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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 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 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, 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 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 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

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.

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).