Most Latin inscriptions are epitaphs and the majority of these begin with dis manibus, generally treated as a boilerplate invocation ‘to the spirits of the departed’ without thought to what that denotes. King's ground-breaking monograph offers a thorough reassessment of the di manes, “Rome's deified dead” (p. xix). It will be an invaluable resource for scholars of religion, funerary practice and afterlife in ancient Rome and more generally.
A brief preface positions this long-gestating outgrowth of King's Reference King1998 dissertation as a corrective to scholarship that has downplayed the import of the manes and the Roman afterlife, despite abundant literary and epigraphic references to both. Compounding the problem are scholars’ conflations of the Roman afterlife with earlier Greek notions and their reliance on Judaeo-Christian terminology of divinity and afterlife that is ill-equipped to convey the nuance of the Roman system, wherein the deified dead are active more in the realm of the living than the dead. King limits himself to the practices of Roman Pagans (as opposed to adherents of imported mystery cults) c. 100 BC–AD 200, as attested largely at the city of Rome (rather than elsewhere in the empire).
Chapter 1 focuses on the aspect of divinity inherent in the appellation itself. King presents the manes as one of four cardinal manifestations of Roman divinity—alongside the lares (household gods), divi Augusti (deified imperials), and honorands of public cults more readily recognised as gods—although the attributes of these classes overlap.
The plurality of the grammatical forms di and manes is the focus of Chapter 2. King shows the plural manes can reference individuals, and finds no evidence of a time at which the dead were venerated only collectively and not individually. His proposal that dis manibus in epitaphs be read as a singular in apposition to the name of the deceased (e.g. “for the divine manes T. Aelius Aurelius” p. 28) is an elegant solution, revising the readings of tens of thousands of epitaphs, where invocations of the collective manes followed by the individual deceased have always been syntactically disjointed.
Chapter 3 uses Roman legal texts to establish patterns of veneration of the living for the manes. King finds that “the transmission and possession of property is ultimately more important than either direct ancestry or gender as a criterion to establish who worshipped which dead persons or was eligible to be worshipped” (p. 40). These obligations cover a multiplicity of social relations ranging from direct descendants to the deceased's creditors to political supporters. Such connections help King differentiate the worship of individuals who died within living memory from the collective worship of manes of all generations.
In Chapter 4, King establishes what Roman ‘belief’ entailed and accounts for its multivalence, refuting scholars who assert that ‘belief’ implies standardised (usually Christian) doctrine—and dedicating almost as much space to dismantling old interpretive frameworks as to postulating new ones. Variability is threefold: polymorphism (wherein different manifestations of a god have conflicting attributes), pietas (referring here to reciprocity based on the aggregate relationships of individuals and communities with specific gods, such that each person has a unique set of relationships), and orthopraxy (standardisation of ritual, not belief). Drawing on set theory, he advocates clustering those with similar beliefs, rather than seeking one canonical form of Roman religion. Lengthy elucidations herein of King's place in theoretical debates are mired in semantic issues unlikely to translate beyond an Anglophone scholarly tradition.
Chapter 5 enumerates how the manes could intervene for worshippers regarding lifespan, moment of death, and conditions of life and afterlife. They could be invoked on matters of agricultural output, reproductive fertility, personal vendettas, military engagements, guaranteeing vows, offering guidance, and entrance to the afterlife. This multiplicity of roles is framed around the belief clusters theorised in Chapter 4.
The overview of funerary rituals in Chapter 6 makes limited use of archaeological and visual evidence, but represents the fullest consideration of such material in the volume. King finds prolepses of the afterlife among these rituals. A graveside sacrifice then consecrates the site to the deceased who is initiated among the manes; attendant mourners thereby become worshippers of this nascent divinity.
Chapter 7 draws primarily on the poet Ovid to elucidate the public and private contexts in which the manes were worshipped individually and collectively. King reconciles the manes venerated in cemeteries during the Parentalia festival with the lemures worshipped at home in the Lemuria festival, and uses belief clusters to show how Romans could equate the lemures, variously, with the manes, the larvae (the unknown dead) or other subsets like the unjustly dead. Outside the context of these festivals, individuals could also worship manes at home or graveside.
The implications of the volume are considered in Chapter 8, which also offers directions for further study. Following this are appendices on larvae and Lemuria, endnotes, bibliography, a combined index of subjects and authors, and a separate index of primary sources. Discounting a paper formerly intended as a third appendix (King Reference King2018), the bibliography cuts off in 2017; non-Anglophone scholarship beyond the mid 1990s is almost entirely absent. Too often afterthoughts elsewhere, the detailed contents and indices are of great utility. Although there is no glossary, King translates all the Latin terminology and explains the more esoteric aspects of antiquity adduced.
Throughout, material evidence is generally treated via second-hand appraisals; likewise, inscriptions seem a secondary concern. (That said, the cover cleverly mimics Latin epigraphic ligatures.) The tens of thousands of dis manibus inscriptions, discussed insufficiently at pp. 126–27, warrant a full chapter. Analysis of the spatiotemporal distribution of such epitaphs and the demographics of those they mention would have been a welcome counterbalance to the overwhelming focus on literary sources that give voice primarily to elite men at Rome.
King aims to use his model of variability in Roman belief to show the cult of the dead as inclusive of all Romans, living and deceased. Through extensive literary evidence and select cross-cultural comparisons, he largely succeeds. This stands to become a foundational text.
