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Contrary to what is claimed above, the conquered peoples were not required by the Romans to worship the Roman gods. There was one occasion when a Roman emperor (Decius) required non-Romans in the empire to offer a sacrifice to the Roman gods to show loyalty to the Roman state and the emperor. However, this did not amount to requiring the conquered peoples (who by then had already been given Roman citizenship) to worship the Roman gods. It was just one single act to show loyalty. The emperor Diocletian ordered the Christians to offer a sacrifice to the Roman gods as part of his persecution of the Christians. These were the only two instances of such a requirement and both were short lived.

That the early religion of the Romans was animistic is just that, speculation. There is not actual evidence for this. Moreover, this hypothesis is also related to the pre-Romans days; that is, to the days before the foundation of the Roman city-state. There were already anthropomorphic (human-like) deities in the very early days of the Roman city-state. There was the Luparcaila, the festival of the god Lupercus, whose origins are thought to be pre-Roman. There were Jupiter, Mars and Quirinus, the three gods of the Archaic Triad (Rome's first trinity of deities, which was later replaced by the

Capitoline Triad). It is thought that Quirinus was a Sabine god. The foundation of the Roman city-state was said to have involved a fusion between Latins and Sabines. The former lived on five of what were to become the seven hills of Rome and the latter lived on the other two. The second king of Rome was from Sabina, the land of the Sabines, which was not far from Rome. He was the founder of archaic Roman state religion and probably the adoption of Quirinus was due to him. He also founded three major priesthoods, one for each of these gods, and fifteen minor priesthoods for the lesser archaic Roman gods.

The above background made the Romans culturally and religiously malleable. They were very open towards other peoples' religions and cultures. They even adopted foreign deities. The last king of Rome (Tarquinius Superbus) was said to have bought the books on the Sybillines (Greek oracular priestesses) from Cumae, a Greek city in Italy, 125 miles to the south of Rome, in the 7th century BC. The Romans consulted these books at times of crisis. During the Second Punic War (218-201 BC), based on a consultation of the Sibylline Books, they adopted Cybele, an Greek goddess of Anatolian origin (they called her Magna Mater, Great Mother). Between the 5th and 5th and 2nd centuries BC they adopted four other Greek deities (Castor and Pollux, Apollo and Aesculapius) and retained their Greek names. They adopted a number of divinities and cults from the Etruscans, form Italic peoples and from other Latin cities. An example of this is Ceres, who was a goddess of agricultural fertility which was originally worshiped by the Sabellians and Oscans (Italic peoples). The Romans also practiced 'evocatio', which was the calling for the favour of the tutelary (guardian, patron) divinity of a city they were about to conquer and then they adopted it into Roman religion. For example, Fortuna Pimigeinia was the name of a goddess who was originally the tutelary goddess of the Etruscan city of Veii (probably Uni), whose favour they'evoked,' and whom they adopted when they conquered this city. This religious malleability helped the Romans to integrate their Italian allies into the Roman world. When the Roman conquered Egypt, they adopted Isis and Osiris, two Egyptian divinities. It was also common for the Romans to associate their divinities (or aspects of them) with the divinities of conquered peoples, thus creating an amalgamation between Roman cults and cults of the conquered peoples and creating elements of religious amalgamation between the themselves and the conquered peoples. This occurred especially in the Celtic areas of the Roman Empire.

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8y ago

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