Abstract
Since Roman religion knew neither Revelation nor the Sacred Book, ritual obligation was the only thing practitioners could cling to. This book, Professor John Scheid's closing lecture at the Collège de France, traces the difficult appreciation of this religious peculiarity, which is still shared by many of today's world religions, and which moderns have been slow to recognize. By differentiating between the religion of the individual, in the Romantic sense, and polytheistic and ritualistic religions that ignore the modern concept of the person, this reflection invites the reader to rethink the notions of the individual and the citizen in Roman society.
