How would the Romans incorporate a new god? | AskHistorians Archive Observer

This makes it sound so official! I just wanted to add to the linked answer, which largely focuses on top-down state action, that the expansion of Roman worship to new gods didn’t happen solely at the state level, nor were the evocatio or translatio of a foreign deity the only way to introduce a new one. Individuals played a large role in Roman religion as dedicators of temples and shrines, and it was this act of founding a shrine that allowed for a much more diverse picture of religious change than models of foreign importation would suggest.

One of the places where we can see this is the establishment of cults to a collection of deities Anna Clark calls divine qualities (I tend to use her term for this group), deities like Victoria, Concordia, Fides, Spes, Libertas, etc. who are both deities and qualities or concepts. In the fourth and third centuries BCE, there were a large number of temple dedications to these deities in Rome, a large number of them attributed to individuals. Scholars have interpreted this large group of dedications as efforts on the part of Roman plebeians to express a new communal identity and to carve out dedicated plebeian spaces within the city, especially when the locations of new temple building in this period are taken into account.

In one instance, we can even see the establishment of a new cult along the lines of patrician-plebeian tensions in the city. The cult of Pudicitia Patricia was open to Roman women who were univirae, that is, women who had been married only to one man, and were patricians. At the beginning of the third century, a separate cult was established to Pudicitia Plebeia specifically for plebeian women to have a place in the cult of Pudicitia as well (it’s likely that before the separate cult was founded, Pudicitia Patricia was just Pudicitia, only picking up the epithet when there was another Pudicitia to distinguish her from). Livy’s account, while its details should be taken with a grain of salt, shows just how informal a process this could be. In his version of events, Verginia, a patrician woman married to a plebeian consul, was denied access to the cult of Pudicitia Patricia and so dedicated part of her own house and erected an altar there to Pudicitia Plebeia. Whether or not we believe Livy’s version, here what’s actually important is his unquestioned assumption that an altar dedicated in part of someone’s house is a cult capable of rivaling an established shrine. There is a group - plebeian univirae - with a religious need (they don’t have access to the cult of Pudicitia), and so an individually-led effort to dedicate a new shrine meets that pressure.

One reason these divine qualities are interesting to highlight is that there is no clear origin on where they come from. They aren’t foreign evocationes, they aren’t translated forms of Greek deities (not that it hasn’t been argued, but the claim doesn’t survive scrutiny). They’re a result of local pressures and their establishment in cult is largely the result of local, individual action. Focusing only on state action completely ignores such a large part of what's actually happening in the Roman religious sphere.

I’ll even add here as a post script that even with evocationes, it’s likely that religious action was the driving force, not political action. One of the more famous evocationes, that of Aesculapius, is reported in our written sources to result in the establishment of a temple to Aesculapius on the Tiber Island at the beginning of the third century BCE, this dedication a result of the senate’s action in order to end a plague. However, archaeological evidence points to a healing cult on the Tiber Island before the arrival of this foreign cult, and a recent find has introduced the possibility that even before the senate took action, this healing cult may have already been associated with Aesculapius. That is, the official political creation of a cult followed only after an existing religious practice.

Clark, Anna. Divine Qualities: Cult and Community in Republican Rome. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007.

Curti, Emmanuele. "From Concordia to the Quirinal: notes on religion and politics in mid-republican/hellenistic Rome." In Religion in Archaic and Republican Rome and Italy: Evidence and Experience. Chicago: 2000.