ABSTRACT
It will be apparent from our study of the Imperial cult that religion and politics were not easily divorced. The Pax Deorum provided divine protection for the State, just as the army provided material protection. The State could no more neglect the gods than it could neglect its fortifications. This chapter is however designed less as an illustration of unchanging factors in Roman life than as an illustration of the ways in which changing attitudes might affect even distant Britain. The ethos of the governing class in the early Roman period is splendidly evoked by Tacitus in the Agricola. At first sight this is not a source to tell us much about Roman attitudes to religion. Agricola fostered the building of templa in Britain just as he did fora. The reason was political, ‘so that men, scattered and uncivilised and thus quick to take up arms, might be made accustomed by comfort to peace and otium (civilised retirement)’ (Agricola 21). For himself, we know that he came under the influence of Greek philosophy at Massilia and had to be dissuaded from being too enthusiastic. Tacitus tells us that ‘his soaring and ambitious spirit craved the beauty and splendour of high and exalted ideals’ (Agricola 4). It is likely that Agricola shared the modified stoicism of his circle, and of the historian Tacitus. Fortitude, a sense of duty and of justice, a predisposition not to take matters to excess, a vague belief in deity and perhaps too in an afterlife-allowed the Roman to adopt an attitude of lofty magnanimity towards the cults of different regions, provided there was no clash with the best interests of the Empire.
