Conclusion
Conclusion
Religion and the Enduring State
This concluding chapter offers a two-part assessment of the book's major findings, first through an examination of one of the institutional religious procedures that arose from the repetitive patterning of those collective commitments surveyed in the previous chapters, and second through the formulation of one final model that attempts to visualize the cumulative force of religious practice on the design and experience of civic time. It begins with the institutional procedure: prodigy expiation. The chapter then illustrates two key dimensions of the middle Republic's timescapes that bear directly on the understanding of Roman state formation during the fourth and third centuries. The first is that religious practice must be mentioned in the same breath as political engagement in any study of what held the res publica together. The second proposition is about method, and about quantitative methods in particular. Systematic quantification is a great boon to those seeking to study the interrelation of religious observance and state formation, and in particular those who are seeking to build bridges between otherwise isolated or (artificially) partitioned bodies of evidence.
Keywords: institutional religious procedures, religious practice, prodigy expiation, middle Republic, Roman state formation, Roman Republic, quantitative methods, religious observance, Rome
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