Garth Fowden’s research while affiliated with National Centre for Social research and other places

Decline versus TransformationClassical CrystallizationsMonotheist HistoriographyFor and Against the First MillenniumAcknowledgmentsNotesReferences

The late polytheist world-view, as formulated by intellectuals, affords the historian a first orientation amidst an exceptionally complex body of evidence. But daily contact with the gods came to most people not, of course, through philosophy or theurgy, nor even the occult sciences, but through public and domestic cult, dreams, the rites of the dead, and so on. Here, too, the central problem is always how to deal correctly with, and exploit, divine power, in order to maintain personal and communal identity. It is only secondarily, if at all, the pursuit of what we call “religious experience’, or of ethical progress. Immersion in the details of cultic practice provides evidence to support these generalizations about mentality, and allows others to emerge. SHRINES AND CULTS The building of temples was among the most fundamental human social acts. Temples were at once the distinction (or “eyes’) and the essence (or “soul’) of any settlement, whether town or village (Lib. Or. xxx.9, 42). As the sixth-century historian John of Ephesus wrote of the mighty “house of idols’ at Heliopolis (Baalbek), “the adornments of that house were so wonderful that, when the misguided pagans [considered] the strength of that house, they glorified even more in their misguidedness’ (ap. ps.-Dionysius of Tel-Mahre, Chronicle (Chabot (1933) = CSCO 104) 130; tr. A. Palmer). Besides making public statements about the power of the gods and the role of religion in the community, the temples also said something about the structure of the society that made them.

“Paganism’ was first invented towards the end of its existence, during the period covered by this volume. Previously there had been “religion’, or “piety’, evoked by the many gods of many peoples. The monotheistic religions – Judaism, and its recent offspring Christianity – were aberrations. But as Christianity's fortunes improved, it felt the need to define, as diminishingly as possible, “the other’. Hence – in the Latin-speaking world and, with any frequency, only from the mid-fourth century onward – “paganism’, from paganus, meaning originally either a rustic or a civilian (non-soldier), in other words “not one of ours’. In the Greek-speaking world, adherents of the old religion came in the fourth century to be referred to as “Hellenes’, a different sort of limitation, but still a limitation, which had however the virtue of drawing attention to Greek culture's role as a common frame of reference for the various local polytheisms of the eastern Mediterranean. The convenience of “paganism’, in particular, was that, as a single cultural hypostasis, undifferentiated either spatially or chronologically, it could in toto be credited with whatever infamy had at any time in the past attached to alleged cultic abuses, however isolated. Because of the pejorative connotations of “paganism’, and in order to underline that the cult of the many gods, whether in the ancient Mediterranean world or anywhere else, does not have to be seen through Christian eyes, we shall speak of “polytheism’. Admittedly, “polytheism’ too is a clumsy and implicitly monotheist category, since it attaches a single label to a range of religions whose most obvious common denominator is apparent only from a monotheist perspective; but it is a less nakedly offensive formulation than “paganism’.

The perspective on late polytheism offered in the last two chapters has been primarily that of the individual. But individuals all organized themselves into groups as well: whether families at the graveside of a relative, villagers celebrating the harvest festival, Isiac initiates lending each other a helping hand in cities across the empire, or philosophers gathering round a revered teacher to study. These group identities, transitory or more enduring, were consecrated by the invocation and presence of particular gods. And the sum total of all these individuals, amidst their shifting group allegiances, was Rome's empire. To the empire's public cults as well, individuals were expected to pledge themselves, to strengthen and in turn be strengthened. It is time now to make a more consistent use of this public perspective, both at the centre and in the provinces. THE ROLE OF THE EMPORER As the incarnation of human power, the emperor had to be explained and accommodated no less than did the gods, and irrespective of whether one was polytheist, Jew or Christian. Hence the emergence of emperor-cult. Although during their lifetime the emperor and his family were “divine’ (divi) rather than “gods’ (dei), their statues were everenced in conspicuous sanctuaries in even the smallest provincial cities, and they were depicted in the company and often within the very temples of the gods. Rulers might also claim to be specially guarded by certain powerful deities, or be assimilated to them by being represented with their attributes. The Severans out did their forerunners in this respect, and Julia Domna's surviving portraits assimilate her to at least ten different goddesses.