Cato and the Control of Ritual Authority

Britta K. Ager (University of Michigan)

Cato in the De Agricultura is concerned not only with the economic and agricultural organization of an estate, but also with ritual activity on the farm. He includes a number of agricultural rites, invocations, and quasi-magical home remedies in his treatise. A pervasive concern in De Agricultura is the regulation of such ritual and the authorization of appropriate people to perform it. Cato considers the owner the sole arbiter of ritual on his property; the dominus, he says, attends to the rem divinam for the whole household. But Cato’s assertion that the dominus controlled all ritual is more ambiguous than it appears, for he repeatedly implies that the dominus could choose to delegate his authority to others. The slave overseer and housekeeper could perform rites when instructed to, and they could further authorize others. Some tasks with magical or religious aspects were so ordinary that most of the household must have taken part at one time or another. On larger estates the dominus could be absent much of the time, so that the performance of even crucial rituals depended on subordinates.

The ideal of a personally attentive dominus clashes with 2^nd century realities of absentee landlords and large slave-run estates. Cato’s comments on the delegation of magico-religious actions show a concern to balance ritual necessity and efficient management which complements his better-studied interest in the agricultural and economic aspects of farming. Traditionally, scholarship on Italian agriculture has dismissed such material as superstitious nonsense (e.g., White, Roman Farming), but to Roman farmers, ritual, from sacrifices before plowing to cures for sick oxen, was an integral part of the agricultural regime.