Crisis rituals: Civic religion and crisis management in Republican Rome

How do leaders manage community crises? Which roles might religion play in crisis management?

This project´s purpose is to investigate the interactions between, and transformative effects of, community crises and the official religious responses of political and religious leaders in Republican Rome (509–27 BCE), a city characterized by crises, wherein civic religion was a focal point for crisis management.

Previous studies seldom treat civic religion as crisis management, or include women, and scholarship on crisis and religion is rarely in dialogue.

This project aims at a) investigating and systematizing the official religious responses of male and female leaders to community crises; b) investigating and outlining how crises and leaders´ religious responses physically and religiously transformed Rome; and c) broadening our knowledge of Roman leaders´ crisis management strategies and religion´s roles therein.

To do so, this project will: systematically survey and analyse the ancient textual and material evidence (Year 1), collate and systematize the data in a database (Years 1 & 2), synthesise the data and interpret it with anthropological and sociological theoretical perspectives (Year 2), and produce an overarching analysis (Year 3).

This project will generate a more comprehensive and integrated image of crisis management in Republican Rome, encourage reflection on the entanglement of religion and politics, and offer a lens on leaders’ responses to contemporary crises.