point of distraction. The book may have been better served had Fowler included a brief primer on the Roman pantheon before the calendar, but he instead details them whenever their temple dedications appear, which are sometimes long before/after important festivals to them appear on the calendar proper. Occasionally his diatribes drift into discussions only tangentially related to the deity at hand. There are also clear blind spots in Fowler’s research, such as flawed anthropological interpretations of folk practices, which further dilute his work. While Fowler does hit the mark on occasion—f’ex, he accurate guesses that the festival to Anna Perenna would be on older Republic calendars despite its absence on later Julian versions, a full sixteen years before any pre-Julian calendar had been rediscovered—his questionable sources and dated methodology only serve to hurt the final product.
  
  Even with its flaws, ROMAN FESTIVALS is one of the few easily accessible academic books on the topic of the religious Roman calendar, especially for modern pagans. That does not mean, however, that the text itself is accessible. Fowler wrote the academic audience of his time, and it shows—Latin sources are never translated, not even in footnotes, and he expects the reader to be as familiar with other Roman scholars as he is. While standard for both its time and even now in terms of academia, the amateur enthusiast may find themselves lost if they haven’t done significant outside research beforehand.