Sotto il segno di Apollo: Roma e il Lazio tra etruschi e cumani. Religione e politica in età arcaica

This essay reflects on the meaning and the religious history of Apollo in Rome and Latium. The development of the Apollonian cult is almost as a complex phenomenon, which intersects founding legends and different traditions. Its results are not yet fully understandable. To investigate its historical aspects, since the Archaic Age integrated into a plot of political and religious relations, it is essential to start from the relations between Etruria, Latium and Campania, and from the comparison with the Cuman model. Historiography has greatly enhanced Apollo’s role in Greek colonization and Etruscan expansion. In the same way, the ‘archegetic’, mantic and oracular value of the Euboic-Cuman God has been repeatedly highlighted. The worship history in Rome begins with the Apollinar mentioned by Livy, it seems to start from Delphi and, through the Tarquins and the Sibylline Books, lead to Cuma. Actually, the question reveals itself to be conceptually stratified: historical mythical admixtures, epic traditions and different political, cultural and religious agents define the spheres of sacred competence of a Delian, Delphic or Trojan deity, which comes in, next to the Sibylla (or rather to the Trojan and Cuman Sibyllas), in the foundation and in the fata of Rome. Focusing on the interference between expressions of the Apollonian cult, the action of Sibylla and the oracular practice, this work is interested in political use of worship traditions according to forms that transcend so much the limits of the Archaic Age, as well as the horizon of colonization.