Religion in the Roman Empire (Die Religionen Der Menschheit, 16) 9783170292246, 9783170292253, 9783170292260, 3170292242

Table of contents :
Cover
Titlepage
Imprint
Contents
Introduction: Living Roman Religion
1 Approaching Roman Religion
2 The Idea of Religion
3 Lived Ancient Religion
4 The Story of Rome
5 Themes and Methods
Bibliography
Empire as a field of religious action
1 A Religion of the Empire?
2 Emperors in the Religious life of the Roman World
3 Empire as an interaction sphere
4 The Empire in the World
5 Empire and Religions
Bibliography
The City as a Field of Religious Action: Manufacturing the Divine in Pompeii
1 A city full of gods
2 The Gods in Action
3 Working with the Gods
4 Conclusion
Bibliography
Sanctuaries - places of communication, knowledge and memory in Roman religion
1 Sanctuaries - places for people and gods
2 The role of sanctuaries in an empire full of differences
2.1 New temples and gods under new rulers
2.2 Villages, towns and regions: spatial-religious references and regional traditions in sanctuaries
2.3 Sanctuaries as places of permanence, political appropriation and religious change
3 Costs, events and experiences: Visitors, users and religious specialists in a sanctuary
3.1 Space for experience—ersonal needs and religious experience
3.2 Oracles, healing and life counselling
3.3 Great feasts and great gifts
4 Collection of knowledge and objects - sanctuaries in the dynamic between memory and oblivion
Bibliography
People and Competencies
1 Introduction
2 Public priests
3 Divination, diviners and the diagnostic value of signs
4 Oracular officials in the Eastern Roman Provinces
5 Anchoring religious innovation
6 Small-group religious entrepreneurs
7 Developing a priestly role in Christ-centred imaginations
8 The philosophers as religious experts and henotheistic tendencies before Christianity
9 Setting borders to religious experts
Bibliography
The Gods and Other Divine Beings
1 Introduction
2 The Gods and Roman ›Religion‹
3 Whose Roman Religion?
4 Interacting with Divine Beings in the Roman World
5 Intellectualizing Religious Experts
Bibliography
Managing problems: Choices and solutions
1 Introduction
2 Mainstream options
2.1 Healing waters, therapeutic dreams
2.2 Divinatory shrines
2.2.1 Oracles, mainly in Italy
2.2.2 The eastern Mediterranean
2.3 Settling the dead
2.3.1 Monumentum and sepulcrum
2.3.2 Ritual meals
3 Minor ritual specialists
4 Self-help
5 Conclusion
Bibliography
Artefacts and their humans: Materialising the history of religion in the Roman world
1 Introduction: From (Late) Prehistoric to Roman
2 Artefacts and religious change in the Roman world
3 Objects, affordances, and religion
4 Objectscape and semiotic form
5 How new objects and materials change religious practices: ÜcfSemiBoldItÝautomataÜfyMyriadProÝÜcfSemiBoldÝ
6 Religion in the Empire of things
7 Beyond wood
8 With terracotta (and double moulds)
9 Through marble and ÜcfSemiBoldItÝcaementiciumÜfyMyriadProÝÜcfSemiBoldÝ
10 Led by lead
11 Conclusion
Bibliography
The Impact of Textual Production on the Organisation and Proliferation of Religious Knowledge in the Roman Empire
1 Introduction
2 Calendars: Appropriating Time and Systematizing Religious Action
3 Controlling ›Religion‹: Legalization and Ratification of Religious Knowledge
4 Re-framing ›Religion‹: Exegesis, Appropriation and Translation as Means of Reiterating Old and Propagating New Religious Ideas
5 Texts and Rituals in the Second Century CE: A€Century of Intense Religious Experimentation
6 ›Religion‹ as Philosophy in the Second Sophistic
7 Martyrologies: Textualizing Death and Embodying ÜcfSemiBoldItÝdevotioÜfyMyriadProÝÜcfSemiBoldÝ
Bibliography
Economy and Religion
1 Introduction
1.1 The wider context: the demography and macro-economy of the Roman Empire
1.2 Implications for expenditure on religious activity
2 Income, outgoings and the nature of the evidence
3 Public versus private: an unhelpful opposition?Ücf+supÝÜcf-supÝ
4 Funding civic and imperial religion
4.1 Standing revenues of sanctuaries and their protection
4.2 Revenues from sacrifice
4.3 Regular income from non-agricultural sources
4.4 Variable income: patronage
4.5 Income versus wealth
5 The finances of associations and small religious groups
6 Pilgrimage as an economic factor
6.1 Competition stimulates business
6.2 Infrastructure and services in and around pilgrimage sites
7 Conclusion
Bibliography
Abbreviations
Figures
Index
Places
Names
Keywords

Citation preview

Die Religionen der Menschheit Begründet von Christel Matthias Schröder Fortgeführt und herausgegeben von Peter Antes, Manfred Hutter, Jörg Rüpke und Bettina Schmidt Band 16,2

Jörg Rüpke, Greg Woolf (Eds.)

Religion in the Roman Empire

Verlag W. Kohlhammer

Preparation of an animal sacrifice; marble, fragment of an architectural relief, first quarter of the 2nd century CE. Department of Greek, Etruscan and Roman Antiquities, Rome, Italy. Alle Rechte vorbehalten © W. Kohlhammer GmbH, Stuttgart Gesamtherstellung: W. Kohlhammer GmbH, Stuttgart Print: ISBN 978-3-17-029224-6 E-Book-Formate: pdf: ISBN 978-3-17-029225-3 epub: ISBN 978-3-17-029226-0 All rights reserved. This book or parts thereof may not be reproduced in any form, stored in any retrieval system, or transmitted in any form by any means—electronic, mechanical, photocopy, recording, microfilm/microfiche or otherwise—without prior written permission of W. Kohlhammer GmbH, Stuttgart, Germany. Any links in this book do not constitute an endorsement or an approval of any of the services or opinions of the corporation or organization or individual. W. Kohlhammer GmbH bears no responsibility for the accuracy, legality or content of the external site or for that of subsequent links.

Contents

Introduction: Living Roman Religion Jörg Rüpke and Greg Woolf 1 Approaching Roman Religion . . 2 The Idea of Religion . . . . . . . . 3 Lived Ancient Religion . . . . . . 4 The Story of Rome . . . . . . . . . 5 Themes and Methods . . . . . . . Bibliography . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

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Empire as a field of religious action . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Greg Woolf and Miguel John Versluys 1 A Religion of the Empire? . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2 Emperors in the Religious life of the Roman World 3 Empire as an interaction sphere . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4 The Empire in the World . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 5 Empire and Religions . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Bibliography . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

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The City as a Field of Religious Action: Manufacturing the Divine in Pompeii . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . William Van Andringa 1 A city full of gods . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2 The Gods in Action . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3 Working with the Gods . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4 Conclusion . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Bibliography . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

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Sanctuaries – places of communication, knowledge and memory in Roman religion . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Rubina Raja and Anna-Katharina Rieger 1 Sanctuaries – places for people and gods . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2 The role of sanctuaries in an empire full of differences . . . . . . . . . . 3 Costs, events and experiences: Visitors, users and religious specialists in a sanctuary . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4 Collection of knowledge and objects – sanctuaries in the dynamic between memory and oblivion . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

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Bibliography . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . People and Competencies . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Georgia Petridou and Jörg Rüpke 1 Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2 Public priests . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3 Divination, diviners and the diagnostic value of signs . . . . . . . . . . 4 Oracular officials in the Eastern Roman Provinces . . . . . . . . . . . . 5 Anchoring religious innovation . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 6 Small-group religious entrepreneurs . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 7 Developing a priestly role in Christ-centred imaginations . . . . . . . 8 The philosophers as religious experts and henotheistic tendencies before Christianity . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 9 Setting borders to religious experts . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Bibliography . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . The Gods and Other Divine Beings . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Heidi Wendt 1 Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2 The Gods and Roman ›Religion‹ . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3 Whose Roman Religion? . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4 Interacting with Divine Beings in the Roman World 5 Intellectualizing Religious Experts . . . . . . . . . . . . . Bibliography . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Managing problems: Choices and solutions Richard Gordon 1 Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2 Mainstream options . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3 Minor ritual specialists . . . . . . . . . . . 4 Self-help . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 5 Conclusion . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Bibliography . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

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Artefacts and their humans: Materialising the history of religion in the Roman world . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Miguel John Versluys and Greg Woolf 1 Introduction: From (Late) Prehistoric to Roman . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2 Artefacts and religious change in the Roman world . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3 Objects, affordances, and religion . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4 Objectscape and semiotic form . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 5 How new objects and materials change religious practices: automata 6 Religion in the Empire of things . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 7 Beyond wood . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 8 With terracotta (and double moulds) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

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9 Through marble and caementicium 10 Led by lead . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 11 Conclusion . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Bibliography . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

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The Impact of Textual Production on the Organisation and Proliferation of Religious Knowledge in the Roman Empire . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Georgia Petridou and Jörg Rüpke 1 Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2 Calendars: Appropriating Time and Systematizing Religious Action . . 3 Controlling ›Religion‹: Legalization and Ratification of Religious Knowledge . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4 Re-framing ›Religion‹: Exegesis, Appropriation and Translation as Means of Reiterating Old and Propagating New Religious Ideas . . . . . 5 Texts and Rituals in the Second Century CE: A Century of Intense Religious Experimentation . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 6 ›Religion‹ as Philosophy in the Second Sophistic . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 7 Martyrologies: Textualizing Death and Embodying devotio . . . . . . . . . Bibliography . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Economy and Religion . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Richard Gordon, Rubina Raja and Anna-Katharina Rieger 1 Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2 Income, outgoings and the nature of the evidence . . . . 3 Public versus private: an unhelpful opposition? . . . . . . 4 Funding civic and imperial religion . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 5 The finances of associations and small religious groups 6 Pilgrimage as an economic factor . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 7 Conclusion . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Bibliography . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

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Abbreviations . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 306 Figures . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 308 Index . . Places . . Names . . Keywords

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Fig. 1: The Roman Empire 117 A.D.

Introduction: Living Roman Religion Jörg Rüpke and Greg Woolf

1

Approaching Roman Religion

How can we reconstruct the religious dimensions of life in the Roman empire? How were rituals entangled with the routines of everyday living and extraordinary events? How did relations with the divine intrude into the spaces Roman inhabited and the patterns of their lives? How, in short, was Roman religion lived? Over the last decade a number of excellent general accounts of Roman religion have been produced, themselves building on a rich tradition of scholarship more than a century old. Some of these deal with the same sort of questions that exercised Roman scholars from the last century BCE on, men (and it was always men) such as Marcus Terentius Varro, Marcus Tullius Cicero, Verrius Flaccus and behind them a series of works now known only in fragments. Those first Roman experts on Roman religion were interested in particular priesthoods and religious rules. Why was the flamen of Jupiter not allowed to spend prolonged periods outside the city? They tried to distinguish elements of Greek or Etruscan origin from ancient local customs and more recent innovations. Some Roman writers, and some Greek ones too, tried to explain some more bizarre rituals such as the Lupercalia when young aristocrats ran half naked around the city striking women with leather straps, the Parilia which in some sense (but what sense?) celebrated the birthday of Rome, or the October Horse. And some ancient writers wondered about the origin of the gods, how they were related to similar gods worshipped by other ancient peoples and how to connect traditional myth with modern philosophy. Because the modern study of antiquity began as an exegetical process focused on the Greek and Latin classics, it was natural that much early scholarship dealt with the same questions that had puzzled the ancients.1 Parallel to that sort of investigation have been attempts to capture the broader pattern of Roman religion by standing outside it. An influential tradition, one we may trace back to Fustel de Coulanges (1864), found the key to Roman (and Greek) religion in the structures of the city state.2 If ancient cities were fundamentally, perhaps even in origin, communities of coreligionists, then much of the shape of ancient religion could be understood as calqued on or coterminous with the shape of ancient civic societies. The boundaries of the citizen body coincided with the boundaries of participants in collective ritual or the boundaries of those whose 1 Still fundamental and useful: Wissowa 1912 (modelling his account on Varro, see Rüpke 2003). 2 Fustel de Coulanges 1984.

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religious actions had consequences for the community. Generally the same groups and individuals that controlled a given city-state—aristocrats and the senate in Rome, the demos and the ecclesia in Athens—controlled ritual. The most recent formulations along these lines—sometimes termed ›civic religion‹ or ›la religion poliade‹—remain influential.3 There are naturally many variations: some scholars treat this as a harmonious homology between the religious, the social and the political, a sign that these spheres were weakly differentiated in ancient thought, or that ritual was deeply embedded in social structure and political order. Some see polis religion as an ideological construction, created to serve the interests of the powerful and to legitimate their control of the state, always opposed to a less sharply defined field of heterodox views, deviant practices, superstitions and the like. Given most of our written sources for Roman religion derived from members of those ruling elites it is not always easy to know—at least not from texts alone— how contested their views of religion were. The best modern accounts of Roman religion make the most of the written evidence for ancient belief and cult but do not allow these texts to determine the questions we might ask. One way to escape ancient definitions of the subject is to deploy comparative evidence. Greek, Roman and Etruscan rituals have long been compared, and at one time it was common to broaden the field of comparison to include other religions regarded as of common Indo-European descent. Fewer scholars are now comfortable with moving easily from a linguistic taxonomy to a family of related societies: in that sense the legacy of Dumézil4 is almost extinct. It has also become less common to explain Roman religion in terms of its supposed origins (Etruscan, rustic, Indo-European etc.).5 Most experts on Roman religion now try to elucidate particular rituals and institutions in terms of their contemporary context. So the Lupercalia as practiced in the late Republic has to have a significance in terms of the collective life of a city of several hundred thousand at the heart of vast and expanding empire, led by an elite self-consciously engaged in the creation of a distinctive cultural tradition that might rival that of the Greeks. The key question now is how to balance these contexts: which explain most, the urban? the imperial? the intellectual? or a mixture of these and others? Now we mostly approach Roman religion through synchronic rather than diachronic analysis, trying to understand rituals and utterances in the context of their performance, and we read texts not as authorities so much as as momentary crystallizations of discourse.6 Our focus on the wider context and the contemporary has meant that the social sciences—especially anthropologies of various kinds—have provided powerful tools for interpreting and imagining Roman religion.

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E.g. Beard, North, Price 1998; Scheid 1998; Rüpke 2006. Dumézil 1970; earlier e.g. Usener 1913; Usener 1948; Bailey 1932; Rose 1958. E.g. Altheim 1931; Schilling 1954; Latte 1960; Scholz 1970. E.g. Rüpke 2009.

2 The Idea of Religion

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The Idea of Religion

Before outlining our own approach some comment is appropriate on how we use the terms Religion, Religions and Religious since there has been much discussion in recent years of how appropriate these ideas are to describe ancient and nonChristian ritual and belief in particular. Religions are understood as traditions of religious practices, conceptions, and institutions, in some contexts even fully developed organisations. According to an important strain of sociological thought going back to Émile Durkheim (1858-1917), we are dealing here with social products,7 as a rule with groups of people normally living together within a territory, who withhold the central core of their life together, their shared orientation, from the necessity of daily discussion by investing it in forms of religious symbolism. There emerges a system of signs whose immanence is preserved by the performance of rituals, and which seeks to explain the world in images, narratives, written texts, or refined dogma, and to determine behaviour by the use of ethical imperatives, often by recourse to an effective apparatus of sanctions (for instance through the power of the state), but sometimes even without that implied threat. Many volumes within the series Die Religionen der Menschheit are following the first, tradition-based, and the second, geographically defined, line of understanding. Such a conception of religion meets its limits when it seeks to explain religious pluralism, the enduring coexistence of different, mutually contradictory conceptions and practices, or the quite distinct relationship of individuals with religion on which lived ancient religion is focusing. This conception of Religion has already been attacked as being too closely oriented to ›western‹, and above all Christian religious and conceptual history, and criticized for its unquestioned and unquestioning ›colonial‹ transference to other cultures.8 It has similarly problematic ramifications when we seek to apply it to Antiquity.9 The reason for this also lies in the present. The dissolution of traditional allegiances frequently to be observed in our time is seen as religious individualism, the disappearance of religion, or even the displacement of collective religion by individual spirituality.10 This perspective then becomes associated with the complementary assumption that early societies and their religions must have been characterized by a high level of collectivism. We shall see how a problematic assumption in respect of the present day creates a highly distorted picture of the past.11 But it is not the notion of religion that we have to drop. In demand is a concept of religion that enables us to describe the aforementioned changes in the social location and individual significance of religion. This can successfully be achieved

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Durkheim 1947; also Pickering 2008; Rosati 2009. Asad 1993; McCutcheon 1997; Masuzawa 2000, 2005. See Nongbri 2013. Luckmann 1991; also Dobbelaere 2011, 198 and Rüpke 2016. See Rüpke 2012; Rüpke 2013a.

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by conceiving of religion from the standpoint of the individual and his or her social involvement. Only in rare instances does such lived ancient religion coalesce into networks and organized systems, to resemble what we normally categorize as religions, expressed in written texts that may then develop an enduring autonomous existence of enormous proportions. How, then, is religion to be modelled? We understand the religion of the epoch in question as comprising the situative inclusion of agents (whether they be described as divine or gods, demons or angels, the dead or the immortal) who are in a particular respect beyond or above that situation. Above all, however, their presence, their collaboration, their significance in a particular situation is not simply an unquestioned given: other human participants in the situation might regard them as invisible, silent, inactive, or simply absent, perhaps even non-existent. Succinctly, religious activity is present at a time and a place where, in a particular situation, at least one human individual includes such agents in his or her communication with other humans, whether by merely referring to those agents or by directly addressing them. Even in ancient cultures, however, such a strategy of communication or action is not simply self-evident. It was beset with risks in respect of personal and functional credibility. Opposition hardly ever implied a general statement that the gods did not exist; it would rather question the assertion that one particular deity, whether Jupiter or Hercules, had helped or would help oneself or others, or question the claim that Fortuna or ›fate‹ stood behind one’s own actions. In the same vein also an occasional obvious success of a prayer or curse did not produce unquestionable proof, but it could also sustain the plausibility of such claims in the face of many unfulfilled prayers. Ascribing authority to invisible agents and exercising corresponding circumspection in one’s actions appears, as postulated by evolutionists, to have been conducive to survival and accordingly favoured in human development;12 but the same strategy has always tended to be seen by one’s fellow humans as presenting an Achilles’ heel, and its systematization has been liable to provoke organized dissent.13 It is not simply the case that the past was more pious. Countless thousands brought small gifts to Roman temples to show their gratitude or give emphasis to their requests; millions did not. Millions buried their deceased children or parents with care, and provided them with grave goods; countless millions contented themselves with disposing of the corpses. As a consequence, we have to ask, where the use of religious communication and religious activity strengthened the agency of the individual, his or her competence and creativity in dealing with problems that sometimes went beyond the everyday. Where did reference to not indisputably plausible agents contribute to the formation of collective identities that enabled the individual to act or think as part of a group, of a social formation that might vary greatly in form and strength, no matter whether it existed in actuality or only in the imagination or fevered

12 Boyer 1994. 13 Archer 1996, 225–6.

3 Lived Ancient Religion

13

awareness of a few people? We have defined religion as the extension of particular environments beyond the immediately plausible social milieu of living humans in specific forms of agency, identity formulation, communication. What is no longer ›immediately plausible‹ in a relevant milieu may vary in ways that are entirely culture-dependent; plausibility, ›worthiness of applause‹, is itself a communicative, rhetorical category. In the one instance it might be the dead, in another gods conceived of in human form, even places that are no longer definable in terms of mere topography: or humans beyond a sea. Interpretation and assignment of what is disputed in a culture depends on the boundaries drawn by the academic observer. A high level of investment in the construction of initially improbable actors as ›social partners‹ consistently creates an ›excess‹ of personal consolidation, power, or problem-solving capacity in the person making that investment, an outcome that in turn becomes precarious on account of the disadvantage caused to others, who may seek to defend themselves against it. Sacralisation, declaring objects or processes in the immediately plausible, visible environment to be ›holy‹, is an element of such an investment strategy.14 The investment metaphor can easily be related to the enormous scale on which religions have recourse to media, cult images and sanctuaries, as well as complex rituals and strategies in respect of texts and communication, as has been indicated under the rubric of religious communication. We should also, however, be curious about inferior status reinforced by religion, a situation countered with strategies of social change by some individuals in a religious context, while others turn their backs on religion, to pursue social mobility on their own account (when they do not turn to quietism). Such questions and problems indicate the role of concepts of ›religion‹. They help to stimulate and to systematize observations. Many of the questions thus provoked cannot be answered for ancient or ›Roman‹ religion. Many of the details will not be applicable to other cultural configurations.

3

Lived Ancient Religion

When we originally discussed how to present the religious practices of the Roman Empire in the Imperial period to the readers of Religionen der Menschheit, we decided not to try to summarise or replicate the high quality recent accounts framed in the terms mentioned at the beginning. This volume offers something different and complementary, although also self-sufficient and self-contained. Rather than beginning from institutions and structures, we aim to explore Roman ritual and religious thought as a lived religion, a bundle of practices and attitudes, habits and routines, practiced and understood by members of Roman society and subjects of the Roman state. The term Lived Religion acknowledges the inspiration of a broad set of approaches very different to the structuralist and post-structuralist anthropologies that inspired most accounts of Roman religion as a system. The concept 14 Rüpke 2013b; cf. Dobbelaere 2011 (›holy‹) and Taves 2009 (›special‹).

14

Introduction: Living Roman Religion

of ›lived religion‹ was developed in the late 1990s in the context of the study of present-day religions. In such a framework, ›religion‹ is understood as a spectrum of experiences, actions, and beliefs and communications hinging on human communication with super-human or even transcendent agent(s), for the ancient Mediterranean usually conceptualized as ›gods‹. Material symbols, elaborate forms of representation, and ritualization are called upon for the success of communication with these addressees.15 Such a communication at the same time implies the forging or—at times—rejection of human alliances. Thus, the existence and importance of culturally stabilized forms of rituals and concepts and people who are invested in developing and defending them cannot be denied. Traditions claimed, kept and re-invented; the religious practices of elites, demonstratively practiced; and emerging forms of institutionalised religion in complex sanctuaries or professionalised priesthoods were part and parcel of such lived religion in antiquity. Members of the elites of circumMediterranean ancient cities (we know much less about tribal areas) certainly used the possibilities offered by religious communication for various purposes. For political actors, reference to divine agents was ideally suited to creating a communicative space beyond the families and clans. Thus, they could emphasize shared interests and yet could also use religious activity as a field in which to compete and obtain distinction. This flexibility helped ritual activity and religious architecture to achieve a high degree of dynamism: ever new possibilities of religious communication were invented, or existing traditions appropriated and altered in order to deal with the problems thrown up by the increasing geographic extent of ancient empires, urban growth or increasing social differentiation and competition. ›Civic religion‹ as just mentioned could be reconceptualised as part of lived religion rather than as the over-arching frameworks allowing for inconsequential acts of popular religion and its irrelevant variations and innovations respectively a politically similar unimportant sector of elective cults.16 By contrast with contemporary anthropological research, ›ancient lived religion‹ goes far beyond concepts like ›everyday religion‹ or ›popular religion‹.17 Vice versa, individual religious practices are not entirely subjective. There are religious norms, there are exemplary official practices, there are control mechanisms. For the historian ›lived religion‹ also points to the fact that our evidence is biased. It is precisely such institutions and norms that tend to predominate in the surviving evidence from antiquity. Such norms, too, are the outcome of a communicative strategy on the part of agents in positions of power or larger means. If we observe religion in the making—as is stressed here—institutions or beliefs are not simply culturally given, but are themselves aggregates of individual practices—as well as of the latters’ constraints. The specific forms of religion-as-lived are barely comprehensible in the absence of specific modes of individual appropriation of motives and models

15 Bell 1992; Rüpke 2010, 2021a, b. 16 Rüpke 2018b, 83–108. 17 Cf. Bender 2016; Orsi 1999, 2010; McGuire 2008.

3 Lived Ancient Religion

15

offered by traditions, even when this took the form of the radical rejection of dominant ways of life, as in asceticism or martyrdom. For the concrete forms and above all for their survival to the present day to be available to us as ›evidence‹, cultural techniques such as reading and writing, the interpretation of mythical or philosophical texts, rituals, pilgrimages and prayer, and the various media of representation of deities in and out of sanctuaries are decisive. The notion of agency is important here. Agency is not about the lonely individual, but about the interaction of individuals with structures, structures, which are themselves the result of individual actions.18 In view of the normative tagging of teachings, traditions, narratives etc. in the field of religion, and in view of the normative claims raised by some of the agents—the question of how ideas are taken up and are modified by others or in other words—the specification of processes of reception is of particular importance. Talking of lived religion offers a frame for a description of the formative influence of professional providers, of law and other legal norms, of philosophical thinking and intellectual reflections in literary or reconstructed oral form, of social networks and socialization, of lavish performances in public spaces (or performances run by associations) with recourse to individual conduct in rituals and religious context. Against this background this volume implies a methodological reorientation in order to achieve a richer description of ancient religious practices and concepts and their interaction and change in space and over time. In the individual chapters we are focusing on religious practices as situational appropriations19 as well as individual realizations of locally or regionally established, family or group ›traditions‹. Combining micro- and macro-historical perspective, the range of individual variations and innovations is taken seriously as a potential driver of long-term changes, even against contemporary as well as later, academic observers, who took for granted that a coherent set of religious networks20 and cultural rules defined individual behaviour. The constitution of individual religious agents and the elaboration of collective identities (or even tangible social groups) are presented as an intertwined process. Replacing the reproduction of traditional religious norms (a process usually judged as incomplete and faulty) by the selective and creative ›appropriation‹ of individual actors is central. But the ›lived ancient religion‹ approach induces further methodological modifications in the process of selecting and interpreting the evidence. Its focus is on experience rather than on symbols. We do not start from lists of gods, mythologems or an inventory of rituals. The concept of experience has not yet been brought fully to bear on ancient religion outside Judaism and Christianity, even if ›experience‹ has been used in a book title already by Fowler21 and increasingly in phrases indicating the stress on the subjective side of ancient

18 19 20 21

Emirbayer, Mische 1998; Rüpke 2015. Certeau 2007. Rutherford 2007; Eidinow 2011; Rüpke 2013; Collar 2014. Fowler 1911.

16

Introduction: Living Roman Religion

culture by French structuralists and Anglophone anthropologists.22 For many, the very subjective nature of ›experience‹ seems to be in conflict with the dearth of ancient sources. However, there is a lot of communicated, narrated experience in even formulaic texts. The focus on ›experience‹ points to the individual prehistory and consequences of acts of religious communication and stresses the roles of the viewer and user of images, and also more or less sacralised space in open and domestic contexts. For material culture, the term ›archaeology of religious experience‹ addresses this perspective and stresses individual experience both domestically and in the service of public religious infrastructure.23 A second focus is on culture in interaction rather than on habitus, organisation or culture as text. Religion in the making24 is not to be grasped in terms of individual isolation, but is characterised by diverse social contexts that are appropriated, reproduced and informed by the actors on relevant occasions. Like the anthropological concept of ›lived religion‹, the concept of ›culture in interaction‹ has been developed in the ethnographic analysis of contemporary societies. Focusing on situational communication in groups, the concept aims to identify specific ›group styles‹, which modify the use of linguistic as well as behavioural register within cultural contexts.25 As a consequence, we have chosen not to organise the volume in terms of a series of chapters each addressed to particular ›cults‹ treated as stable and exclusive groups of people or ›proto-religions‹. Our primary focus is not on competing ›religions‹ or ›cults‹, but symbols as they assumed ever new configurations within a broad cultural space.26 It was religious professionals who made enormous efforts to establish and secure group boundaries. ›Religions‹ as seen ›from below‹ are the product of attempts—often by just a few individuals—to occasionally create order and boundaries, rather than an imperfect reproduction on the part of the citizens of some normative system. Thus, the people that do religion are not a group and do not behave according to that group’s norms. Instead, by trying to embody imagined norms they form a group in a specific public context, according to the situational necessities of forming alliances, displaying differences, pretending membership.27 For the most thoroughly defined and stabilised social contexts of ritual interaction—namely the nuclear and wider family (including slaves), clans, neighbourhoods, professional bodies, and voluntary associations (usually meeting three or four times a year), intellectual networks supported by letters and the exchange of manuscripts28—the concept helps theorise situational differences in reproducing

22 23 24 25 26

Vidal-Naquet 1960; Needham 1972; Malamat 1989; Hanson 1991. Raja, Rüpke 2015. For the term see Albrecht et al. 2018. Eliasoph, Lichterman 2003; Lichterman 2009. Here we can build on a critique of the concept of ›oriental cults‹ (or ›religions‹), e.g. Bonnet, Rüpke, Scarpi 2006; Bonnet, Rüpke 2009. 27 Rebillard 2012. 28 E.g. Haines-Eitzen 2000; Eshleman 2012; Rüpke 2018a, 327–63.

4 The Story of Rome

17

cultural religious representations as well as in evoking less widely shared knowledge and practices. The authors of the essays gathered together in this volume are not doctrinaire followers of one particular set of investigative protocols. Our work develops out of common discussions, many framed within the ERC funded Lived Ancient Religion project.29 But our methods are eclectic as is our inspiration. What we have in common is a commitment to begin with the agency and understanding of practitioners, with the day-to-day business of existing in a world inflected with peculiarly Roman views of the gods and of the sacred. That starting point has not just led us through a different series of theoretical orientations, some deriving from religious studies, others from a wider range of social studies. It has also led us to emphasize different categories of evidence, especially the material traces of ritual. And we have found that if one does begin an exploration of Roman religion from, say, anatomical votives or the archaeology of graves rather than Cicero’s On the Nature of the Gods and Augustine’s City of God a rather different picture emerges.30 It is in the nature of an approach of this kind that we do not seek to depose the knowledge orders of an earlier generation and replace them with our own. Instead we seek to offer a different route through the religion of the Romans (writ large), one which opens up some novel panoramas, suggests new contrasts (and similarities with) other traditions, and has more to say than some other general accounts about the material traces of Roman cult and the experiences of individual members of Roman society.

4

The Story of Rome

For those less familiar with ancient Rome we offer a very short sketch.31 The city of Rome was one of hundreds of urban communities that came together gradually in the first centuries of the last millennium BCE. It did not appear in a sudden moment of foundation—whatever later Romans liked to believe—but coalesced from a cluster of nearby villages. Similar sequences are known from all around the Mediterranean Sea around the same time. Iron technology, agricultural expansion, a slow increase in maritime trade and perhaps climatic amelioration all seem important. The first clear signs that communities were being constructed on a large scale is usually temple building and Rome is no exception here. Urbanization was accompanied in central Italy by state-formation. Romans in later periods believed their political community had been founded in 753 BCE and

29 Financed under the 7th framework programme of the European Union, contract no. 295555, at the Max Weber Centre for Advanced Cultural and Social Studies of the University of Erfurt, Germany. 30 See e.g. Van Andringa 2009; Woolf 2017; Rüpke 2018a. 31 For more details, Woolf 2012; for religious change Rüpke 2018a; for urbanization Woolf 2020.

18

Introduction: Living Roman Religion

that until 509 BCE it was ruled by kings, the last of which were Etruscan in origin. The expulsion of the kings gave birth, in tradition, to a Republican government in which the interests of the high status patricians were repeatedly rebalanced with those of the more numerous plebeians. Like most of the ancient city-states we know of Rome had a series of assemblies where the masses convened, and a council—in Rome the senate—which in practice represented the interests of the property classes. Those property classes provided civil magistrates, generals and priests, and in Rome there was a strong overlap between those categories. The details of this political system evolved over time, partly in response to the extension of the citizen body as a result of successive wars against Rome’s neighbours. No reliable narrative is possible, however, until Rome attracted the attention of historians as a consequence of wars fought on a larger scale beginning in the third century BCE. By that point it already had some unusual political features. For one thing it was quite willing to extend its territory and its influence and to consolidate victories by settling citizens in new centres—coloniae—often anchored on roads that began to form an infrastructure for the peninsula as a whole. Secondly it was unusually ready to extend its citizenship, first to citizens of other Latin towns, then to former slaves and successively to more and more groups until it no longer looked very like a conventional city-state. One theme of Roman history from the third century BCE to the third century CE is the creation of this growing and dispersed citizen body, all carrying with them Roman ideas of ritual and propriety, all bound in principle to the same gods. By the middle of the millennium, Rome was probably already one of the biggest urban centres in Italy: it owed this to its geopolitical location, to its nodal position on key communication routes and perhaps because of the wide range of natural resources found close by, including clay and salt. The Servian Walls constructed in the fourth century BCE formed an 11 km circuit which suggests political dominance of Italy even in this early period. By the end of the third century BCE Rome had become the dominant Mediterranean power, defeating the largest cities of the western Mediterranean—Phoenician Carthage, Greek Syracuse and Tarentum. Its armies and navies consisted of citizen soldiers supplemented by former enemies compelled to become part of a military alliance on their defeat. During the first half of the second century BCE these armies went on to defeat the main kingdoms founded by the generals who had divided up Alexander the Great’s empire. Rome had no rival within the Mediterranean region, even if few areas beyond Italy were converted into provinces. Historians ancient and modern have debated what advantages or tactics had ensured Roman supremacy: Romans themselves seemed to believe that their unusual piety towards the gods was an important factor, alongside the virtue of Roman men, particularly aristocratic men. At first Roman hegemony over the remaining petty kingdoms, leagues and much smaller city-states was chaotic and inconsistent. The political system of the city was critically destabilized by the pace of growth and the uneven distribution of the proceeds of empire. Not much effort was put into creating the fiscal, administrative and military infrastructure needed to run an empire and as a result Rome very nearly lost it on a number of occasions between the middle of the second and

4 The Story of Rome

19

the middle of the last centuries BCE. Provincials antagonized by brutal troops and greedy tax collectors (the infamous publicani or publicans) made common cause with client kings seeking to exploit Rome’s lack of attention. Competition between factions and individuals in Rome was swollen by bribery and eventually the armies created to reconquer the empire and reestablish Rome’s hegemony made common cause with generals whom the senate now distrusted. The last century of the Republican period was characterised by revolts and civil wars of various kinds. Ancient historical writing was obsessed with these multi-level conflicts. But in the background we can now see the emergence of more enduring structures. One was the emergence of Italy as a region increasingly unified by the Latin language, Roman citizenship, a mixture of Roman coloniae and local municipia that resembled each other more and more, and on the religious plane a shared vocabulary of rituals, symbols, images, beliefs and practices. Another was the emergence around the Mediterranean of major sanctuaries that attracted visitors from some distance to participate in games, to consult oracles, and to undergo initiations Gods moved too, often with their worshippers but sometimes in more dramatic fashion as when the Roman state began importing cults to the City. It would be an exaggeration to describe the Mediterranean world as religiously unified by the turn of the millennia, but a number of deities and rituals had become widely shared, and conversely those traditions that did not use Greek or Latin, and did not represent the gods in anthropomorphic form, and which did not invest places and temples with complex mythologies were becoming marginalized. A few practices, such as human sacrifice and a bundle of efforts to control divine beings through magic, were now widely distrusted. Rome emerged from two generations of sporadic war—in which most of the Mediterranean had eventually been involved—as a monarchy. The last general standing took the religiously inflected title Augustus and set about harnessing the considerable religious resources available within his domain. Hailed as a pharaoh in Egypt, given god-like honours in Greek cities, Augustus created temples and leagues devoted to the worship of Rome and himself in the west and in Italy accumulated priesthoods and religious qualities. His image was everywhere, his name inserted into countless prayers and even the calendar. His power rested too on the control of the army and of taxation but ritual provided one means to offer his subjects the seductive idea that all this had come about not by chance or villainy but through the will of the divine, a theodicy of good fortune. Provincials, soldiers, city-dwellers and even the elite had their own versions of what modern writers have collectively termed ruler cult. Part of the process of adjusting to empire was the development of an intellectual culture that included historical and antiquarian investigations. Much of what we know of early Roman religion originates in the educated guesswork of members of a ruling class in the process of tearing itself to bits, and then learning to live with the consequence of peace. The theological works of Varro and Cicero, the philosophical epic of Lucretius, and the learned discussions of later intellectuals like Plutarch and Gellius all show, in different ways, the search for a systematic and philosophically satisfying version of Roman religion that cohered with history

20

Introduction: Living Roman Religion

(the official version) and the imperial order. This activity was not the lived experience of the masses but informed the practice of the enlarged Roman aristocracy that still played a key part in the ruling of the empire. That political system evolved rather more slowly during the first two centuries CE. Local cultures persisted, but some parts of the empire followed the same path as Italy had done in the last century BCE. Across the empire a network of between two and three thousand cities emerged, most using Latin or Greek as their public languages. Religious institutions that had originated in central Italy or around the Aegean became widespread. Economic growth, a modest increase in mobility and peace all provide conditions for religious exchanges of all kinds. Italian style priesthoods and temples were imitated (and modified) in much of the west and templestates in the east came to resemble Greek poleis. Not all movement was from the centre to the edge. A number of local deities from Anatolia, Syria, Palestine and Egypt travelled, sometimes in modified forms throughout the empire. No Reichsreligion, no Religion of the Empire, ever emerged. But the empire provided a capacious zone of interaction. The structure of the empire evolved too in ways that were slow and unplanned, punctuated by dramatic decisions at the centre. Military crises in the middle of the third century triggered by war with Persia and movements on the steppe meant that emperors and their courts spent longer and longer away from Rome. The public religion of late antique Rome, once the emperors had departed, looks self consciously archaizing, but even those senators most committed to projects of traditionalism and restoration were also involved in mystery cults and various theological speculations. The population of Rome, and of most cities, was reducing in this period, and in many part of the empire local traditions were revived or invented. Against this background of slow change the interventions of emperors appear as dramatic acts the impact of which is never completely clear. This applies to Deciusʼ requirement that all Romans (now effectively all his subjects) produce proof of sacrifice, it applies to imperial initiatives to persecute Manicheans and then Christians, it applies to edicts about magic and about the Jews. In many times and places we suspect lived religion did not change rapidly. The conversion of the emperor Constantine to Christianity in the early fourth century had an immediate impact on the imperial court, and restrictions on the public funding of the worship of other gods and of sacrifice itself had an impact on many cities by the end of the fourth century CE. Yet polytheism flourished in some parts of the empire through the fourth century, survived in pockets into the sixth, and perhaps for many made less of a difference than church leaders claimed. Funerary rituals show no sudden shift. The Lupercalia survived in Rome into the fifth century CE, and Roman games in connection with the cult of Roman emperors were performed in Carthage under the (Christian) Vandal kings. Bishops vacillated between a pragmatic rebadging and appropriation of existing ritual traditions and occasional prohibitions, the efficacy of which has often been doubted. No society remains the same over 1500 years, and no empire that takes weeks to cross is socially homogenous. Beneath the Latin and Greek rhetorical cultures of civic elites and imperial officials, every kind of local diversity could be found.

5 Themes and Methods

21

These microcultures were not all of them very conservative—notoriously many communities in the west of the empire and the Roman Near East retained almost no public memory of the world before Rome. When something new arrived—the cult of the emperors, the worship of Christ—it almost always fragmented into a myriad of local traditions. Part of this was a process analogous to modern globalization, the local appropriation of the global—and part of this was simply a feature of the narrow horizons within which most ancient lives were lived. Women rarely moved long distances and almost never without the men to who they were related or who owned them. Many men too rarely travelled beyond their own community and those that bordered it. The inhabitants of inland communities often never saw the sea, many inhabitants of the empire had very imperfect knowledge of any language beyond the ones spoken where they had been borne. Writing was widely used, but the capacity to read long texts (and access to them) was very restricted. The organisation of our chapters attempts to capture some of that diversity and mutability, but cannot offer a comprehensive account of it. Chronologically we have most to say about the period from the end of the first century BCE to the third centuries CE when literary texts, inscriptions and monumental building are more numerous than ever before or after. But we reach back, when we can, to the world of Varro and Cicero and occasionally beyond. And we have tried not to overemphasised the immediate impact of Christianity.

5

Themes and Methods

The themes we have chosen are those for which a lived religion approach seems to us to have most to offer. Objects and well explored locales feature, as a result, more than does law or philosophical theology. Other thematics were discussed and would have been possible, and sometimes we have made difficult choices in order to avoid duplication or artificial demarcations. One example is the question of how to deal with the body, a key locus for ritual action and prohibition in the Christian period and also before. It would be been possible and interesting to explore Roman religion in these terms. But after discussion we decided that since knowledge and practice are both embodied, it would be better to stress this integrally within other chapters, so we could explore lived spaces in terms of the bodies that passed through them, connect images of bodies and body parts to those of the worshippers who dedicated them and so on. This instance illustrates one other distinctive feature of this book, its collaborative nature. Encyclopaedic projects often divide authorial responsibilities between a team of authors who work more or less autonomously if in parallel. We felt it was important that this subject be more deeply and routinely collaborative. One expression is that almost every chapter is co-authored. But our collaboration goes deeper than this. The conception and design of the project has been a shared one from the start, and although the editors share the final responsibility, they are glad to acknowledge, with gratitude, the degree of participation by all involved.

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Introduction: Living Roman Religion

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— 2021b. Ritual als Resonanz: Muster von Weltbeziehungen in alten Kulturen und heute. Religionswissenschaft heute. Stuttgart: Kohlhammer. Scheid, John 1998. La religion des Romains. 2e éd. 2010 ed. Paris: Armand Colin. Schilling, Robert 1954. La religion romaine de Vénus depuis les origines jusqu’au temps d’Auguste. Paris: Klincksieck. Scholz, Udo W. 1970. Studien zum altitalischen und altrömischen Marskult und Marsmythos. Heidelberg: Winter. Taves, Ann 2009. Religious experience reconsidered: A building block approach to the study of religion and other special things. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Usener, Hermann 1913. Kleine Schriften 4: Arbeiten zur Religionsgeschichte. Leipzig: Teubner. — 1948. Götternamen: Versuch einer Lehre von der religiösen Begriffsbildung. Frankfurt a. M.: Schulte-Bulmke. Reprint, 1896. Van Andringa, William 2009. Quotidien des dieux et des hommes: la vie religieuse dans les cités du Vésuve à l’époque romaine. BEFRAR 337. Rome: École française de Rome. Vidal-Naquet, Pierre 1960. »Temps des dieux et temps des hommes: Essai sur quelques apects de l’expérience temporelle chez les Grecs.« Revue de l’Histoire des Religions 157/158. 55–80. Wissowa, Georg 1912. Religion und Kultus der Römer. 2. Aufl. ed. Handbuch der Altertumswissenschaft 5,4. München: Beck. Woolf, Greg 2012. Rome: An empire’s Story. Oxford: Oxford University Press. — 2017. »Archaeological Narratives of the Collapse of Complex Societies.« In Decline and Declinenarratives in the Greek and Roman World: Proceedings of a conference held in Oxford in March 2017, ed. T. Minamikawa. Kyoto: Kyoto University. 113–122. — 2020. The Life and Death of Ancient Cities: A Natural History. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Empire as a field of religious action Greg Woolf and Miguel John Versluys

1

A Religion of the Empire?

Official papyri from Egypt are often dated quite precisely, which is how we know that forty-six certificates (libelli), each testifying that its recipient had performed a sacrifice to the gods in the proper way, were all produced in the summer of AD 250.1 Women and men, all over Roman Egypt, were conforming to an edict issued by the Roman emperor Decius, a universal edict in fact that commanded all Roman citizens to sacrifice on behalf of the empire. That edict has been interpreted by modern scholars both as a deliberate exercise to root out atheists—as Christians were often described—and as a desperate attempt to win divine support in the depths of the military crisis of the third century. Either way it seems to express the sense of the Roman Empire as a single worshipping community, united by particular ritual practices and directed unambiguously by a single authority. Nothing could be further from the truth.2 Deciusʼ edict was only possible because one generation before most inhabitants of the empire had been enfranchised through an earlier universal edict, the Constitutio Antoniniana issued by Caracalla in AD 212. Caracalla’s motives have been much discussed and the decision certainly had many unintended consequences, including major consequences for the use of the ius civile documented in the works of the jurist Ulpian.3 Before that point perhaps only a third of the empire’s inhabitants were Roman citizens.4 The remainder were either foreigners (peregrini) or had one or other of a range of statuses that can be thought of as part citizenships, among them Latins, Junian Latins, Alexandrines and the former slaves of Roman citizens. Almost all inhabitants of the empire had at least one additional citizenship of a much more local and immediate kind, membership of one or more of the many communities of which the empire was made up, such as the Treveri, formerly a powerful Iron Age tribe living around the Mosel Valley in western Germany; or the Athenians once an imperial people themselves; the Corinthians, descendants of

1 Rives 1999; Schubert 2016. 2 Hopkins 1978; Gordon 1990a, b; Cancik, Rüpke 1997; Ando 2003, 2007; Cancik, Rüpke 2009 for contrasting approaches to the question of imperial religion. 3 Ando 2016 for discussion of some of the implications. 4 Lavan 2016.

26

Empire as a field of religious action

Roman colonists settled on the site of a Greek city sacked a century before by a Roman army, and so on. There were between two and three thousand such communities in the empire. Local citizenships were often proudly proclaimed on tombstones even by those whose families were also Romans. Local identity never lost its importance in antiquity.5 Indeed the local and the universal went hand in hand, and were rarely mutually exclusive or even opposed categories, as modern scholars sometimes seem to think when writing about ›Roman identity‹.6 The collective rituals in which individuals participated were almost always conducted at the local scale, whether it was the worship of gods with strange indigenous names sometimes through ancient ritual forms; prayers and vows to Mars, Saturn, Apollo or Jupiter; the worship of Roman emperors, living and dead; and eventually rituals performed at the tombs of Christian martyrs. When dedicators in Greek speaking areas of the east set up inscriptions to patrioi theoi (the ancestral gods) they did not mean the gods of the Romans, but the gods of their own cities. There were even more localised forms of collective cult, in villages, in city quarters, and in households. Many of the same people also took part in worshipping communities that were not defined by existing ties of kin, locality or citizenship.7 Little clusters of male worshippers came together in many of the western provinces to take part in the mysteries of the Persian god Mithras.8 And as individuals some men and women made their way to healing shrines like those of Asclepius at Epidauros and Pergamum; visited places like Bath and Mainz where they could enrol the gods in cursing their enemies; consulted oracles in Delphi, Dodona, Praeneste, Grand, Abonouteichos, the Siwa Oasis and countless other places; promised offerings if they returned safely from dangerous journeys as they did at shrines to Nehalennia at the Rhine mouth; traveled huge distances to undergo initiations like those performed at Eleusis; climbed to mountaintop sanctuaries like Mount Casius in Syria or the Puy de Dôme in the Auvergne, travelled to temples at sources of rivers like the Clitumnus or visited sacred lakes like lake Avernus; and everywhere they prayed for fertility and good health.9 Most of these religious traditions were not new, and some of these sanctuaries claimed to be very ancient indeed. Our question in this chapter is what difference did Empire make to the religious practices and experiences of individuals on all these different levels of participation? Our answer is that Empire did operate as a distinct field of religious action, but not in a straightforward sense. Imperial authority constrained where it could not

5 Bickerman 1952; Millar 1968, 1998; Erskine 2001; van Nijf 2001; Woolf 2004; Price 2005; Clarke 2008; Whitmarsh 2010 explore different manifestations of local identity from one end of the empire to the other. For the persistance of local identity in late antiquity Mitchell, Greatrex 2000. 6 For examples of combining local and global perspectives see Gardner, Herring, Lomas 2013; Pitts, Versluys 2015. 7 North 1992. 8 Clauss 1992. 9 Elsner, Rutherford 2005.

2 Emperors in the Religious life of the Roman World

27

direct, and accidently facilitated developments no emperor could have dreamt of. Few of these transformations were planned and the consequences of empire building were mostly unintended.10 The limits of empire, vague as they sometimes seem, created a vessel within which religious change followed a distinctive course. That vessel was, however, a leaky one. The last part of this chapter will consider the space of empire as just one part of a much more extensive set of cultural spaces through which objects and images and ideas as well as people circulated quite freely, with consequences of their own for religious developments.

2

Emperors in the Religious life of the Roman World

Let us start, however, with what was clearly the most recognizable universal aspect of this religious field: the emperor. Deciusʼ edict was the first of a series of attempts by emperors to extend their fiat over ritual practice. During the decades that followed there would be imperially instigated persecutions of Christians and Manicheans, imperial constitutions prohibiting Jews from converting Christians, bans on public funding for sacrifices to the gods, and attempts to impose particular varieties of Christian dogma and discipline. In parallel to this process the emperors began to claim a special relationship to the divine and a divine mandate. This had been a strand in imperial ideology from the very start but became more explicit during the military crisis of the third century AD. Deciusʼ predecessor Philip celebrated Rome’s Thousand Year Birthday, and the rhetoric of the tetrarchs allocated the ruling emperors to Jovian and Herculean dynasties. Constantine’s decision to proclaim himself a follower of Christ was just the latest version of this. An unintended consequence was that from the early fourth century Christian bishops began to press emperors to assist them against those they regarded as pagans, schismatics or heretics. Some resisted but by the end of the fourth century a new explicitly Christian Roman Empire had emerged. The increased involvement of imperial authorities in religious affairs was not unique to Rome. Around the same time Christians in the Persian Empire found their loyalty suspect, and Sasanian Emperors began to persecute Manichaeans and to develop a closer connection to the Zoroastrian priesthood.11 These changes in the religious conduct of emperors respond to the emergence of the precursors of modern religions, in the sense of organized and disciplined entities that demanded exclusive adherence and made claims to uniquely authoritative accounts of the cosmos.12 This includes the spread of monotheisms, the precursors of modern religions such as Zoroastrianism, Judaism, Christianity and Islam, and the appearance of priesthoods that asserted an authority independent of that of early propertied classes, political elites and monarchs.

10 See chapter ›Artefacts and their Humans‹, p. 219. 11 Barnes 1985. Canepa 2009 explores some parallels. 12 North 2005; Woolf 2017; Rüpke 2018

28

Empire as a field of religious action

Earlier emperors had tried to centre themselves in religious practice in different ways. From Julius Caesar on emperors had claimed the senior priesthood in Rome, as pontifex maximus, been members of the more important priestly colleges, had their names inserted into public vows, performed sacrifices and dedicated temples and had had themselves portrayed in the likeness of gods.13 Formally all this was in relation to the local cults of the city of Rome and the community of the Romans: neither the emperor nor the Roman priestly colleges had jurisdiction in the territory of subject populations. In practice echoes of these titles and powers can be found in the cults of Roman colonies and municipia in the west, while in other regions emperors were assimilated to local traditions of divine monarchy, such as the Pharaohs of Egypt. There was never an official pantheon for the empire as a whole: hundreds of gods received cult even if some were much more widely worshipped than others. The municipal charters issued to new Latin communities in the west provide some direction. Oaths were to be sworn by Jupiter, by each of the Divi (deified emperors) by name, by the genius of the living emperor and by the Penates. But each community determined for themselves which other gods would receive collective worship.14 The Treveri chose Lenus Mars, the Arverni Mercury, the Athenians continued their cults of Athena and other deities, the inhabitants of Crocodilopolus Sobek and so on. Most communities had major temples to a number of deities, some often given Greek or Roman names, some more transparently alien. The Baalim of Syrian cities had mostly become Zeuses under the rule of Alexander’s Macedonian successors: now they were assimilated to Jupiter so we read inscriptions to Jupiter Optimus Maximus Hierapolitanus or Jupiter Optimus Maximus Dolichenus. There is no sign of any process of formal approval of these choices outside the community itself. Even within the community there was no sense that only the deities mentioned in official inscriptions or whose cults were public funded could be worshipped. Civic cults included the most spectacular rituals performed in most cities, but as far as individuals were concerned no gods had to be worshipped and the worship of none was prohibited. Even ruler cult was not centrally co-ordinated. Images exist on Egyptian temple walls of Roman Pharaohs worshipping the Apis bull even though Octavian apparently declined to do so.15 Jews and even some Christians prayed for the emperor, even if not to him. Where there were traditions of paying cult to kings and generals, carrying their images in processions, or inserting their names into hymns and prayers this continued with Roman generals and then emperors supplanting their predecessors. A detailed account of civic ritual at Ephesos provides an excellent example of how the names, images and birthdays of emperors were fitted into larger ceremonies and religious spaces.16 Emperors sometimes had their own temples, like those set

13 14 15 16

Hopkins 1978; Gordon 1990b. Scheid 1991; Van Andringa 2002. Hölbl 2000–2005. Rogers 1991. For the general pattern Price 1984.

2 Emperors in the Religious life of the Roman World

29

up in Asian cities which had won the privilege of being neokoroi (temple wardens) for their provincial cult, but often were found cohabiting with more famous and older gods, as theoi sunnaioi.17 Emperors, imperial princes and governors were certainly involved in making some of these arrangements: both in Asia/Bithynia and in the Gallic provinces separate arrangements were made for resident Romans and for the provincial associations (koina or concilia) of local communities, and in both cases members of the imperial family were on hand for the inauguration of the new cults. Military units also payed annual cult to the emperors, led by their commanders, and we have one calendar from Dura Europus on the eastern frontier which preserves what is probably a military transformation of a Roman civic model and includes many imperial anniversaries. Yet none of this was systematic or Empire wide. As late as the middle of the first century AD there were still some places where ruler cult did not take place at the provincial level.18 The diversity of titles—sacerdotes, flamines, Asiarchs, augustales, seviri and the like—and the regional distribution of most of these titles, strongly suggests that local initiatives lay behind the creation of new priesthoods and the rituals they conducted.19 Roman religion came into being through all kinds of bottom-up initiatives and their consequences rather than as a top-down construction from the imperial centre. There was, in short, no Imperial Religion, no Reichsreligion and no Religionspolitik.20 Nor was there any religious description of the person of the emperor that was widely disseminated or recognised. The nearest thing to an empire-wide object of cult was Jupiter Optimus Maximus, one of the chief deities of the Roman community, the central figure of the triad of deities worshipped since before the Republic was founded on the Capitol.21 The touchstone of oaths in Roman Spain, he became Zeus Kapitolios in Egypt, was associated with endless male chief deities in eastern cities who came to be known as IOM Heliopolitanus, Dolichenus, Hierapolitanus and so on. Jupiter was seated on the top of columns in the Rhineland with Juno Regina, or else was depicted there fighting serpent footed giants. In school rooms across the empire the children of the better off heard Jupiter give Aeneas his mission statement for Rome, and those who had already learned their Greek from Homer recognised in him the cosmic deity of the Iliad. Most Roman gods did not travel far from Italy, but he—along with Mars, Hercules, Mercury, Fortuna, Venus and a few others—got everywhere.22 That unity of focus did not reflect an empirewide organization of cult, nor any widely held dogma or widely practiced ritual. Simply the chief god of an imperial power became a model everywhere for divine authority.23 But custom (nomos) remained king, as it had been in the time of Herod-

17 18 19 20 21 22 23

Nock 1930; Price 1984; Burrell 2004. Fishwick 1987–2005. Lozano 2007; McIntyre 2016. Cancik, Rüpke 1997; Naerebout 2014; Rüpke 2011. MacMullen 1981. Bonnet, Bricault 2016. Woolf 2008.

30

Empire as a field of religious action

otus, and nomos was always local, and the Jupiter of Heliopolis was always the chief god of Heliopolis as well as Jupiter.

3

Empire as an interaction sphere

Empire contained within it many peoples. Where they mingled they became aware of each others’ different ideas about the gods and local traditions of ritual. They mingled in port cities and in the army, in the great metropoleis and at pilgrim sanctuaries, communicating sometimes in Latin or Greek, sometimes hardly at all. Sometimes they simply found each other’s habits bizarre, and sometimes they were probably horrified, as many Romans seem to have been at the notion of human sacrifice.24 But there were also moments of comparison and translation, borrowings and imitations and appropriations, and some gods travelled far from home. No uniform mix was created—nomos remained local—but the diversity became more familiar. This was not new. The various »ethnic polytheisms« of the ancient Mediterranean world25 had always been easy to map onto one another, and syncretisms and translations were already a feature of the archaic world. Long before there were emperors Romans knew that their Jupiter was in some sense Zeus, connected Isis through Ceres with Demeter, and worshipped a Hercules who was also known to Etruscans, Phoenicians and Egyptians as well as Greeks.26 The earlier prose works written by Greeks in the fifth century BC were already engaged with the diversity of religious traditions, trying to find ways of translating one religious idiom into another, and even exploring the philosophical and theological implications. Herodotus wondered which traditions were more ancient and how the Egyptian Herakles was connected with the Greek one, and his philosophical contemporaries wondered if all local versions of the gods were incomplete, and what more perfect and more universal idea of god lay behind them. This theological activity only increased in the third and second centuries BC in the vast territories ruled over by Alexander’s Macedonian successors and around a Mediterranean that had become, in terms of iconography, myth and literature, increasingly Greek-facing. Empire intensified these exchanges by moving people around more (as slaves and soldiers for example), in making other kinds of movements easy by providing roads, ports and security, and by presiding over the growth of cities, a few of which had large and cosmopolitan populations. Time and again we are told new gods or cults were created in Antioch, in Alexandria, in Ctesiphon perhaps even in Rome. That sort of origin myth might be fiction but, as in the case of the spread of diseases, it is only when a new set of ideas reached a major population centre that widespread

24 Rives 1995. 25 The formulation is that of Fowden 1988. See also Price 2012. 26 On Hercules see Bonnet 1988; Jourdain-Annequin 1989; Bonnet, Jourdain-Annequin 1992; Bauchhenß 2008.

3 Empire as an interaction sphere

31

dissemination begins. From the archaic period on we find some of the best evidence for religious encounters in port cities, Naukratis in Egypt, the Piraeus of Athens, Corinth, Ephesos, Delos, Alexandria, Carthage, Puteoli and Ostia. Overlapping diasporas of Egyptians, Syrians, Greeks and eventually Romans brought their gods with them, and became interested in local gods just as some locals became interested in the new arrivals. One sign of this is that certain conventional equations between gods from different traditions became very widespread: Venus became the conventional translation for Aphrodite, Juno for Hera despite differences in the ways they had been imagined in the past.27 Eventually these conventional equations gave birth to new forms of the gods, just as Greek and Roman theonyms rapidly became dominant, replacing names in Celtic, Germanic, Aramaic and other languages.28 Canonical visual types for Greek deities such as Apollo and Athena had already become established in the classical and early Hellenistic periods. Rapid Roman expansion in the west disseminated these images and names very widely, and these versions of the gods became entrenched in the imagination and ritual practices as a result.29 There is also a noticeable shift in how gods were represented in the Roman Near East where anthropomorphic and especially Hellenizing images became widespread. In Egypt ancient gods even came to be portrayed in Roman military costume.30 These changes in what we call and analyse as ›semiotic forms‹ later in the volume profoundly changed rituals and religion. It is one of the unintended consequences of religious change through the field of religious action that was the Roman Empire. Conventions about ritual practices also became established. Classical Greek and Roman forms of animal sacrifice became more widespread. Although how the two traditions performed the sacrifice varied, the general pattern of sacrificing domestic animals and sharing meat among some or all of the participants, became a norm. Pausanias specifically comments on cases where local traditions depart from this, for example in the sacrifice of wild animals to Artemis Laphria at Patras (Description of Greece 7.18.9–13). Instances of human sacrifice, real or imagined, also appear in classical texts as markers of difference.31 In the west there were changes to established practices in the last decades BC and the first AD.32 These included new styles of anthropomorphic representation, the dissemination of Latin epigraphy used mainly for religious inscriptions on votives or funerary markers, and the adoption of a set of rituals of Mediterranean origin including the vow and the use of curse tablets.33

27 MacMullen 1981; Beard, North, Price 1998; Derks 1998; Woolf 1998. 28 MacMullen 1981; Derks 1991; Mora 1995; Spickermann 2003; Cadotte 2007. 29 Gordon 1979; Elsner 1995, 2007. The point is made easily if one looks up any well known deity in LIMC (Lexicon Iconographicum Mythologiae Classicae). 30 Frankfurter 1998; Kaizer 2002. 31 Rives 1995. 32 Derks 1998; Woolf 1998. 33 See chapter ›Artefacts and their Humans‹.

32

Empire as a field of religious action

The spread of specific rituals is also widely attested. One example is the Roman practice of making a conditional vow to a deity, an offering that would only be handed over if the gods did his or her part.34 Another is the technology of making and hiding curse tablets, attested in east and west.35 Rarer, because more expensive, were the initiation rituals associated with mysteries that in the classical period had taken place in just a few places and in the Roman period were much more widespread. It seems that certain ritual traditions acquired a prestige that meant they were often imitated or incorporated into the worship of other deities or the local traditions of other places. None of this was directed by imperial authorities, but the fact of empire maybe made this processes easier, just as it facilitated the transfer of other technologies for example in craft production, building and decorative arts. There is very little evidence of attempts to coerce religious conformity before the third century AD. It is easier to compile a dossier of state actions against religious deviance.36 Republican religious authorities—mainly the Senate and the major priestly colleges which were themselves filled by senators—were mostly concerned with religious negligence and their focus was on the proper maintenance of the public cults of Rome, those rituals performed by priests and magistrates and generals on behalf of the citizen body. Greek city-states too had policed their public cults and sometimes tried to regulate the religious activities of their cities: the trial of Socrates by the city of Athens in 399 BC is the most famous example. At Rome the neglect of public rituals or mistakes in their performance was usually detected retrospectively, as an explanation for some military disaster. Divination of various kinds indicated which ritual remedies were required. Plagues and portents elicited similar official responses. The religious behaviour of individual Romans acting in a private capacity was rarely an issue, even when it was derided as superstitio.37 The best documented exception to this is a decree passed by the senate in 186 BC imposing restrictions on the way Bacchic ritual could be performed in Italy.38 It is probably significant that much of the panic focuses on unfamiliar activities. Foreign groups were occasionally mocked in satire, and the performance of unusual rituals was often one component of their negative characterization. Worshippers of Jewish and Egyptian cults in the City of Rome were expelled a few times at the turn of the millennium, although in this period it is never easy to distinguish religious from political factors.39 Early attacks on Christians seem also focused on what they did not do (animal sacrifice, cult of the gods, worship of the emperors,) rather than on what they actually did or believed, of which non-Christians were perhaps usually ignorant.

34 35 36 37 38 39

Derks 1995 drawing on Scheid 1990. Rüpke, Pantheon 2018, 88–95. Gager 1992. Rüpke 2016. Gordon 2008. North 1979; Pallier 1988. Versluys 2004.

4 The Empire in the World

33

Formally none of this changed with the transition to empire, but in practice emperors took all the key decisions about cult in the city of Rome while no person or authority took responsibility for regulating the religious life of the empire. Neither the senate nor the senators lost their local religious roles entirely at least in so far as cult in the capital was concerned.40 Senatorial priests like the Arvals and the Pontiffs continued to manage the ritual affairs of the city of Rome down into the late fourth century. Yet Roman citizens abroad were in practice beyond the reach of their supervision. A letter of Pliny makes it clear that the authority of the pontiffs over graves did not extend to the provinces. Governors had some religious duties, in practice just another aspect of their general and loosely described powers of oversight.41 Commanders led their units in collective cult. In almost every case what we can see are communities of Roman citizens, scattered across the empire, conducting cult together under the guidance of their most prominent social members.42 Meanwhile non-citizens did as they always had done, but now often with more ritual possibilities at their disposal.43 Local religious authority took different forms, that of priests in Egypt and some Syrian cities, of civic authorities in Greek cities. When we can see this in any detail, for example in the working of religious councils such as the gerousia of Ephesos or the sanhedrin in Jerusalem, local religious arrangements were every bit as complex as in Rome itself. Apart from a very few general prohibitions which were perhaps rarely enforced, the empire rested very lightly on the religious lives of its subjects. Traditional religious authorities such as the Egyptian priesthood and the councils of Greek cities had been weakened. Indeed emperors had removed more authority than they had imposed. The principate was not a period of exceptional religious tolerance and freedom.44 The great mass of the population worshipped their ancestral gods in accord with local norms which were backed up by local authorities just as they had done for many centuries. But it was easier to evade that local authority and the exclusive bonds of the Greek polis in particular had loosened with more individuals marrying citizens of other cities, holding dual citizenships, relocating and travelling at will and so on. All this opened up many more spaces for experimentation and innovation.45

4

The Empire in the World

In some respects the Empire constituted a geographical and demographic space with some common religious experiences. Imperial government affected all parts.

40 41 42 43 44 45

Talbert 1984; Martin 1985; Eck 1989; Várhelyi 2010. Eck 1992. Ando 2007; Woolf 2009. See chapter ›Artefacts and their Humans‹. Garnsey 1984. Ando 2008.

34

Empire as a field of religious action

The habit of governing through cities—not quite the rule in the Republican empire that still made use of many alliances with kings and tribal leaders, but increasingly the case under the emperors—gave religious authority almost everywhere to the kind of priest that came from the same classes as property owning councillors and magistrates.46 That had knock on effects for the funding of collective rituals and temple building, which depended on variable combinations of income from civic revenues and the generosity (euergetism) of each city’s most wealthy citizens. Equally the lack of imperial oversight before the middle of the third century, and then the increased attempts to control and harness religion after Decius affected all parts of the empire. The General Persecution initiated by Diocletian was precisely that, even if some regions (and probably some cities) were keener to turn on Christian minorities than were others. The empire was not entirely a closed religious world. Almost no Roman citizens settled beyond the Roman frontiers, and many diasporas were in effect confined by imperial borders. Artefacts travelled further. Religious statuettes of Roman origin are occasionally found north of the Rhine and even in Denmark, but it does not look as if they were used in similar ways there. The same is true of the motifs on silver found in Scotland. To the south there was a barrier of a different kind, one formed by desert and high mountains, with just limited connections through the Nile Valley and the Red Sea. Some Roman objects and images found their way to Nubia or to the oases of the Garamantes and perhaps some religious ideas travelled with them. Yet to the east—in Anatolia, Syria and Mesopotamia—successive Romano-Persian frontiers bisected a zone which had had a common religious history for millennia. Religious networks of various kinds straddled those frontiers. The Jewish diaspora spread well into what is now Iran and had major centres in Mesopotamia. There were Christian communities in Armenia and in the Persian Empire before Constantine’s conversion. The Manichees in the third century AD had adherents from what is now Tunisia through Egypt, Mesopotamia and Iran to India. These networks rested on older foundations. Zoroastrian ideas were well known throughout the Near East and by some Greeks as well. A whole series of religious exchanges and borrowings characterised this region from the Hellenistic period on. The cities of Phoenicia on what is now the Levantine coast, display a deeply sedimented religious history in which Roman and Greek forms of cult are built on and out of earlier traditions stretching back to the second millennium BC.47 A century ago this ›open frontier‹ to the east played an important part in religious history, and it was argued that most of the religious developments that can be seen from the second century AD, could be explained in terms of the arrival of so-called oriental religions from beyond the empire.48 The worship of Cybele, Isis, Mithras, the Syrian gods and several others were grouped together as being less

46 Gordon 1990a. 47 Bonnet 2015. 48 Cumont 1906.

4 The Empire in the World

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civic, more emotional, and more mystical than the more formal and less personal religious traditions of Greek and Roman city-states. This picture no longer looks convincing and has been criticised from several standpoints.49 Not only are we more aware of the differences between all these traditions—in terms of rituals, of representations, in their points of origin and also in the chronology of their appearance—but it is certain that most originated within the boundaries of the Roman Empire. At best we can say there are links between their initial movement and the movement of particular groups of people—Syrian soldiers serving in the Rhineland, Egyptian traders in the Aegean and so on—and that one thing that made some diasporic cults attractive to others was the idea of a particular place of origin, real or imagined (Artemis of Ephesos, Isis of Egypt, Jupiter of Doliche, Christ and the Holy Land, Mithras and Persia).50 The network of cities, routes and diasporic populations that connected the Mediterranean to central Asia and India via Syria, Mesopotamia, Iran and by a different route via the Red Sea, allowed religious transfers in more than one direction. This too can be traced back at least to the last millennium BC and the empires of the Assyrians and Persians before those of Macedonians and Romans. Gandharan art is now widely understood as reflecting contacts with Mediterranean traditions. Greek ideas, including about the divine, met Buddhist thought in Bactria and elswhere. It is presumably the fact that to the north and south these networks involved populations which did not have forms of urbanism and political culture similar to those of the Mediterranean world, that explains the particular energy of religious transfers east and west. Consider for example the group of twelve or more huge metal cauldrons, deliberately broken and buried in a pit beside a route linking two Iron Age hillforts which was found at Chisledon in southern Britain in 2005 along with the skulls of two cattle and other material that may represent the remains of a feast.51 The disposal of metal, which could easily have been reused, represents a major expenditure of wealth, comparable to large scale animal sacrifice in the classical world or the construction of a new temple. But although we can see those analogies, the gap between this ritual and those to which Romans were accustomed perhaps made it impossible to incorporate this sort of ritual into the worship of a Mediterranean deity. Connections between the eastern Mediterranean, Anatolia, the Levant and beyond that the Iranian plateau had existed since the Bronze Age. Achaemenid rule had provided a different imperial space through which the alphabet, coinage, and sculptural traditions depicting humans, animals and gods flowed back and forth. Those existing connections, enhanced by the growth of cities and road networks, and the spread of diasporic populations of Greeks, Jews and Syrians among others,

49 Bonnet, Rüpke, Scarpi 2006; Bonnet, Pirenne-Delforge, Praet 2009; Sfameni Gasparro 2011. Spectres of orientalism naturally haunt the initial characterizations and also some sectarian differences on which Smith 1990. 50 Versluys 2013. 51 Baldwin, Jo 2017.

36

Empire as a field of religious action

provided an infrastructure across which religious ideas and symbols could also flow.52 One contemporary of the emperor Decius, with whom we began, was the prophet Mani, born in the disputed frontier region of Mesopotamia in a period in which it was ruled by the Persians.53 A religious innovator he combined elements of Jewish and Christian thought with traditions drawn from Zoroastrianism and produced a series of sacred texts written in Aramaic, the lingua franca of the Roman and Persian Near East for centuries. Sacred texts were another newish religious technology, one that had spread from one religion to another. Mani did not only draw on an eclectic range of influences, he also tried to mobilize authority from several traditions, apparently claiming to be an apostle of Jesus Christ and a successor of the Buddha. Some passages of his writing drawn on Jewish Apocalyptic literature like the Book of Enoch. The dualism of his cosmology reflects the same Zoroastrian background that had been appropriated centuries before by the creators of Mithraism. After his death, probably in the 270s AD, Mani’s teachings spread west and east and at least some of his followers adopted Manichaean as an exclusive identity. Persecuted in late antiquity by Persian and Roman emperors and in the eighth by Abbasid Caliphs and Chinese emperors, it has left behind texts from all over central Asia written in a bewildering variety of languages. Unsurprisingly Manichaean practice adapted to local circumstances across its vast range. The same was partly true of the worship of Isis and of Mithras, both of which had become widespread within the empire, and certainly true of Christianity. Yet what one individual was able to make through the bricolage of elements from so many sources, something that could resonate in local societies from Carthage to Samarkand and beyond gives some sense of the interconnectedness of that world. Shifting and overlapping imperial spaces, diasporic populations, and interlocking networks of roads and seaways provided the hardware across which religious innovations flickered back and forth, most lost within a year or two, but just a few enjoying spectacular success. The religious life of Rome and its empire, straddling the western third of this broad Eurasian network, cannot be understood in isolation.

5

Empire and Religions

Mani provides an example of a kind of religious entrepreneurism that became more common, or at least more successful in terms of attracting adherents, over the first centuries AD. Earlier religious innovators certainly existed. It is difficult to imagine any other origin for the cult of Mithras as we know it in the Roman West, apart from a single invention by a founding group.54 That group had some knowledge of Iranian and

52 Canepa 2018. 53 Lieu 1994. 54 Beck 1998; Gordon 2017.

5 Empire and Religions

37

Syrian traditions about the god that we can trace back to the Bronze Age via the Achaemenid Empire. They also knew something about Greek mystery cults, and their central rituals seem to have been formed in dialogue with Roman ritual traditions. At some point, probably in the late first century AD, a new synthesis was created with a new iconography and temple form and it was widely imitated or disseminated throughout the west before local variants appeared and the cult became less and less distinctive. Roman Mithras had some unusual features—apparently worshipped mainly by men for example—but he did not demand exclusive adherence, and relationships were established with other deities over time. Why no founder’s name was attached to this is impossible to say. From the first century AD a new series of religious movements appear which did stress the identity of their founder, tended to make use of sacred texts, and tended to demand exclusive adherence and to claim uniquely accurate knowledge of the cosmos (as opposed to authoritative knowledge about how to perform particular rituals). Rabbinical Judaism, Christianity, Manichaeism and Islam were the most successful but there were others as well, and Sassanian period Zoroastrianism could be considered alongside them.55 It is reasonable to ask how far they were shaped by developing in a world dominated by empires.56 A range of suggestions can be made. As has already been observed empires tend to foster networks of cities, facilitate movement and communication of various kinds, and often nurture diasporas within them. Diaspora is a perfect incubator of religious identity, since common beliefs and rites are one means by which populations distinguish themselves from their neighbours. The transformations of Isis from Egyptian through Greek and Roman versions provides one example of the generalization or universalization of previous local religions.57 A Bronze Age deity who occupied an important place in the Egyptian myth of the death of Osiris was identified probably during the Persian period with the Greek goddess Demeter and in the last centuries BC worshipped by Egyptians in the Aegean world and Greeks in Egypt. Associated with many other powerful female deities, and given a Greek iconography she gradually became popular in Sicily, southern Italy and eventually in Rome from where she moved north of the Alps. By the first century AD she was mostly accompanied just by Serapis (a new version of Osiris) and her baby son Harpocrates (once Egyptian Horus) and had new roles not just in initiation rituals modelled on Greek mystery cults but also as a goddess of sailors. The navigium Isidis, a ceremony opening the sailing season each year, was celebrated in port cities in the west and eastern Mediterranean basins during the early empire. Some other features of imperial rule may have played a part. Most empires have relied on writing and written law or edict. The kind of sacred texts used by emergent religions were not very like those issued by emperors but they shared in (or

55 For Zoroastrianism and its study see Stausberg 2008. 56 Lieu, North, Rajak 1992; Schwartz 2001; Carleton Paget, Lieu 2017. 57 Woolf 2014 drawing on Smith 1971, and now Bricault 2019.

38

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challenged) their authority. Imperial messages were sometimes entitled sacrae litterae and imperial and religious documents were often inscribed in monumental inscriptions from the Achaemenid period onwards. Finally there were the grandiose universalisms created by many early empires.58 Perhaps earthly empire, with its great symbolic production of maps and globes, geographies and astrologies, and all those divine emperors, helped create a space for more grandiose cosmologies. It seems unlikely that a new species of entrepreneurs appeared in this period, and more likely that their ideas found more fertile ground among the subjects of earthly empires. In the long run, the religions they helped create, long outlasted the empires of Eurasian antiquity.

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58 Bang, Kolodziejczyz 2012 compare Morris, Scheidel 2009; Lavan, Payne, Weisweiler 2016.

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The City as a Field of Religious Action: Manufacturing the Divine in Pompeii William Van Andringa

Of all the various social locales of religious action across the Roman world one stands out above all others: the city. The city was a place where resources were spent as nowhere else, a place where different social and often ethnic groups were drawn into the closest proximity. The city was a point of unparalleled visibility for ceremony and monumentality, and also a place that offered individuals some of the greatest range of options when it came to the divine. The city was the source of many of antiquity’s most striking religious innovations. Yet every city was its own world, its own unique landscape and its own changing community of gods and humans. This chapter explores these themes in relation to one of the best documented cities in the Roman world, the city of Pompeii in Campania in central Italy.

1

A city full of gods

Walking through the streets and houses of Pompeii, one has one overwhelming impression: the gods seem to be everywhere. For a start they were established in public places (Fig. 1). In AD 79, the forum district was dominated by no less than six major sanctuaries, eight if we include the two chapels set up in the public market. Apart from the four great temples arranged around the forum and on the square, including the Capitolium, there was the sanctuary of Venus which dominated the sea and the mouth of the Sarno, and that of Fortuna Augusta established at the junction of the streets of Fortune and Mercury. Then there was the portico of Eumachia opening onto the forum, which was dedicated to Concordia Augusta and Piety: the statue of Concordia adorned the main niche of the building, opposite the entrance. Similarly, the monumental apse of the municipal curia must once have housed a statue representing the genius of the colony or the statue of an emperor. The theatre district was the other religious centre of the city: three shrines were arranged in a semi-circle around the entertainment buildings, the old Doric temple surrounded by a portico, the temple of Isis and the temple attributed to Aesculapius. There are about ten sanctuaries founded at various times in the history of the city and clearly all still active at the time of the eruption of mount Vesuvius.

44

The City as a Field of Religious Action: Manufacturing the Divine in Pompeii

1 8

2 7

4 100

200m

10

11

5

3

0

6

9

N

Fig. 2: Map of Pompeii and location of the main places of worship (DAO: Carole Chevalier): 1. Temple of Fortune Auguste, 2. Capitol, 3. Temple of Apollo, 4. Temple of Venus Pompeian, 5. Porticoes of Eumachia, 6. Temple of Augustus, 7. Temple of the Divine Domus (?), 8. Chapels of the Macellum, 9. Temple of Minerva, 10. Temple of Isis, 11. Temple attributed to Aesculapius.

People at Pompeii were surrounded by the sacred1. It is not enough to consider the number of places of worship, because as soon as the entrance to a sanctuary was crossed, the visitor was confronted with a crowd of divine statues erected at various times in the history of the shrine, most often as offerings. In the sanctuary of Apollo, the excavators were thus able to count, despite the spoliations, bronze and marble effigies that were originally placed on the bases aligned along the portico: Apollo of course (he was the patron of the temple), but also Diana, Venus, Hermaphrodite, Mercury and Maia (Fig. 2). Certainly, one could offer the god his own effigy or the statue of another god, but the presence of masonry altars in the southwest corner of the portico clearly indicates that rituals were performed to deities other than Apollo, even on his own estate. In polytheism, the gods are never alone. Since each divinity possessed a multitude of facets and fields of action, associating them with other divine powers made it possible to specify their personality and their historical depth for each place of worship. In a sanctuary, the gathering of the gods therefore added to the religious meaning of the cult in question. In the enclosure of his Pompeian residence, Apollo was thus associated with members of his mythological family such as Diana, his sister, also with deities of the city such as Venus, holder of the nearby temple, or Mer1 Van Andringa 2009. This is the very essence of polytheism, Petronius, Sat. 17:5, with an obviously comic dimension; also Seneca, Quaest. nat. 2:5: »Therefore we can realize that the celestial population is even more numerous than the earthly one, since individuals also create an equal number of gods by adopting Junoes and Genii for their own use ....«; without forgetting Fronto, Ep. I, 175 about the municipality of Anagnia: »There was not a corner without a chapel, a sanctuary or a temple«.

1 A city full of gods

45

cury and Maia whose worship was managed by the public authorities. The sanctuary of Isis was similarly populated by statues of deities, some of which were found in place: in the northwest corner of the portico stood a Pentelic marble effigy of the titular deity Isis, the offering of a certain L. Caecilius Phoebus, in a place granted by the city council, the ordo decurionum. In the same way as in the sanctuary of Apollo, a statue featuring Venus coming out of the bath was installed in the southwest corner of the same portico. Simple ornament? Yes, but it is likely that Venus was there again as the patron goddess of the city (and the goddess coming out of the bath is indeed an iconographic model retained by local tradition). There were also gods directly linked to Isiac mythology such as Harpocrates, whose painting adorned the east portico in the axis of the temple. Effigies of the same deity as Horus the Child associated with Anubis may have been displayed in the niches of the temple entrance, the pronaos. A marble statue of Dionysus completed the cycle of representations: it found its place in a niche in the rear wall of the temple. The presence of six bases posted along the colonnade overlooking the temple courtyard indicates that even more gods were invited.

Fig. 3: Reconstruction of the Temple of Apollo by Weichard 1897. The attribution of the statues to the bases preserved in situ was determined shortly after the excavation of the temple; bronze and marble gods took place on the bases placed under the porticoes. The altars, on the other hand, were installed in the courtyard.

Outside the great temples, the gods were present in all the public spaces in connection with the activities that took place there. In the market located in the northern part of the forum, a cult room was built, probably dedicated to Mercury, with a fixed and oriented altar used for sacrifices; a cattle pen was also located in the immediate vicinity. A niche the console of which still bears the traces of the place where the cult statuette was set up is also visible in the south entrance of the building, possibly a seat of

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The City as a Field of Religious Action: Manufacturing the Divine in Pompeii

the genius of the macellum. Inside the water tower located at the gateway to mount Vesuvius, a religious painting depicts the divinity of the spring that fed the aqueduct. The setting of the painting is no less evocative, the goddess and the three nymphs appearing exactly where the water from the aqueduct was discharged into the reservoir: this is where the action of the goddess of the spring stopped, the water was then distributed and used, losing its sacred character. Thus, logically, there are no places of worship related to water in the urban thermal baths. Such a statement deserves to be underlined for a site as well conserved as Pompeii, even if divine patronage sometimes intervenes in the name given to the establishments, as shown by the balneum venerium on the property of Iulia Felix.2 Simple patronage, let us repeat, this was, which could be symbolized by the presence of a statue of divinity as in the suburban baths of Herculaneum, where a bust of Apollo was enthroned in the atrium of the entrance. More visible is the mark of the divine on the walls and entrances of the city. A small sanctuary of the Porta Marina contained a terracotta statuette of Minerva, who was obviously in Pompeii the guardian of the city’s walls and gates. The same goes for the gorgon of the Stabiae Gate Fountain, a traditional attribute of Minerva. Under the porch of the same gate, there is a niche with painted plaster, found empty, which may have sheltered an effigy of the goddess. Finally, and not without good reason, a portrait of Minerva is identified on the keystone of the Nola Gate. It is likely that these places of worship and religious representations were linked to the sacred nature attributed to the gates and walls by Roman law. In public spaces, the gods were also present at the crossroads of the city: to take only the example of the via dell’Abbondanza, one of the two main axes of the street plan (decumani), about ten altars dedicated to the Lares compitales were placed along the street or at the entrance of secondary alleys (Fig 3). Most included religious paintings in bright colours depicting the gods of the crossroads, a scene of sacrifice or simply snakes that marked, in the cities around Vesuvius, the presence of the gods and geniuses. These are the sanctuaries of urban vici duly dedicated to the Lares of the crossroads – they protected the territory of the crossroads which constituted the place of representation of neighbourhood associations, a kind of extension of domestic spaces – and sometimes associated with other gods of the neighbourhood3. Thus, the Twelve Gods are represented on a compitum on the via dell’Abbondanza while the name of the goddess Salus is written in painting above an altar in region IX. A god important for the district was sometimes depicted on the fountain posted at the crossroads: the one in the via di Stabia bears the face of Venus; in the via di Mercurio, an effigy of the god of commerce serves as a gargoyle. Well-being and daily happiness were obviously based on the presence of the familiar gods of the neighbourhood: were they not the first gods a Pompeian met when leaving home? The deities who held the crossroads were, however, the Lares, whose favourite sacrificial victim was the pig,

2 CIL IV, 1136; De Vos 1982, 141ff. This type of patronage is attested elsewhere, cf. the balneum Veneris de Literni, ILS 5693, the balneum Martis de Rome, ILS 8518 or the balneum Apollinis de Lyon, CIL XIII, 1983. 3 Flower 2017.

1 A city full of gods

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slaughtered during neighbourhood festivals, the Compitalia: skewers and a curse painted on an altar of abundance remind us that the animal was shared and the parts of meat consumed in banquets. These ceremonies celebrated by the officials responsible for their worship were among the public holidays that brought together all the heads of households in the district (popularia sacra). At the crossroads, the Lares and the protective gods of the neighbourhood were honoured, but there is no apparent trace, as in Rome, of the genius of Augustus or the Augustan Lares: obviously, the place of cults linked to imperial power was, in Pompeii, in the public square and not in the neighbourhood associations, which constituted above all a local reality.

Fig. 4: The crossroads of a vicus on the rue de l’Abondance, the site of the Compitalia celebration, a celebration that brought together the neighbourhood association (Photographic Archives of the Soprintendenza archeologica di Pompei). We can distinguish the XII gods lined up under a portico (painting on the left) and the sacrifice of the ministers of worship framed by the Lares gods (painting on the right). In the foreground, the fountain and the sacrificial altar.

Images of the gods were also displayed on the facades of houses and shops4 (Fig. 4). Halfway along the via dell’Abbondanza, going up to the forum on the right, passersby could successively admire shopfronts with religious representations. On the wall of a workshop (IX 7, 1), there was Venus Pompeiana dressed in a cloak decorated 4 Fröhlich 1991.

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The City as a Field of Religious Action: Manufacturing the Divine in Pompeii

with constellations, then a procession scene showing a goddess identified with Mater Magna and four paintings of Sol, Jupiter, Mercury and Luna, likely evocative of the calendar of activities taking place in the district. A few metres further on (IX 7, 7), the workshop of a textile entrepreneur exhibited another painting of the city’s tutelary goddess, Venus Pompeiana, on a chariot pulled by four elephants and also Mercury leaving a temple. Some of these deities were closely related to the commercial activities of the shops and workshops in question. This was undoubtedly the case of Mercury, the god of profit and gain, omnipresent in Pompeii. The other images on the exterior facades, notably Venus Pompeiana on a chariot pulled by four elephants or the devotees of the Great Mother, more likely refered to the pompae, the solemn and public processions of the participants in the games (ludi). Professional corporations took part in these parades and accompanied the images of the gods, with their symbols and attributes placed on floats carried through the streets of the city: at least that is what a well-known painting from Regio VI showing the carpenters’ float indicates. It is not surprising then to observe such representations also in the via dell’Abbondanza, the city’s main artery.

Fig. 5: Verecundus’ workshop, on rue de l’Abondance, facade painting depicting Venus Pompeiana, Fortuna and the genius.

Among these gods of the facades, others guarded the entrances of the houses as in VI, 9, 6–7 where Mercury and Fortuna were painted on each side of the door overlooking the street. Mercury (who was also the god of passages) was most frequently displayed, with Hercules at the entrance of house II, 12, 1 or on a facade of via di Nola, but there were a range of combinations (Fig. 5). Mercury accompanied Venus at the entrance of

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the sanctuary of Sabazios (II, 1, 12) or on the facade of the shop VII, 4, 22; he shared in the protection of the entrance of house IX, 9, 7 with Minerva. These gods associated with the entrances of the houses sometimes took their position in a niche arranged in the exterior façade at a height probably sufficient for the statuettes to be safe: examples are visible in an alley (I, 12, 7) overlooking via dell’Abbondanza and nearby, above a shop (I, 11, 1) and at the main entrance to the estate of Iulia Felix (II, 4, 6).

Fig. 6: Front of a shop located at a crossroads near the Vesuvius Gate (V, 6, 1). The inside of the room has not been searched, but the paintings on either side of the entrance, showing Mercury and Bacchus, probably identify an inn or a caupona, at least a place where wine was sold (Photographic Archives of the Soprintendenza archeologica di Pompei).

This abundance of divine images reflects a reality that has disappeared from almost all archaeological sites: the gods lived in the company of men, in a proximity built and maintained by the various groups that made up urban space. The same was true inside the houses. Mythological scenes adorned the interior walls, involving the gods and their stories (Fig. 6). Wall paintings certainly made cultural references, but the choice of episodes depicted might have a precise link with the deities living in the city. On a panel decorating the ceremonial room of a house (VII, 7, 5) located opposite the great temple of Venus, the arrival of the goddess in Pompeii has been identified.5 We can also highlight the taste of house owners for painted panels associating Venus with Mars, which probably also had a connection with the status of the goddess in Pompeii. In the same vein, the great success of the Herculean paintings is clearly explained by the local 5 Sogliano 1937, 111–12 and fig. 34.

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tradition that associated in antiquity the foundation of Pompeii with the hero accompanied by the cattle of Geryon6 (the name of the city, Pompeii, supposedly derived from the Herculean pompa, his following). This is even more true in Herculaneum, the city of Hercules. Should we then speak of images with a decorative function or of religious images? Obviously, neither term is appropriate; these figurations had first of all a cultural role, affirming, in addition to the good education and rank of the owner, the local identity of the Roman citizen of Pompeii or Herculaneum. Featuring Venus, Hercules or the Capitoline Triad, the themes chosen for the wall decorations took into account the city’s divine residents. In the house of Ephesus (I, 7, 10), the attributes of the great Capitoline gods, Jupiter, Juno, Minerva decorated a cubiculum. Elsewhere, in a house on the via di Stabi (IX, 1, 7), the same triad, whose temple stood on the city’s forum, is represented in the form of portraits on round shields. An evocation of the Almighty Roman God, the image of Jupiter enthroned recurs from one house to another, in a room overlooking the atrium of the Vetti family and in so many other places. In the ›House of Epigrams‹ (Casa degli Epigrammi Greci, V, 1, 18), the owner surrounded himself with a gallery of medallions painted in the atrium, showing the divine patrons of his city: Minerva, Mercury, Juno, Mars, Venus, Vulcan and probably Jupiter. In the House of the Dioscuri (VI, 9, 6–7), the atrium was decorated with vignettes showing Fortune, Jupiter, Mars, Mercury, Victory, Saturn, Apollo, Ceres and Bacchus.

Fig. 7: At the Palace of Ares, the loves of Mars and Venus. The two deities resided in the city. House of Marcus Lucretius Fronto, V, 4 a (photo Johannes Laiho).

6 Servius, Aen. 7, 662; Solin 2, 5; Isid. Orig. 15, 51. For all this Coralini 2001, 25ff. and Van Andringa 2013, 47–55. On the mythological themes present in Pompeii and the omnipresence of Venus scenes, see Hodske 2007.

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The gods were not only represented. They inhabited the houses as a graffito clearly indicates (CIL IV, 8417–18): Bonus deus/hic habitat in do/mo/Act(ii); »a good god lives here, in the house of Actius«, which is confirmed by the many sanctuaries, conventionally called lararia by scholars, which are found in various places of the house.7 The generic term lararium is certainly not well documented in the literature, but the word has the advantage of clarity: the Lares were indeed the protective gods of the house par excellence. The Latin texts more usually speak of sacrarium or aedicula, which has a more general meaning. In the aristocratic residence of Menander, a monumental aedicula, a veritable temple, stands in the atrium (Fig. 7): many similar examples show that it is often in this place that the main sanctuary of the Lares familiares, the ›Lares of the household‹, was established. There was also a second place of worship in the same house, installed in a corner of the peristyle and dedicated to other domestic gods carved in perishable

Fig. 8: Larary of the house of the Menander (I, 10, 4): an aedicula located in the northwest corner of the atrium that housed the gods of the house (William Van Andringa cliché).

7 Boyce 1937. Cf. SHA, Tacitus 17.4.

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material, probably wood8. In the House of the Golden Cupids, the main lararium was built in the peristyle. It contained, at the time of its discovery, statuettes representing the Lares, the entire Capitoline triad and Mercury. Two neighbouring dwellings in Regio I (I, 16, 3–4) are more modest in appearance, yet their sanctuary, a high podium topped by a pedimented aedicula, is an imposing element of domestic furniture. This one received all the attention of the owner as evidenced by the freshness of the paintings: on one side, we can distinguish the images of the genius of the paterfamilias associated with Minerva, protector of domestic work or the owner’s profession; on the other side, the divine presence is evoked by two coloured stucco snakes, symbolizing the presence of the two Lares (or the geniuses of the house’s master and matron). In the same district (I, 13, 2), one house has no less than three places of worship: a niche with a divine effigy in the atrium (largely erased, the painting probably represents the genius of the paterfamilias), another containing a statue of Minerva in the garden and then the Lares’ home in the kitchen. Other gods, who were probably taken out on certain occasions, were stored in the atrium cupboard. Still in the private domain, it is worth considering the necropolises that developed outside the urban space, along the access roads to the city: the tombs were the domain of the Di Manes, the gods of the Netherworld, collective deities who represented the deceased once his remains had been buried. It is to these gods and the deceased that the offerings and libations made on the tombs during the feasts dedicated to the dead were destined. Here again, we are talking about ritual and religion. In the tomb of Vestorius Priscus, at the Porta Vesuviana, an altar stands above the burial chamber. Its religious character is marked by four medallions surmounted by snakes. The opening of the lead libation tube, visible on the altar’s top platform, indicates that the patron climbed onto the podium to celebrate the rituals due to the deceased, facing the city gate, in a setting adapted to the status of a tomb erected to celebrate the deceased’s social excellence. Recent excavations in the necropolis of the Porta di Nocera confirm that the Pompeians frequently visited their dead to pour perfumed oil on the ground, in front of the tomb or inside it through the libation tube, and to burn some fruits in honour of the infernal gods, according to a ritual modelled on the domestic religion: it was obviously the place and the context that gave meaning to the ritual action9.

8 These effigies made of perishable material have been identified so far as imagines maiorum; they are more likely to be the ancient gods of the family preserved and venerated in a chapel separate from the house’s larary. 9 Van Andringa, Duday, Lepetz et al. 2013. On the clear distinction made by Pompeians between funerary rites and honours given to the gods, see Van Andringa 2019.

2 The Gods in Action

2

53

The Gods in Action

In places of worship at the entrance to the city, on the forum, around theatres, in public buildings, in the streets, inside houses, in gardens, in necropolises ... Were the gods, innumerable and ubiquitous, in what has sometimes been presented as an amorphous permeation? Were the gods really everywhere? Certainly an illusion. The Pompeian evidence shows first of all that the same gods appear in very different contexts, with modes of action adapted to different places, sanctuaries, and groups. Was Jupiter present in the great temple dominating the forum? Certainly he can be found in some of the street sanctuaries that delimit the district of the Forenses (the inhabitants of the forum district), but likewise he was present next to the Lares in some houses (CIL 4.6864): »Oh Jupiter very good very great, all-powerful master«, one can read on the wall of a kitchen (IX, 5, 11). In the garden of a suburban house, a man named Numerius Popidius Florus dedicated an altar to the father of the gods facing Vesuvius, in the same way that the great temple of the forum was facing the volcano. »Jupiter, the Best, the Greatest« obviously represented here the god of Vesuvius, the god of the summit, while Bacchus, god of the vineyard, was associated, on another altar placed in the eastern branch of the portico, with the great city gods of Pompeii and Herculaneum, Venus and Hercules.10 Another example is provided by the Twelve Gods, equivalent in a way to the dii omnes, »all the gods« inscriptions, who protected a district of the via dell’Abbondanza as indicated by their presence on the painting of a crossroad. Installed at the crossroads as gods of the neighbourhood, they also received a sanctuary in the garden of a house of this quarter, the House of the Chaste Lovers. Isis owned a public temple in the theatre district while a private chapel was dedicated to her in the House of the Golden Cupids and on Julia Felix’s estate. As for Venus, possessor of the great temple that dominated the port and the mouth of the Sarno, she can be found in many places, on the façades and inside the houses, and in the main lararia, overlooking the summer triclinium or in the gardens. The gods of antiquity had this ability to multiply themselves according to human groups and fields of action. Hence the plural and shifting character of pantheons: each community or individual appropriates the power of a divinity according to their needs, their activities, the places to be protected and their place in the cityscape. Venus Pompeiana, who had given her name to the colony (Pompeii became Colonia Cornelia Veneria Pompeianorum in 80 BC), played a tutelary role for the city. This is indicated by her temple, which was established in a dominant position, between the forum and the port. It is also indicated by the reminders of her portrait on the facades of houses and shops. And we should not forget her involvement in electoral life.11 The domestic Venus intervened in another context; many graffiti

10 See the Jupiter Vesuvianus of an inscription from Capua, CIL X, 3806. On Jupiter god of the summits, ILS 2997–99; for the association Venus, Bacchus, Hercules on the slopes of Vesuvius, Martial, Epig. IV, 44, 3–6. 11 CIL 4.26; 546 and 1839.

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confirm that she was mainly the goddess of love charm or, more often still, of sexual desire.12 For Bacchus, the story is different. The god of wine and vines had no important sanctuary in the city: a temple was reserved for him in the countryside, south of the city, a meeting place for an association of about twenty initiates, according to the number of places available on the benches of the pronaos as well as on the triclinia placed in front of the building.13 And yet, the images depicting him are numerous and constantly recur inside houses or on their exterior facades, in the city as well as on the farms. In Pompeii, economic activity was largely based on the cultivation of the vine: no political god here, but a god associated with economic and social activities, which were regularly frequented at each stage of the wine chain, from grape harvests to the excessive consumption of wine in the city’s bars and gardens, which were honoured with a toast or a libation paid on the domestic altar. In a small farm in Boscoreale (Villa Regina), two representations of Bacchus were directly linked to the patronage of the god on wine production. The first is placed near the press, the second overlooks the barrels that contained the fermenting wine: Bacchus supervised the winemaking (Fig. 8).

Fig. 9: Satyr head discovered in the larary of the peristyle of the Villa Regina farm. This is a reuse of garden furniture (Inv. 25828, Soprintendenza archeologica di Pompei).

12 CIL IV, 1410; 1520; 1625; 1824; 2457; 4007; 5092; 5296; 6865; 6842; 8711b, etc. This function of Venus refers to the personality of the Greek Aphrodite. 13 Van Andringa et al. 2013.

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The production of wine and Bacchus, the desire for love and Venus, enrichment and Mercury, work and Minerva, the supervision of the house and the Lares, civic organization and Jupiter: in the cities of Vesuvius there was no domain that was not under divine supervision. On these patronages depended the future and wellbeing of a fragile society. The ancient gods served above all to promote the good progress of things, to assist individuals in their daily lives: »We live here; may the gods make us happy«, prays a Pompeian on the wall of the great Palestra, the training ground for the youth.14 Vested with the power to associate in multiple combinations, the gods appeared to be essential protectors: »Whoever pays me the salary of my courses must obtain from the gods from above what he asks of them«, proclaims a poorly rewarded teacher on a wall of the same building.15 It was not eternal salvation that was at issue, but the daily life of human groups and individuals. Setting out on a journey, success in the arena, domestic harmony, the protection of property, deferred payments, disappointed love, so many acts of everyday life that could motivate a prayer or an urgent request to the divinity. »Méthè, slave of Cominia, a daughter of Athella, loves Chrestus. May Venus Pompeiana be favourable to both of them and may they always live in harmony«, one finds on the wall of a house. Another graffito emanates from a gladiator who vows, if he is victorious, to offer his shield to the same Venus, the one who protected Pompeii and her inhabitants.16 And then this surprising mention written above a freshly executed painting of gladiators: »Let the anger of Venus be manifested against him who would spoil this!« These inscriptions show that the testimonies of »popular piety« often concerned the great public gods, Venus, but also Jupiter or Apollo, and not obscure divinities. The reason is simple. These gods inhabited the city, they were close and had the reputation of being powerful. And when individuals felt that their piety was not rewarded, they made it known. A Pompeian male addressed the Great Venus (in these terms, on a wall of the basilica, very close to the temple of the goddess): »Let come here whoever is in love. To Venus: I want to break the ribs with my stick and debilitate the kidneys of the goddess. If she is able to pierce my tender breast, how could I not break her head with my stick?«17

3

Working with the Gods

When we characterize ancient paganism, we sometimes speak of religious freedom. It is true that individuals were in principle free, at least outside the public sphere, to worship the gods they wanted. Would not the omnipresence of the gods and the multiplicity of places of worship in Pompeii be a perfect illustration of this? The nature of the gods encountered in the public square, in the streets and houses of

14 15 16 17

CIL CIL CIL CIL

4.8670. 4.8562. 4.2457; 2483; 538. 4.1824.

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The City as a Field of Religious Action: Manufacturing the Divine in Pompeii

Pompeii seems to show, however, that free choice was closely controlled by the omnipotence of the great public gods, by community and civic constraints (the control of the authorities and the paterfamilias) without forgetting the involuntary servitude of the representatives, the implicit belief as defined by sociologists (Fig. 9).18 Obviously, the gods or the location of shrines are repeated from one neighbourhood to another or from one house to another. It is not diversity that dominates, but rather a certain uniformity and great coherence in the location of religious representations. Some easily recognizable divine personalities provided a close protective network with, on a daily basis, a repetition of the same forms of ritual: the same fruits were thus offered, in various combinations, on the flame of the domestic altar and on the tombs. Certainly, the idea of the gods that individuals held for themselves was in principle a personal matter, although the abundance of standardized images on walls and facades apparently left little room for very elaborate personal conceptions of the divine, at least for the vast majority of the population. The daily gods were in the end mainly the great gods of the city whose presence and means of action had to be ensured, in all places and under all circumstances.

Fig. 10: Ceremony painted in the kitchen of the house of Sutoria Primigenia (1, 13, 2). The family attends the sacrifice led by the paterfamilias (William Van Andringa cliché).

18 We are talking about fides implicita, Bourdieu 1984.

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Thus, the picture drawn from Pompeii’s documentation reveals a pantheon that is not very varied, but carefully ordered and hierarchical according to the needs of circumstances, community circles and places of activity. The Pompeians sought above all the proximity of the gods they knew, a guarantee of a »daily tranquillity«.19 The gods were everywhere, but everyone in their place, in the countryside and in the city, in the public square, at crossroads, in houses or necropolises. »Our region offers such an assistance of deities that a god meets himself there more easily than a man,« Quartilla claims, with humour, in Petronius’ Satyricon (17.5), written during the last decades of Pompeii. The deities, geniuses and heroes lived with men; they had their own homes, temples, and sponsored everyday activities that interested public and professional life as much as the intimacy of the domestic world. Their status certainly made them superior beings, but they were easily accessible, present or made present in any place of daily life. The gods were finally considered as benevolent patrons who had to be made attentive by celebrating a sacrifice, most often a simple libation or an offering of a few burnt fruits on the flame, a gesture undoubtedly largely reflected in and guided by the many paintings in lararia which represent the same scene and officiants. The rituals made it possible to keep the attention of the gods awake, to modulate the meaning of the tributes paid according to the gods and communities involved, in other words according to the place. They also allowed a hierarchy of religious acts. While the Venus of the public square received animal victims, in principle female and white animals20, slaughtered at the foot of the monumental altar, the domestic Venus was satisfied with a toast or a few minor offerings, a little incense, wine, a few fruits. Context guided the ritual action. All this defined piety and founded the Roman religion defined by orthopraxy, that is, the accomplishment of an action in favour of the gods judged in accordance with tradition. On this point, recent archaeology provides some insights into the composition of rituals and the transmission of ritual know-how in a society like that of Pompeii. A few years before the destruction of the city by the eruption of Mount Vesuvius, lightning struck a house in the south-eastern districts, the House of Four Styles (I, 8, 17), an event that led to the intervention of a specialist (perhaps a haruspex) in order to interpret the phenomenon and ensure a funeral of the lightning according to Roman custom. The recent excavation of the mound showed that it was a buried structure, which the Romans called bidental, consecrated according to specific rules: a site was chosen in the garden, sheltered from view and places of passage, an organized and careful collection of the materials affected by the lightning was carried out, the order was given to freeze the deposit with liquid mortar and to constitute a masonry mound with selected lightning elements. Given we know that the ritual knowledge of the Romans was not transmitted in writing, the question arises of how the procedure evident in the garden of the

19 Veyne 1984. 20 As indicated by the procession from the house of the Wedding of Hercules. A white cow is brought in front of the altar of the temple of Venus, Van Andringa 2009, 190 and fig. 145.

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House of the Four Styles was determined. How were rituals transmitted in a religion defined by orthopraxis, in other words on ritual action? Obviously the care taken in the burial of lightning in the House of the Four Styles indicates a well mastered ritual framework, the respect of elementary principles concerning the location of the structure and the necessary burial of the elements struck. These principles were known to Latin authors and undoubtedly from the fulgural books preserved in Rome.21 However, a comparison of the Pompeii bidental with other structures attested by archaeology in Rome, Ostia, Aquileia, Minturnae and elsewhere shows that, despite the respect of these few general principles, lightning could be buried according to various methods, defined by the designer and according to local knowhow. The ritual was not only performed according to tradition and reinvented, it was tirelessly reconstructed, each time as a new object, as if the meaning ultimately resided in this unique construction and not only in the repetition of a general schema. It was the interpretation and implementation that were fundamental, the correct interpretation and project management entrusted to a specialist, deemed capable of devising the ritual, who was recognized as having the authority to do so.22 Comparable principles are found in the devising of funeral rites and in their transmission. Indeed, the traces found in funeral enclosures, far from showing complex or frozen sequences, confirm the extreme plasticity of Roman ritual, articulated on a general framework that formed the ritual catchment, again well recognized by literary tradition. In fact, the transformation of the deceased (by fire) and the deposition of her or his remains in the grave were accompanied by ritual sequences involving a few objects, an oil lamp, perfume bottles, a coin, or food products burned on the flame of the pyre in honour of the deceased, usually some fruit, a little meat or fish placed on a plate. These few objects and products are recurrent; they were clearly sufficient to build the otherness of death, to structure the performance of local funeral beliefs, a necessary guarantee of the proper installation of the deceased in their final resting place.23 The description of the gestures allowed by archaeology undoubtedly places us as close as possible to the meaning of the rites, because much of it resides in the objects and products themselves as well as in their manipulation.24 The objects placed or broken, the light of the lamp (which marked the opposition to the darkness of death), the perfume exhaled (which marked the opposition to the bad smell of death), the money of little value offered (which accepted the installation of the deceased), the few items of luxury foods placed at the stake could certainly be interpreted in the light of general knowledge transmitted by Roman culture, written and oral (on the purification, the transformation of the deceased or the infernal gods). The essential factor, how-

21 These texts are compiled by Thulin 1968, 92–119. The survey on Pompeii’s fulgur conditum is developed in a forthcoming book (Van Andringa, forthcoming). 22 See Patzelt 2018 for further details. 23 On the materiality of religion see Chapter ›Artefacts and their Humans‹. 24 Boivin 2008.

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ever, laid in the intrinsic power of these objects, in their ability to generate an experience, a sensual, emotional framework and obviously in their manipulation at different moments allowing to build, to orchestrate the funeral ceremony. The meaning was constructed in the course of the performance of the ritual, rather than predetermined in advance, as is evidenced by the variety of gestures deployed and the varied fate given to the objects. Far from being mere accessories, the oil lamp, the perfume, the coin participated in the construction of the ritual signifier, thanks to a cleverly orchestrated articulation by individuals between a common knowledge, relatively schematic and general, but sufficient to express the same tradition, and the personal or family initiative that gave its true meaning to the rite25.

4

Conclusion

Gods and humans, the history of a city like Pompeii is above all that of two communities living together, a precarious harmony guaranteed by the celebration of regular rituals, in temples, in the public square, in the streets, in houses or on graves. In a society thus organised and hierarchical due to sacrifices that were intended to express the superiority of the gods over men, to speak of the gods is, then, inevitably, to speak of men. To describe the cult of Jupiter is to evoke the Roman identity of the inhabitants, the public oaths, the patronage over the assemblies (Jupiter is the god of public oaths), that is, at the foot of the altar of the local capitol. To speak of Venus is to talk about civic harmony, about maritime navigation and the life of corporations, especially textile craftsmen; it is also, of course, to talk about love and eroticism in a Roman city. To speak of Bacchus is to conduct a sociological study of wine, from the cultivation of vines on the slopes of Vesuvius to the drunkenness of banquets, of which there are so many testimonies in Pompeii. To examine the cult of the Lares is to better understand the social and topographical organization of a Roman house, the involvement of the family in neighbourhood life. Explaining funeral practices means defining the grave not only as a testimony to the rank of the deceased, but also as a place of worship, adapted to a ritual separation between the dead and the living. Faced with the richness of religious expressions encountered in Pompeii, the essential observation is that no area of human activity was spared by religion. From birth to death, at work or in the theatre, in one’s city or on a journey, piety was a daily concern, maintained by gestures of reverence towards the gods, a greeting in passing by a temple, a few grains of incense on the family altar, a toast during the banquet and then, from time to time, the sacrifice of a chicken or a pig in the yard of the sanctuary or in the garden of the house. This interweaving of religion and human life is so thorough that the study of the testimonies of religious activity reveals a whole section

25 Van Andringa 2019 and forthcoming.

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of the functioning of Pompeian society, completing our knowledge of the history of the city.

Bibliography Boivin, Nicole 2008. Material Cultures, Material Minds. The Impact of Things on Human Thought, Society, and Evolution. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Bourdieu, Pierre 1984. Questions de sociologie. Paris: Minuit. Boyce, George K. 1937. Corpus of the Lararia of Pompei. MAAR 14. Rome: American Academy. Coralini, Antonella 2001. Hercules domesticus: Immagini di Ercole nelle case of the Vesuvian region (1st century B.C.-79 A.D.). Napoli: Electa. Flower, Harriet 2017. The Dancing Lares and the Serpent in the Garden: Religion at the Roman Street Corner. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Fröhlich, Thomas 1991. Lararien- und Fassadenbilder in den Vesuvstädten: Untersuchungen zur »volkstümlichen« pompejanischen Malerei. MDAI R Ergänzungsheft 32. Mainz: Verlag Philipp von Zabern. Reprint, Diss. Freiburg i.Br. 1989 (Strocka). Hodske, Jürgen 2007. Mythologische Bildthemen in den Häusern Pompejis: Die Bedeutung der zentralen Mythenbilder für die Bewohner Pompejis. Ruhpolding: Rutzen. Patzelt, Maik 2018. Über das Beten der Römer: Gebete im spätrepublikanischen und frühkaiserzeitlichen Rom als Ausdruck gelebter Religion. RGVV 73. Berlin: De Gruyter. Sogliano, Antonio 1937. Pompei nel sviluppo storico. Pompei preromana (dale origini all’ 80 av. C.). Roma. Thulin, Carl Olof 1968. Die etruskische Disziplin I–III. Darmstadt: Wiss. Buchgesellschaft. Repr. (Göteborgs högskolas årsskrift 11. 1905,5; 12. 1906,1; 15. 1909,1). Van Andringa, William 2009. Daily Life of Gods and Men: Religious Life in the Cities of Vesuvius in Roman Times. BEFAR 337. Rome: Ecole française. — 2013. Pompeii: mythology and history. Paris: CNRS editions. — 2019. »Rituels pour les morts et culte des dieux à Pompéi.« Cahiers de la villa »Kerylos« 30 = Actes ddu XXIXe colloque de la villa Kerylos, 2018. 101–121. — forthcoming. Words are not enough: Archaeology of Gesture and Ritual Knowledge in Roman Times. — et al. (eds.) 2013. Archaeology and Religion: The Dionysian Shrine of St. Abbondio in Pompeii = Mélanges de l’École française de Rome—Antiquité [Online], 125–1. http://mefra.revues.org/ 1165. Van Andringa, William; Duday, Henri; Lepetz, Sébastien 2013. Mourir à Pompéi: excavation of a funeral district of the Roman necropolis of Porta Nocera (2003–2007), vol. 2. Collection de l’Ecole française de Rome 468,2. Rome: Ecole française de Rome.

Sanctuaries – places of communication, knowledge and memory in Roman religion Rubina Raja and Anna-Katharina Rieger

1

Sanctuaries – places for people and gods

Sanctuaries were a crucial part of human life in the Roman period across the Empire both in the sense that sanctuaries were visible and tangible spaces, in- and outside settlements, as well as spaces in which ritual practice that constituted and made religious life took place.1 Sanctuaries differed immensely in their physical appearances. There was no entirely set formula for how a sanctuary should look. Nonetheless the absolutely crucial feature in every sanctuary was the altar at which the offerings took place. These offerings constituted the essence of practicing religion and were the actions, which created contact between the gods and the mortals.2 However, sanctuaries were not spaces in which everyone would have had the same experiences and they were not even spaces into which everyone was allowed at any given point in time. All too often sanctuaries are approached merely as physical spaces in which ritual practices took place.3 However, they were so much more than that. They were frameworks for experiences and places where the senses were stimulated. Sanctuaries in the Roman period were spaces where visitors had visual impressions, smelled, heard and sometimes tasted things. Sanctuaries framed, gave space and controlled religious practices.4 They gave a home to the gods and were elaborated in order to make the gods want to be there.5 Sanctuaries were spaces in which performances took place and rituals were acted out. They were living spaces for living people and their living gods.6 Therefore, sanctuaries, their surroundings and makers were in a constant dynamic process of mutually shaping each other. Sanctuaries shaped experiences, but experiences shaped people and enabled continuity or change in practices over time. Religion was therefore so to say lived in such spaces and the constant interaction between space and people would have had an impact on how religion was practiced and given shape over time.7 It was not a 1 2 3 4 5 6 7

Raja 2018. Raja 2015a, 308. Advocating a different approach: Raja and Rüpke 2015; Rüpke 2011a. Tweed 2011. Chaniotis 2009. Chaniotis 2017 for cult statues. Raja and Rüpke (eds.) 2015 for a collection of contributions dealing with the archaeology of religion in a lived religion perspective as well as contributions in Gasparini et al. 2020.

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given that deities would want to live in a particular sanctuary. They would have to be offered a home and to accept that home. In attempts to bind the deity to sanctuaries epithets were given to the deities that could help tie them to one particular place. In the Roman period—as opposed to the earlier Classical periods— epithets became much more popular.8 Sanctuaries, although often called public spaces, cannot be assumed to have been public at all times—and some most likely were not public at any point in time. Access to sanctuaries would have been controlled and monitored, which in turn would have impacted the experience of the visitors. Experiences would also have differed depending on the situation of the individual. Aspects such as occasion, rank, gender, power relations, societal standing and role in religious situations would have had an impact on the ways in which the individual would have perceived a visit to a sanctuary.9 Sanctuaries, whether dedicated to local deities or empire-wide cults, would have borne the imprints of local ways of interpreting how a sanctuary should look10 and what it needed to embody. Sanctuaries did not even need to have been architecturally defined. Sacred forests, groves, lakes, mountains and caves are well known to us from ancient sources and such spaces could constitute important religious spaces which held sanctuary-like properties, such as Mount Olympus in Greece11 or the Afqa grotto in Lebanon12 or even gardens.13 Nature could constitute sanctuaries as well, although not being defined solely by architecture, they were often associated with some architectural elements underlining the sacredness of the place (Figs. 2. and 4). Often myths evolving around the natural environment and the topography of a landscape would shape the materialisation of these perceptions. An example of such personifications of environment and landscape is the case of Tyche of Antioch, who firmly places her foot on the river Orontes to hold down the dangers presented by the flowing river.14 The city goddess wins, so to say, over the god of the river—although he is acknowledged as a god. Power relationships therefore also must be taken into consideration when speaking about sanctuaries and their locations in the physical landscapes—both in- and outside of cities. However, the Tyche of Antioch must also be set within a wider chronological framework and needs to be seen within the frame of time as an older goddess, whose image already in the Hellenistic period was prevailing. To be old, to have existed or be able to claim existence back in time, was also a feature which gave power and

8 Chaniotis 2009. Also see the ERC Advanced Grant project headed by PI Corinne Bonnet: Mapping Ancient Polytheism. Cult Epithets as an Interface between Religious Systems and Human Agency. 9 Raja and Rüpke 2015, 7–8; also see Raja 2016 for a contribution, which concerns itself with the impact of objects in specific religious situations. 10 Raja 2015a, 308–9. 11 I.e. Virgil, Aeneid 10.1, description of the mountain as the seat of the gods. 12 Lipinski 1995, 106. 13 New Decker 2015, 227. 14 Meyer 2006.

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acknowledgement to cults and deities in the Roman period. In particular the 2nd century A.D. saw a surge in the invention and reinvention of cults across the Empire, where tracing back local deities to past times became a trend.15

Fig. 11: The temple of Artemis in Gerasa/Jerash (Jordania), constructed during the 2nd century A.D. (APAAME_20100601_SES-0481.dng, Arial photographic archive for the archaeology of the Middle East, APAAME).

We also know that sanctuaries could work as banks and treasuries. Inscriptions tell us about deposits made there as well as large monetary gifts given to sanctuaries at various points in time.16 Exactly how such mechanisms worked is not known.17 To return to power relationships, at Baalbek in Lebanon for example, a string of sanctuaries were monumentalised in the Roman period creating the largest sacred precinct in the Roman world. The most impressive of these was the extensive Sanctuary of Jupiter Heliopolitanus, which dominated the plain in front of another sanctuary located on the hill. The so-called temple of Bacchus and temple of Venus were located close to the Jupiter Heliopolitanus sanctuary as well.18 While we know that Baalbek was important, not only locally, but also on an imperial scale, not least in the period when emperors of Near Eastern descent, such as Elagabalus, 15 16 17 18

Blömer, Lichtenberger and Raja (eds.) 2015; Raja (ed.) 2017. Welles 1938, inscriptions nos. 2–5. See chapter ›Economy and religion‹. Kropp 2010, 2009; Laird 2013.

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ruled the Roman Empire, it is still puzzling and important to ponder on the fact that religiously important spaces, and in this case one of the most spectacular sacred spaces in the Roman Empire of this period, were produced outside of Rome. Nonetheless the dynamic interaction with Roman religion—and local religion—was obvious in the names of the deities worshipped in the sanctuaries there.

Fig. 12: The forum with the sanctuary of the province Hispania in Tarraco/Tarragona (Spain) on three terraces with circus, square and temple for the emperor’s cult from the Flavian period (2nd half of the 1st century A.D.). (Pensabene and Mar 2010, Fig. 1).

In the city of Gerasa in the Decapolis region, this middle-sized provincial city in the 2nd century A.D. produced the second largest sanctuary in the Roman world, that of its city patron, Artemis.19 This sanctuary was never entirely finished for reasons unknown. But the unfinished sanctuary would have made an imprint on the central urban landscape. The Artemis sanctuary (Fig. 10) might have stood in competition with the other monumental sanctuary of the city, that of Zeus Olympios, and therefore in the case of Gerasa the continuous development of the main sanctuaries of the city impacted the entire layout and development of the city itself.20 The sacredness was present all over—although perhaps not practiced all the time. Gerasa’s urban landscape is a good example of how sacred architecture can dominate an entire city and how a middle-sized city through investment in the monumentalisation of a sanctuary came to hold the second largest sanctuary in the Roman world. In Rome, sacred spaces were also numerous: altars, temples and architecturally defined sanctuaries were integrated parts of the urban landscape of the largest city, million-scale in terms of inhabitants, of the Empire.21 Apart from being the largest city, Rome was also the city which religiously speaking was one of the most important in imperial times. The main cults of the Empire were celebrated there and the 19 Raja 2009. 20 Lichtenberger 2008. 21 Beard, North and Price 1998.

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annual calendars tell us about these festivals and celebrations around which urban life also evolved.22 The organisation of urban life was to a large extent structured around the religious life and not least the religious actions, which the religious life demanded to be fulfilled. This structure of and emphasis on the carrying out of religious activities had been boosted by Octavian, later Augustus, who made it one of his main principles to restore the Roman religion in the urban centre and across the Empire and used religion in order to establish the Roman sovereignty in the Mediterranean region.23 Here the layout and constructions of sanctuaries also held an important place and the Augustan period saw a huge increase in the building of such sanctuaries across the Empire. Another means through which order was restored was the imperial cult.24 While deities might be worshipped both in the sanctuaries dedicated to them, they could also be worshipped in other places. However, some deities were more locally bound than others, but still came to hold importance in a wider region or even empire-wide.25 The sanctuary of Jupiter Dolichenus in Anatolia is one example of a deity26 whose importance spread—most likely with that

Fig. 13: The building for the worship of the imperial family in Narona (Croatia), erected around 10 B.C., with marble statues of members of the Julio-Claudian to Flavian dynasty (1st century A.D.). (Rolf Kawel, CC BY-SA 3.0).

22 23 24 25 26

Rüpke 2011b on Roman calendars (translation of the German publication from 1995). Lake Galinsky 2008, 2007; Elsner 1996. Price 1984; Gradel 2002. Cf. Rieger 2020a. Winter (ed.) 2017 and 2014.

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of the Roman army—across the entire Empire.27 Another example of a localised but important cult is that of Dea Syria. We know that she held a monumental sanctuary in Heliopolis in Syria of which Lucian wrote informing us about the religious practices, which took place there at different points in time over the year. Although it has been doubted how realistic his descriptions are, it has also been argued that we need to take this text more seriously than it has been in earlier research.28 In recent years more emphasis has been put on understanding sacred spaces through the intertwined and complex source material, which often is full of lacunae and need to be patched together. It remains important to underline that reconstruction of religious practices and therefore religious life in antiquity is still a challenge. Issues, however, pertaining directly to the ways in which we can gain insight into various aspects of religious life which took place in sacred spaces, have been tackled through breaking down parts of religious life and tackling it by thematic approaches.29 While architectural expressions of religious life, such as sanctuaries, certainly present us with the most obvious and visible sources through which we can begin to reconstruct religious practice in the Roman period, there are other important groups of evidence to take into consideration. These include inscriptions, written texts as well as the objects associated with religious life and sanctuaries in particular. While architectural layouts easily become subjects of over-interpretation in attempts to claim universal elements in religious life (which in fact might have been present,30 but cannot be verified through architectural analysis), texts, inscriptions and objects give us the opportunity to investigate other aspects of religious life, which took place in sanctuaries and often give insight into the more subtle nuances of the practices performed there. The now well-researched and so-called banqueting tesserae from the oasis city in Palmyra, which served as entrance tickets to religious banquets held in the city’s sanctuaries, are good examples of practices connected to the religious life of the city, which are not visible in the archaeological architectural record.31 These banquets are only visible to us through the tesserae, which in abundance tell us about these events, give insight into who invited and sponsored such events (priests and groups of priests), as well as into the multifaceted ways in which religious iconography was shaped in order to make each series of invitations distinct from each other, but recognizable overall, as part of a Palmyrene tradition central to the way in which religious life was practiced in Palmyra in the Roman period. Here again the Roman calendars must be mentioned as sources for religious practices as well as inscriptions stemming from sanctuaries and dedications made in these spaces and texts telling us about festivals and processions.32

27 28 29 30 31 32

Collar 2009. Lightfoot 2003. See for example Raja and Rüpke 2015. Nielsen 2012. Raja 2015b, 2015c, 2019, 2020. Rüpke 2011b on calendars; Wörrle 1988 on Oinoanda; Luginbühl 2015 on sanctuaries and sacrifices; Stavrianopoulou 2015 on processions.

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It often becomes clear to us through such evidence that the focus on a cult could be driven by either groups or even by individuals. This adds another level of complexity to our struggle for understanding sanctuaries as shared spaces. If groups or individuals could take charge and drive the way in which sacred spaces—in- and outside cities—were located and upkept and how religious life therefore was practiced, then we must consider whether the presence of particular agents might have been what drove religious life more, than an overall societal engagement in such matters. Sanctuaries were places where euergetism was fully lived and thus the intersection between doing good for the public and at the same time forcing religious practices would in some cases have been deeply intertwined; the public and the religious spheres became intersecting realms, which could not be completely separated. Sanctuaries of the Roman period across the Roman Empire were spaces, which embraced multiple realities of which we might only see a few represented in the evidence that we have today, and we therefore have to stay alert to the various other realms, which might be invisible to us.

2

The role of sanctuaries in an empire full of differences

The local traditions, gods, rituals, the relationship between divine and human actors—in short, the diversity of micro-regional elements, socio-cultural groups and religious customs—grew in the first centuries A.D. with the expansion of the Roman Empire. However, a religion from above, a state-controlled religious practice in the strict sense did not exist from the beginning, and would certainly not have had a future for a growing community that tried to bring such different traditions, habits, languages and people under one administrative and political roof.33 In the course of the conquests by Rome in the 3rd to 1st centuries B.C., there were no comprehensive measures in the newly created provinces—neither by the new rulers nor the old elites—to spread in a quasi-missionary manner new deities and places where they were worshipped. Yet, changes, which gods were worshipped or shifts in the spatial design of sanctuaries, and other, often small developments reflect the changed socio-political conditions. Even the Christian religion, which is often regarded as the religion of the Empire, cannot be described as such before the 5th/ 6th century A.D. Nonetheless the first centuries A.D. demonstrate a rise in evidence, inscriptions in particular, which tell us about how rituals were to be performed34 and how people needed to behave in order to conduct offerings and other religious acts. The growing diversity, the—sometimes—fast spread of cults, and the adaptability

33 See chapter ›Empire‹; Ando 2008. 34 LSAM 28LL, dating to 14/37 A.D.

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of local societies also called for a higher degree of regulation and description of how to perform rituals correctly and worship the gods in the way that was defined as correct. The increasing interconnectivity between regions, often located far from each other, gave rise to the need for formalising ritual practice through written texts and inscriptions, and most likely also through religious practices and performances. So while no »Reichsreligion« existed, an underlining of the importance of performing religion in the correct way increased. This certainly shows that religion obviously also could be performed in what was perceived as a wrong way. However, such evidence is hardly ever passed on to us, since the enticement to record failed religious practice would not have been high. Sanctuaries as places where people came together for individual or collective rituals, where memories of groups and different actors gathered, where younger generations acquired identity and self-understanding and where life was regulated with the help of the gods, reflect how a society changed and how its global contexts (in the case of the Roman Mediterranean Empire extending both east and south) shifted. Changes resulted from the development of socio-cultural groups, places and regions that became part of the Roman Empire. Often the local social and economic elites, but also traders and peasants or members of the military were the carriers of change. This plethora of individuals and groups could add to the religious life of a society and furthermore give insight into the complexities of religious life also as it must have been performed in the sanctuaries. In Palmyra, we know that the main sanctuaries of the city, at least both the Sanctuary of Bel and that of Baalshamin, at different points in time were occupied by different groups of priests and even individual priests, who through the financing of religious banquets appropriated these central and important religious spaces at least at a certain point in time.35 At other sanctuaries we also know of groups financing festivals and processions and through such activities claiming ownership of a certain religious activity. How actively and consciously people pushed developments forward, e.g. by accepting more gods or changing religious customs and rituals, varied. Local interests and circumstances, political circumstances or the individual ideas of religious specialists in the cities and regions could be decisive here.36 The countless landscapes, places and inhabitants that had gradually come under Roman administration (Sicilia, Sardinia, Hispania, Africa, Asia, Graecia) during the time of the Roman Republic on the Italian peninsula and around the Mediterranean brought together great differences not only in languages and economic bases, but also in dedication practice and figures of the gods. According to the Roman-Latin attribution of names to ethnic groups, it was Oscans and Samnites in Campania, Lucanians and Daunians in Puglia and Lucania, Volsicans, Aequans and Marsians in

35 Raja 2020. 36 See chapter ›People and competencies‹ and ›Gods and other divine beings‹, pp. 149–59. On local phenomena Kaizer (ed.) 2008, as well as Blömer, Lichtenberger and Raja (eds.) 2015.

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the Abruzzo, as well as Picenians and Umbrians, Etruscans and Celts in the northern parts of the peninsula who made up the diversity.37 The Greek-Punic roots of the southern and western provinces also brought conditions for relations and exchanges with them. People with Italian-Latin roots, Romans and Latins with their concepts of deities and places of worship came into contact with sanctuaries of a completely different design, which, for example followed Punic, Near Eastern or Celtic traditions (Africa, Gallia, Hispania).38 Growing attention to binding gods to places can be noted as an important driver in the development of local religious life. At Gerasa, the Roman period gives us evidence of the city’s society creating their own unique Tyche, namely the ArtemisTyche-of the Gerasenes, who is mentioned on coins from the 2nd century A.D. onward.39 In this way local societies claimed their gods as belonging to their physical spaces and the elaboration of the physical sanctuary spaces was another way of underlining such belonging through monumentality and visibility in the urban fabric, and also often on the civic city coins, which were the mass media most broadly circulated in this period, and which would have reached beyond the city’s own territory and alerted outsiders to the religious topography/ies of the given city. Sanctuaries and deities of cities were often depicted on coins in this period.40 Sanctuaries, which had a certain fame and material wealth,41 ran the risk in this period when the Roman Empire expanded rapidly that Roman commanders took statuary or other valuable objects as booty for their legions and for their reputation, which could be enhanced by showing the objects during the triumphal processions in Rome.42 This procedure literally left some holy places in Greece (Delphi, Athens, Epidauros) or in Lower Italy and Sicily (Taranto) empty, since sanctuary furnishings were brought to Rome as symbols of victory and dominance in order to decorate Roman temples before the eyes of the Roman population. The triumphator was able to build a new temple with the money from the spoils and set it up in gratitude towards the gods to whom he often had pledged a personal connection. Q. Lutatius Catulus who offered a temple to Fortuna huisuque diei is one example of an individual using sacred spoils to further his own relations with the Roman gods.43 Or the commander had an already existing temple re-equipped, such as the temple for Apollo Sosianus, where classical, i.e. centuries-old, sculptures from an

37 38 39 40

For changes especially in Samnium see Stek 2015. Quinn 2013, 2011; Prague and Quinn 2013; Revell 2007. Lichtenberger 2003; Raja 2012. For example, Samaria; also see Lichtenberger 2003 in general for the Decapolis or Roman civic coins of the first two centuries CE. 41 See chapter ›Economy and religion‹, esp. pp. 268–81. 42 See e. g. Diod. 38, 7 (Sulla plunders Delphi, Epidauros and Olympia); Livius 38,43,5 (Fulvius Nobilior plunders the temples of Ambracia after the victory over Pyrrhus, see also Polybios 21, 30, 9); Plin. nat. hist. 34, 19, 54 (Aemilius Paulus sets up an Athena of Phidias in his temple of Fortuna huiusce diei). 43 Arnhold 2020, 2011; Bravi 2014.

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Apollo temple in Eretria in Greece decorated the pediment.44 This looted sacred art was used to negotiate the Roman religious values, demonstrate superiority and show respect for the Roman gods; at the same time, these newly laid out or furnished sanctuaries in Rome were places where the identity of the Romans was realigned, adapting to a growing empire and new influences. The general Lucullus (Felicitas sanctuary) as well as Fulvius Nobilior (Hercules Musagetes) donated temples surrounded by porticoes in Rome in order to set up sculptures of deities which they had carried with them in their triumphs.45 An action in the opposite direction could then be a return, as Augustus arranged for it, in order to give back the property of the gods to the sites of Asia Minor.46 However, some sanctuaries in the conquered provinces were completely destroyed by the Roman legions. One such example is the Demeter sanctuary of Corinth, which was put out of service in 146 B.C. under Lucius Mummius in such a way47 that it was only used as a colonia, again as a sacred place, over a century later with the reestablishment of the city.48 Shrines as places of remembrance through which people and communities defined their identity through recurring celebrations, rites and meetings were particularly suited to demonstrate and materialise power relations through the destruction or translocation of honoured objects. Conversely, temple buildings and sanctuary districts, together with their furnishings and their religiously connoted objects, are the places in the provinces where new political structures were negotiated in interaction with local actors and new social and cultural contexts about the buildings, rituals, festivals, personnel and the deities present.49 The Hekataion in Lagina in Caria in Asia Minor is one such example in which political changes in the 2nd and 1st centuries B.C. are expressed by Roman interests and are thus available as a basis for political discourses and position determination.50 On the frieze of the temple the Olympic gods and goddesses, local Carian deities and heroes, were depicted. In the central scene stands a magistrate holding out his hand to an Amazon-like figure, probably the Dea Roma. The responsible local elites with the pledge of the sanctuary sealed a contract with Rome from the end of the 2nd century B.C., which was renewed again under Sulla in 81 B.C.51 The expansion of the city of Rome further into the Mediterranean region also brought about the import of new deities into Rome. The best known are Asklepios, Venus Erykina or Magna Mater, which were »fetched« or »called« with great diplomatic effort in moments of political and military crises.52

44 45 46 47 48 49 50 51 52

Pape 1975. Bravi 2014. Scheer 1995. Polybios 39.2. deMaris 1995; Rieger 2016b. See e.g. chapter ›Empire‹. van Bremen 2010. Willamson 2013; Nollé 2003; van Bremen 2010. For these complex processes see for example Gall 2006; Orlin 2010.

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In the Roman imperial period, not least through the efforts of Augustus to reestablish religious piety in the Roman world throughout his reign, all these traditions were brought together, not merged or homogenised, but linked by the inclusiveness and elasticity of Roman religion, which proved to be capable of embracing wideranging religious traditions, as long as these did not interfere with the basic structure of Roman religious practice, namely offering to the gods through ritual practice. The problems which the Roman administration had with for example the Jews and more specifically their monotheistic religion are well-known, and the Jewish resistence and unwillingness to acknowledge the Roman gods was part of a profoundly complex process that led to the First Jewish Wars, which devastated not only Jerusalem, but also other parts of the region beyond the diaspora.53 The same goes for early Christianity and the massive problems with fitting into the religious system of the Roman Empire. Much could be embraced by Roman religion but insistence on a monotheistic faith was not one of them.54

2.1

New temples and gods under new rulers

But how does religious diversity and the clash of religious traditions develop in a growing empire that reached its greatest expansion in the 2nd century A.D.? What role do sanctuaries play in transformation processes? This empire did not form a territorial unit and knew no nationalistic aspirations, as we know it from modern times. Rather, it was a structure that was permanently in flux or literally »under construction«, whose partners had to adapt to the manifold conditions and knew how to adapt. Particularly, places where religious practices concentrated (shrines, sanctuaries) are the spots where changes, new strategies of communication, processes of transformation and appropriation could be negotiated. Sacred places are the physical constants in dealing with different gods and rituals and as such played an important role in social and political processes. The layout, structure and architecture of sanctuaries in the various regions of the Roman Empire differed not only in terms of design and form, but also functionality. Differences lie, for example, in the fact that since the 6th century B.C. people in Etrurian regions built temples on podiums, of which the sanctuary of Portonaccio in Veii is an example.55 Podium temples recur in later Roman temples of the Republican period, but more often in urban or settlement contexts, as it can still be seen in the temple for the Capitoline Triad in Pompeii, or the Quattro Tempietti, and the temple for Hercules in Ostia.56 With influences from the Greek-Hellenistic East, which were picked up and transported in different ways by local actors such as craftsmen, city officials or

53 54 55 56

Goodman 2007, ch. 11. Brown 2012; Lane Fox 1986. Jannot 2005, 114–9. Rieger 2004, 39–92 and 225–32; Lippolis 2016.

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merchants,57 the building traditions for sacred buildings on the Italian peninsula changed considerably between the 3rd to the 1st century B.C. Many smaller shrines in Italy experienced an upswing or expansion in the period before the civil wars in the 1st century B.C.—the inner-city temple buildings in Pompeii, but also the small sanctuary for Liber (Dionysos) near S. Abbondio near Pompeii would be examples of this.58 Local differences remain clear, as for example in the areas of former Punic influence (Iberian peninsula, Sicily, Sardinia, North Africa), where holy places were characterised by stelae (tophet) placed on the ground, a tradition that was taken up differently in the re-construction of sanctuaries after the Roman conquest,59 but similar strands of action and reference systems of the actors are emerging from the 3rd century B.C.: Terraced sanctuaries such as the sanctuary for Jupiter in Antium or for Fortuna in Praeneste show the architectural form of expression at this time.60 They are modified and varied all over the Italian peninsula, for example in Pietrabbondante in the southern Abruzzi, and bear witness to multilayered relationships between Latin and »indigenous« tribes.61 Temples with peristases, i.e. columns standing around the cella, decrease in number, whereas those with a front portico with columns become more popular, as the temple of Cori in Latium shows.62 The early Italian-Etruscan form of temples on podia come into fashion again. Thus the Temple of Minerva in the old Lucanian-Greek sanctuary in Canosa was erected on a podium in the 2nd century B.C.63 The increasing focus on monumentality also brought a forced focus on the interaction between the altar, which was placed in front of the temple, the temple (house of the god) and the people who came to make sacrifices. This linear, not triangular, relationship—godsacrifice-people—was one, which became the axis for all religious communication in the Roman imperial period. A straight line of communication was firmly located as central. Do ut des stood at the centre of religous practice and shaped not only the communication with the gods but also the physical (architectural) lines of interaction. Although, each individual directed the gift or sacrifice towards the deities, she or he and their dedications were also embedded in a social context and served communication with their fellow human beings.64 With endowments of temples ex manubiis in the Late Republican times, which represented treasure houses for looted works of art, commanders could convey a clear and highly visible message. But even on a smaller scale of portable offerings, their visibility, presence or legibility in a sanctuary was part of the act and purpose communicated to visitors coming

57 See Maschek 2012, who demonstrates the adoption of elements specifically chosen for certain buildings, arguing in favour of a non-linear acculturation. 58 Zanker 1976; Bielfeldt 2007. 59 Quinn 2011; Schörner 2011. 60 d’Alessio 2011; Coarelli 1987. 61 Stek 2009. 62 Cf. Hesberg (forthcoming). 63 Dally 2000, 164–5. 64 See chapter ›Textual production‹.

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at the same time and later to the sacred place. In the imperial period, especially in the 2nd century A.D., the number of inscriptions exploded, while at least in Italy the previously prevailing terracotta consecrations declined.65 These shifts show that the people in the different regions of the Empire have repeatedly adapted their ways of communicating with the deities and their fellow human beings.66 The dedications and consecrations of objects, buildings or inscriptions to the gods, whether by individuals or groups,67 are always an expression of competition and contest, i.e. communication not only with the gods, but also with fellow human beings. Hence, sanctuaries were places of a multifarious self-representation. These social processes and functions of sanctuaries can be well traced in the history and life of the various sacred places and shrines at Ostia, the harbour city of Rome.68 The changes in religious practices were at the same time the driving force and the result of the different clear or rapid transformations by the Roman administration between the 1st and 3rd centuries A.D.: Expansions of cities on a large scale in all provinces of the Roman Empire went hand in hand with changes in religious practices, including the establishment of new sanctuaries, but also the changes in existing ones.69 Above all, the legal status (colonia, municipium) of the cities, which regulated the relationship with Rome, meant that, in addition to the numerous individual consecrations, the policymakers and the financially powerful persons in the cities erected new squares with temple buildings, which offered spaces for the social, religious, political and economic life and forms appropriations. They took over particular functions according to the location, purposes and facilities of the previous sanctuaries. Thus, the temple of Mercury in Gightis in the province of Africa proconsularis (Tunisia/Algeria) was rebuilt with courtyards (probably in the 1st century A.D.), but the kind of actions taking place there—market, trade and religious practices—remained the same.70 The inhabitants of Thouggha and Lambaesis continued to visit ancient sanctuaries in the 2nd and 3rd centuries A.D. and set up stelae on the ground (tophet), while they gave other kinds of gifts—statues, inscriptions—to the gods in the new places and temples at the same time.71 It shows that the practices were often very much bound to the local ideas and religious concepts, even if a certain uniformity of the architecture (square, temple, porticoes) convey Roman influence.72 Stories about the foundation and meaning of sanctuaries and gods were also reinvented or existing ones adapted so that a particular sanctuary could again become an important place of communication among people and with the gods. The Demeter sanctuary of Eleusis in Attica and the 65 66 67 68 69 70 71 72

Lloris 2014. See e.g. Schörner 2015. For thiasoi and collegia see chapter ›Gods and other Divine Beings‹. Rieger 2011, 2004; van Haeperen 2017. E.g. Thugga: Saint-Amains 2014; Gerasa: Raja 2012, 139–82. Eingartner 2005. Schörner 2009, 2011; McCarty 2013; Saint-Amans 2004. Eingartner 2005 on victim devices on the podiums.

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mysteries held there saw an immense increase of institutions being interested in the place and its cult, so that it was re-designed on a larger scale: Propylea – elaborate entrance buildings – altars, but also the Telesterion as a central cult building were re-built on the initiative of the Roman elite up to the emperor in the 1st century B.C. to the 2nd century A.D.73 The city of Gergakome in Asia Minor erected a temple for a local mother goddess only in the imperial period, but chose an archaic style for it. Religion and antiquarianism went hand in hand.74 In the early imperial period an archaising style was prominent also in Rome itself, where the terracotta friezes used on the Temple of Apollo on the Palatine are one example of the Augustan focus on reviving »old« religious tradition using the materials of former cultures, in this case that of the Etruscans.75 The underlining of the importance of old traditions whether »real« or not became a renewed focus in religious architecture and even for the gods themselves.76 The god Apollo in Didyma tells us through an inscription of the 2nd century A.D. that he preferred the oldest music to be sung to him.77 Even gods came to care about the most ancient religious traditions in the Roman period. Composing and singing hymns, choruses and hymnnodies generally increased in this period, especially for the purpose of the imperial cult.78 If, for example, one had assumed for a long time that the Capitoline Triad of Jupiter, Iuno and Minerva was exported from Rome to the cities (new or old coloniae and municipia), today we rather see the local conditions of various elite groups striving to combine the old with the new. Such dynamics were the driving force for the creation of capitolia for Roman divine triad which often took place long after the cities had been founded or elevated to the status of colonies. An ideal type temple like the Capitolium on the arx of Cosa79 was built about 100 years after the foundation of the colonia (273 B.C.).80 A similar situation occured during the imperial period, when cities were reestablished or given a new legal status, respectively, and the cities’ elites commissioned new temples. But the temple buildings, often at fora or other squares, are not always aligned with these legal-administrative changes as for example at Cuicul/Djemila in Numidia (Algeria), which was refounded in Flavian-Traianic times, whereas the capitolium is not built before the end of the 2nd century A.D.81 Also, there is a larger range of local variations of the

73 Eckhardt and Lepke 2018; Galli 2004; Miles 2012; Bowden 2007; see chapter ›People and Competencies‹, p. 121. 74 Held 2008; Hallet 2018. 75 Hallet 2018. 76 Chaniotis (forthcoming). 77 I.Didyma 217. 78 Chaniotis 2003. 79 For the erection of the Capitolium around 160 B.C. see Taylor 2002; Fentress 2003. 80 Controversial Beard, North and Price 1998, 333–4; Van Andringa 2007 for the correlation of civic status and erection of capitolia in contrast to Quinn and Wilson 2013, 127, whose arguments are followed here. 81 Sufetula/Sbeitla and Thugga (Tunisia) in the Antoninian period, cf. Eingartner 1992.

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buildings than the often homogenised images of the uniform, three-partite temple cellae convey,82 and they refer to predecessors or local traditions. Thus, not every temple with three cellae can be traced back to Rome’s Capitoline temple and its direct influence. Rather, the relationships and interaction are to be seen in a more complex way. Formerly »new« gods such as the deities Isis and Serapis, who came from Ptolemaic Egypt and who have been worshipped since the 3rd century B.C. in the Mediterranean region, probably strongly bound to merchant groups and harbour cities, developed into independent deities with their own traditions at the places of worship.83 On the Aegean island of Delos, which as an important harbour and hub in the eastern Mediterranean was the home of many different people and their gods, several sanctuaries of these Egyptian gods are preserved, which take elements in form and style from Egyptian sanctuaries. Thus the long entrance pathway (dromos) to Serapeion C is flanked by sphinxes on pedestals. In Benevento in central Italy several objects, inscriptions and sculptures with Egyptian themes or objects bearing hieroglyphs suggest that Isis and Serapis, who were already established in the area at the time the objects can be dated to, probably possessed a larger sanctuary. The people who equipped and used this shrine with the egyptianising elements were in favour of an imagined origin of Isis—far from Italy at the Nile. In Pompeii, where inhabitants as in other places in Campania adopted and practiced this cult already in the 2nd/1st century B.C., stands a secluded temple for Isis that today allows us to reconstruct ritual acts in an environment that is distinctly different from, for example, a temple on the forum.84 The temple of Isis at Pompeii is one of the many places of gods in the Roman Empire that refers to a certain region of the Empire and its traditions—often Egypt or Western Asia—but develops from the region of reference partly decoupled of cult practices.85 To a more political context belong buildings that served the meetings of the provincial administration, the conventus, even though they also have religious functions. These large complexes are typical for the provinces of Spain and Gaul: In Tarraco/Tarragona, an originally Celtic-Punic city, the Roman governors erected the Provincial Forum of the province Hispania (citerior) in the Julian-Claudian period, consisting of porticoed squares stretching over two terraces. On a third, the lowest terrace, a circus was built, on the highest square lay axially a temple (Fig. 11). A similar layout of temple and square can be seen in Augusta Emerita (Mérida, Lusitania), where on its forum of the province Lusitania a temple for the deified Tiberius stood. A circus was situated just outside the town, which was certainly also used for the religious festivities on the occasion of the conventus.86 At Augusta Emerita the intertwined relations of the imperial house, the local elites and the communities of

82 83 84 85 86

Quinn, Wilson 2013. Versluys 2015; see contributions in Nagel, Quack and Witschel (eds.) 2017. Gasparini 2011, 2013. Kleibl 2009; Rüpke 2016, 272–80. Márquez 2006; Haensch 1997; see also Lugdunum/Lyon and other places in Gaul Goffaux 2011; Goodman 2002; Van Andringa (ed.) 2000.

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the province become evident through epigraphic, architectural and sculptural evidence: Over the course of three centuries the various religio-politicial spaces of the city reflect the negotiations of power.87 These always included a temple building, since the meetings of representatives from the municipal and provincial administrations of communities and populations (populi) in the province had to take place under divine protection. Likewise, decisions made at these meetings were affirmed by oaths or other sacred acts. The presence and goodwill of the gods were needed in order to confirm decisions and make them legitimate.

2.2

Villages, towns and regions: spatial-religious references and regional traditions in sanctuaries

It can be assumed that about 95% of the people in the Roman Empire lived in the countryside, many of them in villages, daily occupied by farming and livestock breeding.88 But these people often appear less clearly in archaeological or textual sources than the inhabitants of urban habitats,89 such as poleis, oppida, municipia, coloniae, who formed the socio-political and administrative cores of the Roman Empire and its bureaucracy.90 Since Rome itself was a city-state, and also in its new territories in Italy, Greece, the former Carthaginian territories in Africa, Hispania, and Gallia urban social organisations were common, the question arises how the socio-political and socio-religious changes, how the representation of power functioned in areas that were differently and less urbanised, such as the Celto-Germanic regions of Gallia, Hispania and Germania, later also Britannia, Noricum and Dacia, or areas far away from the cities, as the countless rural regions for example in North Africa, Asia Minor, or Syria. The religious needs of rural people were no less pronounced than those of urban dwellers. The areas of life that absolutely needed divine protection were mainly about vital resources (crops, water and appropriate climate) and social order among closer and more distant neighbours. Therefore, there was a plethora of local sanctuaries in the Mediterranean region—not only in Roman times—with a small catchment area and no supra-regional significance, at least in most phases of their history. The sanctuary of San Giovanni in Galdo, located in Samnium, is such a place where the surrounding population gathered for festivities.91 In Attica or the Anatolian region Phrygia, for example, a considerably large number of small sanctuaries is documented, often only by inscriptions and not in architectural remains,92 whose catchment area included the surrounding villages. Yet, we cannot assume a strong dichotomy of rural and urban lifestyles in all provinces of the Roman Empire. The 87 88 89 90 91 92

Cf. Edmondson 2016. Woolf 2012; Horden and Purcell 2000. Vaccaro et al. 2013. See chapters ›A city full of gods‹ and ›Empire‹. Stek 2009. Chiai 2009; Schuler 1998; Baumer 2009.

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settlement pattern in Hauran (southern Syria/northern Jordan), as we know it from the 1st century B.C. to the 5th century A.D., is characterised by a large number of rather small settlements, some only 2 km apart, which were closely linked by religious institutions such as buildings, deities, festivals and the persons responsible for them.93 Even if there were poleis—settlements with the status of a city like for example Bostra or Dionysias/Suweida—each smaller settlement also had temple buildings;94 in addition, sacred precincts could also be found between the settlements.95 The people who used these local sanctuaries did not do so less intensively than was the case in large sanctuaries with supra-regional significance. Religious practices and participation in the religious life of a community was to be equated with social togetherness in general, and at the same time closely linked with economic institutions such as markets and the like.96 Especially epigraphic evidence from some of the ancient villages in Asia Minor provide information about this,97 as does the sanctuary of Baitokaike/Hosn es-Suleiman in Syria.98 The local influence that such places, their operators, users and visitors had was great and to some extent independent of the Roman administration.99 Varying distances from and varying significance for the city of Rome determined which people came to the santuaries, which traditions were kept or how they were transformed. Depending on whether they were locally important sanctuaries, whether they were located in or near militarily equipped cities, whether veterans were settled, or many merchants passed by, shaped the buildings, the practices, the (image-)objects in a sanctuary, and visitor numbers would also differ. As the provincial capital of Syria and seat of a legion from Cyrenaica, Bostra, for example, housed a temple for a genuinely North African god—Zeus Ammon.100 In the architecture of temple buildings and sanctuaries the overlays caused by the different architectural and religious traditions can be determined. In cities in North Africa, such as Thugga, where a temple on a podium for Saturn was erected on the forum, people took over new types of religious buildings, while at the same time the areas of stelae (tophets) were still in use or revived.101 In the provinces of Syria and Arabia local, West Asian and Mesopotamian elements were used in the formation of ritual facilities, either architecturally framed ones or in the open, such as altars, platforms, courtyards, banqueting rooms or high places.102 In Roman times, commissioners of religious buildings often referred to plans and designs perceived of as »old«, so that new forms were created with formal and functional

93 94 95 96 97 98 99 100 101 102

Rieger 2017; Rieger 2020b and (forthcoming). Dentzer 2007; Mazzilli 2018. Kalos 1999. See chapter ›Economy and religion‹, p. 263 Schuler 1998. Ahmad 2018. Rieger 2020a. IGLS 13.1, 9107. McCarty 2013. Raja 2018; Lichtenberger 2003; Mazzilli 2018; Tholbecq, Delcros and Paridaens 2014.

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links to former architectural layouts again an attempt to underline the antiquity of the practised cults through reinventing religious traditions.103 Furthermore seasonality would have played a role in religion but remains an understudied area within archaeological research.104 The shifting seasons were the basis for the structure of economic, but therefore also religious life. Certain cults could and were only celebrated at certain points of the year. Where markets were connected with religious festivals, these would certainly have been given preferences as to what suited the harvest for certain crops and production circles—not everything was decided by the religious traditions, but religious traditions could be shaped around the human needs and circumstances. The interaction between the gods and the humans was directed pragmatically by life circumstances. What has been described for many years by the concept of Romanisation is a grand narrative suitable for perspectives on large scales, which—to be better understood—must be tracked down in local, individual cases. Since processes of contact and exchange often crystallise in identity-forming, religious practices of groups of individuals in local conditions, these processes are among other places lived and negotiated at sacred places. By the continuous actitivites of people simultaneously worshipping and communicating with a multitude of deities in countless ways, self-positioning in always changing circumstances was re-assured,105 Hence, the lived religion plays a crucial role in grasping the interplay of known, new, reappropriated socio-cultural and socio-political traditions.106

2.3

Sanctuaries as places of permanence, political appropriation and religious change

Many actors, from the Roman administration and military personnel to local trade associations, participated for obvious reasons in the processes and design of sanctuaries in administrative centres or provincial capitals, since communication, information, influence and contacts with many other groups happened there. A sanctuary of the province in Tarraco/Tarragona (Hispania citerior) (Fig. 11) or a place for the emperor’s cult in Bostra (Syria) have rather also had an influx from outside.107 At places that were not so central, for example Pompeii, the local elites and the surrounding population used and shaped the sanctuaries. Large, politically, culturally and economically leading places like Rome itself, but also Athens, Carthage, Pergamon, Antiochia, Alexandria, Cyrene, Cologne, Trier or Lyon, whose significance went far beyond their surrounding area, show often very »individual« stories in the development of their sanctuaries and religious landscape.

103 104 105 106 107

Examples in Blömer, Lichtenberger and Raja (eds.) 2015. However, see Lichtenberger and Raja (forthcoming). Ando 2008; Woolf 2003; Stek 2009; Van Andringa 2007. Albrecht et al. 2018. Sartre 2001; Dupré Raventós (ed.) 2004.

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Above all, relationships effective on a smaller scale between cities had a clear impact on the significance and the number of visitors at a sanctuary. Thus, some large sanctuaries in the Mediterranean region, known in archaic and classical times, experienced periods of stagnation in the 3rd and 2nd centuries B.C. Since former confederations of cities were no longer of importance, political powers shifted, and dynamics of social cohesion changed.108 Olympia and Delphi, for example, only play a role in their local environment in Hellenistic times, while the sanctuary of Asklepios at Pergamon attracts more and more people. Although operating already in the 3rd century B.C., the cosmopolitically oriented elites of Pergamon in close relation to the emperors Hadrian and Antoninus Pius expanded the sanctuary of Asklepios considerably in the 2nd century A.D. The great popularity that the sacred place then achieved is due to the needs and interests in the body prevalent in the 2nd and 3rd centuries A.D. that this god could meet.109 Local elites, (dynasties of) religious specialists and the very mobile group of military personnel and merchants shaped the religious developments in the period

Fig. 14: A sanctuary for Mithras near San Giovanni di Duino (Italy) in a natural cave, in use between the 2nd and 4th centuries A.D. (Federazione Speleologica Regionale del Friuli Venezia Giulia).

108 Heinen 2003, esp. 56–113, too much emphasising the »polis religion«, but still a good overview of the Hellenistic period. 109 See below 4. Collection of knowledge and objects; Petsalis-Diomidis 2010; Petridou 2020.

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in which the Roman Empire reached its greatest expansion—the 2nd century A.D.110 Structural and organisational changes in many sanctuaries reveal the changed political constellations and religious interests.111 However, the traditions that were alive at the various places had an impact on the actors of the established ones as well as on the newcomers. The power of their influence can be seen very well in the case of a new god, who had been worshipped since the turn of time: the divinised emperor (Fig. 12). The cult of the divinised Roman emperor, which spread like fire in the Eastern provinces from the early imperial period onwards, was very popular. One of the reasons for this was that the ruler cult was no unknown cult in the eastern parts of the Roman Empire. Hellenistic ruler cults had been practiced there for centuries and the new Roman rulers could be worshipped in the same way—together with the local and imperial deities as a sign of loyalty and veneration. The initiative to worship the Divus often came from the local elites, who found various ways and forms of expression in the region of the Empire. The religious practice around the Roman emperor was one, which brought a new dimension into Roman religion in the 1st century A.D. and firmly fixed politics as an integrated part of Roman religious life. There was almost no religious activity not including the Roman emperor, despite the fact that some regions were slower and more resistant to the incorporation of imperial worship into their religious repertoire. When early Christ-followers in the 1st to 3rd century A.D. refrained from worshipping the emperor, the problem was less the choice of another god to be worshipped than the missing loyality towards the god-like ruler. Early evidence for the worship of the first emperor Augustus and his successor Tiberius can be found in Asia Minor and Syria, and also in the West, such as in Gaul. Although not recognised by Augustus himself, he was widely worshipped as a god across the Empire and also did not obstruct such worship.112 The temple to Rome and Augustus in Ankyra is one example of such a sanctuary that was dedicated to him and the Dea Roma and shows that such non-official imperial worship held a central and important role in the religious landscape of the provinces.113 Some of the earliest evidence for institutionalised imperial cult comes from Gerasa where an inscription from the 20s A.D. tell us about a »former priest of Augustus«— who was Tiberius in this time.114 The altar which bears the inscription, was found close to the Sanctuary of Zeus most likely indicating that the imperial cult was integrated into the Sanctuary of Zeus Olympios, which was the main (and Hellenistic) cult of the city. This shows that religious life and sanctuaries were dynamic spaces and that although dedicated to one deity or more, further cults could have

110 Galli 2001; Collar 2009. 111 Rüpke and Woolf 2013; Van Andringa 2007. 112 Galinsky 2011. See Woolf 2008 on the relation of Rome’s rulers, their divinity and their veneration in Rome and the provinces. 113 Güven 1998; Nicolet 1994. 114 Welles 1938, inscription no. 2.

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been celebrated there as well.115 Also in Lugdunum/Lyon it has not been determined, where the emperor cult took place, but there are reports on an altar for Caesar and Roma, dedicated in 12 or 10 B.C.116 If these hints to an early imperial worship are rather bleak, the material from other sites can transmit the impression and impact the imperial cult could have: In Narona/Vid (Croatia) a building particular for the veneration of the imperial house (and its representation) is preserved, where people from the city and the region could see and worship (the statues from Augustus to Vespasian, and from Livia to Agrippina Minor (Fig. 12).117 In the Mediterranean East, in Iudaea, the establishment of several Augustea (Kaisareia, Sebasteia) goes back to Herod the Great, the client king of the still independent region in the early 1st century A.D. These sanctuaries are clear expressions of loyalty to Rome and the emperor. However, people did not always worship the emperor in newly erected temples. The majority of statues have been inserted into existing sanctuaries, apses or exedrae, without any elaborate new construction, which cannot be paralleled to worshipping the divinised emperors but influenced the perception of omnipresence at every important spot of public (also religious) life. Statues of the gens Iulia—the lineage of Caesar, Augustus and their successors— were found, for example, in the basilica at the forum of Corinth.118 Also at the forum of Ostia, close to the basilica, many portraits of emperors of the 1st century A.D. were found, so that a gallery can be assumed there.119 Likewise, religious specialists were often not only in charge of the emperor’s cult, but responsible for several cults.120 Cities in Asia Minor, Ephesus, Smyrna and Pergamum competed to have neokoroi, »guards«, i.e. priests for temples of the imperial family, in order to ensure appreciation and benevolence by the imperial court.121 On the Iberian Peninsula, where the emperors Trajan and Hadrian came from, temples for the imperial cult (Fig. 11) were built on the fora in Tarraco/Tarragona and Italica (Spain), closely interlocked with the administrative, mercantile and judicial functions of the cities. These patterns of an »embedded« imperial cult can also be found in smaller towns, such as Grumentum in southern Italy, where on the forum the Tempio C for the imperial cult is erected in Augustan times opposite the already existing temple for the Capitoline triad.122 Even if nothing is known precisely about the rituals, the layout and situation provide information about how this god and emperor appropriated existing forms of worship and were appropriated.123

115 116 117 118 119 120 121 122

Dirven 2011; Raja 2012; 2013; SEG 35, 1568. Goodman 2002; Woolf 1998, 217–8. Marin 2001; Liverani 2006. Boschung 2002. Rieger 2004, 176–204, including the later »Tempio Rotondo«. IscrCos ED 266, Chaniotis 2003. See on Pergamon; Friesen 1993; Burrell 2004; Berns 2006; Witulski 2007. Fusco 2012. »Embedded« is used here in the sense of a socio-spatial embedding of the new god and cult, not in the sense of »embedded religion« Eidinow 2015 explains for Greek religion and the case of socio-politically relevant asebeia. 123 Ando 2000; Van Andringa 2016.

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On the municipal level, it was rather the local associations of the Augustales who were in charge of worshipping the emperor, communicating among themselves and with other politically influential groups. The meeting place of the corpus of the Augustales at Misenum is a convincing example of this: Several statues by and for the emperors were financed by the collective in the 1st century A.D. and erected in the clubhouse.124 The inscriptions attest to the intense life of this group, whose influential members were also visibly active in other economic and political areas of the city, and were able to make rich donations for and in the name of the corpus. Only slowly the association of the Augustales opened up to new groups of people, as can be read in the inscriptions of the 2nd and 3rd centuries A.D. At other places a shift to the inclusion of the divinised emperor into existing cults and places occured on smaller scales, though not less effective: A statue of Augustus replaced the city deity of Pergamon, Athena Polias, in her sanctuary on the Pergamene acropolis—moreover, a concerted action by »the citizens of the city« (demos) and of «the Romans residents« in the years 20/19 B.C.125 The emperor had to give permission for this, but the city administration financed the building and the cult operation. The correspondence of the city of Pergamon with Hadrian, who only allows a temple for his deified father Traian on the altar terrace, is evidence of the complex expression of loyalty to the emperor and Rome, the devotion of the emperor or a game of power and competition in the urban elites and between the cities.126 Another politically highly charged example is the temple dedicated to Roma and Augustus, which was erected on the Athenian acropolis during the reign of Augustus. This was not just a religious act, but also a very political statement, since the relationship between the Roman emperor and Athens was not an easy one. Cassius Dio tells us about the Athena statue on the Acropolis turning towards Rome and spitting blood.127 Religion was not always a space where peace and piety ruled; gods could take sides and act on behalf of their communities. Not least in the Greek world where they always had been associated with human qualities. For example, Greek gods could not multiply, they could only be present in one place at a time and therefore people needed to attract their attention and the attention was not a given,128 but something which needed to be asked for through religious practice and the performance of rituals. Sanctuaries of Isis were places where the worship of the emperors and the Egyptian gods were linked in the reign of the Flavians. The Iseum Campense in Rome and the Isea in Beneventum and Mogontiacum/Mainz were built in this time and included from the beginning the worship of the emperors.129

124 125 126 127 128 129

Laird 2013. I.Pergamon 2, 383; Frateantonio 2003, 82. Müller 2009; Rieger 2005b; Witschel 2011, 2002. Cass. Dio 54,7,3. Chaniotis 2009. Pirelli 2006; Lembke 1994; Witteyer 2004.

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Also the emperor himself in cooperation with the local administration and elites could take the initiative, as in the case of a temple like in Ankara for Roma and Augustus, whose walls were covered by the inscription of the res gestae of Augustus—a report and government statement. In Puteoli, the Campanian harbour city with its social class of rich merchants, a private donation paid for the renovation of the older temple on the tufa promontory in marble, most probably meant also for the cult of Augustus.130 The special relation between Ostia and Rome which were close and dependent, but still two civic entities, may be one of the reasons why the imperial cult was able to gain a foothold already during the lifetime of Augustus—a unique phenomenon for the western parts of the Roman Empire.131 Other places of worship also emerged in imperial times that are as prone to negotiate and adapt the social and religious relations between cities, regions, people, and their needs as the places of the imperial cult are. Smaller places for the worship of Mithras, which are not easily recognisable from their exterior, increase in numbers from the 2nd century A.D., which means that the number of those who worshipped the god in small groups grew (Fig. 13). Mithrea, similar to those of other collegia, are housed in residual spaces of the urban fabric, did not require much space, and are oriented inwards. They do not have fronts, columns, facades, or wide squares, with which they could attract attention and offer space for many.132 It is these small groups in terms of regulations of membership, small sanctuary spaces, and the identity-forming element that they offer that characterised the transformations in the Roman religion until the 3rd/4th century A.D. Owed to the mythos of rock-born god Mithras, some Mithrea were fitted into natural rocks or grottos, for which the Mithraeum of S. Giovanni di Duino in northern Italy is an example (Fig. 13).133 The axially oriented, small cult spaces set up for banquets and glossily cultic practices reflect the strategies of their operators and users, who were looking not only for possibilities of social profiling and distinction, but also for »personal well-being«.134 Such focus on smaller groups and assemblies was not unknown in other cults. Palmyra’s religious life seems to have been structured around groups of priests and religious banquets to which such priests would invite.135 Other collegia can also be argued to have had such qualities. Religion and religious practice and the spaces in which such groups met catered for their needs and not for larger audiences.136

130 131 132 133 134 135 136

L. Calpurnius, CIL 10.1613; Laird 2013. Rieger 2004, 251–2; Nucci 2013. Gordon 2012; Rieger 2004; Steuernagel 2004. Stacul 1976. Gordon 2017. Raja 2016 Nielsen 2016; see chapter ›Gods and other divine beings«, pp. 141–165.

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Costs, events and experiences: Visitors, users and religious specialists in a sanctuary

Sanctuaries can only be grasped if individuals and groups of people have repeatedly come there and have practiced rituals and routines that left textual or material evidence. But who are the people, who use sacred places so that they become and continue to be places of religious communication and rituals? Who comes, when and for what reason? Why are some places more frequented than others? These questions can only be answered in the respective local and historical contexts. The size, type of celebrations and number of visitors to the shrines were the factors that determined the personnel, organisational investment and the financial expenditures. Those who run sanctuaries could be cities, any Roman municipium or colonia can serve as example here,137 but also associations of people who pursued the same interests as it is the case with collegia.138 Federations of several cities also took part in or confirmed their solidarity through shared sanctuaries, such as the cities of the Syrian Decapolis139 or the Carian league at the sanctuary of Labraunda.140 In the Roman Republic as well as in the imperial period, many sanctuaries received funds for the maintenance of buildings, persons, rituals, etc. through returns from the property of the sanctuary. Additionally, the consecrations and donations of the visitors and their payment for religious services flushed money into the treasuries. The appointment of religious specialists (sacerdotes, hiereus, hiera, flamines and flaminiciae) with a financially strong background (that allowed the expenses of repeated leiturgeia and the initial summa honoraria) also makes the operation possible.141 In the case that club-like groups (collegia) were the providers of religiously used facilities or sanctuaries, i.e. associations of like-minded people and traders, the membership fees and donations by members helped run the places and activities. Several inscriptions, especially from the 2nd and 3rd centuries A.D. from Apulum, Delos, Ostia or Puteoli, attest to payments for buildings, installments to festivals, endowments with annual returns to members and the like.142 That this was not always sufficient or that the members of the collegia overstrained themselves is demonstrated by the case of the merchants from Tyros in Lebanon, who maintained a trading station in Puteoli. In the 1st century A.D. they could not guarantee the maintenance of the office in which they also worshipped their gods. The branch of Tyrian merchants at Rome had to bear the costs in the end.143 Sanctuaries such as the Asklepeion of Pergamon attracted visitors from places all over the Mediterranean. These visitors belonged in the case of Pergamon to the

137 138 139 140 141 142 143

For example Pompeii, see Van Andringa 2009. For example S. Abbondio at Pompeii see above, p. 72. Raja 2013, 2012, 2009; Lichtenberger 2008, 2003. van Bremen 2010; Nollé 2003. See chapters ›Economy and religion‹ and ›People and competencies‹; see also Woolf 2012. Rohde 2012; CIL 3. 1212; 1174; CIL 14.367; 432. OGIS 595.

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elites, the senatorial class, the educated upper classes and intellectuals of the Roman Empire, who were highly mobile. In addition, it was also a sacred place for the residents of the region who visited the sanctuary for thanking and asking for curments, healing and well-being. Asklepios also belongs to the gods, who met the growing interest in body practices and self-awareness in the process of »religionification« of various realms of life in the imperial period.144 This god and his sanctuaries ensured a permanent influx and presence of members of the empire-wide elites. The result of this popularity was a measure of enlargening the sacred place in the 2nd century A.D. by buildings to accommodate, entertain and cure the visitors, more porticoes and stoai, as well as an extended number of employees145 who regulated the events.146 In the East the description by Lucian of the Sanctuary of Dea Syria in Heliopolis (Manbij, Syria) and the religious practices there, does—despite arguments about the authenticity of the text—give insight into the range of people who would visit such a sanctuary.147 Lucian’s text also gives an idea about the festivals and practices as well as the ways in which such a sanctuary was full of statues, objects, people and activities at various points in time. Descriptions of such festivals are (if preserved) biased by the particular and personal view of the author(s), and Lucian is an example of this highly tendentious report on the feast of the Dea Syria in Heliopolis. Gatherings in the provincial sanctuaries of the western provinces of the Empire might have been an impressive spectacle as well. Their architectural layout based on axiality, hierarchy, and vast open spaces as described above convey a structuring political character allowing for large assemblies, to which on the various levels of accessibility people were admitted: the population, the communal and provincial officials and the inner circle of the imperial government. Religious specialists formed a crucial part of the officials and we know from Tarraco/Tarragona, the ordered capital of the Hispania citerior, that high-ranked flamines provinciae Hispaniae were responsible for the religious acts. Their names were kept in long lists over decades.148 The temple of the large sanctuary at Tarraco itself was probably only accessible on special occasions such as anniversaries or birthdays of the emperor, and then, only for certain persons (Fig. 12).149 It is evident from the find material and the site as well as the temple complex that he played an »official« role and fulfilled less the needs of individual communication with the gods than those of the collective.150

144 145 146 147 148 149 150

Rüpke 2010, 197. Aeditui, neokoroi see chapters ›Empire‹, p. 29 and ›People and competencies‹. Petsalis-Diomidis 2010, Lightfoot 2003. Alföldy 1973, 46–53. Fishwick 2002. Dupré Raventos 2004.

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Space for experience—personal needs and religious experience

Each individual, if he did not attend large periodic celebrations, naturally came to a sanctuary with individual needs, ideas or desires. What the exact motivation of a person was to involve her- or himself with a deity can be traced in written sources, such as papyri or inscriptions, and ranges from oath formulae (for example to the tyche of the emperor151) to dedications ex voto, whereas in the archaeological material only in the case of individualised forms of dedications a glimpse of an individual motivation can be grasped.152 The countless prayers and acclamations with which she or he communicated with the deities and asked them for support do not find reflections in the archaeological material. If someone wanted to express a wish or thank a god for a good result, she or he could set up a dedication. Such dedications could find their place at home at the household altars or in niches and consists in organic material. But many people brought these dedications and gifts to sanctuaries as places of divine presence and successful communication with the gods. Mass produced motifs, lamps, ceramic vessels and statuettes give insights into the innumerable occasions when wishes and thanksgiving were necessary or appropriate.153 An object with an inscription, bases or vessels that make references to the donating person are rarer, but the consecrations of objects of personal use— such as amulets, jewellery, utensils, etc.—to the deities attest to close personal identification with the act of dedicating. If an inscription states that he or she made the dedication ex voto, ex visu, or kat’ oneiro, it demonstrates that the direct invitation or admonition from the deity was the initial motive. Cartilius Euplus uses this formula in the dedication of the extraordinary Attis statue in the sanctuary of Mater Magna at Ostia.154 The dedicators by materialising these contacts to the gods and the sanctuaries as places for keeping these materialisations mutually confirmed the significance of the place and the rituals and helped to make such experiences of successful communication possible. Every new visitor came across the former consecrations, dedications or traces of religious practices of those who have been there before him or her. In turn, every act of consecrating an object, a plant or an animal, every visit, and every testimony of successful communication with the gods enhanced the credibility and religious suitability of the place.155 The socio-political changes in the Roman Empire coming along with the establishment of a princeps around the turn of the era caused an increasing interest in religion in order to define identities and roles in society. With this, the nature of deities, and how to get close to them, and the nature of religious practices changed insofar as people created parallel societies (Lares Augusti, Mithras), set up their

151 152 153 154 155

P. Yadin 16, line 34, 127 A.D. Rieger 2011. von Hesberg 2007. Rieger 2005a, 2011. Rüpke 2016, 2015.

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own religious spaces in private houses, and provided the gods with an »autobiographical history« that was enacted in the gatherings (Mithras, Syrian gods). The regulations for admission to such groupings (somehow paralleled to initiations), which might have been necessary to be accepted into such a group, fostered personal attention to and experience with these gods.156 The sacrifices as well as the sacrificial banquet for which many of the small sanctuaries with their side benches were prepared (Mithraea in Ostia, Sacello delle tre navate),157 connected these groups of worshippers closely to the rituals common for other Roman gods.158 The importance of communal meals is reflected in the findings of a Mithraeum in Tienen from the 3rd century A.D. in present-day Belgium: Bones of fish, chicken, piglet, but also jackdaw and hare were found in the small cult area demonstrating the high number of attending persons as well as the gamut of sacrificial animals.159 Also the followers of Christ in the 1st and 2nd century A.D. met in smaller groups and in rooms of private houses. Based on the motifs of furnishings and wall paintings we can detect such meeting places of early Christ-followers in Rome and Ephesus.160 It was not before the 4th century A.D. that the Christian sanctuaries, churches, were erected.161 A local peculiarity in Roman times are the so-called confession texts,162 in which villagers in smaller sanctuaries in Asia Minor (Lydia and Phrygia, 1st to 3rd centuries A.D.) left their individualised experiences and results of contacts with co-villagers and deities on stone stelae. These inscriptions show on the one hand the very personal problems of the persons consecrating the stelae. On the other hand the texts reflect issues of health and illness, of social and economic stress or of situations of crisis or cases of misconduct in which individuals sought help from the gods. The priests as mediators in this process of communication played an important role by allowing, chosing and keeping the stelae.163 The fact that these were openly visible and legible in the sanctuaries showed to future visitors that communication with the gods had an effect here, and that help and relief were to be expected.164 Moreover, the texts, individuals and families »talked« to each other and referred to cases of others. The relatively long chronological span of these stelae shows that the communicative strategies were effective, both for the villagers and for the religious specialists.

156 157 158 159 160 161

Adrych et al. (eds.) 2017. Steuernagel 2004. Gordon 2012, 2017; see also the volume by Nagel, Quack and Witschel (ed.) 2017. Martens 2015. Öhler and Fugger 2016; Bowes 2008. See for example the Constantinian basilica at Ostia (Bauer et al. 2000) or Rome (S. Peter), or the cathedral at Trier. 162 Belayche 2006; Gordon 2016. 163 See chapter ›Managing problems‹, p. 172. 164 E.g. to Apollo Lairbenos at Maeander near Motella, Drew-Bear and Thomas 1999; MAMA IV 279–289.

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Oracles, healing and life counselling

Sanctuaries and the deities who gave oracles where one could ask for prophecies played an important role throughout antiquity: A personal crisis and helplessness were the motivation for people to go to a deity and his or her sanctuary. Predominantly illness and health problems were the motivation to ask for divine support. The rituals and procedures for obtaining beneficial advice from competent deities vary greatly in the Roman Empire depending on place and time. One possibility was to stay overnight in certain sanctuaries and receive visions in the dreams that the specialists of the place could interpret. The sanctuaries of Asklepios in Epidauros in the Argolis in Greece or Pergamon in Asia Minor were completely equipped for incubation, oneiromancy and subsequent treatments as well as for the entertainment of visitors.165 Animals (especially birds and fish) could also be observed for divination (ornithomancy and ichthyomancy). Places like Delphi looked back on a long tradition, where a snake of the priestess, Pythia, the interpreter of the statements, gave oracles sitting above the fumes rising from a crevice in the rock.166 At other places religious specialists used sayings on tablets chosen by lot to give advice: In the sanctuary of Fortuna at Praeneste in Latium (Italy) there was a box filled with small tablet plaques and with a special staff organising the drawing of lot.167 Some of these oracle places, which were often consecrated to Apollo in the Greek regions and Asia Minor, to Hercules or Fortuna in the Italian region, were located at crevices or in caves (the Sibyllines at Cuma, Pythia at Delphi) or close to watercourses (the oracle of the hero Trophonios at Lebadeia, Boetia).168 At Dodona (Epirus, Greece) an oak tree sacred to Zeus formed the centre of the oracle sanctuary, at Lanuvium (Latium, Italy) in the sanctuary of Juno Sospita it was a grove,169 similar to to the sacred places of Klaros (Asia Minor, also with a cave) and Gryneion (Aeolis, Greece).170 Depending on the people frequenting an oracle and the type of oracle, a diversified and complex architecture developed often around such natural places. The sanctuary of Apollo at Delphi and the Corycian cave above it on the Mount Parnassos formed a complementarily functioning unit of an architecturally elaborated, cosmopolitan cult site and oracle, and a cave with only little interventions in the natural setting of the cave, which was used for centuries by local people and groups. Nature and natural topography played a central role in many oracle sanctuaries and we might speculate that such features would have invoked a feeling of close-

165 166 167 168 169 170

Petsalis-Diomidis 2010; Tomlinson 1983. Kindt 2015; Friese 2012. Cic. De div. 3.41.86. Friese 2012; Sporn 2010. Propert. 4.8. Graf 1993.

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ness to the gods (Fig. 2).171 Even nature would have made sounds, just like the people would have made sounds when they worshipped. The sound of water, the sound of leaves in the wind, but also light and temperature of the air, in the mountains, close to the sea or in the plains would all have contributed to the feeling of the divine being all over and within all.172 In the case of the oracle sanctuaries this would have played an important part in the experience offered to the worshippers, who were seeking the advice of the gods.173 The layout of the terrace sanctuary of Fortuna Praeneste allows for such experiences, but also sacred places like the Venus temple of Pompeii with its grove in the porticoed square, even though not an oracular shrine, were able to create a peculiar atmosphere due to the nature in or around the sacred place.174 Caves as the above mentioned Corycaean cave or the cave of Vari in Attica sacred to Pan and the Nymphs embraced people with either silence, or sound, either darkness or light, cold or heat.175 References to older sayings or prophecies at and from other places represent a confirmation of their effectiveness. At Lebadea in Boeotia it seems that the sayings of the oracle-giving hero Trophonios have had to been written down, so that they could become common knowledge (Pausanias 9.39.14). Even though it is a coloured account by Suetonius of Emperor Galba, the core of the story is not invented: a Jupiter priest in Clunia, Spain, gives the Emperor an oracle in a carmen, a poem, that is identical to his dream. Whatever kind of devination was practiced at a site, sacrifices, gifts, and vota accompanied the visits and inquiries of the people, because one had to come into contact with the god or goddess, influence them, or thank them afterwards. Again from the Trophonios-oracle in Lebadea we can refer to Pausanias (9.39.5–9), who tells about the preparatory practices before approaching and asking the oracle, but which consisted in a stay on the site including certain diets, sacrifices, purification rites and ablutions before going down to cave.176 Religious specialists working at oracle sanctuaries providing healthcare were of course strongly involved in the interpretation of sayings and the subsequent healing rituals.177 Their success determined the attractiveness of the sanctuary and its oracle.178 The religious specialists, and every visitor who received suitable advices and left an (image-)object and an inscription at the site telling about his or her experiences, were the guarantors for attracting more visitors. The more people were able to talk about successful consultations, the more—depending on the catchment area of sanctuary—were inclined to go there. Thus the oracle sanctuaries were, with all political and historical ups and downs, influential places where divine 171 172 173 174 175 176 177 178

Graf 1993; Ahmad 2018, 61–3 with bibliography. For example at Caesarea Philippi, see Rieger 2018. Rieger 2016a. Carroll 2008. Pausanias 10.32–38. See Ustinova 2009. Rosenberger (ed.) 2013. See chapter ›Managing problems‹, pp. 170–182 and ›Textual production‹, pp. 247–250. Contra Bowden 2005, 26–33, who focuses on religious power at least in Classical times.

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(and human) knowledge and access to it was manifest. Yet, the enthusiasm on both sides, the inquiring persons and the prophetes to document the sayings, was much greater in Roman than in Hellenistic and Classical times.179 The fact that people went to soothsayers and visited oracles for divination and prophecies throughout antiquity, even though the world around them changed,180 speaks for the desire of people to want to know better about their fate, to eliminate risks—even though communication and inquiries to the gods was a risky business as such.181 Decisions, support for undertakings, but very often health, physical integrity, prevention of pain and suffering or childlessness are reasons that moved people to ask the gods for help. Healing cults are therefore extremely frequent, anatomical terracottas mostly from Classical and Hellenistic phases of sanctuaries around the Mediterranean reflect a permanent revolving around body, health, corporal abilities etc.182 Yet, the 2nd century A.D. are the heydays of healing cults: The remains of and reports about the Asklepeion at Pergamon for example allow reconstruction of a place of healing, a hospital, a spa, but at the same time an awe-inspiring sanctuary and intellectual centre.183 Beside the incubation rooms and medical facilities the porticoed entranceway with portraits of great minds, the establishment of a library and its empire-wide fame and the presence of intellectuals show its significance. It was a place of knowledge, education, arts and of a concentration of social and political power. One famous visitor of the sanctuary of the Pergamenian Asklepios was Aelius Aristides, patient, writer, orator and a devoted follower of Asklepios. In various ways all over the precinct of the Asklepeion and by day or night Aelius comes into contact with the god (and vice versa) in order to receive recipes, instructions, advice etc. An orator like Aelius knew how to use the god’s sanctuary to his advantage.184 His writings and rhetoric performances found an immediate and willing audience to augment his own recognition.

3.3

Great feasts and great gifts

Whereas soothsaying and providing healing in the sanctuaries could be run on a daily basis, which brought certain numbers of people and small, but regular amounts of money into the coffers, it is the large, periodically recurring festivals and ritual celebrations that attracted many visitors at once. The catchment area and thus the number of visitors, participants and personnel necessary for the prac-

179 180 181 182

Kindt 2015; Nollé 2007. Bowden 2013. Rüpke 2016. See for example Graham and Draycott 2016, with the contributions by Justine Potts paralleling the anatomical votives (5th to 2nd century B.C.) to the confession stelae (2nd/3rd century A.D.), and Fay Glinister and Oliver de Cazanove about swaddled babies. 183 Petsalis-Diomidis 2010; Petridou 2016b. 184 Petridou 2016a.

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tical course varied according to the location and importance of the sanctuary, where a feast was celebrated. But the gamut from games and procession to sacrifices and banquets took place in and around the sacred places.185 Such great celebrations not unlike in other societies and times, served to establish and stabilise social and political relationships or negotiate hierarchies. Religious festivals represent moments for social groups as well for families or individuals, in which identities are re-affirmed and consolidated through the references to former rituals, to myths and to memory. In addition, more practical activities such as the exchange of information or goods, arranging agreements and contracts or marriages took place on the occasion of such gatherings, which offered (beside religious practices and devotion) much space also for entertainment.186 This development might very well have stood under the influence of the growing importance of theatre performances. There was so to say a surge in the want to be entertained and in performances being part of religious experiences as well. The processions and so-called pilgrimage travels/processions are one tendency, which we detect as growing in the Roman period. The movement (processions on a smaller scale, pilgrimages on a larger scale) constituted an important part of the experiences of the individual and the community during religious acts. In processions, people could set deities in motion; the (image-objects of) deities were on this occasion visible to a larger crowd on a path from a temple to for example a spring or the seaside where they were washed.187 The ablution of the (image of the) Mater Magna in the river Almo or the transvectio equitum for the Dioscuri in Rome are such rites of a translocation. Hence, connections between sacred places, places of a religious-mythical event and whereabouts of the deities were established. The people in Rome celebrated not only the feast of the washing of Mater Magna but also a festival in spring over several days with elaborate processions, framing and representing theatrically the story of the goddess and the hero Attis, who killed himself (or at least castrated himself) because of her.188 Such parades consisted of many participants, musicians, mimes, actors, carriers, etc., and required an audience. They allowed many people to participate and to build up a communal communication with the respective deities. Processions do not only reflect a spatial reach of the religious practice, but also enable a visible integration of people. Many sanctuaries were adapted to these ceremonial acts, for example with porticoes as places to linger or to look out, with theatre-like

185 Agones (games and competitions) were held not only in the well-known places like Olympia or Isthmia, but also, for example, in Caesarea Philippi (Rieger 2018). In Rome, the Circus Maximus is often used for games related to feasts for deities, such as the Dea Dia. A sophisticated culture of religious banquets is known from Palmyra (Raja 2015a-c) or Baitokaike (Ahmad 2018). 186 Gordon 2016. 187 See Iara 2015; Estienne 2014. 188 Rieger 2004.

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installations.189 The money for buildings, facilities and equipment came—as often in the Roman Empire—from influential citizens of the cities or their clubs.190 We have evidence of some mimes, actors or musicians (agonetes), who donated their portraits in sanctuaries. Fundilius re-organised an entire room in the sanctuary of Diana at Lake Nemi to a porticus in order to set up statues of himself and his family. In Pompeii, C. Norbanus Sorex set up his bronze portrait on a herm in the sanctuary of Isis. Both actors did this as an act of self-representation, but the portraits are also a sign of the close relation of religious acts and theatre-performances. Another manifestation of the interlinkage of play, game, competition and religion were inscriptions of victors of agones. At Caesarea Philippi in the 2nd century A.D. athletes and musicians winning in the ritual games immortalised themselves in inscriptions set up in the public square of the grotto sanctuary.191 Aside from the non-permanent offerings such as a sacrificial animal that was slaughtered and partially consumed, or vegetale offerings that passed away, visitors could also set up gifts made from more permanent materials that they could often buy on the spot.192 In Hellenistic and Roman Italy and Greece, people favoured terracotta figures, often body parts, and black-glazed ceramics, as well as bronze figures.193 With the assumption of political supremacy by the Romans, this tradition changed in many areas to coins and ceramics as consecrated offerings. Especially in sanctuaries that were connected with (healing) water, coins were given to the gods, as the large coin find in Aquae Sulis/Bath (Great Britain) shows.194 In the centuries after Christ, from the 2nd century A.D. onwards, people chose inscriptions on small stone blocks or pedestals, which could have also carried objects and statuettes, as gifts for the deities.195 Sanctuaries were and—to an even larger degree—became spaces for selfrepresentations through votives, but often votives, which circled around the individual who made the dedication. So while the line of communication was between god, sacrifice and human being, a second line of interaction became clearer as well, namely that which consisted of the relationship between individuals and other individuals or groups.

189 Herda 2006, 260; Stavrianopoulou 2015. 190 Vibius Salutaris in I.Ephesos 1a27, cf. chapter ›Religion and economy‹, p. 278. Graf 2011, 110–5 and 2015; Knibbe and Langmann (eds.) 1993, 30ff. 191 Poulsen 1941; Sporn 2014; Rieger 2018, 42; Van Andringa 2012. 192 At least that what food dishes are like in a shrine in Apulum, see Schäfer 2013. 193 Dedications of the type Etrusco-laziale-campano, See chapter ›Artefacts and their humans‹, p. 222–5. See also above fn. 65. 194 Facchinetti 2010; on dedicational practices at Aqua Sulis/Bath in brief see Cousins 2014; Revell 2007. 195 See the findings of dedications by the dendro- and cannophori from the Magna Mater sanctuary at Ostia, Rieger 2011, 2005, 2004, 128–54; van Haeperen 2017; see also Rüpke 2009.

4 Collection of knowledge and objects

4

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Collection of knowledge and objects – sanctuaries in the dynamic between memory and oblivion

Sanctuaries were intended to endure when they were instituted and dedicated, religious acts not necessarily. Religious acts and the practices evolving around these, were meant to be reproduced over and again in order to legitimise and underline the importance of religion and deities. Physical spaces were not created just for intermediate reasons but to create a framework for the rituals and shape the stage for the experiences which would be offered in the sanctuaries. Sanctuaries were intended to be lasting spaces, which stood on the one hand as symbols for the importance of the cult and the deity/deities, on the other hand as expressions of the wealth invested in these by either entire societies, groups or individuals.196 Perceived as stable and persisting, sanctuaries outlasted lifetimes and lifecourses of individuals, but even bridged generations in families or other societal groups. However, this does not mean that some sanctuaries did not fall out of use or that they were always finished. The question of architectural unfinishedness—deliberate and non-deliberate—is one which boggles our minds to this day.197 Why were some sanctuaries not finished? This was the case in the sanctuary of Artemis in Gerasa as well as for example some sanctuaries in Lebanon where bosses on the stones were left roughly outlined, which gave the temples a quite rustic look. This sort of intentional unfinishedness was a style which was applied purposefully in order to make the sanctuaries look more impressive and rougher and potentially also give an archaising impression. How long people visited shrines, whether in the towns and villages where they lived or in those of supra-regional importance, depends not only on needs, but also on strategies developed by those responsible for the sanctuaries. But it was not only the services (divination, dream interpretation, healing place for dedications and sacrifice) that made a sanctuary attractive for visitors. Alexander of Abunouteichos, a cult founder in the 2nd century A.D. in Asia Minor, seems to have mastered the entire gamut of the charismatic leader from illusively performing and attracting, to mastering the media—but this worked only for a short time.198 Other sanctuaries were accumulations and archives of religious practices that took place there again and again,199 and represented lived memories and points of reference for establishing identities. Yet, especially those places could serve usurpers as demonstrations of power by tearing down their core parts or pieces, by destroying the temples and altars or robbing the sculptures.200

196 197 198 199 200

See chapter ›Artefacts and their humans‹. Butcher 2017. Bremmer 2016; Petridou 2016a. Rieger 2016b. See above p. 70.

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The changing position of Christianity in the 4th century A.D. as a religion practiced by the imperial family led to the deliberate destruction of cult facilities: all statues of the emperors of the 1st century A.D., which were otherwise found in relatively good condition in the cult area in Narona/Vid (Croatia), are missing the heads (Fig. 12).201 However, no matter how long a sanctuary endured, sanctuaries by being used and offering space for religious practices accumulated knowledge and memories through objects left and kept, buildings erected and the rituals performed there.202 From literary sources we know that sanctuaries kept votives, some on display and some stowed away. In the sanctuary of Diana at Aricia/Nemi one can still see the storage rooms for gifts, donations and votives, along with an inscription listing the inventory which belonged to the deities Bubastis and likely Diana.203 Temples used as archives are well-known from Egypt, where storage and record keeping went hand in hand. The evidence from the temples at Narmouthis or Tebtynis in the Fayyum attest to this tradition.204 Libraries as archives of knowledge were often located in sanctuaries, for example at the sanctuary of Athena, where probably the famous Hellenistic collection of book rolls was stored, or the library of Asklepeion at Pergamon.205 Furthermore certain objects could be brought out for special occasions such as the above mentioned festivals and processions. Through these practices and the embodiment of the ritual practices, memories were created, sparked and brought to life. Only through the rituals performed by people did a space become truly sacred and the continued and repetitive nature of rituals underlined the fact that these had to take place in order for a space to be sacred. The found buildings and consecrations, the recurring celebrations and sacrifices which are publicly carried, are the confirmation that the desired communication with the gods works here and is often crowned with success. The inscriptions, dedications or even building foundations they could see there were in turn confirmation of the successful request for help from the gods, which in turn made them attractive. The interplay between knowledge and memory is one, which was complex.206 However, the production, dissemination and reading of texts, the singing of religious hymns and acclamations of oaths and religious declarations and dedications would all have been aspects which added to the creation and trickering of memory.207 Regardless of how long a shrine had existed, they were places of accumulated knowledge and objects, places where the memory of a community was gathered and, at the same time, repeatedly renegotiated.208 Every single cult action, every single dedication is therefore part of the place. On the one hand they prove the reliability and power 201 202 203 204 205 206 207 208

Liverani 2006. See chapter ›Artefacts and their humans‹ p. 229. CIL 15.2215 (1st century A.D.); for the archives in the temples of Rome see Culham 1989. For Graeco-Roman archives from the Fayum see Vandorpe, Clarysse, Verreth 2015. Coqueugniot 2013; Petsalis-Diomidis 2005, 218–20. Galinsky (ed.) 2016 and 2014; Galinsky, Lapatin (eds.) 2016. Chaniotis (forthcoming) on the sound of Greek Religion. Raja and Rüpke (eds.) 2015; Van Andringa 2012.

Bibliography

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of the gods for the people in these places, on the other hand human actors can use this manifested power to help their own interests or those of their group to succeed. At these places people gather again and again and thus also the traces of their rituals. In this capacity shrines are archives, they record and layer »stratigraphies« of religious practices and their changes.209 In the Roman Empire there were thousands of such smaller and larger archives and some of them have been presented in this chapter.

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209 Rieger 2016b.

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Prag, Jonathan R. W., Josephine Crawley Quinn (eds.) 2013. The Hellenistic West: Rethinking the Ancient Mediterranean. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Price, Simon R. F. 1984. Rituals and Power. The Roman Imperial Cult in Asia Minor. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Quinn, Josephine Crawley 2011. ›The Cultures of the Tophet: Identification and Identity in the Phoenician Diaspora‹. In Cultural Identity and the Peoples of the Ancient Mediterranean, ed. Erich Gruen. Los Angeles: Getty Publications. 388–413. — 2013. ›Monumental Power: Numidian Royal Architecture in Context‹. In The Hellenistic West: Rethinking the Ancient Mediterranean, ed. Jonathan R. W. Prag, Josephine Crawley Quinn. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 179–215. — ; Wilson, Andrew 2013. ›Capitolia‹. Journal of Roman Studies 193. 117–173. Raja, Rubina 2009. ›The Sanctuary of Artemis in Gerasa‹. In From Artemis to Diana. The Goddess of Man and Beast, ed. Tobias Fischer-Hansen, Birte Poulsen. Acta Hyperborea 12. Copenhagen: Museum Tusculanum Press. 383–401. — 2012. Urban Development and Regional Identity in the Eastern Roman Provinces, 50 BC–AD 250: Aphrodisias, Ephesos, Athens, Gerasa. Copenhagen: Museum Tusculanum Press. — 2013. ›Changing Spaces and Shifting Attitudes: Revisiting the Sanctuary of Zeus in Gerasa‹. In Cities and Gods: Religious Space in Transition, ed. Ted Kaizer, Anne Leone, Edmund Thomas, Robert Witcher. Leuven: Peeters. 31–46. — 2015a. ›Complex Sanctuaries in the Roman Period‹. In A Companion to the Archaeology of Religion in the Ancient World, ed. Rubina Raja, Jörg Rüpke. Chichester: Wiley-Blackwell. 307–319. — 2015b. ›Cultic Dining and Religious Patterns in Palmyra: The Case of the Palmyrene Banqueting Tesserae‹. In Antike. Architektur. Geschichte: Festschrift für Inge Nielsen zum 65. Geburtstag, ed. Stephan Faust, Martina Seifert, Leon Ziemer. Gateways 3. Hamburger Beiträge zur Archäologie und Kulturgeschichte des antiken Mittelmeerraumes. Aachen: Shaker Verlag. 181–200. — 2015c. ›Staging »Private« Religion in Roman »Public« Palmyra: The Role of the Religious Dining Tickets (Banqueting Tesserae)‹. In Public and Private in Ancient Mediterranean Law and Religion: Historical and Comparative Studies, ed. Clifford Ando, Jörg Rüpke. Berlin: De Gruyter. 165–186. — 2016. ›In and Out of Contexts: Explaining Religious Complexity through the Banqueting Tesserae from Palmyra‹, Religion in the Roman Empire 2:3. 340–371. — (ed.) 2017. Contextualizing the Sacred in the Hellenistic and Roman Near East Religious Identities in Local, Regional, and Imperial Settings. Contextualizing the Sacred 8. Turnhout: Brepols. — 2018. ›Ancient Sanctuaries‹. In The Oxford Handbook of Early Christian Ritual, ed. Risto Uro et al. Oxford: Oxford University Press. 137–153. — 2019. ›Dining with the Gods and the Others. The Banqueting Tickets from Palmyra as Expressions of Religious Individualization‹. In Religious Individualization: historical dimensions and comparative perspectives, ed. Martin Fuchs et al. Berlin: De Gruyter. 243–256. — 2020. ›Come and Dine with Us. Invitations to Ritual Dining as Part of Social Strategies in Sacred Spaces in Palmyra‹. In Lived Ancient Religion in the Ancient Mediterranean, ed. Valentino Gasparini et al. Berlin: De Gruyter. 385–404. — ; Jörg Rüpke 2015. ›Archaeology of Religion, Material Religion and the Ancient World‹. In A Companion to the Archaeology of Religion in the Ancient World, ed. Rubina Raja, Jörg Rüpke. Chichester: Wiley-Blackwell. 1–26. — ; Jörg Rüpke (eds.) 2015. A Companion to the Archaeology of Religion in the Ancient World. Chichester: Wiley-Blackwell. Revell, Louise 2007. ›Religion and Ritual in the Western Provinces‹, Greece and Rome 54:2. 210–228. Rieger, Anna-Katharina 2004. Heiligtümer in Ostia. Studien zur antiken Stadt 8. München: Verlag Dr. Friedrich Pfeil.

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People and Competencies Georgia Petridou and Jörg Rüpke

1

Introduction

People in the imperial period employed religious communication to very different and shifting degrees, in different frequency and intensity. In the course of the previous chapters, many different types of actors in different social and geographic environments have been observed. This chapter will not focus on religious activities that tended to be associated with particular political, social, family and gender roles1 or even age—children learnt how to communicate to divine others from early age onwards.2 Such a general religious competence could be acquired in family and neighbourhood rituals as well as in specific places. Especially in larger cities of Italy, Gaul, and Britannia, but also provinces in Northern Africa amphitheatres— side by side or instead of theatres, which dominated in the Hellenised East—invited people to share communication with gods (present as images) by (just) seeing and applauding. Hardly any other sanctuary accommodated like numbers. But it is not on the average citizen or woman or slave that this chapter concentrates. Instead, it focuses on permanent roles or professions, on what is called »priests« or more widely and aptly »religious specialists«. Such expert roles were an integral part of many types of religious communication, comparable to expert roles that developed in political communication or many types of material production. They were stabilized by control of sites, better religious rhetoric in praying and singing,3 »knowledge«, or embodied experience, frequently just age or descent, and not only occasionally financial support by patrons and matrons. Perhaps due to increased competition, specific garments and paraphernalia became more popular in the course of the imperial period.4 As in the case of space, the degree of »sacralisation« and the relative weight of such a religious role could vary. Professionalisation had been rare in the republican period and spread only slowly.5 Whether a specific ethical comportment was inte1 See for instance Schultz 2006; Rives 2013; Sterbenc Erker 2013. – References to the works and editions of Galen follow the conventions set out in R.J. Hankinson (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Galen (Cambridge, 2008), 391–403. 2 Prudentius, Contra Symmachum 1.197–214. On religious learning of children see van der Leeuw 1939; Horn, Phenix 2009; Prescendi 2010; Tulloch 2012. 3 See Patzelt 2018. 4 See Rüpke 2008, 65, and Cameron 1999, 32–351. 5 On the applicability of the concept see Schöllgen 1998 and Rüpke 2013a.

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gral not only to the religious role but to the person’s overall behaviour had been (very occasionally) a matter of debate and even political conflict already in the imperial period, focused on highly visible figures like Vestal virgins or a specific priest of Jupiter whose life was subjected to regulations day and night at Rome, or on the priestly quality of the emperor himself.6 This was also a parameter of the growing importance of what was associated with communication with the gods, with religion, in the imperial period.7 The range of such roles and their function for a group’s or individuals’ practices varied enormously. This is hardly captured by the concept of »priesthood«, frequently invoked in modern descriptions and hardly an equivalent to the (likewise broadly applied) Latin concept of sacerdos (»who gives/renders sacred«).8 We prefer to employ the concepts of »experts« (stressing knowledge, sometimes experience, but above all expertise in the sense of practical knowledge of how to perform ritual) or religious specialists (stressing specific, but even temporary roles9). Again, any coherent and reliable data are lacking, but the growing attention ceded to such figures in inscriptional or literary texts (including legal regulations) suggest that they grew in prominence in the imperial period in parallel to the growing institutionalisation of religious groups. Both these developments might have been due to an increased interest in getting in touch with the divine. At the same time the very services, be it in terms of knowledge, rituals, or even educational services offered, and the necessity to earn one’s living on the part of these »practitioners« might have induced a supply-driven increase in religion.

2

Public priests

As elsewhere in the Roman Empire, the city of Rome contained many male and female religious specialists. Their number grew and shrank in relation to the size and composition of the population, of the sanctuaries set up or neglected and the religious services demanded or offered. Different forms of specialisation and roles were developed in different segments and hierarchical layers of the hundred thousands of inhabitants. »Public priests« (sacerdotes publici), recruited among the members of the political and social elites were of particular importance. They did not exercise any overarching control, even if Marcus Tullius Cicero (106–43 BC) in his tractate on the political and religious constitution of Rome of the 50s BC ascribed this role to them, that is imagining them as supervisors and advisors of all private religious practice (leg. 2.20). Only very occasionally did people invoke them as instances of controlling and enforcing religious or legal norms, for instance on tomb-

6 7 8 9

Plin. paneg. Rüpke 2011b; Rüpke 2018, passim. For the term see Bévenot 1979; Flobert 1988; Prosdocimi 1988; Strunk 1995. See Rüpke 1996; Dignas, Parker, Stroumsa 2013.

2 Public priests

109

stones for protection of tombs.10 Yet, their social standing and intensive interaction with the magistrates and political bodies11 made them visible and important as representatives of what was invoked as res publica in relation to many gods and as exemplary performers of lavish rituals. In fact, they had an important role in the functioning of publicly financed cult, even if many a public ritual would be performed by magistrates rather than priests. It also needs to be stressed that in difference to magistrates priests were not hierarchically organised. Instead, even »public« priestly religious authority was fragmented into many independent colleges with very different fields of action. Nevertheless, religious rituals and considerations permeated political action, probably far down into the imperial period. For many, membership in a »public« priesthood preceded, accompanied or followed a career of political offices.12 Only from the second half of the third century onwards a combination of priestly offices acquired a dignity of its own.13 On the other hand, the new festivals of the imperial period, for instance the victory games for Augustus, frequently involved several priesthoods without any known functional necessity. Perhaps in compensation for the loss of other functions they inscribed themselves into the fabric of actions that could be called »imperial religion« or rulercult. In the case of the splendid »Augustan games«, the four most prestigious colleges of priesthoods were involved. Terminologically, the most prominent position was held by the rex and the regina sacrorum, »king and queen of rituals«. As usual for priestly positions and in clear contrast to political offices, the position was held for life. Number one in the protocol of the pontifical college,14 the last office-holder known, L. Manlius Severus, also acted as a »baker to the pontiffs« in the 3rd cent. AD, a prestigious, but clearly subordinate office.15 The pontifex maximus functioned as the permanent »chairman« of the pontifical college, which at first comprised – including him – nine members (from 300 BC), then fifteen (Sulla) and sixteen (Caesar). During the Imperial Period the college was further enlarged by supernumerarii from the imperial family. The basis for membership was a process of co-optation comprising nomination by members of the college, election (with interruptions; from 104 BC under the lex Domitia in the form of a popular vote by sixteen of the thirty-five tribes), and actual co-optation within the college itself. From Augustus onwards, the office was held by the emperor or the most senior among the emperors; only from the mid-third century onwards the office could be given to every co-reigning Augustus. In fact, his functions within the college were performed by a promagister, ever more present in honourific and funerary inscriptions of those who held it, perhaps beyond an annual rotation.

10 11 12 13 14

E.g. CIL 6.10791, 35987; 10.8259, see Van Haeperen 2002, 315–31. See Scheid 2001. Rüpke 2005a. Ibid., 1601–16. On the ordo sacerdotum see Fest. 198.29–200.4 L, similarly Gell. 10.15.21 = Fabius Pictor, Sac. publ. 1; see also Fest. 372.8–19 L and Macr. Sat. 1.16.9–11. 15 FS no. 2347.

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Differentiation of functions and enlarging of the circle of office-holders to several hundred priests from the first century BC onwards is already early indicated by the pontifices minores, formerly seen as mere »scribes«, but filled from the ranks of the equestrians in the Imperial Period. They were founded in 196 BC, probably initially to deputise for the pontifices their duty to arrange the meals in honour of Jupiter or of the Capitoline Triad during the games of the ludi Romani and ludi plebei. In the long run—as in the case of the »minor pontiffs«—this resulted in a structural differentiation. These epulones, first tresviri, then septemviri (perhaps brought up to the eponymous seven under Sulla, and after Caesar’s reform of the colleges ten in number) likewise rose in status to become the fourth of the collegia maiora (an Imperial-Period expression), but always remained the lowest of them in terms of prestige.16 Coordinated with the pontifical college, not partaking in their judicial functions, but in their socialising, were also the Virgines Vestales. Six Vestals served in the Aedes Vestae complex in the Forum,17 each for a minimum period of thirty years. The longest-serving virgo Vestalis maxima had particular authority. Obliged to virginity the vestals were nevertheless accorded the status of matrons and headed the small segment of female public priests.18 As in the case of the rex and regina sacrorum, wives were also involved as flaminicae with the male roles of the flamines, individual priests responsible for the cult of a particular god (but not thereby monopolizing that cult). Basically, they seem to have acted as a couple, a joint priesthood, ending with the death of one of them. As priests of Jupiter, Mars, and Quirinus, the flamen Dialis, flamen Martialis, and flamen Quirinalis—and their flaminicae—enjoyed the highest prestige within the pontifical college. These were the flamines maiores recruited from among the patricians. They were joined by the flamines minores, probably twelve priests of various gods. The dim evidence might reflect their reduced importance, we even have no idea about their wives and their priestly roles. As flaminica and flamen became the technical term of priests leading the local cult of a divinised emperor as flamen divi Augusti and the like, the office lost in visibility and probably also importance during the empire. The integration of the flamines into the pontifical college illustrates the opposing processes of differentiation, being driven by people competing for prestige or trying to cater for specific religious needs, and the institutional assimilation. Structurally, as well as terminologically, there were hardly any differences between normal voluntary associations (collegia) and collegial priesthoods (collegia sacerdotum). Beyond institutional »isomorphism«, the continuous enlargement of the pontifical college, which also included the new flamines of the divinised emperors, might also reflect a theological concept and concern. In Greek as well as Roman thinking the multitude of individualised deities, dominant in ritual procedures, was always relat-

16 Rüpke 2005a, 21. 17 Archaeology: Arvanitis 2010. 18 Studies after Fasti sacerdotum: Mekacher 2006; Wildfang 2006; Takács 2008; Rüpke 2012a; Andrew 2015; Lindner 2015; DiLuzio 2016; Garofalo 2016; Rüpke, Santangelo 2017.

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ed to a unified concept of »the divine« or »all the gods« (to theion, di immortales), dominating in systematic reflexion, but also frequent in everyday language.19 The pontifical colleges brought together all those priests who were tasked with the cult of specific deities as such rather than just certain rituals or functions. Basically, the augurs, specialising in divination, formed a college modelled for or after the pontifices. Only the duties of the augur maximus as senior member are unknown; the function did not undergo the institutionalization that befell the supreme pontificate. Originally not a college but a committee charged with consulting the Sybilline Books (libri Sibyllini) were the duoviri and later decemviri and quindecimviri sacris faciundis. As a college, they were brought increasingly into line with those of the pontifices and augures, although these two remained always more prestigious. The college was headed by several magistrates; according to two sources from the third century AD the emperor’s function was delegated to promagistri.20 Terminologically, collegia were differentiated from sodalitates, but at least for the imperial period we do not see significant differences. This holds true for the Fratres Arvales, the Arval Brethren reorganized by Augustus around 29 BC. Their monumental records, inscribed on stone at the sanctuary of Dea Dia a few kilometres outside the city, afford an exceptional insight into the everyday business of this priesthood, which combined archaic features with veneration of the ruling family and intercession on its behalf.21 The Salii Palatini and Collini, each of twelve members, might have been a result of an Augustan reform, too. They comprised very young members (in the Imperial period often about twenty years old) whose parents must still be living, but ceased membership upon appointment to the consulate or to particular priesthoods. Inside views from the fetiales and sodales Titii are lacking. The same holds true for the Luperci, even if we know of several members and thus can see that the priesthood gained in social prestige by the later second century AD. It is the new imperial colleges that offer the best glimpses into individual ambitions and structural control among »public priests«, all of whom had to invest their own money in taking the office and running its business, as the positions were honourific only.22 They were in personal contact and banqueting circles within a flat hierarchy and rotating offices, benefitting from public funds only for the actual performance of large-scale rituals and by the allocation of some publicly bought slaves (publici). Of course, as ritual agents they had to rely on helpers, usually taken from their own slaves and personnel. Even in public representations like monumental reliefs, it is not a priest or magistrate who actually slaughters some beast. The number of official slaves employed (publici) and of the minor civil servants (apparitores) cannot be reconstructed. Some of the more specialised functionaries formed autonomous colleges that would serve all Roman magistrates and

19 20 21 22

See Rüpke 2012c; for the integration of the flamines divorum Rüpke 2008, 43–5. Latte 1960, 161 n. 4. See Scheid 1990; texts and translations: Scheid 1998. Rüpke 2019.

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priests, for instance the flute players (tibicines)23 or the victimarii, the butchers proper. Very occasionally, we see a woman in such a role: Critonia Philema, a freedwoman, acted as a popa de insula, a regional slaughterer (CIL 6.9824). Apart from the establishment of a flaminate and incorporation of the imperial name into the hymn of the salii (carmen saliare),24 another aspect of the deification of an emperor or member of the ruling family was the founding of a sodalitas, whose membership corresponded in social rank to that of the great colleges (members of the imperial family itself may even have been over-represented, contributing to a distortion of the putative power of these institutions). Membership of such a sodality was frequently combined with other priestly offices. The institution began at the death of Augustus (b. 63 BC) in AD 14 with the founding of the sodales Augustales (Tac. Ann. 1.54.1–2). In contrast to the flaminate, here the aspiration was to establish a dynastic cult, as demonstrated by the cult site and meeting centre at Bovillae. As a consequence the cults of dead emperors belonging to a particular dynasty were combined, and the sodales Augustales continued to operate under the probably more precise title of sodales Augustales Claudiales. The extent to which such combinations were original or secondary, that is to say established in retrospect, remains unclear. Thus for a long time the sodales Augustales Claudiales, the sodales Flaviales Titiales, the sodales Hadrianales, and the sodales Antoniniani (for the deified emperors from Antoninus Pius onwards, including the Severan dynasty) existed side by side. They were supplemented by the Sacerdotes domus Augustae (Palatinae), an evidently large and lavishly structured priesthood, known primarily from an album that appears to be from AD 182.25 At its head was a triad of magistri, followed by ten exalted members (decem primi), to which two of the masters belonged. The »crowd« (ordo) comprised at least eighteen individuals, to which must be added fifteen members of the clarissimate (clarissimi viri), who are thus of senatorial rank and probably beyond the usual duties. Apart from ritual functions priests were credited with particular knowledge in religious matters. Whereas Cicero, himself an augur, belaboured an imagined loss of knowledge among the augurs in his dialogue »On the nature of the gods« (Cic. nat. 2.9), he profiled them as keepers of a discipline in his normative »On laws« (Cic. leg. 2.21). By the early empire, in Tiberian times, it was above all »knowledge« that priests in general were credited with. In the new imperial economy of knowledge that gave the last decision and legitimacy to the princeps and not any longer to the traditions kept by the senatorial class (the so-called mos maiorum, defined situationally by those who boasted noble decent), sacerdotes had been reduced to experts rather than people sharing in distributed authority that focused on keeping the »commonwealth« (res publica) together.26 These imaginations were hardly matched by any intellectual production on part of these priests themselves, by

23 24 25 26

Fless 1995; Péché 2001. See Cancik, Hitzl 2003; Miller 2014. See Rüpke 2005a, 1591–3 for details. Rüpke 2016a; in general: Habinek, Schiesaro 1997; Wallace-Hadrill 2008; Rüpke 2012b.

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treatises written on augural or pontifical law as known from the late republic. Of all the augurs known, twenty-five percent are known for literary activities, of the pontiffs twenty, of the quindecimviri, who needed to know Greek and professionally had to deal with written oracles, just ten. Compared to the fifty-eight percent of Roman bishops active in literary production before the sixth century (across all Christian groups)27 these percentages indicate an actual behaviour far from the imaginations of Cicero or Valerius Maximus. The services offered by religious specialists went far beyond animal sacrifice or public ritual. Female experts in expiation, piatrices, offered various services, for example cleansers for cremations, under many labels.28 Terms such as saga (»having acute prescience«, »wise woman«), simulatrix (capable of producing illusions), and expiatrix could be understood as to be synonymous. This shows how imprecise the boundaries were in this context between the various activities and specializations, whether in practice or perception. But it also shows how frequently these services might be used while leaving no further trace. Unlike Festus, who made no bones about classifying such a woman as sacerdos, »priestess«, modern analysts have overlooked her.29 The same applies to those female actors who produced and sold highly specialized sacrificial cakes; consistently referred to as »old women«, they are mentioned in contemporary accounts but given no particular title. Varro saw them everywhere in the city at the festival of the Liberalia as »priestesses of Dionysus«.30 There was a special cake, probably produced in the same fashion, for birthdays.31 The Vestals, of course, had male bakers: gender roles were entirely alterable when it was a matter of emphasizing status. Yet, similar to the division of labour among the religious specialists between »priests« and servants, the »baker to her Highness the Vestal Virgin« (to use a non-ancient designation) was at least in the imperial period not the one who actually produced dough and did the baking, but influential members of the upper social echelons.

3

Divination, diviners and the diagnostic value of signs

Ritual competence or expertise32 was also sought when it appeared advisable to fill gaps in knowledge of facts relevant to decisions, or simply knowledge of the future, 27 28 29 30

See Rüpke 2011a, 29. Fest. 232.33–234.2 L; here too the following synonyms. Definition of saga in Cic. Div. 1.65. Exception:Keegan 2014, 129. See Varro, Ling. 6.14: sacerdotes Liberi. Only two male libarii are known, from Pompeiian graffiti (CIL 4.1768–9); the normal assumption that these were secular bakers is questionable. 31 Mart. 10.24.4. The great variety of different cakes for rituals included the arculata: Paul. Fest. 15.10 L. 32 Belayche 2013, 114–22 rightly challenges any categorical separation between priests male or female and specialists in divination.

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or to seek further confirmation regarding a decision already made.33 The very words »divination« and »mantic« derive from the ancient concepts of divinatio and manteia (Greek), inquiry into the will of the gods, whether actively sought or due to signs (omina, prodigia) sent by the gods on their own initiative. It was possible to procure a wider public by pursuing such an activity, for the demand for such services was presumably always very high. Members of the Roman elite, and the authors among them, had already polemicized against these callings in the first half of the second century BC.34 Here too, women played an important role in the wider population as service providers but a Syrian female seer with the name of Martha was employed by the seven-time Roman consul Gaius Marius at the end of the century.35Plautus, producer of comedies at its beginning, had been aware of praecantrices (female cantors or prayer-leaders), coniectrices (»seers«), hariolae (»soothsayers«), and haruspicae (»readers of entrails«).36 With the exception of the first-named function, men too provided such services. What all these providers lacked was the authority of a widely accepted institution like a temple or oracle. Where no claim was made of repeated or even enduring direct communication with a deity by means of visions, the focus was frequently on a reference to special, often exotic knowledge. Astrology was paramount here. Developed in the Hellenised East and Alexandria on the basis of Babylonian traditions and Greek mathematics, the idea of the relevance of above all the moon’s position with regard to the constellations of the zodiac and the position of »planets« (moon and sun included) had entered Rome massively (after beginnings in the preceding century) during the first century BC in a westward movement that paralleled diffusion to the East and India. Soon, a background of popular practices related to the waxing and waning moon and of the quick spread of the qualification of days in the form of a recurrent week of seven days (in contrast of the Roman week of eight days) all related to the planetary deities and thus theologically plausible, was established. Much more expensive forms of expert knowledge became available from people awesomely qualified as »Chaldeans«. The imperial period was characterised by a market of well differentiated religious entrepreneurs. Here, divinatory knowledge was offered from instruments like parapegmata that allowed the user to follow the cycles of the week, the days of the lunation and the moons course through the zodiac by daily or every second day moving a pin in a tablet hanging on the wall (Fig. 1), to expert »mathematicians« exclusively serving some emperor.37 This supply and its economic forms, but also the attempts to either discredit or monopolise specific practices up to legal restrictions,38 was comparable to the magical practice described in more details below.39 Only taken together the extent of people actually living on selling religious services and the extent of the 33 See Rüpke 2013b; Eidinow 2013 and Bowden 2013, 54–6, on the increasing importance of the latter aspect during the course of the Imperial Age. 34 Cato Agr. 5.4; critical voices also in Plaut. Amph. 1132. 35 Plut. Mar. 17.1. 36 Plautus, Miles gloriosus 693. In general see Mowat 2017. 37 Barton 1994; Gordon 2013. 38 For imperial astrology Fögen 1993, Green 2014. 39 See Chapter ›Managing problems‹.

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consumption of such services offered by individuals or institutions like temples and oracles, in the close surrounding or distant places within or outside of the large cities, can be grasped.

Fig. 15: Graffito-Parapegma from Dura Europos, 3rd cent. AD (Journal of Roman Studies 26, 1936, fig. 2).

The central role divination played in producing and organising the Roman religious practises and identity is attested by the introductory section of Valerius Maximus’ »On Religion« (De religione), the first book of his »Memorable Deeds and Sayings« composed under Tiberius (14–37 BC):40

40 On the term religio, see above. Valerius Maximus 1.1.1.

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Our ancestors desired that fixed and formal annual ceremonies be regulated by the knowledge of the pontifices; that sanction for the good governance of affairs be marshaled by the observations of augurs; that Apollo’s prophecies be revealed by the books of the seers; and that the expiation of portents be accomplished in accordance with the Etruscan discipline. Also, by hallowed practice, observances are paid to divine affairs: by prayer, when something must be entrusted; by vow, when something is demanded; by thanksgiving, when a vow is discharged; by entreaty [for a favourable sign], when an inquiry is made by entrails or lot; and by sacrifice, when something is accomplished through formal ritual, whereby, too, the warnings of prodigies and lightning are expiated. So great was the desire among the ancients not only for the preservation but also for the expansion of religion (religio) that, at a time when the city was flourishing and wealthy, by decree of the Senate, ten sons of leading men were handed over to the peoples of Etruria in order to acquire technical mastery of their sacred rites. Our ancestors had a very beautiful temple for this goddess in the city, but when, during the Gracchan troubles, they were warned by the Sibylline books to placate Ancient Ceres, they sent the committee of ten to propitiate her at Henna, since they believed that this place was the origin of her cult. Our generals likewise often went all the way to Pessinus after gaining a victory so as to fulfil their religious vows to the Mother of the Gods. (trans. Ando with emendations).41

Entreating, praying, vowing and sacrificing to the divine may have been open to all, but very few individuals or groups of hieratic specialists held the reins of religious orthopraxy. As mentioned above, in the Imperial period there was a conscious effort for systematisation of knowledge that regulated mortal-immortal relations, and certain individuals were granted the privilege of embarking on this enormously challenging expedition: the pontiffs, the augurs, the seers, and the haruspices.42 From this observation alone, one can safely conclude the central role diviners played in both systematising existing divinatory practises and enriching the gamut of publically acceptably ways of communicating with the divine. By publically acceptable we refer to the ways that were sanctioned by the senate, because, as has been made obvious,43 the number of conjuring the divine on a private level must have been infinitely more multifaceted. More significantly, the same text showcases nicely how divination offered numerous possibilities for religious appropriation and effectively religious innovation. Apparently the religious regulators of the early Principate were not only concerned with organising existing divinatory practices, but also expanding their areas of systematised knowledge (cognitio) to foreign (but otherwise popular) cults and mastering their new, specialised areas of expertise. Why else would the offspring of the Roman elite be handed down to the peoples of Etruria to be trained in the highly skilled area of sacrificial divination?44 All in all, as the retreating to the consultation of the Sibylline books at a moment of extreme political tension (down

41 42 43 44

On this passage, see also: Ando 2008, 1–2; and more recently, Rüpke 2016a. For the late republican situation cf. Rüpke 2018, 172–82. See Chapter ›Managing problems‹. Fundamental: Torelli 1975.

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to the sack of Rome in AD 410) shows, divination had proved to be a fertile ground of political contestation, as well as the ground of religious expansion and experimentation. In difference to the situation in the Republican period, however, it was not rivalling aristocratic families who held such positions, setting off the power of contemporary holders of political offices. Instead, it was paid expertise that was employed by the emperor’s apparatus or potential contenders. The same emphasis on the central role of divination in the systematisation of religious knowledge can be seen in one of the character’s remarks (Cotta, the pontiff ’s) in the opening of book 3 of Cicero’s »On the Nature of the Gods« (Nat. deor. 3.5): The entirety of the religio of the Roman people is divided into rites and auspices, to which is added a third thing, namely whatever warnings the interpreters of the Sibylline books or haruspices issue for the sake of foreknowledge on the basis of portents and omens. I hold that none of these religiones [harum ... religionum nullam]45 should ever be neglected, and I have persuaded myself that Romulus and Numa laid the foundations of our state by establishing the auspices and rites, respectively, and that our state could never have become so great without the greatest appeasement of the immortal gods’ (trans. Ando).

Formulated in the second half of the first century BC this is less a precise description, but an attempt at keeping control on part of »public priests« who are facing ever more rival claims by a growing market for divinatory services. Differences need to be made regarding the basis of expertise. While the power of the interpreters of the Sibylline books steams from reading and interpreting established oracular records, the power invested on the Etruscan haruspices has its roots on a more fluid ›oracular text‹ that was to be construed from the entrails of the sacrificial victims. The common denominator of both is what has been called the diagnostic power of the signs and the unceasing desire for future risk assessment.46 Having said that, we must also not forget that the very possibility of predicting the future had been vehemently disputed, at least since Cicero’s treatise on the subject.47 Divination may be an art with certain rules and methods, but the complexity of its subject matters often prevents its practitioners from securing valid results.48 Quintus’ main line of argumentation (in Cicero’s De divinatione) is formed along these lines.49 Just like medicine, the other parallel art that is based heavily

45 Note that unlike other translators of the passage, Ando 2008 does not gloss over the switch from singular to plural when it comes to the word religio. 46 Santangelo 2013. 47 Critique on divination or questions about its possibility can be found in Oenomaus, frr. 5–6 (cf. Hammerstaedt 1988, 38–40); Diogenes of Oenoanda fr. 8.III.7 and 32.II.1 Chilton; Alexander of Aphrodisias, De fato 17, 31; Plut. De Pyth. or. 25.407C and Vit. Cic. 17.4. Gal., Inst.Log. 17.8 pp. 44–5 Kalbfleisch envisages the possibility that mantikê does not exist. See Johnston 2005 and Burkert 2005. 48 Kany-Turpin 2003. 49 Beard 1986; Schofield 1986; Blänsdorf 1991; Krostenko 2000.

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on conjecture and on the individual reading of the signs,50 divination opens itself to failure.51 More importantly, popular divinatory methods were quite often susceptible to accusations of religious deviance, magic and superstition (deisidaimonia, superstitio).52 Long before Lactantius’ time (Inst. Div. 4.29.11), when at the turn from the 3rd to the 4th cent. AD superstitio was simply defined as the polar opposite of religio—and by that one must think of the newly founded confidence of Christianity and believing in one god—the boundaries between magic and divination were much more fluid. Having just arrived in Rome in the early 160s AD, Galen was keen to establish his reputation as a competent anatomist, a successful physician and a knowledgeable philosopher. However, when he correctly predicted and facilitated the recovery of Eudemus from quatran fever, a member of the local elite, by reading his bodily symptoms (a type of medical signs), he was ridiculed by the team of the Roman physicians who has treated Eudemus thus far and accused of having employed methods of divination (mantike) and magic (goeteia) rather than medicine (iatrike).53 These accusations might have been the natural consequence of the imperial law that had forbidden the practise of magic and inflicted the heavy penalty of death.54 However, the real problem comes when attempts to answer difficult questions such as why Galen chose to preserve these accusations in his On Prognosis, a flagship treatise that aimed at advertising his gaining Imperial favour, which is also the closest really we get to a Galenic biography; and why the Pergamene physician is so keen to draw a close comparison and simultaneously delineate the boundaries between mantike and iatrike techne, when there is ample evidence that in his oeuvre he regarded them as two distinct, but parallel arts (technai).55 One tentative answer to these questions could be found in the shared principle of medicine and divination: the diagnostic value of signs. Just like divination, medicine is based upon proper medical training in interpreting bodily signs, such as delirium, rigor, depression, haemorrhages, abscesses, vomiting, sweating, stomach troubles, and fainting fits. Nonetheless, as Galen tells his audience in the beginning of his treatise (Praen. 1.6 p. 70.6–7 Nutton), every time a truly skilled doctor (like Galen himself) makes a valid prediction, instead of being admired by the masses and his colleagues, he manages to raise suspicion and gets accused of being a

50 Augustine, De divinatione daemonum (G. Bardy, J.-A. Beckaert and J. Boutet, Oeuvres de Saint Augustin. 10. Mélanges doctrinaux [Paris, 1952], 647), for instance, treats medicine and divination as parallel arts. 51 Cic. Div. 1.24. See also Cic. Nat. D. 2.12, 3.5; Sext. Emp., Math. 1.72, 2.13; Diog. Laert. 7.149; Ammon. 21.1.14; Serv. ad Aen. 10.75; Mart. Cap. 9.892 K. See Wardle 2006, 165; Guillaumont 2006. 52 Gordon 2008; Rüpke 2016c, 45–91. See also Chapter ›Managing problems‹. 53 Galen. Praen. 3.7 p. 84.6–10; cf. also Praen. 3.17 p. 88.1–7; 10.15–19 p. 124.16–29 Nutton; Hipp. Prog. 3.7 p. 337.14; 3.42 p. 369.9 Heeg; CP 3.18 Hankinson; Loc. Aff. 5.8 361.12–366.5 Kühn; Diff. Feb. 2.7 p. 354 Kühn; Opt. Med. 1.5 p. 285.17–18 Véronique Boudon-Millot. 54 Nutton 1979, 150; Apuleius, Apologia 26; Institutes 4. 18.5. 55 Van Nuffelen 2014.

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sorcerer (goes). It is important to remember here that although Galen strives hard to shake accusations of being a mantis and a goes, he clearly enjoys the glory of being a miracle doer and that glory can only come by comparing iatrike to the level of mantike and himself to a mantis.

4

Oracular officials in the Eastern Roman Provinces

One way to limit, if not eliminate risk of newly imported ways of deciphering the signs (semeia, signa) altogether,56 was to return to the old and trustworthy oracles of the provinces and attempt to control them. This was the case, for instance with the well-known oracular and healing temple of Amphiaraos in Oropos (Attika). What started as an amicable and convenient collaboration between the Roman magistrates (Sulla in particular, who stayed in the temple in the winter of 84/83 BC and in all likelihood received some favourable pronouncement for this impeding military expedition in Asia) ended up as much more dry monetary affair with the famous lex censoria of 73 BCE curtailing not only Amphiaraosʼ influence in Roman military and political affairs, but his divinity too. As a combination of literary and epigraphic sources reveal (Cic. Nat. deor. 3.49; SIG 747; RDGE no. 23) the senate responded to the attempts of the Amphiareian priestly personnel to avoid taxation, by declaring that Amphiaraos could not have been a real god, since he had been a human before.57 Turning to well-established oracular authorities in Greece, such as Delphi was nothing new. Delphi along with the Sibylline oracles were consulted in 216 BCE, when the gods showed their extreme unkindness by allowing Hannibal to humiliate the Roman legions and two Vestals to be accused and convicted of incastity. Strangely enough, it were the Sibylline oracles that ordered human sacrifices to be performed in the Forum Boarium, ›a most un-Roman rite‹.58 The priestly personnel of Apollo at Delphi and Amphiaraos at Oropos were not the only religious entrepreneurs who continued to enjoy a life of privilege and immense popularity in the Roman East. The cult officials who served in Claros and Didyma were evidently extremely popular and active in the early and late Imperial period. However, unlike the priests of the imperial cult, whose interaction with the Roman authorities is more prominent, the oracular specialists of Roman Asia Minor has received relatively little scholarly attention.59 As long as they did not cross swords with the Roman power the sacred personnel of Claros and Didyma enjoyed both political and economic power conferred upon them by the production of sacred texts, the responses to the questions both individuals and institutions addressed to them.

56 57 58 59

Cf. Renberg 2015 Ando 2008, ch. 3 and chapter ›Gods and other divine beings‹. Livy 22.57.4–6. On the larger framework see Schultz 2010. Busine 2006.

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To start with, the prophetess, the prophet and the other sacred officials of Didyma (such as the hydrophoros, »the water-bearer«, and the »treasurer«) appear to be an extremely powerful individuals as long as we turn our gaze beyond the imaginative descriptions of Iamblichus (De Mysteriis 3.11) around the turn of the second to the third centuries AD and into the contemporary epigraphic corpus.60 Both the high decree of diversification of the oracle staff itself and the fact that three Roman emperors (Trajan, Hadrian and Julian) opted to accept the honourific title of the prophet can be interpreted as proof for the success that the Didymean Apollo’s shrine enjoyed during that period.61 Nonetheless, it is possible that here too, as in many other cities of Roman Asia Minor, emperors and members of the Imperial family held highly regarded but costly offices, when no other financially fit candidate could be found among the members of the local elite.62 An equally high degree of diversification in sacred officials is attested in the oracle of Clarian Apollo by a plethora of second century inscriptions found in situ.63 The inscriptions from the Roman period record a priest, an oracle-singer)64 and a prophet and other secretarial staff. If we are to trust more creative literary descriptions of the oracular process at Claros, this process was apparently unique in that the prophet became the receptacle of divine inspiration by drinking water from a nearby sacred spring and delivering oracular responses after knowing the identity and the number of the suppliants, but not the subject of their consultation.65 More significantly, in both Didyma and Claros, several inscriptions attest to members of the priestly personnel presiding over not simply sacrifices (thysiai) and libations (spondai), but also the organisation of mystery initiations (mysteria).66 Such was for instance the case of the third century AD honourific inscription of the prophet T. Flavius Ulpianus (I.Didyma 299), who was praised for organising the sacrificial altars, the subsequent common feast and some sort of mystery rites. This accumulation of priestly roles to one person reminds us very much of other sacred officials of famous oracular sites of the Imperial period, such as those of Neos Asklepios-Glykon in Abonouteichos and Trophonios in Lebadea, where the prophet was said to have been presiding over the organisation of mystery rites in addition to their other priestly duties.67 For years, scholarly views were divided as to whether these rites indeed constituted mystic initiations or were simply metaphorical uses of the concept, which had been semantically expanded to include other rites. However, at least in Didyma real initiatory rites took place, perhaps very much like those performed

60 Busine 2002. Nonetheless, unlike Archaic and Classical Didyma, there is no evidence that this priestess came from the legendary sacerdotal family of the Branchidai. 61 Mitchell 1987. 62 Busine 2006, 302. 63 Busine 2006; Ferrary 2005. 64 OGIS 530. 65 Tacitus, Annals 2.54; Iamblichus, De Mysteriis 3.11. 66 I.Didyma 299, 280A, 312, 326, 327, 329, 333, 352, 360, 373, 381, 382. 67 Busine 2006, 292; Sfameni Gasparro 2002, 149–202; Bonnechère 2003; Bremmer 2017.

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by Alexander, the pseudo-prophet in Lucian’s Alexander (38–40), to whom we have to turn now.68

5

Anchoring religious innovation

Τhe whole mysteric component of the Glykon cult was, it seems, constructed so as to mirror the time-resistant and revered mysteries of Eleusis, yet another cult who enjoyed renewed popularity in the Roman period. The treatise on the founding of such a cult by a figure called Alexandros by Lucian in the 160s offers ample evidence. The main initiation ritual at Abonouteichos lasted for three successive days. Just like in Eleusis, there was a prorrêsis, i.e. a public proclamation that excluded certain people from participating in the mysteries (Alex. 38), there were torchlight processions led by the priestly personnel, and members of the »garlic-reeking Paphlagonian« elite who, as we are explicitly told in our text, function like the Eumolpidae and the Kerykes gene in Eleusis (Luc. Alex. 39). Needless to say that Alexander retained for himself the priestly roles of both the hierophant and the dadouchos.69 What Lucian fails to tell us is that the god’s healing and oracular abilities were celebrated not only by »the fat and garlic-smelling Paphlagonians«, but also by a large number of educated and sophisticated individuals in Rome. In fact, Lucian presents the cult’s popularity in Rome as yet another ploy engineered by Alexander and his manipulative attitude towards influential individuals, such as Rutilianus and Sedatius. Out of those two individuals, we are particularly interested in the latter, M. Sedatius Severianus, the consul suffect of 153.70 This is the same Roman consul who was said to have consulted the oracle of Neos Asclepius-Glykon before invading Armenia in 161 (Luc. Alex. 27). In all likelihood, it is the same individual who in Aelius Aristides‹ Hieroi Logoi is also named as one of the most well-known therapeutai of Asclepius at Pergamum and one of Aristides‹ closest friends (Or. 50.15–18). The therapeutai of the Pergamene Asclepieion,71 must be imagined as an elite group of religious entrepreneurs, who engaged in regular ritual activities and contested fiercely the monopoly of medical and religious expertise in the Pergamene Asclepieion. Unsurprisingly enough, in Claros and Didyma, but also in Delphi (as the testimony of Plutarch shows) the priestly officials running the oracles and healing sites were in their majority members of the intellectual and socio-political local elites, practices of selection not tampered with by the Romans.72 This was an age-old

68 69 70 71 72

Graf 2003. Petridou 2017b. Várhelyi 2010, 83–4. Petridou 2017. In Roman Didyma, for instance, most of the offices were held by powerful families from Miletus, most of whom had also secured Roman citizenship. Cf. I.Didyma 175, 192, 196, 215a, 217, 220, 235 and 265. On Claros, see Tacitus, Annals 2.54.

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institution in most circum-Mediterranean cities. But there was more to it. Perhaps it was amongst members of the socio-political elite that these healing cults had a stronger impact. They must have appealed to the conservative tendencies of Rome and the need of the upper classes to belong to an exclusive club or association while simultaneously accumulating symbolic capital. Healing cults such as those of Isis and Sarapis, Asclepius and Zeus Hypsistos offered an opportunity for these privileged individuals to display their generosity, offer patronage, and increase their social cachet.73 The main means of achieving all the above was to join these religious associations often by becoming a priestly official of sorts, and then model these priestly hierarchies on long-standing and highly respectable priesthoods, such as the priesthood of Athena Polias in Athens or the sacred officials of Eleusis. It is important, however, to remember that unlike the officials of the cults of Demeter and Kore in Eleusis, which would have been firmly embedded in the structures of local administration (without excluding specific individual appropriations),74 some of these new elective cults of healing deities and their personnel became part of the new, rich, and pluralistic religious market of the Roman Empire, which emphasised choice, experience and, more often than not, personal communication with the divine.75 It is within the same context that we would like to examine in the next section »small-group religions« and their religious entrepreneurs.76

6

Small-group religious entrepreneurs

These charismatic religious entrepreneurs were not restricted to healing cults.77 Instead, they operated in a wide spectrum of religious supply, since they provided the religious experiences and delivered the salvation-goods (»Heilsgüter«) to their religious clientele. Examples of these individuals can be found not only in the early Christian founders of small groups and »heresies« (on which see below), but also in the Dionysiac cults of the western Asia Minor, the small groups that honoured the so-called »Danubian Riders« in the central Balkans, and the Isiac and/or Serapian clusters of devotees that populated the entire Roman Empire, and in the numerous Mithraic groups of the western Empire. To take the Mithraic groups as an example, these charismatic individuals must have had their fair share in the dissemination of the cult, if we are to judge by the extremely wide geographical distribution: from Heddernheim in Germania Superior (modern Germany) and Carnuntum in Pannonia (modern Austria) to Britain, Spain

73 Grijalvo 2005. See in general Michaelides 2014; Steger 2016. 74 But see also Lippolis 2013; Ustinova 2013 on individual experiences. 75 On the new and pluralistic religious market of the Roman Empire, see North 1992 and Woolf 2014. For a critique of the concept of ›market‹ see Beck 2006 and the chapter ›Economy and religion‹, p. 265. 76 For these terms see Gordon 2017b. 77 Gordon 2013b; Cf. also Gordon 2014.

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and North Africa, and from the Black Sea to Syria. The Mithraic cults were also popular in the big urban centers of Rome and Ostia. More significantly, the last traces of the Mithraic popularity come from the fourth century Rome long after the adoption of Christianity as the official religion of the Empire.78 This is not, to say that celebrating Mithras across the Empire was a uniform experience. Far from it. There are considerable variations in fundamental Mithraic semiology, for instance in the ways the so-called tauroctony is represented, which suggest a significant degree of ritual variation in the various cultic groups, for which we should perhaps credit these charismatic individuals.79 The problem, of course, with Mithraic groups is that although there is material and epigraphic evidence for initiatory rites practiced by and perhaps centred on these individuals, we do not have evidence that comments on the relationships of the initiators, transmitters and maybe ritual agents, with their respective communities. Things are far more promising in the case of the Dionysiac groups (thiasoi) who flourished from the Hellenistic period onwards. In these thiasoi, we can safely discern patterns of individual appropriation and innovation based on recognisable and successful initiatory schemata and Bacchic iconography. More significantly, epigraphic formulae in dedicatory inscriptions such as »the worshippers of Bacchus formed around X (name of the founder plus papponymic)« or naming explicitly the founder (ktistês) of the group allows glimpses into the close relationships these mystagogues developed with their communities.80 In some cases these dedications were also accompanied by a bust or statue depicting the founder. These thiasoi were not instituted exclusively by men. As a first century BC inscription from Tomis (modern Constanța) reveals, women like Paso (IScM II 120, 5–6 = Jaccottet 2003, vol. 1: 132, 5–6) were also actively involved in establishing Dionysiac cultic associations, in which men served as carriers of the narthex, bearers of the thyrsus, lampcarriers, bearers of the liknos, boukoloi or bacchoi, sebastophoroi (i.e. carriers of the image of the emperor, semiophoroi (i.e. bearers of the thiasos-emblem), etc.81 These groups and their founders relied on local elites for financial support, who in turn took the opportunity to exhibit their euergetism. Fiscal status is important as it determines the degree of dependence of these groups enjoyed on public funds.82 Individual providers of services usually had to rely on selling these services (or their cakes) to individual clients. Not everybody had to make a living from that, but a growing number seemed to have done it and to have been inventive in order to stand competition. Here, certainly, was one of the driving forces of religious developments in the imperial era. Here, the difference to the ›public‹ priests introduced at the beginning of the chapter must be spelt out. Public ritual was paid

78 Dalglish 2017. 79 See more recently Szabo 2015; Gordon 2017; Mastrocincque 2017; Arnhold 2018. Critical overview: Gordon 2012. 80 E.g.: IGBulg I² 20 (Thrace and Moesia Inferior); IG XII,3 1098 from Melos. 81 Jaccottet 2003; Turcan 2003. 82 Jaccottet 2005.

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from public money—at least in its minimal form; there was always place for lavish adornments and additions from the organiser’s private funds. The latter held true for the internal dealings of organised groups of religious specialists. In the imperial period, on entering the municipal college of the seviri Augustales, new members had to pay a kind of entrance fee called summa honoraria, »honourary sum«.83 It often amounted to two thousand sestertia. Such a fee had to be paid for nearly all local magistrates in colonies or municipia administrate in Roman patterns. The sale of priesthoods in Greece or compulsory taxes due on any advancement in Egyptian temples are equivalents. With regard to the multitude of local positions and the annual recruiting of the magistrates, these entrance fees could be the most important type of revenue for communitites or colleges who did not possess any land. For the urban priesthoods of Rome such summae are not attested; two literary references are limited to priesthoods instituted by Caligula. Roman priests and magistrates seem to have been obliged to organize and pay for games and the like instead of paying a fixed sum. Newly coopted priests invited their older collegues to come to an extremely luxurious »entrance meal«, cena aditialis. Seneca, the philosopher, laments that on the one hand it was thought to be shameful to consume a knight’s fortune – that is 400.000 sesterces – in a sumptuous meal, yet on the other hand even persons of extreme modesty would have to organize entrance meals worth a million sesterces (epist. 95,41). These sums did not appear in the statement of the pontiffs‹ cashbox, the arca pontificum, but they have to be reckoned in the total financial effects of priestly colleges. For a college of twenty persons and an average period of service of twenty years, every year one banquet had to be paid for. This was a world very different from that of the small religious entrepreneurs. Not all providers of religious services were locally installed. Traveling diviners offering to perform rituals on behalf of the clients they were encountering or visiting or offered prefabricated divinatory knowledge had been present for long periods in many regions of the Roman empire, from archaic Greece orphics to poetprophets in middle-republican Italy or early Iron age Syria and Palestine. In the fictitious first-person account of the Metamorphoses in mid-second century AD, the narrator (even if bewitched and transfigured into the form of a donkey) gives an account of such practitioners to which he is forced to provide his carrying services. They are depicted a bunch of rough men who carry about a statue of Dea Syria and earn their living from offering rituals to city-dwellers. Even if not based in a city, it is the densely populated cities of the Roman Empire were they now find most easily their clients. It is by acoustic means, by playing a form of music that is typically associated with the goddess, that they attract clients who would not be able to see this court of the deity arriving.84 Alexander of Abonouteichos is in a way as mobile as the men of Dea Syria, mixing traveling with stable phases of activities in promising urban sites. Of course, such practices were not restricted to

83 Duncan-Jones 1962. 84 Apul. met. 8.24.2, 26–5, 30.4; cf. 8.27–29; 9.8.

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cities. Cato the Elder had warned the administrators of farms owned by urban aristocrats of wandering diviners three centuries earlier.85 Other phenomena had to do with processes of migration and acculturation. A telling example is the development of religious specialists of a group organised around the veneration of Jupiter Dolichenus at Rome, attested by several lavish dedicatory inscriptions that concentrated on presenting names and positions. Here, the personnel structure of the Dolichenus group on the Aventine underwent a change. The basic pattern was at first a hierarchy defined by religious competence, rising from simple venerator via »candidate« to »priest«. Further functionaries appear in association with this hierarchy, but not clearly embedded in it: bearers of the stretcher of the deity, and finally a »curator of the temple«. One among the priests (there could be more than one bearing this title) may have filled the special function of pater candidatorum, a particular patron of the candidates. Already before the Severan Age, this system is overlaid by a collegiate structure, in which a larger group of patrons plays a leading role, modelling itself on the pattern of the »first ten« among the decurions of a town. As a rule, these patrons can scarcely be said to have been qualified in a religious sense. Probably, they fall into the general category of venerators; priests; represent the exception among their number. Nevertheless, members of this circle often appear to seek a religious qualification, and to lay stress on their election or status as candidates, which they may have shared with many others. A »first« (princeps) may have fulfilled an annually revolving leadership function within this circle. The large number of patrons may be surprising; but the choice of a title normally reserved for an individual to apply to all members of a leadership committee has a parallel in the multiplicity of Jewish archons attested for Rome: nearly fifty, compared with one single presbyter.86 The keeper of the temple may represent a function that emerged within this circle; it is unlikely to have featured in the religious hierarchy. Only a distorted version of that hierarchy is portrayed in these texts. The fact that the priests always appear at the end of the lists of distinguished patrons indicates the lack of consonance between the two hierarchies, that is to say the decreased significance of the traditional religious rankings. The same is indicated by the change in the title of the »high priest«: the notarius had a title freed from any religious connotation, and one that, in the assessment of his contemporaries, probably ranked below that of patron in terms of prestige. This is emphasized by the synonym ›scribe‹: the leading sacral office has been reduced to an ancillary function in relation to the leadership of the college. When comparing developments at the Dolichenum with other epigraphic sources, we should exercise caution before arriving at specific conclusions in respect of the city of Rome, owing to the very uneven nature of the evidence. It is, however, possible to go further than merely establishing local variations in organizational

85 Cato, Agr., 5.4 (see above, p. 114). 86 Rüpke 2005b.

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models and social structures.30 Whereas priests are widely attested in groups formed around the veneration of Jupiter Dolichenus, and candidates occur in at least two further locations (Carnuntum, Brixia),31 patrons and ›firsts‹ remain confined to the Aventine. One scriba, moreover in a leading function, is found earlier, in 183 at Carnuntum.87 The existence of such parallels in the military context of the base at Carnuntum underlines the possibility that developments on the Aventine owe less to local idiosyncrasies than to a specifically Roman social conception. Events on the Aventine are perhaps associated with the new involvement of members of the equestrian class. In terms of the history of religion, it may be possible to draw one final conclusion from our clarification of the relationship between patroni and candidati: it may by now have become clear that we cannot speak, in sociological terms, of a »community« at the Dolichenus sanctuary on the Aventine. » Patrons and candidates« do not constitute a »community« in terms of the plebs of an association; what we are seeing here is the upper stratum of the membership. Social qualification is the primary consideration (given expression in a structure that probably involved »rankings« based on the principle of seniority: this would explain the constant sequences of names through the series of inscriptions). High religious qualification is acknowledged, but leads to mention by name only in the case of full-blown specialists: that somebody functioned as stretch-bearer is known to us only from a small number of inscriptions. A further striking circumstance is the association of stable positions with other names that change rapidly: biological factors might not be the only grounds for this phenomenon; the stability of membership of the cult should also be questioned. It would appear that the group based at this particular sanctuary frequently had to compensate for the departure of leading members. It might be revealing to make a comparison with the development of JudaeoChristian structures in third and fourth century Rome. In the case of Christianity, the strong position of the permanent deacons, limited to seven in number, has to be mentioned, who were frequently successful in becoming bishops. The latter office bore a similarly non-sacral title, episkopos, both within and outside the city of Rome. Here, though, processes of professionalization can be observed that appear to be absent in the case of the Dolichenus groups. But this is a broad view. Results obtained from the Aventine can be of aid in the creation of models for describing the development of communities during the period in question, and the relationship between patrons, providers of land and funds (»titular churches« in the case of Christian groups), and religious specialists. The question of the sacralisation and de-sacralisation of political, administrative, and religious offices is highly significant for the religious history of the third and fourth centuries as a whole.

87 CCID 221, named after two curators.

7 Developing a priestly role in Christ-centred imaginations

7

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Developing a priestly role in Christ-centred imaginations

When within the wider field of Judaism beyond the heritage of offices related to the temple destroyed in AD 70, presbyteroi and episkopoi appeared at the margins of synagogues and beyond (forming their own ekklesiai, »people’s assemblies«), they organized themselves on the lines of organized associations and political offices. But roles of religious specialists, and in particular the cluster of associations defined by knowledge and ritual competencies called sacerdos or hiereus (»priest«), were also part of the imaginaire and identity issues. The best example is the »Tractate to the Hebrews«, that ultimately formed part of the fourth century and later canon of the »New Testament«. Written in Italy, if not Rome, it was a reaction to developments of the Flavian period. It is well worth looking closely into the text. The development of the high priest motif in Hebrews starts with an expression that is quite unusual: »Since, then, we have a great high priest who has passed through the heavens, Jesus, the Son of God, let us hold fast to our confession« (4:14). Archiereus megas is not the title for the high priest found in the Septuagint, the Greek version used elsewhere in Hebrews,88 which normally uses hiereus megas. But it was the equivalent of pontifex maximus—with archiereus used for local or provincial chief priests. It functions in Hebrews as a semantic signal inviting reflection on one of the most widely known offices of the time. That function was not unique in Hebrews. A number of passages imply difference from contemporary Roman practice or claim a comparable status for Jesus. The sermon starts with titulature, with reference to Christ’s »name« (1:4).89 It stresses the divine transferal of the office,90 rather than its self-arrogation: ›And one does not presume to take this honour, but takes it only when called by God, just as Aaron was. So also Christ did not glorify himself in becoming a high priest, but was appointed by the one who said to him, »You are my Son, today I have begotten you«‹ (5:4–5). The uniqueness of the priestly office (7:11–19) could be contrasted with the plurality of Roman priesthoods, more than one of which might even be held by a single emperor. Jesus makes new ways metaphorically, just as Domitian did literally, especially in his last years (Heb 10.20; 448). The heavenly sanctuary (»the true tent,« 8:2) is not man-made, unlike the many urban temples. Perhaps even the »guarantee of the covenant,« testamenti sponsor, (7.22), quoting from the Vulgate, had a contemporary reference, as Suetonius told of Domitian’s excessive demands for inheritances in the context of his dealing with the Jews (Dom. 12.2). In the posthumous panegyric on Domitian’s successor Trajan, Pliny refers to Domitian’s avaricious and illegal dealings with the testaments of others, providing a contrast with the new Trajanic practice of respecting testaments (Pliny, Pan. 39–40). There is no Tanakh parallel for the reference to a guarantee of a 88 Koester 2001, also for the following. 89 Ibid., 187. 90 Rissi 1987, 52.

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testament, with no oath taking by the high priest in Exod 28.91 The image of Jesus’s priesthood is informed by contemporary institutions even more than it is informed by Scripture. The interpretation of Jesus in terms of a heavenly priestly office was a reaction to recent political developments, but by concentrating on one aspect, the author is able to frame the derogative comparison with the emperor—potentially a capital crime—in strictly religious language. The focus on the supreme pontificate of the emperor (which had recently been emphasized by Vespasian’s sons) made possible a reinterpretation of the Flavian destruction of the Jerusalem temple, which was perhaps commemorated on the occasion of the homily, and also enabled the author of Hebrews to counter the appeal of the towering figure of the emperor on like terms. Priestly offices were compared. Given the complex composition of Domitian’s (like other emperors’) earthly and divine status,92 the argument was complex and leads to inconsistencies. The shifting between the earthly high priest and the heavenly high priest was necessary to locate the discussion within the Jewish tradition and to establish the high priest of the Pentateuch as the competing office. The already faded tradition of Melchizedek combined a priestly office with kingship, which may have invited its selection. At the same time the office of the Jewish high priest, temporarily obliterated by Titus, had to be reinterpreted in terms of an incomparable heavenly office, held by the son of god, Iesus dei filius. »Son of god« was a designation valid for Domitian, too, and thus the author of the sermon specified, »And again, when he brings the firstborn into the world, he says, ›Let all God’s angels worship him‹« (Heb 1:6). The term prototokon (»firstborn«) followed by »into the world« not only takes up a known Christological title as used in Col 1:18 and Rom 8:29, but also has political implications. Domitian was born in second place only. The juxtaposition of Jesus and the living emperor—for legal reasons the reference is never explicit or by name—needed not, and could not, suggest a common form of megalomania. Rhetorically, the outcome was just the opposite of tyranny. Hebrews stressed the humanity and compassion of the son (e.g., 2.11–18), even in relationship to his office: For we do not have a high priest who is unable to sympathize with our weaknesses, but we have one who in every respect has been tested[a] as we are, yet without sin (4:15).

The comparisons with Pliny’s strategy early in his speech are striking, for Pliny writes, Never shall we flatter him as a god, never as a divinity. We do not speak of a tyrant, but of a citizen, not of a lord, but of a father. ›I am one of you‹ (did he say) ... (Pan. 2.3–4).

Resonances can be found with Domitian’s having himself addressed as ›Lord and God‹, but additionally, this passage suggests audience expectations that might have

91 Bruce 1990, 170. 92 On the medial production of it see Coleman 1987; Stewart 1994; Leberl 2004.

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been shared by the addressees of Hebrews. Legitimacy by sonship is important, but a follower of Jesus would not have hoped to have the Crucified merely as the emperor’s equal in divinity. Compassion and closeness were also part of the argument.93 The role of the highest priest involved standards set by Domitian, standards that he himself failed to keep, at least in the judgment of the upper class, for otherwise Pliny would not have dwelled on the issue in crucial passages in his speech. Hebrews followed the same route by opening the eyes of the audience to the standing of their own idol.

8

The philosophers as religious experts and henotheistic tendencies before Christianity

The advent of the different strands of Christianity was, to an extent, facilitated by inherent henotheistic tendencies in Greek philosophical tradition, Judaism, and a number of old Greek mystery cults, such as that of Demeter and Kore, whose popularity was revived in Imperial period.94 For instance, Christian iconography borrowed a fair number of Bacchic and Isiac motifs, while terminology that initially belonged to Greek time-resistant and popular in the Imperial period mystic cults, such as that of Eleusis, was eventually appropriated by the worshippers of Isis, Mithras and Christ. The structural similarities between pagan and Christian initiatory rites were that many that some Christian polemicists regarded the first as perverse parody of the latter.95 In addition, individuals and groups of intellectuals who were trained in philosophical systems postulating a single divine principle (such as Stoicism, Epicureanism and Middle/Neo-Platonism) would have perhaps treated the claims made by the Jesus followers in a more sympathetic way.96 Was religious innovation anchored in philosophical interests, did philosophers contributed to the enrichment of the pluralistic market of the Roman Empire?97 Probably, we need to see the different and only occasionally intertwined strands of religious practices and discourse on matters religious. »In writing De Iside et Osiride, Plutarch is not showing an ›interest‹ in the cult of Isis and Serapis that he could see around him, but rather attempting to accommodate an Egyptian myth to the Middle-Platonic dogma of the value of the wise nations in the re-construction of primitive religious purity, for which allegory was an absolutely indispensable tool. Porphyry is not ›interested‹ in sacrificial practice in De abstinentia but, like Theophrastus,

93 Note the list of qualities collected by Hagner 2002, 104, and Gray 2003. 94 For instance, the worshippers of Theos Hypsistos (often identified with Zeus) should be identified partly with the theosebeis of the Jewish synagogues, as has been argued by Mitchell 1999. Contra: Belayche 2011, 2005b. 95 Woolf 2014. 96 Athanassiadi, Frede 1999. 97 Van Nuffelen 2011. On the same issue or religious pluralism, see also North 2010; and the chapter ›Empire‹.

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selecting material to prove its inadequacy as a means of communication with the other world — precisely inasmuch as it is based on a false view of the nature of divinity. And anyway in neither case has the discussion anything to do with monotheism as a theoretical principle — ›the sensible‹, the nous, ›the Good‹, the cosmic soul and so on, are surely not a deity in the required sense«.98 However, the success of cults with prevalent henotheistic tendencies cannot be accounted for by examining how they were treated in the writings of the members of the intellectual elite.99 Instead, their wider popularity and socio-political impact can only be understood if we view them as religious options (complementary to the civic rites) that paid greater attention to individual ritual experience, guaranteed »participation in divine benefits«,100 and, above all, offered a timely response to the contemporary challenges of the new, hyper-connected and urbanised Imperial world order.101 If we were to take as an example the immensely successful dissemination of Isiac cults all over the basin of the ancient Mediterranean, we could perhaps postulate that this successful career could be largely credited to charismatic individuals who would on the one hand encouraged simpler and mobile ritual structures (i.e. disassociated from sacred landscapes), while on the other they would have expedited religious links, comparisons and equations with other prominent mother-figure cults like that of Cybele, Mētēr Theon, or Demeter. Thus, these individuals would have in many ways facilitated the transition of Isis from provincial deity to a truly universal divine figure, whose appeal could be recognised in every corner of the Roman Imperium. It goes without saying that the celebration of initiatory rites at least during the second and third centuries AD must also have contributed to Isis’ triumphal career. Above all, it was the accommodating and all-embracing nature of these mysteries that were offered as a complement rather than as a replacement for other mystic rites that upsurged the popularity of Isis. Apuleius’ Lucius, to take the first example that comes to mind, was first initiated into the mysteries of Isis and then into the mysteries of Osiris.102 In general, there is strong evidence, both epigraphic and literary, that suggest that members of socio-political elite participated repeatedly in initiatory rites of multiple mystery cults.103 Apuleius claims multiple initiations for himself, if we are to believe what he wrote in his »Apology« 55.104 Plutarch in his Face of the Moon puts his famous eschatological myth in the mouth of Sulla (942D–945D), who heard it from an unnamed character called »the Stranger«, who

98 Gordon 2010. 99 For more on influential religious texts in the Roman Empire, see chapter ›Textual production‹. 100 I have borrowed the formulation from Johnson 2009. 101 Woolf 2014, 62–74; 2009; Rüpke 2016b. 102 Apul. Met. 11.29–30. 103 Johnston 2009, 42–3. 104 He claims to have collected material reminders, »certain signs and mementos (signa et monumenta)« of all the initiatory rites in which he took part. More on this in Turcan 1996, 310.

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also took part in multiple initiations in many different mysteries on the island of Cronus.105 This habit of multiple initiations continued well into the third and the fourth centuries. The emperor Julian, if we believe Libanius’ testimony, »consorted with δαίμονες in countless rites (teletai)«.106 Nonetheless, the popularity of Isiac mystic initiations could not account solely for the successful dissemination of the cult. Isis was in many ways the product of careful and well-planned religious refashioning that started with the Ptolemies in Memphis during the Hellenistic period and continued well into the Imperial era with the so-called »Romanisation« of Isis.107 The Isiac aretalogies of the first century BC and Book 11 of Apuleius’ Metamorphoses were products of this long and conscious process to raise Isis from a provincial Egyptian goddess to a deity fit for an empire. The same holds true for the new and Graeco-Roman iconographic physiognomy of Isis that included her consort Sarapis. See for instance the second century AD statues of Isis-Persephone holding a sistrum who was accompanied by ZeusSerapis and Cerberus from Gortyn, Crete (fig. 2). Agents of the process of Romanisation of foreign goods, customs, and services was widely distributed.108 Such new gods were normally domesticated by being given a slot in the civic calendar, a sanctuary in the heart of Rome and by being allocated an official priestly personnel. Despite the persecutions of the 50s BC or those the cult suffered at the time of Tiberius, Isis became a »naturalised« Roman deity and was eventually given a temple on the Capitoline Hill after enjoying the Flavians’ patronage once the civil war of 69 AD was over.109 The same process of careful and conscious religious refashioning of Isis from a local to a universal deity can be compared to other analogous developments in the cults of Jupiter Dolichenus and Mithras. In both cases we can imagine local sacred personnel engaged closely with exporting these deities to foreign religious markets. In both cases, these two indigenous deities (to Syria and to Persia respectively) were »Romanised« to fit the religious needs and niches of the Empire. In all three cases (Isis, Jupiter Dolichenus and Mithras) we can imagine that what started as the religious innovation of a handful local religious entrepreneurs must have been accepted and propagated by diasporic populations, traders in the case of Egypt and soldiers in the cases of Syria and Persia.110 Some scholars have suggested that analogous forces must have been at work during the transformation of Jesus from a locative deity to a universal one that would also appeal to gentiles attracted to henotheism.111

105 While the Stranger is undoubtedly a fictional character, he is, nonetheless, a character based on contemporary cultic realities. 106 Nock 1933, 115. 107 On the notion of ›Romanisation‹, see Gordon 1990. 108 Spickermann 2001; Rives 2011; Chiai, Häussler, Kunst 2012; Häussler 2012; Simón 2012; Bettini 2016; Simón 2017; see chapter ›Empire as a field of religious action‹. 109 Versluys 2003. 110 Isis: Bricault 2004; Mithras: Beck 1998; Jupiter of Doliche: Collar 2011. 111 Woolf 2014, 79.

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However, this linear and rather one-dimensional narrative of religious change does not account for religious networks, serendipity, and the evolutional replacement of old and outdated religious schemata by new and appealing ones—all these factors being important catalysts of religious innovation.112 It also does not account for the various degrees of acquiescence exhibited by the members of the priestly personnel of the newly introduced cults. One of the reasons, Mithraic cults fared so well might had to do with their political compliance.113 Equally significant must have been the response of institutionalised sacred officials of key sanctuaries such

Fig. 16: Roman Imperial (ca. 180–190 AD) statues of Isis-Persephone holding a sistrum and Zeus-Serapis with three-headed Cerberus from Gortyn. Now in the Archaeological Museum of Heraklion, Crete. (sourced: wikipedia commons)

112 Bricault 2000 offers a comprehensive discussion of the patterns of religious transfer and exchange between big urban centres like the Egyptian Memphis and the diaspora population in Egypt and abroad. 113 Gordon 1972.

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those of Memphis, Doliche, Jerusalem, Eleusis, etc. to the Imperial pressure for homogeneity and conformism: whether they resisted, partially endorsed or fully embraced the new world order violently imposed by the Roman legions before.

9

Setting borders to religious experts

Not every type of religious expertise was well received with everybody and in particular those in power. Magi, supposedly coming from and propagating Persian knowledge, offer the best example. Religious differences were not the prime factor, however. The editors of the Codex Theodosianus, in the final volume of this collection of norms from the fourth and fifth centuries pertaining to the religious sphere, and ranging from rightful belief and bishops to heretics and pagans (Book 16), did not concern themselves with magical practices. The criminalization of felonies such as murder by poisoning is not pursued in religious terms, even though, phenomenologically, a propinquity to other magical practices or even an identity of actors may commonly have been assumed: or rather, in the context of literary texts, assumed. The Severan jurist Ulpian, in Book 7 of his work on provincial administration (De officio proconsulis), writes »on mathematicians and soothsayers« in purely non-religious terms: punishment should be apportioned solely »on the basis of answers given when questioned«, and according to the content and purposes of the particular inquiry into present and future events.114 Murder by poisoning is missing from Cicero’s list of religious offences concluding the second book of his »Laws«. To clarify: the above findings are purely textually-based. They concern the semantics of legal texts, not their pragmatics. We do not wish to deny that laws against causing bodily injury by magic were used to penalize religious practices.115 But such penalization was directed against concrete offences: Apuleius was not arraigned for magical activities in the abstract, but for fraudulently obtaining a marriage by means of nocturnal acts of sacrifice (nocturna sacra, Apul. Apol. 57.2), thereby winning the hand of the older, wealthy Pudentilla. Apuleius was accused of the murder of his brother-in-law Pontianus, of grave magica maleficia, »magical misdeeds« (1), and—as he states in his final plea—bodily injury by ueneficia, the preparation of poison (102). The time of day is of course indicative of evil intent. Cicero too had expressed distrust of nocturnal rituals (Cic. Leg. 2.2). Apuleius’ plea accordingly included a denial of the material facts (Apul. Apol. 58 ff.). He questioned the credibility of the witness. Before the era of scientific evidence, poisonings did not differ from assaults by means of curses: the victim bore no wounds. Any action at all might be adjudged to have been causal. Apuleius’ defence was aimed at rendering plausible his role as philosopher. Religion did not enter into it.

114 Collatio legum Romanarum et Mosaicarum 15.2. 115 On the problem of magic see Schaefer, Kippenberg 1997; Zeddies 2003; a full treatment in Otto 2011 and Otto, Stausberg 2013.

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The Gods and Other Divine Beings Heidi Wendt

1

Introduction

The religious landscape of the Roman Empire underwent significant transformations, witnessing, among other developments, the emergence of phenomena that appear to resemble distinct ›religions‹ in a modern sense.1 These transformations were once attributed to fundamental shifts in people’s religious needs, beliefs about the gods, and confidence in traditional institutions, a teleological arc that arrives at the eventual triumph of Christianity.2 The contention of this chapter, however, is that the ways in which inhabitants of the Roman world imagined and interacted with non-human beings—the gods, spirits, the dead, and so forth—remained largely constant in the face of other currents of change. Nor is this world a relic of a past so distant and unlike our own to be incomprehensible in modernity. To the contrary, shared understandings, interests, practices, and dynamics involving divine agents were pervasive throughout the empire and can be redescribed profitably as ›religion‹ in a manner that promotes comparison with evidence from other periods and cultural contexts. At the same time, an apparent swell of enthusiasm for heno- or putatively monotheistic forms of religion over the course of the imperial period requires explanation, even if their embrace was not as thoroughgoing as certain ancient authors insisted. Such impressions of rupture may be the effect less of a new and radically different religious sensibility than of another feature of the empire: the prominence of religious ›experts‹ who were intensely preoccupied with matters of philosophy, cosmology, the systematization of theology, and abstract, universalizing ideas about divinity.3 These figures garnered authority from their own skills and claims to wisdom rather than affiliation with existing religious institutions or well-defined traditions. They were also highly competitive, not only with others claiming expertise in matters of the gods, divine wisdom, divination, and so forth, but also with 1 For the development of something akin to modern concepts of religion in the ancient world, see, e.g., Boyarin 2004; Beduhn 2016; MacRae 2016. 2 Stark 1996 and 2007 are especially representative of this triumphalist narrative, although it is often implicit in other, more nuanced studies (e.g., MacLean Rogers 2013). For critique of Stark, see Beck 2006. 3 For theorisation of literate experts and their influence on broader cultural (including religious) currents of the empire, see Stowers 2011; Eshleman 2012; Wendt 2016; Marx Wolf 2016; and Texts in this volume.

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similarly self-authorized specialists in philosophy, astrology, medicine, education, and other intellectual offerings. These areas of expertise, such as they existed, were only taking shape during the imperial period; they were also porous, so that any would-be expert might cobble together a teaching, text, or larger religious program comprising elements from many. From this particular setting arose forms of religion with increasingly intellectual profiles purveyed by specialists whose authority stemmed from literacy, education, and the production or interpretation of writings.4 Their success depended, in turn, on the basic recognition and varying investments of audiences interested in esoteric wisdom and novel rites couched in intellectual valences. These experts drew in complex ways on notions about the gods that were both ordinary and widespread throughout the ancient world, even as they distinguished their offerings from more mundane options.5 And although intellectualizing forms of religion predate the Roman period, they were nourished by certain imperial conditions that contributed to their prestige and appeal, even among people largely unskilled in reading, writing, and other textual practices.6 Early ›Christian‹ experts exemplify and provide rich evidence for this phenomenon, although, importantly, it neither originated with nor was dominated by them prior to the fourth century, however much their legitimation and political enfranchisement have obscured our picture of religion and religious belief in the pre-Constantinian period.7 The chapter that follows offers an overview of the various ways that inhabitants of the Roman world thought about, cultivated, and otherwise interacted with the gods and other divine beings. Despite local points of distinctiveness and behaviors that were suited to particular social contexts, these ideas and practices were largely ubiquitous throughout the diverse cultural areas of the empire. They are, moreover, consistent with ethnographic evidence for how many contemporary peoples engage the gods and similar beings, especially in polytheistic societies. Hence, the recognition of such patterns where they occur throws into higher relief the innovations that accompanied the rise of intellectualizing religious experts and, eventually, Christianity, as an institutional entity.

2

The Gods and Roman ›Religion‹

The past decade has witnessed considerable interest in the question of whether religion is a meaningful category for study of the ancient world, with many objecting to its utility on the grounds that the concept inappropriately projects onto a

4 5 6 7

Stowers 2011a; Wendt 2016: esp. 114–45; and Texts in this volume. Stowers 2011a; Rüpke 2016: esp. 80–157. For extensive discussion and bibliography, see Texts in this volume. Wendt 2016, 190–216.

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different time and place characteristics that are not only anachronistic but also Christo-centric.8 It is undoubtedly the case that many characteristics associated with modern concepts of religion are ill suited to antiquity, which, at least prior to the third century, lacked rival systems of belief and the features that accompany them. So too did the preponderance of interactions with the gods occur without recourse to elaborate doctrinal positions, texts, or scriptural interpretation of the sort that are the hallmarks of later Christianity.9 Above all, ancient societies did not decouple matters of the gods from other social activities, relegating them to a well-defined and autonomous sphere of social life.10 Despite these and other distinctions between antiquity and modernity, it is possible to speak of the multiform strategies that inhabitants of the Roman world employed to think about and communicate with the gods as instances of ›religion.‹ In this chapter, I use this language in reference to any social practices that directly enlisted divine beings, including more abstract anthropomorphisms such as fate or the heavens, and imputed to them, in addition to any number of special abilities and powers, human-like characteristics that allowed people to interact with them according to an intuitive social logic.11 Theorizing ancient Mediterranean religion as a matter of variously linked methods for communicating with such beings allows for a definition that is flexible enough to include examples from any historical period or cultural area. Likewise, debates about whether the Latin word religio, Greek threskeia, or any other word maps exactly onto the modern concept of religion are easily sidestepped. The Romans and other ancient peoples had many terms for practices and beliefs involving their own gods, ancestors, and so forth; they could also recognize these behaviors among other peoples and translate them into their own native concepts.12 This concept of religion is also a conscious departure from speaking of a religion or religions of the Roman Empire. Whereas the singular rides roughshod over rich religious diversity, the plural problematically implies coherent and stable entities tethered to complex institutions with the following sort of characteristics: a fixed pantheon or adherence to one god at the exclusion of others; professional clerics; a system of beliefs shared across space and time by like-minded practitioners; a bounded group; an exclusive identity; specific places and times for worship; a moral code; a scriptural canon; and, often, considerable secondary literary activity (e.g., theological treatises, creeds, commentaries) that reinforces all of these features.

8 Studies that argue in favor of incommensurability between antiquity and modernity include Nongbri 2013; Barton and Boyarin 2016; Anderson 2015 and 2018. 9 Stowers 2008. 10 For a productive critique of these methodological issues, see Nongbri 2008. 11 For elaboration, see Stowers 2008, 442–45; Rives 2007, 1–12; Rüpke 2018, 6–10. By more abstract anthropomorphisms I have in mind, for example, Greco-Roman astrology, whose practitioners typically held theological understandings of celestial bodies and their relevance to human affairs. 12 North 2005.

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Neither did religious practices form an exceptional domain of social activity in the Roman world, nor do they constitute a coherent set of evidence on the basis of some unique shared essence. Rather, interactions with the gods linked in an unlimited number of ways with other pursuits—political, economic, military, and so forth—and were distributed throughout many areas of daily life. A map of possible combinations is especially rich in the Roman world, where divine beings pervaded nearly every human activity. In instances where religious practices were only marginal components of an activity, the basic assumption that gods were relevant to the task at hand might result in a religious practice playing a minor role. Examples include invoking the gods in a political meeting, consulting a diviner to determine a military course of action, recognizing a god as the patron of a trade guild or voluntary association through prayer or offerings, and so on. On the opposite end of the spectrum, religious practices might be bound up in complex institutional structures of the sort the sort that eventually did give rise to the impression of distinct religions. Taking any and all interactions with the gods as a unit of analysis—as opposed to, say, groups, communities, religions, or religious systems—permits the disaggregation of these larger social formations.13 Hence, my own account of religion in the Roman Empire explores how practices that were common and widespread throughout the diverse cultural areas of the Roman Empire coalesced in a variety of social contexts, from households to the more ornate settings of civic temples, and a host of other sites in between.

3

Whose Roman Religion?

I begin with a brief sketch of the contours of the empire’s religious landscape, first, at the level of widespread and ordinary practices and, then, of more complex and larger-scale activities that usually unfolded on occasions and in spaces appointed specifically for their performance. However, any such map must be drawn in tandem with qualification of the evidence that informs it and the perspectives, possibilities, and liabilities of our sources. There were broad continuities in the range of practices through which inhabitants of the Roman world, as well as populations beyond its limits, interacted with the gods. Everywhere people made sacrifices and other offerings; uttered prayers, vows, and other speech acts; celebrated games, festivals, and meals; constructed worship spaces whose scale ranged from household shrines to prominent sanctuaries; enlisted various techniques for ascertaining extraordinary knowledge; underwent rites of purification and initiation to improve or otherwise alter their status vis-à-vis the gods; and commemorated the dead. Although there existed notable local or regional inflections with respect to which beings received cult, to how gods were represented (if they were represented at all), to the appearance of and rules that governed sanctuaries, to the character of religious office, and so forth, 13 Stowers 2008, 445.

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these practices shared a common logic of exchange between human and divine beings that was itself an extension of the everyday interactions structuring ancient Mediterranean societies. They amounted to the building blocks for a spectrum of possible approaches to divine beings that could be scaled up or down in complexity, formality, spatiality, and occasion. While many rites that unfolded outside of civic life lacked its pomp, circumstance, and particularity, the rationale of honouring and appeasing the gods so as to implicate them in webs of mutual obligation was consistent across many settings.14 Even while acknowledging such affinities it is important to recognize how certain methodological priorities have coloured our sense of ›what counts‹ as evidence for Roman religion.15 On the one hand, its study has suffered from anachronism, often, the failure to assign the same weight to the aforementioned expressions of religiosity as to the more elaborate and institutional entities implied by the language of ›religions,‹ in the sense that Judaism, Christianity, and Islam would become.16 Conflation of the two has resulted in not only distortive models of ancient religion, but also the minimization or exclusion of any behavior involving the gods that did not fit these institutional models.17 On the other hand, many early studies of religion in the Roman period privileged those occasions and representations of the gods for which we have the most evidence: ones involving monumental temples, civic rites, and officiants drawn from the ranks of Roman or local elites. Civic or polis religion has all too often been elided with broader concepts of Roman or Greek religion, while non-civic practices are parceled into separate analytical categories (e.g., magic). A helpful illustration of the first problem, the misapplication of a modern concept of religion to antiquity, can be found in how the notion of religious ›belief‹ once served as a boundary marker between the rote ritualism of Greeks and Romans, whose religious institutions were not tethered to doctrine, scripture, or faith, on the one hand, and the profounder theological commitments of Christians (and to some extent Jews), on the other.18 This un-nuanced distinction has produced impressions of fundamental and incommensurate difference, usually in the service of Judeo-Christian exceptionalism. The refrain that the Romans did not actually believe in their gods or that myth was a frivolous precursor to scripture are apt illustrations.19

14 Parker 1998. 15 For an overview of this problem in the wider study of Greco-Roman religion, see Rives 2010; Kindt 2012. 16 For helpful discussions of religion versus a religion or religions, see the introductions in Rives 2007 and Rüpke 2018. 17 See the introduction to Wendt 2016. 18 For the history of this characterization of Roman religion, see Ando 2009, x–xvii; Rüpke 2018. For Greek religion, see Johnston 2008. 19 Important correctives for Greek theology include Eidinow, Kindt, Osborne 2016. For Greek myth, see Johnston 2018.

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While participation in the types of religious practices mentioned above entailed and promoted a host of intuitions and expectations about divine beings—about their natures, abilities, temperaments, desires, dislikes, expectations, relations with one another, spheres of influence, and relevance to human affairs—they did not require assent to elaborate theological propositions. Religious beliefs in this sense were largely unreflective, enabling people to engage with the gods in a similar fashion to how they navigated other relationships.20 They were also pragmatic and empirical in orientation, positioning practitioners to enlist the gods’ abilities effectively to aid in concerns over which the latter exercised influence.21 This is not to say that the Romans never engaged in theological speculation or ascribed loftier meanings to their customary rites and institutions; to the contrary, from the late republic onward there is a notable increase in the production of texts that labored to organize and defend the rationality of Roman religion using intellectual tools and categories. Yet, it would be a mistake to mine these sources for a theological architecture of Roman religion equivalent to what would come to define Christianity. They were not passive reflections of a religion that actually existed but strategic intellectual projects that bore a complex relationship to attitudes and behaviors on the ground.22 Rather than speaking of religious beliefs per se, it is helpful to consider the assorted interests that inhabitants of the Roman world, including Christians, pursued through interactions with divine beings, irrespective of the precise form, scale, or spatial contexts in which they occurred. These interests are apparent in evidence that speaks to practitioners‹ expectations when soliciting benefits from divine beings, and, sometimes, to the outcomes of these solicitations. From the copious votive offerings excavated from temple precincts throughout the empire to epigraphic texts to literary descriptions of religious practice emerges a fairly regular assortment of such interests—in health, healing, fertility, safety, protection, prosperity, justice or punishment, afterlife benefits, the acquisition of inaccessible knowledge, and so forth—as well as a general sense of confidence in the ability of divine beings to address them.23 A preponderance of positive outcomes or material expressions of a god’s efficacy—the quantity and variety of dedications or inscribed narratives commemorating miraculous cures that adorned so many healing sanctuaries, for instance—undoubtedly routinized such expectations. But beliefs of this sort arose from cultivated intimacy with and trust in the gods rather than the formal, learned commitments implied by the modern term. To proceed from the manifest goals of religious practice thus avoids the Judeo-Christian theological baggage of ›belief‹ without reducing the inhabitants of the Roman world to uncritical ritualists.

20 21 22 23

Parker 1998; Stowers 2008, 443; Rüpke 2018, 224–6. For this characterization of Roman religion, see Ando 2009, 13. For Roman theological writings, see MacRae 2016 and Texts in this volume. For the value of epigraphic texts for reconstructing Roman religious life, see Texts in this volume.

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The second methodological issue I raised has to do with taking as most representative the evidence for Roman religion that is most visible and obvious, namely, the armature of civic religion. Its apparent primacy and normativity receives in turn ample reinforcement from extant Roman-period literature, much of which was produced either by the very figures who held civic religious offices or else by writers closely allied with their interests through networks of literary patronage.24 As they extolled the rationality, temperance, and traditionalism of this concept of Roman religion, the same authors wrote disparagingly about any practices involving the gods that fell beyond the scope of civic institutions and occasions, often in the pursuit of interests that misaligned with their predictable focus on reinforcing ideological constructs of community, entrenched systems of power, and so forth. As a consequence, the ways that most inhabitants of the empire interacted with the gods—non-citizen men, freeborn women, children, and current or former slaves of either sex—whenever these occurred apart from the relatively few civic occasions that extended formal participation to such demographics, are usually disparaged in Roman-period literature as superstitio, magic, or an equivalent label denoting fundamental difference from what these authors take to be proper comportment toward the gods. There is no shortage of stock literary characters to illustrate this tendency, whether the conniving slaves and slavishly superstitious women who drive the plot of many a Roman comedy or satire, or the more seemingly objective, if just as stereotypical, historical anecdotes of elite women who enlisted nefarious magicians and occult techniques in their political or romantic maneuverings.25 It is important to recognize, then, who and what is excluded when our impressions of Roman religion are coloured by such highly interested discourses, in large part the regular devotions and motivations of most practitioners, including many social elites when they were not acting in civic capacities.26 All of these considerations bear on modern reconstructions of Roman religion, which have leaned heavily on its most conspicuous archaeological remains and the literary sources that guide their interpretation. The realia of religious activities that occurred outside of the civic sphere tend to be less durable, impressive, or amenable to clear interpretation, to say nothing of a dearth of literary commentary that might give voice to ambiguous material remains. Sometimes the religious activities in question, though less apparent in the archaeological record, accorded with or had official counterparts in Roman civic religion. Roman lares are a prime example (see below), inasmuch as their outsized presence in Roman households and neighbourhoods greatly surpassed the handful of monumental temples dedicated to these gods. In all likelihood, inhabitants of Rome encountered them more regularly as small statuettes in household shrines or modest

24 For instance, in the case of Cicero, a prolific authority on Roman religion and member of the augural college. For further examples, see MacRae 2016. 25 For rich illustrations of elite women employing ›magic‹ to such ends, see Pollard 2014. 26 See the conclusions of Faraone 2008 and the much fuller discussion in Rüpke 2018, 211–61.

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street altars. Their permeation of various urban networks meant that the lares far outnumbered the grander gods of civic cult; however, were it not for the preservation of dozens of street altars and hundreds of domestic shrines in the Bay of Naples by the Vesuvian eruption in 79 CE, the omnipresence of these gods would be far less apparent.27 Since our evidence speaks disproportionately to the logic and character of civic religiosity, to make these sources central to a definition of Roman religion risks excluding or marginalizing the human-divine interactions of the vast majority of the empire’s population, any who were not socially elite men, and even many of theirs.28 Myriad though they were, civic rites and festivals also lacked legitimate outlets for addressing the concerns that pressed most urgently on many people’s daily lives. Roman matronae occupied precarious, asymmetrical positions within their own households, insofar as the sexual availability of slaves could easily jeopardize the privileges they enjoyed. Since civic expressions of marital values championed only such qualities as domestic hierarchy, obedience, and harmony between husbands and wives, any appeal to the gods a woman might make for the sake of protecting her position necessarily departed from this civic script. To classify her self-interested petitions as instances of magic or cursing rather than religion denies the legitimacy of any interests that did not hew to societal norms.29 Over-reliance on certain witnesses also imparts an impression of Roman religion that is both too hegemonic, insofar as it takes for granted that civic institutions scripted and regularly policed people’s religious behavior, and also too static or compartmentalized, in the sense that the gods had precise, unalterable guises and functions. Rigid pantheons with sharp divisions between the gods on the basis of the kinds of concerns they were called upon to address have been thwarted time and again by evidence that any one god might be enlisted for reasons either civic or personal, lofty or nefarious.30 In reality, individual practitioners exercised considerable agency in expanding or injecting nuance into the purview and potentialities of the deities for whom they performed cult. Although loosely beholden to normative sensibilities and media—for instance, standard representations of the gods found in prominent civic temples or that circulated on coins—ordinary supplicants continuously defined, and redefined, the character and relevance of divine beings through the material tokens of their communications with them.31 That is, a god’s character, accoutrements, and powers were not fixed but reflected the sum total of their human interactions and perceived relevance. Popular enthusiasms could also precipitate innovation and change in civic institutions, for instance, in 27 For the easily overlooked prominence of the lares in Roman religion, see Flower 2017, 1–4. See also Rüpke 2018, 250–5. 28 Rüpke 2018, 211. 29 Ripat 2014 offer insightful examples of the limitations placed on women’s religious interests. For analogous arguments regarding slaves, see MacRae 2018. 30 For further discussion of evidence that evades these schemes of categorization, see Versnel 2015 and MacRae 2018. 31 Rüpke 2016, 42–63.

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the late-first century CE recategorization of Isis worship as public sacra and construction of a prominent civic sanctuary for the Egyptian goddess after well over a century of her unofficial veneration at Rome. Hence, the need cannot be overstated for a bottom-up approach that grants considerable weight to religious activity that happened apart from public priests and formal city or imperial occasions. The term ›private‹ would be something of a misnomer for this panoply of experiences, conceptions, and practices encompassing how the population as a whole communicated with the gods: not only are modern concepts of public and private a poor fit for the Roman world, but ancient religious life constituted a network of practical strategies that, once learned, could be adapted and applied as different situations or settings demanded.32 Activities that occurred beyond the spaces and patterns of civic religion did, however, admit considerably more latitude for idiosyncrasy, individuality, and innovation. The religiosity of Roman neighbourhoods or vici are a case in point. Prone to the sort of interventions best known from Augustus’s reform and expansion of the lares compitales, vici were simultaneously coordinated with broader civic devotions through the appointment of neighbourhood magistrates (vici magistri) and observances regulated by the Roman calendar, while also serving as incubators for high degrees of religious innovation.33 Since all forms of religious activity entailed practices connected with beliefs about gods, ancestors, and other non-obvious beings, practitioners would have experienced them seamlessly, tailoring common understandings and expectations to any given expression. In other words, they are discrete principally from an analytical perspective and lacked clear or consistent boundaries in lived experience. To extrapolate more globally from this point, there was also far more religious continuity than difference across the cultural areas of the ancient Mediterranean; the features that distinguished the religion of a particular ethnic group or region—so that we can even speak of ›Roman‹ or ›Greek‹ religion—were slight.34 Beginning in the late republic, awareness of Rome’s mounting religious diversity did stimulate considerable intellectual interest in comparative religious practice, gods, religious epistemologies, and religious institutions.35 The literary record from this period onward teems with writings about religion: ethnographies of provincial subjects, surveys of foreign religious practices and theologies, and philosophical investigations of cross-cultural religious practices such as divination.36 Beyond mere curiosity about provincial cultures, many writers had a vested interest in parsing novel or foreign religious phenomena into discursive categories that

32 Rüpke 2018, 255. 33 The detailed study of Flower 2017 explores the dialectic between civic and neighbourhood cults. 34 Scheid 1995 and Rüpke 2018, 1–5 offer succinct justifications for these pan-Mediterranean continuities. 35 The studies of Ando 2009 and Orlin 2010 are especially relevant. 36 See, e.g., Murphy 2004, esp. 154–60; Gruen 2011.

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were distinct from and, often, antithetical to their own normative conceptions of Roman religio.37 Cross-cultural explorations of this sort occurred not only in elite-authored writings but also in assorted, non-literate media: frescoes, mosaics, statues, coins, and sculpted reliefs; occasional performances; and installations ranging from exotic flora to looted art.38 That a tendency toward comparison cut across so many registers of accessibility suggests that interest in ›exotic‹ cultural practices, religious in particular, went beyond elite audiences. The increasing heterogeneity of the empire became most evident at Rome itself, which came to resemble a microcosm of the territories within its sphere of influence. As the capital honed its cosmopolitan character an emphasis fell on making these new horizons knowable to the public. From the vivid exhibitions of triumphal processions to the exotic materials and motifs that permeated Rome’s urban fabric, the city was, by all appearances, a world fair of its reach.39 The global symbolism suffusing the topographies of cities throughout the empire contributed in subtle but broadly legible ways to the basic recognition and attractiveness of foreign religion among Roman audiences, defined broadly. The same conditions facilitated the recognition of new gods, rites, ritual paraphernalia, and religious office or authority, even if many conceptions of foreignness revealed more about how Romans imagined the religion of provincial and other peoples than about how these forms of religion operated in their native contexts.40 From the late republic onward, Rome also officially recognized an increasing number of foreign cults, which were imported according to specific protocols—for instance, consultation of the Sibylline Oracles—and which were often officiated by native priests or priestesses.41 Of course, no factor contributed more to curiosity about other cultures than close proximity to people hailing from all over the empire, an unavoidable reality under the empire owing to mass waves of voluntary and involuntary migration.42 Multiethnic neighbourhoods, marketplaces, and trade emporia brought religious diversity to the fore, but just as much could be found in Roman households. The latter scenario is implicit in the late first-century CE historian Tacitus’s complaint that most Roman familiae now comprise many nationes—ethnically diverse slave populations— each with its own foreign gods, rites, and manner of conducting them.43 Attention to the specificities of local cult, theology, or representation might pique exaggerated expectations of difference.44 And yet, practices and beliefs attested throughout the empire shared a basic intelligibility tinted with regional distinctiveness: a curious rite or manner of worship, a god with a special purview

37 Orlin 2010 maps these tandem constructive projects and their centrality to an emerging conception of Romanness. 38 Östenberg 2003 and the essays in Loar, MacDonald, and Pedilla Peralta 2018 are apt. 39 See the essays in Edwards, Woolf 2003. 40 For elaboration of Roman conceptions of foreign religion, see Wendt 2016, 74–113. 41 Again, Scheid 1995; Orlin 2010. 42 Noy 2000; Jongman 2003. 43 Tac. Ann. 14.44.3. For further discussion, see Bodel 2008, 268. 44 Rives 2005.

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or unusual characteristics, an impressive corpus of writings, or a rare and attractive religious benefit.45 Notwithstanding these local emphases and idioms, there was great consistency in both the character of religious life and also the environments in which it took place. This is true even for a population such as the Jews (hereafter Judeans, as they would have been understood among Roman), notable throughout the empire for their aniconic worship of a single god in one temple, as well as curious dietary restrictions and the practice of circumcision, but who engaged in the full spectrum of religious activity presented in this chapter.46 I will say more below about the role that conceptions of foreignness, exoticism, and religious difference played in stimulating religious innovation, especially at the height of the empire’s territorial reach and accompanying cultural heterogeneity.

4

Interacting with Divine Beings in the Roman World

Having raised several methodological and conceptual issues that bear on reconstructing human-divine interactions in the Roman Empire, I turn now to an overview of how and where such interactions took place, as well as what assumptions about divinity can be deduced from them. To fully appreciate the ubiquity of the gods and other divine beings in this world, one must first recognize their thoroughly material status, even in arenas such as philosophy in which theology tended toward abstraction. While materiality and entanglement with all areas of human existence strike some as unique features of the ancient world, similar ideas persist throughout South, Southeast, and East Asia, among other contemporary comparanda. In these regions, as in the Roman world, an abundance and thoroughgoing integration of temples, shrines, and other sites of religious practice in human landscapes naturalizes their presence and relevance to all human affairs.47 So pervasive were such reminders that inhabitants of the empire would have been hard-pressed to disentangle their daily activities from divine presence, if it was even possible to do so.48 Civic religion may furnish the most prevalent and visible examples of religion throughout the empire, but it was far less central to most people’s daily rhythms than household or neighbourhood cults and other religious activities conducted apart from civic institutions. The point is worth restating, even if, again, these distinctions were ultimately a matter of scale or context, of how a common repository of premises, strategies, and signs for communicating with the gods were ad-

45 Scheid 1995; Rives 2014. 46 Rives 2005; Wendt 2015a and 2016; Stowers 2018 all stress these continuities between different expressions of ›Judaism‹ or Judean religion and their ancient Mediterranean settings. 47 Watts 2015. 48 Flower 2017.

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justed to different social spaces. The adjustments themselves were fairly predictable. Civic religion was formalized as ritual, administered by officiants, regulated by complex rules and a calendar, embellished, and often appointed discrete performance spaces. Household religiosity was more improvisational, necessarily entwined with domestic spaces and bustle. Each adaptation of the network of conceptions and strategies for interacting with the gods also emphasized certain values befitting its context. Religious rites presided over by the emperor, senators, or local magistrates reinforced practitioners‹ corporate membership, place in the social hierarchy, compliance with civic norms or virtues, and stake in a common identity forged by tradition, however constructed the latter might be. Household and neighbourhood cults, likewise, had distinct communal dimensions that, in turn, inscribed the roles and standards appropriate to each member’s gender, age, and status.49 The formal responsibilities of household cult fell to a male head of household, the pater familias, who supplicated the gods, foremost Vesta and the family lars (lares familiares), on behalf of all members: kin, but also slaves, as well as freedmen of the familia and their descendants. Such responsibilities were not the totality of religious practices that unfolded in household spaces; others included special meals, offerings, and interpretations of signs from the gods.50 While the pater familias served as a de facto religious officiant, other individuals within the household possessed the knowledge, resources, and opportunity to communicate with the gods on their own. Slaves or freedmen could tend to the lares in their master’s absence, for instance, and, as the earlier reference from Tacitus suggests, foreign slaves were often permitted to worship their own gods in the customary fashion. Likewise, nearly everyone was capable of soliciting, recognizing, and interpreting signs sent by the gods to express their will or intentions. Ancient sources take for granted that ordinary people possessed these skills when recounting personal acts of divination. Multiple authors relate a story about Caecilia, the wife of Metellus, who, in the first half of the first century BCE, held a nocturnal vigil in a shrine to ascertain her niece’s marriage prospects.51 Unbeknownst to Caecilia, an omen was issued when she offered her seat to the weary niece, who would marry Caecilia’s own husband after her untimely death. Although the sign went unrecognized, the matron was equipped with a customary procedure and suitable venue for soliciting it. L. Aemilius Paullus, a two-time consul of the early second century BCE, was able to ascertain from his daughter’s tearful report that her dog Perseus had died that he would defeat his Macedonian adversary of the same name.52 Roman literature is replete with such anecdotes.

49 For a succinct breakdown of household gender, status, and age dynamics, see Rüpke 2018, 212–8. 50 For an overview of the religious activities that might unfold in different domestic and adjacent areas such as gardens and tombs, see Rüpke 2018, 226–47. 51 Cic., Div. 1.104, 2.83; Val. Max. 1.5.4. 52 Cic., Div. 1.103; Val. Max. 1.5.3; Plut., Aem. 1.10.6–8.

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Matters of interpretation that were more complex or had higher stakes might warrant the solicitation of someone recognized for expertise in the matter at hand. After waking from a disturbing dream in which he raped his own mother, Julius Caesar consulted dream interpreters who determined that it portended his destiny to rule the world.53 And although acknowledged in his own right to be exceptionally gifted in religious interpretations, Caesar’s father-in-law and general, C. Marius, never campaigned without the Syrian woman Martha, on whose authority he was said to have made every move.54 There will be more to say about these religious experts in due course, but it is noteworthy that even a seemingly extraordinary religious practice such as divination could be performed by anyone with basic competence, itself the product of acculturation and intuition. The regular features of household and neighbourhood cults should not overshadow the flexibility they afforded for idiosyncrasy and innovation, especially in the variety of divine beings that might be introduced into these spaces, each with preferred methods of worship. This fluidity is apparent in the Romans’ cultivation of the penates, a nebulous and potentially eclectic cast of beings who were represented by cumulative collections of images and tokens. Unlike lares, a pair of youthful gods with stock iconography, the penates were menageries of sacred items, whose contents manifested the interests and commitments of individual family members.55 While religious activities involving all of these personal gods were linked, the practices specific to each set were conceptually distinct. Many sources bear witness to the popularity of personalized versions of deities venerated in civic cults. In the mid first century BC, Cicero dedicated his Minerva, a personal cult image, in the Temple of Jupiter Optimus Maximus, after his house was famously destroyed by a political rival.56 His rough contemporary, the twotime consul, general, and dictator, Sulla, would publicly supplicate before battles a portable image of Apollo that he had despoiled from Delphi.57 Roman literature contains many such anecdotes of personal devotions, which presumably went hand-in-hand with idiosyncratic beliefs about their divine recipients. In his twelfth satire, written in the early second century CE, the poet Juvenal imagines himself at home offering incense to his familiar lares before appeasing ›his own Jupiter‹.58 Sometimes personal gods were more novel in character, appearance, or cultivation. In a discussion of Nero’s proclivity to superstitio, Suetonius, an imperial biographer of the early second century, notes the emperor’s cultivation of a small maiden figurine, whose powers, Nero thought, would protect him from plots.59 Writing later that century, Apuleius defends the inclusion of an ebony Mercury statuette, 53 Suet., Iul. 7.2. 54 For evidence of Marius’s own interpretive skills, see Val. Max. 1.5.5. For his relationship with Martha, see Val. Max. 1.2.3; Plut., Mar. 17. 55 On the penates, see Bodel 2008; Rüpke 2018, 253. 56 Cic. Leg. 2.42. 57 Val. Max. 1.2.3. 58 Juv. 12.87–90. 59 Suet. Ner. 34.4.

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which he kept along with other linen-wrapped religious tokens, in his stepson’s sacrarium.60 This literary description is supported by actual assemblages recovered from domestic shrines in the Bay of Naples, which juxtapose motley casts of deities, both civic and unrecognized, with amulets, scarabs, and other exotic objects.61 The testimony of Apuleius offers a glimpse of not only the scope and eclecticism found in such collections, but also how the items comprising them might be acquired, for instance, as tokens of initiation into the mysteries of various gods. Apuleius writes, I participated in several sacred initiations in Greece and I keep certain tokens and objects of these rites, which the priests gave to me. I claim nothing unusual, nothing unknown. Even you initiates of the one father Liber who are here know what you keep hidden at home and honour silently, away from non-initiates. Certainly I…have learned complex rituals, many rites, and various ceremonies out of an eagerness for truth and service to the gods…. Can anyone who has any recollection of religious practice really be astonished at seeing a man who has knowledge of so many mysteries of the gods guard in his home certain amulets of these sacred rites and wrap them in a linen cloth, which is the purest covering for divine things? (Apol. 55.18–25, 56.2–6)

In defending the religious value against accusations of magic, Apuleius discloses an important detail about them: of these objects that they are reminders of instruction he has received in esoteric rites and accompanying instruction. Indeed, the impetus for commissioning the controversial Mercury was to obtain a specific representation of the god so that he could interact with it in accordance with a an equally specific set of protocols. Here and elsewhere, literary accounts indicate that the diversity evident in penates collections or in the statuettes put up in private houses might correspond to diversity in religious practice. The large-scale population displacements that occurred under (and as a result of) the empire also contributed to the popularity of another form of religious activity that is amply attested in this period, participation in so-called voluntary associations.62 The raisons-d’être of these groups are notoriously varied, ranging from professional or ethnic affiliation to shared servitude to the cultivation of a particular deity or deities. All appear to have enjoyed a convivial component; many managed to secure regular gathering places, often in areas clustered with tombs. Freedpersons, slaves, and women not already reflected in the former categories are represented disproportionately in the evidence for associations, likely because these groups afforded them many more opportunities for religious office and benefaction than civic institutions.63 The same dem-

60 Apul. Apol. 53–56. 61 The diversity of these collections receives ample treatment in Bodel 2008; Rüpke 2018, 218–23, 253. 62 For associations, see, e.g., Kloppenborg, Wilson 1996; Harland 2003; Perry 2006. For a selection of representative inscriptions in translation, see Ascough, Harland, Kloppenborg 2012. 63 For slaves and freedpersons, see Patterson 2006, 254–61. On the social status and religious participation of Roman women generally, see Schultz 2006, esp. 139–50. The sources for women in ancient Mediterranean religion are collected with helpful introductions in Kraemer 2004.

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ographics dominated occupations that grew steadily more lucrative as the early empire saw a surge in economic growth, trade, and construction. An association formed on the premise of a common trade—carpentry, for instance—might convene gatherings with a prayer or honour a patron deity during a convivial meal, but some took religious engagement further, displaying images of members in medias res of performing devotional acts or pooling resources to finance a temple.64 While interacting with the gods, or supporting such interactions, constituted a marginal component of many voluntary associations‹ activities, others were devoted foremost to religious matters. Explicitly cultic groups—those whose membership was determined by common religious interests and objectives—tended to be inclusive, admitting members of either sex and any social status, although their leadership criteria might be more restrictive. Joining or patronizing these associations might earn one a prestigious title, official responsibilities, or even the acquisition of religious talents. The apostle Paul, for instance, promises his followers they will teach, prophesy, interpret prophecy, discern spirits, speak in tongues, and perform healings, among other abilities.65 The implications of the myriad roles and ranks that members held are often unknown, but their authority is unlikely to have translated reliably beyond group boundaries. Notwithstanding, some groups were prominent or sufficiently connected to earn formal roles in civic festivals or another form of official recognition. For the social opportunities that voluntary associations might facilitate it would be easy to marginalize the religious interests they served. These were paramount for the many groups of immigrants who congregated to worship native gods in a customary fashion: Judean synagogues, a household of Alexandrians, a corporation of Phrygians, and another from Berytus, among many others known from inscriptions.66 One group of Tyrians, who transferred a statue of their god Sarepta to Puteoli in 79 CE, still existed a century later, when they appealed to the city council in Tyre for financial assistance in maintaining their ancestral worship.67 All over the empire, Judeans established synagogues for maintaining their own ancestral customs and organize annual tithes to the temple of their god in Jerusalem, among other possible activities.68 It would be mistaken to assume, however, that these associations were somehow equivalent to distinct or eternal religions; their longevity was limited to the lifespan of members and any younger generations the latter managed to recruit. Immigrant piety was only one mechanism by which the religion of a particular region or people could migrate to another part of the empire: many accounts of a

64 65 66 67 68

Important studies of trade-based associations include Joshel 1992; Bakker 1994; Bond 2016. E.g., 1 Cor 12:1–11, 14:1–39. See esp. Harland 2009. IGR 1.420–1. Philo offers a highly idealizing account of the Roman synagogues in Leg. 156–8. The literature on Judean synagogues is especially rich and treated comprehensively in Cappelletti 2006 and Kraemer 2020.

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god’s or rite’s arrival at a new destination implicate self-authorized religious experts as the responsible agents. These examples indicate that some religious social formations only grew into discernible phenomena with regular contours, members, and leadership roles as the result of considerable entrepreneurial labor. Of course, the provision of religious expertise is not mutually exclusive with pietistic motivations; the same dedication to native deities and practices that prompted people of shared ethnicities to form associations abroad can be imagined for individuals eager to instruct curious audiences. That said, self-authorizedreligious experts warrant their own discussion. There are many indications that over the course of the empire would-be religious experts grew increasingly influential, more diverse with respect to the skills or methods in which they claimed expertise, and more global in the character of their religious programs.69 Literary sources also testify to an escalation in the frequency and severity of efforts to counteract their influence, particularly during the first century CE.70 And while the full cast of ›specialists‹ included people alleging expertise in philosophy, medicine, jurisprudence, and rhetoric, conspicuous among them were purveyors of religious wisdom, benefits, technologies, and so forth.71 Moreover, the boundaries between these putative areas of expertise were porous and also secondary to deeper field dynamics that all such figures negotiated: the challenges of asserting one’s own authority and legitimacy, often through learned displays; acute and copious rivalries; the problematic connotations of interest and profit; and the looming threat of censorship or punishment. Aspiring religious experts did not originate in the Roman imperial period; people of every social rank had always made a regular habit of consulting diviners, astrologers, seers, religious healers, dream interpreters, and sundry other specialists about any matter seen to warrant a specialist’s abilities.72 And yet, certain features of the empire seem to have amplified their activities and promoted intense competition between them. Given the dramatically changing territory and population demographics of the early empire, as well as the networks of trade and connectivity that enabled its administration, it is unsurprising that a large number of participants in this sort of religious activity were foreigners who capitalized on interest in wisdom, teachings, rites, and techniques perceived to be novel or exotic among Roman audiences.73 Many specialists deployed ethnic or provincial caricatures to their advantage by claiming expertise in skills, practices, wisdom traditions, and artifacts, including texts, that were strongly associated with a particular people or region. We inherit several examples who operated outside of existing institutions—

69 Rives 2007, 158–81; Wallace-Hadrill 2006 and 2008, 213–58; Eshleman 2012; Wendt 2016. See also chapter ›People and competencies‹ in this volume. 70 Ripat 2011; Wendt 2015b and 2016, 40–73. 71 Wallace-Hadrill 2008; Eshleman 2012. 72 For similar figures in classical and Hellenistic Greece, see Flower 2008; Johnston 2008; Graf and Johnston 2013; Edmonds 2013. 73 Stowers 2011b; Wendt 2016, 74–113.

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established cults, public and private temples, voluntary associations—and appealed to or even exaggerated their foreignness in order to gain recognition as legitimate purveyors of offerings framed within a given ethnic or geographic idiom. This exotic dimension of this sort of religious activity is particularly relevant to the emergence of Christians, insofar as Judeans appear regularly among other purveyors of ethnically coded skills, types of knowledge, practices, and paraphernalia, or else in contexts that were deeply resonant of self-authorized religious experts.74 In most cases, their apparent freelance status is overlooked on the assumption else that they were ›proselytizers‹ acting on behalf of a larger corporate entity, Judaism or a Jewish community. And yet, many Roman-period sources depict Judeans as dream interpreters, exorcists, wisdom instructors, and so forth, to say nothing of the robust religious program found in the letters of Paul, whose practices ranged from initiation into the mysteries of the Judean god to demonstrations of signs and wonders to speaking in tongues.75 To take this evidence on its own terms locates some Judeans—and, later, self-identifying Christians—within a phenomenon that is well attested for religious experts claiming other foreign idioms, thus counteracting the assumption that they were exceptional or unique in the Greco-Roman world.76 To the contrary, they partook heavily from their wider cultural milieu, competing with as they borrowed from and influenced in turn assorted rivals. Since any given expert might employ skills and concepts from multiple areas— a mystery initiator who explained the mechanism behind transformative rites using philosophical representations, or a healer whose prognoses involved astrology—we ought not to presume essential differences between these actors on the basis of selective characteristics of their practices. By way of illustration, Arignotus, a Pythagorean who appears in the mid second-century satirist Lucian’s Philopseudes (11–15; 30–36), was evidently a sort of philosopher, but one who enlisted esoteric Egyptian wisdom in order to contend with a ghost. Likewise, Paul’s religious program has points of continuity with Greco-Roman philosophies, ›Judaism‹, and ›Christianity‹ but is not fully at home in any of these categories. Since many specialized offerings were composite, they cut across as many areas of expertise as there were different kinds of practices comprising them. It is thus unsurprising when religious experts resist clear categorization and it would be misleading to locate their diverse offerings under only one rubric. Thus, although they differed with respect to claims or methods, to ethnic frames of reference, to levels of skill, and to the preconditions that enabled specific skills—for instance,

74 Wendt 2015b, 2016. 75 Wendt 2015a and 2016, 146–89. 76 In certain contexts ›Judean‹ even seems to function as an ethnic term connoting expertise in the fairly regular assortment of practices for which Judeans seem to have been especially well known—exorcism, prophecy, dream interpretation, divination or wisdom instruction from the Judean writings—not unlike how ›Chaldaean‹ was virtually synonymous with astrology, or magus denoted expertise in Persian wisdom and religious skills until the end of the first century, when its semantic range broadened to encompass any kind of freelance religious actor.

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the requisite literacy for producing religious writings or divining from texts—it is useful to theorize such differences as variations within a common class of religious activity. While distinctions in the content of specialist offerings are far from unimportant, these are secondary to some of the deeper dynamics that all such actors negotiated. Whether one calculated a predictive astrological chart or crudely inscribed strange characters into a lead sheet is a difference of aptitude or strategy but not of the basic kind of activity in which the expert engaged. The popularity of self-authorized religious experts under the empire seems to have contributed appreciably to the emergence of several religious phenomena first attested in this period.77 Indeed, there is a tantalizing coincidence in the growth and diversification of religious expertise over the course of the first century and the emergence of new or more discernible groups attested in the second or the third, including the worship of the Persian-themed god Mithras and the Judean Christ.78 One of the most revealing indices of their influence is the frequency with which they start to appear in literature of the first and second centuries CE, above all in the writings of Lucian. His tale of Alexander of Abonouteichos (a two-bit charlatan in Lucian’s estimation) charts a ›false prophet’s‹ establishment of a cult to Glycon, a serpentine proxy of the god Asclepius revealed to Alexander alone. With its mounting fame, the cult grows ever more multidimensional, as do the justifications for these expansions, which emerge from oracular texts that Alexander himself drafts, ›discovers,‹ and interprets in accordance with his newest scheme; Glycon’s very identity and relationship to Asclepius are thus conveyed, as is Alexander’s own religious authority.79 When news of this new god reaches the capital, he acquires an even more robust mythology, complete with accompany mysteries and initiation rites, to excite the palates of his Roman audiences. Whereas most of the religious activities that I have outlined in this chapter were intuitive, ubiquitous, and mutually intelligible, the religion of freelance experts traded strategically on pretensions to novelty, uniqueness, secrecy, mysterious knowledge, and the acquisition of extraordinary religious benefits such as a favorable afterlife.80 Some experts alleged to represent a supreme deity, while others concocted elaborate eschatological narratives whose details and the effective preparation for which they alone could guarantee. Juvenal lampoons this dynamic in his sixth satire, which depicts frenzied acolytes of Phrygian Cybele, shaven, linenclad priests of Egyptian Osiris, and a Judean woman presenting herself as a high priestess and interpreter of the laws of Jerusalem seeking recompense from credulous Roman women who have unwittingly offended their respective gods.81 To be sure, the satirist’s depiction of women doling out fines to a hitherto unknown

77 Wendt 2016. 78 The earliest epigraphic evidence for Mithras is typically dated c. 80–120 CE. See Beck 1998. 79 Luc. Alex. 10–11. To say nothing of the fact that generating and interpreting literary oracles on demand is one of the cult’s principal services. See also Texts in this volume. 80 Stowers 2011a. 81 Iuv. 6.508–91.

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foreign god for neglecting to refrain from sex on his holy day is the stuff of hyperbole. Adjusted for bias, however, this strategy is not such a far cry from the diagnosis Paul lays out in Romans 1, that gentiles long ago enraged the Judean god by exchanging knowledge of him for idolatry and will be harshly punished unless they accept the very antidote to their plight that he now purveys. It is among these religious actors and the various religious social formations— scholastic circles, individual teacher-student relationships, initiations, and even doit-yourself guides for casting horoscopes or performing spells—that one begins to find evidence of ever more elaborate claims about and approaches to the gods, primary or exclusive allegiances to single gods, and totalizing demands on those to whom divine mysteries have been imparted. Hence, in what remains I will consider the role that self-authorized experts played in precipitating fundamental transformations in the character of Roman religiosity.

5

Intellectualizing Religious Experts

Earlier I touched on the ordinary, fairly modest beliefs about divine beings that structured the commonest types of interactions with them, namely, ones amounting to knowledge about what they were like, how to maintain balanced and continual relationships with them, and what humans might expect from such interactions.82 This sort of knowledge was rather different from that claimed by wouldbe experts who enlisted book-learning, reading, writing, and other intellectual content such as philosophy in the context of religious activities.83 And while many Roman-period intellectuals thought and wrote about divine beings, others employed skills such as allegorical interpretation, esoteric wisdom instruction, and the composition of new writings to communicate directly with such beings. The interpretation of inspired literature became increasingly prevalent throughout the ancient Mediterranean from the late Classical period onward and could be applied without limits to a miscellany of oracular or poetic texts.84 Notable examples from the pre-Roman world include the Derveni papyrus, a text of the fourthcentury BCE whose original author, a self-proclaimed priest, offers a proprietary interpretation of a cosmogonic poem that he characterizes as a repository of hidden knowledge conveyed in riddles. The sacred meanings of these riddles pertain to a punishing afterlife, escape from which entails both initiation into and the receipt of further instruction about his Orphic mysteries (but not those of his Orphic rivals); even these measures may prove insufficient if the initiate does not truly understand what he or she has seen and heard.85 Other ritual texts of the

82 Again, Rüpke 224–6. 83 For additional analysis of religious experts and their relationship to religious writings, see Texts in this volume. 84 The foundational treatment is that of Struck 2004. 85 Struck 2004, esp. 29–39; Edmonds 2013, esp. 95–138.

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Hellenistic period invoke the figure of Orpheus to similar ends, seemingly in conjunction with mysteries involving a particular aspect and mythology of Dionysus.86 By the Roman period, examples of symbolic interpretation had breached the repertoire of Greek texts and mythology. In the middle decades of the first century CE, Paul plumbed ›Judean oracles‹ and Greco-Roman philosophical discourses to animate a religious program offering initiation into the mysteries of the Judean god and his recently revealed Christ through a special rite called baptism.87 All of these elements worked together to prepare his gentile audiences ›in Christ‹ for a forthcoming eschatological scenario that would result in their divinization and immortality. Other readers of these (biblical) texts would not understand the clues concealed within them since only ones who possed Christ’s own spirit discerned their mysteries with unveiled minds.88 Such acts of interpretation were predicated on a shared epistemological orientation toward particular writings (often ancient and exotic ones), that they harboured concealed knowledge or mysteries elucidated only through specialized skills or ciphers. Since a god had encoded these communications, their decipherment amounted to a form of divination: the extraordinary meanings that experts teased from their respective corpora were not academic or theological speculation but are better understood as instances of mythmaking that explained, justified, and even necessitated other practices comprising their offerings.89 Sometimes, as in the case of Paul’s concept and mythology of Christ, literary divination might bring into focus a previously unknown, or new aspect of and role for a, divine being.90 It is among these intellectualizing experts that we can observe religious activities undergirded by loftier theological conceptions, more stringent requirements of practice, claims to exclusive and proprietary divine knowledge, and other characteristics associated with more modern concepts of religion or religious belief.91 That many also composed writings enabled the reinforcement, explanation, and defense of elaborate theological or eschatological schemes with many moving parts.92 Intellectualizing forms of religion that worked in this way—enmeshing rites and other religious practices with meanings, revealed knowledge, and so forth—were met with great enthusiasm during the Roman period. In this climate, expertise was fashioned increasingly along literate lines and value accrued especially to religious offerings rooted in writings.93 A remarkable quantity of texts known from this

86 Graf and Johnston 2013. 87 For analysis of Paul’s biblical exegesis as an instance of literary divination, see Wendt 2016 and 2017. 88 2 Cor 3:13–16, 4:3. 89 Stowers 2011b. 90 Stowers 2011b; Wendt 2017. 91 Stowers 2011a. 92 Marx Wolf 2016 captures this. See chapter ›Textuals production‹, pp. 244–246. 93 For discussion of the conditions that favored this development, see ibid., p. 247.

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period suggest such a context: works attributed to Hermes, Orpheus, or Pythagoras; Sibylline, Chaldean, and Judean oracles; books of ancient sages or seers; manuals for calculating horoscopes, casting lots, and interpreting dreams; and assorted socalled magical or ritual spells. The imperial period was also rife with confiscations at Rome of privately circulating Sibylline Oracles and other prophetic writings, including those attributed to the Persian sage Hystaspes and the Judean (again, biblical) prophets. This literature captures a range of aptitude and types of accompanying social formations but all examples have in common that they seem to have bolstered the authority of would-be religious experts and were indispensable to their practices. Given how competitive religious experts were with one another, and also with similarly self-authorized figures such as philosophers, it is worth considering the possibility that ostensibly heno- or monotheistic phenomena amounted to a competitive strategy that enabled individual experts to make totalizing and exclusive religious claims to privilege their own offerings at the expense of rivals. There has been considerable interest in the apparent rise of heno- or monotheism among not only Jewish and Christian, but also ›pagan‹ groups of the first three centuries.94 Accounts of late antiquity that once attributed this development to ›pagan‹ institutions giving way to the power of Judeo-Christian salvation have faltered for their triumphalism, although without a wholly satisfactory alternative. A productive path forward may lie in the activities of self-authorized religious experts, particularly those within this intellectualizing subset. Many of these figures alleged to represent and broker relationships with a single god, often one to whom they attributed supreme or singular abilities. They also tended to present their proprietary religious claims as a revealed and ultimate truth, largely to distinguish themselves from rivals, especially ones operating within the same ethnic idiom (Persian, Egyptian, Judean), affiliating with the same mythical founder (Orpheus, Pythagoras, Moses, Christ), or drawing upon the same texts (Orphic, Hermetic, Sibylline, Chaldean, Judean). Given the high degrees of competition and innovation that characterized this sort of religious activity, monotheism, exclusivity, and totalization might even be seen as predictable effects of its dynamics. In a context wherein religious experts vied with one another to become jacks-of-all-trades, championing an all-powerful divinity, whether Dionysus, Mithras, Isis, or Christ, might be viewed as the ultimate competitive strategy for safeguarding oneself and one’s religious program from any alternative. The freedom with which they sampled practices, technologies, and texts once associated with but increasingly dislocated from particular ethno-geographic conceptions was, likewise, germane to universalizing rhetoric. Mani, the founder of ›Manichaeism,‹ is a case in point: awash in the cultural riches of thirdcentury Iran, he pulled threads from ›traditions‹ that would become Christianity, Mazdayasnianism, Buddhism, and Jainism to weave a novel tapestry featuring a single divine truth revealed by a line of prophets that culminated in Mani himself. 94 See, e.g., the collection of critical essays in Mitchell and Van Nuffelen.

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Of special note is the hodgepodge of texts from these diverse and prior traditions that supplied the raw materials for his new theological architecture. In this and other examples we may be witnessing the development of a discursive concept of religion that approaches many associations of the modern one.95 It is difficult to measure the impact of such ideas and tactics on other forms of religious life under the empire; experts themselves invariably insist on their own revolutionary successes but there are obvious methodological challenges to trusting these accounts, even or especially in the case of Christian sources. Whatever influence they wielded contributed to a series of related developments that saw, among other examples, heightened competition between cultic and oracular institutions throughout the empire, expressed through communicative technologies that amplified the alleged supremacy of each site. Even if one can identify a shift in discourse about divinity or theology over the course of the first three centuries, it is less clear that such a shift precipitated broader changes in religion on the ground, so to speak. That being said, the institutions of Roman civic religion did mimic some of these trends, particularly in the third century, with the emperor Elagabalus’s (218–222 CE) promotion of his namesake, a Syrian solar deity, and Aurelian’s (270–275 CE) subsequent embrace of Sol Invictus.96 Theological currents of the later empire went hand-in-hand with legislative changes that broadened civic religious obligations through the extension of citizenship while also strengthening assumptions about the historical autonomy of local religious life.97 It is only in the fourth century, however, with Constantine’s official recognition of Christianity, that the empire witnessed an unprecedented collapse of the religion of intellectual experts into the civic religious institutions of the empire. Here, one finally encounters a concept of religion that resembles the modern category, though not without considerable political and institutional investment.

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95 See the excellent analysis of BeDuhn 2015. 96 Ando 2012; Salzman 2017. 97 Ando 2012, 122–45.

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Rüpke, Jörg 2018. Pantheon: A New History of Roman Religion. Princeton: Princeton University Press. — 2016. On Roman Religion: Lived Religion and the Individual in Ancient Rome. Townsend Lecture Series/Cornell Studies in Classical Philology. Ithaca: Cornell University Press. Salzman, Michelle Renee 2017. ›Aurelian and the Cult of the Unconquered Sun: The Institutionalization of Christmas, Solar Worship, and Imperial Cult.‹ In Expressions of Cult in the Southern Levant in the Greco-Roman Period: Manifestations in Text and Material Culture, ed. Oren Tal, Zeev Weiss. Turnhout: Brepols. 37–49. Scheid, John 1995. ›Graeco Ritu: A Typically Roman Way of Honouring the Gods,‹ HSCP 97: 15–31. Schultz, Celia E. 2006. Women’s Religious Activity in the Roman Republic. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press. Stark, Rodney 2007. Cities of God: The Real Story of How Christianity Became an Urban Movement and Conquered Rome. New York: HarperOne. — 1996. The Rise of Christianity: A Sociologist Reconsiders History. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Stowers, Stanley K. 2018. »Why ›Common Judaism‹ Does Not Look Like Mediterranean Religion.« In Strength to Strength: Essays in Appreciation of Shaye J.D. Cohen, ed. Michael L. Satlow. Providence: Brown University. 235–256. — 2011a. ›The Religion of Plant and Animal Offerings Versus the Religion of Meanings, Essences, and Textual Mysteries.‹ In Ancient Mediterranean Sacrifice, ed. Jennifer Wright Knust, Zsuzsanna Várhelyi. New York: Oxford University Press. 36–51. — 2011b. ›Kinds of Myth, Meals, and Power.‹ In Redescribing Paul and the Corinthians, ed. Ron Cameron, Merrill P. Miller. Early Christian Literature 5. Atlanta: Society of Biblical Literature. 105–150. — 2008. ›The Ontology of Religion.‹ In Introducing Religion: Essays in Honour of Jonathan Z. Smith, ed. Willi Braun, Russell T. McCutcheon. New York: Equinox. 434–449. Struck, Peter 2004. Birth of the Symbol: Ancient Readers at the Limits of Their Texts. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Versnel, Hendrik S. 2015. ›Prayer and Curse.‹ In The Oxford Handbook of Ancient Greek Religion, ed. Esther Eidinow, Julia Kindt. Oxford: Oxford University Press. 447–462. Wallace-Hadrill, Andrew 2008. Rome’s Cultural Revolution. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. — 2006. ›Mutatas Formas: The Augustan Transformation of Roman Knowledge.‹ In The Cambridge Companion to the Age of Augustus, ed. Karl Galinsky. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 55–84. Wendt, Heidi 2017. ›Galatians 3:1 as an Allusion to Textual Prophecy.‹ Journal of Biblical Literature 135: 369–389. — 2016. At the Temple Gates: The Religion of Freelance Experts in the Roman Empire. New York: Oxford University Press. — 2015a. ›Iudaica Romana: A Rereading of Judean Expulsions from Rome, Journal of Ancient Judaism 6: 97–126. — 2015b. ›Ea Superstitione: Christian Martyrdom and the Religion of Freelance Experts.‹ Journal of Roman Studies 105: 183–202.

Managing problems: Choices and solutions Richard Gordon

1

Introduction

The overall theme of this chapter is how families and individuals in the Roman Empire used religious forms as a response to contingent threats to their physical and social integrity. From one point of view, no doubt, all such efforts were doomed: given likely (urban) fertility/mortality rates in antiquity, it was improbable that any family would survive in recognisable form for much longer than three generations—even in the case of senators, for example, about one-third of families in the Late Republic would have had no surviving son over forty. But that was merely a frame-fact irrelevant to individual understandings of the options for meaningful, i.e. effective or instrumental, religious action available in critical situations. Insofar as we can speak of a ›religious system‹ in the Roman Empire, it is clear that investment, material and ideological, was extremely unevenly distributed.1 By far the most visible input occurred in major cities, where the elites used religious performance in the wide sense, i.e. including temple-building, games and public feasts, as a central mode of self-representation, closely aligned with the symbolic order represented by the emperor in Rome. Yet, in terms of sheer number, most religious acts took place in the agrarian sector, where the mass of the population lived, exposed as they were to the vagaries of weather, blight, animal pests, and contagious disease among the live-stock. But these innumerable acts were massively dispersed, followed for the most part an unreflective, seasonally-orchestrated habitus, and their marginal cost was almost always low. Inevitably, the civic religious regimes so created largely reproduced the interests of these elites.2 We can however identify three major areas in which these political orders recognised, and invested in, the perceived needs of their populations for help in contingencies: healing in the form of shrines mainly dedicated to the recovery of health; the reduction of uncertainty through public divinatory options; and the provision of spaces and ordinances relating to death. In each of these areas we can speak of a modelling relationship between the local public order and the familial or personal realm, whereby norms, practices and meanings were negotiated, reappropriated, cited and sometimes subverted. We may think of these as so many

1 By ›investment‹ here I mean simply the choice of allocating resources to one end rather than another. For a wider use of the term, see ›Introduction‹, p. 13. 2 Cf. Beard, North, Price 1998; Scheid 2013.

1 Introduction

167

specialised resources available to individuals and families beyond the basic protective routines which are generally bundled together as ›domestic religion‹. Since this chapter focuses on the management of individual problems by appeal to a plethora of ›invisible quasi-personal agents‹, i.e. ›powers‹ very variably instantiated in local polytheisms and individual imaginations/performances, its two main threads are materiality and ritualisation. The modern academic interest in materiality and material culture has many facets, most of which are irrelevant to the issues under discussion here.3 In the present context, two aspects are of importance. First, complementarity, that is, the inherent reflexivity of the relation objecthuman: by making things, people transform the world in accordance with their own immediate needs and desires and their technological capacities, yet these transformations, by becoming taken-for-granted frames for action, in turn direct human agency into certain modes, leading to the formation of habitus, the skilled but unselfconscious performance of complex routines around objects and sites.4 The second aspect is the irrepressible human tendency to turn objects into signs of something else, a tendency that is central to the religious project of antiquity. This applies not merely to features of the natural world, such as mountains, clefts, meteorological and astronomical phenomena, animals and their behaviour, but also to all the media employed to connote or intimate the culturally-constituted invisible-immaterial world, from monumental temples to the performance of prayer.5 Once such media exist they become ›discursive objects‹, open to strategic re-appropriation by different interests. We may think here of a practice such as Hindu darshan, whereby the development of an intimate reciprocity between worshipper and deity is based on the practice of gazing at images of a deity who in turn gazes at the worshipper.6 An excellent example from antiquity is the use of figurines and written amulets derived from polytheistic practices in the domestic sphere by Christians in Egypt.7 Ritualisation is best understood as a mode of empowerment through deliberate modification of environments, every-day action-sequences and language-behaviour. Given the role of habitus in human life, it is impossible to establish clear boundaries between meaningful repetition or routinisation of actions and ritualisation—it is more a question of nuance and intensification.8 Moreover, efforts at ritualisation in the context of religious communication themselves depend upon the prior existence of a ›tool-kit‹ of practices, signs, objects and utterances already

3 Compare the different approaches represented by e.g. Tilley et al. 2006; Bellinger, Krieger 2006; Henare at al. 2007. 4 Cf. Tilley 2006, 69. Moreover the existence of such objects implies a social recognition of the ›intrinsic‹ value of the cultural practices whose performance they enable or further (Wilburn 2012, 54–94). 5 Cf. Miller 2005, 20–9; Engelke 2005; Rüpke 2018a. See also chapter ›Artefacts‹, pp. 214–6. 6 Cf. Pinney 2002. 7 de Bruyn 2017; Frankfurter 2018, 54–63. 8 Cf. e.g. Michaels 2010.

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connoted within the local culture as effective in such contexts.9 Ritual competence is measured by the skill and originality with which selections from the tool-kit are made, combined and orchestrated both synchronically and diachronically. Complex ritualisation will thus involve all or some of the following: natural locations, buildings, equipment, substances, animals, non-verbal sound-effects (music, shrieks, babbling ...), elaborate action-sequences and extended utterance, shifting roles, differential treatment of time, natural and artificial light, narrativisation. All of these are variables; generally speaking, however, the lower the social station of the actor, and the smaller the overall investment in terms of time, energy and resources expended, the less prestigious the communication, even if it may be widespread in a particular social milieu.

2

Mainstream options

Since this chapter is mainly concerned with the management of problems, it is inappropriate to discuss domestic or family religion at any length, whose ›mutual tracking‹ with public cult is clear, except insofar as it offered rituals designed to protect people, live-stock and crops from harm.10 One example is a ritual during the Compitalia (late December) during which families in Rome, at any rate during the Republic, hung little images (effigies) representing their free members, and balls (pilae) representing the slaves, at the compital shrines scattered about the city, chiefly at street-junctions, so that the Lares (divinised ancestors) would be satisfied with them and spare the living; in late antiquity we hear that such images (sigilla, oscilla) were presented to Saturn instead of Underworld Dis, at the end of the Saturnalia (17–23 December, later extended), as a propitiatory offering for the head of the household and the entire household (pro se et suis).11 As for farms, the Elder Cato’s handbook on running a sizeable enterprise with slave-labour makes clear that, at any rate in the mid-second century BC, agrarian rituals were, or had been, regularly performed.12 Thus, when one needs ritually to purify a stretch of land, one is to arrange for a suovetaurilia, in this case the sacrifice of a male calf, piglet and lamb, to be offered to Mars, expressly requesting that the head of the family and all its members be kept healthy and the land protected from sickness, barrenness and freak weather conditions, so that the harvest, grain, vineyards and orchards may flourish, and the herdsmen and live-stock stay healthy.13 Another example is the elective procedure, which can be carried out by

9 Rüpke 2016, 100; 2018b. On ›ritual scaling‹, see also chapter ›Gods and other divine beings‹, pp. 144 and 151. 10 ›Mutual tracking‹: Bodel 2008a, 267; cf. Harmon 1978. 11 Festus ap.Paul. De sign. verb. 237 Lindsay; Macrob. Sat. 1.7.30; 11.49; cf. Bodel 2008a, 266. 12 E.g. Cato De agricultura 132, 134, 139–40, 143.2. All of these belong to the ›miscellany‹, the odd jottings from different sources that are found towards the end of the text. 13 Ibid. 141.

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a slave or a free person, for an annual offering of a votum to Mars Silvanus to protect the health of cattle: for each animal to be protected, one should place 3 Roman lbs of flour, 4½ lbs of animal fat, 4½ lbs of red meat in one vessel and 1½ litres of wine in another.14 Exactly what should be done with all this is not stated, since women are expressly forbidden to witness the ritual, let alone take part in it, and Cato (or the source) must have feared that his book might be read by such a person; but after the ceremony is over (ubi res divina facta est), it is to be eaten up (or possibly ›destroyed‹: consumito). To protect an entire herd of cattle, this would amount to a prodigious quantity of food, so the details must be suspect. Nevertheless, it is clear that, by being committed to writing, such ritual practices might become known, tried out, and if necessary adapted, far beyond the locality in which they originated (›Mars Silvanus‹, for example, is not otherwise attested, implying a very local origin for the ritual). Although later handbooks in Latin, such as those by Varro and Columella, contain no such instructions for ritual procedures, the Byzantine collection of agricultural tips in Greek known as Geoponica contains a number of ritualised remedies taken from earlier writings ascribed to ›Democritus‹, ›Zoroaster‹ and others. Weeds, for example, can be combatted by drawing a picture of Heracles strangling the Nemean lion on five ceramic sherds and burying them in the four corners of the field and in the centre, or by getting a naked virgin, with her hair down, to walk round the field holding a cockerel.15 The first of these simply transposes a very popular amuletic image to a directly instrumental purpose, while the second requires that the weed be the parasitic plant dodder, ›lion‹ in Greek, and depends on the widely-accepted ›fact‹ that lions are afraid of cockerels. Although family or domestic religion was to a degree integrated into the public festive calendar at Rome, most obviously in the major festivals for the dead and the ancestors, Parentalia and Caristia, and, under the Empire, the popular festival of the Rosalia, it was essentially a matter of individual choice by the head of the family or the proprietor of a craft-shop, as the archaeological remains from houses, gardens and work-places in Pompeii and Ostia show.16 The major investment by civic elites in religious means of coping with contingency lay elsewhere, in the monumentalisation and maintenance of sites for healing and divination on the one hand, and the establishment of necropoleis outside the limits of the inhabited area on the other.

2.1

Healing waters, therapeutic dreams

Given the combination of low life-expectancy, the incidence of infectious diseases, poor nutrition and medical ignorance, it is hardly surprising that there was a wide

14 Ibid. 83. 15 Geop. 15.1.9. 16 Bodel 2008a, 255–64; Van Andringa 2009, 217–70; in Greece, cf. Boedeker 2008, 240–3.

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variety of healers and healing practices in the Roman Empire, many of whom appealed to familiar forms of ritualisation and, in many cases, explicitly incorporated divine interventions into their procedures.17 The most widespread—indeed universal—form of healing took the form of what is commonly called ›popular medicine‹, essentially self-help based on the oral or written transmission of remedies for personal use and within the family, and, in the case of the rural population and land-owners, to cure or heal valuable domestic animals, and ward off infestation by pests such as beetles and caterpillars, cropblight and so on.18 This might also apply to freak weather conditions: holding up a cloth stained with the first menstrual blood of a virgin will keep hail away.19 Every adult knew a handful of remedies derived from herbs or animal parts, sometimes gender-specific,20 and, in case of need, would enquire from friends and neighbours for others; Galen, the personal doctor of the Emperor Marcus Aurelius (reigned 160–180 CE), collected remedies for his own long list from acquaintances and chance encounters, while in the fourth-century CE Marcellus of Bordeaux also collected from country-folk and ordinary people (ab agrestibus et plebeis).21 Hundreds, indeed thousands, of such remedies, from plants and animal parts, are listed in Pliny’s Natural History Bks. 19–32, compiled in the mid-first century CE, or in the late-antique indexed compilation known as ›Plinius Iunior‹.22 These works were themselves based ultimately on the activities of dozens of earlier practitioners, mediated through specialists (Gk: pharmakopôlai; Latin: medicamentarii), some of whom were literate. The majority of remedies listed in such works are purely pragmatic, i.e. offered without any ritualisation. For example: the plant staphylinus is a diuretic: the root helps against liver problems, diarrhoea, opisthotonus (violent spasms), pleurisy, epilepsy—and one can chew the leaves aganst indigestion; cytinus-flowers stop excessive menstruation, heal mouth-sores and sore-throats, help against spitting blood, upset tummy, problems with genitals, running sores ...23 The Elder Cato advises treating an ox that has been bitten by a poisonous snake by administering through the nostrils a mixture of melanthium (black cummin?) steeped in wine, and smearing pig’s dung on the wound.24 In all such cases, it was left to the individual to identify the ailment, choose among the remedies offered, determine the length of time one was prepared to follow a given regime before trying another, and acknowledge a point at which one might pronounce oneself, the patient or the animal ›cured‹. At the same time, any of the items might be used as an amulet, a practice we would think of as ›magical‹,

17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24

E.g. Steger 2004, 19–75. Gil 2004; Draycott 2016; Harris 2016. Geoponica 14.1.2. One thinks, for example, of the Elder Cato’s wonder-drug, brassica (cabbage): De agricultura 156–158. Galen: Nutton 2016; Marcellus: Med. 1 prol. 2, with Motta 2006. Gaillard-Seux 1998a; Bonet 2014. Pliny HN 20.30–32; 23.112; Bonet 2003. Cato De agricultura. 92.

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but in such cases ›external application‹ was considered merely a pragmatic extension to the ingestion of a herbal remedy. Thus the ›Samian stone‹ is an effective amulet against miscarriage; Plinius Iunior advises making an amulet against quartan fever by cutting the head off a snake (vipera) and tying it to the patient in a linen bag; an amulet in the form of a maggot from the corpse of a rabid dog will reduce the horror (pavor); according to the Byzantine Geoponica, wolves will not attack flocks of sheep if the shepherd carries a bulb of Mediterranean squill about with him.25 From this point on, though, as we shall see later, ritualisation might take more pronounced forms: to prevent a sore on the groin from swelling up, Iunior recommends tying nine knots in a thread (licium), each time uttering the name of a different widow (mulieres viduas), and then tying the string to the ankle or leg.26 Among the Elder Cato’s farm remedies is a very slightly ritualised preventive cure for an off-colour ox, which consists in a) giving him a whole raw egg to swallow; and b) making him next day drink a mixture of leek-leaves mashed with wine. For this, the cowherd must use a wooden container and stand up while mashing the leek; the ox too must be standing, and both should not have eaten anything that day.27 More heavily ritualised is the remedy later in the book for treating a work-ox’s dislocated limb that involves chanting nonsense syllables (voces magicae, e.g. motas vaeta daries dardaries astataries dissunapiter) as the two sides of a split green reed (a common remedy for sprains and dislocations) are applied to the lesion.28 Both in Greece and at Rome, cities had always felt the need to take defensive action against serious epidemics (or other general ills) afflicting both humans and domestic animals, whether indirectly by consulting major oracles for advice or by direct action in the form of customary special sacrifices, for example lectisternia at Rome.29 Inasmuch as widespread infectious or contagious illness, both in humans and animals, might be interpreted as punishment for, say, impiety or civil war or, so personal guilt might be understood as a possible cause of illness, albeit only under relatively specific circumstances—in the great majority of cases personal illness, especially when it involved ailments recognised in popular nosology, was understood as part of the human condition, as ›fate‹. In specific areas, however, such as the valley of the Hermus (Turkish: Gediz) in Lydia, local temples might foster, through the medium of an oracular response, the interpretation of more serious illness as due to a specific offence against a god, whereby death might well

25 Samian stone: Pliny HN 36.152; Plin. Iun. Med. 3.15.3; 3.10.4; squill: Geopon. 18.17 (and see n.131 below). 26 Plin. Iun. Med. 2.22.2. The word licium here underscores the ritualisation, cf. Pliny HN 23.125; 28.48; 83. 27 Cato, De agricultura 71. 28 De agricultura 160. The recipe, which is part of the ›miscellany‹, has been re-edited and as it stands is incoherent, cf. Gordon 2007, 118–22. 29 In Greece: Thuc. 2.47.2–48.3; Plut. De def. orac. 417d, 419f, 434c, 435d; Amat. narr. 773d etc.; Paus. 2.7.2–8; 9.22.1–2, cf. Burkert 2011, 395–401; Republican Rome: Wazer 2004.

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be seen as final proof.30 For example, in 253/4 CE a wealthy woman, Cornelia Bassa (Fig. 16) had a stela erected outside such a temple near Saittai, whose upper register shows her standing beside an altar over against a temple priest, after admitting that though she was ill she had refused to accept that it was a divine punishment. Below this scene are figures representing the family acclaiming the god’s healing power. It was precisely here that Christian therapeutics tended to lay its major stress, above all in the fictive lives of miracle-working saints, and thus succeeded

Fig. 17: The ›confession stela‹ of Claudia Bassa (253/4 CE) from near Saittai, Lydia (Turkey) (= Petzl 1998 no. 12). Musée Cinquantenaire, Brussels, inv. no. A4147. Copyright: Royal Museums of Art and History, Brussels. Photo: G. Petzl.

30 See e.g. Petzl 1994, 1998. See also chapter ›Sanctuaries‹, p. 87.

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over the longer term in changing the character of healing shrines.31 Nevertheless appeal for divine aid continued into the Empire to seem appropriate in the face of large-scale epidemics. Several responses by the oracle of Apollo at Claros near Colophon on the west coast of Asia Minor (Turkey) are known against the ›Antonine Plague‹ (c.165–190 CE), in one case advising the city to set up statues of the gods outside the city-gates or, in another case probably involving Sardis, to organise processions in honour of Artemis of Ephesus and solemnly burning certain wax dolls that had been discovered and were understood by the people to be the cause of an outbreak of pestilence.32 A similar pattern of public undertakings in the face of epidemics and famines continued far into the Byzantine period.33 Hundreds of votives survive recording restorations of health by a range of deities, grand, like Zeus, Apollo, Artemis or Serapis, middling, such as Herakles, Pan or Mên Axiottenos, or local, such as petty ›Zeuses‹, Iunones, Dianae, Nymphae, or heroes, in Greece especially at statues of Homeric warriors and famous athletes, but very little is known of how such cures were effected.34 However, we know that In late Pharaonic and Graeco-Roman Egypt, for example, it was common practice to drink holy water that had been poured over a ›Horus-stela‹, thus acquiring curative power by contact with the sacred image.35 The main focus of this section, however, is upon ritualised healing of individual patients at springs, pools, streams or locations, such as the myrtle-plantations above Baiae, where sulphurous vapours rose out of the earth, on the one hand, and therapeutic incubation on the other. Springs, hot and cold, were exploited immemorially for healing purposes and, once they had been monumentalised and commercially exploited, often recommended by school doctors.36 Several around Rome were renowned for helping with specific disorders, such as Albulae, near Tibur, for wounds, the cold spring at Cutilia in the Sabinum for stomach, tendons and ›the entire body‹, or the aquae Nepesinae (Nepi, Etruria) for stomach and bladder problems.37 Indeed, healing waters became a major literary topos, especially with the increasing concern for bodily welfare under the Empire.38

31 See the papers in Dal Covolo; Sfameni Gasparro 2008, esp. Filoramo 2008. 32 Busine 2005, 89–93; Jones 2016; Sardis: Graf 1992 on SEG 41: 981. In other cases, evidently, ›doctors‹ advised burning clothes and other infected items: Plut. De Is. et Osir. 383c; cf. Duncan-Jones 2018. 33 Cf. e.g. Joh. Malalas Chron. 18.92 (ed. Thurn) with Congeourdeau 1993. 34 E.g. Gorrini 2012. 35 E.g. Gasse 2004. 36 Cf. Vitruv. De arch. 8.4–5; Pliny HN 31.3–8; 33.4–5; useful surveys in Campbell 2012, 330–68; Bassani, Bolder-Boos and Fusco 2019, 9–112. Recommended: e.g. Soran. Gynaec. 1.56, 3.16, 28, 32 etc. On ›monumetalisation‹, see further chapter ›Sanctueries‹, pp. 64–72. 37 Aquae Albulae: Pliny HN 31.10, cf. Suet. Aug. 82.2 (numbness in feet); Nero 31; aquae Cutiliae: Pliny HN 31.10; Nepesinae: Cael. Aurel. Morb acut. 3.2.45; 5.4.77; Aquae Auguriae (ibid. 5.4.77). In old age, the famous general Caius Marius († Jan. 86 BCE) visited the hot springs at Baiae on the Gulf of Naples for rheumatism: Plut. Mar. 34.2. 38 E.g. Guérin-Beauvois 2007. On water as an aspect of religious ›technology‹, see chapter ›Artefacts‹, pp. 227.

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We may take it for granted that most healing waters were associated with deities of one status or another, even if this is not mentioned by our sources.39 Many however were explicitly so linked, for example the nymphs of an unknown site at or near Ostia, the late-Republican hydrotherapeutic installation below the lower terrace of the temple of Diana at Nemi, the springs of Salus (= Hygia) Umeritana at Flaviobriga in Hispania Tarraconensis, the hot springs of Herakles at Aidêpsos on Euboea, the grand sites in the Tiberias basin in Syria-Palaestina such as Hammat-Gader and Hammat-Selim.40 Typically such places attracted a regional clientèle, which expected to be treated by an experienced ›lay‹ staff, including slaves, in addition to ritual experts. The degree of ritualisation undoubtedly varied widely: patients had in effect agreed to relinquish at least some of their right to selfdetermination by coming to such a site, and ritualisation might well be understood both as a reassurance and as a form of pressure. Votives, both visible and invisible (e.g. submerged in the waters), played a central role not merely in affirming a selfdiagnosed ›cure‹ but also in the self-staging of such sites, which were in the nature of things often relatively remote and troublesome to reach. Particularly instructive examples of the dynamic combination of material investment and ritualised healing are the grand octagonal temple and the associated baths of Longeas at Chassenon (Charente), with their unusual double caldarium, the pools at the sources of the Seine, with their wide variety of votives in bronze, stone and wood; the hot springs of Sulis Minerva at Bath where multiple votives including altars, manufactured objects and coins have been recovered, the crowded sanctuary at the Hermon spring of Banyas near Caesarea Philippi in the Golan Heights, or the series of basins linked to the sacred lake at the temple of Hathor at Dendera in Upper Egypt.41 In some cases, such as the fons Aponi, a thermal lake at S. Pietro Montagnon in the Veneto, or, as we shall see in the following section (2.2.1), the Clitumnus, an oracle intensified the ritualisation by assisting in the production of diagnoses.42 The appearance of female consorts of male healing divinities in NW Europe apparently attests to a localised awareness of the need to adapt the mode of ritualisation to the perceived needs of a wider clientèle.43 The other major form of institutionalised healing under the auspices of divinity was incubation, primarily, but by no means exclusively, in temples and shrines of Asclepius, some in connection with springs. Already by the mid-Hellenistic period

39 Esp. in the Galliae: Deyts 1990. 40 Ostia: e.g. CIL 14. 4322 (a man apparently saved from rabies, 199 CE); Nemi: Ghini and Diosono 2012, 121; Flaviobriga: CIL 2. 2917 = AE 1998: 773 with Iglesias Gil and Ruis Gutiérrez 2014; Aidêpsos: Strabo 9.4.2; cf. Plutarch De fratr. amore 487f; Quaest. conviv. 667c with Campbell 2012, 360; Tiberias basin: Dvorjestski 2007, 57–61. See chapter ›Sanctuaries‹, p. 89 and chapter ›Economy and religion‹, p. 290. 41 Longeas: Hourcade 1999; Seine: Deyts 1969 (whose interpretation I follow, as well as that of the museum at Dijon, where the finds are kept); Bath: Cunliffe and Davenport 1985; Cunliffe 1988; Banyas: Rieger 2018; Dendera: Cauville 1990, 90–1. 42 Champeaux 1990, 279 n.17; Zanovello 2007. 43 Ferlut 2016.

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at least 171 Asklepieia are known to have existed on the Greek mainland alone, and by the early Empire over 730 are known from outside Greece.44 Although the size of such installations varied, these figures represent an enormous effort of investment in the ritualisation of health-care,45 mainly at individual initiative but with the eventual support of the local council, expressed in the installation of a public priesthood, the provision of public money for buildings and the allocation of public land for the upkeep of the shrine. It is now generally understood that, just as there was no clear distinction in practical, as opposed to theoretical, terms between ›popular‹ and school medicine, so both of these were fully integrated into temple-medicine.46 Institutionalised incubation represents the high point of the ritualisation of medical intervention: before patients could experience incubation (Gk: kataklisis; engkoimêsis) in the hall provided, purity rules (abstention from wine, for example) had to be observed, ablutions performed, sacrifices and other offerings (the ›sacred portion‹) provided, prayers spoken, acclamations such as ›io paian!‹ shouted, emoluments disbursed to the staff.47 The most informative neutral description of the proceedings at such a shrine is provided by the Greek periegete Pausanias (writing c.150 CE) in the case of the Amphiareum at Oropus on the north coast of Attica facing the island of Euboea.48 By contrast with healing springs, the spring here, from which the hero Amphiaraos was himself supposed to have emerged, was not used for purifications or ablutions but only as a receptacle for coined money thrown in recompense for successful healing. Patients prepared themselves by abstaining from wine for three days, and from food for one. They then sacrificed a ram, with whose blood they purified themselves. Once the carcass had been flayed, they lay down to sleep on the fleece, in company with other patients, in a stoa 110m in length at the far end of the site from the temple, the materiality of the dead animal’s fleece acting as a communicative medium between sacrificant and the other world. Relevant dreams might not occur at once; when they did, they seem to have taken one of two forms: either the god appeared with a diagnosis,49 injunction or remedy, often enough, as is apparent from Aelius Aristides‹ Sacred Discourses (written c. 170–175 CE), enigmatic or baffling, and requiring interpretation; or the god was observed to perform a healing act, such as the removal ›with his hands‹ of P. Aelius Isidoros‹ lump on the spleen.50 Such reports belong of course to the informal discursive rules of these sites, which required the representation of ›conventional‹, i.e. ordinary surgical and medical, interventions by the staff, such as phlebotomies

44 45 46 47 48 49 50

Riethmüller 2005, 2: 9–315; Renberg 2017, 1: 124–66. E.g. Känel 2015. Horstmanshoff 2004, 337–8. A dissenting opinion in Artemidorus, Oneir. 4.22. Steger 2004, 104–25; Petridou 2016, 437–9; Renberg 2017, 167–268. Paus. 1.34.4–5; Philostr. Apoll. Tyan. 2.37, with Renberg 2017, 1: 272–94, 310–5. E.g. IG 42.1, 127. IGUR 1, 104, cf. Artemidorus Oneir. 2.44.

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or routine application of herbal and animal-part remedies, dietary regimes, gymnastics, mud-baths, going for walks without shoes, or plunging into hot or cold water, as acts or injunctions by the deity. These discursive rules in turn framed the images commissioned as votives, for example those found in the Asklepieia below the Acropolis in Athens and in the Piraeus.51 The routinisation of incubation as a medical recourse is evident from the prevalence both of what we might call ›autoritualisation‹, by which the decision to surrender oneself to Asklepios‹ care is represented, at least in retrospect, say in constructing a formal narrative, as ›pre-incubation‹, i.e. warning dreams bidding the patient-elect to consult the god, and by the frequent habit of attending such temples on behalf of someone else, a family member or friend.52 Such representations also exemplify, or rather suggest, the advance possession of requisite trust in the god’s power and/or emotional commitment to the experience of residing in the sacred area; temples themselves might represent disbelief or scepticism as impiety towards the god.53 This theme of trust is affirmed by the Greek geographer Strabo in his account (written before c. 21 CE) of the famous incubatory shrine of Serapis at Canopus at one of mouths of Nile, in which »the most eminent men have trust and (where they) perform incubation either on their own account or for others«.54 By far the fullest surviving account of the incubation experience is Aelius Aristides‹ sophisticated retrospective account in the six books of the Sacred Discourses of the long periods he spent at the Asklepeion of Pergamum in the Roman province of Asia (now Bergama in north-western Turkey) and the intimate relationship he developed with the god through dreams, reflection, and discussion.55 Although it is clear that the subject is not so much the god as Aristides‹ own rhetorical persona, the main point to emphasise here is Aristides’ presentation of a group of ›servants‹ of the god (syntherapeutai), including M. Sedatius Severianus, the orator Claudius Pardalas, and P. Afranius Favianus, all of them eminent Roman citizens—the schooldoctor Galen too had an intense and enduring relation to the god Asklepios, and as a young man spent time at this Asklepeion. They are shown exchanging the details of their dreams and discussing not just their interpretation, independently of the official oneirokritai (dream-interpreters), but also the meaning of symptoms and signs, the nature of illness, and the value of different therapies, such as risky phlebotomies, in the context of their more or less long-term residence in the city and attendance at the shrine.56 Aelius Aristides thus represents himself and this elite circle as capable of taking responsibility themselves, with the god, for the treatment of their ailments, and so deconstructing the usual hierarchy of authority at such shrines. We may take it that analogous strategies of self-empowerment,

51 52 53 54 55 56

Renberg 2017, 2: 634–49. E.g. IG 42.1, 126, with Steger 2004, 154–9; also Aristides Or. 50, 14–8. Epidaurus: IG 42.1, 258; Pergamum: I.Perg. 3, 161a; cf. Philostr. Apoll. Tyan. 1.19. Strabo Geogr. 17.1.17, 801C. E.g. Petsalis-Diomidis 2010, 122–50; Downie 2013. Petridou 2018.

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through command of medicalised discursivity, negotiation of ritual procedures, and/or insistence on the clarity and immediacy of personal revelations, might be deployed informally by many other patients in order to assert a degree of selfdetermination vis-à-vis the staff. Ritualisation in such cases should be understood as one among several means of re-valuing dreams so as to make them the basis of personal therapeutic authority.

2.2

Divinatory shrines

»The gods believe that you birds reveal their intentions«.57 In wittily rejecting the sceptical assumption that divination is human self-delusion, the Augustan poet Ovid here manages to assert both that there truly are divine signs, delivered for example through the behaviour of birds, and that these, when rightly interpreted, are veridical. But which signs are truly divine? And what is a correct interpretation?58 Both at the level of political discourse and in everyday life, ›signs‹ in the Roman world were thus always a matter of debate: what, if anything, did it mean when the emperor Nero suffered a fit of shivering as he entered the shrine of Vesta in the Forum one day in 64 CE?59 What, if anything, does it mean when I feel an unexpected twitch in my left thigh? In a world in which there were any number of small-time diviners,60 and any event could be understood as a sign of some event or state in the near future,61 questions of authority were central, not merely for the sake of social order but also in safeguarding the viability of the meaning-system itself. Both considerations demanded that criteria of evaluation be developed, which in effect meant the establishment of a hierarchy of authoritative instances. We may here ignore the role of incidental signs with possible implications for the public realm, such as the ›grim‹ comet that repeatedly appeared in the reign of Nero, or the abandoned two-headed baby found in rubbish, again in 64 CE, however striking they may have seemed at the time.62 Their value as signs could only be established retrospectively, after the event or calamity they supposedly portended; under the Empire such signs were inevitably focused on the emperor himself, as the embodiment of the political order. As such, they found their proper place in the mood-settings required by grand historiography. If we are to think in terms of attempts to structure and manage private divination, we need to look to institutionalised oracles, which were major reference-points for individuals and families in need of advice about anxieties, illness, and especially prospective decisions of some importance.

57 Ovid Fasti 1.446. 58 See e.g. Cic. Div. 1.108 = Ennius Ann. 72–91 Skutsch, with Rüpke 2016, 100–3; cf. Santangelo 2013, 47–54. 59 Tacitus Ann. 15.36.3, cf. Shannon 2018. 60 Cf. Cic. Div. 1. 132, and see § 4 below. 61 Pliny HN 2.24; cf. Potter 1994. See also chapter ›Gods and Other Divine Beings‹, p. 152. 62 Resp. Pliny HN 2.92; Tac. Ann. 15.47.2, cf. Weber 2000; Vigourt 2001.

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Oracles, mainly in Italy

Although there were modes that do not easily fit, such as dreams and personal encounters with deities (epiphanies), it was usual in antiquity to distinguish between inductive and inspirational forms. The famous institutionalised oracles in the Greek-speaking world were mainly variations on the latter type: at Delphi in central Greece and Didyma (Fig. 17) on the west coast of Turkey, for example, the utterances of a female medium were reduced to intelligible responses by an organised body of officials; at Claros, the priest himself uttered verse oracles after drinking water from the sacred spring, while at the oracle of Zeus Ammon in the oasis of Siwa in Egypt, the response was communicated by mute signs.63 In Italy, by contrast, except for the wealthy shrine of the two ›truthful sisters‹ (Fortunae) at Antium or the woodpecker at the shrine of Picus Martius at Tiora Matiene (Torano near L’Aquila), which was however probably disused by the late Republic, almost all the important oracular sites were based on cleromancy, a form of ›inductive‹ divination involving lots, evidently in the form of slips of wood bearing prepared sentences or phrases.64 The great majority of these sites, which cluster in

Fig. 18: The perron leading up to the entrance of the oracular temple of Apollo at Didyma (Didim, Turkey) (Photo: A. Heitmann).

63 Cf. Lampinen 2013. 64 Champeaux 1986; 1990; Buchholz 2013; Oria Segura 2017.

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Central Italy (Etruria, Latium, Umbria), with some outliers, were established in some form in early times and only later monumentalised. A few, however, such as the oracle of Hercules Victor at Ostia, were not founded until the late Republic; the nymph Albunea at Tibur (Tivoli) seems to have been turned into the Tiburtine Sibyl at about the same time, and the temple remodelled. Many of these oracular sites were established at remarkable natural locations, that of Albunea for example, at the impressive falls of a sulphurous spring, or that of Jupiter Appenninus among steep rocks at Scheggia off the Via Flaminia in northern Umbria. None were in Rome itself. The most vivid description of such a site, at the source of the Clitumnus, near Spoleto in Umbria, set on rising ground amid woods, is provided by Pliny the Younger, who passed through on his way to northern Italy in 107 CE.65 A statue of the god Clitumnus, dressed in a real magistrate’s toga, stood in the temple cella, whose walls were covered in inscribed dedications (leges), besides hundreds of pious graffiti written by those unable to afford a proper inscription. Typically, however, such oracles were sacralised not just by sacred groves, buildings and dedications (of which the most spectacular was the temple of Fortuna Primigenia at Praeneste, a triumph of collective investment on the grand scale by major local families in the mid-second century BCE),66 but also by means of narratives corroborating their special status: a statue of the nymph Albunea holding her scroll was ›found‹ in the stream; the alleged founder of the oracle at Praeneste, Numerius ›Suffustius‹, was instructed in repeated dreams to split a block of stone, out of which there fell lots engraved with antique lettering; the lot-oracle of ›Geryon‹ near Padua was so called because Hercules, on his way from Hispania to Greece with Geryon’s cattle, ploughed the spot, thus producing a famous curative hot spring; a statue of Hercules Victor, wearing a military cuirass and wielding his club, was fished up in a net outside the harbour of Ostia at the mouth of the Tiber.67 This last legendary event is depicted in the right-hand scene on a votive relief dating to 75–50 BCE, and dedicated by the Ostian haruspex C. Fulvius Salvis.68 The central scene represents the cult-statue, now holding his club over his left shoulder, handing a lot marked s]ort(es) [or s]ort(is)] H(erculis), to a small boy who stands on the other side of an altar. Above this altar two oblong shapes seem to represent an opened wax-tablet. To the boy’s left, a figure, presumably the dedicator himself, is represented holding such a tablet towards another person (unfortunately the relief is broken at this point). The focal point is the altar with the lot, marking the moment at which a divine utterance passes into the material world and so reaches the hands of the consultant in written form. A similar medium was used at Praeneste, where the lots were kept in a chest made of wood from an olive-tree on the site, from which honey had dripped at the time of their discovery; when required

65 66 67 68

Pliny Epist. 8.8. Coarelli 1987, 35–84; Wallace-Hadrill 2008, 111–6. Resp. Cicero, De div. 2. 85; Claudian Idyll. 6. 25–30, cf. Riemann 1987. CIL I2 3027, cf. Cébeillac-Gervasoni; Cadelli; Zevi 2010, 115–7.

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for consultation, they were picked out and shuffled by a boy.69 Such practices helped intimate that the lot(s) transmitted were truly god-directed, just as the messages inscribed were ›timeless‹.70 This type of institutionalised cleromancy with inscribed lots was thus identical in principle to ›popular‹ cleromancy (see § 3 below), with the exception that the texts, being invented by the temple staff on the god’s behalf, limited the type of prediction on offer, which was not the case with individual seers using the same method, who relied upon drawing multiple lots each answering a succession of different but of course related questions (see below). Limiting available answers is one type of control; another is the fact that civic investment into such oracular sites—Augustus for example gave the site of the Clitumnus spring to the town of Hispellum, which invested in a bathing-establishment and other infrastructure— ensured greater prestige for such institutions. This enabled them to be used to check or confirm predictions or claims by individual ritual specialists, thus helping to protect the divinatory enterprise as a whole against scepticism and disconfirmation. On the other hand, the physical location of these oracular sites outside major political centres allowed them to exploit the elective affinity between prescriptively wild nature and authentic divine presence, prompting the Younger Pliny to the phrase praesens numen atque etiam fatidicum indicant sortes, ›the lots attest to the god’s living presence and his prophetic power‹.71 And although Cicero, in the role of sceptic, claims that no educated person or office-holder would dream of consulting such oracles, which are patronised only by the common people (vulgus),72 we hear of several emperors making visits, even as late as Claudius II (reigned 268–70 CE). Despite the significance of these oracular sites among the divinatory resources of Italy, almost nothing is known about the texts inscribed on the lots. Literary evidence is suspect: Livy reports that in 217 BCE, the year of the disastrous Roman defeat at Cannae, a lot that jumped ›by itself‹ out of its container at Faleriae bore the text Mavors telum suum concutit, ›Mars is brandishing his spear‹; the future emperor Tiberius was allegedly told by a lot that his question would only be answered if he rolled golden dice into the sacred pool; the Historia Augusta obligingly supplies three lots from Jupiter Appenninus for Claudius II, but they are all citations from Vergil’s Aeneid.73 There survive just a handful of probable lots, almost all of them in the form of thin slips of metal. However, the practices they imply differ from one another. One main group was discovered in northern Italy, during the Renaissance, at ›Bahareno della Montagna‹. The find consisted originally of at least fifteen oblong

69 Cic. De div. 2. 86, cf. Tibullus 1.3.11–13 (written c.25 BCE). 70 Champeaux 1997. 71 Pliny the Younger Ep. 8.8.5. On the exploitation of natural environments, see also chapter ›Sanctuaries‹, p. 62. 72 Cic. De div. 2.86. 73 Resp. Livy 22.1.1; Suet. Tib. 63.1; Hist. Aug. Claud. 10.4–6.

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bronze slips, two with rings at one end, perhaps implying that they were hung on a wire; both of these survive in museums, while the texts of the others, all lacking this detail, are given in manuscript sources.74 Some, such as ›Certainty does not come from the uncertain: watch out, if you are wise‹, acknowledge the uncertainty of the future; others imply criticism of the consultant: ›Why do you ask advice after the time? What you ask is not the case‹. Others again are more reassuring: ›I am not (one of those) lying (oracles) you have spoken of; ask away, fool‹; ›I command (the consultant) to engage (in the course of action suggested); if he does so, he will always rejoice‹; ›Ask away confidently; you will always be pleased at what is to be granted (you)‹. These texts are in a variety of verse forms, several of them , e.g. ne fore stultu; gaudebit semending in a dactyl followed by a spondee ( per). But all are written in gnomic style;75 twelve address the implied consultant directly as ›you‹, and in five the implied author speaks in the first person. It also seems likely that the oracle assumed basic literacy on the part of consultants, unless we are to imagine a significant interpretative role for the sortiarius in communicating responses and suggesting new questions. Nevertheless, lot oracles of this type gained much of their authority by overtly ignoring circumstantial or social knowledge in favour of ›impersonal‹ responses mediated by writing, thus leaving ample scope for the interpretative ingenuity of the questioner. Irrespective of the self-understanding of the authors of these texts, which remains opaque to us, as far as questioners were concerned, the randomness of the lot proved that the hand of a god was at work, while the challenge lay in exercising one’s own capacity for insight. 2.2.2

The eastern Mediterranean

During the second century CE, well over thirty cities in the south-central area of Asia Minor (modern Turkey) funded the installation of public dice- and alphabetoracles, located, it seems, in temple-areas.76 All divination of this kind proceeds by creating a ›field‹ crossed by chance: the ›bed‹ of dice-oracles consisted of a list of 56 gnomic answers in hexameters inscribed on all four sides of a large block of marble almost 2m high, that of alphabet oracles a slab with 24 answers (the number of letters in the Greek alphabet), mostly in iambics. Such installations are evidently more ›open‹, medialised versions of Italic lot-oracles, and stimulated in turn a number of further experiments for private use, whose descendants include the Coptic Gospel of the Lots of Mary and the medieval Latin Sortes Sangallenses.77 Asia Minor however also boasted a number of major public oracles, such as the incubation oracle of the mythical seers Amphilochus and Mopsus at Mallos in Cilicia, which Pausanias in the second century CE described as ›the most veridical of 74 75 76 77

CIL 12.2183, cf. Grottanelli 2005. Polizzano 2009–12. Graf 2005. Luijendijk 2014, 95–143; Klingshirn 2005.

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those in operation down to my day‹.78 There were also several oracles of Apollo, the most prestigious of which were those at Claros and Didyma, mentioned above. Both were acutely conscious of their place in the Roman system of power;79 the surviving responses show that they answered a wide range of questions of both public and private concern. Many responses reveal a particular interest in cultic issues, and from the second century increasingly recommend a new, internalised form of piety, centred on personal prayer and contemplation. Especially in the third century, Claros provided a spear-head against Christian claims and influence in western Asia Minor.80 Alongside Claros and Didyma, however, the second century also saw the dramatic rise to fame and prosperity of a new kind of Apolline oracle in Asia Minor, namely the ›autophone‹, in which the god spoke to the consultant directly in the form of a snake with a human-face and long hair. Among the writings of the satirist Lucian of Samosata (c. 120–after 180) has survived an unforgettably biting portrait of an unscrupulous religious entrepreneur, Alexander, who built up such an oracular business in the small town of Abonouteichos, diversifying his project later by staging public processions and mysteries, creating ›interesting‹ images of the bewigged snake as a logo, and even managing to marry the daughter of a Roman senator, P. Mummius Sisenna Rutilianus.81 This success was based upon the oracle’s tireless production of positive narratives, including the claim that Alexander, like the semimythical Greek sage Pythagoras, had one thigh made of gold and was probably actually a reincarnation; while the equally one-sided claims by its enemies, who saw nothing but fraud and manipulation, ensured that everyone continued to talk of it. It seems likely that Lucian’s charlatan is at least partly a composite figure, but the fact that the town of Abonuteichos, and indeed other cities in the vicinity, started to mint a limited bronze coinage (c. 162–68 and later into the third century) bearing the image of the snake proves not only its historical core but also the intense interest of the civic authorities in the success of the enterprise as a mark of distinctive local identity.82 Here there is no opposition between personal charisma and civic advantage.

2.3

Settling the dead

Until Late Antiquity, there was no Latin word for ›cemetery‹: one spoke of graves (sepulcra, tumuli, monumenta) but not of a specific space allocated to them. The Greek word nekropolis, ›City of the Dead‹, which is nowadays used to refer to these spaces, referred in antiquity solely to a suburb of Alexandria, where there were

78 79 80 81 82

Paus. Perieg. 1.34.5, cf. Strabo Geogr. 14.5,16 (675C); Plutarch De defect. orac. 45, 481ab. Busine 2013. Busine 2004; 2005. Sfameni Gasparro 1999; Elm von der Osten 2006. Petsalis-Diomidis 2010, 31–4.

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›gardens and tombs and facilities for embalming corpses‹.83 This perspective was appropriate, since tombs were essentially familial projects, rather than collective or individual ones, and it was familial tradition, within the limits of the financial resources available but also with respect to age-differences, that governed the manner in which rituals were understood and performed in order to produce a ›really fine funeral that all the neighbours would praise‹.84 The ritual sequence of the ›Roman funeral‹, from the laying-out to the ritualised meal of ›the ninth [i.e. eighth] day‹ (novendialis cena), pieced together from literary sources by scholars since the Renaissance, can thus at best be thought of as an ideal which few families apart from the social elite could think of living up to.85 At any rate in Latium and Campania, however, the sequence provided a horizon of aspiration, even if in practice numerous compromises had to be made. In other words, if a modern archaeoethnographer could watch the ordinary funerals of the middling to poorer urban population of the first and second centuries CE, he or she would find that they bore little resemblance to the literary descriptions. The archaeology of non-elite burials in the area tends to confirm this intuition.86 2.3.1

Monumentum and sepulcrum

The death of a family-member had emotional, financial and ritual consequences, whose management was a major component of domestic religion. As is well known, funerary inscriptions outnumber all other types by a large factor: almost 90% of the c. 95,000 inscriptions from the City of Rome, published and unpublished, are epitaphs;10,000 funeraries have been recorded in North Africa west of Tripoli/Libya; the total number from the Empire as a whole must amount to rather less than 200,000. Even so, to put these figures into perspective, in the important military settlement at Bonn, where at the very least c. 55,000 legionaries, to say nothing of auxiliaries, will have been stationed between, say, 10 BCE and 250 CE, only 130 have left tomb-stones that survive, despite the fact that legionary soldiers disposed of far more cash than the great majority of the provincial population.87 Especially on the land, where the great majority of the population lived and died, most graves were unmarked, though not necessarily untended.88 Traditionally, little distinction used to be made in modern study between monument and burial (sepulcrum). The very existence of grand Roman monuments such 83 Strabo, Geogr. 17.1.10; 14; Joseph. Against Apion 2.36; Acta Alex. 14 frg.1. 84 A loose translation of Hor. Sat. 2.5.105f. Family project: Dig. 11.7.5 with Heinzelmann 2001; on the continuing enthusiasm in Egypt for ›beautiful (and expensive) burials‹, see Riggs 2005; Lembke 2018. 85 Schrumpf 2006, 11–106. Augustus famously required an entire papyrus roll (volumen) to set out the instructions regarding his funeral (Suet. Aug. 101; cf. Cass. Dio 56.34.1–4). Private undertakers (libitinarii): Schrumpf 2006, 224–82. 86 Heinzelmann et al. 2001, 31–177. 87 Carroll 2006, 15 n.50; funerary epigraphy: Chioffi 2015 with ILS 7818–8560. 88 Aarts and Heeren 2017.

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as the imperial mausolea, the tomb of Caecilia Metella on the via Appia, or C. Cestius‹ pyramidal tomb by the Porta S. Paolo, tended to focus attention on the most visible part of the tomb, the monument and its inscriptions. Although there had been similar finds earlier, such as the mausolea of Isola Sacra at Portus in the 1920s, at Ostia in the 1930s, it was the publication in the 1980s of the secondcentury CE mausolea beneath St Peter’s in Rome,89 combined with a belated recognition of the importance of the architectural context and the monumental support (Schriftträger) of inscriptions, that alerted epigraphers to the potential value of the mausolea and other tombs lining the major roads out of towns and cities (Gräberstraßen) for one traditional type of social history, namely the study of the selfrepresentation of elite urban families.90 The point also holds good for inscriptions on much less costly monuments, such as ash-altars and chests, or simple stelae. In all these cases, the primary aim was social communication, not only on the part of social elites but also, and in great numbers, on the part of freedpersons, who had a particular interest in commemorating both their escape from servile status and their ability to afford their own grave markers.91 The mausolea of Rome and Ostia also accommodated, like columbaria, family dependants, above all domestic slaves; in one of the relatively small second-century mausolea beneath St. Peter’s, for example, 170 persons had been buried, in another 120.92 In the case of the simplest tombs, both within mausolea and those scattered among marked burials, there was no monument of any kind: only the feeding-tube might be visible.93 Beyond Italy, the attraction of inscribed grave markers for provincial populations in the Latin-speaking Empire can be judged from the rapidity of their local appropriation from military centres,94 and the subsequent development of distinctive regional styles, irrespective of Roman provincial boundaries. More recently, however, it has been argued that we need to distinguish relatively sharply between grave-plots and monuments, on the one hand, which could be bought and sold,95 and the sepulcrum on the other, i.e. the tomb in the narrow sense of the spot where the cremated bones were interred.96 In most cases, the roughly bust-shaped (Ω) stelae, which in central Italy marked some individual sepulcra inside the monument, were uninscribed, so that the identity of the cremated bones was known only to the family-members who assembled periodically to pay their respects. As the spot that marked the final form of death, the passage from

89 Isola Sacra: Baldassare 1996; Ostia: Heinzelmann 2000; St. Peter’s: Miesch; von Hesberg 1986–95. 90 Esp. von Hesberg; Zanker 1987; von Hesberg 1992, 26–36; in the Germaniae: Heinzelmann et al. 2001; Fasold; Hampel 2016. 91 von Hesberg 1992, 55–230; Carroll 2006; in Asia: Cormack 2004, 51–103. 92 Eck 1987; cf. Steinby 2003; Bodel 2008b. 93 E.g. Buranelli 2006. 94 Carroll 2006, 17. 95 Schrumpf 2006, 198–223. Commemoration: Dig. 11.7.2.6 with Carroll 2006, 30–58. 96 van Andringa 2018; Lepetz; van Andringa 2009. Mass-burials due to epidemics or disasters, e.g. Blanchard 2014.

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personhood to anonymous membership of the collective di manes, the sepulcrum alone was res religiosa, technically inviolable, and could not be alienated.97 Moreover, the so-called feeding tubes were intended not so much to ›feed‹ the dead as to mark the gulf between the dead and the living. At the same time, it is noticeable that even the limited personhood ascribed to the cremated bones expired after a generation: the ›feeding tubes‹ were removed, and the container of the bones, while left undisturbed (and of course invisible), received no further individual attention. We thus find in individual mausolea strata of such containers, of which only the uppermost still received homage from the descendants. 2.3.2

Ritual meals

Although idealised and stereotyped paintings and reliefs of funerary meals survive in some quantity,98 archaeology, even bio-archaeology, can contribute little directly to identifying ritual sequences connected to funerals. But in general we can say that animal sacrifice on such occasions served three main ends, to pay homage to the dead person, to bind his or her spirit in the tomb (so that it would not continue to haunt the grave or the family), and to purify the family of the pollution occasioned by death.99 Where the requisite work has been done, the taphonomic remains, especially animal bones, are instructive regarding local differences in funerary practices in different parts of the Empire.100 The variations affect the species killed, the parts of the animals selected, their presence on or by the pyre (bustum); and their presence/absence in the burial pit itself. If we take Pompeii, for example, meals involving meat seem to have been consumed at four separate points: at the cremation itself, i.e. at the ustrina, where the pyres were built; at the collection of the bones into the ceramic or glass container and their deposition into the sepulcrum; at the closure of the tomb; and on the occasion of periodic visits, notably at the novendialis and on the anniversary of the death, no doubt also the Parentalia in February and the Rosalia in May.101 Although the preliminary sacrifice of a sow (porca praecidanea) is taken as a fixture in literary accounts, only 30% of the tombs of 64 persons recently excavated in the Porta Nocera necropolis contained any remains of pork, mainly of piglets (small cuts, from head, legs and trotters; few ribs), and then in very variable quantities. The others mainly contained domestic cockerel bones (almost entirely legs and wings), again in variable quantities, with a few remains of sheep and goat. In all two-thirds of the ash-urns contained some burned animal bones, which means that in 30% of cases the family chose not, or

97 98 99 100 101

See Dig. 11.7.2.5. E.g. in the Rhineland: Faust 1998, 80–2. Purification: Aul. Gellius Att.Noct. 4.6.8, cf. Serv. ad Verg. Aen. 3.64 (cf.4.507); 6.216; 12.169. Lepetz; van Andringa 2004; van Andringa; Duday; Lepetz et al. 2013; Lepetz 2017. See e.g. CIL 5. 2072; 4016 = ILS 6710; 5. 4410; 4489 = ILS 8370; 4871; 55272; AE 2001: 1067; CIL 11, 1436. Parentalia alone: IscrAquil. 2. 2873, cf. Cicero, Philipp. 1.13; Petron. Sat. 78.4. Rosalia alone: CIL 3. 703; 6662; 7526; 7576; 11042; 10. 444 = ILS 3546.

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could not afford, to place cuts of meat on the pyre at the point of cremation, or on the occasion of the interment. Bones were also found in the pyres themselves and on the paths near the tombs. In additions to the burned bones, some 2000 unburned animal bones were found scattered about by the tombs and on the paths, some eaten by stray dogs, which evidently infested the cemetery (and sometimes died there). 60% of these unburned bones, which had been thrown away during butchery in preparation for the meals and the offerings, were of pork, 30% of ovicaprids. The co-presence of fishbones presumbly implies the consumption of garum during the meals at the tomb.102 Extremely little bio-archaeological work has been done on North African tombs; an exception is the large necropolis of Pupput/Hammamet in modern Tunisia, whose tombs mainly date from the second and third centuries CE, and contain both cremations and inhumations.103 Here the situation is quite different from Porta Nocera: only 5% of the cremation tombs at Pupput contained any kind of animal-bones, and then mainly chicken, very rarely pork or ovi-caprid. In the case of inhumations, the meat, mainly unburned (i.e. raw) parts of chicken (wings, thighs), possibly even whole birds, sometimes an egg, was usually placed directly on the corpse, beside it or at the foot. A whole chicken was found on the chest of one young woman; the lower left arm of a young man was covered in several dozen cockerel bones.104 A typical feature of North African cemeteries are large stone offering-tables (mensae), which sometimes (though not at Pupput) are decorated with images of prepared dishes, cuts of meat, fish and eggs.105 Whatever the precise implications of this iconographic practice, the refuse from such meals not found by the tombs but thrown into shallow pits or wells some way away. Other features of North African practice were also found at Pupput, where young people, probably the mother who died during or after confinement, were buried in inhumation graves with the baby (foetuses were sometimes found in the woman’s body). In one private area of the necropolis, the bones of 32 foetuses and children up to 3 years of age were found in a well (third- to fourth century CE), presumbly in order to save space in an already crowded enclosure. However the most remarkable find in Tunisia is perhaps the discovery of the remains of between 2,000 and 4,000 children from 0–15 years buried in strata over an area of 25m2 of the necropolis at El-Jem (Thydrus). Since they date from the period of Augustus to the early third century, this practice has been interpreted as evidence of continuity from, or perhaps rather re-invention of, the model of the Punic tophet. Burials of very small children are also known from shrines of the god Saturn, though it is uncertain whether this implies continuity, or again a re-imagining, of infant-sacrifice (molk) from Punic times or an alternative funeral practice.106

102 103 104 105 106

See Lepetz 2013, 1367–1400; 2018, 432–6. At Pupput, as elsewhere in North Africa, the tombs are of the ›half-caisson‹ type. Lepetz 2018, 439–42. De Larminat; Lepetz forthcoming. Cf. de Larminat 2012; re-invention: McCarty 2017, 396–401.

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In northern Gaul, continuity of practice, in this case from the Late Iron Age, has generally been assumed. Here animal remains are far more prominent than at Porta Nocera or Pupput, mingled with human bones in the ash-urns, in the remains of pyres and in the burial shafts: the material includes half heads, ribs and vertebrae of pigs and, more infrequently, complete unburned (i.e. raw) chickens—in the later Empire chicken in fact replaces pork as the main animal species. As in the two preceding cases, these differences reproduce prior variations in the place of meat in the local diet.107 In this area, too, and no doubt often elsewhere, there is evidence of the consumption (and offering) of other food, wheat, barley, lentils and peas for example, as well as olives and even dates in wealthier burials.108 Whereas in Pompeii virtually the only ceramic remains deposited with the bones are balsamaria that contained the scented oil poured over the corpse on the pyre,109 in Northern Italy, Gaul, southern Britannia and the Germaniae quantities of ceramic and other grave goods, including clothes, are found in burials, again implying reference to pre-Roman tradition.110 In the rural Batavian cemetery at Tiel-Passewaaij (Netherlands), quantities of military equipment, the personal mementoes of former auxiliary soldiers, were found, recalling the Celtic tradition of warrior-burials; among civilians, this desire might express itself differently, as in the testament of a wealthy member of the Lingon people who wished his hunting equipment to be cremated with him.111 Another type of continuity is the practice in Gaul of killing new-born puppies and placing them in vessels beside children.112 In NW Europe, we find inhumation, itself apparently spreading from elite practice in Rome, replacing cremation in towns from the second half of the second century, and penetrating the rural areas relatively rapidly about a century later.113 A perceptible decrease in the size of pyres and and the quantity of grave-goods is found even in these latter areas already in the second half of the second century. How far the motives for such a shift are uniform may be doubted. It has recently been shown that in Asia Minor, which has traditionally been thought of as demonstrating a clear preference for inhumation, cremation-burials are in fact widely attested from the early Hellenistic period to the third century CE in the western, southern and central areas.114 Moreover, ash-urns (osteothêkai) are sometimes found in sarcophagi and other forms of inhumation tomb, showing that members of the same family might have different preferences here. In this regard, as in many others, local and personal preferences weighed heavily: for example, Republicanperiod Gräberstraßen in Asia Minor were sometimes, as at Hierapolis, abandoned as

107 108 109 110 111 112 113

Lepetz; van Andringa 2004. Preiss; Zech-Mattern; Latron 2005. Cf. Tibullus 1.3.7–8 (see n.69 above). Lenz 1998; Witteyer 2000; Fasold, Witteyer 2001; Blaizot 2009; Hensen 2009; Pearce 2015. Tiel-Passewaaij: Aarts, Heeren 2017, 144–6; Lingon testament: CIL 13. 5708 = ILS 8379. Hermary; Dubois 2012. Tranoy 2009; Blaizot 2018, 505–6. In the Germanies, inhumation was previously mainly reserved for children. 114 Ahrens 2015.

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preferred tomb-sites in favour of wooded hill-sides; in parts of Phrygia, select persons might be treated post mortem as quasi-deities or angels.115 Moreover, a preference for burial in finely-sculpted sarcophagi in Athens and Rome probably had little to do with the motives of those in rural Gaul who for economic reasons began to make do with inhumation and chicken. On the other hand, shifting attitudes towards the felt status of the body cannot be excluded.116

3

Minor ritual specialists

If we treat religion as fundamentally a matter of the strategic appropriation by individuals of variable networks, discourses and institutions relating to such ›invisible quasi-personal agents‹, there can be no clear distinction between it and magic. There would only be religious practices of different degrees of social acceptance, ranging from the universally approved to those generally considered questionable or in some way problematic. From this perspective, different kinds of practices are simply different strategies or options, resort to which depended largely on the individual actor’s estimate, all things considered, of what he or she stood to gain or lose in a given situation.117 An alternative is to frame magic in terms of the kinds of ritualised help offered by we may call ›minor ritual specialists‹ (the modern substitutes for ›magicians‹ and ›witches‹). One aim of the following section is to try to get behind the ancient literary stereotypes—of naked witches collecting herbs in Thessaly, drunken crones preparing love-philtres for sex-workers to press upon their clients, demented emperors sacrificing children so as to read the future from their livers, that is, the ›negative literary discourse‹—so as to re-situate ›magic‹ within the frame of lived religion in the Empire.118 Although we can have no realistic idea of the extent to which ordinary people consulted minor ritual specialists, not merely in the agrarian sector but also in towns and cities, it seems probable, given the costs of having recourse to public oracles and healing shrines, let alone school doctors, that they were widely consulted. As a form of social action, minor religious specialism has both a demand and a supply side. A hint of the variety of the practitioners that might interest us here is provided by a subject vocabulary in Greek extracted by the epitomator of the Onomasticon of Iulius Pollux, a vast thesaurus originally compiled during the reign of the emperor Commodus ([co-]reigned 176–192 CE) on the basis of words found in the course of excerpting literary texts: manteis, alphitomanteis, astromanteis, sphondylomanteis, aleuromanteis, koskinomanteis, oneiromanteis, analytai, oneirokritai, oneiropoloi, oneiroskopoi, oiônistai, ornithoskopoi, oiônopoloi, thytai, philothytai, magoi, goêtes, exêg-

115 116 117 118

Cormack 2004, 105–22; Scardozzi 2017; Chiai 2010. Cf. Rebillard 2015 (North Africa); de Jong 2017, 175–223 (Syria). Cf. Otto 2011; Wendt 2016, 114–45. Cf. Stratton 2007; Stratton, Kalleres 2014. See also chapter ›Gods and Other Divine Beings‹, p. 147.

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êtai, kathartai, telestai, apomaktai, apomaktriai, teratoskopia, thaumatopoios, thaumatôn dêmiourgoi … words that can roughly be translated ›diviners, diviners from barleygrains, diviners from the stars, diviners from pebbles, diviners from ground flour, sieve-diviners, diviners from dreams, unwitchers, dream-interpreters, interpreters of dreams, dream-scryers, diviners by birds, bird-diviners, bird-scryers, sacrificers, expert sacrificers, workers of magia, people who claim to be workers of magia, experts in religious matters, purifiers, mystagogues, experts for purifications, female purifiers, interpreters of strange occurrences, wonder-workers, workers of wonders …‹119 Note that the sole term here that specifically refers to female practitioners is apomaktriai, female purifiers; all the other terms refer primarily to male roles. On the other hand, two of the tiny number of Classical references to sievediviners (koskinomanteis) explicitly refer to them as female; in one of these they are said to be ›old women‹ who use their sieves to divine the nature of illnesses among sheep and cattle for herdsmen.120 It would therefore be wise to assume that at least in some cases a masculine grammatical form also covers female practitioners. The number of synonyms here makes clear that these are hardly technical terms; nor are they words for regular professions, but rather roles into which individuals could slip, names for skills and claims to competence. For example, the speaker of Theocr. Idyll 3, infatuated with the hard-hearted Amaryllis, mentions that he was harvesting in the fields with Agroeo, the ›sieve-diviner‹, when she told him the blunt truth, that Amaryllis has no time for him. Sieve-diviner was only one of her roles. In the present context, however, the list is especially valuable in that—except for the word goês, which I take in its common, negative, sense of ›a fraudulent magician‹, ›a person who wrongfully claims to be able to work marvels‹—it includes only neutral words, that might have been used as self-descriptors by such practitioners, by contrast with pejorative words such as epôdai (chanter of incantations) and pharmakeis (people who know about magical potions), agyrtai (itinerant specialists) in Greek, or venefici/ae or magi in Latin.121 It also emphasizes the link in contemporary minds between divinatory techniques, protective and purificatory procedures, ritual knowledge, ritual power—and the fine, perhaps even often imperceptible, line that separates competence in this area from ›mere‹ fraud. And it suggests the open market, the competitive field, in which such specialists operated: there is nothing hugger-mugger about all this, it was, as in any modern developing country, simply all around, on sale, on booths in the market, down the street there on the left, outside the gates of the Circus, sometimes indeed in a local temple.122 On the other hand, the list is extremely selective—in his reading Pollux had probably come across dozens more words for divinatory procedures and ritual expertise, but they meant nothing to the epitomator, and anyway many practices,

119 Pollux 7.188 (with minor omissions). 120 Philostr. Vit. Apollon. Tyan. 6.11, p. 63412–14 Mumprecht; the other case is Theocr. Idyll 3.31–33 (say 270 BCE). 121 Cf. Dickie 2001, 12–6, Rives 2011; 2010, 58–70; Eidinow 2018. 122 Eidinow 2014; Wendt 2016, 40–73.

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especially of divination, never received a denomination. The mere listing of words provides no insight into the knowledge-practices involved: for people in Pollux’ station in life, these practices are mere outlandish exhibits from a world one does not wish to have much to do with. The urge to make decisions of value here is made clear by another, briefer, list drawn up by Artemidorus, the second century CE author of the only handbook on the interpretation of dreams to survive complete of the dozens written in antiquity. Here he contrasts authoritative practitioners of divination, such as ›sacrificers‹ (presumably civic priests), the official interpreters of signs given by birds, the traditional forecasting of weather by the rising of constellations and star-clusters, portents, and of course his own métier, the interpretation of dreams, with fraudulent ›low‹ diviners, such as ›Pythagoreans, physiognomists, knuckle-bone tossers, cheese-tellers (tyromanteis), sieve-diviners, patterndiviners (morphomanteis), chiromancers, bowl-diviners, those who summon the spirits of the dead‹.123 There survive a handful of divination-scenarios that did not involve recourse to writing, even though in principle they were analogous to the case of dice-oracles in Asia Minor mentioned above. Here the ›field‹ was a selected site, say a table, an oil-lamp, a bowl containing water, or a tree, occupied by one or more objects (say a nail, a lamp-flame, an oil-film on the water, or the leaves of the tree), crossed by chance (direction of fall, flickerings, swirls, rustlings), and a catalogue of meanings stored in the practitioner’s head. The term morphomanteis used by Artemidorus in the passage just quoted is never otherwise attested, but it is presumably intended as a general designation for practitioners who interpreted such patterns, for example fallen leaves, shapes appearing on the shoulder-blades of sacrificial animals when placed on a fire, the flickerings of lamp-flames, the whorling of incensesmoke, cloud-formations and so on. In many other types, the logical form is binary: either a positive or a negative answer is provided to a carefully-formulated question; a succession of such questions eliminates a succession of alternatives. In such situations, the diviner’s social knowledge plays a decisive part in making plausible sense of the chance outcomes.124 In his Satires the poet Horace comically sketches such a consultation by the use of lots, i.e. a method borrowed, like almost all such techniques, from institutionalized oracles: An old Sabine woman with second sight shook her lot-vessel (urna) and gave a prediction (cecinit): no horrid poison, no enemy sword, will put an end to this consultant, nor internal pains, nor cough, nor hindering gout will kill him; but a Bore will one day be the end of him ...125

At first sight, the word cecinit, ›sing‹, and the continuous form of the prophecy suggest a quite different kind of divination, the intuitive oracle in metrical form.126

123 Artem. Oneirocr. 2.69, cf. Harris-McCoy 2012, 495–7. 124 Gordon 2017. 125 Sat. 1.9.29–32. Urna is found in analogous contexts for divination by lot, e.g. Cicero De div. 2.69. 126 Cano is the usual poetic word for ›prophesy‹, e.g. Horace, Sat. 2.5.58; Tibullus 1.7.1 etc.

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But the form of the forecast, a series of negations followed by a positive prediction, is exactly what would result from the construction of a series of questions each of which can be answered positively or negatively. »Will he die by poison (dura venena)?«, out jumps the lot: »No«; »Will he die by violence?«, out jumps the lot: »No«; »Will he die of internal pains?«, »No« ... and so on. Of course, many such questions were quite standard for the practitioner; her skill was shown in leading the client to ask questions that would eventually frame or suggest a more or less specific outcome. In this satirical case, the prophecy is of course absurd—the consultant will perish button-holed by a Bore. But Horace has caught something of the timeconsuming procedure involved and the way the diviner induces the consultant to frame the risks envisaged by getting him or her to formulate a series of specific questions.127 The key figure missing from Pollux’ list is the ›root-cutter‹ or herbalist, specialists in the collection and preparation of herbs, animal parts and minerals, mainly for curative purposes but also for making potions or salves for a range of ends.128 Since, as I have already pointed out, the medical value of many herbs was widely appreciated among rural populations, and a modicum of medical knowledge essential within families,129 root-cutters created their own separate hierarchy of value by intense ritualisation of the rules for collection, specifying for example the gender of the plant to be selected (›male‹ or ›female‹), the status of the agent (e.g. prior abstention from sexual intercourse; women during menstruation; virgins), the time of day (e.g. sunrise, sunset), time of the lunar month, time of the appearance of a specific constellation such as the Pleiades, the direction of the wind, the hand or fingers to be used, the means of extraction from the earth, the part to be gathered, how to act once one has obtained the plant (e.g. raise it high in the air), sometimes the form of address to the plant or a statement of the purpose for which the herb was to be used, or even the name of the patient.130 The plants in question often had striking forms and characteristics. For example, a powerful medicinal vinegar could be prepared from the plant Pliny calls scilla.131 This is probably the modern Sea Squill (Urginea maritima), which grows in the Mediterranean and has remarkably large bulbs (10–15 cm); the spikes of white flowers emerge in late summer directly out of the earth; the leaves appear only after the flowers are over and persist until the following autumn. Similar rules applied to animal parts, for example if boarsemen is to be be effective against ear-ache, it must be collected before it drips onto the ground out of the sow’s vulva.132 Generally speaking, the preparations were administered in an altered form, whether boiled, crushed, pounded, as ash,

127 Eidinow 2007, 48f. 128 The Greek terms are rhizotomos, rhizopôlês, and pharmakopôlês, in Latin herbarius, medicamentarius. 129 Cf. Pliny HN 18.205; 19.111; families: Draycott 2016. 130 Cf. Gordon 2015, 140–52. 131 HN 20.97–99. 132 Pliny HN 28.175.

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as juice, or as ointment. They might be chewed, ingested, inhaled, hung round the neck inside a specific type of container (such as a red cloth) as an amulet, or removed immediately after some significant event, such as parturition.133 If they felt they had not been properly recompensed, practitioners were known—or alleged—to put the plant in question back into the soil where it had been gathered, so that the ailment that had been cured would recur. Pliny found such misuse of ritual power so disgraceful that he mentions it three times.134 The root-cutter’s knowledge was based on the lore imparted by his or her teacher, often a relative, on experience, sometimes on deliberate experimentation; it was also limited to the locality in which he or she practised. Many, if not all, were surely illiterate; at any rate written sources played virtually no role in their practice. A case in point is Ovid’s description, written somewhat before 8 CE, of a ritual against malicious gossip, a perpetual source of anxiety in villages and small-town neighbourhoods, addressed by a typical ritual specialist of this kind, an old woman, to the goddess of keeping secrets, Muta Tacita: with three fingers she places three bits of incense beneath the threshold, where the housemouse has made its hole. She utters charms over some threads, and ties them round dark lead, and mumbles seven black beans in her mouth. Then she takes a fish, the maena, smears its head with pitch, sews its mouth up, drops wine upon it, and roasts it before the fire: the rest of the wine she drinks with the girls. »Now,« she says, »we have bound the hostile tongues and spiteful mouths« (hostiles linguas inimicaque vinximus ora).135

There was however a range of more ambitious practitioners, who relied absolutely on written texts, which in itself implied command of a completely different type of knowledge-practice. One example is the authors of complex private oracles based on canonical texts, such as Homer- and Vergil-oracles (›bibliomancy‹), which consisted of dozens of lines selected from these poets, crossed, as in the dice-oracles, by throws of astragals/dice, or the encrypted Sortes Astrampsychi, in which access to the responses could only be gained by the practitioner.136 The two most important types, astrologers and those claiming to work within a learned temple-tradition, relied upon formalised knowledge derived from the high cultures of the Near East, i.e. Babylonia and Egypt. The salient feature of divination by astrology, developed in the second century BCE and ostensibly based upon observed positions of the planets and the zodiacal signs, was competition between self-styled experts. Such competition was the rule not just in relation to expository handbooks but evidently also in the two main forms of practical astrology, katarchic (concerning immediate decisions and problems, e.g. marriage, purchase of land, runaway slaves ...) and genethliacal (predictions regarding the course of an individual’s life and death). Such self-styling was common knowledge: the Augustan poet Propertius created an astrologer named Horus who buttonholes the narrator and

133 134 135 136

Gaillard-Seux 1998b. HN 21.144; 25.174; 26.24. Fast. 2. 571–81 (tr. W. Warde Fowler, adapted). Bibliomancy: Luijendijk 2014, 62–4; Homeromanteion: PGM VII (first five columns); Sortes Astrampsychi: Naether 2010.

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spends forty-five lines of verse expatiating on his genealogy in Babylon and his successful forecasts, before turning his attention to the present case.137 No traditional forms of divination—not the oracle of Zeus Ammon in the oasis of Siwa, not hepatoscopy, not augury by the flight of birds, not even magic—can hold the candle to astrology. It was precisely this claim to superiority over traditional forms of divination that made astrology so contested, leading to its virtual identification with (criminal) magic and attempts by emperors to restrict the type of questions that might be posed.138 Among writers of astrological handbooks, both in prose and verse, competition took two main forms, the development of complexity, both for its own sake and to protect the claims of the project as a whole, and explicit criticism of other writers. Both furthered the continuing development of the dispositif while at the same time veiling from the experts an awareness of the arbitrariness of their procedures and the gap between their practice and any observable natural phenomena. The second type of ritualized practice that relied wholly upon written documents emerged in the late Ptolemaic period as a fusion of traditional ritual procedures within the Egyptian temple for protection, success and good fortune and scattered traditions of Greek incantatory verse.139 The instructions for such rituals might be very complicated, combining a range of magical techniques such as ›words‹ and signs that cannot be recuperated into known languages or sign-systems.140 They also often display an astonishing degree of theological knowledge.141 Ambitious invocations in this tradition were usually the personal invention of individual practitioners. Individual recipes were often circulated among limited groups of similarly skilled practitioners, and eventually, after frequent revision and alteration, collected into regular books or grimoires.142 The majority of these recipes concern divination, primarily in order to legitimate the practitioner’s own authority vis-à-vis the source of inspiration, the powers of the other world. Other significant aims are influencing emotions (erotic passion, causing people to quarrel, restraining anger, producing charismatic charm), escaping danger (winning a law-suit, phylacteries against a range of medical problems and spirit-attacks caused by witchcraft or the evil eye,143 getting through locked doors), direct healing, and influencing outcomes in competitive contexts, especially in public spectacles, such as chariot-racing, beast-fighting, athletics competitions or the dramatic stage. Recipes for such purposes appear randomly jumbled in no apparent order in the few surviving ›grand‹ magical formularies on papyri, raising questions about the owners’ understanding of the practice as a whole. The only surviving practical attempts to ›activate‹ such recipes in Egypt, mostly on papyrus, are phylacteries for protection of clients against recurrent illness such

137 138 139 140 141 142 143

Propertius 4.1b (written c. 20–16 BCE). Cf. Desanti 1990; Fögen 1993. Faraone 2000; Fraser 2015; de Haro Sanchez 2017; Frankfurter 2019. The technical names are onomata barbara/voces magicae and charaktêres. Cf. Pachoumi 2017. English translations of these ›Greek magical papyri‹ will be found in Betz 1986. Alvar Nuño 2012.

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as fever, anxieties, or spirit-attack; and aggressive texts, some on lead-sheet, mainly for influencing emotions.144 Several of the latter are very accomplished, but too long to cite here; a simple, and therefore inexpensive, example of an erotic text on a scrap of linen, perhaps part of a shroud, of unknown provenance but now in Cologne, starts with nine lines of mingled magical words and signs, followed by the request: »Quickly bring here Tapias, whose mother is Demetria, to Achillas, whose mother is Helene, by means of the soul of the man untimely deceased, bakaxichych, the one who is entrusted with everything, eulamo. Bring Tapias to Achillas, now, now, quickly, quickly«.145 The claim to especially effective knowledge rests here entirely on the use of the ›words of power‹, bakaxichych and eulamo, designations or epithets, of spirit-beings of supposedly unlimited power; what makes it ›magical‹ is the appeal to an unquiet, dangerous soul. Other texts on metal in the same tradition are found outside Egypt, aggressive texts on lead mainly in Rome, Athens and Carthage. Phylacteries in this tradition, however, are found sporadically all over the Empire; a good example is a pewter strip found on the Thames foreshore in London with a metrical inscription against plague, which begins ›Abrai b[a]rbasô barbasôch euliôr athemporphi [magical names] ... send away the discordant clatter of raging plague, air-borne, ..... infiltrating pain, heavy-spiriting, fleshwasting, melting, from the hollows of the veins‹, and includes a quotation from an oracle by Apollo of Claros.146 A few practitioners in this tradition must have travelled to major cities outside Egypt, but we must also allow for the limited circulation of recipes and formularies as individual texts or books from the second into the late fourth century CE. A case in point here is the mistaken reproduction of the word logos (i.e. incantation), in the abbreviated form λο, at the beginning of the main prayer, addressed to the Nymphs of the locality, in a series of late-antique curse-tablets, mainly in Greek, found in a mausoleum just outside the Porta S. Sebastiano at the beginning of the via Appia in Rome.147 The pattern of writing phylacteries on precious metal foil was picked up by other cultural traditions in the West, as is shown by the case of a gold phylactery in a Gallic dialect found in the depository of a Gallo-Roman temple at Baudecet in Belgium.148

4

Self-help

»Most people believe that hail can be averted by charms«.149 Verbal charms, combined with simple ritual actions, were known to almost everyone in antiquity, though hardly any survive, and were a major protective device in family or domestic religion. They

144 145 146 147 148 149

Emotions: Pachoumi 2012; Suárez de la Torre 2019; Gordon 2017 [2019]. Daniel 1975, 255–64 (tr. Daniel with slight changes). AE 2013: 946 with Jones 2016. E.g. DTAud nos. 155–8; 160–161; 163; 165–167; on the Nymphs, see Bevilacqua 2003. Plumier-Tores et al. 1993. Pliny HN 17.267.

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195

drew upon every imaginable feature of the local ›encyclopedia‹ of common knowledge, including myths and were often in vernacular verse-forms, such as iambic senarii.150 They often deployed paradox or impossibilities and simple forms of ritualisation such as triple repetition. A charm against horse-colic recorded at secondhand by the lateantique horse-leech Pelagonius, for example, to be recited while rubbing the horse’s abdomen, runs in translation: »Three pigs fell from the sky; a herdsman found them, killed them without a knife, cooked them without fire, ate them without teeth. You cooked them well, you cooked them well, you cooked them well!«.151 The other major form of self-help here was undoubtedly resort to protective amulets of all kinds. Although the absolute majority of these, in the tradition of ›popular medicine‹, were composed of degradable organic substances, there were also many traditional forms in clay or metal, such as the club of Hercules, or the erect phallus: at the settlement of Tienen in Gallia Belgica (Belgium), for example, a large clay phallus was discovered that had been inserted into the structure of a metal-working furnace.152 Clay had other uses too: one could protect a horse from being bitten by a shrew by wrapping the creature in potter’s clay, allowing it to get hard, and then hanging it round the horse’s neck.153 Iron nails, especially large nails, were often placed in tombs to prevent the spirit of the dead person from troubling the living; in some inhumation graves, the corpse itself or the skull has been pierced or smashed.154 Court-rooms were notoriously places where one might be attacked by magical means, such that the speaker would forget a crucial argument in a carefully-rehearsed speech, or a witness be unable to speak coherently. One of Pliny the Younger’s bêtes noires, the rhetorically-talented but unscrupulous M. Aquilius Regulus, used to paint a ring round one or other orbit before his court appearances, or wear a white patch over an eyebrow, to ward off the evil eye; and the emperor Claudius had an equestrian of the Gallic people of the Vocontii put to death who was found to have concealed a ›serpent-egg‹ (urinum) in his clothing, an object was reputed by the Druids to be a means of winning court-cases and influencing the mighty.155 The imperial period saw a very considerable extension of selective re-appropriation of new types and forms from models developed, once again, in the ancient high cultures of the Fertile Crescent.156 There are two aspects here, on the one hand the demand by ritual specialists for new types of authority through image and text, and on the other, individual selection from a range of ready-made, or at any rate ready-styled, items for cash. It is characteristic of amulets is that they are routinised, so that anyone could adapt items such as ring-stones with exotic images such as the ›cock-headed anguipede‹ (Fig. 18) to whatever claim he or she thought

150 151 152 153 154 155 156

Versnel 1996; cf. Blänsdorf 1991. Pelag. Ars vet. 121, reprinted by Önnerfors 1991, 24. Martens 2012, 29 fig. 1.5. Columella, De re rust. 6.17.6, copied by Pelag. Ars vet. 280, cf. McCabe 2007, 166–7. Alfayé 2009. Pliny Epist. 6.2.2; Pliny HN 29.53–54. Faraone 2018; Endreffy; Nagy; Spier 2019.

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Managing problems: Choices and solutions

fitted the context of use.157 Mass-production of ready-made amulets for sale, exemplified by the find of a chestful of amulets of widely different materials and forms in a house in a hitherto unexcavated part of Regio V, in the NW sector of Pompeii,158 simply points up the fact of routinisation, in that the market provided a range of goods for dealing with everyday, objective, needs, thus reducing consciousness of the means-end relation to a minimum. From that point of view, to commission bespoke, i.e. original or innovative, products in this area was a form of individual assertion of distinction in the Bourdeusian sense.159

Fig. 19: Reverse of a ring-stone in green jasper showing the ›cock-headed anguipede‹ (1.7 x 1.3 x 0.2 cm). The inscription around the bevel reads: Ιαω Αdωναι ταβαν (Iaô Adônai taban), i.e. two names of the Judaic god + taban (magical word, possibly Egypt. tbn, ›head, summit‹). Note the Latin D for Greek δ in Adônai, which suggests the intaglio was cut in a workshop in the Latin West. Département des Monnaies, Médailles et Antiques, Bibliothèque Nationale, Paris, cat. no. M8002 = Mastrocinque 2014 no. 141 (Photo: A. Mastrocinque).

157 Dasen, Nagy 2019; Bohak 2018. 158 See https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/found-pompeii-magic-treasure (among other sites) viewed 19.8.2019. 159 Bourdieu 1979.

4 Self-help

197

The other major form of self-help was to resort to a written curse. Unlike such texts written in the Graeco-Egyptian tradition, ›vernacular‹ curses were written mainly by the principal, as is shown by the extremely wide variation of competence, ranging from uninscribed texts deposited by illiterates through minimal command of curse-language to accomplished lists of body-parts, and by the fact that even at circumscribed locations such as the joint temple of Mater Magna and Isis at Mainz (see below) or the sacred spring at the temple of Aquae Sulis in Bath, all the texts are in different hands.160 Their authors sought to use the formal curse as a means of redress in situations felt to be beyond their control—a notable group was evidently written by slaves afraid of being denounced, or framed, by fellowslaves at a hearing before the head of the household.161 We may call this view of their situation a subjective moral economy combined with a demand to re-assert justice in the form of a penalty. The ›objective‹ rights and wrongs of the case are of no importance, only the subjective perception, the need to protect oneself from others, counts. The most important group to have been found recently is that from behind the joint temples of Isis and Mater Magna in the centre of Moguntiacum, Roman Mainz.162 Here thirty-four tablets, many of them very small, could be recovered and read, which is only a small fraction of those ever deposited—the sacrificial pit directly behind the temple of Mater Magna in which most were found was full of melted fragments of lead. Since the custom here was to inscribe lead plaques with a curse and then melt the lead in the fire, these scraps represent dozens, perhaps hundreds, of messages ›successfully‹ despatched to the other world; those we can read are from the principals’ point of view the failures that never arrived there. They reveal the co-existence in the same relatively small settlement of many different notions of how to manage a curse involving writing (no doubt in direct relation to degrees of literacy), showing that there was no conception of ›the rules of the genre‹.163 In the present context the most significant point is that the longer, more fluent, texts refer repeatedly to ritual events in the cult of the Mater Magna and Attis, such as the self-flagellation of the galli, or the drying out of the pine-tree introduced into the temple during the March festival, in their attempt to create powerful images to reinforce the rhetorical authority of the curse. The texts from the ash-pit can be closely dated to between 80–120 CE; after the closure of this area, a small number of other tablets were found in the neighbouring area used for ordinary sacrificial pits, in one or two of which roughly-modelled poppets of clay were found, one of them twisted in half and pierced with pins.164 In general, curse-tablets show clear signs of awareness of informal knowledge of how ›such things‹ were done in a given region: for example, in Italy and North

160 161 162 163 164

See Blänsdorf 2012, 21; Tomlin 1988, 98–101. Ogden 1999; Bailliot 2012; slaves: Alvar 2018. Blänsdorf 2010, 2012. Cf. Gordon 2019. Witteyer 2013.

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Africa the tablets are mainly deposited in tombs, as near the sepulcrum as possible without actually infringing on the res religiosa itself, whereas elsewhere templeareas were preferred, or locations by or in water, whether running or still, sometimes even liminal areas such as abandoned houses or settlements. Explicit allusions to ritual knowledge, as at Mainz, are common: for example, a pair of texts from near modern Bordeaux alludes to the Gallic practice, mentioned above, of killing puppies at child-burials, and uses it as a performative analogy for the fate to befall the targets: »Just as its mother could not save this puppy ... just as this puppy is twisted about [i.e. its neck has been wrung] and cannot get up ...«.165 The violence inherent in blood-sacrifice might suggest spontaneous acts for a similar purpose: thus at Carthage in North Africa, where, as we have seen, chickens were frequently killed at tombs, another principal tore the tongue out of a living cockerel as a way of exemplifying the inability of his enemies to give evidence against him.166 Texts against thieves form another significant group of curse-tablets. Almost unknown in Italy, they are common in southern Britannia, especially the deposits at Bath (Aquae Sulis), and a shrine of a local Mercury at Uley in the Cotswold Hills, Gloucestershire.167 The god is enjoined to force the thief to return the stolen goods; the pragmatic intention was to use illness or a guilty conscience as a handle for negotiation or pressure. Yet they almost invariably demand the acute suffering and even death of the thief. The phenomenon itself can be linked with the ›endowment effect‹, the over-estimate of the value of things simply because they belong to one, which was greatly accentuated in a poor province such as Britannia. where all manufactured goods, and money, were especially valuable because they were so unevenly distributed. We must of course add the effects of humiliation, the link between property and identity, property and personal honour. The implicit sense of justice here does not imply the mere restitution of an even playing-field: appealing to a god was evidently felt to legitimate fantasies of violent revenge.

5

Conclusion

Under the conditions of ancient life—low life expectancy, high rates of illness and debility, poverty and harsh conditions of labour—means of managing contingency, especially through recourse to religious forms, were inevitably at a premium. For it is adverse contingency, along with major socio-political interventions, that is the major threat to the level of security provided by habitus. In the Roman Empire, both civic elites and individual ritual specialists sought to provide such support to families and individuals. Both relied, to different degrees, on materiality and

165 CIL 13.110069–70 = ILS 8752. 166 DTAud 222b 1–3, cf. 241.15–17. Such transfers exemplify the notion of ›agency‹ in ›Introduction‹, pp. 15–7. 167 Tomlin 1988, 1993.

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ritualisation. Despite the denigration of small-time ritual specialists in the sourcematerial, much of it written by spokesmen committed to philosophical or satiricalmoralising positions, or, like Artemidorus the dream-interpreter, to a specific mode of divinatory practice, such attitudes need not have penetrated very far into the social order. In other words, we need not think of what I have called ›mainstream offers‹ as in practice opposed to those made by small-time religious specialists. The central need, of families and individuals, was for help in the face of adverse contingency. The choices made were based on a variety of pragmatic considerations. In some areas, notably Roman family religion and the realm of funerary practice, ›mainstream options‹ were widely accepted, partly because there was a good deal of freedom regarding the management of details and specific practices. So much so that we can think of these forms of religious action as part of family habitus. The case of healing-shrines and public oracles is rather different, in that, despite enjoying local and even regional prestige, consulting them usually involved journeys and monetary costs. Their patrons therefore needed to weigh advantages against disadvantages, gain against loss. Is my problem sufficiently serious to require such a journey? By contrast, small-time ritual specialists, both in towns and in the agrarian sector, though they usually enjoyed only limited prestige, were not merely much cheaper and nearer to hand but also operated within local subcultures.

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Artefacts and their humans: Materialising the history of religion in the Roman world Miguel John Versluys and Greg Woolf

1

Introduction: From (Late) Prehistoric to Roman

Around 260 BC, at a cultic site at what is now Ribemont-sur-Ancre (Picardy, northern France), religious ceremonies took place at a remarkable monument. It consisted of a wooden enclosure of around 40 x 40 meters, made of a ditch and a palisade each 3 meters in height, with a monumental entrance that was decorated with human skulls, probably of conquered enemies, nailed to the gate’s large beams.1 In front of it, an elevated podium had been built on which the bodies of around 500 male warriors, fully equipped but decapitated, had been set up. Their bodies were left on the podium to decay over time, became mummified and eventually fall off. The ditch and the palisade will have served to separate the sacred enclosure from the secular world. We can say little in detail about the rituals that took place at Ribemont. Three other enclosures have been found that will have served for communion: a coming together of people for a ritual ceremony with the intention of creating a sense of belonging to each other as well as to the divine.2 These ritual festivities, which incorporated communal banqueting, will in this particular case perhaps have served to thank the gods, to honour the dead, and to celebrate the living. Ribemont is a special sanctuary in the sense that it was most likely a kind of trophy, a site to commemorate a large battle that had taken place there.3 Yet other sanctuaries from that period also show a similar pattern of rituals: the sacrifice of domestic animals and the importance of skulls; the offering of weapons and the use of ›sacred pits‹ that will have served to enhance direct contact with the divine in a chthonic way.4 Ribemont was probably still in use in the 40s BC, when its ›biography‹ witnessed a profound and remarkable change that would also have major consequences in the long term: it was replaced by a large sanctuary in stone. Although this sanctuary in stone also served to make a distinction between sacred and secular, it looked very different as it was built in what we call a Gallo-Roman style and tradition. Offerings of human skulls and bodies to the gods were now replaced by small votive figurines or coins. The Roman period offerings are, in that

1 2 3 4

Brunaux 1999. Mol, Versluys 2015. Brunaux 2006. See Poux 2006.

1 Introduction: From (Late) Prehistoric to Roman

211

sense, just a (material) variation of earlier patterns of deposit.5 That variation, however, would have a profound impact on religious developments in the centuries to follow. Let us briefly contrast Ribemont-sur-Ancre, and the ceremonies that took place there, with what happened half a millennium later at a place now called Tienen (Tirlemont, central Belgium), about 300 kilometres to the north-east. Sometime between 250 and 270 AD, another religious ceremony also took place under the open sky. As in 260 BC, this ceremony and the religious experiences it evoked probably functioned to create a sense of community. In the same area, remains from the early and late Iron Age have been documented and we can imagine a cultic site like the one excavated at Ribemont to have existed and functioned in the area of Tienen as well. However, things had considerably changed in the course of these 500 years. At Tienen, we are dealing with a small vicus of the Civitas Tungrorum that came into existence around 50 AD. At the south-western periphery of the settlement, not far from the cemetery, a small, wooden mithraeum (12.5 x 7.5 metres) had been built around the middle of the third century AD, located within a large ditched enclosure of 60 x 60 metres next to a road leading from the vicus centre.6 A large number of mithraea from the Roman world have been excavated and we are relatively well informed about their architecture and architectural decoration, the central element of which was a relief showing Mithras killing the bull. We know much less, however, about the rituals taking place within them.7 The mithraeum of Tienen is remarkable because here we encounter the opposite situation: the architecture and architectural decoration are lost, but through the evidence of ›small finds‹ we have relatively full information about the rituals at the site. A ritual feast took place at the end of June or the beginning of July, so probably at the occasion of the summer solstice.8 Based on the large amounts of domestic animals, such as chickens (285), lambs (14), and piglets (10), all male, that were offered and eaten at the occasion, and the remains of which were carefully deposited, we can deduce that hundreds of people must have been present. As had been the case 500 years earlier at Ribemont, such ›sacred deposits‹ were used as a means of communication with the divine. Naturally there are many differences between the two sites. Skulls and trophies in the form of weapons (along with decapitated warriors) are notably absent at Tienen. But the greatest structural difference, we would argue, is the very large number of objects present in Tienen that both constituted and reflect the rituals that took place there. A series of depositional pits next to the mithraeum were filled with objects that were directly related to specific cult activities. Remains of more than 700 ceramic vessels were found (spouted jars for heating liquids, cooking pots, lids, plates, black-slipped beakers), of which some were made for the occasion

5 6 7 8

For which see Bradley 1990. Martens 2004. Gordon 2017, with earlier literature. Martens 2015.

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Artefacts and their humans: Materialising the history of religion in the Roman world

and apparently brought over by the participants from their homes. Around 100 locally made incense burners were excavated, as well as 12 oil lamps imported from the Rhineland. Only a cella wall has been preserved from the mithraeum itself; inside the cella there might have been a cultic relief, and perhaps even more visual representations related to the cult, of the kind we know so well from other sanctuaries.9 Not only were there many more objects, there were also objects that had been developed, so to speak, to serve the rituals in a specific way.10 The snake plays an important role in Mithraic iconography and pottery decorated with snakes, undoubtedly meant to play a role in the rituals, is well known from Mithraic sanctuaries. From Tienen, a very special example of such a Schlangengefäß has been preserved. Made of metal, the snake was added to the vase almost as a sculptural element and as such it was able to perform, as it were, during a ritual.

Fig. 20: Schlangengefäß from Tienen.

9 See Hensen 2017. 10 Gordon 2004.

2 Artefacts and religious change in the Roman world

2

213

Artefacts and religious change in the Roman world

Material culture has become much more prominent in the study of Roman religion in the last decades, in part as a consequence of a new emphasis on ritual practice and action.11 Looking at artefactual evidence makes us ask new questions, turns our attention to different themes, and complements our written sources.12 When we apply such a change in perspective to the study of religion in the Roman Mediterranean, we are usefully reminded of the fact that there is much more to the subject than emperor worship and the Capitoline Triad alone. Rather, lived religion in the Roman world is very much about the generation and use of new kinds of material things, including altars, lamps, figurines, amulets, musical instruments, papyri, vessels, ex-votos, tablets, baskets, images, pots, knives, and garments—and the list could go on.13 These new artefacts changed religious practices and hence the communication with the gods.14 Emphasising the mundane and concrete is important when what we are interested in is religious practice and experience in itself; that is the functioning of religions in the Roman world. But, as we will argue, materialising the history of religion for our period can also show how objects played their part in constituting the religions of the Roman world.15 Our introductory example contrasting Ribemont-sur-Ancre with Tienen is meant to illustrate precisely that. The difference between the two ways of communicating with the divine would traditionally have been described as a transition from »Celtic« to »Roman« religion, understood in an ethnic, ideological or ideational way. We argue that we should rather try and explain this change in terms of shifting repertoires of objects and the work all these new objects performed in transforming religious communication and hence constituting a new type of religious behaviour, what we call the religions of the Roman world. It is on purpose, therefore, that the chronological frame chosen for this essay is very long-term, with our examples and case-studies stretching from the middle of the first millennium BC to the middle of the first millennium AD. Our topographical frame is equally wide, as we believe that the increasing connectivity between different regions of the Ancient World characterising this millennium is fundamental to many of the

11 For which see Raja, Rüpke 2015. 12 See in general Gerritsen, Riello 2015. With a focus on religion, Houtman, Meyer (2012, 4) state that »(-) championing materiality signals the need to pay urgent attention to a real, material world of objects and a texture of lived, embodied experience.« 13 See Moyer 2016. 14 This remarkable development of how things make history is one of the main narratives of Rüpke 2016. 15 Such an approach is already visible in Rüpke 2016 for ancient religion in the Mediterranean; in Smith 2017 for the ›parting of the ways‹ between Jewish religion and Christianity and in Frankfurter 2018 for how the Christianisation of Egypt is mediated through material forms, amongst others. Comparable examples from outside the field of (ancient) religion from which we drew inspiration include Böhme 2006; Gosden 2006; Goody 2012; Wells 2012; Goldhill 2014.

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(religious) changes we call Roman.16 We have also chosen to refer now and then to examples from outside the field of Roman studies to illustrate our argument. Materialising the history of Roman religion is a relatively new development within our field and for the reader of this Handbook it is important, therefore, to see what the debate has already achieved in other domains of religious studies and to be aware of the more general, theoretical debate on artefacts and their humans and its key terminology.

3

Objects, affordances, and religion

Objects and religion are intimately connected, as the emergence (or loss) of certain material forms often leads to a reconceptualization of both the divine in itself, and of the religious practices associated with it. There is a strong relation between objects, the possibilities for human action they provide (something referred to as their affordances, see Gibson 1979), and religion. This strong relation always exists, but it tends to become most prominently visible in periods of radical change. After the Spaniards had conquered the Americas, they began to impose their own Catholic faith on the indigenous populations. An important part of this Christianisation was the destruction of »pagan idols«. The elimination of these material objects forced some Indian populations, like the Andeans, to rethink their understanding of the gods, as they now were faced with the question of where their gods had gone. The loss of certain material forms forced the Andeans to develop new, and in this case more abstract theological concepts. Through this change in the availability of objects and their specific affordances, Andean religion was reimagined in much more abstract terms than it had been before.17 Roman polytheism did not deal with the beliefs and ritual practices of others in the same way as did the Catholic conquistadores. Yet also in the Roman world, religion revolved around objects and their affordances, and a change in the availability of certain repertoires of objects could result in dramatic religious changes. An example of this, if we follow the ideas of Stroumsa, might be the fact that the destruction of the temple in Jerusalem and its altar in 70 AD forced the Jews to invent a new form of Jewish religion without an altar on which sacrifices could be made—and hence becoming a religion of the book.18 The loss of the material form »temple with altar«, according to Stroumsa, resulted in a reconceptualization of both religious beliefs and practices and formed the basis of the radical transformation of Jewish religion in the first centuries AD. The destruction of the temple brought about a change in what we could call the Jewish religious objectscape, and likewise a change concerning one of the most important semiotic forms enabling Jews to do Jewish religion. This forced them to choose a new semiotic form and

16 See Chapter ›Empire‹, pp. 25–6. 17 MacCormack 1991; Keane 2007, 135–6. 18 Stroumsa 2005. His ideas have met with strong criticism. What we take from Stroumsa here is his emphasis on material culture to account for religious change.

4 Objectscape and semiotic form

215

subsequently they developed their religion as a religion of the book. This is also evidenced by a new focus on the materiality of the book, for example in the depiction of Torah scrolls in late antique synagogue mosaics, and by Christian concerns about the treatment of sacred writings during the Great Persecution.19

4

Objectscape and semiotic form

It is most worthwhile to try and materialise the history of religions in the Roman world from such a perspective. We call this a material history because the changing repertoire of objects brought with it a complex range of socio-cultural and religious effects. To this purpose, we will not only explore how the material world of objects was indispensable for the lived experience that was religion in the Roman world;20 but we will mainly focus on how things played their part in constituting, maintaining, and changing religious practices, identities and communication.21 As we have seen with the sudden, non-availability of images of the gods in the Andes, and also with the transition from altar to sacred book in the Jewish case, shifts in the objectscape form an intricately component of the emergence of new religious configurations. They always do so, of course, in tandem with human agents. From this perspective then, it could be argued that it is the interplay of objects with their affordances on the one hand, and various kinds of human agency on the other, that »make up« religion. Historians and archaeologists have investigated human agency expertly and for a long time already. It is important now to focus properly on the material side of this entanglement as well.22 To be able to investigate things as the agents provocateurs of religious change, and in order to do so in an applied manner, we use the idea of an objectscape that consists of specific semiotic forms. We briefly explain what this entails below. Simply put, we define an objectscape as ›the repertoire(s) of material culture available at a certain site in a certain period‹.23 Focussing on objectscapes in the study of religion allows us, first of all, to chart the objects available in a certain context at a certain period and thus to determine that the Andeans had certain cultic images before the Spanish conquest and not after; or that the Jews in and around Jerusalem had an altar as part of their material environment at the end of the first century BC and a book at the end of the first century AD. The second step is interpretative, as we are interested in the religious consequences of these changes in the material environment. In other words, we want to know why and how these objectscapes differed in terms of action and (emergent) causation.24 To that purpose, we use the notion of semiotic

19 20 21 22

Goodman 1994; Woolf 2012. As proposed by Raja, Rüpke 2015. As proposed by Rüpke 2016. As argue, in more general terms, Boivin 2008; Hodder 2010; Hicks 2010; Barrett 2014 amongst others; cf. Miller 2017 for the historiography of what is called ›the material turn‹. 23 Versluys 2017; Pitts 2018. 24 Robb 2013; Van Oyen 2016.

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form. In terms of possibilities for religious action, the presence (or lack thereof) of a cultic image is of great importance; and an altar has different affordances to those of a book. Altars and books are different semiotic forms: what can be done with one is not the same as what can be done with another. Or think about a very specific semiotic form like visual imagery.25 Through the particular affordances of images – that is, what visual imagery allows you to achieve in terms of doing religion – a religious system which does make use of sacred iconography is not the same as one in which no images are available for religious action. For the history of religion in the ancient Mediterranean the availability of (novel forms of) visual imagery has, at several points, resulted in new possibilities of communicating with the gods, with religious transformation as a result. One could think of the life-size statues that we encounter in religious contexts of Iron Age Italy in the 6th century BC or the use of terracotta reliefs with Greek mythological scenes for temples in late Republican Rome: as new media for communication with the divine both were revolutionary innovations.26 We use the concept of semiotic form here in a distinctly phenomenological sense: altar or book or image are not just abstract notions expressing an underlying intellectual idea but also objects with their own »thingness« and potentially independent of what they originally were meant to signify. The study of ancient religion has traditionally only looked at the first, representational aspect, but when we want to materialise the history of ancient religion both aspects matter, as we will illustrate below.27 Semiotic forms are not just signs referring to something, but they also constitute possibilities in themselves. The outcome of these possibilities might very well not be related to the original meaning or idea that the sign referred to. It is therefore important to distinguish between the semiotic form as signifier (for example: the Bible as the word of God or the image of a bearded man as the representation of Jupiter) and the materiality of that semiotic form (the Bible as a folio; the image as a (sculpted) piece of stone or wood). In other words, establishing a relation between distinct materiality (the Bible as a book) and distinct semiotic understanding (the Bible as the word of God) is only one out of many affordances that a Bible folio provides. In exactly the same way, there are many more things that one can do with a (sculpted) piece of stone or wood than understanding it as a representation of the divine.28

25 Estienne, Huet, Lissarague, Prost 2014. 26 Rüpke 2016, 59–63, 95ff. and 194 respectively. 27 We therefore use the concept of semiotic form, or signifier, in the sense of how Charles S. Peirce understood semiotics, rather than in terms of Ferdinand de Saussure; cf. Preucel 2010. 28 The difference is illustrated in depth by Keane 1997 and formulated as follows on his p. 79: »Once semiotic forms are introduced into a social world, they become available as materials for experience on which further work is carried out. They can become objects of reflection, sources of disciplinary practice, points of contention, or sources of anxiety. (-) These forms could never be fully confined to their original contexts or definitively subordinated to their ›true‹, immaterial meanings. They risked being fetishized, producing new hybrids. That risk is inseparable from their efficacy, the capacity that semiotic forms have of being recontextualised.«

5 How new objects and materials change religious practices: automata

217

To sum up: the notion of the objectscape provides us with an idea of continuity and change in the material repertoire. Understanding these repertoires in terms of semiotic forms allows us to investigate what these objects did; how and on the basis of what kind of affordances they had an impact.

5

How new objects and materials change religious practices: automata

Let us briefly look at a remarkable change in the objectscape of lived religion in our period from this perspective: the availability, from the Hellenistic era onwards, of automata or self-operating machines in the Mediterranean.29 An automaton is an object that has been constructed to move on its own and is powered by mechanical processes. Mechanical automata were first created in the Hellenistic period and contributed to the increasing complexity of rituals that had started in the Iron Age.30 None have survived from Antiquity, but they are described in the writings

Fig. 21: Reconstruction of an automaton.

29 Fragaki 2012; Bosak-Schroeder 2016; Mayor 2018. 30 Rüpke 2016, Ch. IV and V for the increasing complexity of rituals as triggered by new communication possibilities afforded by new semiotic forms in the first millennium BC.

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of the first-century AD author Heron of Alexandria. Automata were powerful tools for evoking and instilling religious awe and were made part of rituals in a variety of ways. In his Spiritalia pneumatica, Heron mentions automatic holy water dispensers (1.21), temple door openers (1.38), and an automaton of Heracles that was able to shoot an apple and thus collect a snake. Many more elaborate scenes with ›living statues‹ are described in his Automatopoetica and are also known from the famous description by Athenaios of the grand procession of Ptolemy II Philadelphos that took place in the second quarter of the 3rd century BC.31 Athenaios (5, 198–200) says the following about the Dionysiac part of the procession: After them (i.e., hundreds of statues of satyrs and silens) came a four-wheeled cart 14 cubits long and eight cubits wide pulled by 180 men. On it was a statue of Dionysos ten cubits high pouring libations from a gold karchesion and wearing a purple tunic that stretched to its feet and a thin saffron robe over this. … After them came a four wheeled cart eight cubits wide and pulled by 60 men. On it was a seated statue of Nyse eight cubits height wearing a yellow tunic with gold spangles, with a Spartan robe wrapped around her. A mechanical device made the statue stand up without anyone touching it; pour a libation of milk from a golden libation bowl; and sit down again.

Given their novelty, one can easily imagine the great impression these moving gods will have made on their public and the religious awe they would have evoked. Ancient texts had fantasised about religious statues coming alive from Homer onwards, but now this had become reality. Consequently, theatricality began to play an increasingly important and more complex role in rituals. The same Ptolemy II also built the famous Arsinoeion, only known through some literary references and remarks by Pliny.32 In this sanctuary for the sovereign’s consort Arsinoë, the architect apparently had begun to roof the temple with magnetic material in such a way that the iron image of Arsinoë would seem to float in the air. This will have added to the impression of the queen-pharaoh’s divinity in no small way. A change in the religious objectscape, is this case the innovation of the semiotic form cult statue, thus resulted in all kinds of communicative and conceptual changes. However, as argued above, we should not forget the materiality of the new semiotic form that are automata as cult statues. In this case, materiality would prove to play an important role in quite a literal way. In order for automata to have a religious effect, to suggest divine appearance, their practical workings and functioning had to remain out of sight. For reasons of materiality and mechanics (and because of the publication of treatises like those of Heron!) this often proved to be difficult. Hence continuing experimentations occurred, like those with the floating Arsinoë in the Arsinoeion from Alexandria mentioned above. As a result of the fact that the libation-pouring Dionysos and other automata remained mechanical devices, however, and that these mechanics could not be made invisible, we see a shift in the understanding of automata from magical to mechanical over the course of time.33 In the

31 See Mylonopoulos 2014. 32 See Fraser 1972 (I), 25 with references. 33 Tybjerg 2003.

6 Religion in the Empire of things

219

story of automata, therefore, new objects and their materials changed religious practices and ideas twice.

6

Religion in the Empire of things

Applying these ideas to the era characterised by the formation and consolidation of the Roman Empire is particularly worthwhile. One consequence of the overseas expansion that began around 200 BC was a great disturbance in Mediterranean objectscapes: unparalleled quantities of objects, made in a huge variety of local styles, were redistributed around the Mediterranean. Both the trade and production of elaborate artefacts increased, as Rome conquered successive cities and kingdoms and as the tastes of metropolitan elites were enlarged. We can indeed talk about an artefact boom as well as a consumer revolution;34 or, in more general terms, about the ›excitation of the material world‹.35 The real globetrotters of this era were inanimate—not humans but things—and many parts of the (increasingly Roman) Mediterranean were inundated with non-local objects and materials. These objects embodied geographically wide and temporally deep connections and thus triggered strong associations in both their users and viewers.36 This change in the objectscape, and in the semiotic forms it consisted of, had all kinds of dramatic and often unintended consequences for Roman society. Religion was one of the aspects profoundly touched by it. For instance, many more religious technologies became available. One cluster of such technologies is represented by the use of votive, durable offerings alongside the perishable offerings employed in sacrifice. Another is represented by images of sacrificial victims, worshippers, and gods, congregated in shrines and public spaces that fossilised performance and incited imitation.37 Anatomical votive offerings and monumental writing now appeared in sacred places, which posed new problems of disposal and curation. Deposits and treasuries were constructed. Another cluster of artefacts facilitated rituals that had become phenomenally widespread. Among these, we include the use of amulets, the making of defixiones (curse tablets), portable altars, portable images of the gods in bronze, soapstone, wood, and ceramic, and a mass of specialised equipment, including paterae, knives, incense burners, head dresses, sistra, and sacred books. These objects both incited and enabled use and thus created new visual, tactile, and auditory universes. Through all these objects religion changed dramatically. But how and why were certain (classes of) objects able to generate new practices; through what kind of affordances were they capable of remaking the divine; and what does religion in the Roman Mediterranean look like from such a perspective?

34 35 36 37

Woolf 1998; Wallace-Hadrill 2008; Pitts 2018. Gosden 2005. Versluys 2014; Pitts 2018. Estienne, Huet, Lissarague, Prost 2014 and Luginbühl 2015 for examples.

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What role, in other words, did objects, their materiality and the excitation of the material world play? Below we present several examples that provisionally start answering these questions, taking up the ideas on objectscapes, semiotic forms and the excitation of the material world in relation to religious changes as formulated above.

7

Beyond wood

Although it is by no means an ethnographic source, Tacitus’ Germanica at least gives us an idea of what the religious rituals of a tribe known as the Semnones (were thought to have) looked like. On their veneration of divine ancestors, he comments (Germanica 39): At a fixed time, all the people of the same lineage assemble by their delegates in a wood, consecrated by the signs of their forefathers and ancient terror, and there, by the public slaughter of a human victim, they celebrate the horrid origin of their barbarous rites. Another kind of reverence is paid to the grove. No person enters it without being bound with a chain, as an acknowledgment of his inferior nature, and the power of the deity residing there. If he accidentally falls, it is not lawful for him to be lifted or to rise up; they roll themselves out along the ground. The whole of their superstition has this import: that from this spot the nation derives its origin; that here is the residence of the divine ruler of all things, and that everything else is subject and subordinate to him.

The fragment suggests that, in the conceptual universe of the Semnones, the gods resided in the landscape; and this is indeed how scholars reconstruct the religious traditions of northern Europe during the Iron Age in general terms.38 The articulation of religious ideas and rituals through material culture would be relatively limited—although there is increasing evidence for the use of wooden statuary.39 There are »signs of the ancestors«, but those were most likely skulls or other bodily remains. Regarding homicide, Tacitus does not mention the use of a special object – he even uses the phrase caeso homine, suggesting that the victim was literally ripped apart with bare hands – and even when he mentions the chain, which is an object in itself, he gives no indication that it was somehow special in either stylistic or material sense. The situation becomes strikingly different after the change in objectscapes that was brought about by the Roman invasion of the area. Through Roman conquests, Western Europe became more connected with the Mediterranean than ever before, and through the Mediterranean with other parts of Eurasia, as well. It had always been in touch with that wider world, of course, and already from the late Bronze Age onwards those connections had intensified, resulting in an influx of new objects and materials that would significantly alter the Bronze and Iron Age societies

38 Joy 2011. 39 Py 2011.

7 Beyond wood

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that they entered, also in religious terms.40 But such changes had never been as profound as in the period between 100 BC–100 AD; the period during which Rome conquered large parts of the Mediterranean and Near East. Through these conquests, Rome enhanced that connectedness even more. Take, for instance, the stone altar from Sint-Michielsgestel (›Ruimel‹), which can be dated to the middle of the first century AD.41 This votive, dedicated by a socalled summus magistratus of the Batavi to their principal god Magusanus Hercules, is, for this region, novel in almost every respect. It could be described in terms of the influx of several novel affordances. One of those novelties is the altar itself; the pre-eminent expression of the Roman ritual of the votum. The god Hercules constitutes another affordance; a deity that brought many associations, ranging from heroic traveller and protector of cattle to mythical founder. In this case, the choice for Hercules could link the local deity Magusanus to a much more global system. Another incoming affordance, which we could call »monumental writing«, suggests that this indeed changed the ritual practices surrounding Magusanus: the god now received a stone votive that was inscribed – and in Latin, a new language in the region.42 Another altar for Hercules Magusanus, found near Bonn, adds yet another innovation: a naturalistic depiction of the god. Dedicated by a legionary and also

Fig. 22: Stone altar from Sint-Michielsgestel.

40 Frère 2006. 41 Derks 1998, 89 with earlier literature. 42 For monumental writing, see Woolf 1996; for altars and their materiality Moser 2019.

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made from stone, it contains a dedicatory inscription as well as a depiction of Hercules and the three-headed hell-hound Cerberus in a niche.43 Magusanus, here depicted as a distinctly Roman Hercules, was probably venerated as the protector and founder of the civitas and as guardian of cattle. Whereas the Semnones had to go into the wild to venerate their ancestors and demonstrate their descent, a prominent member of the civitas could now do this at Magusanus’ sanctuary. Materiality allowed him to claim a place in a much larger world than that of the civitas alone, in the form of an inscription and an (iconographic) depiction. The durability of stone, moreover, would potentially even allow him to do after his death. As a result, the way of articulating a special relation with the gods and the rituals surrounding that articulation changed dramatically, namely, from donations of mobilia to the landscape, via altars like this and small cult places to financing, maintaining, and embellishing monumental public buildings, often in the cityscape. All these novelties (a votive altar, Hercules, an inscription in stone, a naturalistic depiction in stone) must have radically changed the rituals for Magusanus and the identity of related cult communities, although in this case it is impossible to say exactly how. It is therefore difficult to understand those changes more profoundly.

8

With terracotta (and double moulds)

The goddess Isis constituted a not overly remarkable part of Egyptian religion until the beginning of the first millennium BC. At that time, her character changed, as did her popularity. Around 500 BC, Herodotos regards her as the Egyptian goddess par excellence (Histories II, 42) and for the Roman period, it has even been remarked that »in fact, Isis was everywhere in Egypt«.44 Two aspects appear to have played a major role in this development: the fact that the character of Isis changed to that of a mother goddess, and the circumstance in which Isis established a strong relation with kingship and royal power.45 The former might account for her popularity around the middle of the first millennium BC, and the latter for her appropriation by Hellenistic kings and Roman emperors. But why was Isis really everywhere in especially Roman Egypt, and throughout the Mediterranean, during the period of the Roman Empire? Terracotta and its affordances played a role in this.46

43 44 45 46

Derks 1998, 113–4 with earlier literature. Kaper 2011, 149. Bricault, Versluys 2014. See Barrett 2011 for how Hellenistic religion on Delos was mediated through terracotta figurines of Egyptian gods and the observations below.

8 With terracotta (and double moulds)

Fig. 23: Terracotta figurine of Isis from Egypt.

223

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Terracotta figures have been preserved in Egypt from the Pre-Dynastic period onwards, as clay for making them was abundantly present in the Nile valley. Egyptian craftsmen used moulds to produce figurines as early as the New Kingdom but it is only from the moment they could be shaped by means of double moulds, to be casted as hollow figurines, that their occurrence increases significantly. The double mould technique for figurines was invented in the Greek Mediterranean around the 7th century BC. Through the increasing Roman involvement with the Eastern Mediterranean and Egypt, it seriously took off at the Nile in the later Hellenistic and Roman periods, when Egyptian artists adapted these new manufacturing techniques to their own religious concepts. The technical choices made by Egyptian coroplasts suggest a consistent preference for time efficiency. Aesthetics were deemed less important than quick production and these cult objects were produced in as short a time as possible in enormous quantities.47 The many religious festivals might in part have been responsible for this artefact boom and its consumer revolution. In combination with the double mould technique, the affordances of terracotta would change Egyptian ritual and religion in various ways. Not only was it cheap and could now be produced quickly and in a quasi-industrial way, it also allowed for images to be produced in a naturalistic and detailed manner. In other words, terracotta figures now enabled the establishment of an intimate relation with the divine, at home and on a daily basis. Through terracotta, the character of domestic, private worship changed—and for the first time becomes visible to archaeologists and historians on a large scale. Of course, private devotion already existed in earlier periods, but at that time it was still relatively difficult to get in touch with the divine materially. There were religious ceremonies, but normal people could not often participate in them. It was also possible to leave an inscription on the temple wall; to sleep in the temple or leave an oracle there; but for all those, it was necessary to go to the sanctuary and leave something behind there. The mass availability of cheap terracotta figurines that offered a large variety of iconographies achieved the opposite. More than ever before the gods could now be taken home, by everyone and for any occasion. Through the occurrence of objects like votive beds and ancestor statues in households, we know that this already happened in Pharaonic Egypt; but terracotta and double moulds changed both the scale and the modalities of this practice. The most popular themes of Hellenistic and Roman ›domestic religion‹ that we see expressed in terracotta figures revolve around fertility, motherhood, and feasting. These ideas combine well in the figure of Isis, who therefore, along with related gods like Osiris and Bes, became very popular. Yet another affordance of terracotta, that you could make lamps of it, might have played a role with this as well. The light radiated by these lamps created its context together with the images depicted on the lamp.48 In this way lamps could function

47 See Barrett 2011, Chapter 3. 48 Ruth Bielfeldt has recently shown how strong the presence and agency of terracotta lamps and their decorations really was in the Roman world; cf. Bielfeldt 2014, 233: »Die antike Bild und Figurallampe ist grundsätzlich deiktisch und somit vergegenwärtigend.« See also Stewart 2000.

9 Through marble and caementicium

225

as the shrines of the god; their fire is the fire of the altar. The mass availability of terracotta and its figural decorations thus enabled the development of domestic religion in a way that was unheard of before. The fact that Isis was eventually found everywhere in Roman Egypt can probably be understood better against this background, namely: by means of terracotta and double molds. But the much-debated »diffusion« of the cults of Isis throughout the Hellenistic and Roman oikumene is probably related to these material aspects as well. Through a remarkable project of translation, as testified by the Isis aretalogies as well as the iconographic revolution of the goddess, we know that Isis was universalised into something of a global commodity.49. This process most likely took place in Alexandria or Memphis, or at least along the Nile itself, in the first place. But the fact that this innovation would spread across the wider world is closely related to the materiality of the semiotic form that is Hellenistic Isis. Exporting Egyptian religion was notoriously difficult in material terms, due to its focus on monumentality and the temple. It proved to be difficult to construct large temple walls with Pharaonic images of Isis outside Egypt. The Hellenisation of Isis provided one solution to this dilemma; her transportability would prove to be another. Not only could terracotta figures of Isis be easily made almost anywhere, their production also allowed for fast and easy changes in iconography. Isis became very popular because of her ability to be associated with other gods with whom she shared similarities. On the Italic peninsula, for instance, Isis became strongly associated with Fortuna. The success and popularity of this association was also related to the fact that their overlapping identities could be easily shown through the addition or removal of characteristic iconography. Through terracotta, amongst other media, bricolage became mainstream as artisans could now easily fabricate their Isis-Fortuna themselves.50

9

Through marble and caementicium

The influx and availability of marble would have a profound impact on many aspects of Roman society in Italy, including religion. Perhaps one can even talk about ›the marble revolution‹. Marble enabled specific forms of durability that, in large parts of the Mediterranean, simply could not be achieved before on such a scale. We have already encountered the importance of the durability of specific materials earlier, when discussing the stone altars for Hercules Magusanus. Through its specific affordances, marble would take the question of durability to a different level. Hence, the material qualities of marble changed religious rituals, as the idea of perpetuated action was at the core of such rituals. The perishable quality of materials matters a lot in relation to this, because durable materials allow for an uninterrupted continuation of the ritual and hence the communication with the divine. 49 Woolf 2014 with earlier bibliography. 50 Naerebout 2010; Frankfurter 2018 for similar processes of bricolage in a later period.

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As such, they are able to establish strong links with the past as well—which further enhances their performative power and impact. But marble afforded much more than enhanced durability alone. It also provided different means for figurative representation and display of the divine. Figuring gods and myths had mattered greatly to Roman religion from the 6th century BC onwards. Until the widespread availability of marble in the Augustan period and unlike the situation in the Greek world where bronze was the preferred material for prestige statues, these representations were mostly made from (painted) terracotta. Such displays were rather vulnerable; which is one of the reasons why they have not been preserved in great quantities today. There were also limitations to what you could do with terracotta plaques in terms of reproduction. The influx of marble statues in the late Republican period, from Greece and the Hellenistic East in particular, provided the Romans with a whole new range of iconographic possibilities to imagine their gods and to do Roman religion. This resulted in profound changes to temples and the rituals taking place there.51 Another material bringing new affordances with it, concrete, would equally contribute to religious change. Opus caementicium was a new composite material developed in Republican Italy around the middle of the 2nd century BC.52 Other types of mortared rubble had been in use earlier and available all across the Mediterranean, but these could not match Roman concrete in terms of strength and efficiency. Caementicium consisted of volcanic ash and lightweight aggregates called caementa. Its invention enabled the imperial ›architectural revolution‹ that has determined, and still strongly determines our image of the Roman world. The new construction possibilities that concrete enabled created a different kind of building environment for the Romans to live in as well as a new architectural environment for Roman religion.53 How the material history of caementicium branches out into a material history of Roman religion can be illustrated by the sanctuary of Fortuna Primigenia in ancient Praeneste, in Latium, near Rome. The embellishment and monumentalisation of this sanctuary on a magnificent scale, around 100 BC, would have been unthinkable without the new possibilities provided by concrete, including construction techniques. These interventions not only changed the features of the site itself but can also be shown to have changed its rituals and cult. One of its consequences is the fact that the creation of a different kind of religious space made »decorations, statues and furniture accumulate at the cult place, progressively creating the religio of the site.«54

51 Von Hesberg (2015, 327) summarises the result of these changes in relation to temple building as follows: »In the early Empire, the interior of the temple changed again, also due to the availability of new materials such as marble and religious statues.« 52 We follow Mogetta 2015. 53 As recently summarised by Van Oyen (2017, 111) for the Roman world in general terms: »These new kinds of concrete vaulted spaces fostered new kinds of interactions with and between their occupants. (-) Concrete’s material histories branch out into histories of imperial identities, economic development, control, and citizenship«. 54 Van Andringa 2015, 34–5.

10 Led by lead

10

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Led by lead

The cult place of Apollo Moritasgus in Alesia had always drawn on the availability of water at the Alesian plateau. Still, as far as we can tell, water did not play any significant role in the sanctuary and its rituals in the La Tène period. This changed in the late Augustan period, when water became one of the most prominent features of the site and its religious activities. Through this both the conception and the experience of the cult changed.55 These changes had everything to do with Roman water technology – and hence with lead. At the end of the Augustan period, first a recess enclosed by three walls was built on the slope of the complex to contain a large basin that was used for offerings. Water acquired a truly central role a few decades later, when an octagonal temple was built on a large-sized water channel. The construction of the underground channel destroyed all earlier structures and it is clear that the water, staged to emerge from the earth like an epiphany, was meant to represent the divine. It came above ground only downstream to feed a thermal complex. A large nymphaeum was added to this complex in the first decades of the second century AD. As becomes clear from the many anatomical ex-votos that were found there, its basin, overseen by a goddess holding a snake (Sirona?), was intensively used for offering. Lead is one of the major Roman-period additions to the material landscape of the Mediterranean.56 Complex water systems could only be designed and built through the availability of pressurized water pipes from lead. In Alesia and many other places, the new possibilities of increasing complexity this material provided were eagerly capitalised upon. Different affordances of lead played a role with ritual changes taking place elsewhere in the Roman period, as becomes clear from the excavations of a temple complex in the centre of Roman Mainz.57 Originally built around 50 AD, and directly on top of Hallstatt-period tumulus burials, two small temples for Isis and the Mater Magna could be identified. These were later replaced by one larger temple that stood inside a walled temenos. Southeast of this complex was a field that served for sacrificial offering: many shallow pits with the remains of animals and vegetables were excavated there. In a narrow space between the rear of the temenos and a wall of the earlier complex, however, a sacrificial fire pit was excavated containing a large number of inscribed curse tablets made from lead, as well as many coins.58 Lead curse tablets provided many new possibilities for ritual than perishable materials did and widened the scope of religious possibilities and their understanding.59

55 Indeed, as de Cazanove (2015, 188) writes: »The water system in a sanctuary can evolve over time and reveal, along with new possibilities in the field of hydraulics, a change in the very conception of the cult and the ritual staging of divine power.« 56 Flohr 2016. 57 Witteyer 2004. 58 Blänsdorf, Lambert, Witteyer 2012. 59 Gordon 2014 and our Chapter ›Empire‹ as a field of religious action in this book, p. 31.

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Fig. 24: Roman curse tablet from lead, Matilo (the Netherlands)

The same applies to the practice of making coinage, both as money and as medium, part of the religious instrumentarium, as was done in Mainz. In his Christian Moderns, Webb Keane (2007) illustrates how unsettling the Protestant missionaries’ introduction of money into the local religious system was to the Sundanese for whom money was part of a very different socio-cultural sphere. The questions these changes raised subsequently made a round trip, in that they also forced the Protestant missionaries to evaluate and rethink their way of offering and their relation to the divine. A parallel from the Roman context for changes set in motion through the introduction of coinage concerns the thesaurus. It is only through the introduction of coins that the analytical and religious category of the thesaurus comes into being – and thesauri would result in important ritual changes.60

11

Conclusion

Our aim in this chapter has been to show that the study of Roman religion needs to take objects seriously as agents provocateurs of religious change. New kinds of objects did not just reflect change, but had the potential, the affordances, to bring it about. The transition from Late Prehistoric to Roman that we started with, from the rituals taking place at Ribemont-sur-Ancre to those in Tienen, is, of course, tied up with many developments, but certainly also with changes in the humanthing entanglement within religious settings. In that entanglement the humans

60 Stek 2009.

11 Conclusion

229

had very much stayed the same over half a millennium; the things, however, had gone through a tremendous evolution in both quantitative and qualitative terms. To illustrate how objects played their part, together with human agency, in constituting Roman religion we have explored the idea of an objectscape that consists of specific semiotic forms. We have seen that the religious objectscape changed dramatically in the Roman period as there was an excitation of the material world: not only was there much more stuff around, but the repertoire of available objects was also wider than ever before. In fact, the Hellenistic debate on simplicity versus elaboration in the visual construction of the divine already conceptualises the wider availability of artefacts and its implications for religion.61 The notion of a semiotic form, that we borrow from the influential book by Keane (2007) on religious change through an excitation of the material world in the 20th century, allows us to better understand why certain objects, or repertoires of objects, had an impact, and how they were able to play their part in processes of religious change. This is because the notion of semiotic form rightly has attention for both aspects of the question why objects have their impact. First there is the (original) meaning of the object; the object as signifier. When in 204 BC the Romans introduce the mater deum magna Idaea, the Magna Mater also called Cybele, by fetching a sacred stone, probably a meteorite, from Asia Minor and delivering that stone to the temple of Victory at the Palatine, this clearly is an example of how an object plays its part in changing Roman religion.62 It is an individual example of human-thing entanglement that shows us what people make of objects, because for the Roman crowds lining the Tiber and welcoming the stone with gifts and prayers this was the Magna Mater. Secondly, however, there are the unintended consequences of appropriating this semiotic form; the object as a material for experience on which further work is carried out. If we look at those, we focus more on how objects make people and their religion or, in other words, how Roman religion evolves through the particular relationship between objects and people. This concerns not so much what happens in 204 BC but is rather about material engagement in the middle and longer term. The examples of materialising the history of religion in the Roman world that have been put forward in this article have focused on the latter aspect; on the unintended consequences for religion brought about by the object revolution. We have seen that the materiality of the objects play an important role in all this. This idea was clearly not lost on the Romans themselves; not without reason Lucian of Samosata famously sorted the (statues of the) gods according to the materials they are made from (Dialogues of the gods). But there is, of course, much more to objects than the materials they are made from, as we also hope to have shown by treating them as signifiers. But that even profound changes in materiality play their part in the development of what we call Roman religion only underlines how important it is to try and materialise its history.

61 Mylonopoulos 2014. 62 Ando 2008.

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It has been the aim of this chapter to open up that perspective. We have done so in a general way, by focussing on an appropriate theoretical framework for materialising the history of religion in the Roman world and by describing the potential of some types of objects and, more specifically, some materials (wood/stone, terracotta, marble, cement and lead). Further study should try and quantify the changes they brought about and thereby focus on the new religious technologies made available through the widening of the repertoire—and the consequences thereof. To achieve this, it is imperative to investigate well-excavated sanctuaries where we can document changes in the religious objectscape in relation to transformations in ritual more in depth.

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The Impact of Textual Production on the Organisation and Proliferation of Religious Knowledge in the Roman Empire Georgia Petridou and Jörg Rüpke

1

Introduction

This chapter asks how religious ideas and practises were constructed in and disseminated through literary and epigraphic texts. This aspect of diffusion of religious knowledge has largely been neglected primarily because a large part of the scholarly work produced on the topic has been heavily influenced by Christianity (and partly Judaism) as the par excellence religions of the book. The complex ways religious practices and institutions interacted with Judaeo-Christian scriptures became the paradigmatic prism through which we also used to examine Graeco-Roman antiquity. From Georg Wissowa’s famous dismissal of the centrality of holy texts in ›Roman religion‹, to Ittai Gradel’s careful cautioning against employing foundational texts like Cicero’s ›On the Nature of Gods‹, ›On Divination‹ (and one has to add his ›On His House‹) in our intellectual enterprise of delineating what Roman mortal-immortal interaction may have looked like, for centuries and with only a handful of exceptions,1 looking at books and texts as integral in shaping Roman religious ideas and practises has been actively discouraged. By contrast, this study argues that the relationship between texts and religion was a dynamic, two-directional one: texts reflected, reiterated and even confronted pre-established or newly introduced religious ideas and religious behaviour gave rise to new texts or took decisive action for the regulation of previously authorised but widely circulated documents. Even significant advances in textual production, such as the so-called epigraphic habit (see next section on Calendars) and the passage from the scroll to the codex, as argued below, impacted on the transition of religious ideas, precisely because the codex, in particular, functioned as a more effective mode of religious transmission across the vast and diverse geographical and cultural boundaries of the Imperium Romanum. In other words, literary and epigraphic texts should be interpreted as both actively construing and circulating Greco-Roman religion, rather than simply as pieces of evidence for it.2 The production and selection of »canonical« texts is examined in the same conceptual framework. Therefore, it seems more a result rather than the precondition for that.

1 Wissowa 1912; Gradel 2002; see Feeney 1998, 2007; for De domo sua see Rüpke 2019. 2 See the introduction in Elm von der Osten, Rüpke, and Waldner 2006. Some of these issues were also considered in the introduction to Barchiesi, Rüpke and Stephens 2004. For a more recent discussion see MacRae 2016 and Rüpke 2016/2018, ch. 6 and 11.

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In the process, this study provides a brief overview of the circulation, reception and impact of texts produced, appropriated or commented upon by key figures of the Graeco-Roman literary world such as Augustine, Cicero, Ennius, Lucian, Macrobius, Ovid, Philostratus, Philo, Paul, Plutarch, Pliny, Suetonius, Aristides, Lucian, Origen, Tertullian, Cassius Dio, Justin, Tatian, Flavius Josephus, Varro and Virgil, and others. Along with them, this chapter surveys an array of literary genres (historiography, biography, periegetical writing, philosophy, satirical writings, etc.) and epigraphic sources (honourific decrees, calendars, etc.), which enabled the fusion and diffusion of religious knowledge and the role of engaged and connected readers in this process.3 Textual practices of reading, writing, and exegesis, including epigraphic practices are discussed and seen as linked closely to administrative or school practices (law, commentary). Crucially, this chapter looks also at practises of professionalization, as well as at processes of canonisation, drawing boundaries, excluding texts and authors, and labelling them as heretic.4 Readers and reading communities (and in those we include audiences of performative texts, on which see below) function as important filters in not only fusion and diffusion of religious ideas, but also in construing religious belief, knowledge and practises, since written texts are integral in the preservation of religious knowledge as cultural heritage both on synchronic and diachronic level.5 It is this textuality of Graeco-Roman religions that opens up the possibility of reconstructing the lived ancient religious experience through the lenses of reader response criticism of earlier religious actions and concepts. Having said that, one cannot emphasise enough that equating Roman Religion (as an etic category) with religion of the Book or Book religion (Buchreligionen in German), i.e. as religion centred around one or several sacred books, as for example Christianity or Islam are conceptualised by many, would be to miss the point entirely.6 As Augustine implies in his City of God (7.35), the burning of Numa’s books at the Forum, meant that ›there would be no scripture‹ for Rome.7 This study argues rather that Roman epigraphic and literary texts about religious ideas and practices in particular and literary communication in general, helped to overcome spatiotemporal boundaries and contributed actively to both synchronic and diachronic dissemination of religious knowledge. The ensuing section, which offers an overview of organisation and periodisation of social and religious activities in the specific textual form of Roman Calendars, will fresh out this.

3 On the connected reader, see Rüpke 2015. 4 See the ensuing section »Controlling ›Religion‹: Legalization and Ratification of Religious Knowledge«. For the concept of lived ancient religion see Rüpke 2012b. 5 The introduction in Johnson 2010 offers a comprehensive discussion of both the cultural specificity of reading practices and proliferations of cultural knowledge in the High Roman Empire. 6 Bendlin 2005 and Rüpke 2005a. 7 MacRae 2016, 2.

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The Impact of Textual Production on Religious Knowledge

Calendars: Appropriating Time and Systematizing Religious Action

To give accents and rhythm to the course of the year by specifically religious »festivals« beyond seasonal agricultural and economic activities is a cross-cultural fact and a topos of handbooks on religion, usually under the heading of ›calendar‹. Typically, very religious practices and ideas of very different people are lumped together and presented in the form of a list. In the Roman case such lists, graphic representations of every day of the year including abbreviated information on legal and religious matter, were actually produced and used on the ground. This was very different from comparable lists that focus on the divinatory quality of days popular in other historical and contemporary cultures, and it is the blueprint for rather than a specimen of current concepts of ›calendar‹. In the perspective of this chapter thus Roman calendars appear as media and texts rather than as a sequence of ritual practices. As far as we can see, the written form of the Roman calendar, the fasti, were probably an invention of the late fourth century BCE. This type of calendar served as an instrument for rationalizing the political and especially the juridical use of time in the city of Rome. The main information given by the fasti from the early third century BCE onwards was on the suitability of days for certain types of legal action and public assemblies.8 Probably due to the initiative of Quintus Ennius, a keen observer of contemporary politics and Roman history in his dramas and a historical epic, in the early 160s BCE, these fasti were reinterpreted as a grid for historical memory by way of introducing references to the founding of temples and lists of the supreme annual magistrates, the consuls.9 Here, a discourse not only about political and historical identity, but also about religious practices started. The introduction of deities into Rome and the foundation of annual festivals and temples were all noted down in the calendar. This was not mere chronological documentation, but rather a way of thinking historically about religion. A similar interest could also be seen in the contemporary translation into Latin of Euhemeros of Messene’s »Sacred History« and its narratives about the genesis of gods from beneficial historical figures. Against this background, the new form of the calendar had a much wider significance. In that form, an incipient history of religion was produced.10 The history of the Roman calendar system formed part of this argument. The calendar became self-reflexive. Statements about origins are claims of an interested party rather than neutral ›findings.‹ A historical narrative is a critical appraisal of tradition and an indication of divergent positions and their growing explicitness. Thus, developments in the time of the Julian reform are relevant for our understanding of the degree of reflexivity of cultural and religious practices. Processes of explicit reflection on religion at 8 Rüpke 2011, 44–67; Rüpke 2012a, 100–10. 9 Rüpke 2012a, 152–71. 10 Rüpke 2014.

2 Calendars: Appropriating Time and Systematizing Religious Action

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Rome have been pointed out before.11 For knowledge about calendar, contemporaries would above all participate in a discourse about ›the year‹, de anno.12 It is a discourse about the properties of the ›natural year‹, about astronomical cycles and the measurement of time.13 Treatises with this title, for instance by Suetonius writing at the beginning of the second century CE, have not been preserved, but most of our knowledge about Roman calendars comes from passages under this title, ranging from a section in Varro’s ›On Latin Language‹ (6.8–11) of the first century BCE through Censorinus’s ›On the Birthday‹ (18–21) of the early third century CE to Macrobius’s dialogue ›Saturnalia‹ (1.12–16, leading to a treatment of Sol/Apollo in 1.17) of the early fifth century CE. Inherently, this type of discourse had a comparative component: the ›year of the Romans‹ was different from ›the year of the Greeks‹ or Egyptians. This type of treatment also included the subdivisions of the year; ›on months‹ was the main interest of Greek treatises, given the variety of names and types of months in the world of the Greek luni-solar year. For people ever more distant in historical as well as religious terms the very mechanisms of and the information contained in the fasti and the form of the ›Roman year‹ that had become the standard reference for any local calendar throughout the empire, such ›knowledge‹ became likewise more interesting. From the fifth century onwards, the Roman fasti were fleshed out with Christian contents, but remained the basic form of organisation of time and its graphic representation into the European medieval period and geographically and chronologically beyond.14 What were the categories used for organising such knowledge by those first century BCE thinkers, who were quoted ever after? In Marcus Terentius Varro’s (116–27 BCE) treatise on Latin language, information on the festivals and days of larger religious rituals follow under the heading of vocabula dierum (6.12–32), followed briefly by the ›names of the months‹ (mensium nomina, 6.33–34). It is to this type of information that Macrobius assigns the activities of Caesar’s ›scribe‹ (probably a member of the pontiffs as pontifex minor) Marcus Flavius, who ›drew a list of the single days‹, which allowed to establish a stable structure of the months and the year.15 In Varro’s treatise on religion, the ›Antiquities of divine things‹, a group of three books (8–10) was dedicated to holidays (feriae) and games (ludi circenses and scaenicae). In Varro (and this is confirmed by later treatments) there is a clear sense of the constructive character of such religious qualifications. Against the background of the natural character of the seasons (naturale discrimen), the institutionalization of certain days is openly expressed, be it for religious or for social reasons.16 One fragment of these books on festivals talks about the institution of

11 12 13 14 15 16

Rüpke 2012a. For an exhaustive list see Degrassi 1963, 1, xxv–xxvi; see Rüpke 2012c, 79–136. See Elias 1988 for this metaphor; see in general, Zerubavel 2003. Briefly Rüpke 2008 and 2001. Macrob. Sat. 1.14.2. Varro ling. 6.12.

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feriae, ›holidays‹, by ›decree of the pontiffs.‹17 This is a self-aware interpretation of all religious practices (not of the divine realm as such!) as historical human institutions.18 Of course, Varro’s interpretation is a historiographical claim rather than a historical finding. Romans of the republican period had been very reluctant to regulate the sphere of the divine by laws.19 At the end of the republic, however, certain intellectuals not only claimed to know about religion (and other spheres of culture) and its origins, but also started to attempt to formulate religious norms on such a basis. Certainly, this type of antiquarian knowledge was of importance in Hellenistic Athens and in late-republican Rome. Mastery of knowledge of the past qualified for legitimizing recent changes as a return to tradition.20 Systematization produced new knowledge and inspired new, supposedly ›forgotten‹, practice. Reflecting on the very character of historical change as ›institutionalization‹21 offered even more space for conscious religious politics in general and calendar politics in particular. Such an epistemological climate could call for open reform rather than veiled change. Varro mused about the religion he would have installed if he had not felt obliged to the antiquity of the Roman people.22 His contemporary, the philosopher and statesman Marcus Tullius Cicero, considered radically different options of public religion, even if, as a good sceptic, he withheld any final judgment.23 Nevertheless, it required the personal union of a pontifex maximus and a dictator as well as the ruthlessness of a Gaius Iulius Caesar to pursue and realize a reform that would basically last for more than two millennia. And yet, the Julian calendar reform was the only precondition for the diffusion and longevity of this calendar. The calendar of January 1, 45 BCE, was far from the ›Julian calendar‹ of the Roman Empire and its globalized Gregorian variant. Against such a background, the rapid inserting of new ›holi-days‹ and memories of the achievements of emperors or emperors to be had a low threshold. Throughout the imperial period such imperial days were massively inserted and likewise removed after dynastic change. Apart from a very small number of festivals around the turn of the year, the Saturnalia in mid-December and the Kalendae Ianuariae, New Year on 1st January, these quickly changing imperial festivals gave a thin temporal grid in the form of days of ›lawcourt holidays‹ to the whole empire. Actual calendars must have travelled in the form of parchment or papyrus roles or codices. The form of monumental marble inscriptions had been an important instrument to relate the space used by voluntary associations or public space in small towns to Rome and the imperial order in the first century CE. For the quickly

17 18 19 20 21 22 23

Varro ant. rer. div. fr. 78 Cardauns (Bk. 8). Rüpke 2014a. See the review of laws on priesthoods by Rüpke 2005, 1617–50. Thus Wallace-Hadrill 2008, 239 (on the calendar see 239–48); Rüpke 2012a, 172–85. Stressed by Cancik 2008, 28; see also Cancik 2006 on the spatial dimension of the argument. Varro ant. rer. div. fr. 12 Cardauns (Bk. 1). Cicero, nat. deor. 3.95.

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changing rulers and their dates this was no longer feasible and had to be replaced. But the number of copies must have been limited. After all, the text of the calendar was a ritual prescription just for military units and a legal prescription just for judges. Whether the movable dates of new religious traditions, Egyptian, Asian, or Jewish and Christian, the ›Entry of the Tree‹ related to Osiris or the celebration of Christ’s resurrection on Easter were to be fixed in the Roman fasti were battles fought intensively and with varying local results for centuries.24

3

Controlling ›Religion‹: Legalization and Ratification of Religious Knowledge

From the mid-second century BC onwards, (ex-) magistrates at Rome or their protégées compiled statutes describing in detail particular institutions or procedures on the basis of records of magistrates or priests and their own intuition. Quintus Fabius Maximus Servilianus wrote about ›pontifical law‹, Marcus Iunius Congus about ›prerogatives of office‹. Sergius Fabius Pictor too wrote about ›the law of pontiffs‹, listing »the following deities invoked by a flamen when he performs the Ceres sacrifice to Tellus and Ceres: the field-sweeper, the one who ploughs again, the furrow-maker, the sower, the over-plougher, the harrower, the hoer, the weeder, the cutter, the collector, the storer, the one who brings forth stored grain«.25 Even if Pictor as flamen Quirinalis was a member of the college,26 the most likely stimulus to such systematization would have been provided by the records of the pontiffs, which must have been accessible. Subsequently, however, augurs too wrote about auspices and augural law.27 Anyone ›producing‹ knowledge in this way altered traditions at the same time as he determined them, decided on cases of doubt, or suppressed alternative versions. It was also the writers themselves who claimed ownership of this knowledge: unlike historians, they themselves belonged to the class of officials that carried out the practices in question. Attempts to regulate individual conflicts by statute might either support that circumstance or negate it, in that a question of knowledge was relocated to the sphere of power.28 The area of divination was especially affected.29 Historians, in contrast, whether in prose or hexameters, were frequently not themselves senators, but with their texts and recitations sought and found the support of patrons belonging to that circle.30 The alternative to employing a professional

24 25 26 27 28 29

Mosshammer 2008; Rüpke 2011, 157–60. Fabius Pictor Iur. fr. 6 Seckel/Kübler (Serv. auct. Georg. 1.21). For a full account of this identification: Rüpke 2005b, no. 1600. See a more complete account in Rawson 1985. On these conflicts Beard 1994 and Beard, North, Price 1998, 108–13. Rüpke 2012a, 111–25. See also below, as well as Chapters ›Gods and Other Divine Beings‹, pp. 149–57 and ›People and Competences‹. 30 Yarrow 2007, 76–7; Rüpke 2014b, 2012a, 218.

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was of course always the possibility of writing one’s own autobiography, as did Sulla, Cicero, and Caesar, with varying emphasis on the religious aspect.31 The suspicion of partiality could more easily be avoided by refraining from the narrative form and obvious narrative positions. Epigraphic chronicles with no mention of authorship could achieve this, while providing a clear reference to place; in Greece as in Rome, these assigned great significance to religious data as a particular token of the »common weal«. Roman authors associated chronicles such as those produced in the Hellenistic Period on Paros and Lindos with representations of the calendar; the first of these was the work of Marcus Fulvius Nobilior or perhaps Ennius in the Temple of Hercules and the Muses in the 160s BC, to be followed by examples at Antium and Ostia in the 1st century BCE.32 This Roman invention was particularly influential in that, besides an added chronological list, it used the schema of the twelve months of the calendar itself to bring reminders of both Roman successes and the successes of families into the calendar’s text along with the dates of temple foundations. This pattern was to be taken up frequently in the Late Republic, by Marcus Antonius, Cicero, and Augustus himself.33 Ritual actors too demonstrated knowledge about religious communication in this public form, and not only in Rome. In the course of the 2nd century BCE the fratres Atiedii, a priesthood in Umbrian Iguvium, produced a total of seven bronze tablets, the Tabulae Iguvinae. Inscriptions in the bronze indicated codified knowledge, with detailed portrayal of the ritual first in Etruscan then, on the later tablets, Latin script, with the tablets themselves ranging in size between tabloid and double demy. The perhaps contemporary Etruscan Liber linteus, a linen book with rituals arranged in calendar order, indicates venerability by virtue of the material of which it is made, and may likewise have enjoyed a visibility and public presence beyond the expert circle of its authors.34 Such impetuses, however, so far as we can tell, were not taken up in Rome until the Augustan Age, then to be cast in the form of monumental inscriptions in the sanctuary of the reorganized Arvals, and a short time afterwards for the ›secular games‹ of 17 BCE. The protagonists systematized: they arranged, completed, wrote down; this they did for particular areas and procedures. They did not think of doing it across an entire field (whether or not they would now have called it ›religion‹) or even of defining such a field. There were exceptions. In Caesar’s final year, the founder of the Roman colony of Urso in Spanish Baetica set himself the task of decreeing rules for various areas of life in the settlement (44 BC). A relevant ›need‹ may have existed before this, but nobody appears to have addressed it; and the author of the lex Ursonensis, who

31 See Rüpke 2014b; Flower 2015, and for a general treatment Smith 2009; Scholz, Walter 2013. 32 Greece: Chaniotis 1988; Peró 2012 (on internal orientation: 25); Ennius: Rüpke 2011, 105–8; 2012a, 152–172. Further instances: Rüpke 2012c, 95–110. 33 Rüpke 1995, 391–416, and Rüpke 2011, 121–39. 34 Cautiously: Belfiore, van Heems 2010. For the Augustan inscriptions: Scheid 1998; SchneggKöhler 2002.

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came from Caesar’s circle, naturally fell back on older norms where they were available.35 Cicero’s unpublished attempt to compile rules for religious practices, on the model of those governing magisterial posts and competencies, was only a decade older, and itself referred predominantly back to Plato.36 Although a lex Iulia municipalis had been passed, probably on Caesar’s initiative, immediately before the colony’s foundation, perhaps as a model statute for civic ›constitutions‹,37 the author of the law in respect of Urso did not refer to it; ›religion‹ had not constituted a category of the lex Iulia municipalis, and the statutes of Ursowere themselves seen as archetypal. When the constitutions of Salpensa and Malaca were being written more than a hundred years later, during the Flavian dynasty at the end of the 1st century CE, in Urso the statute was merely republished on bronze tablets, the very ones that survive to this day.38 All three of the above statutes contain rules for religious activities, in all three similarly dispersed and assigned to other categories. What we would call religion is thus treated in chapters 64 to 72 and 125 to 128 of the lex Ursonensis. These chapters do not exhaustively cover our understanding of ancient religion and knowledge of ancient religious practices, but there is no reason to assume that this or one of the other collections of statutes contained chapters addressing further religious procedures.39 In detail, chapters 64 to 72 govern the financing of the cult (62–65), describe pontiffs and augurs (66–68) and the procedure for financing ritual consumables (69), the organization and financing of games (70–71), and administration of the cash donated to temples (72). Generally speaking, the author uses the term sacra, »public rituals«, as his most general concept. The rules set out here are directed at the duoviri, the colony’s most senior magistrates; they are followed, from ch. 73, by norms applying to others. The later chapters concern the rules for seats at games, obligations regarding priests‹ place of residence, and restrictions to donations to temples. The author, or the committee set up for the purpose, must have had in mind a model of religion characterized by a two-layered structure. One level was made explicit and regulated. It was here that religious activity had an established place in the social and political fabric of the colonia. As a public cult (sacra publica), it was financed and organized by the council and its magistrates; accordingly, the financing of the cult is the binding theme of the entire passage on religion.40 The precise content of the public ritual, with its emphasis on commonality, was the responsibility of the political decision-makers and to be financed by them. The specified cults were those of the Capitoline Triad and to a lesser extent Venus, 35 On archaic elements Gabba 1988, 162–3. 36 On Cicero’s second book On laws see Rüpke 2016, 21–31. 37 See Crawford 1996, 362. At ibid., 396, an attempt is made to reconstruct a vague concept of religion for the lex Ursonensis. 38 Gabba 1988, 158. 39 Thus also Raggi 2011, 342–3. 40 See Lex Ursonensis chs. 65, 69–72; also central to ch. 128. For more details see Rüpke 2014c, 113–36. Cf. Raggi 2006, 719 on the self-evidence of such public financing in the later lex Irnitana.

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probably Venus Genetrix. This choice ensured that every magistrate who sought prestige for himself as the organizer of games had to do so with reference to Rome and Caesar. The second level of religion was precisely not made the subject of explicit regulation, or only negatively so. To this level belong priesthoods, compensation for malfeasance, burial and the cult of ancestors; perhaps also religious groups if such there were. All this might exist, but must not impede the administrative functioning of the colony. Even pontiffs and augurs, a traditional element of the first level in Rome, while their existence was assumed by the statute’s authors, were assigned to the second level insofar as they were given no functions liable to be essential to the colony’s administration. Donations by individuals to cults seen as belonging to the public sphere were to be administered solely within temples, and so could not be used to develop activities beyond their confines. Legal devices were employed to restrict opportunities for independent religious activity, without preventing time-honoured traditions. The authors regulated all this with a view to problems that occurred to them in one context or another. None of it amounted to anything that might be called ›religion‹. In another area, however, the reflection of practice went further. A good hundred years after Ennius‹ ›Euhemerus‹, it was not merely that Greek rhetoric had found supporters in Rome, after enormous resistance: a number of senatorial families, and wealthy ›equestrian‹ families firmly entrusted with judicial duties, were even sending their growing sons to receive appropriate instruction in Greece itself. Greek philosophers and philosophy were also finding support or a ready hearing among these elements of the Hellenistically-inclined Roman elite. But even an advocate, orator, and theoretician of oratory like Marcus Tullius Cicero waited until the perceived end of his political career before he undertook the attempt to make Greek theologia systematically accessible in the Latin language. Cicero demonstrated its principles in fictional dialogues.41 Even in the dialogues ›On the nature of the gods, On divination, and On fate‹, the limit of reflection on a general concept ›religion‹ was rapidly reached. The profiling of this term was consequential in the long run and merits some attention, as it helps us to see the focus and the difference of first-century Roman conceptualisation of what is now called ›religion‹. What may at first sight have appeared to his readers to be a definitive position42 was revealed on closer inspection to comprise standpoints taken up by the disputing participants. Thus in ›On the nature of the gods‹, the trinity pietas, sanctitas, and religio, by means of which Cicero juxtaposes religiosity and the gods’ involvement in religion, is not so fundamental as it first appears. It is used only in the introductory section (1.3 and 1.14), and is not clearly defined. The most stable of the relationships involved is that between pietas and religio. Pietas describes the relationship of a person to a human or divine other who is his or her superior. Religio on the other hand is a particular consequence arising from a relationship

41 What follows is based on Rüpke 2012a, 192–202. 42 Thus also the reading of Feil 1986.

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to the gods, perhaps expressed in terms of the cult. The existence of the gods is thus the prerequisite for any piety or religiosity towards them.43 Despite its original context in a trinity with pietas and sanctitas, in this way religio emerges as a central concept: not frequently employed, but when it is it occurs at introductory or summarising sections of the argument. Its distribution between the participants is uneven. Velleius, Epicurus’ disciple, hardly ever uses religio; Quintus Lucilius Balbus the Stoic uses it rarely; Cotta the academic and pontiff, on the other hand, employs it frequently. He uses it in both singular and plural form. He juxtaposes the plural religiones with caerimoniae (1.161), as well as sacra with caerimonia (3.5), and qualifies religiones as ›public‹: these it is the pontiff ’s duty to defend. Religio, for Cotta, is not merely a vague sentiment (for this he criticizes his adversary) or an ›empty fear‹, like superstitio (1.117), but a human disposition, a habit, a part of the social order that follows from acceptance of the gods and finds expression in corresponding rituals (cultus deorum, 1.117); here the argument follows a quite normal Greek slant,44 in which the existence of the gods is a prerequisite for religio (ibid.), whereas religio may be imperilled by an unbridled multiplication of gods. Cotta sees religio as a social factor of great importance for the stability of the community (3.94), but not as an argument that can be introduced into philosophical discourse (see 1.118). Cicero himself set great store by the notion that religio tends to be constrained by ratio, and this is the purpose of his entire book, as can be seen from the subsequent work ›On divination‹ (2.148–9). Religio in the singular in Cicero’s argument denotes a necessary consequence of any belief in a god, and finds its expression, as also its qualification, in various sentiments of religious obligation: religiones. It is possible to argue as to the existence or the relevance of the gods; about theism, which is a theoretical problem or tenet; but not about religio. As a pontiff, and inclined to academic Scepticism, Cotta mentions Romulus’ institution of the auspices, and that of other cults (sacra) by Numa, with satisfaction; he however omits the philosophical justification claimed, but in Cotta’s opinion not provided, by the Stoic: ›As you are a philosopher, I must require of you a justification for religion (rationem … religionis); I, though, must concur with our ancestors, even if no justification is forthcoming‹ (3.6). Such a justification could of course amount to no more than a proof of the gods’ existence; it could not apply to historical cult forms. Cult practice imposed limits on theory, and vice-versa. Faced by the choice between no god and too many gods as a basis for religion,45 the figure of Cicero in the dialogue chooses the latter. It is admittedly a weak theoretical position, but the best among the options given. It is a serious option notwithstanding, one that avoids the separa-

43 Cic. Nat. D. 1.118–19.; similarly Lactantius, Institutions 5.14. On the concept of pietas as an essentially social relationship see Schröder 2012. 44 See Henrichs 2010. 45 So far as we can tell, Cicero is here making a polemical point, which fails adequately to acknowledge the broad acceptance of traditional gods by both earlier and contemporary Epicureans (see Obbink 2001).

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tion, indicated by Cotta, between a public and a private, a philosophical and a traditional persona. Unlike religion, philosophy offered a comprehensive model for the conduct of a life. Religion here was an object of reflection among others, but one that was not to be separated from everyday religious practices. Could it be that its dignity was loftier, even for theoretical purposes, than Cicero allowed Cotta to assume? The traditional cult, touched upon only anecdotally by Cicero, is exhaustively portrayed by his contemporary Marcus Terentius Varro in ›Antiquities of things human and divine‹. In one sense an accumulation of historical-ethnographical scholarship, this latter work was also driven by the assumption that religion itself might become a philosophical resource, and may at its earliest historical levels contain philosophical insights.46 The Roman cult’s original absence of imagery (as much as Varro might apply his imaginative powers to some details) was a notable instance in support of this view.

4

Re-framing ›Religion‹: Exegesis, Appropriation and Translation as Means of Reiterating Old and Propagating New Religious Ideas

What can be established so far is that communicating religious ideas and practises through literary production was always very important for Rome, but this process seems to have become extremely significant after the ›cultural revolution‹ of the Augustan period in the last decades of the first century BCE.47 To take an emblematic narrative such as the ›Aeneid‹ as an example, the entire poem could be read as Virgil’s mythical metaphor for major historical events in general and for the transmission of religious ideas in the Roman Empire in particular.48 The Trojan immigrants who carry their gods with them on their way to Italy and who disseminate and integrate Trojan religion into indigenous local cults could be read as a metaphor for the ›mobility‹ of religion. The diaspora of the Trojans could be thought of as the mirror image of the Roman diaspora throughout the empire. In that light, Roman ›religion‹ could be thought as reformed after a moment of crisis by the ›brave new‹ Augustan world in ways analogous to the Trojan religion that is construed through Aeneas‹ journeys. What is more, the restricted roles of the religious entrepreneurs in the Aeneid mirrors their reduced role in Augustus’ reformed Empire. In addition to the processes of canonisation of religious knowledge and action examined above (periodisation, legitimisation, legalisation, and ratification), we may also like to think of exegesis as yet another process that facilitated individual 46 Van Nuffelen 2010, 2011. The Stoical idea of rational coherence may be a factor in the background here (Long 2010, 53). 47 Wallace-Hadrill 1993. 48 Barchiesi 2006 and Cancik 2006.

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and group appropriation, extensive re-framing, and, above all, selective dissemination and preservation of earlier religious ideas. Exegesis facilitated processes of appropriation and re-interpretations of influential and fundamental texts for the etic category of Roman ›religion‹. Varro’s fragmentary 16-book work, Antiquitates rerum divinarum, is a good example of how the same ideas may resonate differently with different authors, audiences and bookish communities. Although Varro’s Antiquitates have not survived in their entirety, we have enough fragments and surviving titles from these books to know that Varro’s treatment of the Roman divinities, the places of their worship, the religious professionals who served them, and the meaning of their rituals were extremely influential to Roman authors of the calibre of Cicero (e.g. Acad. Post. 1.9) and Saint Augustine. Although many other studies have emphasised the distinct political dimension of the work (after all, it was dedicated to Julius Caesar, who was at that time pontifex maximus: August. De Civ. D. 7.35), not enough attention has thus far paid on the reception and resonance of the religious ideas and practises preserved there and its diverse reception by later authors, especially by the Christian apologists. Most notably, the reader of Varro’s Antiquitates is struck by their author’s conscious effort to ›domesticate‹ and normalise foreign divinities by identifying them with Roman deities. In the first fragment of the first book of the Antiquitates, for instance, the Roman polymath identified Vacuna, a Sabine goddess with Victoria, since the explanation provided for it presents relevant correspondences with Caesarian political propaganda of the last period of the Civil War; while in another fragment from the last book (frr. 267–8 Cardauns), Varro equates the Phrygian goddess Cybele with the Roman Mater Magna. Although, Cybele, a predominantly healing deity, was imported in 204 BC and installed on the Palatine hill, remained distinctively a ›foreign‹ goddess, that shocked the pious Romans with the bloody and ›savage‹ rites dedicated to her by the Phrygian priests. Out of these rites, the self-castration of her attendants, the Galli, was perhaps the one Romans found most challenging.49 Varro’s complex and sophisticated reading of Cybele as Mater Magna speaks volumes of her ambivalent reception by the members of the Roman socio-political and intellectual elite and simultaneously betrays an implicit desire to resolve this tension satisfactorily, i.e. within the conceptual boundaries and limitations of ›tradition‹ (mos maiorum). Other authors, like Tertullian and Minucius Felix, who wrote around the turn from the second to the third century CE,50 a period of extreme religious experimen-

49 Eidinow 2017 and Klöckner 2017. 50 There is no scholarly consensus as to whether Minucius Felix inspired or was inspired from Tertullian. The main reason for this is that it is indeed unclear when exactly Minucius Felix wrote his Octavius. However, most scholars would have Minucius writing after Tertullian and following him closely in thematic terms. Minucius’ Octavius contains ideas which are also at play not only in Tertullian’s Apologeticum and Ad Nationes, but also in his De Testimonio Animae. More on this topic in Binder 2012, 74–88.

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tation and heated ideological discourse, as shown below, read Varro’s work and employed it to advance their completely different authorial agenda. In fact, Tertullian and Minucius read Varro and Cicero, but interpreted them in very different ways to their predecessors. Both authors appropriated and re-interpreted foundational texts on the Religions of the Romans, such as Cicero’s De natura deorum and Varro’s Antiquitates rerum divinarum, and they both lay emphasis on the religious pluralism of the Roman Empire,51 precisely because they pay so much attention on local diversity. The secret agenda of these Christian apologists, however, soon becomes apparent when by paying too much attention to local religious diversity and pluralism, they manage to reduce Varro’s universal Roman gods to minor local deities, who cannot really compete with the advent of all-mighty Christianity.52 The fact that prior knowledge of foundational texts of Roman theological discourse, such as Varro’s Antiquitates rerum divinarum, was a prerequisite for understanding Tertullian’s work is yet another proof that the latter’s target audience was mainly the intellectual and socio-economic elite of the Roman world, not the uneducated pious majority that may have had little or no interest at all in this sort of complex philosophical and theological discourse. It is reasonable to assume that Tertullian attempted to engage intellectually with the intellectual elite of the Roman world so as to convert them to Christianity and make them discover the light, as he had done himself.53

5

Texts and Rituals in the Second Century CE: A Century of Intense Religious Experimentation

Indeed, the close and dynamic interrelation between texts and religious ideas and practises is also most evident in the sacred texts of Early Christianity.54 These sacred texts could be thought as a ritual interface in the sense that in Early Christianity texts not only inform us about Christian ritual but become an integral part of the rituals themselves. Performative texts, such as Paul or Ignatius’s letter, are in the heart of forming religious groups and communities, who are set around the reading and interpreting these texts. New Testament itself could be thought of one of these ›performative texts supporting individual and group identity‹.55 For this reason, the apparent plurality of formulations of basic early Christian ritual performances should not necessarily be interpreted as an indicator of theological variety. Rather, it may be thought as a sign of performative flexibility. The emphasis on performative flexibility should not detract our attention from the significance of the canonisation, a process, which takes place roughly between

51 52 53 54 55

See Versluys and Woolf in this volume: ›Empire as a field of religious action‹. Rüpke 2006. Binder 2012, 90, passim. Henderson 2006. Henderson 2006, 90.

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the first and the second century CE. Even the quality of the text as material medium and the transition from scroll to codex played an important role in the shaping of the religious life of third and fourth century Christianity.56 The passage of texts from scroll to codex revolutionised the religious life of late antiquity, and even had an integral role in the Roman Empire’s conversion to Christianity. Effectively, this new medium of textual transmission enabled the spread of Christian faith across the oikoumene. In this view, scriptural interpretation replaced blood sacrifice as the central element of religious ritual,57 thus facilitating the transition from paganism to Christianity. However, unduly concern with the triumphant Christianity in the first two CE centuries is to be blamed for not paying enough attention to the vibrant and varied gamut of texts that both re-interpret and re-imagine (if not re-invent) Graeco-Roman religions of that period. Until very recently, another important reason for insufficient scholarly attention paid to the sphere of religious ideas and practices was Michel Foucault’s work and its influence on the modern scholarship. Foucault neglected the study of the modern category of ›religion‹ in his foundational ›History of Sexuality‹ and many modern scholars followed suit navigating away from the rites, rituals and their literary representations in Roman literature.58 The study of texts on ›religion‹ at this period, nonetheless, is a sine qua non to the fathoming of socio-political identity of the diverse and disparate communities and ethnic groups in the Empire, precisely because ›the second century was perhaps a peak in the production and exhibition of an elite, antiquarian Greek identity that was (variously) an act of resistance towards the Roman Empire and an item of social capital to be acquired by provincial and Roman elites alike‹.59 More generally and beyond Graecia capta, there is now consensus that the second century was a period of intense thinking about religion and experimentation with new and exciting religious traditions that were partly new and imported from the furthest corners of the Imperium Romanum and partly old one that had been reimagined and re-appropriated by members of the socio-political elite within the Empire.60 Lucian’s ›Alexander, the Pseudo-Prophet‹, for example, written in the 160s CE or shortly later is a Greek literary text that has long held as illustrative of the intense processes of religious unrest and experimentation of that period.61 Lucian’s Alexander speaks volumes about the immense popularity of new oracular and healing-orientated deities, such as that of Neos Asclepios Glykon (›the Sweet One‹) at Abonouteichos (modern Inebolu) at the Black Sea. The same text reserves for its

56 57 58 59 60

Stroumsa 2016. For a critique of this view, see Vinzent 2017. Goldhill 2006. As Laura Nasrallah (2005, 287) puts it very aptly. See, e.g. Woolf 2014; Bremmer 2017; Rüpke, Santangelo 2017; and the introduction to Gordon, Petridou, Rüpke 2017. 61 Elm von der Osten 2006; Bremmer 2017; Petridou 2017b.

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author the role of the sober Epicurean, who gets indignant at the absurdity and the wider appeal of the cult and its Mysteries,62 the latter largely mapped on those of Eleusis, and attempts to rectify things. One must be careful though, as the demarcation lines between religious realities and creative writing about religion is not always and easy one to set. The borders between rituals and ›rituals in ink‹ are often blurred.63 Crucially, what Lucian fails to tell us is that the god’s healing and oracular abilities were celebrated not only by ›the fat and garlic-smelling Paphlagonians‹, but also by a large number of educated and sophisticated individuals in Rome. In fact, Lucian presents the cult’s popularity in Rome as yet another ploy engineered by Alexander and his manipulative attitude towards influential individuals, such as Rutilianus and Sedatius. Out of those two individuals named in the text, we are particularly interested in the latter, M. Sedatius Severianus, the consul suffect of 153.64 This is the same Roman consul who was said to have consulted the oracle of Neos Asclepius-Glykon before invading Armenia in 161.65 The same individual is named in another literary work of the period the Hieroi Logoi, as one of the most well-known therapeutai at Pergamum and one of Aristides‹ closest friends (Or. 50.15–18). Perhaps it was amongst members of the socio-political elite that these healing cults had a stronger impact. They must have appealed to the conservative tendencies of Rome and the need of the upper classes to belong to an exclusive club or association, perhaps as means of amassing symbolic capital. Healing cults such as those of Isis and Sarapis, Asclepius and Zeus Hypsistos offered an opportunity for these privileged individuals to display their generosity, offer patronage, and increase their social cachet.66 The main means of achieving all the above was to join these religious associations often by becoming a priestly official of sorts, and then model these priestly hierarchies on long-standing and highly respectable priesthoods, such as the sacred officials of Eleusis in Roman Athens. For many generations, Lucian’s Alexander was read quite literally as a figment of a satirist’s imagination at worst, or as a testament to the creativity of Alexander as a religious entrepreneur at best. Both these readings fell short of a balanced assessment, as they fail to take into account the abundant material evidence that attests the popularity of this healing particular deity.67 We know now that Glykon, the theriomorphic reincarnation of Asclepius, was received warmly not only by the

62 63 64 65 66 67

Bremmer 2014, 2017; and Petridou 2017b. Cf. also Robert 1980, 419, n. 60; Jones 1986, 135. See the introduction in Barchiesi, Rüpke, Stephens 2004 and Culpepper Stroup 2004. Várhelyi 2010, 83–4. Alex 27. On Severianus’ defeat in Elegia, see also Birley 19872, 161. Muniz Grijalvo 2005, 274. On the cult and the popularity of Neos Asclepius-Glykon see Petsalis-Diomidis 2010, 12–66, where an informative discussion of Lucian’s treatment of the cultic realities behind the parody and more bibliography can also be found. The most comprehensive treatment of the Lucianic text remains Victor 1997. On the cult’s competition with Christianity, see Gilhus 2006, 110; and Bricault 2014, 97–114. On Alexander as a religious entrepreneur, see Bremmer 2017.

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›gullible‹ and ›uneducated citizens‹ of Abonouteichos, but also throughout the entire Roman Empire.68 The wide geographical distribution of the cult can be seen in coins, inscriptions, statues and statuettes depicting the god himself in a variety of forms, which perhaps are not the result of ›iconographical types‹, but are, rather, indicative of the physiognomic variations with which the god appeared to his worshippers.69 The great medical specialist Galen himself, yet another prolific author and representative of the Second Sophistic at the end of the second century, seems to have been well acquainted with the cult of neos Asclepius Glykon (via Lucian’s writings or personal knowledge?) and its popularity amongst the members of the Roman ruling class, whom he vehemently chastises at 1.4 of his treatise On examining the best physicians.70 Alexander, no doubt a literary composite figure,71 seemed to have anchored his new (›fraudulent‹ in the Lucianic text) cult on strong pre-existing and time-revered signifiers of Asclepian healing powers, such snakes and prognostic (and, to an extent, oracular) declamations.72 He was apparently well acquainted with all the specifics of Asclepius‹ cult, because he has served one of the Asclepiadae—his teacher from Tyana being a public physician (demosia iatros, Alex. 5). He also utilised his firm grasp of Asclepian myths and lore and builds up his connection with the god, when he engineers an oracle from Chalcedon, which supports the idea of his congenital proximity to Asclepius: Alexander traces his bloodline back to Asclepius’ son, Podaleirius (Alex. 11).73 When prognoses and prescriptions did not go according to plan (Alex. 28), a post-eventum oracle (metachronios chrêsmós) followed immediately to reinterpret Glykon’s first prognosis and salvage the trustworthiness of the god and his prophet. Nothing, however, could be done in the case of the spontaneous

68 Statuettes of Glykon have enjoyed a wide geographical distribution: from the Athenian agora to Pisidia, Dacia, and Mysia. Alex. 2 confirms the wide geographical attestation, albeit not without some ironic overtones. 69 Petsalis-Diomidis 2010, 12–66. On Glykon’s reptilian shape, see Ogden 2013, 325–9. On Alexander the Pseudo-prophet and the cultic realities behind the Lucianic parody, see Jones 1986, 133–48. On the material culture that attests to the existence of the cult, see Robert 1980, 393–421; Lane-Fox 1986, 241–50. Jones 1999, 107–9 discusses a fascinating inscription honouring a doctor called Nikētēs, son of Glycon, from Tieion and with the image of a snake (SEG 18.519), which, he maintains, could refer to a follower of the snakegod Glycon of Abonouteichos. This doctor could have been one of the many illegitimate children of the god’s prophet conceived in the course of one of their initiations. 70 Galen’s treatise On examining the best physicians survives only in Arabic and is translated by Iskandar, Galeni De optimo medico cognoscendo with Nutton, (»The Patient’s Choice«, 23–5). This cult’s influence spread from the Black Sea to the center of Pisidia and from there to the Roman court, if we are to judge by the fact (as reported by Lucian) that Rutilianus, a Roman senator, was keen to make the founder of the cult, Alexander, his son-in-law. 71 Gordon 2013. See also the Chapter ›People and Competencies‹. 72 On snakes as signifiers of Asclepius’ presence and healing power, see Petridou 2013. 73 On conscious attempts to forge an ›elective affinity‹ with the divine, see Petridou 2015, 343–7.

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oracle (autophonos chresmos) that failed to protect the inhabitants of the Empire from the deadly plague that devastated large parts of its population in 165 (Alex. 36). Alexander’s devotees put all their faith in an apotropaic verse (Phoibos akeirekomes loimou nephelen aperykei) they were instructed to inscribe on their doorways and, according to Lucian, paid with their life for their gullibility. The popularity of oracles and oracular consultations in the Second Sophistic is attested not only by literary texts and authors, such as Lucian and Plutarch; it is also confirmed by a large number of epigraphic collections, such as the many Roman honourific inscriptions found at the temple of Apollo in Claros.74 Although it is tempting to read literary texts, which criticise the validity and the truthfulness of these oracular predictions, such as Lucian’s Alexander the Pseudo-prophet and Plutarch’s Delphic dialogues as a critique of the earnest acceptance by the pious dedicants of these inscriptions, it is essential to remember that they were both produced by the same local elites of towns in the Roman Empire and both must be understood in this context of intense re-evaluation and re-interpretation of religious knowledge and its dissemination that is characteristic of the Second Sophistic. One may not be too far away from the truth, however, if they were to point out that it is often in the literary accounts that speak volumes of this proliferation of interest in divinatory techniques (technê mantikê) that we find a multitude of often clashing discourses and approaches to divination. Take Plutarch’s Delphic Oracles, for example, a text that can read both a treatise on the uses and abuses of divination and a personal record of belief in the power of divination written by a member of the socio-cultural elite, who was also a religious professional (priest in Delphi) and therefore intimate familiar with both its advantages and disadvantages.75

6

›Religion‹ as Philosophy in the Second Sophistic

If we are to believe Lucian’s ›The Ignorant Book Collector‹, accumulating physical texts in the form of book scrolls was one of the favourite past-times of the sociocultural elite in the second century CE. During this period, texts and readers were invested with significant symbolic capital, while groups of intellectuals engaged in passionate and exhibitionist demonstrations and competitions, which were often centred on the ›expert‹ interpretation of a text or a set of texts.76 There was a long prehistory to that. In many instances, antiquarian tastes were not simply satisfied by the acquisition of books. If sufficient money and perhaps

74 On this corpus, see Ferrary 2000. More on the topic of popularity of divination in the Imperial period in Bendlin 2006 [2011]; Jacquemin 1991; Kokkinia 2000. Cf. also chapter ›People and Competencies‹. 75 Jones 1971; Hirsch-Luipold 2002. 76 For the close correlations between Greek paideia under the Roman Empire and symbolic capital, see Gleason 1995, xxi.

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even space were available, members of the upper classes (not necessarily the political elite) employed many varieties of specialists. Those available ranged from Greek slaves and immigrants in particular as domestic tutors from as early as the 2nd century BC, to house poets and philosophers. Polybius, Ennius, and Philodemus fell into these categories, with the imparting of knowledge merging with ›life coaching‹. This applied to philosophy, and it is easy to imagine a slave Epictetus as just such a ›philosopher‹ in the second century CE before his manumission: that is to say, before he founded his own school, in common with Gaius Musonius Rufus, of equestrian stock, in the 1st century, or Justin, similarly wealthy, also in the second century Whether at home or in the ›school‹, long years of contact between teacher and pupil were the rule. Religion increasingly became a theme of such philosophical practice, and did not have to be confined to one theme among many, as with Epictetus.77 Philosophical and religious authority could scarcely be distinguished one from the other among this profusion of elements, so long as they were both confined to the interpretation of recognized texts and to ratiocination, and did not bring personal revelation to the table. But the latter tendency increasingly characterised the field from the second century onwards, as is demonstrated by the many later biographical sketches of supposed heretics.78 So expert knowledge too occurred in many forms, finding varying degrees of following, depending both on what was feasible and on contingent challenges. In all cases, people were then enabled to optimize their own experience of religious communication with their gods on the basis of the knowledge of others. Indeed, the work of Justin the Martyr, writing at Rome, and his ever so slightly idiosyncratic student Tatian, writing in the East, show further how inextricably intertwined religion and philosophy really were in this period. Both authors are similar in traditionally having been thought as ›apologists‹ of early Christianity. Nonetheless, whereas Justin is depicted as offering a better kind of apologetic to the empire and is celebrated for offering a satisfactory ›articulation of Christianity as philosophically competent, a necessary negotiation or syncretism for the sake of Christianity’s success‹,79 Tatian, on the other hand is seen as excessive in both his rhetoric and his religious practice. In fact, Eusebius (Church History 4.28, 29), citing Irenaeus, accuses Tatian of having introduced the ›blasphemy‹ of Encratism. The Encratites, meaning ›self-controlled‹ or ›masters of themselves‹ from the Greek encrateia (›temperance‹), were an ascetic second century Christian group who forbade marriage and instructed abstinence from meat and wine.80

77 Epictetus 1.31; rivalry with soothsayers: 1.32. 78 See Denzy Lewis 2017 with reference to Irenaeus and the Hippolytus of the Refutatio; later to be joined by Epiphanius. 79 Nasrallah 2005, 299. Justin was born in Samaria and travelled across the Empire teaching and writing about Christianity recast in Middle Platonic terms. More on this topic, in van Henten and Friedrich 2002, 96 with more bibliography. 80 The sect of Encratites is supposed to have been established ca. 166 CE and Tatian might have died soon afterwards. His many disciples continued practising the severe austerities instituted by Tatian long after his death.

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However, instead of attempting to distinguish between religious and philosophical texts, we could read authors like Justin, Tatian and even Lucian as engaging closely with the quest for truth within the wider cultural framework of the Greek paideia.81 This has wider implications for our modern textual and authorial categories. Justin’s ›Dialogue with Tryphon‹ (Dialogus cum Tryphone) and Tatian’s ›Oration to the Greeks‹ (Oratio ad Graecos) are no longer exclusively thought as the products of Christian apologetic literature speaking volumes about the tension between ›religion‹ and piety as they were conceived by Christianity and its polar opposite adherence to Hellenism. Instead, they can thought as comparable to Lucian’s ›On the Sacrifices‹ (De sacrificiis), where both anthropomorphic and anthropo-centric religious practise and sacrificial protocol are criticised the product of small-minded human beings with neither a clear notion of piety nor a sense of essential hygiene, as it were.82 Likewise, Tatian’s mockery of Heraclitus and Empedocles in his Oration to the Greeks (Oratio ad Graecos 2.1; 3.2) brings to mind Lucian’s analogous criticism of ›Alexander, the Pseudo-Prophet‹, a text, which, as mentioned above, condemned both the excessive theatricality and the deep-rooted greediness of the wandering, unsolicited religious specialists and their attempts to take advantage both of the individuals’ need for a deeper, more meaningful connection with the divine and their need to assess and deal effectively with the uncertainty and precariousness of human life via oracular and healing cults with distinct mysteric components.83 Tatian, on the other hand, declares proudly that his initiation into a variety of time-resistant and wide-spread Graeco-Roman mystery cults has left his thirst for truth unquenched and has left him longing to get acquainted with more civilised less absurd and contradictory ideas about ›religion‹ and the divine (Oratio ad Graecos 28–29). In the end, Tatian’s conversion to Christianity is re-cast in terms of a battle between texts: the Scriptures versus Homer and all the authors who came before him (Oratio ad Graecos 36, 40, 41). Tatian’s preoccupation with religious knowledge via texts is also well attested in his Dia Tessaron, or the ›Harmony of the Four

81 Nasrallah 2005, 288. 82 See esp. 29 Lucian, De sacrificiis 9–13: »If anyone sacrifices, [the gods] all have a feast, opening their mouths for the smoke and drinking the blood that is spilt at the altars, just like flies … Then too they [humans] erect temples, in order that the gods may not be houseless and hearthless, of course; and they fashion images in their [human] likeness. … Those who offer victims … deck the animal with garlands …; then they bring it to the altar and slaughter it under the god’s eyes, while it bellows plaintively—making, we must suppose, auspicious sounds, and fluting low music to accompany the sacrifice! Who would not suppose that the gods like to see all this? And although the notice says that no one is to be allowed within the holy-water who has not clean hands, the priest himself stands there all bloody, just like the Cyclops of old, cutting up the victim, removing the entrails, plucking out the heart, pouring the blood about the altar, and doing everything possible in the way of piety.« Trans. Harmon, LCL. 83 On these specialists see the introduction to Gordon, Petridou, Rüpke 2017 and Bremmer and Eidinow’s chapters in the same volume. On the cult of neos-Askelpios Glykon being an oracular/healing cult with distinct mysteric components, see Petridou 2017b and above.

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Gospels‹, as it was also known, his lost treatise on the Four Gospels, which interestingly enough were already thought of as an authoritative textual unity already in the second century CE. It is of great significance that all three authors (Lucian, Justin, Tatian) come from the eastern provinces of the Empire, but they all appear to be connected by both their common membership in the cultural club of the Greek paideia and the citizenship in the diverse ethnic mosaic of the Imperium Romanum. It comes as no surprise then that some parts of their work mock the ›Greekness‹ of religious action and actors, others focus more exclusively on composite nature and the pluralistic character of the religious life in the Roman Empire.84 Take Lucian’s ›On the Syrian Goddess‹ (De Dea Syria), for example, in which Lucian’s own city, Hierapolis, is portrayed as a bricolage of diverse and often clashing religious ideas and identities. The very cult statue of Hera, the Interpretatio Graeca85 of the primary deity honoured in Hierapolis is riddled with the same syncretic hybridity and compositeness: it ›appears to be of many forms‹ and ›has something of Athena and Aphrodite and Selene and Rhea and Artemis and Nemesis and the Fates‹. In Tatian’s Oratio ad Graecos 35, on the other hand, the members of the Roman sociopolitical elite are portrayed as avid and yet uncritical collectors and consumers of Greek knowledge (rhetoric, philosophy, poetry). Now, it is hardly surprising that Justin’s clash with the current religious affairs in Rome was far more profound and direct since his percussion for his religious beliefs poses a threat to both his religious identity and bodily integrity. In his Second Apology (2 Apol. 3.1) Justin paints an unflattering picture of Roman casual violence against the religious practices of the practising Christians. His accusations are not directed to the Imperial family, but to the lower, blood-thirsty class of Roman citizens like Crescens, whose vicious urges and base instincts fears that he himself may not be able to escape. This passage must have had a greater resonance with the synchronic audience who may have been familiar with traditions that placed his martyrdom in Rome.86 All in all, both Justin and Tatian appear to engage closely in a battle of texts. They both end up utilising their mastery of Greek paideia to argue just like Philo of Alexandria before them that the Greek got their laws, philosophy, etc., by copying Moses, who is thought of as the ultimate God’s writer and the lawgiver of the Jewish people.87 In Philo’s ›the Assumption of Moses‹ (Assumptio Mosis), Moses himself was turned into the protagonist of a pseudo-historical account of Moses’ revelation and his communications with his successor Joshua.88

84 See also the introduction in Andrade 2013. 85 That is the Greek way of understanding and categorising the native deity of Hierapolis. On the concept of Interpretatio Graeca, see von Lieven 2016. 86 Musurillo 1972, 42–61. 87 Andrade 2013, 336. Moses as a lawgiver: Philo’s Vit. Mos. 1.3, 49; Op. 1–12; Erb. 1; Prob. 43. Cf. also, Joseph. Ant. 12. 37. 88 van Henten, Friedrich 2002, 79–83.

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Martyrologies: Textualizing Death and Embodying devotio

Philo, who was born in the last quarter of the first century BCE and died around 45 CE, has variously been labelled as a philosopher and an exegete of the Pentateuch.89 As a member of the intellectual elite in Alexandria, Philo was familiar with Greek Literature and Philosophy and his works, although focussed on Jewish religious ideas and practises are interspersed with allusions and references to PreSocratic philosophers, Plato, Euripides and other key figures of the First Sophistic. For instance, Herakles’ endurance of pain and suffering becomes the archetype of heroic stamina and defiance on the face of painful death even in texts that detail the sufferings and often the heroic and spectacular death of the Jewish people.90 Jewish martyrologies followed a long both Pagan and Christian textual tradition of commemorating ›noble death‹ and self-sacrifice in public settings.91 This section offers some insights into the special role of this corpus in the dissemination of religious knowledge, creation of paradigmatic religious action, and exercising control over religious actors. Although strictly speaking the term mártyr (from the Greek μαρτυρεῖν, ›to give witness‹) does not appear in literary sources before the 150s CE, scholars do tend to apply the term martyrdom retrospectively to earlier material too. Martyrdom is thus a modern term with an intentionally wide semantic capacity, much wider that the ancient martyrium, passio (passion narative), or acta (martyrs acts). To be sure, a ›martyr‹ is an exemplary religious actor, who defies physical (and often mental) torture and effectively death, which could even be self-inflicted, in order to comply with the recommended religious action, e.g. not eating pork (2 Maccabees 6:18–31; and 7:1–42) or not worshipping the Emperor and/or non-Christian idols (›Martyrdom of Polycarp‹; ›Acts of Justin‹). However, all these texts can be grouped together as putting forth exemplary embodiments of the Roman devotio. These texts are extremely diverse in terms of authorial persona, agenda and rhetorical self-fashioning. Some of them celebrate the glorious death of an individual, as Polycarp, the bishop of Smyrna (Martyrdom of Polycarp); others detail the demise of a group of devotees, as in Josephus’ ›Jewish War‹ (7.389–406). Some were said to have been written by the martyrs themselves, whilst others are clearly the result of careful compilation and editing of earlier sources. Compare, for example, the sixth or seventh century CE text ›Martyrdom of Ignatius‹, which details the sufferings of Ignatius, the bishop of Antioch, who was convicted to fight wild beast in Rome (condemnation ad bestias), to the seven letters that Ignatius himself was said to have written on his way to the Roman amphitheatre in the second century CE. Interestingly enough, some of these texts like 1 Clement 5.1–6.2 (probably early second century) even recast earlier key figures of the Judaeo-Christian tradition 89 van Henten, Friedrich 2002, 76 with more bibliography. 90 E.g.: All. 3.202; Jos. 78; Prob. 25. 91 On the concept of noble death, see the Introduction in van Henten and Avemarie 2002.

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such as Paul and Peter as martyrs and their perseverance on the face of violent death were described in such lucid and lurid terms.92 The thematic common denominator between these multiple and diverse texts is that an often spectacularly cruel and violent death is preferred over compliance with the demands of unyielding pagan magistrates. In terms of form, some of these texts, like the ›Acts of Justin‹, which narrates the trial conviction of the early Christian apologist Justin, or the ›Martyrdom of Lyon and Vienne‹ (Eus. Hist. Eccl. 5.1.1–63; 2.1–7) resemble partially official Roman acts of trials, but they are clearly literary texts with carefully choreographed action for all those involved. They lay emphasis on the heroic action of their protagonists, and describe with fiendish fervor the graphic details of their bodily sufferings.93 Nowhere, however, are these tendencies of obsession with physical pain and voyeuristic sensationalism as prominent as in texts that relate the martyrdom of the North- Africa female followers of Christ, Perpetua and Felicitas. The physically abused bodies of the martyrs invite simultaneously the enjoyment of the audience’s voyeuristic tendencies and thirst for sado-erotic violence along with the disavowal of that enjoyment, ›which is projected onto the violently punitive actions of Roman authorities, heathen mobs, or (in eschatology) angels of hell‹.94 On a different level, the martyr’s scourged, burned, and disembowelled bodies also allow for ›masochistic identification with victims‹ eroticized brutalization and dissolution‹.95 There must have been a market for these sort of texts with complex authorial agendas and intricate narrative strategies that both allow and prohibit, condemn and encourage erotic voyeurism, if we are to judge by the proliferation of analogous

92 This tradition is followed by Eusebius (Hist. Eccl. 2.25.5), who writes about Pauls’ crucifixion and Peter’s decapitation, whereas John 21: 18–19 only alludes to Peter’s violent death, as rightly remarked by van Henten, Friedrich 2002, 89, n. 2. 93 van Henten and Avemarie 2002, 99. Cf. also the standard treatment of the topic in Frankfurter 2009. Note, however, how carefully Augustine differentiates the worship of the Christian martyrs from the worship of the immortal gods in Greek and Roman religions. In the twentieth book of his Contra Faustum Manichaeum, Augustine, who is writing in late fourth and early fifth century AD, notes: ›We do celebrate the memory of the martyrs with religious solemnity, but we neither build altars nor sacrifice to them‹ (Augustine Faust. 20.21): ›But that cultus which is called latreia in Greek but that cannot be rendered in Latin by any one word, as it is a sort of servitude owed exclusively to divinity (cum sit quaedam proprie diuinitati debita seruitus) with that cultus we neither worship anything, nor teach that anything should be worshipped, other than the one God. Moreover, the offering of sacrifice relates to this cultus, whence we name »idolatry« (εἰδωλολατρεία) the practice of those who pay sacrifice to idols. Therefore, we never in any way offer anything of this kind to any martyr, or any holy spirit, or any angel, nor do we teach that such offerings should be made‹. 94 Frankfurter 2009, 215. 95 In the Passion of Perpetua and Felicitas, for example, the sensual portrayal of Perpetua and Felicitas, a virgin and a woman fresh from childbirth with the milk still dripping from her breasts, cause both horror and excitement to the crowds congregated in the arena as they stand in front of the Roman magistrates awaiting their martyrdom while stripped naked, placed and covered in not much else but the nets that were used for their imprisonment.

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narrative action in a great gamut of literary texts from the second to the third centuries CE, from Achilles Tatius‹ ›Leukippe and Clitophon‹ to Philostratus‹ Imagines (King 2018, 175–216). Nonetheless, the paradoxical co-existence of pleasure and pain, revulsion and eroticism, appeal to the basest of instincts and high-ground moralism in early Christian texts is raised to wholly new level in texts like ›The Shepherd of Hermas‹ or Prudentius‹ ›Crowns of Martyrdom‹,96 precisely because familiar iconography and rhetorical tropes familiar from pagan authors are now employed to shape Christian community values and self-representation. Texts like 1 Clement 5–6 or Origen’s ›Exhortation to Martyrdom‹, on the other hand, that is texts that lay extra emphasis on the ideological differences between the Gentiles and the followers of Jesus Christ, were of equally fundamental for the formation of Christian self- and group-identity. Compare, for instance, how Polycarp is saluted as the teacher of Asia, the father of the Christians, the destroyer of the pagan gods, and instigator of conscious resistance to traditional forms of worship, such as offering sacrifices (Mart. Pol. 12.2). Texts like Philo’s ›Every Good Person Is Free‹ (Quod omnis probus liber sit) and Josephus’ ›Jewish War‹ facilitated analogous processes of identity formation in the Jewish communities of the Roman Empire.

Bibliography Ando, Clifford 2008. The Matter of the Gods: Religion and the Roman Empire. Transformation of the Classical Heritage 44. Berkeley: University of California Press. Andrade, N. J. 2013. Syrian Identity in the Greco-Roman World. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Barchiesi, Alessandro. 2006. ›Mobilità e religione nell’ Eneide. Diaspora, culto, spazio, identità locali.‹ In Texte als Medium und Reflexion von Religion im römischen Reich, ed. Dorothee Elm von der Osten, Jörg Rüpke, Katharina Waldner. Potsdamer Altertumswissenschaftliche Beiträge 14, Stuttgart: Steiner. 13–30. —, Jörg Rüpke and Susan A. Stephens (eds.) 2004, Rituals in Ink: A Conference on Religion and Literary Production in Ancient Rome Held at Stanford University in February 2002. Stuttgart: Steiner. Beard, Mary 1991. ›Writing and religion: Ancient Literacy and the function of the written word in Roman religion.‹ Literacy in the Roman world. Ann Arbor: Journal of Roman Archaeology. 35–58. — 1994. ›Religion.‹ In The Cambridge Ancient History 9: The Last Age of the Roman Republic, 146–43 B. C., ed. J. A. Crook, Andrew Lintott, Elizabeth † Rawson. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 729–768. —, John North and Simon Price 1998. Religions of Rome. 1: A History. 2: A Sourcebook. Cambridge: University Press. Belfiore, Valentina, Gilles van Heems 2010. ›Neue Betrachtungen zum Liber Linteus – Die Begriffe hil und sacni.‹ In Neue Forschungen zu den Etruskern. Beiträge der Tagung vom 7. bis 9November 2008 am Archäologischen Institut der Universität Bonn, ed. Anna Kieburg, Annette Rieger. Oxford: Archeopress. 113–121.

96 Rüpke 2016/18, 139–57; Palmer 1989.

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Bendlin, Andreas 2005. ›Wer braucht »Heilige Schriften«? Die Textbezongenheit der Religionsgeschichte und das »Reden über die Götter« in der griechisch römischen Antike.‹ In Heilige Schriften: Ursprung, Geltung und Gebrauch, ed. Christoph Bultmann, Claus-Peter März, Vasilios N. Makrides. Münster: Aschendorff, 205- 228. — 2006. ›Vom Nutzen und Nachteil der Mantik. Orakel im Medium von Handlung und Literatur in der Zeit der Zweiten Sophistik.‹ In Texte als Medium und Reflexion von Religion im römischen Reich, ed. Dorothee Elm von der Osten, Jörg Rüpke, Katharina Waldner. Potsdamer Altertumswissenschaftliche Beiträge 14, Stuttgart: Steiner. 159–207 — 2011. ›On the Uses and Disadvantages of Divination: Oracles and their Literary Representations in the Time of the Second Sophistic‹, in The Religious History of the Roman Empire: Pagans, Jews and Christians, ed. John North and Simon Price. Oxford: Oxford University Press. 175–250. Binder, Stephanie E. 2012. Tertullian, On Idolatry and Mishnah Avodah Zarah. Questioning the Parting of the Ways between Christians and Jews. Leiden: Brill. Birley, Anthony. 19872. Marcus Aurelius: A Biography. New York: Routledge. Bremmer, Jan N. 2014. Ancient Mystery Cults. Berlin: de Gruyter. — 2017. ›Lucian on Peregrinus and Alexander of Abonuteichos: A sceptical view of two religious entrepeneurs.‹ In Beyond Priesthood. Religious Entrepreneurs and Innovators in the Roman Empire. RGVV 66, ed. Richard Gordon, Georgia Petridou, Jörg Rüpke. Berlin: De Gruyter. 47–76. Bricault, Laurent 2014. ›Isis, Sarapis, Cyrus and John: Between Healing Gods and Thaumaturgical Saints.‹ In The Alexandrian Tradition. Intersections between Science, Religion and Literature, eds. Luis Arturo Guichard; Juan Luis Garci´a Alonso; Mari´a Paz de Hoz. Bern: Lang. 97–114. Cancik, Hubert 2006. ›Götter einführen: ein myth-historisches Modell für die Diffusion von Religion in Vergils Aeneis.‹ In Texte als Medium und Reflexion von Religion im römischen Reich, ed. Dorothee Elm von der Osten, Jörg Rüpke, Katharina Waldner. Potsdamer Altertumswissenschaftliche Beiträge 14. Stuttgart: Steiner. 31–40. — 2008. Religionsgeschichten: Römer, Juden und Christen im römischen Reich. Gesammelte Aufsätze 2, ed. Hildegard Cancik-Lindemaier. Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck. Chaniotis, Angelos 1988. Historie und Historiker in den griechischen Inschriften: Epigraphische Beiträge zur griechischen Historiographie. Heidelberger Althistorische Beiträge und Epigraphische Studien 4. Stuttgart: Steiner. Crawford, Michael H. (ed.) 1996. Roman Statutes. Bulletin of the Institute of Classical Studies, Suppl. 64. London: Institute of Classical Studies. Culpepper Stroup, Sarah 2004. ›Rituals of Ink?‹ In Rituals in Ink: A Conference on Religion and Literary Production in Ancient Rome held at Stanford University in February 2002. Potsdamer altertumswissenschaftliche Beiträge 10, ed. Alessandro Barchiesi, Jörg Rüpke, Susan Stephens. Stuttgart: Steiner. 141–148. Degrassi, Attilio (ed.) 1963. Inscriptiones Italiae 13: Fasti et elogia. Fasciculus 2: Fasti anni Numani et Iuliani, accedunt ferialia, menologia rustica, parapegmata. Roma: Libreria dello stato. Denzey Lewis, Nicola 2017. ›Lived Religion Among Second-Century Gnostic Hieratic Specialists.‹ In Beyond Priesthood: Religious Entrepreneurs and Innovators in the Roman Empire. Religionsgeschichtliche Versuche und Vorarbeiten 66, ed. Georgia Petridou, Richard Gordon, Jörg Rüpke. Berlin: de Gruyter. 79–102. Eidinow, Esther 2017. ›In search of the »beggar-priest«.‹ In Beyond Priesthood: Religious Entrepreneurs and Innovators in the Roman Empire. Religionsgeschichtliche Versuche und Vorarbeiten 66, ed. Georgia Petridou, Richard Gordon, Jörg Rüpke. Berlin: de Gruyter. 255–276. Elias, Norbert 1988. Über die Zeit: Arbeiten zur Wissenssoziologie 2. Frankfurt a. M.: Suhrkamp. Elm von der Osten, Dorothee 2006. ›Die Inszenierung des Betruges und seiner Entlarvung: Divination und ihre Kritiker in Lukians Schrift »Alexandros oder der Lügenprophet«.‹ In Texte als Medium und Reflexion von Religion im römischen Reich, ed. Dorothee Elm von der Osten, Jörg Rüpke, Katharina Waldner. Stuttgart: Franz Steiner. 141–157.

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—, Jörg Rüpke and Katharina Waldner (eds.) 2006. Texte als Medium und Reflexion von Religion im römischen Reich. Potsdamer Altertumswissenschaftliche Beiträge 14. Stuttgart: Franz Steiner Verlag. Feeney, Denis 1998. Literature and Religion at Rome: Cultures, Contexts, and Beliefs. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. —2007. ›The History of Roman Religion in Roman Historiography and Epic.‹ In A Companion to Roman Religion, ed. Jörg Rüpke. Oxford: Blackwell. 129–142. Feil, Ernst 1986. Religio [1]: Die Geschichte eines neuzeitlichen Grundbegriffs vom Frühchristentum bis zur Reformation. Forschungen zur Kirchen- und Dogmengeschichte 36. Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht. Ferrary, Jean-Louis 2000. ›Les inscriptions du sanctuaire de Claros en l’honneur de Romains.‹ BCH 124. 331–376. Flower, Harriet I. 2015. ›Sulla’s Memoirs as an Account of Individual Religious Experience.‹ Religion in the Roman Empire 1, 3. 297–320. Frankfurter, David 2009. ›Martyrology and the Prurient Gaze.‹ Journal of Early Christian Studies 17.2. 215–245. Gabba, Emilio 1988. ›Reflessioni sulla Lex Coloniae Genetivae Iuliae.‹ Anejos de Archivo Español de Arqueología 9. 157-68. Gilhus, Ingvild S. 2006. Animals, Gods and Humans: Changing Attitudes to Animals in Greek, Roman and Early Christian Ideas. London: Routledge. Gleason, Maud 1995. Making Men: Sophists and Self-Presentation in Ancient Rome. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press. Goldhill, Simon 2006. ›Religion, Wissenschaftlichkeit und griechische Identität im römischen Kaiserreich.‹ In Texte als Medium und Reflexion von Religion im römischen Reich, ed. Dorothee Elm von der Osten, Jörg Rüpke, Katharina Waldner. Potsdamer Altertumswissenschaftliche Beiträge 14, Stuttgart: Steiner. 125–140. Gordon, Richard 2013. ›Innovation, Individuality and Power in Graeco-Roman Religion: The Mystagogue Second Sophistic Perspectives.‹ In Religious Dimensions of the Self in the Second Century CE, ed. Jörg Rüpke and Greg Woolf. Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck. 146–172. —; Georgia Petridou and Jörg Rüpke 2017. ›Introduction.‹ In Beyond Priesthood: Religious Entrepreneurs and Innovators in the Roman Empire, ed. Richard L. Gordon, Georgia Petridou, Jörg Rüpke. Berlin: de Gruyter. Gradel, Ittai 2002. Emperor worship and Roman religion. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Henderson, Ian H. 2006. ›Early Christianity, Textual Representation and Ritual Extension.‹ In Texte als Medium und Reflexion von Religion im römischen Reich, ed. Dorothee Elm von der Osten, Jörg Rüpke, Katharina Waldner. Stuttgart: Franz Steiner. 81–100. Henrichs, Albert 2010. ›What is a Greek God?‹ In The Gods of Ancient Greece: Identities and Transformations. Edinburgh Leventis Studies 5, ed. Jan N. Bremmer, Andrew Erskine. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. 19–39. Hirsch-Luipold, Rainer 2002. Plutarchs Denken in Bildern: Studien zur literarischen, philosophischen und religiösen Funktion des Bildhaften, Studien und Texte zu Antike und Christentum 14. Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck. Jacquemin, A. 1991. ›Delphes au IIe sie`cle apre`s J.-C.‹ In Hellenismos: quelques jalons pour une histoire de l’identite´ grecque, ed. S. Said. Leiden: Brill. 217–31. Johnson, William A. 2010. Readers and Reading Culture in the High Roman Empire. A Study of Elite Communities. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Jones, Christopher P. 1971. Plutarch and Rome. Oxford: Clarendon Press. — 1986. Culture and Society in Lucian. Cambridge MA and London: Harvard University Press. — 1999. ›A follower of the God Glykon?‹ Epigraphica Anatolica 30. 107–109. Kokkinia, Christina 2000. Die Opramoas-Inschrift von Rhodiapolis: Euergetismus und soziale Elite in Lykien, Antiquitas 3, 40. Bonn: Habelt.

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Klöckner, Anja 2017. »Tertium genus? Representations of religious practitioners in the cult of Magna Mater.« In Beyond Priesthood: Religious Entrepreneurs and Innovators in the Roman Empire. Religionsgeschichtliche Versuche und Vorarbeiten 66, ed. Georgia Petridou, Richard Gordon, Jörg Rüpke. Berlin: de Gruyter. 343–384. Lane Fox, Robin 1986. Pagans and Christians. New York: Harper and Row. Long, Anthony A. 2010. »Cosmic craftsmanship in Plato and Stoicism.« In One book, the whole universe: Plato’s Timaeus today, ed. Richard D. Mohr, Barbara M. Sattler. Las Vegas: Parmenides. 37–53. MacRae, Duncan 2016. Legible Religion. Books, Gods, and Rituals in Roman Culture. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Mosshammer, Alden A. 2008. The Easter Computus and the Origins of the Christian Era. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Muniz Grijalvo, Elena. 2005. ›Elites and religious change in Roman Athens.‹ Numen 52.2. 255–282. Musurillo, Herbert 1972. Acts of the Christian Martyrs, Oxford: Clarendon University Press. Nasrallah, Laura 2005. ›Mapping the World: Justin, Tatian, Lucian, and the Second Sophistic.‹ Harvard Theological Review 98. 283–314. Ogden, Daniel 2013. Drakon: Dragon Myth and Serpent Cult in the Greek and Roman Worlds. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Palmer, Anne-Marie 1989. Prudentius on the Martyrs. Oxford: Clarendon. Peró, Anna 2012. La statua di Atena: Agalmatofilia nella ›Cronaca‹ di Lindos. Pubblicazioni della Facoltá di lettere e filosofia dell’Universitá degli Studi di Milano 278. Milano: Il Filarete. Petsalis-Diomidis, Аlexia 2010. Truly Beyond Wonders: Aelius Aristides and the Cult of Asclepius. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Petridou, Georgia 2013. ›Blessed is he, who has seen ... the power of ritual viewing and ritual framing in Eleusis.‹ In Vision and Viewing in Ancient Greece, ed. Sue Blundell, Douglas Cairns, Nancy Rabinowitz. Helios 40.1–2. 309–341. — 2015. Divine Epiphany in Greek Literature and Culture. Oxford: Oxford University Press. — 2017a. ›Contesting Religious and Medical Expertise in the Hieroi Logoi: The therapeutai of Pergamum as religious and medical entrepreneurs.‹ In Beyond Priesthood: Religious Entrepreneurs and Innovators in the Roman Empire. RGVV 66, ed. Richard L. Gordon, Georgia Petridou, Jörg Rüpke. Berlin: de Gruyter. 183–2r08. — 2017b. ›What is divine about medicine? Mysteric imagery and bodily knowledge in the second sophistic.‹ Religion in the Roman Empire 3.2. 242–263. Raggi, Andrea 2006. ›Le norme sui sacra nelle leges municipales.‹ In Gli statuti municipali, ed. L. Capogrossi, E. Gabba. Pavia: IUSS Press. 701–721. — 2011. ›»Religion« in Municipal Laws.‹ In Priests and State in the Roman World. Potsdamer Altertumswissenschaftlich Beiträge 33, ed. James Richardson, Federico Santangelo. Stuttgart: Steiner. 333–346. Rawson, Elizabeth 1985. Intellectual Life in the Late Roman Republic. London: Duckworth. Robert, Louis 1980. A Travers l’Asie Mineure: poètes et prosateurs, monnaies grecques, voyageurs et géographie. Paris: Bibliothèque des Écoles françaises d’Athènes et de Rome. — 2017b. ›What is divine about medicine? Mysteric imagery and bodily knowledge in the second sophistic.‹ Religion in the Roman Empire 3.2, 242–263. Rüpke, Jörg 1995. Kalender und Öffentlichkeit: Die Geschichte der Repräsentation und religiösen Qualifikation von Zeit in Rom. RGVV 40. Berlin: de Gruyter. — 2001. ›Ein neues Jahrtausend und noch immer der alte Kalender: Antike Konstanten in der europäischen Zeitrechnung.‹ Gymnasium 108. 419–438. — 2005a. ›Βuchreligionen als Reichreligionen? Lokale Grenzen überregionaler religiöser Kommunikation.‹ Mittellateinisches Jahrbuch 40. 197–207. — 2005b. Fasti Sacerdotum: Die Mitglieder der Priesterschaften und das sakrale Funktionspersonal römischer, griechischer, orientalischer und jüdisch-christlicher Kulte in der Stadt Rom von 300 v.

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Chr. bis 499 n. Chr. 3 Bde. Potsdamer altertumswissenschaftliche Beiträge 12/1–3. Stuttgart: Steiner. — 2006. ›Literarische Darstellungen römischer Religion in christlicher Apologetik. Universalund Lokalreligion bei Tertullian und Minucius Felix.‹ In Texte als Medium und Reflexion von Religion im römischen Reich. Potsdamer Altertumswissenschaftliche Beiträge 14, ed. Dorothea Elm von der Osten, Jörg Rüpke, Katharina Waldner. Stuttgart: Steiner. 209–223. — 2008. ›Kalender- und Festexport im Imperium Romanum.‹ In Festrituale in der römischen Kaiserzeit. Studien und Texte zu Antike und Christentum, ed. Jörg Rüpke. Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck. 19–33. — 2011. The Roman Calendar from Numa to Constantine: Time, History and the Fasti, trans. David M.B. Richardson. Malden: Wiley-Blackwell. — 2012a. Religion in Republican Rome: Rationalization and Ritual Change. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. — 2012b. ›Lived Ancient Religion: Questioning ›Cults‹ and »Polis Religion«.‹ Mythos 5. 191–204. — 2012c. Religiöse Erinnerungskulturen: Formen der Geschichtsschreibung in der römischen Antike. Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft. — 2014a. ›Historicizing Religion: Varro’s Antiquitates and History of Religion in the Late Roman Republic.‹ History of Religions 53, 3. 246–68. — 2014b. Römische Geschichtsschreibung. Marburg: Tectum. — 2014c. From Jupiter to Christ: On the History of Religion in the Roman Imperial Period. Transl. by David M. B. Richardson. Oxford: Oxford University Press. — 2015. ›The »Connected Reader« as a Window into Lived Ancient Religion: A Case Study of Ovid’s Libri fastorum.‹ Religion in the Roman Empire 1.1. 95–113. — 2016. Religious Deviance in the Roman World: Superstition or Individuality. Transl. by David M. B. Richardson. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. — 2016/2018. Pantheon: Geschichte der antiken Religionen. München: Beck. Engl. trsl. Princeton 2018. — 2019. ›Roman Gods and Private Property: The Invention of the State Religion in Cicero’s Speech »On His House«.‹ Religion in the Roman Empire 5,2. 292–315. —, Federico Santangelo 2017. ›Public priests and religious innovation in imperial Rome.‹ In Beyond Priesthood. Religious Entrepreneurs and Innovators in the Roman Empire. RGVV 66, ed. Richard L. Gordon, Georgia Petridou, Jörg Rüpke. Berlin: de Gruyter. 17–46. Scheid, John, Paola Tassini 1998. Recherches archéologiques à la Magliana. Commentarii Fratrvm Arvalivm qvi svpersunt; les copies épigraphiques des protocoles annuels de la confrérie arvale (21 av. – 304 ap. J.-C.). Roma antica 4. Rome: École Française de Rome. Schnegg-Köhler, Bärbel 2002. Die augusteischen Säkularspiele. Archiv für Religionsgeschichte 4. München: Saur. Scholz, Peter, Uwe Walter 2013. Fragmente Römischer Memoiren. Studien zur Alten Geschichte 18. Heidelberg: Verlag Antike. Smith, Christopher 2009. The lost memoirs of Augustus and the development of Roman autobiography. Swansea: Classical Press of Wales. Stroumsa, Guy G. 2016. The Scriptural Universe of Ancient Christianity. Harvard University Press. van Henten, Jan Willem, Friedrich Avemarie 2002. Martyrdom and Noble Death: Selected Texts from Graeco-Roman, Jewish and Christian Antiquity. London: Routledge. van Nuffelen, Peter 2010. ›Varro’s Divine Antiquities: Roman Religion as an Image of Truth.‹ Classical Philology 105. 162–188. — 2011. Rethinking the gods - Philosophical Readings of religion in the Post-Hellenistic Period. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Várhelyi, Zsuzsanna 2010. The Religion of Senators in the Roman Empire: Power and the Beyond. New York: Cambridge University Press. Victor, Ulrich 1997. Lukian von Samosata: Alexandros oder der Lügenprophet. Religions of the Graeco-Roman World 132. Leiden: Brill.

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Vinzent, Markus 2017. ›Christians, the »more obvious« representatives of the religion of Israel than the Rabbis?‹ In Beyond Priesthood. Religious Entrepreneurs and Innovators in the Roman Empire, ed. Richard Gordon, Georgia Petridou, Jörg Rüpke. RGVV 66. Berlin: DeGruyter. 215–230. von Lieven, Alexandra 2016. ›Translating Gods, Interpreting Gods: On the Mechanisms behind the Interpretatio Graeca of Egyptian Gods.‹ In Greco-Egyptian Interactions. Literature, Translation, and Culture, 500 BC-AD 300, ed. Ian Rutherford. Oxford: Oxford University Press. DOI: 10.1093/ acprof:oso/9780199656127.001.0001. Wallace-Hadrill, Andrew 1993. Augustan Rome. Bristol: Bristol Classical Press. — 2008. Rome’s Cultural Revolution. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Wissowa, Georg 1912. Religion und Kultus der Römer. Handbuch der Altertumswissenschaft 5,4 (2. Aufl.). München: Beck. Woolf, Greg 2014. ›Isis and the Evolution of Religions.‹ In Power, Politics and the Cults of Isis. Proceedings of the Vth International Conference of Isis Studies, Boulogne-sur-Mer, October 13–15, 2011, ed. Laurent Bricault and Miguel John Vesluys. Leiden: Brill, 62–94. Yarrow, Liv Mariah 2007. Historiography at the End of the Republic: Provincial Perspectives on Roman Rule. Oxford Classical Monograph. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Zerubavel, Eviatar 2003. Time Maps: Collective Memory and the Social Shape of the Past. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Economy and Religion Richard Gordon, Rubina Raja and Anna-Katharina Rieger

1

Introduction

Religion is generally thought of as symbolic action par excellence. Yet if the immaterial is to be instantiated in this world beyond ephemeral words and gestures, it needs to take on material form, whether in the shape of buildings, objects, or manpower—in a word, religion requires material resources. And material resources, being limited, necessarily raise issues of possession, allocation, and distribution. Who controls the resources used for religious performance? How are they obtained? Who is responsible for the costs incurred? Is expenditure on religion solely a matter of consumption, or does it also have productive aspects? Is expenditure on religion a form of luxury? Which groups in society gain most from outlays on religious expression? Questions such as these have aroused considerable interest in the last thirty years, not merely because of the studies on the economy of Christianity associated with Laurence Iannaccone and Rodney Stark in the United States, but also because of the spectacular rise in many parts of the world of fundamentalist and charismatic/pentecostal churches and the prodigious resources that they often manage to mobilise.1 In the case of antiquity, there has been a continual, if intermittent, interest in the economics of religion, mainly focused on civic temples and festivals in the eastern Mediterranean during the Hellenistic period, for which the evidence is most plentiful.2 The present chapter takes some account of this work, but is mainly concerned with providing an impression of the scale of expenditure on religion during the Roman Empire, up the 4th century A.D., taking account of civic practice, of associations and other small private groups, and ending with a brief survey of the resources invested in pilgrimage into Late Antiquity. As will become clear, the limited nature of the surviving evidence, which is almost entirely derived from inscriptions and, in the case of Roman Egypt, papyri and ostraca (ceramic sherds used as a writing surface), with a small number of literary texts, means that we can only work with the equivalent of anecdotal evidence, a fact here, a sum of money there. In aggregate, however, combined with inferences derived from the

1 E.g. Iannaccone 1991, 1998; Fink, Stark 1992; Schlicht 1995; Stark 1997; McCleary, Barro 2006; McCleary 2011. 2 E.g. Dignas 2002; Chankowski-Sablé 2005; Maucourant 2005; Sassu 2010, 247–8 n.1; eadem 2018, 133 n. 2; von Reden 2010, 156–84: Smith, Moser 2019.

1 Introduction

263

analysis of excavated sites all over the Mediterranean area, it does provide a very general idea of the value of religious practice in the Roman Empire, both in the sense of what people were prepared to lay out as well as their evaluation of different types of religious practice as a form of social action. In this connection, we often use the terms ›invest‹ and ›investment‹. It needs to be stressed that we use this term not in the modern economist sense of goods or assets intended to produce future wealth but simply in the sense of a choice to spend money or use assets in one way rather than another, i.e. prioritising one option over another in a concrete situation.

1.1

The wider context: the demography and macroeconomy of the Roman Empire

Nevertheless, before turning to the issue of the financing of religion in the Roman Empire, of outlays and social choices, there is something to be gained by looking at the larger framework provided by the macro-economic level. An obvious desideratum here would be an assessment of the proportion of its estimated annual gross domestic product of around 50 million tons of wheat-equivalent (= 20 billion sesterces) that the Roman Empire devoted to the religious field at all levels from direct imperial expenditure to informal gestures of piety.3 This dream however must remain unfulfilled, because it is impossible to decide what to count as a ›religious cost‹, and, in the absence of adequate proxy data,4 how reasonably plausible aggregates might be arrived at. Such data do not exist even for modern societies, let alone ancient ones. Therefore, we cannot estimate even roughly the total annual expenditure in the religious field relative to other costs, i.e. what such efforts were ›worth‹ to this society. On general grounds, however, we can take it that on the assumption at least 75–80% of the total population lived on the land, where the marginal costs of animals and other products suitable for sacrifice were low, aggregate expenditure there was comparable to that in large towns (i.e. those with an estimated population of over 5,000), despite the fact that, given conspicuous (albeit occasional) consumption on buildings for religious purposes, capital expenditure under this head in that sector was a great deal higher.5 This is plausible even if we grant that rural landscapes in the Roman Empire were extremely variable not just with reference to land-quality but also in terms of economic structure and social systems.6 It is also possible to use macro-economic evidence to suggest that an aggregate increase in the resources devoted to religion took place during the ›long‹ empire (say 200 B.C. to A.D. 300), which is the time-period usually employed in the field.

3 4 5 6

Scheidel, Friesen 2009, 62–74. Temin 2017, 195–219 reckons on a somewhat larger GDP. Scheidel 2009, 47–58; Wilson 2009, 71–3. Wilson 2009, 74; Temin 2001, 180. See Grey 2011; Zuiderhoek 2015. See chapter ›Sanctuaries‹, p. 76–8.

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There are two reasons for making such an assumption. The first one is a mere matter of population-increase: since it is now often accepted that the population of the empire increased from an order of c. 50 million in 14 A.D. to c. 70 million around 150 A.D. (declining thereafter for a variety of reasons, including the impact of epidemics), that would imply an aggregate increase in investment in religion over that period assuming a constant level of input per head.7 Secondly, there is evidence for a general increase at any rate up to the third quarter of the 2nd century A.D., in the variety of specialised services, consumption of a wider range of non-élite goods probably including meat, the stimulation of markets for such goods, the use of subsidiary labour and the spread of cash-crops, intensified resort to water-lifting devices—even small details such as the substitution of bread for porridge as the typical form of cereal consumption.8 Some think that these developments actually imply a slight increase in per capita growth, even as high as 0.1% p.a.;9 even if this were not the case, the case for believing that overall aggregate investment in the religious field increased up to c. 150 A.D. or even to the 180s seems strong.10 This increase cannot be quantified and it comprises all resources devoted to ›religion‹ including funerary practices, votive offerings, and all inputs by subsistence-level households—not simply the most visible kinds of expenditure on public temples, priesthoods, and festivals. This overall picture can be further refined. The truly explosive increase in the Italian economy took place in the Republican period after the defeat of Hannibal in 202 B.C., as a result of massive increases in the money supply due to war-booty and plunder in the eastern Mediterranean, the acquisition by the Roman taxfarmers of control over the Spanish and probably Macedonian mines, and the correlative rise in disposable income within the wider Roman elite and the resulting building-boom in Italian cities. Together these factors have suggested that real GDP per capita in mainland Italy rose by 72% between 150 and 50 B.C., i.e. an average compound growth-rate of 0.54%.11 A further result of this process was the relative integration of the economy of the eastern Mediterranean with that of Italy. The end of the late-Republican civil wars in 32 B.C. and the establishment of bureaucratic empire in the Julio-Claudian period (28 B.C. – A.D. 68) permitted a sharp decline in the amount of military spending and a continuing rise in civilian spending priorities fostered both by the central authority and by local elites so that building became a structurally significant feature of the imperial economy.12 The demographic background to this was a slow but steady increase in population, which gradually approached its effective limit in relation to the resources availa-

7 For different estimates, see Frier 2000, 811–4; Scheidel 2007, 48 Table 3.1; Scheidel, Friesen 2009, 66 n. 21, 68 Table 2 and 72 Table 4; Jongman 2014; Cascio, Malanima 2014, 231. 8 Scheidel 2009, 60–3; Wilson 2009, 81; Verboeven 2015, 52–7; cf. Schäfer 2017, 89–97. 9 Scheidel 2009, 62. 10 Cf. Kehoe 2015 on the positive effects of redistributive efforts on the part of government. 11 Kay 2014, 1–58, 269–325. 12 Wilson 2009, 80–1 and 183–6; for Egypt: Bagnall 2009, 110–1.

1 Introduction

265

ble.13 The demographic correction took the form of the successive waves of the Antonine (160–195 A.D.) and ›Cyprianic‹ plagues (249–270 A.D.), which may have reduced the population by one fifth, thus greatly reducing the tax-base, while the resulting military weakness, cruelly exposed by the Marcomannic Wars (162–180 A.D.), forced the Severans (say 193–220 A.D.) both massively to increase investment in military spending and to extend citizenship to all free persons in order to increase the tax-base.14 Moreover, recent modelling of climate, based on proxydata including tree-ring sequences from 398 B.C. to 2000 A.D., and speleothems (i.e. mineral deposits in caves), suggests that the stable warm period of the late Republic and earlier Principate gave way to a period of rapid short-term changes, with five major volcanic eruptions, between 200 and 300 A.D., recovering thereafter.15

1.2

Implications for expenditure on religious activity

One result of these long-term processes up to the third quarter of the 2nd century A.D. was the emergence of a sizeable ›middling‹ income group, amounting on one recent estimate to between 6 and 12% of the population of the empire.16 On the ›optimistic‹ projection, their estimated aggregate gross income would have been between 0.5 and 1.5 times that of the total elite (i.e. the three legally defined upper orders, namely senators, equestrians and city-councillors in the Empire plus ›other wealthy‹, comprising 1.5% of the total population, i.e. between 215,000–290,000 households), that is, around 15–20% of total income. It is among this (mainly but by no means exclusively urban) group, which might well include privileged slaves as well as many freedmen, that we should look for the members of associations and other small religious groups in a position to combine their resources to rent and, in smaller towns, even construct their own meeting-places, with the leisure and resources to travel to healing shrines (which might also serve animals) and oracular centres away from towns, furnish tombs with grave-goods, dedicate anonymous votives in metal, stone, and terracotta and buy other types of religious goods such as manufactured amulets.17 Over against these two groups, who register disproportionately in the historical record, lay the mass of the population (between 92.5–86.5%), including many city-dwellers, who lived near or just about at subsistence-level, were either fully or functionally illiterate, and whose poverty, relative and absolute, in all likelihood forced them to resort to cheap, anonymous, and ephemeral forms of devotion including personal services to divine statues, use of

13 Scheidel 2009, 46–7 and 68–69. 14 Wilson 2009, 68–9 and 81. 15 McCormick et al. 2012, 185–6. On the Roman Climate Optimum, 200 B.C. – A.D 150, cf. Harper 2017, 39–54. 16 Scheidel, Friesen 2009, 84–8. 17 See chapters ›Gods and Other Divine Beings‹, pp. 147–9; ›Managing Problems‹, pp. 168–88; ›Artefacts and Their Humans‹.

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a range of natural products such as flowers or grain as offerings, consultation of wise-folk and itinerant diviners in case of illness, and resort to perishable vegetable and animal amulets. This inevitably meant that their ability to participate in the regional or local symbolic ›language‹ of piety, except insofar as they were able to attend public festivals in cities and villages, was quite limited. Even so, as tax- and rent-payers, this majority of the population contributed massively albeit indirectly (and occasionally directly) to the inputs into the most visible or dominant urban religious sector, including the imperial sector, and to that extent was indispensable to their very existence. Income differentials and residence were thus the two main variables in configuring the type of evidence available for investigating the economic aspects of religious practice in the Roman Empire. This is perhaps as far as we can go from a macro-economic perspective. The fundamental finding is that the complexity, diversity, and openness of the religious field in the Roman Empire makes it impossible to apply modern economic criteria such as rational choice or considerations of political economy to it on the assumption that it may reasonably be represented as, say, a coherent social organisation, let alone as a multi-divisional corporation.18 This does not mean that aspects of the field cannot be interrogated in terms of economic rationality. The cult of Amphiaraus at Oropos on the north coast of Attica during the Hellenistic period is a case in point, which happens to be known to us through a series of inscriptions from Athens, which for part of the time exercised suzerainty over the site. The four parties involved, namely the city of Eretria, on the island of Euboea directly opposite the site, the Boeotian League, the hegemonic power Athens, and the city of Oropos itself, can be viewed as ›firms‹, acting as potential purchasers in an ›implicit market‹.19 Rationality here does not refer to the frame-condition, i.e. the existence of gods, but to the advantages of different kinds accruing from control of the shrine and its territories, which may have amounted to as much as 17% of Oropos’ territory. These benefits included, at any rate for Athens, military security, the maximisation of income from rental leases, financial gains from well-attended festivals, and exploitation of a demand-led market in healing. Yet the language in which the Athenian decrees are framed admits none of this, justifying decisions solely in terms of ›soft‹ goods, splendor and piety. Moreover, the common practice of allocating lands to individual temples, and temples‹ own propensity to thesaurisation of different kinds, can properly be seen as a form of what in modern economics is known as ›rent-seeking‹, i.e. longer-term removal of resources from the market in pursuit of sectoral interests.20 Such accumulations naturally made temples tempting targets for armed forces in search of plunder, such as Sulla in Athens (87–86 B.C.), the Costoboci in the Danube area (171 A.D.), or the Heruli, again in Athens (267 A.D.).

18 As proposed by Ekelund, Héber and Tollison 2011 for the pre-Reformation Catholic Church. 19 Davies 2018, 71–7; cf. Müller 1988, 478; Chaves, Cann 1992; Broekaert 2006. 20 ›Rent-seeking‹: Temin 2017, 18. Thesaurisation: Dignas 2002, 16–25; Bodei Giglioni 1977; Malrieu 2005, 99–110. Some other types of transaction costs are discussed by Broekaert 2016, 164–6.

2 Income, outgoings and the nature of the evidence

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267

Income, outgoings and the nature of the evidence

The central administration on the Palatine at Rome will have been able to draw up annual accounts of its expenditure and income under the head of temple-construction, festivals, games, fines for infringing pontifical rules and so on. It is clear from Augustus‹ résumé of his achievements, the Res gestae, that records were kept of outgoings ordered by the Princeps for games, spectacles, and temples.21 For example, § 20.4 reports that in 28 B.C. 82 temples were repaired in Rome on the Senate’s orders, but in reality by the imperial treasury (the patrimonium); § 19.1–2 names ten temples among buildings in Rome built or repaired by Augustus during his reign; § 21.2 claims that the Princeps dedicated votive gifts to the value of 100 million sesterces in five ›dynastic‹ temples, namely those of Capitoline Jupiter, divus Iulius, Palatine Apollo, Vesta in the Forum Romanum, and Mars Ultor in the Forum of Augustus. The college of two annually appointed senators responsible, among other things, for the upkeep of temple fabric at Rome, will likewise have had its own accounts, which were probably kept in the office of the prefect responsible for the administration of the city.22 But sadly all this mass of information has perished entirely, with the result that extremely little is known about the finances of the religious infrastructure of Rome and the annual costs involved. What survive are anecdotes, such as the scandal caused by the emperor Gaius (37–43 A.D., known as Caligula) in compelling members of his household, including his wife and his successor Claudius, to pay exorbitant sums for the privilege of holding the priesthood of himself as Jupiter Latiaris.23 As for individual cities and townships, their councils evidently, as in the case of Athens and Oropos, might have had access to detailed information about the rights, income, and outgoings of temples and the associated foundations. But in many cases, especially in the case of ancient cities in the eastern Mediterranean area, these affairs might be very complicated, sometimes requiring application to the Senate at Rome or the provincial governor to resolve particularly intractable conflicts between different interests. A famous example is the half-hearted attempt in 43/44 A.D. by the governor of Asia, Paullus Fabius Persicus, apparently at the instance of the Emperor Claudius, to rectify the complicated (and clearly irregular) affairs of the temple of Artemis at Ephesus; the inscription that provides our only evidence is not only lacunate but typical in its rhetorical vagueness and inability to get to the point.24 Another well-known case concerns the claims to rights of asylum in temples in the eastern Mediterranean, which had considerable advantages, above all financial, for the city concerned. Between 20 and 22 A.D., the perceived abuses of such rights induced the Senate to require representatives of numerous cities to defend their claims at Rome. Many, such as Pergamon and Ephesus,

21 22 23 24

CIL 3, p. 774 = IGR 3. 159, with Scheid 2007. See e.g. Kolb 1993. Suet. Claud. 9.2; Cassius Dio 59.28.5. I.Ephesos 1a. 17–9.

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attempted to prove the legitimacy of their claims by citing mythology or tradition; but the Senate generally preferred documents certifying the recognition of such claims by Roman commanders and governors in the Republic.25 But, as will become abundantly clear, it is only in exceptional cases that anything is known even of individual incidents, let alone balance-sheets. In the running of sanctuaries, large and small, economic factors played a major role already in Classical Greece, and continued to do so, as we show here, throughout the long Roman Empire.26 Temple personnel below the level of the public priests had to be compensated for their services, temple slaves acquired, fed, and remunerated, once they had been erected buildings had to be kept in good repair, sanctuary inventory renewed and exchanged, land purchased and leased, loans made, income and outgoings monitored, oscillations and short-falls managed. We know that city councils and private individuals, as well as powerful groups such as the hieronikai of Ephesus with their own particular interests, financed cults and festivals, repaired and restored temples and sanctuaries, as well as seeing to the production and installation of cult statues and their tendance.27 But exactly how such processes were regulated remains elusive to us apart from the few cases in which there is direct epigraphic evidence for such undertakings; and anyway, for the Roman Empire there is nothing remotely comparable to the records of the building work on the Asklepeion at Epidauros from the 4th century B.C.28 Our knowledge rests exclusively on individual instances, which cannot be aggregated and only provide fragmentary—and contingent—insights into the complex mechanisms governing the relationship between economy and religion in the Roman period. And anyway, it is highly likely that in most individual cities there was no institution capable of keeping overall control of finances in this area, or even with an interest in doing so.

3

Public versus private: an unhelpful opposition?29

The sheer number of local shrines, sanctuaries, urban temples, and large pilgrimage sites all over the Roman Empire inevitably raises the question of who paid for this massive effort invested in regular and extraordinary communication with the gods—the infrastructure itself, the running and maintenance costs, and the collateral costs, such as festivals—and how such funding was managed.30 Calling on the gods in a fitting manner, whether one person alone or in a group—as a family, an 25 Tac. Ann. 3.60–3 with Shannon-Henderson 2019, 149–60. 26 For the Classical Greek world, see esp. Horster 2004, 139–213; Papazarkadas 2011, 16–97; Costabile 1987 (Magna Graecia); Sassu 2010, 255–7; Lippolis and Sassu 2016, 179–85 (Athens). 27 See section 4 below. 28 On which see the outstanding study by Burford 1969. 29 Cf. Ando, Rüpke 2015. 30 See chapter ›Sanctuaries‹, p. 84.

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association, a village or an entire town or city—always involved expenditure, often, especially in the case of groups, on a considerable scale. Responsibility for decisions about such investment, about those liable to pay, about income and its reinvestment, and about overall financial care for the sacred places varied widely over the vast extent of the Roman Empire. At first sight we might imagine that a major distinction was drawn between cults, festivals and infrastructure financed by public funds, i.e. those of the city or village, and those organised privately, for example at the level of the household.31 Yet this distinction was by no means hard and fast. Presiding city magistrates were sometimes expected to provide the animals for sacrifice; such persons might even erect sacred buildings, especially in relation to the imperial cult, on their own private property: the Pompeian duumvir M. Tullius, for example, built a temple to Fortuna Augusta on his own property, as did the public priestess Mamia for the Genius Augusti.32 However, in the case of the temple for Fortuna Augusta, at least the altar to the temple stood on public ground. Cases like these reveal how complex the relations between private and public property, religious influence and social power could be, even in a single town or city.33 Provincial high-priests of the imperial cult had the duty of mounting expensive games out of their own pocket, which might well be ruinously expensive, even if some costs, such as those for rubbingoil might be delegated to other officials; in western Asia Minor, as on the island of Cos, priesthoods were often publicly auctioned to the highest bidder, and the outlay recuperated from an official tariff of payments on worshippers, who were sometimes actually compelled to offer sacrifices under certain circumstances; it was common for cities to call upon wealthier inhabitants to co-fund sacred building projects; magnates all over the Empire supported public religion by means of foundations, generously-funded feasts, and direct subventions for repairs.34 Moreover, public temples were constantly used for sacrifices and other ceremonies by individuals and their families, for which fees were charged. From Rome, for example, we have an early-modern copy of a 10-line inscription listing the cost of using the altar and its equipment, such as the axes and knives (Fig. 24).35 Thus the charge for killing the animal and leaving just the blood and the hide or skin was in the case of a lamb 1 denarius and a semis = 4⅕ sestertii, at a time when a litre of cheaper wine cost 2½ sestertii; just killing a cockerel or chicken cost 13 asses = 3¼ sestertii. In each case it was considerably more expensive to holocaust the ani-

31 E.g. Cato Agr. 132–4 and 143, Ovid Fasti 1.337–353. 32 solo et pecunia sua: CIL 10.820 = ILS 5398 (3 A.D.), cf. 10.821 = 5398a. By 45 A.D., however, it seems to have been in public ownership; (CIL 10.825 = ILS 6385); cf. Van Andringa 2015, with Figs. 4 and 5; Mamia: CIL 10.816 = AE 1992: 271 = 2003: 315. 33 Van Andringa 2015. 34 Provincial priests: Edelmann-Singer 2015, 232–235; auctions on Cos: Parker; Obbink 2000, 2001a; co-funding: Parker, Obbink 2001b, 253–65; magnates: Schmitt Pantel 1992, 255–424. 35 CIL 6.820 = ILS 4916, probably first century A.D. The original was broken at the top and on the right-hand side so that both the first entry, probably for an ox, and some of the sums involved, are incomplete.

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mal, i.e. burn it on the altar so there was nothing left, which required more wood and made more mess. There were additional charges for hiring a leaf-crown to add dignity and solemnity to the occasion (4 asses = 1 sestertius per head) and for hot water (2+ asses per head). Hearths and kitchens have been preserved or are mentioned in inscriptions at a number of sacred places. Examples from Italy are the kitchen (culina) in the temple of Bona Dea at Ostia or in a sanctuary of Venus near Casino.36

Fig. 25: The tariff inscription from Rome listing sacrificial animals and prices. The original, of imperial date, is lost, and only an early-modern copy has survived (CIL 6.820).

Moreover, the nominally ›private sector‹ included organised groups (Latin: collegia, Greek: synodoi) and associations, often under the guidance or protection of a relatively wealthy individual, but mainly funded by members’ subscriptions. Not only were such associations, especially in the Greek East, often closely linked to civic elites, but their members were by no means invisible on the streets. For example, they often organised public processions, with music, incense, bustle and noise. Apuleius’ account in the 180s A.D. of an (imaginary) procession in honour of the goddess Isis at the Greek port-town of Kenchreai on the Isthmus of Corinth provides a highly coloured example, with its descriptions of people in fancy dress, parodic shows (such as a tame bear dressed as a lady), women with mirrors fixed to their backs, choruses of chanting boys, crowds of initiates, the men with their heads shaved, troops of priests, and finally human-beings elaborately dressed as Egyptian gods.37 We return to such associations in section 5 below.

36 Ostia: CIL 12, 3025 = AE 1973: 127 with Rieger 2004, 238–9, Abb. 203; Casino: Nonnis 2003, fig. 3, 1st century B.C. 37 Apuleius Met. 11.10–12.

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271

Funding civic and imperial religion

The running costs involved in public cult (expenditure on animals for sacrifice, on organizing processions, of erecting booths and stages, outgoings on construction or repairs, maintenance of temple-groves, and so on) varied greatly depending on the size and prestige of the sanctuary, the importance of the deity, and the wealth of the city that owned them. The costs of major temples such as that of Jupiter Optimus Maximus on the Capitol in Rome were borne by extensive estates which lay scattered in various part of Italy.38 Another example is that of the grand temple of Artemis of Ephesus on the west coast of Asia Minor, which possessed large estates in the province and, very unusually for a provincial temple, was permitted to receive legacies.39 Each temple had its own income from various sources, chiefly land, which, in the case of Rome during the Republican period, had usually been donated by the victorious general when he received permission to found and construct such a building.40 They also profited from other types of payments (e.g. customary contributions made by appointees to priesthoods, workshop rentals, and fees for the performance of rituals). Less prominent shrines had fewer resources of this kind— even in the same city there were wide disparities in income between different temples.41 Especially in the eastern Mediterranean, temple estates might well be treated by cities as more or less their own property, particularly since they were generally responsible for arranging the leases of the farm-land. This income, nominally the property of the god, could be freely used for ordinary and extraordinary outgoings required for the daily running of the sacred place. Provision was very often made for the entire expenses of festivals, including the victim(s), the flowers, the lighting arrangements, the music, and so on, to be paid out of public funds.42 Their permanent ownership of landed property enabled larger temples in the Greek world and in Italy to function as lenders of money, both to cities and to private individuals, just as they themselves undertook transactions with private banks in cases of shortage of liquidity.43 The imperial fiscus allowed tax-exemptions to a number of festivals in Asia and elsewhere, especially in relation to the imperial cult.44 Given the complexity of such arrangements, corruption and malversation were endemic and almost impossible to control.45

38 Oros. Hist. 5.18.26–28. 39 Knibbe, Recip, Merkelbach 1979; Rogers 2007, 142–3; IK 17.2.3501–3513, a and b; IK 15.1523; 1524. 40 Malrieu 2005; Marzano 2009; Duncan-Jones 1982, 90–1. See also Rüpke 2011b. 41 E.g. Ampolo 1992, 25–6 on Heraclea (Lucania); cf. Sassu 2014, 356–78 on temple-economies in the Classical polis. 42 E.g. SEG 32: 456 = Lupu 2009 no. 11 (Haliartus, Boeotia ca. 235 B.C.). 43 Greek world: Bogaert 1968, 279–304; Dignas 2002, 21–34; Roman: Malrieu 2005, 96–110; Bodei Giglioni 1977. 44 Dignas 2002, 136. 45 Cf. Slater 2003.

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The usual word in Greek for the cash resources of temples (though the term also had other meanings) was thesauros, funds (in Latin usually arca, though other terms are known). The Fratres Arvales, for example, who were responsible for the cult of the Dea Dia in a grove on the road to Ostia south-west of Rome, distinguished between its main funds (termed pecunia, money) and the property of the goddess Dia (termed thesaurus), although it seems clear that the distinction between them was rather fluid.46 Both terms could be used indifferently for the sums accumulated and the strong-box or receptacle in which they were stored against theft.47

4.1

Standing revenues of sanctuaries and their protection

It was the task of the city or municipal authorities, usually operating through appointed boards, to manage the temple affairs by leasing out the farms, renting other property, and compiling annual reports. Income might be made up of farmleases, leases of productive resources such as lakes, woods and pasture-land, rents from fixed property, special levies, and interest on loans.48 In principle, though by no means always in fact, this income covered at least the fixed costs. Two cases from Italy illustrate something of the complexities that might be involved. Texts referring to the sanctuary of Diana Tifatina on the western slope of Mt. Tifata near Capua in Campania, which had been granted extensive lands by the dictator Sulla in 83 B.C. including a mineral spring with healing properties (rights that were later confirmed by Augustus and Vespasian) provide an insight into a complex system of land ownership, water sources, and rights, which a staff of administrators had to organise and exploit for the goddess against the covetous councils of neighbouring cities.49 An inscription from the small central Italian town of Furfo, dated 58 B.C., lays down the financial rules for the temple of Jupiter Liber: gifts and dedications could be sold under certain circumstances; if gifts of money are to be used to purchase land or to make loans, they are to be declared secular; if they are used to purchase objects, these must be regarded as if they had been dedicated as votives. There is to be a public trial of anyone who steals sacred property, and the hides or skins of all animals sacrificed are to remain temple property.50 The size and visibility of this inscription remind us that the management of such temples and their affairs required constant attention from the city authorities. Effective use of temple resources required clear rules, case-by-case regulations, and constant vigilance. Another example is the Cippus Abellanus, a detailed inscription

46 Scheid 1990, 323 and 615. 47 E.g. the term arca in CIL 3.6231 (tem[p(lum) et a]rc(am); 10.4873 (cur(atori) templi et arcae Vitrasianae Calenorum). 48 Chankowski 2005, 2011. 49 Sulla’s generosity: CIL 10.3828 and 3240 with Vell. Pat. 2, 25, 4; adminstrators, e.g. CIL 10.3918; 3924 = ILS 6304; 8217 = ILS 3523; 4564 = ILS 6306. Note also CIL 2.2660 = ILS 3259/ 3260 = HEp 2002: 317, Carlsen 1992; Granino Cecere 2009. 50 CIL 12.756 = 9.3513 = ILS 4906 = ILLRP 508 = Gordon 1983, 94 no. 19; Bodel 2001, 129.

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in the Oscan language from the end of the 2nd century B.C. found in the plain between Nola and Avello in Campania, intended to avoid disputes regarding the property of a sanctuary dedicated to Hercules located on the boundary between the two settlements.51 Gifts by citizens of each city are to belong to that city, and likewise buildings erected within specific limits inside the walls of the sacred area, and the contents of the temple collection-box, located at a neutral spot, are to be shared equally. Individual temples were always vulnerable to changes in fashion and reputation. A well-known fictional case is the account of the riot at Ephesus in the Acts of the Apostles provoked by fears on the part of silver-smiths at the loss of trade caused by ›disbelief‹.52 Although the connection with Paul and most of the other details are untrustworthy, since the story cannot be dated before the second quarter of the 2nd century A.D., we do here get a glimpse of the anxieties of the authorities needing to react to a perceived threat to the income of craftsmen working in close relation to an important temple-site, and so to the city’s own finances. The major economic role of the temples in the Nile Valley had a long tradition in Pharaonic Egypt, which was to a large degree continued by the Ptolemies and by the Romans, at any rate until the end of the 1st century A.D. Thereafter, due to a number of incidental pressures, temples increasingly tended to cede their lands to the state in return for subventions and special payments.53 Already in the 2nd century A.D., there are signs that some priestly colleges were declining in size, whereas others continued to flourish into the 4th century. Until the abandonment by the Roman administration of Demotic as one of the two official languages of administration, in favor of Greek, the scribal class within the temple priesthood was able to play a significant role in the administration, a source of income that was subsequently lost. There are also indications that it became more difficult to raise collections within the villages for temple-festivals and distributions of food. An analogous process of erosion of temple lands occurred in the case of the grand temple-estates in Asia Minor that were a legacy of the Achaemenid (Persian) administration and had been tolerated by the Seleucid Empire and its local successors.54 Although it ultimately suffered a still worse fate at the hands of the Romans, something is known from literary sources of the finances of Herod’s Temple in Jerusalem prior to its destruction in 70 A.D. The Torah prescribed that pilgrimage should be made to Jerusalem for three major festivals, namely Passover, Shavuot, and Sukkot, and much of the city’s economy must have been structured around these three major annual events.55 Not only do the literary accounts suggest that they were very 51 Pulgram 1960; Crawford 2011, 887–92 (Abella 1); cf. La Regina 2000, today in the Museum of Nola. 52 Acts of the Apostles 19, 23–41; for the probable date, see Backhaus 2017. 53 Clarysse 2010, 283; cf. Evans 1961; Quaegebeur 1979; Lippert and Schentuleit 2005; Ruffing 2006. 54 Debord 1982, 53–61, 76–100 and 127–184; Dignas 2002a, 233–77. 55 For a translation of the two parts of the Seder Kodashim (Babylonian Talmud) describing the Herodian Temple and the regime of sacrifices, see Epstein 1978.

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well attended, but large numbers of ovi-caprid bones found close to the temple of Herod indicate that sacrificial animals must often have been bought in the local animal markets.56 We also hear of money-changers: visitors from outside Jerusalem would have had to pay for lodgings in Jerusalem as well as their upkeep, and would no doubt also have wanted to buy religious souvenirs.57 Another important direct source of income connected to the Temple in Jerusalem was the annual half-shekel tax, which all Jews, including those of the diaspora, were enjoined to pay to the sanctuary. The tax was paid in Tyrian currency, which is also mentioned in connection with other payments in the Near East, including sanctuaries in Gerasa.58 All this, however, applies only to the larger public temples in urban centres. The mass of small temples and shrines in rural and semi-rural areas all over the empire, where urbanisation was thinly spread—in the north-western provinces, in the Balkans, in Hispania, in Africa and the central and eastern parts of Anatolia, possessed little or no property and depended upon local village labour and resources for construction, upkeep and repairs—though the great extra-urban temples in Anatolia with their enormous estates, or the ensemble at Baitokaike in Syria, whose privileges were confirmed in 258–60 A.D. by Valerian, are striking exceptions here.59 One survey of Gallo-Roman fanum-temples estimates that 269 of the 653 sites located, many of them quite substantial, with walls between 50 cm and 1m thick, and erected during the 1st century A.D., were built in settlements of different sizes, as against 285 on open land.60 In the Germanies, the Gallic provinces, and Britannia, such temples were built of cheap local materials, including timber, although tiled roofs against inclement weather were common.61 Many sacred sites, such as the site where the Senuna treasure at Ashwell (Hertfordshire) was found, were open, without buildings.62 More successful rural sites, often based on pre-Roman sacred places, which acquired a regional reputation, such as Uley (Gloucestershire), managed to acquire the resources to rebuild in stone or brick, but these were the exception.63

4.2

Revenues from sacrifice

The central aim of public sacrifice, effective communication with the other world, was achieved by putting on a spectacle in keeping with the dignity and glory of the gods honoured, their place in the calendar of festivals, and the resources of

56 Applebaum 1976; Hartman et al. 2013, esp. 4374. 57 For the story of Jesus and the money-changers in the temple, see Mk. 11: 15; Matt. 21: 12; Lk 19: 45; Jn 2: 13–14. 58 Welles 1938, nos. 3 and 4. 59 E.g. Dignas 2002a, 224–45; Baitokaike: IGLSyr 7.4028 with Feissel 1993. 60 Fauduet 1993a, 102–21. 61 See esp. Auffahrt 2009; also Fauduet 1993b (Gaul); Lewis 1966 (Britain); Spickermann 2003, 109–19, 284–93 and 315–33; Klein 2009 (Germanies). 62 Senuna: Jackson, Burleigh 2018. 63 Uley: Woodward, Leach 1993.

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the city itself. As such, the city publicly staged itself and its social order. At major events of this kind, adult bulls were the victims of choice unless specific regulations called for another type of victim, say an ox, a heifer or something else again. All such animals were relatively expensive, inasmuch as their greater value as livestock had to be taken into consideration.64 Sometimes indeed no expense was spared to find ›the very finest‹ animal.65 Granted that there were differences in detail between Greek and Roman practices, we can say that in general the ›noble organs‹ (heart, lungs, liver, sometimes kidneys) of the sacrificial animal were roasted over the flames and eaten by the public officials and other members of the council (or donors), while (some of) the red meat was either distributed to those present, normally according to their social rank, such that those of higher status (and greater wealth) received more than the poor; very often, however, it was sold to the butchers’ shops in the city market, who in turn sold it on to their customers.66 (Re-)distribution at such events thus had less to do with philanthropy than with the accentuation of social rank.67 A solemn sacrifice to the Tyche (Fortune) of Perge in Pamphylia (Turkey) with magistrates, citizens, and sacrificial animals—though the distribution scene is not visible—is depicted on a long frieze on an architrave in the theatre of this wealthy Pamphylian city (Fig. 25). Especially in the Greekspeaking eastern Mediterranean, temples often had their own rules regarding distribution and consumption; in some cases it was expressly forbidden for meat or other food to be removed from the sanctuary.

Fig. 26: A frieze of the late 2nd century A.D. in the Theatre at Perge (SW-Turkey), representing a sacrifice to the City’s Tyche. The goddess is represented frontally, sitting on a throne, holding up an image of the goddess Artemis of Perge with her right hand, and carrying a cornucopia connoting prosperity in her left, while members of the civic elite lead bulls up to the altar for sacrifice, accompanied by members of the citizen body.

64 Rüpke 2006, 151–3; Ekroth 2014, 332–7. See also Laum 1924, 100–26. 65 Cf. e.g. IG 2/32 1029 l. 11; 1043 l. 26 (Athens); I.Magnesia 2 l. 12 and 35; LSAM 32 Il. 12 and 21 etc. 66 McDonough, 2004; De Ruyt 2008; Van Andringa 2008. 67 Duncan-Jones 1982, 221–3.

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Cult officials often had the right to important perquisites in relation to sacrifices, normally formalised and regulated by official inscriptions set up by the city, nowadays known misleadingly as ›sacred laws‹.68 For example, in two cases known from the island of Cos in the Hellenistic period, they amount to the complete hide (for sale to the local leather industry) plus one whole hind-quarter in the case of an ox, and one hind-quarter of any other animal, and half of the required, relatively small, money payment.69 From 4th-century B.C. Athens, indeed, we know of entire lists of dermatika, recording the proceeds from the sales of ox hides by different public officials.70 Such charges for specific services might be levied in kind or in monetary payments; if the former, the items would later be sold on the market. In either case, the proceeds ended up in the temple funds. These charges were of course also paid by non-resident visitors, whose presence at a sanctuary meant additional income, because, as already noted, they needed accommodation (or at any rate a place for huts and tents and the requirements of hygiene) and food for the duration of their stay. At the same time, festivals offered ample opportunities for cities to obtain extra income by renting out shops and stalls, quite apart from the influx of visitors and the prestige acquired. Illness too was profitable: for example, the people seeking healing for their ailments at the sanctuary of Asklepios at Thuburbo Maius in Tunisia often stayed for several days, sometimes much longer.71 Such healing shrines of course also demanded doctors’ fees.72 The authorities in charge of running sanctuaries that were not located in the immediate vicinity of a town or city therefore needed to invest in the provision of such infrastructure. At the sanctuary of Baitokaike, now Hosn Suleiman at the source of the el-Gamqa in the coastal mountains of Syria, for example, the areas intended for different purposes such as taking the waters, divination, and markets can be reconstructed from the archaeological remains. Large courtyards as well as the areas around the perimeter of the precinct were made available for temporary camps to accommodate visitors.73 Special topographic conditions might afford further opportunity for charges: the important sanctuary of Soknopaiou Nesos, on the edge of the Fayum in Egypt, could only be accessed by ferry and the ferry boats belonged to the temple.74

4.3

Regular income from non-agricultural sources

Temples were able to add to their income by leasing buildings and land to craftsmen and other enterprises such as brick-works, salt-pans, and so on.75 Of numerous

68 69 70 71 72 73 74 75

E.g. Dignas 2002a, 246. LSCG 163 and 164 (Cos); Kaminski 1991, 180–1. E.g. Syll.3 1029 (334–331 B.C.). ILAfr 225; Kleijwegt 1994. I.Pergamon 3. 161, l. 29–31; I.Oropos 276, 277 (iatraia as medical fees). Dignas 2002a, 164–6; Ahmad 2018. Clarysse 2010, 280; P. Oxf. Griffith 52–4; P. Dime 2 54. For the Classical and Hellenistic period, see Feyel 2006.

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examples we may cite the shops in the substructures of the temple for Castor and Pollux on the Roman Forum,76 potters’ workshops at Fondo Ruozzo near Teanum in Central Italy which probably produced tableware and votives for immediate sale to visitors,77 the linen workers of the temple at Soknopaiou Nesos in the Egyptian Fayum, and a textile merchant known to have operated out of the temple of Serapis at Memphis, likewise in Egypt.78 At Ephesus, wine sellers occupied a section of the colonnaded street attached to the temple of Artemis, where they could sell their products to passers-by and visitors.79 Evidence from Gerasa suggests that bronzecasting might have been undertaken within the sanctuary itself.80 Profitable symbiosis of this kind could operate even when there was no direct link between workshop and sacred place. For example, the small temple of Liber Pater in Apulum (Dacia) is spatially connected to at least four pottery workshops which were active at the same time in the 3rd century A.D.81 Even though it is no longer possible to reconstruct the economic relation between the shops and the temple, it is very likely that their physical proximity was not accidental. Very localized customs such as dues disguised as voluntary gifts and donations might also provide a steady income for a sacred site as well as for its administrators. A case in point is the decuma or herculanea pars, the one-tenth of their profits that the merchants and stall-holders operating in the markets around the Forum Boarium near the Tiber harbour were supposed, at any rate intermittently, to render to Hercules, whose altar, the Ara Maxima, stood in the Forum.82 These sums went straight to the City of Rome, but similar customs are attested in a number of Italian cities.83

4.4

Variable income: patronage

Patronage by the wealthy, never free of self-interest, was a further essential element in the financing of public cult.84 Already in Republican times, senators, knights, and other wealthy persons all over Italy might assume local priesthoods, which involved personal responsibility for the concomitant expenses. Under the Roman Empire, it was the idealised pietas of the emperor that set the tone.85 The expressions de suo, de pecunia sua, also de stipe sua (›Paid from his/her own private resources‹) are often found in dedicatory inscriptions recording major and minor gifts in the religious sphere, es76 77 78 79 80 81 82 83

Neudecker 2005. Morel 1991. Manning 2018, 241. I.Ephesos 2076; SEG 35.1109; Rohde 2011, 285–7. Khalili, Seigne, Weber 2013. Schäfer, Diaconescu 1997; Rieger 2016. Cf. Plaut. Bacch. 665–666; Dion. Hal. Ant. Rom. 1.49.6; Macrobius Sat. 3.6.10–11. E.g. CIL 9.3569 (Pagus Ficulanus?); 4071a (Carsioli); 6153 (Tarentum); CIL 10.3956 (Capua); 4672 (Reate); 5708 (Sora); CIL 14.3541 (Tibur). 84 Woolf 1996; see also Buoncuore 2009 for Central Italy. 85 Noreña 2011, 71–6.

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pecially in Italy and North Africa.86 Much of this effort went into the monumentalisation of religious infrastructure and its upkeep. Costs here varied widely. In North Africa, where the survival rate of inscriptions is relatively high, the largest outgoings for temple building exceed the smallest thought worth recording by a factor of at least 100.87 The process of urbanisation and municipalisation in the western provinces, which required city elites to institute calendars of festivals and create specific priesthoods, prompted these elites, often newly formed, to pay for shrines or altars, extensions or new features such as doors, frescos, or mosaic floors, and the repair of buildings damaged by fire, enemy action, or neglect.88 Use of private wealth for public ends of high symbolic value, especially when they were directed towards the infrastructure required for the imperial cult, played a significant role in the legitimisation and stabilisation of the imperial social order. Access to privileges, including participation in religious events, was often effected by means of tokens (symbolon or pessos in Greek, tessera in Latin). These terms have a wide variety of meanings in ancient social, economic, and military life;89 here we are concerned solely with those linked directly or indirectly with relations of patronage, grand or restricted. Physically, such items took the form of small mass-produced tokens, often coin-like (made of lead, tin, ivory, wood, or bone), spherical (balls), or in the form of small oblong plaques of clay, that were issued as tickets or tokens to enable the holder to gain access to public hand-outs, such as the (restricted) free corn-allowance at Rome and elsewhere,90 and events such as banquets, festivals, and games.91 Such tokens, often carrying the emperor’s image, were an important resource of imperial patronage in the capital-city, and at festivals were sometimes thrown to the crowd, enabling lucky recipients to draw food, goods (such as clothes or pack-animals), gold, silver, jewellery, or cash from state warehouses.92 Private patrons imitated this practice as a means of supporting their clients, likewise granting them access to the corndole, and events, such as games, public shows, and festivals, with religious connotations.93 Recent studies have demonstrated the importance of such tokens in the religious life of Palmyra in the Syrian desert, where they were often stamped with images of gods and priests, imperial portraits, and a variety of other symbols and ornaments.94

86 The standard epigraphic data-bank in Latin (Epigraphische Datenbank Clauss/Slaby (retrieved November 2019) records 2468 cases, though by no means all are connected to sacred buildings. 87 Duncan-Jones 1982, 75 and 90–1; on economics of building see DeLaine 1996 and 2001. 88 Cf. e.g. Derks 1998 with Woolf 2000; Ando 2000, 336–404. 89 The standard older collections are Scholz 1893; Rostovtzeff 1903 and 1905. Note also the images to be found under www.wildwinds.com coins > ric > tesserae (accessed November 2019); cf. Clare Rowan’s project on Token Communities in the Ancient Mediterranean: (accessed November 2019). 90 E.g. Juvenal Sat. 7.174f; Suet. Aug. 42.1 91 See e.g. Scholz 1893, 8–9; von Heintze 1979, 204–5.; Andreau 1987, 486–506. 92 Cf. e.g. Martial 8.78.7–14; Suet. Aug. 40.2; Nero 11.2; Dom. 4.5. 93 E.g. Digest. 5.1.52.1; 31.1.49.1; 87 pr. 94 Raja 2015 and 2016; also Kaizer, Raja 2019.

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Above all in the eastern Mediterranean, individual magnates might exercise major influence on the festival calendar of a city. A prime example in the 2nd century A.D. is the case of Demosthenes, a rich citizen of Oinoanda in Lycia (SW-Turkey), who was prepared to set up a foundation to finance a magnificent festival to take place every four years complete with procession and games (i.e. athletics, wrestling and boxing, as well as the performing arts), and to be named after himself, the ›Demostheneia‹.95 The surviving monumental inscription lays down the arrangements in great detail, and includes some of the written correspondence between the emperor Hadrian, the donor, and the councillors of the city. Another outstanding example of such influence is the enormous foundation set up to finance processions of the youth through the city of Ephesus, carefully directed past monuments of the imperial cult, by C. Vibius Salutaris in 104 A.D.96 Scattered evidence from other cities also provides information about aspects of the economy of sanctuaries. In the Decapolis of Gerasa in the north of modern Jordan we have evidence for large donations given to the Sanctuary of Zeus Olympios, both by priests of the sanctuary and by non-citizens seeking protection, possibly in connection with the Jewish uprisings in the region in the 1st century A.D.97 Such dedications, for temple construction and cult statues, would have been one-off items, which might not have changed the overall financial situation of the sanctuary or its day-to-day balance-sheet, but certainly contributed, as in the case of Syrian Hierapolis (see section 4.5. below), to the overall wealth of the sanctuary and the grandeur of its embellishment, and so to the impression made upon visitors. Such donations of course had a wider economic impact in that they contributed to the employment of local craftsmen and encouraged trade in luxury materials. Social hierarchy was likewise directly reflected in patterns of votive dedication, a phenomenon amplified by the practice of inscribing the name(s) of the donor(s) on votives made of precious metal stored in temples, and by the institution of inscribing votive altars, which begins in the 1st century B.C. and sharply declines between 230–250 A.D., in some places, such as Hispania and the hinterland of the Danubian area, earlier still. Such ›horizontal‹ communication by the relatively prosperous was thus an affirmation both of the efficacy of ›vertical‹ communication (the gods do intervene positively) and of the ›theodicy of good fortune‹, which holds that health and wealth are a function of piety and thus divinely ordained.

4.5

Income versus wealth

The Greek word thesauros could also mean a collection-box located in a temple, or elsewhere in a sanctuary, for the receipt of voluntary donations in coin 95 SEG 38.1462, esp. II. 71–81 on expenditure on sacrificial victims; see esp. Wörrle 1988 for a thorough commentary; also Ando 2017, 125–7; Rives 2019, 95–6. 96 I.Ephesos 1a.27 with Rogers 1991. 97 Welles 1938, nos. 2 (priest of Tiberias), 3 and 4 (non-citizens of Gerasa); refugees: Lichtenberger, Raja 2018.

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(Fig. 26). Thus the ›Sacred Men‹ at the sanctuary of the Great Gods at Andania in Messenia were to arrange with a builder to construct two lockable thesauroi, one in the temple itself and the other near the fountain of the sanctuary. As was usually the case, they were to be opened once a year, at Andania on the occasion of the celebration of the Mysteries, and most of the money they contained assigned to the temple funds.98 At Halicarnassos (modern Bodrum), sacrificants at the temple of Artemis Pergaia were obliged to drop coins into the collection box, two obols for an adult animal, and one for one still at teat; the contents of the box were paid over annually to the woman who had purchased the priesthood.99 The Latin term stips could be used to refer to the coins or sums of money given, as in the expression stipem iacere or conferre, ›give a small sum (to a god)‹, to the collection box itself, or the sums transferred to the temple funds. Such moneys were used to finance a variety of purposes, mainly desirable additions to the appearance of the sanctuary, but sometimes also to defray the cost of special sacrifices such as a taurobolium for the Mater Magna at the city of Narbo (modern Narbonne) in Provence.100 The term is also used for the money not placed in collection boxes but thrown into pools or wells that belonged to shrines: thus members of all the different categories of citizens at Rome would toss coins into the Lacus Curtius in the Forum each year to ensure Augustus‹ continuing health. With the proceeds of these and other gifts, he was able to buy valuable statues of gods to erect in the different city wards.101 So many coins had been thrown into the sacred lake at Narnia in Umbria that in 59 A.D. the city magistrates were able to have a statue made (together with bronze doors, a stone lintel and other furnishings) for the nearby temple.102 Stips in this sense, i.e. income that could be applied to the running of temples and sanctuaries, must be distinguished from gifts considered as votives rather than offerings, which were thus taken more or less permanently out of circulation. The 1200 coins, dating from Augustus to Constantine, found in the remains of the many small shrines that composed the sanctuary of Thun-Allmendingen in the Alps above modern Bern provide clear evidence of this practice, since they were never retrieved or considered as income—just like the wafer-thin lamellae made of beaten

98 IG 5.1, 1390 § 89–95 = LSCG no.65 (probably 1st century B.C.) with Gawlinski 2012, 202–5 citing Kaminski 1990, 115–20. 99 Syll.3 1015 l. 29–36 = LSAM no.73.30–33 (3rd cent, B.C.). Similar payments to the temple thesauros for the right to sacrifice: LSAM 12.13–16; LSAG 88.20–25; 163.21–24; LSCG Suppl. 108.8–12; I.Pergamon 2.255.14–16; 3.161A8,23,32 etc. 100 E.g. CIL 12.683 = ILS 5734 (Capua, a lake for Jupiter, 84 B.C.); CIL 12.2948 = 10. 3935 = ILLRP 721 and CIL 12. 680 = 10. 3781 = ILS 5561 = ILLRP 717 (99 B.C. or imperial?) (Diana Tifatina, Capua see section 4.1. above); CIL 6.379 = ILS 3038 (Iupiter Iurarius,Tiber island, Rome); 6.39803 = ILS 3836 (Aesculapius, Rome); AE 1987: 494 = 1988: 707 (Italica, ?Apollo); cf. Crawford 2003. Taurobolium: CIL 12. 4321 = ILS 4119. 101 Suet. Aug. 57.1, cf. 40.2, 43.1, 57.1 with Lott 2004, 130–131. See Andrews, Flower 2015; Leone, Palombi 2008, 424; Rieger 2020. 102 CIL 11.4123.

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gold and other precious objects also found there.103 Especially in Northwestern Europe, more or less valuable objects such as ear-rings, finger-rings, and gemstones, metal vessels such as jugs, pots, and pans, personal items, but also inscribed lamellae and coins, were often deposited in springs or rivers without any intention of them ever being recovered, for example in the pool sacred to Iuppiter Poeninus at the top of the Great St Bernard pass, the sacred pool of Aquae Sulis/Bath in Britannia or the cistern of the fountain of Anna Perenna just outside the Aurelian Walls north of Rome.104 However, the great majority of precious objects offered to the gods as votives were stored inside the temple itself. In the case of famous institutions such practice

Fig. 27: An offering box in front of the temple of Hermes and Maia in the Agora of the Competalists on Delos, donated by the Italian merchants of the island. The thesauros, which takes the form of a round altar with a slot for coins, dates from the 2nd century B.C. and bears an inscription by the Italian Caius Varius from the end of the 2nd century B.C.

103 Grütter 1976; Martin-Kilcher 2013, 220–2. 104 Poeninus: Walser 1984; Rüpke 2006, 162; Bath: Henig et al. 1988 (utensils/objects); Walker 1988 (Roman coins), see chapter ›Sanctuaries‹, p. 94; Anna Perenna: Piranomonte 2010.

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might well lead to great quantities of items made of precious metals, fabrics, and other valuable objects being kept on display, or more usually, in the strong-rooms. Although the most detailed examples of such inventory lists are from the Classical and Hellenistic Greek world, we do have a first century A.D. inventory in Latin, apparently from a temple of Isis near the sanctuary of Diana at Nemi in the Alban Hills south of Rome, which lists several valuable objects in precious metal, gems and jewellery, as well as richly decorated fabrics and garments.105 Virtually all temples and sanctuaries in cities large and small possessed such stores of votive wealth. At the top end, we hear of the gift of 16 statues at Lepcis Magna in Africa to the value of 1 million sesterces, or the half-ton of silver (1,567.17 Roman pounds) left by the augur C. Ocletius Modestus of Beneventum near Naples for a statue of Hadrian.106 In the middle range, we may just mention the bequests to the temple of Hercules Victor in Rome by Pomponia, wife (or slave) of a man named Buteo, and by Pomponia Zmyrna (possibly the daughter), the first apparently amounting to two bequests of 10 Roman pounds of silver each, the second of just 10 pounds, quantities that are in fact well above the median of known silver weights for making divine statues in Italy.107 We may also cite the silver statuettes (and busts) of deities and members of the imperial house, all about 30 cm high, that probably once adorned the meeting-place (schola) of the college of the dendrophori (a religious branch of the city’s timber-workers) behind the temple of the Mater Magna by the Laurentine Gate in Ostia.108 Temples gauged their prestige by the quantity and quality of such gifts, which represent the most obvious type of rent-seeking by the religious sector in the Empire, that is, the accumulation of ›inert‹ wealth for noneconomic reasons. This point can be vividly illustrated by means of a literary text, the description by the Greek sophist Lucian of the sanctuary at Hierapolis (now Mambij, northwest of Aleppo in modern Syria), written in the second half of the second century A.D.109 The text purports to be an eye-witness account by a naive observer, who has »seen the things that lie hidden in the temple, a great quantity of clothing and other things that have been laid aside in stores of silver and gold.«110 No expense has been spared to make the temple appear as rich as possible: the doors and roof are gilded, as are the cult statues of the goddess Atargatis and her consort Hadad (30–33). Given such wealth, one can also destroy it: at the major festival, the Firefestival (49–50), animals as well as clothes and gold and silver objects are hung

105 CIL 14.2215 = ILS 4423. Granino Cecere 2009, 37–40, with Fig. 1. 106 Lepcis: IRT 700; Beneventum: CIL 9.1619 = ILS 5502, with Duncan-Jones 1982, 126–7. 107 Hercules Victor: CIL 6.333. There are two virtually identical texts referring to Pomponia’s bequests, one on the front of the small altar, the other on the left face, so it is unclear whether they are duplicates referring to the same legacy or whether two sums were mentioned in her will. 108 Mater Magna at Ostia: Rieger 2004, 290–3. nos MMD 42–4; 46; 48 and MM 54; cf. Rieger 2011, 157–59; Cooley 2015, 255–9. 109 See the edition with extensive commentary by Lightfoot 2003. 110 Lucian Syr. D. 1 and 10.

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from trees which have been brought into the sanctuary, paraded around and then incinerated (holocaust offering). By permanently removing wealth from circulation, such destruction perfectly represents the logic of rent-seeking in the religious context. We should not, however, ignore longer-term developments. The general prosperity of the Roman Empire began to decline with the demographic disaster of the mid-Antonine period, and more intensively from c. 240 A.D., under the combined impact of renewed plague, political and military insecurity, and climatological downturn. This decline is clearly marked in the archaeological evidence for sharply reduced investment in temple building in Italy from 170 A.D., in North Africa from the early 3rd century, and in the sharp reduction in building and repair of temples in Gaul during the 3rd century.111 In the 2nd century too Roman authorities had to intervene to restore the finances of several major temples in Asia Minor.112 Even with the recovery in the late 3rd century, investment in religious infrastructure does not seem to have intensified. With the formal recognition of Christianities, however, the pattern of investment in monumental buildings and furnishings by grand euergetes, especially emperors, a pattern then imitated on a smaller scale all the way down the social hierarchy, simply repeated itself in a slightly different idiom. By the same token, the wide range of ›traditional‹ religious practices that did not depend upon monumental construction and was relatively independent of euergetism, above all in the agrarian sector, including recourse to healing shrines, amulets and sacrificial offerings, remained viable over the very long term, and, in forms mixed with Christian elements, well into the medieval period.

5

The finances of associations and small religious groups

Although their basic running costs were met by members’ subscriptions, patronage was also important for small religious groups. Richer citizens, who might either be office holders or official patrons of such groups, were expected to provide a lump sum, usually in the form of a foundation that was intended to defray the cost of periodic celebrations, special meals, distributions of cash and food (sportulae) etc., and for the furnishing, redecoration, and repair of buildings.113 If their members were of sufficient social standing in the city or municipality, such groups might be organised formally as synodoi (Greek) or collegia (Latin), a status that gave them

111 Italy: Jouffroy 1986, 109–54, 385–96; North Africa: Sears 2011, 231–3; Gaul: Fauduet 1993b: 132–3; Goodman 2011, 167–72. 112 Dignas 2000 and 2005. For the archaeological evidence of the decline of temples in Asia Minor, note Talloen, Vercauteren 2011. 113 Royden 1988, 12–7; Šašel Kos 2002, 134; cf. chapter ›People and competencies‹, p. 121–6.

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certain legal privileges such as the right to own land and receive legacies.114 Such benefactors took care to commemorate their munificence. At Ostia in the mid-3rdcentury, for example, one C. Iulius Cocilius Hermes, patron and standing official of the college of the dendrophori, donated not only a statue of Mater Magna weighing 3⅙ Roman lbs but also a foundation of 6,000 sesterces, which, laid out at 12–15% interest, would provide 720 sesterces annually for a feast in honour of his birthday; but if the money is not spent, it is to pass to the collegium of the fabri tignuarii.115 Around the same time, a man named Fructosus, the patron of the flax-workers (stuppatores) of the same town, paid for the complete conversion of part of the private temple of the collegium into a mithraeum.116 In the late 3rd century A.D., as we learn from the mosaic inscriptions, two Jewish citizens of the town of Philippopolis (Plovdiv, Bulgaria) paid for the erection of a synagogue.117 The names of an entire group of donors of a floor mosaic are preserved in the fourth-century synagogue at Apamea (Syria).118 The degree of religious involvement of associations varied greatly: many were primarily professional or trade associations, but even so would regularly celebrate sacrifices as a preliminary to their common meals. Sometime in the 2nd or early 3rd century A.D., L. Publicius Italicus, a member of the city council of Ravenna, built a temple to Neptune and later set up a foundation of 30,000 sesterces; the interest on this sum was to provide an annual payment of 8 sesterces to each of the at least 280 members of the college of fabri (another of the builders) on the feast of the Neptunalia. A further sum of 600 sesterces was to go to the 28th decuria (group of ten men), presumably the one to which he himself belonged or where he had faithful friends, whose members were to spend 100 sesterces on decorating the graves of his deceased wife and two sons with roses, make a sacrifice for 50 sesterces, and spend the rest on a sumptuous dinner.119 In 174 A.D. the association of merchants from Tyre, who had been renting expensive rooms in Puteoli for almost a century, had to ask their home-town to pay their rent-arrears of 100,000 denarii (400,000 sesterces), since they had used their entire budget on celebrating the anniversary of the Roman Emperor, of course a religious act.120 The hymnodoi of Pergamon (now Bergama in western Turkey), the choirs whose job it was to sing hymns at imperial festivals and other cultic events, were formally organised as a synodos (association), and co-financed the celebrations in honour of the goddess Rome and the ruling emperor by means of their membership fees and contribu-

114 Cf. Van Nijf 1992, 73–130 (synodoi in Asia Minor); Ausbüttel 1982, 106 (on CIL 14.2112, ll. 10–13) and 49–58. 115 AE 1987: 198 with 199; cf. Rieger 2004, 168–9 and MM 60. 116 A solo sua pec(unia) fec(it): Becatti 1954, 21–7 (at 27) = Vermaseren 1956–60, 1 nos 226–8. Fructosus as patron: CIL 14.257 with p. 614, cf. David, Melega 2018. 117 Levine 2005, 269–70, cf. Kolarik 2014. 118 Levine 2005, 258–60 (Apamea). 119 CIL 11.126, p. 1227 (2nd/3rd century A.D.), cf. Slater 2000a. On the funerary roles of associations, and their finances, see esp. Flambard 1987. 120 OGIS 595 = IGR 1.421 with Nielsen 2014, 234–5.

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tions, but, like other associations, they also celebrated banquets (preceded by a sacrifice) and took care of the burial of their deceased members, another form of religious obligation to which many such associations were committed.121 As will by now be clear, such associations often disposed of considerable funds, which, like those of public temples, had to be safeguarded. We thus find the same words, thesauros and arca, for these treasuries,122 which again often took the form of stone constructions,123 sometimes with explanatory inscriptions attached to them.124 In such contexts, however, the word arca might also simply mean a ›pot‹ of money, i.e. a conceptually distinct sum of money, as in L. Publicius Italicus‹ inscription at Ravenna.125 A major item of expenditure for all such associations were the collective banquets, which already in the 30s B.C. had at Rome become so extravagant that they allegedly caused the food-prices in the market to rise.126 A number of meeting-places for associations can be recognised archaeologically, above all in Ostia and Rome,127 for example the ground floor of the grand Caseggiato dei triclini south-east of the Forum of Ostia, where the collegium of the fabri tignuarii occupied four rooms fitted up for dining as well as other rooms.128 In Murecine near Pompeii, the remains of buildings offering space in several rooms, with diningrooms, a thermal complex and a kitchen, have been excavated, though it is uncertain whether it was a guesthouse or the building of an association (though the two are not mutually exclusive).129 There were, however, very many small religious groups that were not formally organised as associations, yet were like these also dependent on the generosity of benefactors for basic installations such as accommodation, altars, decoration, and other equipment. Such benefactors were often also the initial founders or leaders of such groups, which commonly rented suitable spaces before they could afford to build or buy their own accommodation. The leaders of many Dionysiac groups (in the Latin-speaking areas: of Liber or Bacchus), of Isiac and Mithraic groups, of worshippers of Silvanus, Jupiter Dolichenus, the Anatolian god Mên, and many others fall into this category.130 A famous case is the domestic Bacchic group with over 400 members probably originally organised by M. Pompeius Macrinus Theo121 I.Pergamon 3.374. 122 Thesauros: e.g. IG 11.4, 1247; 1417 A col. ii, 142; LSCG Suppl. 72A 3–4 (all Egyptian cults); arca: CIL 6.10234 (p. 3502, 3908) = ILS 7213 (college of Aesculapius and Hygieia); 8750 = 29899 (college of cooks in the imperial palace). 123 CIL 12.2440; Kubitschek 1914, 200 (dimensions: L: 22.2, D.: 12.7, H.: 4 cm,); Rieger 2004, 26–37. 124 LSCG Suppl. 72 A, Il. 1–3, 1st century B.C. with Lupu 2003. 125 See n. 119 above. The word could also be used locally, especially in later Latin, to mean ›tomb‹, e.g. CIL 3.669; 11.125, 352; 565 etc. 126 Varro De re rust. 3.2.16. 127 Cf. Bollmann 1997 and 1998 with Slater 2000b; see also Steuernagel 2004, 70–83; 197–209. 128 CIL 14.4569 (198 A.D.), which contains a membership list naming over 330 persons, cf. Rohde 2011, 164–5. 129 Pagano 1983; Nappo 2008. 130 Gordon 2013; Wendt 2016, 40–73.

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phanes, proconsul of Africa 130–131 A.D., at Torre Nova outside Rome, which honoured his daughter Pompeia Agrippinilla as priestess c. 165–70 A.D.131 At the same time, such groups could themselves earn additional income by offering special services, above all initiations into ›mysteries‹: Lucius, the faux-naïf narrator of Apuleius’ novel (late 2nd century A.D.) about a man magically turned, thanks to his improper curiosity, into a donkey, and later transformed back into a man by the goddess Isis, remarks slyly on the exorbitant cost of such rituals, whose necessity was continually thematised by the priests, on each of his three such experiences.132

6

Pilgrimage as an economic factor

The topic of pilgrimage has recently received considerable attention.133 One important point that has been made is that ›pilgrimage‹ may act as a convenient fiction that simplifies the multiple aims of past journeys.134 Whether a pilgrimage is to be seen as tourism with a religious touch or as religious action requiring travel is a matter of judgement from case to case.135 We need therefore to be on our guard against naïvely classifying journeys undertaken by individuals or by groups to shrines of various kinds as exclusively religious. This certainly applies even to an institution as clearly established as Christian pilgrimage. Some later Byzantine sources do give some insight into economic aspects of such journeys. For example, one of the members of a group that travelled with the Pilgrim of Piacenza to the Holy Land in the late 6th century A.D. describes some of the places the group visited, but also incidentally provides some information on the business of the healing sanctuaries in the region including the ›baths of Elija‹ close to Gadara (Umm Qais) in northern Jordan.136 As one would expect given the narrative focus, however, the economic aspects simply provide local colour. In attempting to assess the economic impact of such events, we need to include non-literary data such as material and visual culture. Even so, it is always hazardous even roughly to guess how many people might have visited a sanctuary or holy place in an ordinary year, whether at festival times or outside of these events. For present purposes we can define a pilgrimage as a visit that includes a sanctuary or sacred place further from home than a day’s journey, whether or not the

131 SEG 43.660 = 50.1059bis = IGUR 1.160, with Scheid 1986; Cameron 2011, 143. Agrippinilla is listed as no. 2746 and Macrinus Theophanes as no. 2754 in Rüpke, Glock 2005, 2: 1216 and 1218. 132 Apuleius Met. 11.21, 24, 27, 29. On embodiment, see e.g. Rüpke 2011a, 196–200. 133 See e.g. Alcock, Cherry, Elsner 2001; Elsner, Rutherford 2005; Petsalis-Diomidis 2010, 12–66; Kristensen, Friese 2017. 134 Elsner 2017, 270. 135 Rutherford 2001. 136 The Itinerarium Placentium (›The Piacenza Itinerary‹, or Itinerarium Antonini Placentini): see Graf 2015, 241 n. 3.

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participants label it as such. Conscious motivations varied widely, from personal crisis or illness to fulfilment of personal religious duty.137 Periods of residence too varied widely. Visiting such a sanctuary or sacred place implies not only a physical effort but also a considerable financial outlay on the part of the traveller. Conversely, the sanctuaries to which they made their way needed to provide infrastructure adequate to their needs, both for the sake of prestige and to encourage future visits.138 Viewed in economic terms, going to a sacred place away from home initiated a movement of goods and financial resources not just to the sanctuary but also along the entire route. Depending on the numbers involved, this influx might have a very considerable social and economic impact, above all on the target settlement.

6.1

Competition stimulates business

The oracle of Trophonius in the valley of the river Herkyna near Lebadeia in Boeotia, the Amphiareion outside Oropos in northern Attica, the healing sanctuaries of Asclepius at Epidaurus and Pergamon, the splendid oracular sites of Delphi, Claros, Didyma, the oasis of Siwa in the Egyptian desert, the temples of Serapis in Alexandria and Canopus, the shrine of Caeasarea Philippi/Banyas in the Golan Heights, the magnificent temple of Fortuna Primigenia at Palestrina, the springs of the Clitumnus near Spoleto in Umbria, the sacred pool of Sulis Minerva at Bath—the list of oracles and healing places operating in various periods of antiquity is inexhaustible. We should probably also include here long processions, in which the deities and the people moved or sacred places that were connected along ›sacred ways‹, such as those between Athens and Eleusis, between Miletus and Didyma, or the lavatio (immersion) of the image of the Mater Magna in the Almo river outside Rome.139 In Egypt it was common to stage solemn ›gods visits‹ between temples all along the Nile, whereby relations of exchange, goodwill and trust between settlements were cemented. Such visits regularly involved gifts and donations for the gods and people: on one occasion, when Hathor of Dendera visited Horus in his temple in Edfu, the temple administrators had to provide 500 loaves of bread, 100 jugs of beer and 30 legs of sheep or goat, all provided by the local population in the form of levies.140 The issue of choice and allocation thus arises. How did oracular sites manage to acquire sufficient prestige to stimulate pilgrimage; how did healing shrines acquire a reputation for effectiveness? Such questions are usually unanswerable in specific cases for lack of evidence. We may, however, advance some general considerations. Often grand patronage by Hellenistic kings, Roman governors under the Republic and later the emperors played an important role. Again, during the 2nd century 137 138 139 140

Petsalis-Diomidis 2011, 67–121. Hunt 1982. See Slawisch; Wilkinson 2018. Schentuleit 2006, 389–90.

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A.D., as we can see from literary sources associated with the so-called the Second Sophistic, interest in ›old‹ places increased in the Roman Empire, especially in the Greek-speaking eastern Mediterranean. New myths or stories were invented extolling the agency, efficacy, and power of the deities in certain places.141 Linked to this, many oracle and healing sanctuaries re-gained popularity as pilgrimage sites. Likewise, completely new cults developed around charismatic specialists, such as Alexander of Abonouteichos in north-central Turkey, founding and propagating the oracular and healing cult of the Neos Asklepios Glykon.142 There seems to have been a concomitant tendency to consult oracles for purely private and personal problems.143 Linked to this was a growing readiness to resort to written texts of all kinds, collections of oracles, dice-oracles, anonymous predictions, reports of striking cures, and anecdotes concerning famous personalities including emperors and senators, who came sanctuaries to ask for advice and healing.144 At all such sites, whether temples, tombs or sites associated with famous mythic events, guides and local experts, from self-taught informants to officially-appointed guides, were able to earn an income. Such guides in Greek cities are frequently mentioned by the traveller Pausanias and documented, for example, for the sanctuary of Dea Syria at Hierapolis in Syria (see section 4.5 above).145 This religious revival led inevitably to increased competition between sacred sites, for example between the neighbouring oracular sites of Apollo at Claros and Didyma on the western coast of Turkey. Ever greater numbers of visitors produced ever larger revenues, thus encouraging new investment in buildings and other resources. Especially in the Greek-speaking eastern Mediterranean, the city elites tried to increase the fame of the local sanctuary and so increase the influx of visitors still further. The colonnaded street at Pergamon leading to the Asklepeion or at Didyma to the temple of Apollo, both of them adorned with sculptures, are clear expressions of such aims, which might go along with increasingly specific regulations regarding payments, such as the tariff inscription outside the sanctuary of Asclepius, fixing payments for the use of its facilities, personnel and services.146 Other measures included the establishment of artistic competitions and new festivals and attempts to demonstrate particular favour in relation to the imperial house.147 In such a situation, there might well be losers, such as the new oracular

141 Galli 2004. 142 Chaniotis 2002; Petsalis-Diomidis 2010, 12–66; Bremmer 2017. 143 See Scheer 2001 on the depoliticization of oracles under Roman rule; Rüpke 2016, 289; Kindt 2015; Nollé 2007. 144 Aelius Aristides, Hieroi Logoi, 4.45f., see Petridou 2016; on Pergamon see also PetsalisDiomidis 2010, 221–75; cf. the Hellenistic healing reports (iamata) at Epidauros, Solin 2013. 145 E.g. Pausanias 1.14.7 (local myths in Attic demes); 2.31.4; 5.10.7; 21.8–9; 7.6.5; 9.3.5 etc.; Plut. Theseus 25.2; free-lance guides at Baalbek: see Lehmann and Rheidt 2014. 146 I.Pergamon 3.162; Petsalis-Diomidis 2010, 222–238 with Fig. 65; Ziegenaus 1975; De Luca 1984. 147 Cf. Moretti et al. 2014; Busine 2013; Oesterheld 2008; Sahin 1987; SEG 37.957–980.

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site at Abonouteichos, which seems to have closed down in the early 3rd century A.D., and perhaps even Delphi.148 With the official establishment of the Christian religion, these ancient religious centres were increasingly replaced by tombs and other sites associated with martyrs and saints, such as that of Abū Mena in Egypt (Fig. 27) and those of St. Thecla at Seleukeia (Silifke, Turkey) or St. Simeon Stylites at Qalaat Seman, north-west of Aleppo in Syria.149 A good example of the playing out of competition between pilgrimage sites in late antiquity can be found in the case the shrine of the martyrs Cyrus and John on the Canopus branch of the Nile near Alexandria (today Abū Qīr). The Christian site was probably founded in the 5th century A.D. after the destruc-

Fig. 28: The Christian pilgrimage site of Abū Mena southwest of Alexandria, showing the accommodation in Huwwaryia between the port of Marea on Lake Mareotis and Abū Mena, as well as the infrastructure of the pilgrimage city itself. (Rodziewicz 2010, Fig. 3; Grossmann 2018, Abb. 1).

148 On Delphi, see again Scheer 2001. 149 On St. Simeon, see Hunter-Crawley 2020.

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tion of the healing temple of Isis at Menouthis nearby.150 Although few details are known, the temple had been renowned for its effective treatments of physical ailments and barrenness in women, for which payment was of course required.151 Legends of the 6th and 7th centuries report healings that took place at the Christian site.152 The narratives of incubation and healing advice delivered in dreams correspond to the practices in Graeco-Roman healing sanctuaries. We also have hostile reports of money payments (at least ›many sacrifices‹) for receiving messages in one’s sleep, the unreliability of pagan dreams, and denunciations of reports concerning a child borne to a sterile couple thanks to Isis.153 The case of the enormous Christian pilgrimage site in the desert west of the Nile Delta, which grew around the tomb of St. Mena, but seems to have been administratively dependent on the diocese of Alexandria, offers a late-antique example of successful investment over a long period until its initial destruction by the Arabs in 619 A.D. (Fig. 27).154 Even though it never became a true city, either in legal terms or in socio-spatial structure, the fame of the site rendered Abū Mena quite comparable to early Christian pilgrimage sites such as Jerusalem.155

6.2

Infrastructure and services in and around pilgrimage sites

Visitors often lived no more than a few days’ travel from the sacred place, where they sought help. There were, however, many sites of regional importance, such as the temple of Artemis at Ephesus or the oracle of Apollo at Claros (both in Turkey), whose reputation in the second century A.D. attracted people from all over Asia Minor.156 In such places including Olympia and Pergamon, where there were several important sites, suitable infrastructure had to be built.157 Along the busy routes leading to or from such sacred places it is not easy to distinguish between hostels for pilgrims or other travellers or merchants, but the closer one approaches a pilgrimage-site, the more likely it is to find hostels. With the increase of Christian pilgrimage (peregrinatio ad loca sancta) in Late Antiquity, more such hostels (Greek:

150 Montserrat 1998, 259; see also Petrina 2012. 151 Cyril, Oratiuncula 3, PG 77, 1105A; on the relationship of Christian saints to ancient healing deities see also Markschies 2006. Payment: Sophronios, Narratio miraculorum a 40:6, with Fernández Marcos 1975, 340. 152 Sophronius, Laudes in Cyrum et Johannem ap. Migne, PG 87.3379–3421 (7th century A.D.); cf. Montserrat 1998; Gascou 2007 and 2006. 153 Zacharias Scholasticus, Vita Severi 16–21; Renberg 2017, 371–8, n. 105. 154 Grossmann 2002, 210–6, the tomb seems to date from the 3rd century A.D., while the expansion of the pilgrim site took place from the 4th century A.D. onwards. 155 For Jerusalem see above pp. 272–3. 156 Moretti et al. 2014. 157 E.g. the Leonidaion in Olympia (Paus. 5.15.2–4; 17–1), which remained in use for over 600 years.

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xenodochion; Latin hospitium) were established.158 At the very end of the 4th century A.D., for instance, a prominent Christian senator named Pammachius financed the erection of such a hostel at Portus, Rome’s sea harbour close to Ostia, from where the pilgrims could travel up the Tiber to Rome.159 And a physical example has been excavated at Huwariyya near Lake Mareotis in the Fayum (Egypt), evidently built to enable pilgrims to reach Abū Mena via Taposiris or Alexandria.160 The extent to which the main pilgrimage site organized such hostels, and even funneled money into them, is quite unknown. We should also remember that visitors to such pilgrimage sites could also be accommodated more informally: as we have seen, at Baitokaike in Syria, for example, no purpose-built accommodation has been found, yet plenty of space was available for shelters and tents. Such a pattern probably occurred frequently. With the important exception of the Sacred Tales of the orator Aelius Aristides, who spent long periods in the Asklepeion of Pergamon in the mid-second century and recounts numerous instructions imparted by the god,161 little is known in detail about the services and options provided at any of these sites. A partial exception is the site at Abū Mena, where the surviving inscribed ceramic sherds (ostraka), covering a variety of contractual and economic matters, give some insight into the activities of provisioning, producing, and transporting goods and removing waste.162 Elsewhere, the evidence is thin. At Baitokaike for example, just one inscription refers to healing and medical services.163 However the archaeology allows the inference that the waters specially channelled through the site were taken to be therapeutic. Over the long term, the establishment of Christianity brought about profound changes in patterns of pilgrimage. On the one hand, journeys to the tombs of martyrs and saints, as well as to Rome and Jerusalem, to some extent reproduced earlier patterns of religious action. On the other, Christian holy places, Jerusalem, Golgotha, the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, Bethlehem, could be re-created both in image (in paintings, mosaic, reliquaries, and models) and in imagination: they were at least as much ideas as they were real places.164 In contrast to Islam, for the inhabitants of the Greek-Roman Mediterranean region, among them the followers of Christ, pilgrimage was always just an option, not a duty.

158 E.g the Pandocheion in Bethlehem (cf. Luke 2:7); and see the useful survey by Constable 2003. 159 Jerome Epist. 66.11; 77.10. 160 Rodziewicz 1988, 1991; el-Fakharani 1983, 184–6. 161 Petsalis-Diomidis 2011, 122–50; Petridou 2016. 162 Litinas 2008. 163 SEG 47.1932, dedicated by a man claiming that 36 doctors treated him unsuccessfully until he came to this sanctuary of Zeus; cf. Renberg 2017, 23–4 with note 70, 309; also ReyCoquais 1997; Ertel, Freyberger 2008. 164 On the rise of reverence for saints’ relics in the Latin West, see e.g. Brown 1981; reliquaries: Noga-Banai 2008. Jerusalem as a site of memory for Christians and Jews: Goldhill 2008, 1–92.

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Conclusion

The complexity and diversity of the religious field in the Roman Empire makes generalisation about the relation between religious activities and the economy hazardous. In particular, it will always remain impossible to state in cash or value terms per annum how much religious activities were ›worth‹ in this social order, not merely because sources are lacking but also because definitions both of ›religious activity‹ and ›economic life‹ lack precision. The only type of financial records relating to religion (outgoings, income) made in antiquity were drawn up by specific bodies representing different scales of operation: the imperial patrimonium, the councils of cities, towns, and villages on behalf of their cult properties, the organisers of more or less stable groups of worshippers, and the wealthy donors who established foundations for the celebration of different types of public and private festivals and commemorations. Virtually all of this material is irretrievably lost. Moreover, the great majority of individual votive acts and the outgoings associated with them were never recorded by the principals involved and featured in no balance sheet. The material aspect of religion in the Roman Empire directly reflected wider economic factors, such as differential disposable wealth, while at the same time manifesting dominant and subaltern choices regarding formal and aesthetic factors. The inevitable corollary was a steep hierarchy of authority and significance between different temples, shrines, meeting-places, and domestic arrangements within the same city, to say nothing of those in the dependent rural areas outside. Imperial largesse in this field, imitated by the civic elites, modelled practice all the way down the social scale, reinforcing the socially stabilising, that is, conservative, effect of civic religious practice.165 A significant change in the Principate was the extension of the practice of allocating lands for the support of public temples in the Latin-speaking provinces of the western Mediterranean as a corollary of the dissemination of the model of the municipium. However the financing of the building and upkeep of the tens of thousands of minor and tiny shrines both in cities and in rural areas always relied largely upon small-group or individual efforts. It was at this level too that can we find religious diversity, not only in the adaptation of older patterns of religious practice and the concomitant material expressions, but also, especially in urban environments, in more or less striking innovations and experiments, which required in turn the creation of new spaces and material forms.

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165 E.g. Maucourant 2004, 229–33; cf. Kehrer 1988, 72–7; Kolm 2008, 318–53.

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Abbreviations

AE CIL DTAud

L’Année épigraphique Corpus inscriptionum Latinarum Auguste Audollent 1904. Defixionum Tabellae ... Paris: Fontemoing. Repr. Frankfurt a. M.: Minerva, 1967. EPROER Études préliminaires aux religions orientales dans l’Empire Romain HEp Hispania Epigraphica I.Cos William R. Paton; Edward L. Hicks 1891. The Inscriptions of Cos. Oxford: Clarendon Press. I.Didyma Rehm, Albert 1941/1958. Die Inschriften von Didyma. 2 Bd. Mainz: Verlag Philipp von Zabern. I.Ephesos Inschriften von Ephesos. Inschriften griechischer Städte aus Kleinasien. Vienna: Österreichische Akademie der Wissenschaften. I.Oropos Petrakos, Vasileios Ch. 1997. Οἱ Ἐπιγραφὲς τοῦ̓ Ωρωποῦ. BAAH 170. Athens: Αρχαιολογικα εταιρεíα. I.Pergamon 2 Fränkel, Max 1890–95. Die Inschriften von Pergamon, 2, nos. 251–1334, Römische Zeit. 2 vols. Altertümer von Pergamon 8.1–2. Berlin: Spemann. I.Pergamon 3 Habicht, Christian 1969. Die Inschriften des Asklepeions. Altertümer von Pergamon VIII, 3. Berlin: De Gruyter. IG Inscriptiones Graecae IGLSyr Jalabert, Louis; Mouterde, René; Sartre, Maurice. 1982. Inscriptions grecques et latines de la Syrie, 13,1: Bostra: nos. 9001 à 9472. Paris: Geuthner. IGR Cagnat, Rene´ et al.1906–1927. Inscriptiones Graecae ad res Romanas pertinentes. 3 vols. Paris: E. Leroux. ILAfr Cagnat, René; Merlin, Alfred; Cathelain, Louis 1923. Inscriptions latines d’Afrique. Paris: E. Leroux. ILLRP Degrassi, Attilio 1963. Inscriptiones latinae liberae rei publicae. Biblioteca di studi superiori 40. Florence. ILS Dessau, Hermann 1892–1916. Inscriptiones latinae selectae. 3 vols. Berlin: Weidmann. InscrAquil Brusin, Giovanni 1991–1993. Inscriptiones Aquileiae. 3 vols. Udine: Deputazione di Storia Patria per il Friuli. LSAM Sokolowski, Franciszek 1955. Lois sacrées d’Asie Mineure. École française d’Athènes, Travaux et Mémoires 9. Paris: de Boccard.

Abbreviations

LSCG

307

Sokolowski, Franciszek 1969. Lois sacrées des cites grecques. École française d’Athènes, Travaux et Mémoires 18. Paris: de Boccard. LSCG Suppl. Sokolowski, Franciszek 1962. Lois sacrées des cites grecques, Supplément. École française d’Athènes, Travaux et Mémoires 11. Paris: de Boccard. MAMA Buckler, William H.; Calder, William M.; Guthrie, William K. C. 1933. Monumenta Asiae minoris antiqua, vol. 4: Monuments and documents from Eastern Asia and Western Galatia. American Society for Archaeological Research in Asia Minor. London: Longmans, Green & Co. Migne, PG Patrologia Graeca, ed. Jacques-Paul Migne. 165 vols. Paris: Imprimerie Catholique, 1857–1866. OGIS Dittenberger, Wilhelm 1903 und 1905. Orientis Graeci Inscriptiones Selectae. 2vols. Leipzig: Hirzel. P.Dime Lippert, Sandra Luise; Schentuleit, Maren 2006. Demotische Dokumente aus Dime II: Quittungen. Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz. P.Oxf. Griffith Bresciani, Edda (ed.) 1975. L’Archivio demotico del tempio di Soknopaiu Nesos nel Griffith Institute di Oxford. Testi e documenti per lo studio dell’antichità 49. Mailand: Istituto editoriale Cisalpino, La Goliardica. PawB Potsdamer altertumswissenschaftliche Beiträge PGM Preisendanz, Karl (ed., tr.). 1928–31. Papyri Graecae Magicae. Die griechischen Zauberpapyri. Leipzig: Teubner; cited from second ed., revised by Albert Henrichs (Stuttgart: Teubner, 1973–74, repr. Munich and Leipzig, 2001). RGRW Religions in the Graeco-Roman World RGVV Religionsgeschichtliche Versuche und Vorarbeiten SEG Supplementum Epigraphicum Graecum. Leiden: Brill, 1923-. Dittenberger, Wilhelm 1915–24. Sylloge inscriptionum graecarum3. 4 vols. Syll3 Leipzig: Hirzel.

Figures

Fig. 1: The Roman Empire 117 A.D. Peter Palm, Berlin Fig. 2: Map of Pompeii and location of the main places of worship; DAO: Carole Chevalier. p. 44 Fig. 3: Restitution of the Temple of Apollo; Weichard 1897. p. 45 Fig. 4: The crossroads of a vicus on the rue de l’Abondance; Photographic Archives of the Soprintendenza archeologica di Pompe). p. 47 Fig. 5: Verecundus’ workshop, on rue de l’Abondance, facade painting depicting Venus Pompeiana, Fortuna and the genius. William Van Andringa cliché. p. 48 Fig. 6: Front of a shop located at a crossroads near the Vesuvius Gate (V, 6, 1); Photographic Archives of the Soprintendenza archeologica di Pompei. p. 49 Fig. 7: At the Palace of Ares, the loves of Mars and Venus, V, 4 a (photo Johannes Laiho). p. 50 Fig. 8: Larary of the house of the Menander (I, 10, 4), William Van Andringa cliché. p. 52 Fig. 9: Satyr head discovered in the larary of the peristyle of the Villa Regina farm; Inv. 25828, Soprintendenza archeologica di Pompei. p. 54 Fig. 10: Ceremony painted in the kitchen of the house of Sutoria Primigenia (1, 13, 2); William Van Andringa cliché. p. 56 Fig. 11: The temple of Artemis in Gerasa/Jerash (Jordan); APAAME_20100601_SES-0481.dng, Arial photographic archive for the archaeology of the Middle East. p. 63 Fig. 12: The forum with the sanctuary of the province Hispania in Tarraco/Tarragona (Spain); Pensabene and Mar 2010, Fig. 1. p. 64 Fig. 13: The building for the worship of the imperial family in Narona (Croatia); Rolf Kawel, CC BY-SA 3.0. p. 65 Fig. 14: A sanctuary for Mithras near San Giovanni di Duino (Italy); Grotta del Mitreo di Duino Aurisina, Soprintendenza Archeologia belle arti e paesaggio del Friuli Venezia Giulia. p. 65 Fig. 15: Graffito-Parapegma from Dura Europos, 3rd cent. AD; Journal of Roman Studies 26, 1936, fig. 2. p. 115 Fig. 16: Roman Imperial (ca. 180–190 CE) statues of Isis-Persephone holding a sistrum and Zeus-Serapis with three-headed Cerberus from Gortyn. Now in the Archaeological Museum of Heraklion, Crete. (sourced: wikipedia commons). p. 132 Fig. 17: The ›confession stela‹ of Claudia Bassa (253/4 CE) from near Saittai, Lydia (Turkey) (= Petzl 1998 no. 12). Musée Cinquantenaire, Brussels, inv. no. A4147. Copyright: Royal Museums of Art and History, Brussels. Photo: G. Petzl. p. 172 Fig. 18: The perron leading up to the entrance of the oracular temple of Apollo at Didyma (Didim, Turkey); Photo: A. Heitmann. p. 178 Fig. 19: Reverse of a ring-stone in green jasper showing the ›cock-headed anguipede‹ (1.7 x 1.3 x 0.2 cm). Département des Monnaies, Médailles et Antiques, Bibliothèque Nationale, Paris, cat. no. M8002 = Mastrocinque 2014 no. 141; Photo: A. Mastrocinque. p. 196 Fig. 20: Schlangengefäß from Tienen. Source: Authors. p. 212 Fig. 21: Reconstruction of an automaton. Source: Authors. p. 217 Fig. 22: Stone altar from Sint-Michielsgestel. Source: Authors. p. 221 Fig. 23: Terracotta figurine of Isis from Egypt. Source: Authors. p. 223 Fig. 24: Roman curse tablet from lead, Matilo (the Netherlands). Source: Authors. p. 228

Figures

309

Fig. 25: The tariff inscription from Rome listing sacrificial animals and prices. The original, of imperial date, is lost, and only an early-modern copy has survived (CIL 6.820). p. 269 Fig. 26: A frieze of the late 2nd century A.D. in the Theatre at Perge (SW-Turkey); DAI, Hannestad-88-A0527. p. 274 Fig. 27: An offering box in front of the temple of Hermes and Maia in the Agora of the Competalists on Delos, donated by the Italian merchants of the island. D-DAI-IST-KB 8116. p. 280 Fig. 28: The Christian pilgrimage site of Abū Mena southwest of Alexandria; Rodziewicz 2010, Fig. 3; Grossmann 2018, Abb. 1. p. 288

Index

Places Abū Mena 289–291 Abonouteichos 26, 120–121, 124, 158, 182, 247, 249, 288–289 Aegean sea 20, 35, 37, 75 Aidêpsos 174 Alesia 227 Alexandria 30, 78, 114, 182, 218, 225, 254, 287, 289–290 Anatolia 20, 34–35, 65, 274 Andania 280 Andeans 214–215 Antioch 30, 62 Apamea 284 Apulum 84, 277 Aquae Sulis See Bath Aquileia 58 Ashwell (Herfordhire) 274 Asia 29, 35–36, 68, 75, 77, 80–81, 87, 119–120, 122, 151, 176, 181–182, 187, 190, 256, 271, 273, 283, 290 Asia Minor 70, 76, 93 Athens 10, 31–32, 69, 78, 82, 122, 176, 188, 194, 238, 248, 266–267, 276, 287 Attica 73, 76, 89, 266 Augusta Emerita/Mérida 75 Baalbek 63 Babylonia 192 Bactria 35 Baitokaike/Hosn es-Suleiman (Syria) 77, 274, 276, 291 Bath 26, 92, 174, 197–198, 281, 287 Baudecet 194 Beneventum 75, 82, 282 Berytus 155 Bithynia 29 Bostra 77–78 Bovillae 112 Britannia 76, 107, 187, 198, 274

Brixia 126 Caesarea Philippi 92, 174 Campania 43, 68, 75, 183 Canosa 72 Carnuntum 122, 126 Carthage 18, 20, 31, 36, 78, 194, 198 Chalcedon 249 Chisledon 35 Clitumnus (river) 26, 174, 179–180, 287 Clunia (Spain) 89 Corinth 31, 70, 81, 270 Cos 269, 276 Crocodilopolus 28 Ctesiphon 30 Cuicul/Djemila (Algeria) 74 Dacia 76 Decapolis 64, 84, 279 Delos 31, 75, 84 Delphi 26, 69, 79, 88, 119, 121, 178, 250, 287, 289 Denmark 34 Derveni 159 Didyma 74, 119–121, 178, 182, 287–288 Dodona 26, 88 Dura Europus 29 Egypt 19–20, 25, 28–29, 31, 33–35, 37, 75, 94, 131, 167, 173–174, 178, 192–194, 222, 224–225, 262, 273, 276, 287, 289 Eleusis 26, 73, 121–122, 129, 133, 248, 287 Ephesos 28, 31, 33, 35, 50, 81, 87, 173, 267–268, 271, 273, 277, 279, 290 Epidauros 26, 69, 88, 268, 287 Eretria 70, 266 Flaviobriga 174 Fondo Ruozzo 277 Furfo 272 Gadara (Umm Qais) 286 Gallia 29, 107, 274 Gandhara 35

312 Gerasa 64, 69, 80, 93, 274, 277, 279 Gergakome 74 Germania 274 Gightis (Tunesia) 73 Grand 26 Great St Bernard pass 281 Gryneion 88 Halicarnassos 280 Hammat-Gader 174 Hammat-Selim 174 Hauran 77 Heliopolis 30, 66, 85 Herculaneum 46, 50, 53 Hermus, valley of 171 Hierapolis 187, 253, 279, 282, 288 Huwariyya 291 Italy 17–20, 29, 32, 37, 69, 72–73, 75–76, 81, 88, 107, 124, 127, 178–180, 184, 187, 197–198, 216, 225–226, 244, 264, 270–271, 277–278, 282–283 Jerusalem 33, 71, 128, 133, 155, 158, 214–215, 273, 290–291 – processions 273 Klaros 88, 119–121, 173, 178, 182, 194, 250, 287–288, 290 Labraunda 84 Lagina in Caria 70 Lambaesis 73 Lebadea 89, 120 Lepcis Magna 282 Lindos 240 Mainz 26, 82, 197–198, 227–228 Memphis 277 Mesopotamia 34–36 Miletus 287 Minturnae 58 Misenum 82 Mount Casius 26 Mount Olympus 62 Mount Parnassos 88 Mount Tifata (Capua) 272 Narbo 280 Narona/Vid (Croatia) 81, 94 Nemi 92, 94, 174, 282 Nile 34, 75, 176, 224–225, 287, 289–290 Nola 273 Noricum 76

Index Oinoanda 279 Oropos (Attica) 119, 266–267, 287 Ostia 31, 58, 71, 73, 81, 83–84, 86–87, 123, 169, 174, 179, 184, 240, 270, 282, 284–285 Palaestina 20, 124 Palmyra 66, 68, 83, 278 Patras 31 Pergamum 26, 78–79, 81–82, 84, 88, 90, 94, 121, 176, 248, 267, 284, 287–288, 290–291 Persia 20, 27, 34–35, 131 Phoenicia 34 Phrygia 76, 87, 188 Pietrabbondante 72 Piraeus 31, 176 Pompeii 43–44, 46–49, 53, 55, 57–59, 71–72, 75, 78, 89, 92, 169, 185, 187, 196, 285 Portonaccio 71 Portus 291 Praeneste 26, 72, 88–89, 179, 226 Puteoli 31, 83–84, 155, 284 Puy de Dôme 26 Ravenna 284–285 Red Sea 34–35 Ribemont-sur-Ancre 210–211, 213, 228 S. Abbondio 72 Samarkand 36 San Giovanni di Duino 83 San Giovanni in Galdo 76 Sardis 173 Scotland 34 Siwa 26, 178, 193, 287 Spain 29, 75, 81, 122 Syracuse 18 Syria 20, 26, 34–35, 66, 76–78, 80, 123–124, 131, 289 Tarentum 18, 69 Tarraco/Tarragona 75, 78, 81, 85 Thouggha 73 Thuburbo Maius 276 Thun-Allmendingen 280 Tienen 87, 195, 211–213, 228 Tomis 123 Tyre 155, 284 Uley in the Cotswold Hills 198, 274 Urso (Colonia Iulia Genetiva) 240–241 Vesuvius 43, 46, 53, 55, 57, 59

Names

313

Names Achilles Tatius 256 Aelius Aristides 90, 121, 175–176, 235, 248, 291 Aelius Isidoros, P. 175 Aemilius Paullus, L. 152 Aeneas 29, 244 Agrippina Minor 81 Alexander of Abunouteichos 93 Ammon 77, 178, 193 Amphiaraos 119, 175 Anna Perenna 281 Antoninus of Piacenza 286 Antoninus Pius 79, 112 Anubis 45 Aphrodite 31, 253 Apollo 26, 31, 44–46, 50, 55, 74, 88, 116, 119–120, 153, 173, 182, 194, 227, 237, 250, 267, 288, 290 – Sosianus 69 Aquilius Regulus, M. 195 Artemidorus 190, 199 Artemis 31, 35, 64, 93, 173, 253, 267, 271, 277, 290 – Laphria 31 – Pergaia 280 – Tyche 69 Asclepius 26, 43, 70, 79, 84, 88, 90, 120–122, 158, 174, 176, 248–249, 268, 276, 287–288, 291 Atargatis 282 Athena 28, 31, 82, 94, 122, 253 Athena Polias 82 Attis 86, 91, 197 Augustinus, Aurelius 17, 235, 245 Augustus 82–83, 109, 267 – co-ruler 109 – emperor 19, 28, 65, 70–71, 80–83, 111, 149, 180, 240, 267, 272, 280 Baal 28 Baalshamin 68 Bacchus 32, 50, 53–55, 59, 63, 123, 129, 285 Bel 68 Buddha 36 Caecilia 152 Caecilia Metella 184 Caligula, Gaius (emperor) 124, 267 Capitoline Triad 50, 52, 71, 74, 81, 110, 213, 241 Caracalla (emperor) 25 Castor and Pollux 277

Cato the Elder 125, 168, 170–171 Censorinus 237 Ceres 30, 50, 116, 239 Cestius, C. 184 Christians 80 Christ 21, 27, 35–36, 87, 92, 127, 129, 158, 160–161, 239, 255–256, 291 Cicero, M. Tullius 9, 17, 19, 21, 108, 112–113, 117, 133, 153, 180, 234–235, 238, 240–246 Cicero, Q. Tullius 117 Claudius (emperor) 195, 267 Claudius II (emperor) 180 Concordia 43 Concordia Augusta 43 Constantinus I (emperor) 20, 27, 34, 162 Cornelia Bassa 172 Crescens 253 Critonia Philema 112 Cybele 34, 130, 158, 229, 245 Dea Dia 111, 272 Dea Roma 70, 80, 82–83, 284 Dea Syria 66, 85, 124, 288 Decius, C. Messius Quintus Traianus Augustus (emperor) 20, 25, 27, 34, 36 Demeter 30, 37, 70, 73, 122, 129–130 Democritus 169 Demosthenes of Oinoanda 279 Di Manes 52 Diana 44, 92, 94, 174, 282 – Tifatina 272 Diocletian (emperor) 34 Dionysus 45, 113, 160–161 Dioscuri 50, 91 Dis 168 Divus Augustus 28, 80, 83 Domitian (emperor) 127–128 Dumézil, Georges 10 Durkheim, Émile 11 Elagabalus (emperor) 63 Ennius, Q. 235–236, 240, 242, 251 Euhemeros of Messene 236 Euripides 254 Eusebius of Caesarea 251 Fabius Persicus, Paullus 267 Fata (Fates) 253 Flavius Josephus 235 Fortuna 12, 29, 43, 48, 69, 72, 88, 179, 225, 269 – Augusta 43, 269

314 Fortuna–Primigenia 89 Fortuna – Primigenia 88, 226, 287 Foucault, Michel 247 Fructosus (patron) 284 Fulvius Nobilior, M. 70, 240 Fundilius 92 Fustel de Coulanges, Numa Denis 9 Galen 118, 170, 176, 249 Gellius 19 Genius 52 Genius Augusti 47 genius of the macellum 46 Geryon 50, 179 Great Gods 280 Hadad 282 Hadrianus (emperor) 79, 81–82, 120, 279, 282 Harpocrates 37, 45 Hathor of Dendera 287 Hera 31, 253 Herakles 30, 173–174, 254 Hercules 12, 29–30, 48, 50, 53, 71, 88, 179, 195, 221–222, 225, 240, 273, 277 – Magusanus 221 – Musagetes 70 – Victor 179, 282 Hermas (Shepherd of Hermas) 256 Hermes 161 Herod the Great 81 Heron of Alexandria 218 Horatius Flaccus, Q. 190–191 Horus (astrologer) 192 Horus (deity) 37, 45, 173, 287 – the Child 45 Hystaspes 161 Iamblichus 120 Ignatius of Antiochia 246, 254 Isis 30, 34–37, 43, 45, 53, 75, 82, 92, 122, 129–131, 149, 161, 197, 222, 225, 227, 248, 270, 282, 285–286, 290 Iulia Felix 46, 49 Iulianus (emperor) 75, 120, 131, 236 Iulius Caesar, C. 28, 81 Iulius Cocilius Hermes, C. 284 Iuno 29, 31, 50, 88 – Regina 29 Jupiter 12, 26, 28–30, 35, 48, 50, 53, 55, 59, 72, 74, 110, 131, 179–180, 216, 267, 285 – Dolichenus 28, 65, 125–126, 131, 285 – Heliopolitanus 29–30, 63 – Hierapolitanus 28

Index – Latiaris 267 – Liber 272 – Optimus Maximus 28–29, 53, 153, 271 – Poeninus 281 Justin Martyr 235, 251–255 Lares 46, 51, 53, 55, 59, 86, 147–149, 152–153, 168 – compitales 46 Livia (emperess) 81 Lucian of Samosata 66, 85, 121, 157–158, 182, 229, 235, 247–250, 252–253, 282 Lucretius Carus, T. 19 Lucullus, L. 70 Luna 48 Magusanus 222 Mamia 269 Mani 36, 161 Marcus Aurelius (emperor) 170 Marcellus of Bordeaux 170 Marius, C. (consul) 114 Marius, C. (Consul) 153 Mars 26, 29, 49–50, 110, 168, 180 – Lenus 28 – Ultor 267 Martha (Syrian diviner) 114, 153 Mater Magna 48, 86, 91, 197, 227, 245, 280, 282, 284 Mercurius 28–29, 43–46, 48, 50, 52, 55, 73, 153–154, 198 Méthè (slave of Cominia) 55 Minerva 46, 49–50, 52, 55, 72, 74, 153, 174, 287 Minucius Felix 245 Mithras 26, 34–36, 83, 86, 123, 129, 131, 158, 161, 211 Moses 161, 253 Mummius, L. 70, 182 Musonius Rufus, C. 251 Nehalennia 26 Nemesis 253 Neptunus 284 Nero (emperor) 153, 177 Norbanus Sorex, C. 92 Numerius Popidius Florus 53 Nymphs 46, 89, 174, 194 Ocletius Modestus, C. 282 Olympic gods and goddesses 70 Origen 235, 256 Orpheus 160–161 Paul (of Tarsus) 155, 157, 159–160, 235, 246, 255, 273 Pausanias 31, 89, 175, 181, 288

Keywords Pelagonius (horse-leech) 195 Perpetua, martyr 255 Philip (emperor) 27 Philo of Alexandria 235, 253–254, 256 Philostratus 235, 256 Pietas 43 Plato 241, 254 Plinius Secundus, C. 33, 127–129, 170, 179–180, 191–192, 195, 218, 235 Plutarch 19, 121, 129–130, 235, 250 Polycarp of Smyrna 254, 256 Pompeia Agrippinilla 286 Pompeius Macrinus Theophanes, M. 286 Pomponia Zmyrna 282 Propertius, Sex. 192 Prudentius 256 Ptolemy II Philadelphos 218 Publicius Italicus, P. 284–285 Pythagoras 161, 182 Quirinus 110 Rhea 253 Sabazios 49 Salus Umeritana 174 Sarepta 155 Saturn 26, 50, 77, 168, 186 Sedatius Severianus, M. 121, 176, 248 Selene 253 Seneca, L. Annaeus 124 Serapis 37, 75, 129, 131, 173, 176, 277, 287 Sobek 28

315 Sulla, L. Cornelius 70, 109–110, 119, 130, 153, 240, 266, 272 Tatian 235, 251–253 Tellus 239 Tertullianus, Q. Septimius Florens 235, 245–246 Tiberius (emperor) 80 Titus (emperor) 128 Traianus (emperor) 81–82, 120, 127 Trophonios 88–89, 120 Tullius, M., duovir at Pompeii 269 Twelve Gods 46, 53 Tyche 62, 69, 275 Vacuna 245 Varro, M. Terentius 9, 19, 21, 113, 169, 235, 237–238, 244–246 Venus 29, 31, 43–44, 46, 48–50, 53, 55, 57, 59, 63, 70, 89, 241–242, 270 – Magna 55 – Pompeiana 47 Vergilius Maro, P. 235, 244 Verrius Flaccus 9 Vespasian (emperor) 81, 128, 272 Vesta 152, 177, 267 Victoria 50, 229, 245 Wissowa, Georg 234 Zeus 28–30, 77, 80, 88, 122, 131, 173, 178, 193, 248, 279 – Olympios 64 Zoroaster 169

Keywords ablution 89, 175 acclamation 86, 94, 175 actors 13, 15–16, 68, 70–71, 78, 80, 91–92, 95, 107, 133, 158, 240, 253 aedicula 51 Aequans 68 afterlife 146, 158–159 agency 12–13, 15, 17, 148, 167, 215, 229, 288 Alexandrians 155 altar 44, 46, 52–54, 56–57, 59, 64, 72, 74, 77, 80–82, 86, 172, 174, 179, 184, 213–216, 221–222, 225, 269–270, 277–279, 282, 285 – costs of 269 – destruction 93 – fixed 45 – in sanctuary 61

– portable 219 – sacrificial 120, 214 – small 148 – street 148 amphitheatre 107 amulet 86, 154, 167, 170–171, 192, 195, 213, 219, 265–266, 283 ancestors 116, 143, 149, 168–169, 220, 222, 242–243 ancestral gods 26, 33 animals, domestic 31, 170–171, 210–211 anthropomorphism 143 – of gods 19, 31, 252 apologist 245–246, 251 apparitores (helpers) 111 Aramaic 31, 36 arca (money box) 124, 272, 285

316 archaism 20, 74, 93 architecture 14, 62, 64, 71, 73–74, 77, 88, 162, 211 asceticism 251 Asklepieia 175–176 associations 15 – neighbourhood 46 – organized 127 – religious 122–123, 248 – trade 78, 284 astrologer 156, 192 astrology 38, 142, 157, 192 Athenians 25, 28 athlets 92 augural law 239 augures 111 augury 193 Augustales 82, 124 Augustus (title) 19 authority 12, 25–27, 29, 33–34, 36, 38, 58, 109–110, 112, 114, 141–142, 150, 153, 155–156, 158, 161, 176–177, 181, 193, 195, 197, 264 – religious 251 – self attributed 142, 156–159, 161 automaton 217–218 axe 46, 269 banqueting 47, 59, 66, 68, 77, 83, 91, 111, 210, 275, 278, 284–285 baths 46, 174, 176, 286 belief 10–11, 14, 19, 37, 56, 58, 133, 141–143, 145–146, 149–150, 153, 159–160, 214, 235, 243, 250, 253 bishop 20, 27, 113, 126, 133 book 58, 94, 116, 161, 176, 193–194, 216, 219, 234–235, 237, 245, 250 booty 72 bread 264, 287 Buddhism 35 bull 275 burial 12, 35, 52, 57–58, 183–188, 242, 285 calendar 19, 29, 48, 131, 149, 152, 169, 236–240, 274, 279 – entries 236 – Gregorian 238 – Julian 238 calf (male) 168 cantors 114 Capitolium 43, 74–75 Carthaginians 76 cauldron 35 Celts 69

Index cement 226 cena aditialis 124 ceramic vessel 86, 211 ceramics 92 Chaldeans 114 chariot-racing 193 charm 54, 193, 195 chicken 59, 87, 186–188, 211, 269 Christians 15, 20–21, 25, 27–28, 32, 36–37, 71, 94, 118, 123, 126, 129, 141–143, 145–146, 157, 161–162, 167, 235, 246–247, 251–253, 256, 262, 291 chronicle 240 church building 87 Cippus Abellanus 272 citizenship 18–19, 25–26, 33, 162, 253, 265 – Roman 25, 33–34, 176, 253 city quarters 26 city-state 18, 32, 35 clay 18, 195, 197, 224, 278 clerics 143 codex 234, 247 coin 58, 69, 92, 148, 150, 174, 210, 227–228, 249, 278, 280 collegia 83–84, 110–111, 270, 283 colonia 18–19, 70, 73–74, 76, 84, 241 communication, religious 30, 73, 78, 82, 116, 143, 151, 181, 213, 216, 244 competence, religious/ritual 12, 107, 113, 125, 153, 168, 189, 197 competition 14, 19, 64, 73, 82, 92, 107, 123, 156, 161–162, 192–193, 288–289 – athletic 193 Compitalia 47, 168 compitum 46 concilia 29 confession texts 87 conspicuous (consumption) 263 Constitutio Antoniniana 25 contact, cultural 78 conventus 75 Corinthians 25 cosmology 36, 141 cosmopolitan cult 88 cosmos 27, 37 court-room 195 cremation 185–187 crisis 20, 70 crossroads 46, 53, 57 cult – image 13, 153

Keywords cults 14, 16, 19–20, 28–30, 32, 35, 37, 47, 62–64, 67, 78, 80–83, 112, 116, 122–123, 129–132, 150–153, 157, 225, 242–244, 248, 252, 268–269, 288 – colonial 28 – local 28 – municipal 28 culture in interaction 16 Daunians 68 deacons 126 dead, commemoration of the 144 dedication 66, 68, 72–73, 86, 92, 94, 123, 146, 179, 272, 279 deities, local 20, 62, 246 dendrophori 282, 284 diaspora 31, 34–36, 71, 131, 244, 274 diet 89 Dionysiac groups 123, 285 distinction 14, 83, 145, 175, 183, 188, 196, 210, 269, 272 distribution of food 273 diversity 20–21, 29–30, 56, 67, 69, 71, 143, 149–150, 154, 246, 266, 292 – religious 67 divination 32, 88, 90, 93, 111, 114–118, 124, 141, 149, 152–153, 160, 166, 169, 177–178, 180–181, 189–190, 192–193, 199, 236, 239, 242–243, 250, 276 – combination of rituals 89 divine, images of 49 divine patronage 46 diviner 116, 124–125, 156, 177, 189–190, 266 divinised emperor 80, 82 dream 88–89, 153, 156, 161, 175–176, 178–180, 189–190, 199, 263, 290 – interpretation 93 – interpreter 157 Druids 195 duoviri (magistrates) 241 elite 14, 19, 74, 85, 121, 150, 166, 176, 187, 265, 278 – civic 20, 166, 169, 198, 270, 292 – cosmopolitan orientation 79 – economic 68, 246 – female members 147 – financial 18 – Greek 247 – imperial 85 – intellectual 246, 254 – local 70, 75, 78–80, 83, 118, 120–121, 123, 145, 264

317 – metropolitan 219 – old 67 – political 27, 108, 251 – Roman 74, 114, 116, 242, 247, 264 – ruling 10 – social 108, 147–148, 183–184 – socio-cultural 250 – socio-political 122, 130, 247–248, 253 – urban 10, 74, 82, 184, 250, 278, 288 encrateia (temperance) 251 entrepreneurism 36 epigraphic habit 234 epigraphy 31 episkopos 126 equus October 9 Etruscans 30, 69, 74 exegesis 247 expenditure on religion 262 experience – religious 15, 20, 59, 62, 87, 89, 107–108, 122–123, 130, 149, 175–176, 192, 213, 215, 227, 229, 235, 251 expert 108 expiatrix 113 family 10, 15–16, 29, 44, 50, 59, 81, 92, 94, 107, 111–112, 120, 152–153, 166, 168–170, 172, 176, 183–185, 187, 194, 199, 268 – Imperial 253 fasti 236–237, 239 Feriale Duranum 29 fertility 26, 146, 166, 224 festival 47, 65–66, 68, 70, 77, 84–85, 90–91, 94, 109, 113, 148, 155, 169, 197, 211, 236–238, 264, 266–269, 271, 273–274, 276, 278, 282, 284, 286, 288 – religious 78, 91, 224 fetiales 111 financial support 107, 123 flamen 239 – dialis 9, 108, 110 – divi Augusti 80, 110 – flaminicae 110 – Martialis 110 – minores 110 – Quirinalis 110, 239 flames – flickering of 190 Forum Augusti 267 fountain 46, 280–281 fratres Arvales 111, 272 fratres Atiedii 240 frescoe 150

318 frontier, open 34 funding 20, 27, 34, 268 funeral – enclosure 58 – practices 185, 264 funerary practices 186 games 19–20, 48, 91–92, 109–110, 124, 144, 166, 237, 241–242, 267, 269, 278 garment 107, 213, 282 generals 18–19, 28, 32, 69–70, 72, 116, 153, 268, 271 gerousia 33 gestures of reverence 59 gift 12, 63, 72–73, 86, 92, 94, 229, 267, 272, 277, 280, 282, 287 globalization 21 goat 185, 287 gods – association with other 54, 82, 122, 125–126, 144, 155, 225, 248, 269, 284–285 – attention of 57 – control of 19 – moving of 19 – new arrival 31 – presence of 45 – representation of 15, 144 gorgon 46 Gospel 253 governors 29, 33, 68, 75, 268, 287 graffito 51, 53, 55, 179 grave goods 12, 187 grimoires, magical 193 growth 14, 18, 20, 30, 158, 264 guilt 171 habitus 16, 166–167, 198–199 handbooks, astrological 193 haruspicae 114 healing 26, 85, 89–90, 92–93, 118–119, 121–122, 146, 166, 169–170, 172–175, 188, 193, 199, 245, 247–249, 252, 265–266, 272, 276, 280, 283, 286–287, 290–291 – cults 90 hegemony, Roman 18 hepatoscopy 193 herbalist 191 herbs 170, 188, 191 hierarchy of religious acts 57 hierarchy of temples 292 holocaust 283 horoscope 159, 161 hospital 90 hospitium 291

Index hostels 290 household 26, 47, 144, 147–148, 150, 224, 264–265 hymn of the salii 112 hymnodoi 284 hymns 28, 74, 94, 284 ichthyomancy 88 iconography 30, 37, 123, 153, 212, 216, 225, 256 – Christian 129 – religious 66 identity – local 26, 50, 182 – Roman 26, 59 illness, interpretation of 171 images 11, 16, 19, 21, 27–28, 31, 48, 50, 52, 54, 56, 75, 107, 153, 155, 167–168, 176, 182, 186, 195, 197, 213, 215–216, 224–225, 278 – portable 219 imperial court 20, 81 imperial family 109, 112 incantation 193–194 incense burner 212, 219 incubation 88, 90, 173–176, 181, 290 infrastructure, religious 16, 267, 278, 283 initiation 32, 37, 121, 144, 154, 157–160, 252 intellectual network 16 intellectuals 85, 130, 245 investment in religion 13, 64, 84, 166, 168–169, 174–175, 179–180, 263–265, 269, 283, 288, 290 Islam 27, 37, 145, 235, 291 Jews 20, 27–28, 32, 34–36, 71, 125, 127–128, 145, 151, 157, 161, 214–215, 239, 253–254, 274, 279, 284 – identity formation 256 Judaism 15, 27, 37, 127, 129, 145, 157 – Rabbinic 37 Judeans 151, 155, 157 justice 146, 197–198 kitchen 52–53, 270, 285 knife 213, 219, 269 knowledge – medical 191 – of ritual 57, 189, 198 – of the past 238 – religious 94, 114, 117, 234–235, 244, 250, 252, 254 – shared 17 koina 29

Keywords lamb 168, 211, 269 lamp 58, 86, 212–213, 224 land ownership 272 languages 20, 30–31, 36, 67–68, 193, 273 lararium 51 Latin language 19, 237, 242 lavation of Mater Magna 287 law 15, 21, 37, 46, 113, 118, 153, 193, 235, 239, 241 lectisternia 171 leiturgeia 84 lex Domitia 109 lex Ursonensis 240–241 libation 52, 54, 57, 120, 218 libelli 25 Liber linteus 240 Liberalia 113 lived religion 11–16, 20–21, 78, 188, 213, 217 livestock 76, 275 loan 268, 272 local tradition 20–21, 28, 30–32, 67, 75 lot 116 Lucanians 68 lunar month 191 luni-solar year 237 Lupercalia 9–10, 20 Luperci 111 magic 19–20, 118, 133, 145, 147–148, 154, 188, 193 – criminal 133 magistrates 18, 32, 34, 109, 111, 119, 124, 149, 152, 236, 239, 241, 255, 269, 275, 280 Manichaeism 20, 27, 37, 161 mantic 114 marble 44, 83, 181, 225–226, 230, 238 Marmor Parium 240 Marsians 68 martyrdom 15, 253–255 martyrology 254 martyrs 26, 254–255, 289, 291 mass media 69 material culture 16, 167, 213, 215, 220 media, religious 13, 15, 93, 148, 150, 167, 216, 225, 236 medicine 117–118, 142, 156, 170, 175, 195 Mediterranean Sea 17 merchants 72, 77, 79, 83–84, 277, 284, 290 migration 155 military units 29, 33, 239 mimes 91–92 minerals 191

319 Mithraeum 83, 87, 212 money 58, 69, 84, 90, 92, 111, 124, 175, 198, 228, 262, 264, 272, 274, 276, 280, 284–285, 290 – lent by temples 271 monotheism 27, 71, 141, 161 monumentality 43, 69, 72, 225 moon 114 morphomanteis 190 mosaic floor 278 municipium 19, 28, 43, 74, 76, 82, 84, 124, 272 musicians 91–92 mysteries 20, 26, 32, 37, 74, 120–121, 129–130, 154, 157–160, 182, 252, 286 – initiation 120 mythology 19, 45, 49, 158, 160, 216, 268 neokoroi 29, 81 Neptunalia 284 nomos (custom) 29–30 norms 14–16, 33, 108, 133, 148, 152, 166, 238, 241 oath 29, 59, 76, 94 object – broken 35, 58, 179 – innovation 220 – religious 66, 86 – role of 213 objectscape, religious 230 offering 26, 32, 44, 52, 57, 61, 71–72, 92, 94, 124, 144, 146, 152–153, 157, 161, 168–169, 186–187, 210, 227–228, 251, 256, 264, 266, 283, 285–286 – durable 219 – fundamental religious practice 61 – perishable 219 – permanency 280 – sacred portion 175 oil, perfumed 52 oppidum 76 oracle 19, 26, 88–90, 113–115, 119–121, 160–161, 171, 174, 177–182, 188, 190, 192–194, 199, 224, 248–250, 265, 287–288, 290 – spontaneous 250 ornithomancy 88 Orphism 159, 161 Oscans 68 paideia (education) 252–253 parapegma 114 Parilia 9 passio 254

320 Passover 273 patera 219 paterfamilias 52, 56 patronage 46, 54, 59, 122, 131, 147, 248, 278, 283, 287 perfume 58 pharaoh 19, 28 Pharaoh 28 pharaoh 218 philosopher 129, 161, 242, 251, 254 philosophy 9, 15, 19, 21, 30, 129, 141, 149, 151, 156–157, 159–160, 199, 235, 242–244, 246, 251–253 Phrygians 155 phylactery 193–194 physician 118, 249 Phythia, priestess 88 piatrices 113 Picenians 69 pietas (piety) 242–243, 277 piglet 87, 168, 185, 211 pilgrimage 91, 262, 273, 286–291 – site 268 plague 32, 194, 250, 283 planetary deities 114 Pleiades 191 polis religion 10, 145 political actor 14 polytheism 20, 44, 214 polytheisms 30, 167 pontifices 33, 109–111, 113, 116, 124, 237–239, 241–242 – minores 110 – pontifex maximus 28, 109, 127, 238, 245 popular religion 14 porca praecidanea (sow) 185 port city 30–31, 37 portent 32, 116–117, 190 poverty 198, 265 practitioners, religious 17, 108, 117, 124, 143, 146–149, 152, 170, 188–190, 192–194 praying 12, 15, 19, 55, 114, 116, 144, 155, 167, 182, 194 priestess 88, 113, 158, 269, 286 priesthood 9, 19, 27–28, 32–33, 66, 68, 108–112, 122, 124, 127, 175, 240, 242, 248, 264, 267, 269, 273, 277–278 – christian 128 – creation of 29 – Italian style 20 – professional 14 – purchase 280

Index priests 18, 32–33, 66, 68, 81, 83, 87, 107–113, 117, 119, 121, 123–127, 131–132, 149–150, 154, 158, 239, 241, 245, 268, 270, 278–279, 286 – civic 190 – provincial high 269 – ritual roles 120 procession 28, 48, 66, 68–69, 91, 94, 121, 173, 182, 270–271, 279, 287 – sacrificial 91 professionalisation 107 prohibition (or ritual etc.) 21 prophecy 88–90, 116 prophet 124, 161 protection 49, 55, 76, 109, 146, 193, 270, 279 public religion 20, 238, 269 Punic 69, 72, 75, 186 punishment 133, 146, 156, 171–172 puppie 187 purification 58, 89, 144, 175, 189 pyre 58, 185–187 quindecimviri sacris faciundis 111, 113 ram 175 reading 15, 94, 117–118, 142, 159, 189, 235, 245–246 Reichsreligion 20, 29, 68 religio 76, 116–118, 143, 150, 226, 242–243 religion 143 – definition of 11–12 – institutionalised 14 – of the book 214 religious actors 67 – control of 254 religious communication 12 religious entrepreneurs 114, 119, 121–122, 124, 131, 156, 244 religious expert 142, 153, 156–158, 161 religious network 15, 132 religious practices 11, 13–15, 26, 61, 66, 68, 71, 73, 78, 85–86, 91, 93–95, 129, 133, 144, 146, 149, 152, 160, 188, 213–215, 219, 234, 236, 238, 241, 244, 253, 283 religious practices and commonwealth 67 religious professionals 16, 245 religious specialists 189 – dynasties of 79 – female 113 remembrance, places of 70 renting out shops 276 repair 268, 278, 283 repetition 56, 58, 167, 195

Keywords representations – figurative 226 – of gods 17, 35, 45–48, 54, 56, 145, 148, 157, 176, 212, 226, 236, 240, 247 restoration 20 revenues 18, 34, 181, 264–269, 271–274, 276–277, 280, 286, 288 ring-stone 195 ritual – financing of 123 – formalisation of 68 – performance 58 – representation of 219 ritual practices 25, 31, 61, 169, 214, 221, 236 – embodiment 94 – range of 144 ritualisation 167, 170–171, 174–176, 191, 195, 199 Romanisation 78 root-cutter 191–192 ruler cult 26, 32, 65, 74, 80–83, 119, 213, 254, 269, 271, 278–279 Sacerdotes domus Augustae 112 sacra 47, 149, 241, 243 sacra publica 241 sacrae litterae 38 sacralisation 13, 16, 179 sacrifice 89, 93, 219, 239, 263, 269, 271, 275, 280, 284–285, 290 – altar 45 – animal 32, 35, 113, 168, 185, 198, 210 – critique of 256 – expressing hierarchy 59 – funding 27 – Greek 31 – human 19, 30–31, 119 – in sanctuary 72, 269 – infant 186 – nocturnal 133 – on behalf of empire 25 – preliminary 185 – proof of 20, 25 – relations of 72, 92 – replacement of 247 – representations of 111 – revenues 274 – Roman 31 – scene of 46 – self- 254 – small 59 – special 171

321 – successful 94 – threatened 20 – wild animals 31 sacrificial cakes 113 saga 113 Salii Palatini and Collini 111 Samnites 68 sanctuaries 15, 43, 51, 53, 61, 63, 66, 69–81, 88–90, 93, 132, 144, 146, 176, 210, 212, 230, 286–288, 290 – access 62 – age 26 – alternatives 65 – and city 64 – architecture 64 – as archives 95 – as bank 63 – as home of a deity 57 – as home of deity 86 – as representation of disbelief 176 – as shared space 67 – as visible space 61 – asylum 267 – attractivity 85, 93 – central 68 – change 226, 273 – cheap construction 274 – Christian 87 – complex 14 – costs 271 – decorated with booty 70 – decoration 144, 216 – dedication 28 – destruction 70, 93 – differences 292 – disuse 93 – economic role 273 – economy of 279 – Egyptian 124 – emergence of 19 – experience 93 – extra-urban 274 – fitting 85 – foundation 19, 236 – funding 84 – Gallic style 274 – governance 84, 144, 241–242, 267–268, 272, 276, 280 – income 90, 241, 266–267, 271, 274, 280 – infrastructure for healing 92 – inscriptions 66, 87 – integration in landscape 151

322 – intellectual centre 90 – inventory 268 – investment in 19, 264 – joint 197 – land property 266 – layout 65, 67, 91 – library 94 – location 56, 62 – management 272 – Mediterranean style 20 – memory of religious practices – memory space 94 – monumentality 64, 93, 145 – mountain 26 – multiplication 65 – narratives 288 – natural 62 – number 43, 268 – numbers 28, 267 – objects 66, 86, 94, 282 – of emperor 28 – oracular functions 171 – permanency 93 – pilgrim 30, 287 – private 157 – property 271–272, 285, 292 – provincial 85 – Punic style 69 – record-keeping 94 – relation to deities 62 – religious media 13 – repair 268 – restoration 267–268 – robbing of 266 – services 115 – shaping of 61 – shared 84 – small 87, 274 – staff 108 – statues 92 – staying overnight 88 – storage of metal 279 – story about foundation 73 – unfinished 93 – urban 46, 268, 274 – usage 66, 68, 269 – use by groups 68, 84 – visibility 66 sanhedrin 33 Sasanids 27 Saturnalia 168, 237–238 Scepticism 243

Index

93

Schlangengefäß 212 Sea Squill 191 secular games 240 seer 114, 116, 156, 161, 180–181 Semnones 220, 222 senate 10, 18–19, 32–33, 116, 119, 267 senators 20, 32–33, 152, 166, 239, 265, 267, 277, 288 servi publici 111 Shavout 273 sheep 171, 185, 189, 287 shoulder-blades 190 shrines See sanctuary Sibylline books 116–117 simulatrix 113 skull 35, 210–211, 220 slaughterer 112 slaves 16, 18, 25, 30, 111, 147–148, 152, 154, 168, 174, 184, 192, 197, 251, 265 snake 46, 52, 88, 170–171, 182, 212, 218, 227, 249 Sodales – Antoniniani 112 – Augustales 112 – Augustales Claudiales 112 – Flaviales Titiales 112 – Hadrianales 112 – Titii 111 soldiers 18–19, 30, 35, 68, 78–79, 131, 183, 187 soothsayer 90, 114, 133 Sophistic, first/second 249–250, 254, 288 spa 90 space, sacred 64, 66–67 specialists, religious/ritual 68, 81, 84, 87–89, 107–108, 113, 124–127, 180, 188, 195, 198, 250, 252 sportulae 283 statues of gods 44, 265, 282 statuettes 34, 45–46, 49, 52, 86, 92, 147, 153–154, 167, 210, 213, 224, 249, 282 status 13, 18, 49, 52, 57, 73–74, 77, 110, 113, 123, 125, 127–128, 144, 151–152, 155, 157, 174, 179, 184, 188, 191, 275, 283 stelae 72–73, 77, 87, 184 stips 280 subventions 269, 273 Sukkot 273 summa honoraria 84, 124, 271 sunrise 191 suovetaurilia 168

Keywords superstitio 32, 118, 147, 153, 243 synagogue 127, 155 synodoi 270, 283 Syrians 31, 35 tablets 31–32, 88, 194, 197–198, 213, 219, 227, 240–241 – lead 227 Tabulae Iguvinae 240 tariff for priesthood 269 taurobolium 280 tax 19, 124, 264–266, 271–272, 274, 287 temenos (space marked off) 227 temple 12, 43, 45, 59, 64, 127, 147–148, 167, 174, 227, 262, 267, 273, 275, 282–283, 287 – estates 271 – of Herod (Jerusalem) 274 – on podium 72 – peristases 72 – personnel 268 – slaves 268 terracotta 73–74, 92, 224–226, 230, 265 – figure 92, 224–225 tessera (token) 278 texts and religion 234 textual practices 142 theatre 43, 53, 59, 91–92, 193 – performance 91 theatricality 91 theology 19–21, 30, 110, 141, 143, 145–146, 149–151, 160, 162, 193, 214, 246 thesauros 272, 279, 285 thiasoi 123 threskeia 143 thysiai 120 tomb 183–185, 198 – pyramidal 184 tombstone 26, 109 tophet 186 Torah scroll 215 traditionalism 20, 147 transfer, religious 35

323 travel 29, 265, 286, 290–291 – to sanctuary 26 treasury 63, 84, 219, 285 Treveri 25, 28 triumphator 69 Umbrians 69 universal idea of god 30 universalism 38 urban growth 35 urban networks 37 urbanization 17 vernacular 195, 197 Vestal virgins 108, 110, 113, 119 villages 17, 26, 76, 93, 192, 266, 273 vision 88, 114 visits by gods between sanctuaries 287 voces magicae 171 Volsicans 68 voluntary association 16, 110, 154–155, 157, 238 votive – anatomical 90, 219 – object 17, 31, 90, 92, 94, 173–174, 176, 265, 272, 277, 279–281 vow 31–32, 116 water 46, 76, 92, 120, 173, 176, 178, 190, 198, 218, 227, 264, 270, 276 – rights 272 – Roman technology 227 wine production 54 wish 86, 133, 190 women 9, 21, 25–26, 113–114, 123, 147–148, 154, 158, 169, 189, 191, 270, 290 writing 15, 19, 21, 26, 36–37, 57, 129, 142, 153, 159, 169, 175, 181, 190, 194, 197, 219, 221, 235, 237, 240, 248, 251, 262 – records 111, 117, 239, 267–268, 292 xenodochion 291 zodiac 114 Zoroastrianism 27, 34, 36