Dan-el Padilla Peralta’s Divine Institutions appeared in 2020. Perhaps because of some confusion under Covid as BMCR switched systems from receiving physical copies of books to operating exclusively on the basis of electronic notices from presses, Divine Institutions was never listed by BMCR among its books received. 2025 is not the time to remedy the omission of a BMCR review.[1] What is more, I read the book for the press before publication and supplied a blurb; I am not ideally positioned to supply a review. But I recently had occasion to look at the published version—which is wonderful—and feel strongly that the book deserves substantial engagement on questions of both method and politics. This text is an attempt to suggest some topics for that conversation.
Divine Institutions argues that the elaboration of Roman state cult across the Middle Republic—specifically, from 400 to 200 BCE—played a crucial role in the development of Rome itself from an archaic community into something like a state. The basic argument is that the staggered processes of temple construction (chapters 2-3) and, later, pilgrimage to the resulting sites of cult (chapters 4-5) brought persons from within an ever-expanding territory of Roman domination into contact with each other. The fact that this would take place at Rome is crucial. That is to say, it is not simply that Romans of varied historical experience encountered each other, but that they did so via the mediation of social authority located in the city-state of Rome. Although the term “city-state” is my own, it is clearly implied by Padilla Peralta when he says that it was in the middle republic that “Rome”—read, the city-state of Rome— “develops the institutions and practices that would lend it coherence as a res publica…” (p. 5). In a traditionalist sacred topography, the gods do not, like Isis or Christ, come wherever two or three worshippers gather in their name; they receive sacrifice at Rome.[2] Likewise, Roman citizenship was never citizenship of the empire, a concept for which Latin had neither apparatus nor vocabulary; Roman citizenship was citizenship in the city-state of Rome. The result of these collective encounters as a community at Rome, Padilla Peralta argues, was the “engendering of collective buy-in at the core of state formation” (p. 23).
The large-scale argument of the book therefore proceeds from materiality to affect: from the movement of human bodies in space, whether for corvée labor or cult, to affective aspects of politics, to something like belonging. The effort to employ things we can know—or surmise or estimate—to get at things we cannot know, is one that I esteem. The future of ancient history depends crucially on projects of this kind, as well as critical arguments arising from them about method. In this regard, Padilla Peralta’s theoretical choices strike me as largely appropriate to the project: Richard Blanton and Lane Fargher’s notion of “quasi voluntary compliance” seems apt to the limits on state infrastructural capacity in Padilla Peralta’s period; Charles Tilly’s essay on trust is useful to his desire to imagine political affect as arising form intersubjective relations rather than, say, the eminence of elites.[3]
The flip side to “quasi voluntary compliance,” of course, is a state regime that used “quasi coercion” to compel citizens to supply labor to assorted aristocratic priorities, including both temple building and war. On this topic, the silence of Divine Institutions about varied aspects of domination and political economy is a bit troubling. For example, slavery is at least mentioned as a historical phenomenon but slaves are not considered as a source of labor in the chapters on temple building, neither at the site of temple construction nor in replacing the labor of the free in domestic contexts when free persons were away from home.[4] (By contrast, Padilla Peralta abundantly acknowledges the importance of slave labor and expertise in cult.) Nor does the book discuss animals, either the corvée labor of animals in construction projects or the tithe on rural communities for animals for sacrifice, which of course amounted to a transfer of calories from countryside to city. On these topics, the perspective of the book or, perhaps, its ideology, is essentially that of the Roman elite.
An analogous problem arises when one poses the question, who were the persons—the nominal Romans—whose formation into a community is the subject of Divine Institutions. Roman ideologues were keen to insist that the Roman state in Italy was not an empire, and a very distinguished historiography has followed them. But the history of the (later) middle republic, during which Rome increasingly incorporated defeated parties into the non-empire as allies—and established colonies far afield as Latin communities and not Roman ones—should not distract us from the fact that the archaic Roman state had forcibly assimilated defeated communities into itself. It is extraordinarily unlikely that something like a juridical notion of belonging existed at that time, whatever the later tradition says, but regardless it should be clear that “their” concept of citizenship in the archaic and middle republic was not a liberal one. By starting in 400 BCE and allowing the category of “Roman” to remain largely uninterrogated, Divine Institutions occludes this history.
The close of Divine Institutions in 200 BCE raises similar questions. For one thing, the greatest work of the 20th century on the Roman state in Italy urged that it was in the aftermath of the Second Punic War, in consequence of its competition with Hellenistic states, that Rome ceased to be whatever it had been before and became an empire.[5] To a point, Arnold Toynbee’s argument supports Padilla Peralta’s chronology (see pp. 12-13). But on its own presentation of the data, Divine Institutions understands the effects of the monumentalization of Rome on the topography of the sacred in Roman Italy to be particularly visible in the second and first centuries BCE. Until then, in addition to pilgrimage to Rome, the records also suggests a great deal of pilgrimage by Romans to extraurban sanctuaries (pp. 182-203).[6] This raises a question of causation, namely, the degree of responsibility for these later changes that we should attributed to the actions catalogued by Padilla Peralta in his period. On this question, the analysis would have benefitted from comparative study of the sort that Padilla Peralta devotes to monumentalization (pp. 44-48). There is some reason to believe that the wider Mediterranean witnessed a profound shift at the end of the third century BCE and into the first decades of the second, in which city-states (and empires) worked to center the locus of the sacred in monumentalized urban cores, including agricultural festivals.[7]
Divine Institutions is so successful at raising major historical questions about politics and proposing serious answers on the basis of archaeological data that I for one wish Padilla Peralta had eschewed any reliance on literary mythologizing about the mid-republican calendar or the actions of Cnaeus Flavius (pp. 116-22 and elsewhere) or other topics about which (on my view) they are likely to have mostly ignorant. But I want to close on another topic, namely, the book’s desire to write a history of the coming-to-be of the Roman state that does not foreground the agency of elites.
Padilla Peralta does not specifically identify this as an ambition of his argument, but it is finally revealed in a stunning and brilliant claim that cult should take its place alongside the assembly “in any study of what held the res publica together” (245). “It is in cult and its associated commitments that ‘the core of the consensus’ of long-standing interest to Karl-Joachim Hölkeskamp and other students of Republican political culture undoubtedly resided.” I read Divine Institutions as seeking to cash out this claim through a history of bodies in motion that can be told apart from elite domination. And yet, it remains the case that it was money from empire—and corvée labor—that built the temples that are the subject of Divine Institutions. I understand those temples to have been dedicated by elites precisely because they profited disproportionately from war. Within that framework, the construction of temples—whatever else it achieved—was instrumental in transforming wealth into authority, which in turn furthered elite monopolization of both political and religious power. My view of the middle republic is therefore more distinctly Marxist—and more deeply Machiavellian—than Padilla Peralta’s. But I have benefitted immensely and been challenged greatly by rereading his book, and I recommend it in the strongest possible terms.
Notes
[1] As of 26 December 2025, L’Année philologique lists three reviews: Uwe Walter, Gymnasium 128 (2021): 273-8; Martin Jehne, Historische Zeitschrift 314 (2022): 433-5; and Giorgio Ferri, Arys 20 (2022) 578-87.
[2] Matthew 18.20; Apuleius Met. 11.5; Libanius Or. 30.33-34.
[3] Richard Blanton and Lane Fargher, Collective action in the formation of pre-modern states (New York: Springer, 2008); Charles Tilly, Trust and rule (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2005).
[4] But note p. 58 nn. 80-81.
[5] Arnold J. Toynbee, Hannibal’s Legacy. The Hannibalic War’s effects on Roman life (London: Oxford University Press, 1965).
[6] I set aside here the issue that the historical record of pilgrimage by Romans to extraurban sites—and indeed the historical record of agricultural ritual at Rome—reflects a considerable amount of both reinvigoration and bravura invention of “rural” and extra-Roman cult in the early Principate.
[7] Christophe Chandezon, “L’hippotrophia et la boutrophia, deux liturgies dans les cités hellénistiques,” in Cl. Balandier and Chr. Chandezon, eds., Institutions, sociétés et cultes de la Méditerranée antique. Mélanges d’histoire ancienne rassemblés en l’honneur de Claude Vial (Bordeaux: Ausonius, 2024), 29-50; see also Clifford Ando, “City, village, sacrifice: The political economy of religion in the early Roman empire,” in Richard Evans, ed., Mass and Elite in the Greek and Roman World: From Sparta to Late Antiquity (New York: Routledge, 2017), 118–136.