Subjects, gods and empire, or
Monarchism as a theological problem
Clifford Ando
[email protected]
Please do not cite or circulate without permission.
Let me start by outlining what seem to me two problems of theory in much contemporary
scholarship on religion of the high Roman empire. The first is perhaps best described as
normative, the second conceptual.
To begin, an almost universal ambition, indeed, often an explicit one, of most recent
grand theories of religion in the Roman empire has been to correct or at the very least to set
aside such frameworks as once produced triumphalist narratives of the rise and inevitable
victory of Christianity. (A more appropriate goal might have been to shift the units of
analysis altogether--to ask, in other words, what entitles us to speak of plural 'religions' and to
understand them as historically autonomous and thus in competition in the first place.) But
the fact remains that the Mediterranean world did convert, which is to say that inter alia it
converted to a vision of religion in which conversion was meaningful, and this fact remains a
great explanandum in the field.
I designate this problem normative because it seems to me often to arise from a
concern to avoid teleology not simply on intellectual grounds--in order not to presume that
2
which must in fact be explained--but also, or even exclusively, from anxieties that might best
be described as post-colonial: accepting the dubious contention that Christianity and
contemporary paganisms were autonomous cultural formations martially opposed to one
another (not least in their pantheons), we have decided to reject not only Christian
historiography's diagnosis of its own success but likewise its judgement in respect to
paganism's failings. But this collusion to regard Greek and Roman paganism (that's a
disjunctive "and," by the way) as neither bankrupt nor dying has, for reasons hard to discern,
been extended, such that scholars frequently insist "paganism" or polytheism or the civic
cults or the oracles or what have you were not simply flourishing, but flourishing even as
before: indeed, we are often told that they simply persisted.1 In the new dispensation,
paganism--meaning especially but not exclusively the locative civic and regional cults of the
Roman empire--has become a religion without history.
The second problem of theory affecting much contemporary scholarship arises from
the very success of the dominant models of Greek and Roman civic religion of the last few
decades. The two most prominent--that of 'polis-religion' on the Greek side, and 'the civic
compromise' on the Roman--share with their various revisions and rivals a tendency
implicitly or explicitly to understand religious life as embedded within larger political or
cultural formations.2 On this view, the traditional cults of Greek and Roman cities were
ordered by principles homologous to those that organized their dominant political and
cultural institutions and indeed were not conceptualized as distinct from them. The
adherence of individuals to such cults was then assumed to follow upon local structures of
political belonging: as cities each had their own gods, so citizens worshipped the gods of
their cities.
3
As scholars have begun over the last decade or so to argue, however useful these
models have been, their explanatory power is limited in a number of respects. Two concerns
of this critical literature are relevant to my argument today. First, models of religion as
embedded assume a quite distinctive and potentially misleading form of subjectivity, which
assigns to individuals imaginative and psychological horizons coterminous with those
imputed to them by the political-economic regime rendered visible in textual and epigraphic
evidence. As a result, they generally fail to account for any religious activity not consequent
upon membership in a polity: they have therefore been indicted for failing to explain magic
or incubation or private votives, or for that matter the differential contents of household
shrines.3
The second difficulty with contemporary models of civic religion has been most
cogently articulated by JZ Smith. As he demonstrated now two decades ago, no simple
chronological or developmental argument can account for the existence of cults with complex
institutional structures unrelated to those of the polis, nor, it would seem, for the adherence of
individuals to such cults.4 It furthermore bears stressing in this context that Smith explicitly
maintained on both theoretical and empirical grounds that his taxonomy was not a mask or
cipher for some earlier distinction between Greco-Roman and oriental/mystery cults. On the
contrary, he argued that many so-called mystery cults should in their late Hellenistic forms be
understood as locative in orientation; and that several, including those of Attis and Christ,
show signs in the Roman period of a gradual reinterpretation from a locative to a utopian
view.5
Although susceptible to independent articulation, these two difficulties--the one
antiteleological but issuing in antihistorical thinking, the other arising from models whose fit
to the data gradually diminishes, which fact the models themselves naturally cannot explain--
4
operate together to handicap much research. For where the one encourages us to see the
religions of the high empire in timeless persistence, the other is capable of seeing only them.
The results are historical perspectives of an astonishing and insistent stasis: this is so, it
seems to me, despite quite extraordinary advances in various forms of particularist and
empirical inquiry. But whatever the fluctuations in the technologies of cult or ebb and flow in
the popularity of particular gods these researches reveal, what our fear of teleology will
apparently not permit us to say is that religion in the Roman empire has a history; that one
religion, armed not least with a polemical understanding of what religion is, sought
successfully to eradicate its peers; but that its victory must have had deep historical roots
existing in intricate connection to precisely the disembedding of religion to which Smith
drew our attention; and that among those roots, the failure of the civic compromise looms
large. For though the Romans discovered that they, too, had a religion, it was for complex
reasons not easily exported. On the contrary, rather startlingly a Reichsreligion did not form
part of that national culture that the project of empire sought to universalize among first the
residents and later the citizens of the pre-Decianic empire.6
What we find instead is, for a time, a landscape of increasing complexity, in which an
evolving political economic reality and vastly heightened human mobility brought
previously-isolated cultural systems into ever more contact with each other. One result was
the spread of cults, at first located within immigrant populations; and secondarily the
articulation of new forms of religious identity, as religion became one among several cultural
forms that united the members of those communities in contradistinction to the populations
among whom they resided.7 That is to say, if the religions of Greek poleis and Roman
civitates were of and for their citizen bodies, the period of the empire witnessed staggering
growth in the number and assertiveness of communities of resident aliens, and religion
5
played a prominent role in their constitution.8 Not surprisingly, the earliest, largely abortive
attempts by imperial Greek and Latin writers to describe communities embedded within
civitates but having independent cultic associations, find articulation when those writers
confront the radically deracinated slave population of Rome: the language of Cassius
Longinus in Tacitus, Ann. 14, to the effect that Roman households contained nationes in
familiis..., in quibus diuersi ritus, externa sacra aut nulla sunt, "entire nations of slaves,
practising diverse cults and foreign rites, or none at all," is perhaps the most famous of these
(Tacitus Ann.14.44.3). Such slaves existed as persons and property before the law, and were
known to adhere to cults as individuals and within communities, but neither the slaves
themselves nor their communities were understood as political. Their religious identity--their
religion--had therefore of necessity to be disarticulated from any recognizable form of
poliadic or republican jural-political identity and might have been theorized as such, if only
they had been worth thinking about.
What is more, it is likely that it was precisely the dislocation of cults that had been in
their original context locative that permitted or at least promoted their reinterpretation as
utopian in the high empire. Mutatis mutandis, even Roman cults in new contexts, divorced
from sites to which purely Roman myths attached them, must have taken on new meanings
now lost to us. But this aspect of the religious history of the empire will elude us, so long as
it is mere plurality, whether of gods or religions, by which we index the state of affairs.
Paradoxically, the adoption of such indices is perhaps the most significant practice religious
studies owes to Christian late antiquity; and yet it is precisely Christian late antiquity that this
tradition cannot explain.9
Effects of empire
6
The cul-de-sac in which we now find ourselves is not, however, a necessary endpoint to
contemporary narrative. On the contrary, it is, I argue, precisely modern understandings of
Graeco-Roman religion as embedded and locative, as both homologous to, and consonant
with, the ordering principles and institutional arrangements of the societies that animated
them, which can open the door to a more robust analysis of change, to ways of understanding
the history of religion under the empire as, at least in part, an effect of empire. Simply put,
integration into the Roman empire placed enormous stress on the particularized conceptions
of order and of the self that governed material social relations in the communities it absorbed,
and indeed in Rome itself. One side of the homology changed. Did religion not respond?
On this view, JZ Smith's insight regarding the locative origins of utopian cults does
not so much provide an answer as provoke a question. In what follows, I wish to sketch what
seem to me salient effects of imperial rule on the structures of communal life, which will
have challenged the capacity of traditional cult, in respect of its verbal, gestural, material and
cognitive compontents, to emplace the world. In particular, I want to suggest that the
workings of imperial government, in promoting greater mobility and riving communities and
individuals, one from another, by means of administrative law, effectively atomized
individuals in respect to their immediate political and social contexts. In so doing, the empire
abetted the creation of new and distinctive forms of subjectivity, east and west. Up to a
point, these tectonic changes provoked homeomorphic responses in the domain of religion,
not least in theological discourse. But only to a point, for even as those processes unfolded, I
argue, the ability of cult and the theologies it reified to give cogent, substantial and enduring
articulation to the horizons of daily life gradually collapsed. Here at last, the correlates
7
between the radical alienism of the slave and the deracinated cosmopolitanism of the imperial
citizen are made visible.
Roman practice in provincial governance in the conquest and immediate postconquest period is well-described in light of two modern theories of empire: on the one
hand, being an empire (and not a state), Rome governed through the cultivation and
management of difference. A very great deal of Roman administrative law was thus directed
toward controlling geographic aspects of social and economic conduct, most notably in
forbidding forms of sociality (esp. marriage) and rights of contract between individuals and
groups across boundaries established by Roman agents. At a minimal level, Rome's aim was
no doubt to prevent the realization of solidarity among conquered populations.
At the same time, Rome of this period might be understood as a particularly complex
form of aristocratic empire: it worked through the cooptation of local elites; it shaped local
institutions of government so as to conduce their formation and stability across time; and it
left the conduct of local politics, of jurisdiction, and indeed of tax collection in their hands.
One might illustrate the spirit of the administrative actions taken by Rome in the
period of consolidation with an example from the sphere of religion, namely, the definition
offered by Festus of so-called municipal rites (handout no. 1), The facticity of Festus's
historical claim notwithstanding, the definition distills an early imperial, metropolitan view
of the religious landscape of the empire: on the one hand, the empire is tesselated into as
many communities as once were conquered; while on the other, the nominal persistence of
pre-existing institutions in those myriad localities, under purely local leadership, is taken to
conduce both a particular local and a singular imperial order.
It is, of course, one of the functions of locative traditions to reinscribe and so, often
enough, perchance to redescribe order in the face of change, and had Rome wholly and truly
8
governed through local elites, with time, who knows what the fundamentalist work of the
empire's local, locative cults might have achieved. But as it happens, the world given
normative description by Festus never came fully into being. For even as it took form,
another was being created, wrought also by the actions of government, structured on very
different principles than the other. This came about for two reasons: first, for various
reasons and by varied means, Roman government so worked as to alienate individuals in
respect to their social and political contexts--to bracket them in respect to the structures of
value that made poliadic localism meaningful; second, it simultaneously undermined or
effectively sidelined local institutions of governance and in particular of dispute resolution.
In consequence, local modes of political belonging were ultimately evacuated of meaning,
and the cultural forms through which belonging and its entailments were expressed seem to
have lost their relevance. I take these problems in turn.10
As regards atomization, allow me to commence with the simplest instrument by
which such was achieved, namely, the grant of citizenship. I quote one of the most famous
documents attesting such, namely, the Tabula Banasitana, the inscribed copy of a text
produced from the imperial archives on 6 July 177:
... At the request of Aurelius Iulianus, princeps of the Zagrenses, by petition,
with the support of Vallius Maximianus by letter, we grant Roman citizenship
to them, salvo iure gentis, with local law preserved, without harm to the taxes
and duties of the People or the Imperial Purse. (IAM 94)
On one level, the quoted clause attests no more than a grant of citizenship. Such grants were
wholly commonplace. Indeed, if one feature of Roman history stands out in the history of
9
empires and likewise persists in common memory, it is the tendency of Rome to give away
its citizenship, even unto that still remarkable moment when it did so universally.
That said, its wording hints at a more complex problem, less often remarked. The
spread of a Roman law of persons--even the mere classification of the conquered as alien-imposed upon local systems of identity formation a superordinate one, common to the
empire. More particularly, both ad hoc and systematic grants of citizenship per
magistratuum interpellated individuals in ways that atomized them in respect to just those
structures that made purely local identities meaningful and materially sustainable. It is
recognition of that fact, and its consequences for local economic and social orders, that
provoked the stipulation salvo iure gentis, whose import seems clear enough even if its
practical consequences remain obscure. Similar effects were no doubt worked by all manner
of administrative procedures that operated to create or even merely to classify the identities
of individuals in respect to Rome, not least the census.
We know this not simply from a large sociological literature on the operation of the
census in modern democracies. It is clear, rather, from the enormous body of evidence
suggesting that individuals retained and deployed both unofficial and notarized
administrative records attesting their status before the Roman state: from the citation of
earlier epikriseis in administrative hearings; to the submission of census returns, tax receipts
and death certificates in court; as well as the mere preservation of such documents in family
archives, for years and sometimes decades after their initial production.
Where local institutions are concerned, what patterns in the use of law courts suggest-naturally, insofar as these are visible to us--is a gradual delegitimization of purely local
sources of social authority, a perception, at least, that effective social power derived from
Rome and was most efficiently accessed through individuals and institutions holding (or
10
perceived to be holding) authority delegated directly from the metropole. These processes
could be jural or political or administrative, but they were all communicative. Indeed, they
are virtually all known to us by virtue of written testimonials to bilateral exchanges, in which
individuals addressed, and were themselves in turned addressed by, Roman authorities.
The cooptation of local elites, and their assimilation to Roman cultural norms--visible
to local subalterns not least in changes in elite nomenclature, but also changed patterns of
sociality and perhaps of dress and, who knows?, of sacrificial practice--thus went hand in
hand with a transformation worked by what we now call municipalization, in which local
offices that had existed in something like a fractal relationship to Roman institutions were
gradually reoriented in direct subordination to them. This is easiest to document in respect to
rules of jurisdiction but operated in respect to virtually all forms of public authority,
On my reconstruction, it was therefore above all the communicative actions of Roman
government, along with administrative practices designed to produce from persons objects of
knowledge and of governance, that constituted formerly conquered provincials as subjects.
What is more, in so individually interpellating them and in so communicating, Roman
government ultimately undermined its own various attempts to rule through local
aristocracies or, for that matter, to rule through the cultivation of difference. One might even
say that it ceased in any meaningful sense to be an empire. It became, rather, something like
a state--perhaps, to adopt the framework of Geoffrey Hosking, a state that was, rather than a
state that had, an empire--with a uniform law of persons and legal culture, both penetrating
(at least notionally) universally and uniformly throughout its territory.
These processes did not unfold overnight, nor did the second rapidly undermine the
first. On the contrary, the initial (re)constitution of local communities along Roman lines
went hand in hand with the diffusion among local elites of various cultural and political
11
forms by which individual ambition was channeled, and individual achievement was
expressed, through participation in communal authority structures, and through these same
the authority and indeed, the existence of local elites as a whole coalesced and consolidated.
I refer here to the content of elite self-fashioning--the holding of magistracies, priesthoods,
and the like; as well as to the formal means through which claims to honor were publicly
advanced and recognized: the career inscription above all, but also honorific decrees, public
portraiture, reliefs, and so forth; and finally also to the patterned distribution of such
commemorations within monumentalized urban landscapes in which all forms of public
display--of the self, notably, but also of monuments--were regulated in a patently selflegitimating manner by those self-same elites.11
At nearly the same time, however, the empire witnessed an astonishing efflorescence
of public-mindedness--of attention to the place of the self and of private corporate bodies in
the public sphere--on the part of non-elite actors, what amounted to an astonishing
politicization of the previously silent: I refer in particular to the enormous contribution made
by freedmen and even slaves, for example, to the epigraphic habit, or the vast role played by
freedmen in public priesthoods, or the rush of women, freedmen, and sometimes slaves and
children to Roman courts.12 The Principate is, on these terms, an explosion of voices. Up to
a point, one might argue that this development reflects the success achieved by economic
elites at the local level in inducing the worse off into playing the game by their rules, as it
were: by accepting as honors derivative versions of status markers among the elite, those
excluded from power colluded with the powerful in naturalizing a political and cultural
economy that worked to their disadvantage.
That said, this explosion seems to me only partially explicable through models of
cultural mimesis. In my view, it must also derive in very large measure from the self-
12
understanding achieved by such individuals through their constitution as imperial subjects:
their interpellation by agents and processes of imperial government thus endowed them with
a place and an agency that existed and operated geographically alongside but metaphysically
transcended the concrete and depersonalized political structures that nominally mediated
Roman power in the provincial landscape.13
Ultimately, however, these very processes by which individual provincials found their
place within the empire--which is to say, were classified and so achieved subjecthood-operated hand-in-hand with others, better known, which in the abstract amounted to a gradual
and finally an extreme intensification of the penetration by imperial government into the
structures of regional and local life. This, combined with the universal extension of
citizenship, operated so as to evacuate of meaning those varied forms of deportment and selffashioning that had made localism meaningful: euergetism, office, priesthood, and local
citizenship not least among them. On this reading, the death of the career inscription
amounts to an index, gesturing both to the more general phenomenon, namely, the collapse of
precisely that publicness of which the epigraphic habit remains our best evidence, as well as
to its cause: the disintegration of the local through its subordination to the imperial.14
Roman intervention and Roman government thus disturbed more than boundaries or
the place of things. Rather, what the empire presented was a set of structures superordinate
to the polis, outside it and foreign to it, and acting both upon and within it. The purely local
and contingent nature of the structures of life were thereby revealed as never before. By
virtue of the processes I have outlined, the stability of the empire overall, in both its imperial
and its local dimensions, will thus have come to rest upon a more homogenized cluster of
principles of legitimation. For what it's worth, in my view, the local cultures of the empire
remained even then too variegated--and the technology of its communicative apparatus too
13
primitive--to sustain such a monody. What one might call an important moment in the
history of governmentality thus faded away, and from its passage the Roman empire emerged
a less cohesive, less vibrant state.
What of religion? Local cultural norms might be adapted to emplace local life; but
how could they be made to account for structures apart, beyond and above them? As in
politics, so in religion, I focus on two patterns, the one more strictly developmental, the other
adapting an old apparatus to more revolutionary, or at least potentially revolutionary ends.
It was, of course, very often possible to accommodate new gods and new powers
within cult, through logic internal to the operation of ritual; or, one might say, it lay within
the efficacy and regular competence of many cults to account for even fairly radical
developments in the system of things. Perhaps the most helpfully explicated such cultic
system is that of Dea Dia, where, as John Scheid has demonstrated, the rites themselves vary
enormously in the range of gods worshipped, but the embrasure of those gods, including
members of the imperial house, takes place according to a strict logic.15 The same might be
said for the religious-theological import of the ritual housing of imperial portraits in the
temples of other gods, and likewise of the extension of the apparatus of cult to emperor
worship.16
I should perhaps stress now that I am not denying any significance to these
developments. Rather, I am seeking to isolate changes that I would describe as incapable of
articulation in the grammar or traditional signification of Greek or Roman ritual, or, when so
articulated, the effect was to bring a new language into being: shifts in the ontological status
accorded to deity, the development of new epistemological apparatus within (or without)
religious discourse or of new conceptualizations of personhood in relation to the world and
14
the like, particularly such as I would understand to be covariant with the emergent structures
of (super-poliadic) political subjectivity in the high empire.
One such, visible in religious art as well as theological discourse, amounts a shift in
perception regarding the locus, both geographic and metaphysical, of effective power. By
this, in religious art I intend the representation of deity in the trappings of imperial
officialdom: most notably, holding standards or wearing a Roman uniform, such as appear in
Syria, Dura, Palmyra and Egypt in the third century, and were treated in magnificent articles
by Mikhail Rostovtzeff and Ernst Kantorowicz a half century ago, or in the Danubian
provinces, again in the third century.17 In one perspective, these representations may be
aligned with the attribution of superlative divine qualities to emperors (in contradistinction to
gods?)--they are most immanent18--and hence understood in some loose relation to the
cognitive work performed by cult in accommodating imperial power within enduring
conceptualizations of the world.
But in another, to my mind far more revealing perspective, they might be understood
as kindred to the valuation of gods by worshippers according their esteem and support of
those same emperors--they are philokaisaros, and so forth.19 On this understanding, the
representation of a god amounts to a theological statement of a sort, in which, on my reading,
the source domain in a stunning variety of cognitive systems around the empire coalesces
across the second and third centuries around some crude picture of the power within the
empire. The simplest instantiation of this phenomenon is perhaps the rewriting of cultural
metaphor and its analogical elaboration in the Latin translation of [Aristotle] Per‹ kÒsmou
transmitted under the name of Apuleius. Here, the modeling of heaven on analogy with the
Great King's rulership through satraps, widely attested in Hellenistic literature, is very
substantially expanded and its underlying apparatus rewritten in strictly Roman terms
15
(handout nos. 2-3). Not surprisingly, we find much the same language in Tertullian: all
agree, he writes, that there is one God--the chief god, the princeps, of perfectae maiestatis-but the pagans hold that the procurantes et praefectos et praesides through whom god
exercises his imperium should be worshipped alongside of him (handout no. 4).
But similar formulations begin very rapidly to appear in Greek theological literature,
too, and perhaps most spectacularly in Christian texts, where its adoption substantially
precedes the conversion of Constantine. One might classify these instantiations under three
rubrics: descriptions of the governance of heaven on analogy with the governance of earth
(commencing perhaps with the curious hybrid in Celsus, taken up by Origen, at a moment
before the place of the Great King in this tradition was finally abandoned [handout no. 5]);
construals of representation in religious contexts on analogy with imperial portraiture (the
earliest known to me is Methodius [handout no. 6]); and the likening of religious ceremonial,
either as described in Scripture or reenacted in liturgy, to imperial ceremonials.20
There is, of course, a not inconsiderable historical irony in the fact that the Roman
emperor supplants the Great King as the dominant cultural paradigm for world-encompassing
power at nearly the same moment when, in critical literature, the imperial court is described
by contemporaries as adopting Persian ceremonial.21 But as perhaps Gibbon knew better than
any writer since and perhaps before, the cognitive gaps we denominate ironic are often tragic
and always revealing. For what these kindred phenomena of imperial theological discourse
reveal is a stunning inversion of the political and theological ideology once named
monarchism--the belief in a single and singular rulership of heaven--which has oft been
depicted as a theological doctrine invented or at least deployed in support of a particular
distribution of power on earth. So described, this scholarship once had an immense and
distinguished life in our field.22 But the ancient evidence that I have presented is notable
16
against this backdrop for two reasons: first, if we follow Momigliano's characterization of
theology in the early Principate--in it, according to him, "the gods provide models to the
emperors, they do not explain the Empire"--this literature on governance is, to a point,
novel.23 Second, and more importantly, they are precisely inversions: it is the governance of
earth, not heaven, that is the source domain in these analogical mappings. At a purely
cognitive level, this constitutes notable evidence for the direction of historical influence
within this discursive regime; and at an intellectual-historical one, we find here a stunning
absence of that self-consciousness in respect to epistemology that in high imperial
scholarship comes to infect both Christian and neo-Platonic philosophies of religious
metaphor.
On this reading, the phenomena that I have discussed--these disparate traditions of
representation, epithesis, and metaphor--might be usefully understood as effecting precisely
the sort of reversal in ontological priority (my term, not his) that Arthur Darby Nock sought
to identify, isolate and describe in his study of "the emperor's divine comes."24 My
contribution to his effort could then be described as expanding the range of phenomena
understood to instantiate such a reversal and assigning it a cause.
I have urged, furthermore, that the shift in fundamental understanding of the structure
of divine power of which these phenomena represent inevitably partial articulations must
have had recursive effects on the vitality and viability of what might now be described as
purely local cult. The decline throughout much of the empire of both private dedications and
privately-funded building projects should then be understood as kindred in cause to the
decline of the career-inscription. In both cases, a cultural form turns out to have possessed
highly particularized legitimacy in giving public expression to a contingent form of public
17
persona, which became in the new post-Antonine state unviable.25 The relevance of local
cults was thus declining, and local gods were dying, even before they were killed off.
18
1
See, e.g., Aline Rousselle, "Suggestions pour l'étude du paganisme de 191 à 325," in
L'Empire romain de 192 à 325, Pallas hors sérié (1997), 11-19.
2
Brent Nongbri, "Dislodging 'embedded' religion: a brief note on a scholarly trope," Numen
55 (2008), 440-460 provides a recent assessment. See also Andreas Bendlin, "Peripheral
centres - central peripheries: religious communication in the Roman empire," in Hubert
Cancik and Jörg Rüpke, eds, Römische Reichsreligion and Provinzialreligion (Tübingen:
Mohr Siebeck, 1997), 35-68; idem, "Looking beyond the civic compromise: religious
pluralism in late republican Rome," in Ed Bispham and Christopher Smith, eds., Religion in
archaic and republican Rome and Italy (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2000), 115135; idem, "Rituals or beliefs? 'Religion' and the religious life of Rome." Scripta Classica
Israelica 20 (2001), 191-208; and Clifford Ando, "Cities, gods, empire" (forthcoming).
3
Greg Woolf, "Polis-religion and its alternatives in the Roman provinces," in Cancik and
Rüpke 1997, op. cit. n. 2, 71-84, reprinted in Clifford Ando, ed., Roman Religion (Edinburgh:
Edinburgh University Press, 2003), 39-54; Andreas Bendlin, "Looking beyond the civic
compromise," op. cit. n. 2; Clifford Ando, "Evidence and orthopraxy," Journal of Roman
Studies 99 (2009), 171-181.
4
J.Z. Smith, Drudgery Divine (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1990).
5
Smith, Drudgery Divine, op. cit. n. 4, 85-143.
6
On the "discovery of Roman religion," see Clifford Ando, Imperial ideology and provincial
loyalty in the Roman empire (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000), 206-209, 385398; see also idem, The matter of the gods (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2008),
1-3, 105-108. I have recently devoted several chapters and essays to problems attendant
19
upon Roman efforts to accommodate their civic cult to the context of empire, as well as to
modern ways of theorizing their failure: see esp. "Exporting Roman religion," in Jörg Rüpke,
ed., A Companion to Roman Religion (Oxford: Blackwell, 2007), 429-445; "Diana on the
Aventine," in J. Rüpke, ed., 2008. Die Religion des römischen Reiches (Tübingen: Mohr
Siebeck, 2008), 91-104; Matter, 95-148; and "Aliens, ambassadors and the integrity of the
empire," Law & History Review 26 (2008), 491-519. For related studies of the disembedding
of religious identity see Seth Schwartz, Imperialism and Jewish society, 200 B.C.E. - 640 C.E.
(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001), 179-289; and Daniel Boyarin, Border lines:
the partition of Judaeo-Christianity (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2004).
Stuart Miller, "Roman imperialism, Jewish self-definition and Rabbinic society," Association
for Jewish Studies Review 31 (2007), 329-362, offers a helpful review of their work and the
response it has provoked. Regarding the transfer or reduplication of cults on a more general
level, see the case studies and cautionary remarks in Angelos Chaniotis, "Ritual dynamics in
the eastern Mediterranean: case studies in ancient Greece and Asia Minor," in W.V. Harris,
ed., Rethinking the Mediterranean (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), 141-166.
7
Such a view of the religious history of the ancient Mediterranean in the early imperial
period is perhaps still most cogently articulated in John North's (justly famous) essay, "The
development of religious pluralism," in Judith Lieu, John North and Tessa Rajak., eds., The
Jews among pagans and Christians in the Roman Empire. London: Routledge, 1992), 174193.
8
On this topic see for now Nicole Belayche and Simon C. Mimouni, eds., Les communautés
religieuses dans le monde gréco-romain. Essais de définition (Turnhout: Brepols, 2003); see
also Lellia Cracco Ruggini, "Nuclei immigrati e forze indigene in tre grandi centri
20
commerciali dell'impero," in J. H. D'Arms and E. C. Kopf, eds. The seaborne commerce of
ancient Rome, Memoirs of the American Academy in Rome, 36 (Rome: American Academy
at Rome, 1980), 55-76; RamsayMacMullen, "The unromanized in Rome," in Shaye J. D.
Cohen and Ernest S. Frerichs, eds., Diasporas in Antiquity, Brown Judaic Studies, 288
(Atlanta: Scholars Press, 1993), 47-64.; and Nicole Belayche, "Les immigrés orientaux à
Rome et en Campanie: fidélité aux patria et intégration sociale," in André Laronde and Jean
Leclant, ed., La Méditerranée d'une rive à l'autre: culture classique et cultures périphériques
(Paris: Diffusion de Boccard, 2007), 243-260.
9
In other words, it was Christians (and Jews) in late antiquity who polemically assigned the
multiplicity of gods and cults in their world to a collective paganism, and our tendency to
write histories of religion by counting gods or enumerating cults, or itemizing cult practices,
is in part a legacy of this tradition. But Christian polemicists developed this way of talking
about religion precisely to assert the radical otherness of Christianity to its context. It is
therefore no wonder, quite apart from our fear of teleology, that traditional heuristic tools in
the history of Mediterranean religion fail to bridge the gap between (say) the late second and
late fourth centuries.
10
The arguments outlined here condense ones I have laid out rather more exhaustively
elsewhere, including Imperial ideology and provincial loyalty in the Roman empire
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000); but especially "Imperial identities," in Tim
Whitmarsh, ed., Local knowledge and microidentities in the imperial Greek world
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, forthcoming 2009); "From Republic to Empire,"
in Michael Peachin, ed., The Oxford Handbook of Social Relations in the Roman World
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, forthcoming 2009); "Empire, state and communicative
21
action," in Christine Kuhn, ed., Kommunikation und Öffentliche Meinung in der Antiken We/t
- Political Communication and Public Opinion in the Ancient Mediterranean World
(forthcoming); and "Law and the landscape of empire," in Stéphane Benoist, ed., Figures
d'empire, fragments de mémoire: Pouvoirs (pratiques et discours, images et
représentations), et identités (sociales et religieuses)dans le monde romain impérial
(I s. av J.-C. - V s. ap. J.-C.) (forthcoming).
er
11
e
On this theme see, e.g., Geza Alföldy, "Bildprogramme in den römischen Städten des
Conventus Tarraconensis. Das Zeugnis der Statuenportamente," Revista de la Universidad
Complutense 18, número 118 (1979), 177-275; idem, Römische Statuen in Venetia und
Histria. Epigraphische Quellen, AbhHeid 1984, no. 3 (Heidelberg: Carl Winter, 1984);
Markus Sehlmeyer, Stadtrömische Ehrenstatuen der republikanischen Zeit, Historia
Einzelschriften 130 (Stutgart: Franz Steiner, 1999); Markus Sehlmeyer, "Die kommunikative
Leistung römischer Ehrenstatuen," in Maximilian Braun, Andreas Haltenhoff and FritzHeiner Mutschler, eds., Moribus antiquis res stat Romana (Munich: K. G. Saur, 2000), 271284; and Nicholas Purcell, "Urban spaces and central places. The Roman world," in Susan
E.Alcock and R. Osborne, eds., Classical Archaeology (Oxford: Blackwell, 2007), 182-202.
12
On the epigraphic habit see Ramsay MacMullen, "The epigraphic habit in the Roman
Empire," AJPh 103 (1982), 233-246. On freedman in imperial cult see Arthur Darby Nock,
"Seviri and Augustales," in Mélanges Bidez, Annuaire de l'institut de philologie et d'histoire
orientales, 2 (Brussels: Secrétariat de l'Institut, 1933), 627-638, reprinted in Arthur Darby
Nock, Essays on religion and the ancient world, ed. Zeph Stewart (Oxford: Clarendon Press,
1972), 348-356. On women, children and slaves before the law see Liselot Huchthausen,
"Herkunft and ökonomische Stellung weiblicher Adressaten von Reskripten des Codex
22
Iustinianus (2. und 3. Jh. u. Z.)," Klio 56 (1974), 199-228; eadem, "Kaiserliche
Rechtsauskünfte an Sklaven und in ihrer Freiheit angefochtene Personen aus dem Codex
Iustinianus," WZRostock 23 (1974), gesellschafts-und sprachwissenschaftliche Reihe, Heft 3,
251-257; "Kaiserliche Reskripte an Frauen aus den Jahren 117 bis 217 u. Z.," Actes de la XIIe
conférence internationale d’études classiques “Eirene," (Bucharest: Editura Academiei
Republicii Socialiste România, 1975), 479-488; and eadem, "Zu kaiserlichen Reskripten an
weibliche Adressaten aus der Zeit Diokletians (284-305 u. Z.)," Klio 58 (1976), 55-85.
13
The phrasing is indebted to Brent Shaw, "Autonomy and tribute: mountain and plain in
Mauretania Tingitana," in Pierre-Robert Baduel, ed., Desert et montagne au Maghreb:
hommage à Jean Dresch. Revue de l'Occident Musulman et de la Méditeranée 41-42 (1986),
66-89 at 74-75; see also Brent Shaw, "Rebels and outsiders," CAH2 11 (2000), 361-403 at
362-364.
14
On the end of the career inscription, see Werner Eck, "Elite und Leitbilder in der römischen
Kaiserzeit," in J. Dummer and M. Vielberg, eds., Leitbilder der Spätantike -- Eliten und
Leitbilder (Stuttgart: Franz Steiner, 1999), 31-55. Charting changes in self-representation by
the elite, in respect to both medium and message, Eck concludes with a reading of a midfourth century 'career inscription.' Eck notes that the inscription does mention the honorand's
offices, but continues: "Doch all dies geht fast unter in den Lobpreisungen siner persönlichen
eigenschaften, dem splendor seiner auctoritas, der admirabilis eloquentia und benevolentia,
der moderatio und iustitia. Dies wird von ihm verkündet, nicht mehr vornehmlich der
ordnungsgemäße Vollzug einter vollständigen Laufbahn im Dienst der res publica. Früher
war dies die sehr einheitliche Botschaft solcher Monumente gewesen. Jetzt aber tritt an die
Stelle dieser relativen Einheit der senatorischen Elite weit stärker das Individuelle. Die
23
normierende und prägende Kraft des res publica als alleiniger Bezugspunkt eines Mitglieds
der Elite hatte ihre Selbstverständlichkeit verloren" (55). See also idem, "Der Senator und
die Öffentlichkeit - oder: Wie beeindruckt man das Publikum?" in Werner Eck and Matthäus
Heil, eds., Senatores populi Romani. Realität und mediale Präsentation einer
Führungsschicht, HABES 40 (Stuttgart: Franz Steiner, 2005), 1-18, as well as Fergus Millar,
"Die Bedeutung der Cursusinschriften für das Studium der römischen Administration im
Lichte des griechisch-römischen Reiches von Theodosius II," in Rudolf Haensch and
Johannes Heinrichs, eds., Herrschen und Verwalten. Der Alltag der römischen
Administration in der Hohen Kaiserzeit (Köln: Böhlau, 2007), 438-446. For a very different
interpretation of the end of the epigraphic habit in respect (inter alia) to enthusiasm among
local elites for office-holding (but in respect also to changing aesthetics in self-presentation)
see Christian Witschel, Krise - Rezession - Stagnation? der Westen des Römischen Reiches
im 3. Jahrhundert n. Chr. (Frankfurt: Clauss, 1999), 60-84.
15
John Scheid, "Hiérarchie et structure dans le polythéisme romain. Façons romaines de
penser l'action," Archiv für Religionsgeschichte 1 (1999), 184-203. This essay appears in an
English translation by Philip Purchase under the title, "Hierarchy and structure in Roman
polytheism: Roman methods of conceiving action," in Ando, ed., Roman religion, op. cit. n.
3, 164-189, and has been reprinted with modifications in John Scheid, Quand faire, c'est
croire. Les rites sacrificiels des Romains (Paris: Aubier, 2005).
16
Arthur Darby Nock, "SÊnnaow YeÒw," HSCP 41 (1930), 1-62, reprinted in Nock, Essays,
op. cit. n. 11, 202-251; idem, "The emperor's divine comes," Journal of Roman Studies 37
(1947), 102-116, reprinted in Nock, Essays, op. cit. n. 11, 653-675; Sabine MacCormack,
"Roma, Constantinopolis, the emperor, and his genius," Classical Quarterly 25 (1975), 131-
24
150; Thomas Pekáry, Das römische Kaiserbildnis in Staat, Jult und Gesellschaft dargestellt
Anhand der Schriftquellen, Das römische Heerscherbild, 3 Abt., Bd. 5 (Berlin: Mann, 1985),
55-57. On imperial cult see Christian Habicht, Gottmenschentum und griechische Städte,
second edition, Zetemata 14 (Munich: C. H. Beck, 1970); and Simon Price, Rituals and
power: the Roman imperial cult in Asia Minor (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
1984).
17
Mikhail Rostovtzeff, "Vexillum and Victory," Journal of Roman Studies 32 (1942), 92-
106; Ernst Kantorowicz, "Gods in uniform," Proceedings of the American Philosophical
Society 105 (1961), 368-393 = idem, Selected studies (Locust Valley, NY: Augustin, 1965),
7-24, a lovely volume with fresh plates; Geza Alföldy, "Die Krise des Imperium Romanum
und die Religion Roms," in Werner Eck, ed., Religion und Gesellschaft in der römischen
Kaiserzeit. Kolloquium zu Ehren von Friedrich Vittinghoff (Köln: Bohlau, 1989), 53-102 at
81 and 92.
18
On epiphanestatos see for now Fritz Mitthof, "Vom fler≈tatow Ka›sar zum
§pifan°statow Ka›sar: die Ehrenprädikate in der Titulatur der Thronfolger des 3. Jh. n.
Chr. nach den Papyri," ZPE 99 (1993), 97-111.
19
On philokaisaros see W. H. Buckler, "Auguste, Zeus Patroos," RPhil, 3e serié 9 (1935),
177-188; Joyce Reynolds, "Further information on the imperial cult at Aphrodisias," StCl 24
(1986), 109-117 at 110.
20
A much-treated topic, of course, on which see André Grabar, Christian iconography: a
study of its origins (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1968), 44-45.
21
The criticism leveled at Diocletian by both Aurelius Victor, Caesares 39 and Ammianus
15.5.18 suggests an origin in the Kaisergeschichte. For the historical and historiographic
25
problems involved in the study of ceremonial see Clifford Ando, "The end of antiquity," in
Alessandro Barchiesi and Walter Scheidel, eds., The Oxford Handbook of Roman Studies
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, forthcoming), and Michael Whitby, "The role of the
emperor," in David Gwynn, ed., A.H.M. Jones and the Later Roman Empire (Leiden: Brill,
2008), 65-96.
22
As an aside, I observe that this literature varies a great deal not least in the political
commitments it reveals. Highlights include Pierre Batiffol, "La conversion de Constantin et
la tendance au monothéisme dans la religion romaine," Bulletin d'ancienne littérature et
d'archéologie chrétiennes 3 (1913), 132-141; F. J. Dölger, "Zur antiken und frühchristlichen
Auffassung der Herrschergewalt von Gottes Gnaden," Antike und Christentum 3 (1932), 117127; Wilhelm Enßlin, "Gottkaiser und Kaiser von Gottes Gnaden," SitzBay 1943 no. 6, 5383; Per Beskow, Res Gloriae: the kingship of Christ in the early church (Stockholm:
Almqvist & Wiksell, 1962); Ernst Kantorowicz, "Oriens Augusti--Lever du Roi," DOP 17
(1963), 119-177; and Arnaldo Momigliano, "The disadvantages of monotheism for a
universal state," Classical Philology 81 (1986), 285-297, reprinted in idem, On pagans, Jews,
and Christians (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 1987), 142-158. Erik Peterson,
Der Monotheismus als politisches Problem (Leipzig: Hegner, 1935), remains a landmark in
scholarship.
23
I note that I have attempted elsewhere to provide my own, very different answer to what
Momigliano calls his "two questions" (nevermind that three follow!): "first, whether and
how plurality of gods was related to pluri-national character of the Empire; and second, how
was the plurality of gods thought to help the emperors? If the Empire was justified by
26
victory, how was victory related to polytheism?" (op. cit. n. 22, 286). See The matter of the
gods, op. cit. n. 6, chapter 6. (See also Imperial ideology, op. cit. n. 6, 409 n. 13)
24
Op. cit. n. 16.
25
On the nature of the post-Antonine state see Ando, "Imperial identities," op. cit. n. 10; and
esp. idem, "Law's empire," forthcoming.