The Religious Experience of the Roman People

Between 1909 and 1910 Fowler delivered twenty Gifford Lectures at Edinburgh University, and this 1911 volume is their published form: a survey of Roman religion from its earliest traces down to the settlement under Augustus. The first series reconstructs the old system from the inside, working through survivals and magic, the worship of the household, the calendar attributed to Numa, the ritual of the ius divinum, and the sense of divinity carried in words like numen. The second turns to what arrived from outside and what wore away: new cults, the augurs and divination, the Hannibalic War, Greek philosophy, then Virgil and the Augustan revival. Fowler reads numen as a diffuse animistic force, an interpretation later scholars rejected, though the lectures remain a common starting point, written by a tutor who spent nearly forty years teaching Roman history at Oxford.