Читать книгу Religion in the Roman Empire - Группа авторов - Страница 17

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 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

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.

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