# The Religious Experience of the Roman People: From the Earliest Times to the Age of Augustus

> W. Warde Fowler's classic study of Roman religion from its primitive origins to the reforms of Augustus. A lucid, humane account of how a people worshipped, and how their faith shaped their state.

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## About
How did the Romans actually feel about their gods, their rituals, their sense of the sacred woven through farm, family, and city? W. Warde Fowler set out to recover not just the machinery of Roman religion but its inner experience.What it's aboutBased on a distinguished lecture series, this study traces the religion of the Roman people from its earliest agricultural and household origins through its civic and state developments down to the religious revival under Augustus. Fowler examines the old festivals and deities, the numen or sacred power the early Romans sensed in the world around them, the priesthoods and rituals, the influx of foreign cults, and the changes that came with empire. Throughout, he seeks the lived feeling behind the observances.ThemesFowler distinguishes the primitive Roman sense of the sacred from the later, more formalized and Hellenized religion, and charts how religious feeling waxed and waned with the fortunes of the state. Ritual, the family and the land, the relation of religion to law and politics, and the slow secularization and revival of faith are his abiding concerns. He writes with sympathy for the human need his subject expresses.Why it still mattersLong a standard work, Fowler's study remains prized for its clarity, learning, and insight into how religion was actually experienced rather than merely catalogued. It illuminates a dimension of Roman life essential to understanding the whole, and it stands among the enduring classics of scholarship on ancient religion. Students of Rome still consult it.Who it's forFor readers of classical history and the history of religion, for students of Rome, and for anyone curious about how an ancient people understood the sacred and built their world around it.

## Specifications
- language: en
- format: paperback