The vow and the contract

What is attested

The Roman votum was a conditional undertaking, and its conditionality is its defining feature. The person vowing named what he wanted from a god and named what he would give if he got it; if the condition was met, the debt fell due and had to be discharged. The Latin vocabulary for it is legal: a man who had obtained what he asked for was damnatus voti, condemned in respect of his vow, in the idiom of a judgment entered against a debtor. What that idiom shows directly is that the obligation was understood as enforceable; whether it licenses describing the relationship itself as a contract is one of the open questions set out in the disputes below. This structure is not reconstructed from literature. It is legible directly on the objects, in the very large numbers of dedications across the Roman world that record a vow paid — most compactly in the formula abbreviated V.S.L.M., 'he discharged his vow, willingly, deservedly'. It is one of the largest and most uniformly distributed bodies of evidence for Roman religious action — and, as set out below, one of the most systematically skewed.

Two moments were procedurally distinct: the nuncupatio, the public pronouncement of the vow with its terms, and the solutio, the discharge. State practice made this cycle annual and archival. The Arval Brethren assembled each 3 January to pronounce vows for the ruler's welfare, and their proceedings were inscribed on stone at their sanctuary outside Rome; the surviving Acta preserve the sequence year after year, including the discharge of the previous year's vow before the new one was undertaken. A military calendar on papyrus from Dura-Europos in Syria, of the early third century AD, lists the same 3 January vows as a fixed observance for a garrison on the eastern frontier. Between them these two documents show the same date prescribed at both ends of the empire — one as performed liturgy at Rome, one as a calendar entry for a frontier garrison.

Vows scaled. A private individual might promise a small altar or a modelled body part; a magistrate might promise games; a commander might promise a temple. Central Italian sanctuaries have yielded votive deposits containing thousands of terracotta anatomical models — feet, hands, eyes, ears, internal organs, heads — deposited as discharges of vows, presumably though not demonstrably relating to healing. Roman temples were routinely built on vows made in war and paid years later out of the spoils; the dedicatory inscription naming the vower and the occasion was itself part of the discharge. Augustus's own account of his achievements records the vows undertaken for his health and the monuments voted on his safe return. The system produced buildings, and this is why so much Roman monumental architecture is legally a debt payment.

Alongside this ordinary machinery, Roman literature preserves two extraordinary applications of the same contractual logic, and here the evidence changes character completely. In devotio a commander offered himself, together with the enemy army, to the gods of the underworld, dying in the charge so that the enemy should die with him. In evocatio a besieging general invited the tutelary deity of a city to abandon it and accept a better cult at Rome. Both are described as formal procedures with dictated wording. Both are known essentially from narrative and antiquarian sources rather than from any contemporary record of the act, and the celebrated instances — Decius Mus at the Veseris, Juno Regina called out of Veii — reach us as fully composed literary scenes in Livy, writing under Augustus about events some three and four centuries earlier respectively.

One document keeps evocatio from being purely a literary construct. An inscription found in 1970 at Isaura Vetus in southern Anatolia, connected with the capture of the town by the proconsul P. Servilius Vatia in 75 BC, records a dedication addressed to whichever god or goddess had the town under protection, and states that a vow was discharged. The 'whether god or goddess' formula is a known Roman device for addressing a deity whose name or gender the speaker does not know, and its appearance here, in a first-hand commemorative inscription at a captured city, is the closest thing we have to contemporary evidence that something in the family of evocatio was actually performed in the Republic. It is a single stone, it does not use the word evocatio, and it has been read in more than one way.

How the rite worked

The vow was spoken, and the wording mattered. Roman practice held that a formula had to be pronounced correctly and without interruption, and that a magistrate undertaking a public vow was prompted phrase by phrase by a priest — Livy shows a pontifex dictating for a consul, and shows the pontifex maximus supplying the wording for a state vow, including the qualifying clauses that protected the state against technical failure. Public vows were undertaken on behalf of the Roman people by a magistrate with the Senate's authorisation, and the terms were recorded. Private vows required no priest and no authorisation; the vower spoke, and if the condition was met he paid.

Discharge was the visible half, and it is the half that survives. The physical dedication carried, at minimum, the god's name in the dative, the dedicant's name, and a statement that the vow had been paid. The costs ranged across the whole social spectrum: a mass-produced terracotta model or a small altar at the bottom, a marble altar with a cut inscription in the middle, games or a temple at the top. Because the payment was owed rather than optional, the surviving dedications skew heavily toward successful outcomes — a vow whose condition failed generated no monument. This is the most important sampling bias in the entire corpus and it should shape any statement made from it.

State vows for the ruler's welfare operated on an annual renewal cycle. The previous year's vow was discharged by sacrifice, and only then was the following year's vow pronounced, so that the state was never simultaneously in default and re-obligating itself. The Arval Acts document this sequence as a repeated liturgical event with named officiants, named victims and recorded formulae; the Feriale Duranum shows the same date fixed in a garrison's calendar. Longer-term vows attached to reigns — vows for five or ten years of rule — worked on the same principle at a longer interval and are reflected in imperial coinage.

Devotio and evocatio are described by our sources as using the same grammar at an extreme setting. In the devotio narrative the commander is robed, stands on a spear laid on the ground, is prompted through the formula by a pontifex, and then rides into the enemy line; Livy adds the provision that if the man who devoted himself did not die, an image had to be buried and an expiatory sacrifice made, which is a legal contingency clause rather than a heroic detail. In evocatio the deity is promised cult and a temple at Rome as the consideration for abandoning the besieged city, and the ritual is placed before the final assault. Macrobius, writing in the first half of the fifth century and conventionally dated to about AD 430, transmits what he presents as the actual formulae, saying he found them in an earlier compilation which had them from an older book — a chain of at least two intermediaries between him and any Republican original.