This magisterial publication (648 pages, available in open access) considers how boundaries were drawn within Roman religious practice. Thomas Blank constructs a paradigm by which we can think about how religious groups defined themselves, and how those definitions were perceived and responded to by non-members of those sub-groups. In the case of the types of groups that interest Blank, namely initiation and mystery cults, the nature of those definitions and responses is fundamentally about knowledge and its communication: not only the knowledge gained upon initiation, but—more importantly—the nature of the knowledge known and communicated about those groups from outside the group. This paradigm, which Blank labels ‘esoterisch-exoterisch kommunikativen’ (‘esoteric-exoteric communication’), is applied principally to groups of religious participation that were foreign to, and introduced into, Rome, and that were either incorporated into or expelled from Roman religious practice: namely, the worship of the Magna Mater introduced to Rome in 204 BCE and the galli, and the brutal suppression of the cult of Bacchus in the so-called Bacchanalia crisis of 186 BCE.
The greatest strength of this work is Blank’s overall conceptual framework for thinking about the relationship between various groups and more ‘mainstream’ religious participation in the Roman world. His model of secret religious communication, and in particular, the parameters of his theory of esoteric-exoteric communication for religious activity at the fringes of Roman society, is a persuasive one (outlined in Section A, chs. 1–3). For Blank, esoteric-exoteric communication is about the demarcation of the visibility of secret knowledge; the knowledge that those within a group (i.e. initiates) have a ‘secret’ and that those outside it are aware that ‘secret’ knowledge is held by that group, but of which they have no direct access. While scholars have too often been focused on trying to discern the secret knowledge itself and have been frustrated by the lack of access to that secret knowledge, the strength of the model outlined by Blank is that the focus can now shift to thinking about the external discourse about those groups with secret knowledge, which undoubtedly shaped not only responses to those groups, but also how those groups thought of themselves.
Yet the utility of the model, and the painstaking care with which Blank attempts to make it theoretically sound and methodologically rigorous (almost 120 pages allocated to methodology), seems out of step with the scope of the rest of the project, which analyses only two examples to prove the utility of this framework: first, the worship of the Magna Mater and the role of the galli, and then the Bacchanalian conspiracy of 186 BCE (Sections B–C). Blank acknowledges in the Foreword that his ambition for the project, to go beyond these two examples, ultimately proved untenable. Blank’s model would undoubtedly be useful in its application to other religious groups throughout the Roman period that were considered ‘foreign’, are labelled Mysteries, and which included initiation, for instance the worship of Mithras, Isis or Jupiter Dolichenus. Moreover, I can see real application for thinking about early Christians, and Roman reactions to them, through Blank’s model as well. Yet the real test of the model and its limitations would be to scrutinise its applicability in two key areas. The first would be to push Blank’s insistence that there exists an inscrutable difference between ‘civic’ and ‘non-civic’ religious groups (e.g. ch. 3.1), and that his model is only applicable to ‘non-civic’ religious groups, i.e. those outside or foreign to the ‘core’ of Roman religious experience. As Blank himself briefly explores (pages 49–50), the secret knowledge of the cultic objects hidden within the aedes Vestae, which was only accessible to the Vestal Virgins, is a form of secret knowledge, and was undoubtedly one which not only shaped external discourse around the nature of that secret religious activity, but also must have shaped how the priestesses thought of themselves and of the cultic activity they conducted, both in secret and in public. Indeed, while antiquarians and historians (i.e. Varro or Dionysius of Halicarnassus) made desperate guesses about the nature of much of Roman religious practice, much of this practice was built on ‘secret’ knowledge accessible only by a small selection of the ‘initiated’, namely priests (for instance the Sibylline prophecies, to which only the quindecemviri sacris faciundis had access). The second is to push Blank’s insistence that his model can only function for avowedly ‘religious’ groups. While Blank insists that there was a firm dividing line between ‘religious’ and non-‘religious’ groups (e.g. ch. 3), this binary has been shown to be porous or even inapplicable to Roman sensibilities. This is perhaps most obvious in our developing understanding of Roman associations and collegia, such as the associations brought together by collective trades, such as the Ostian college of carpenters, or for the purposes of burial and funerary rites, such as the collegium of the cultores of Diana and Antinous at Lanuvium.[1] These were undoubtedly sub-groups of society, access to which was restricted to particular groups, but which elude strict characterisation: while their purposes might seem ‘civic’ or ‘collegiate’, many were structured around unique forms of religious activity, in ways that were relevant only to initiated/fee-paying members.[2] Although the stakes of their esoteric-exoteric communication are undoubtedly lesser, I nonetheless think that this model need not be confined to what we might more easily characterise as ‘religious’ to have meaning and utility.
It is evident even from scanning the table of contents that Blank’s fundamental interest in this book is in the Bacchanalian conspiracy of 186 BCE; it is the focus of chapters 5–8 of this volume. As Blank notes himself (219–220), the Bacchanalia conspiracy has been subject to an bewildering array of interpretative frameworks (‘Die quaestio de clandestinis coniurationibus des Jahres 186 v.Chr. und ihr exekutive Fortführung in den Folgejahren ist Gegenstand einer kaum überschaubaren Flut altertumswissenschaftlicher Studien gewesen […]’). The fundamental question is, therefore, whether or not another treatment—particularly one at this scale—is warranted; does it add anything to an already burgeoning scholarly landscape?
Blank undertakes an extremely detailed review of literature on the Bacchanalia, and diligently reconstructs almost every possible aspect of both Livy’s famous account of the conspiracy,[3] and the equally famous bronze copy of the senatus consultum de Bacchanalibus found at Tiriolo.[4] The analysis in these sections is undoubtedly fastidious, careful and well-balanced, and draws on a vast range of ancient evidence and modern literature. While these sections are undoubtedly useful, it is only in Blank’s conclusions where the most original work comes to the foreground. Blank’s conclusion is that the extreme reaction against the Bacchanals was fundamentally driven by external speculations as to the cult’s activities which could not be challenged by initiates of the cult, those with internal knowledge of its secrets, due to the level of secrecy required by the cult. In this environment, Blank asserts, the secretive nature of the cult of Bacchus was uniquely placed to invite unfounded, radical and malicious external interpretations of its secrets, and that these were exploited by individual actors (i.e. the consul Sp. Postumius Albinus) to create fear and justify violence.
Intended to complement and extend this analysis, in Section C Blank provides a detailed reading of a handful of the comedies of Plautus (the Aulularia, Amphitruo, Menaechmi, and Bacchides), as well as a number of ‘smaller’ studies of other plays (the Asinaria, Miles Gloriosus and Casina), to illuminate the potential resonances of the Bacchanalia in our only surviving contemporary literature from the period. Structurally, Section C feels like a strange addition. Whilst Blank acknowledges in his Foreword that this Section was originally intended to be merely a subchapter of his analysis of the Bacchanalia scandal and grew as he realised the depth of analysis needed here, to my mind Blank has not effectively reconciled this fundamental shift in structure: Section C feels uncomfortably detached from the rest of the analysis. Part of this is because Blank’s conclusions in these sections are less careful, measured, and robust than the earlier parts of the book. It feels to me that Blank is a little too keen to read every instance of secret or hidden knowledge and unequal hierarchies in these works as a metaphor or allusion to initiation cult, and specifically the cult of Bacchus, where genre is surely an even more relevant factor. That comedy relies on imbalances of knowledge between characters on stage, and between characters and audience, is surely a prominent part of the genre itself. Equally, that Plautine comedy reflects conflicting moral ideas, particularly as a result of clashing and changing social norms, and anxieties over inverted hierarchies, need not be read solely as responses to the Bacchanalia conspiracy, but rather as a symptom of the changing nature of Roman society in the 3rd–2nd centuries BCE, of which the Bacchanalia was surely only one manifestation. Another reason that Section C feels out of step with the rest of the volume is that Blank’s reading of the Plautine plays feels to me to be drawn in multiple directions, not all of which progress the central aims of the book. There are occasions where the analysis draws out ways in which Plautus’ plays can give us a meaningful understanding about the level of knowledge that was circulating externally to the cult, and therefore enrich our understanding about esoteric-exoteric communication in the social identity of the cult. For instance, Blank convinces where he reads a short passage of the Miles Gloriosus (ll. 1009–1018) to show that the very idea of ‘secret communication’ was fundamentally associated with ‘Bacchic’ practice, that the two were intimately intertwined. Yet much more of the analysis feels like it is trying to prove that Blank is correct to read the presence of the Bacchanalian conspiracy more deeply in the plays than has previously been recognised. Ultimately, Blank’s conclusion to Section C is that conflicts between counter-societies and civil society are a fundamental part of Plautus’ repertoire, and that the Bacchanalia often emerges as a metaphor for social disintegration in these plays. Yet this feels out of step with the research questions which sought to guide the work more broadly.
Despite being confined to a single chapter (ch. 4), Blank’s application of his methodology to the worship of the Magna Mater—more specifically on the ecstatic worship of the Magna Mater by the galli—yields some interesting conclusions. Most notably, Blank advocates that whilst the overwhelmingly negative attitudes towards the galli in our literary sources were undoubtedly due to these writers’ own anxieties about the boundaries of masculinity, these priests were not helpless in the face of this social exclusion. Blank urges that the galli were active participants in this ‘othering’, and used their appearance to not only define themselves as a sub-group of society, but to aggrandise their claims about their access to secret knowledge and competence.
Overall, this is undoubtedly a work of significant erudition and labour. On its own, the painstaking work of condensing and summarising over a century’s worth of scholarship on the Bacchanalia and on the worship of the Magna Mater make this book an essential resource for scholars entering or familiarising themselves with these complex and much-discussed fields. Equally, scholars of Plautus must judge for themselves the extent to which they agree with Blank’s new readings of many of these mid-republican comedies. At the heart of this work, however, is Blank’s framework of esoteric-exoteric communication. Blank has proven that it has interesting and illuminating possibilities for understanding the definition of religious groups in Roman society, in ways that could helpfully be applied to a broader range of examples than those explored here.
Notes
[1] CIL 14.2112.
[2] For an exemplary treatment of the identities of collegiate bodies, see Margaret L. Laird (2015) Civic Monuments and the Augustales in Roman Italy. Cambridge.
[3] Liv. 39.8–39.19.
[4] ILS 18.