Religion in the Roman Empire

Die Religionen der Menschheit

Begründet vonChristel Matthias Schröder

Fortgeführt und herausgegeben von

Peter Antes, Manfred Hutter, Jörg Rüpke und Bettina Schmidt

Band Band 16,2

Preparation of an animal sacrifice; marble, fragment of an architectural relief, first quarter of the 2nd century CE. Department of Greek, Etruscan and Roman Antiquities, Rome, Italy.

Jörg Rüpke, Greg Woolf (Eds.)

Religion in the Roman Empire

Verlag W. Kohlhammer

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ISBN 978-3-17-029224-6

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The Roman Empire was home to a fascinating variety of different cults and religions. Its enormous extent, the absence of a precisely definable state religion and constant exchanges with the religions and cults of conquered peoples and of neighbouring cultures resulted in a multifaceted diversity of religious convictions and practices.

This volume provides a compelling view of central aspects of cult and religion in the Roman Empire, among them the distinction between public and private cult, the complex interrelations between different religious traditions, their mutually entangled developments and expansions, and the diversity of regional differences, rituals, religious texts and artefacts.

Prof. Dr. Jörg Rüpke teaches Religious Studies at Erfurt.

Prof. Greg Woolf teaches Ancient History at the University of California, Los Angeles.

Introduction: Living Roman Religion

Jörg Rüpke and Greg Woolf

1 Approaching Roman Religion

2 The Idea of Religion

3 Lived Ancient Religion

4 The Story of Rome

5 Themes and Methods

Bibliography

Empire as a field of religious action

Greg Woolf and Miguel John Versluys

1 A Religion of the Empire?

2 Emperors in the Religious life of the Roman World

3 Empire as an interaction sphere

4 The Empire in the World

5 Empire and Religions

Bibliography

The City as a Field of Religious Action: Manufacturing the Divine in Pompeii

William Van Andringa

1 A city full of gods

2 The Gods in Action

3 Working with the Gods

4 Conclusion

Bibliography

Sanctuaries – places of communication, knowledge and memory in Roman religion

Rubina Raja and Anna-Katharina Rieger

1 Sanctuaries – places for people and gods

2 The role of sanctuaries in an empire full of differences

2.1 New temples and gods under new rulers

2.2 Villages, towns and regions: spatial-religious references and regional traditions in sanctuaries

2.3 Sanctuaries as places of permanence, political appropriation and religious change

3 Costs, events and experiences: Visitors, users and religious specialists in a sanctuary

3.1 Space for experience—personal needs and religious experience

3.2 Oracles, healing and life counselling

3.3 Great feasts and great gifts

4 Collection of knowledge and objects – sanctuaries in the dynamic between memory and oblivion

Bibliography

People and Competencies

Georgia Petridou and Jörg Rüpke

1 Introduction

2 Public priests

3 Divination, diviners and the diagnostic value of signs

4 Oracular officials in the Eastern Roman Provinces

5 Anchoring religious innovation

6 Small-group religious entrepreneurs

7 Developing a priestly role in Christ-centred imaginations

8 The philosophers as religious experts and henotheistic tendencies before Christianity

9 Setting borders to religious experts

Bibliography

The Gods and Other Divine Beings

Heidi Wendt

1 Introduction

2 The Gods and Roman ›Religion‹

3 Whose Roman Religion?

4 Interacting with Divine Beings in the Roman World

5 Intellectualizing Religious Experts

Bibliography

Managing problems: Choices and solutions

Richard Gordon

1 Introduction

2 Mainstream options

2.1 Healing waters, therapeutic dreams

2.2 Divinatory shrines

2.2.1 Oracles, mainly in Italy

2.2.2 The eastern Mediterranean

2.3 Settling the dead

2.3.1 Monumentum and sepulcrum

2.3.2 Ritual meals

3 Minor ritual specialists

4 Self-help

5 Conclusion

Bibliography

Artefacts and their humans: Materialising the history of religion in the Roman world

Miguel John Versluys and Greg Woolf

1 Introduction: From (Late) Prehistoric to Roman

2 Artefacts and religious change in the Roman world

3 Objects, affordances, and religion

4 Objectscape and semiotic form

5 How new objects and materials change religious practices:

6 Religion in the Empire of things

7 Beyond wood

8 With terracotta (and double moulds)

9 Through marble and

10 Led by lead

11 Conclusion

Bibliography

The Impact of Textual Production on the Organisation and Proliferation of Religious Knowledge in the Roman Empire

Georgia Petridou and Jörg Rüpke

1 Introduction

2 Calendars: Appropriating Time and Systematizing Religious Action

3 Controlling ›Religion‹: Legalization and Ratification of Religious Knowledge

4 Re-framing ›Religion‹: Exegesis, Appropriation and Translation as Means of Reiterating Old and Propagating New Religious Ideas

5 Texts and Rituals in the Second Century CE: A Century of Intense Religious Experimentation

6 ›Religion‹ as Philosophy in the Second Sophistic

7 Martyrologies: Textualizing Death and Embodying

Bibliography

Economy and Religion

Richard Gordon, Rubina Raja and Anna-Katharina Rieger

1 Introduction

1.1 The wider context: the demography and macro-economy of the Roman Empire

1.2 Implications for expenditure on religious activity

2 Income, outgoings and the nature of the evidence

3 Public versus private: an unhelpful opposition?

4 Funding civic and imperial religion

4.1 Standing revenues of sanctuaries and their protection

4.2 Revenues from sacrifice

4.3 Regular income from non-agricultural sources

4.4 Variable income: patronage

4.5 Income versus wealth

5 The finances of associations and small religious groups

6 Pilgrimage as an economic factor

6.1 Competition stimulates business

6.2 Infrastructure and services in and around pilgrimage sites

7 Conclusion

Bibliography

Abbreviations

Figures

Index

Places

Names

Keywords

Fig. 1:The Roman Empire 117 A.D.

Jörg Rüpke and Greg Woolf

How can we reconstruct the religious dimensions of life in the Roman empire? How were rituals entangled with the routines of everyday living and extraordinary events? How did relations with the divine intrude into the spaces Roman inhabited and the patterns of their lives? How, in short, was Roman religion lived?