Читать книгу Religion in the Roman Empire - Группа авторов - Страница 30

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 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 multi-layered 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—god-sacrifice-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 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 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 re-founded 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 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 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.