Impiety and the policing of cult

What is attested

At Athens impiety was actionable. A citizen who chose to could bring a public suit for asebeia, ordinarily before the archon basileus, the magistrate responsible for the ancestral cults; there were alternative routes, including denunciation to the Council or Assembly and summary arrest for certain offences. No text of a statute defining asebeia survives, and this absence shapes everything that follows: what we know of the offence's scope we know from courtroom speeches, which are advocacy, and from narratives written by people with a stake in the outcome. The handful of impiety speeches that survive are all about acts and property — a damaged olive stump, the mishandling of rites and money — which is what the surviving sample looks like rather than a measure of the whole run of business. A surviving Athenian defence answers a charge of removing the sekos of a sacred olive on a leased estate — the word denotes either the stump itself or the enclosure protecting it, and which of the two was meant is disputed. Another surviving prosecution attacks the official charged with re-inscribing the city's sacred calendar, alleging that he mishandled the rites and the money. Other attested categories include theft from a temple, misuse of sacred funds, offences against suppliants, and entering or performing in a sanctuary when excluded. This is a law of trespass, damage and procedure applied to a sacred domain.

The great Athenian scandal of 415 BC illustrates both the seriousness of such charges and the difficulty of reading motive from them. On the eve of the Sicilian expedition most of the herms standing at doorways and crossroads in the city were mutilated in a single night, and in the ensuing investigation informers alleged that the Eleusinian Mysteries had been performed in private houses in front of the uninitiated. Thucydides, writing as a contemporary, records that Athenians took the affair as evidence of a conspiracy against the democracy — the political reading is not a modern imposition, it is in the earliest source. Andocides, who was himself implicated and gave information, defended himself fifteen years later in a speech that survives and supplies most of our names. The independent confirmation is archaeological and unusually good: a set of inscribed stelai from about 414 or 413 BC records the public auction of property confiscated from the condemned — land in Attica and beyond it, stores of produce, slaves, furniture, listed item by item with prices. Twelve of the thirty-three men Andocides names over the Mysteries and four of his twenty-two herm-mutilators appear on the surviving fragments. The stones prove that convictions happened and that they had real material consequences. They also show what the process produced: seized estates sold at auction, not recantations.

The trial of Socrates in 399 BC is the most discussed impiety case and the most treacherous. The charge is reported in three forms. Plato's Apology has Socrates state it: wrongdoing in corrupting the young and in not acknowledging the gods the city acknowledges but other new divinities. Xenophon opens his Memorabilia with essentially the same formulation. Diogenes Laertius, writing at some point in the first half of the third century AD, quotes the affidavit and says that Favorinus, a writer of the second century AD, reported that it was still preserved in the Metroon, the Athenian archive: the suit sworn by Meletus son of Meletus of Pitthos against Socrates son of Sophroniscus of Alopece, alleging failure to acknowledge the city's gods, introduction of other new divinities, and corruption of the young, with death proposed as the penalty. That chain deserves stating plainly rather than collapsing: an archive document reported by a second-century writer, quoted by a third-century compiler, more than six centuries after the trial. Plato and Xenophon are both partisans writing to rehabilitate their teacher. What no source contains, including the hostile ones, is a doctrinal examination. Nobody asks Socrates to affirm a proposition. The prosecution alleges a failure of acknowledgement and observance and an importation, and the jury voted on a man, a manner and a reputation.

Everything therefore turns on what the phrase rendered 'not acknowledging the gods the city acknowledges' meant, and this is genuinely unresolved. The verb is built on nomos, custom or law, and its range runs from holding something to be the case to treating something as customary. On one reading the charge alleges disbelief in the existence of the city's gods; on another it alleges failure to render them their customary observance; on a third the distinction is one the Athenians had no reason to draw, because for them acknowledging a god and giving it its due were not separable operations. An honest brief should not pick a side. What can be said is that the offence is framed as something a person does or fails to do with respect to specified gods, that the accompanying allegation is about introducing other divinities rather than about erroneous opinions concerning the existing ones, and that Athens had no body empowered to define correct belief, no formulary, and nothing that could be violated in the way a creed is violated.

Rome had no equivalent action and reached the same territory by other routes. Sacrilege — theft from a temple — was an ordinary criminal offence. The unchastity of a Vestal was prosecuted as incestum and punished by burial alive, which is policing a status, not an opinion. Intrusion on a rite reserved to women produced the prosecution of Clodius after the Bona Dea affair in 62 BC, an episode our sources treat frankly as a political event. Above these sat the Senate's and the magistrates' power to regulate cult in the public interest. The best-documented instance is the suppression of the Bacchanalia in 186 BC, and it is the model case for this subject's hazard, because for once we have both the document and the story. The bronze tablet from Tiriolo in Bruttium, the oldest surviving senatorial decree in Latin, does not abolish the cult: it forbids shrines, prohibits a man from holding the priesthood, bans a common treasury and officers, limits the number who may participate, and requires prior authorization from the urban praetor and the Senate acting with a stated quorum. It is a licensing and association-control measure. Livy, writing about 160 years later, supplies a narrative of nocturnal initiations, sexual crime, murder, forged wills and an oath-bound conspiracy against the state, traced to an anonymous Greek practitioner and a Campanian priestess who corrupted the rites. The bronze corroborates none of that. Four centuries after the Bacchanalian decree, the machinery reached its most explicit form. No text of the edict issued under Decius in AD 250 survives; the surviving certificates and the Christian sources together indicate that inhabitants were required to sacrifice before commissioners and were issued certificates recording that they had done so, and any statement of the requirement's exact scope rests on that reconstruction. More than forty of these papyrus certificates survive from Egypt. They attest a performed act, witnessed and filed. They ask no one what they believe.

How the rite worked

Athenian procedure put prosecution in private hands. There was no public prosecutor; any citizen in good standing could initiate a public suit, and the archon basileus conducted the preliminary hearing for impiety, fixed the issues and set the trial. Trials were single-day events before juries of several hundred, timed by water-clock, with speeches by the parties themselves (often written for them by professionals), no judicial direction on the law, no deliberation and no reasoned verdict. Penalty in many public suits was assessed in a second vote between the figures proposed by each side, which is the procedure that produced the death sentence in Socrates' case as Plato describes it. The system had a brake on frivolous prosecution: a prosecutor in a public suit who failed to win a set fraction of the votes incurred a heavy fine and a partial loss of civic rights.

Penalties were material and social rather than doctrinal. They ranged across fines, confiscation, loss of civic rights, exile, and death, sometimes with a portion of confiscated property assigned to a sanctuary. The Athenian stelai of 414 or 413 BC show the confiscation stage in operation: the condemned men's holdings itemised and auctioned, with the proceeds and the sales tax recorded on stone for public inspection. Condemnation in absentia was possible and was used against Alcibiades. There was no procedure for readmission by recantation, because there was nothing to recant; a person exiled for impiety came back, if at all, by decree.

Rome regulated rather than prosecuted. Cult inside the city was managed by magistrates advised by the priestly colleges, which controlled the calendar, the archive of formulae and the interpretation of prodigies; the Senate could and did restrict a cult, expel practitioners of a foreign rite from the city, or subject an association to licensing, as the Bacchanalian decree did. The consistent object of these measures is the organizational form — shrines, funds, officers, numbers, nocturnal meeting — rather than the content of anyone's convictions, and the same instruments were used against unlicensed associations that had nothing to do with the gods. Under the Empire this developed into the demand for a performed public act as a test of loyalty, certified in writing, which is where the Decian certificates come from.