The theological constructions based on rites, as we analyzed them two years ago, focused solely on Rome, on the religion of the Roman People and Roman families, and not on the countless cities, colonies or municipes of Italy and the provinces. For the religion of Rome, on the banks of the Tiber, concerned only the Roman State, the respublica of the Roman People, as they called it, and of course the Roman citizen, wherever he might be, as a member of that State. But this religion and theology were not imposed on the second homeland of every Roman citizen, the colony or municipe in which they were born and where even the majority of them lived. When a city became Roman, when a Roman colony was founded, the full religious obligations of the Roman state were not poured into it. They didn't convert the existing inhabitants, and when a colony was founded by the Romans, they didn't install a pure copy of Rome's religious system.
So how are we to understand the theologies of the colonies and municipalities of Italy and its provinces? Did they reveal, and if so how, the same theological practices as those we observe in Rome itself? For philosophy, certainly, since the elites had the same education. As for mythology, it's much more difficult, since we don't know or understand the local mythology that predates the Roman occupation, even though the inhabitants of the provincial cities refer to it.
We have partially taken up and completed our earlier research on documents that inform us about the founding of the colonies (notably the d'Urso regulations) to assume that, in addition to religious institutions and priesthoods, the new cities built an annual liturgical calendar, which had to be confirmed each year. And the making of this calendar was certainly a matter of theology, in the sense that the decurions had to proclaim a set of gods and goddesses as the colony's public deities. Using the example of the Augustan Colony of Trevi, we have drawn up an inventory of the attested gods, some of whom represent the Roman side of the new city, others the local side. We've also highlighted the choice of Trevirian deities in the collective pantheon. It seems that, like other Gallic cities, the Trevirians adopted Mars as their major deity, unlike the Tongrans and Batavians, who favored the god Hercules. The Lenus epiclesis also reveals that it was undoubtedly the Trevirians on the northern bank of the Moselle who imposed their "tribal" divinity at the expense of other Marses, Loucetios and Gnabetius, attested by the southern Trevirians.
