Thanks for your new blog! According to "the ancient city" by Numa Denis Fustel de Coulanges for Romans the state was a religion. Their heaviest punishment was interdiction from fire and water. That is the religious fire that is burning in every Roman house, and the holy water they during for rites.
A commercial transaction was a religious ritual, for example Mancipatio: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mancipatio. It was only later that Roman law changed from divine law to human (pretorian) law.
I agree :) But yes, that's an excellent point that further emphasizes that the Romans took religion plenty seriously for most of their history. Jaan Puhvel's Comparative Mythology also points out that Roman religious ritual was extremely conservative, to the point of keeping doing rituals long after any associated myth was forgotten, which also supports the idea that they took religious practice, which you might call "devotion" very seriously.
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Thanks for your new blog! According to "the ancient city" by Numa Denis Fustel de Coulanges for Romans the state was a religion. Their heaviest punishment was interdiction from fire and water. That is the religious fire that is burning in every Roman house, and the holy water they during for rites.
A commercial transaction was a religious ritual, for example Mancipatio: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mancipatio. It was only later that Roman law changed from divine law to human (pretorian) law.
The book is fascinating reading.
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Thanks for the kind words!
Jeff