Theo: If gods were tied to places, what happened when Rome attacked another city? Did they fight that city's gods too?
Ada: They recruited them. There was a ritual called evocatio. Priests outside a besieged city would formally invite the enemy's protecting god to abandon it and come to Rome for a bigger temple and more worship.5
Theo: A divine poaching contract.
Ada: In three ninety-six BCE, at the siege of Veii, the dictator Camillus called Juno Regina out of the Etruscan city and settled her on Rome's Aventine Hill. Meanwhile, back home, the sacred fire never went out. Six Vestal Virgins tended the hearth of the whole city for thirty years each.15
Theo: And this machinery, it ran for centuries. What finally stopped it?
Ada: Christianity, by law. In the early three nineties CE, Theodosius criminalized it. Lighting a lamp to your household Lares, burning incense to your Penates, could cost you your property, even be treated as treason.14
Theo: So the little gods of the door and the pantry just vanished?
Ada: Not entirely. That Robigalia march on April twenty-fifth, priests walking out to bless the fields against blight, survived in the church calendar as a Rogation Day. The form stayed; the names changed.3
Theo: Which is almost the whole story, isn't it. They never really cared what you believed, only that you kept doing it right.
Ada: That's the heart of it, Yev. For a thousand years, being Roman meant tending an enormous, invisible household, pouring food in the fire, crowning the stone, getting the words exactly right, so the world would hold together one more season.
Theo: And if you ever want to stop us mid-episode and ask something, about a ritual, a god, anything, just interrupt. We'll answer.
Ada: This was Historai, where history answers back.