1 Earliest Rome

12 Religious groups
288
As Roman religion developed, religious pluralism became more important:
individuals faced a wider range of religious choices, and increasingly joined
groups which were specifically devoted to a particular god or goddess. These
groups interacted with the civic cults and to an extent with each other. This
chapter starts from the hostile reaction of the Roman senate to one of the earliest
attested religious groups in the cult of Bacchus (12.1), and regulations
that governed a very different kind of society - a burial club' under the patronage
of Diana and Antinous (12.2). The bulk of the chapter concerns the group
worship of a series of individual deities during the imperial period: Jupiter
Dolichenus (12.3); Isis (12.4); Mithras (12.5); Jahveh (12.6); and the
Christian god (12.7); documents relating to the cult of the Magna Mater are
given elsewhere (2.7, 5.6 a-b, 6.7, 8.7). The focus of the selection is on the
internal organization and social location of the cults, as well as their different
cosmologies. We have drawn evidence from Rome where possible, though we
have included some material from other places to illustrate regional spread and
local differences.
See further: Vol. 1, 95-6, 215-16, 221-7, ch. 6 passim; North (1992)*; for
* further translated texts see F. C. Grant (1953) 116-23, M. Whittaker (1984)
229-68 and Meyer (1987).
12.1 The cult of Bacchus
The spread of the cult of Bacchus (in Greek, Dionysos) from southern Italy to
Etruria and Rome triggered a violent reaction on the part of the Roman senate
in 186 B.C. This is the earliest attested specifically religious group in the
Roman world - though its exact nature is hard to understand, since the reports
of its activities are uniformly hostile, stressing the immorality of the cult and
its political threat to Rome.
See further: Vol. 1, 91-6, 98; Nilsson (1957); Henrichs (1978); North
(1979)*; Pailfer (1988).
12.1a Roman discovery of the cult of Bacchus (186 B.C.)
Livy's account of the discovery of the Bacchic cult enlarges on the danger of its
practices: magic, theft, immorality, fraud, even murder. These were common