Paganism in the Roman Empire
Ramsay MacMullen
Number of quotes: 80
Book ID: 171 Page: 1
Section: 2B1
would need room for temples to the Capitoline Triad (Jupiter, Juno and Minerva), plus Mercury, Isis and Sarapis, Apollo, Liber Pater, Hercules, …
Quote ID: 3692
Time Periods: 0
Book ID: 171 Page: 3
Section: 4A,4B
pagans thinking only of other pagans affirm exactly similar views. “Such is the chief fruit of piety,” says Porphyry, “to honor the divinity according to one’s ancestral custom.” {12}
Porphyry indicates one reason anyway for saying what he does: the impious man wrongs his own forebears as well as the deity. {13}
Quote ID: 3693
Time Periods: 34
Book ID: 171 Page: 3
Section: 4A
“New” was a term of disapproval, used in that sense both in and beyond the debates between pagans and Christians; {15} “old” was good. In the apologies written by Christians, the reader is struck by the emphasis, through position near the front of the works or through length and frequency of discussion, accorded to proving the religion of the Jews, Moses, and the Pentateuch older than Hellenism, Homer, and the Iliad, or to proving the priority of Jewish ethical positions over Platonic.Pastor John’s Note: Romans then, Xns now
Quote ID: 3694
Time Periods: 23
Book ID: 171 Page: 5
Section: 2B2
Next, allowance must be made for the gods not being what they appear, as, for instance, Apollo sometimes hiding a Gallic god of oracles, Hercules sometimes hiding a Phoenecian or Punic god, and so forth. This produces one distortion in particular: Mercury served as the chief translation into Latin for the dominant Celtic deity Teutates, {28}
Quote ID: 3696
Time Periods: 01
Book ID: 171 Page: 7
Section: 2B2
But, in a standard collection for Asia Minor, if one sets aside Zeus, invoked two and a half times as often as any other god, the rest offer no surprises: Apollo, Athena, Dionysus (=Liber), Artemis (=Diana), Hera (=Juno), Aphrodite (=Venus), Asclepius, Tyche (=Fortuna), Hercules, and the Great Mother (=Cybele), in that order. {31}
Quote ID: 3697
Time Periods: 0123
Book ID: 171 Page: 7
Section: 2B2
The many gods of the second and third centuries can be arranged in some sort of ranking, then, with ten or fifteen rather easily identifiable ones atop a mass beyond ordering.
Quote ID: 3698
Time Periods: 23
Book ID: 171 Page: 8
Section: 4B
What is likely first to attract notice are the blunt words of contempt and disapproval with which the lettered aristocracy, in talking about religious views, belabor the simple, unthinking, ordinary folk, the unlearned. {33} It is a pagan, but it could almost equally well be a Christian, who deplores any sort of theological speculation by the “crude untaught raw yokels, to whom it is not even granted to understand citizen affairs, let alone to discuss the divine,” {34}Pastor John’s Notes: Same reasoning of Xns later
Quote ID: 3699
Time Periods: 237
Book ID: 171 Page: 12
Section: 2B2
At Oenoanda, home of the eccentric Diogenes, a city wall bore the text of one of the answers given by Apollo of Caros to a certain Theophilus who, in the early third century, inquired about the nature of the divinity. He was told: “Born from himself, innately wise, without mother, unshakeable, abiding no name but many-named, living in fire, that is god.
Quote ID: 3700
Time Periods: 23
Book ID: 171 Page: 15
Section: 5C
recovered now from inscriptions: the Paeans to Asclepius by Ariphron of about 400 B.C. and by Sophocles a generation earlier, {72} plus some otherwise unknown verses to the god by Aelius Aristides. {73} These last are somewhat fragmentary; but it is pleasant to think that gifted, boring, tenacious, pitiable, godly sufferer who dedicated years of residence to the healing sanctuary at Pergamon, undergoing a thousand experiences of divine assistance recorded for us in his spiritual diary. It is pleasant to suppose, too, even if we cannot be quite certain, that Sophocles’ verses were sung before temples of Asclepius every morning in series unbroken for six hundred years
Quote ID: 3701
Time Periods: 0
Book ID: 171 Page: 17/18
Section: 4B
Menander indicates elsewhere the freedom he would allow to speeches of praise – here, however, praising men, not gods: “You should invent dreams and pretend to have heard certain voices and wish to proclaim them to your listeners, or of dreams, for example, that Hermes stood by your bed at night, commanding you to announce who was the best of the magistrates: ‘Obedient to his commands, I will repeat from the very center of theaters what I heard him say…”
Quote ID: 3703
Time Periods: 3
Book ID: 171 Page: 18
Section: 2B2
‘Whether offspring of Kronos, whether blessed of Zeus, whether of great Rhea, hail to thee, mournful message of Rhea, O Attis. The Syrians call you Adonis, thrice-desired, all Egypt calls you Osiris, Greek wisdom calls you the heavenly crescent of the month, Samothracians, venerable Adamna; the people of Haemon, Corybas; and the Phrygians, sometimes Papa, sometimes the corpse, the god, the sterile unharvested, or the goat-herd, the verdant ear of grain gathered in, or the piper whom fruitful Amygdalos brought forth.’ “ And so he continues, quoting next from a hymn to Attis. {92}
Quote ID: 3704
Time Periods: 23
Book ID: 171 Page: 19
Section: 2A4
The Syrian priest and worshipers of Hadad and Atargatis dedicated a theater on Delos in 108/7 B.C. It lay at one end of a terrace, the other end of which held the temple; and on holy days the seated idol was paraded out of her house, along the terrace, to a marble throne that faced the theater, there to receive offerings at an alter in front of her. What else was shown the spectators is not known.
Quote ID: 3705
Time Periods: 0
Book ID: 171 Page: 27
Section: 5C
Holy places only by chance lay where cities grew. Many lay rather at some distance away: the Asclepieion in the suburbs of Pergamon,
Quote ID: 3707
Time Periods: 0
Book ID: 171 Page: 27
Section: 2A4
There was thus much traveling out to see them. But some deities themselves had to make an annual visit to convenient water. Among them, Isis. Early in the spring her image was taken from its house down to the shore, to set the ships asail , and again in the autumn, to find Osiris. Other images went to water for a bath. {41} many were ritually carried to a secular or cult theater, {42}
Quote ID: 3708
Time Periods: 0
Book ID: 171 Page: 28
Section: 5C
Divine doctors received many calls. Asclepius alone maintained hundreds of offices open for patients throughout the Greek-speaking provinces, {51} of which those at Epidaurus and Pergamon are only the most famous.
Quote ID: 3709
Time Periods: 0
Book ID: 171 Page: 40
Section: 4A
For most people, meat was a thing never eaten and wine to surfeit never drunk save as some religious setting permitted. There existed – it is no great exaggeration to say it of all but the fairly rich – no formal social life in the world of the Apologists that was entirely secular. Small wonder, then, that Jews and Christians, holding themselves aloof from anything the gods touched, suffered under the reputation of misanthropy!PJ: Used last phrase only
Quote ID: 3710
Time Periods: 2
Book ID: 171 Page: 43
Section: 2A4
and in Cilicia you could see inspired votaries walk barefoot on hot coals, in trust or tribute to their local goddess, as still today in Macedonia the votaries of St. Constantine walk on coals “at the command of their General,” as they say.{7}
Quote ID: 3712
Time Periods: 07
Book ID: 171 Page: 47
Section: 2A4
At the beginning of the Panamareia [cannot find definition], the idol was set on horseback and taken along the road, a part of which is still paved, for a sojourn in Stratonicea,
Quote ID: 3713
Time Periods: 0
Book ID: 171 Page: 50
Section: 2D3B
"let a man be produced right here before your court who, it is clear, is possessed by a demon; and that spirit, commanded to speak by any Christian at all, will as much confess himself a demon in truth”; and “traces of the Holy Spirit are still preserved among Christians, whereby they conjure away demons and effect many cures.”{4}PJ: FN 49 - Justin Martyr, Apology, 6. cf. Dialogue 76.6.
Quote ID: 3715
Time Periods: 2
Book ID: 171 Page: 57
Section: 4B
It was certainly recognized throughout antiquity, at least by people able to look at their world with any detachment, that religion served to strengthen the existing social order.
Quote ID: 3716
Time Periods: 014
Book ID: 171 Page: 59
Section: 2E1
Aside from rare and rarefied speculation on sympathetic magic, inhabitants of the Apologists’ world thought first to touch the gods through images, because that was where the gods lived; or at least, to images they could be brought by entreaty, there to listen and to act. Whether or not they fitted exactly, whether they looked like their portraits in stone or wood, they were to be found inside. Christian observers, who had no reason not to be accurate, report this as the generally prevailing idea.{42}
Quote ID: 3717
Time Periods: ?
Book ID: 171 Page: 63
Section: 4A
In contrast, Porphyry declares “the one who loves god cannot love pleasure or body; but the latter sort of man will love money and so be unjust, and the unjust man is unholy, both toward god and his ancestors, and a criminal in his conduct toward other. So he may sacrifice hecatombs and adorn the temples with a myriad offerings, but he remains impious and godless and, in true calling a sacrilegious person.” {10}
Quote ID: 3718
Time Periods: 34
Book ID: 171 Page: 72
Section: 4A
That was the test: ridicule. Fully to sense the meaning of Constantine’s preposterous pontification, he must be imagined speaking at Plutarch’s table. There, his views would have produced delighted grins; likewise, no doubt, in the company of Lucian or Apuleius. Lucian knew of opinionated ignoramuses in very high places indeed,
Quote ID: 3719
Time Periods: 234
Book ID: 171 Page: 72
Section: 4A
Another hundred years pass, and gullibility is no longer a target for ridicule. In the most educated circles that the Empire has to show, enchantments, trances, and wonder-working raise no laugh; rather, fear and awe. It is rationalism, as we would call it, that now must defend itself; and it is easily put to rout by Constantine. Most of his listeners – not all, for such large changes come about very gradually – no doubt shared his views.{39}
Quote ID: 3720
Time Periods: 4
Book ID: 171 Page: 73
Section: 2E2
Or we can compare another tourist at Atargatis’s shrine, seeing the pillar saints atop their pillars, “whom hoipolloi believe to be up there in the company of the gods, requesting benefits for the whole of Syria.”
Quote ID: 3721
Time Periods: 23
Book ID: 171 Page: 73
Section: 4B
It is not till the third century that the very emperors are acclaimed in open ceremonies as winning bountiful harvests for their farmers and calm seas for their sailors, by their piety.{43} The change is not abrupt, a matter of emphasis rather than of innovation; but is assumes in the gods accessibility to direct and specific appeal, it assumes their willingness to make their favor felt by visible tinkering in the natural world. Earlier, by contrast, when a panegyrist credited Trajan with averting famine, it was not the emperor’s prayers that had brought supernatural aid, but his shrewd administration that had mobilized quite human forces.{44}
Quote ID: 3722
Time Periods: 3
Book ID: 171 Page: 75
Section: 4A
It needs no demonstration, of course, that Christians were wholly of the world around them – of what other can they be supposed? – and drew in its everyday assumptions with their very breath; that those among them who engaged in debate with pagans had had the same schooling beneath or in step with the catechetical; and that in such debate they could best hope to win by anchoring their assertions to points of common conviction. Hence their free characterizing of beliefs as “absurd,” “irrational,” “folly,” “incredible,” “outrageous,” and the like, without need of refutation step by step. All parties shared the same preconceptions.
Quote ID: 3723
Time Periods: 23
Book ID: 171 Page: 77
Section: 4A
The sacred had lost its story when its enlightened critics finished with it.
Quote ID: 3725
Time Periods: 34
Book ID: 171 Page: 78
Section: 4A
The stories of Kronos eating his young bewildered and revolted anyone who stopped to think of them; but they could suggest cryptically that mind turns in upon itself. So says Sallust the philosopher.
Quote ID: 3726
Time Periods: 4
Book ID: 171 Page: 78
Section: 4A
Reinterpretation had a long history before the period of our study. The art found favor among Jews and Christians as well as pagans. Seneca thought it nonsense, Dio Chrysostom scorned its exculpations of Homer; but their respective contemporaries Cornutus and Plutarch made frequent, reverential use of it in defense of existing religion – even Egyptian.{19}
Quote ID: 3727
Time Periods: 12
Book ID: 171 Page: 79/80
Section: 2C
But demons were something else again: very deeply rooted in paganism, western as well as eastern, even if much more easily documented in the latter. First, the word itself. It occupied a place apart form “gods,” a little lower, in common usage. But there were passages in what might be called sacred writings, notably in Homer, where the two terms appeared synonymously.{23} Christian writers drew a sharp distinction, reserving the proper title for their own God and the lower rank for everyone else’s.
Quote ID: 3728
Time Periods: 012
Book ID: 171 Page: 81
Section: 2B1,2E5
PICTURE. As appears in the restored drawing by L. North, the faded painting in the Bel temple shows a Syrian triad of deities to the left, dressed in Roman military costumes and with gold disks (the later Christian aureoles) behind their heads. Below are the patron Fortunes of Palmyra and Dura. To the right, sacrifice is offered by the Palmyrene troop commander Terentius, holding some holy scroll, and by the priest Themes Mocimi, who in A.D. 239 shows up in a duty roster assigned to the troop’s chapel (ad signa, cf. Corp. pap. 331 = PDura 89, and below, chap. 2.4 n.70). Courtesy Yale University Art Gallery, Dura-Europos Collection.
Quote ID: 3729
Time Periods: 3
Book ID: 171 Page: 81/82
Section: 2C
Inscriptions for Germany refer to Sol as “the unconquerable emperor,” Jupiter as “princeps of the gods,” and in Italy even Christ appears in imperial military regalia under the title Christus Imperator, before the mid-third century.{27}
Quote ID: 3730
Time Periods: 0123
Book ID: 171 Page: 82
Section: 2C
The pagan and Christian pictures of divine administration were identical, however different in origin; both could have accepted what the emperor Julian later said in his oration against the “Galilaeans” (143A-B), that “over each nation is a national god, with an angel acting as his agent, and a demon, and ‘hero,’ and a peculiar type of servant-powers and subordinates.” The titles he chose would have aroused some disagreement;
Quote ID: 3731
Time Periods: 4
Book ID: 171 Page: 83
Section: 2B2
in the earlier third century at Rome, when a worshiper set up an inscription to “One Zeus, Sarapis, Helios, maker of the universe, invincible,” someone else came along and substituted the name “Mithra” for “Sarapis”{34} – two indications that too high a claim for one god gave offense to the worshipers of others. That sort of intolerant behavior in paganism was extremely rare.
Quote ID: 3732
Time Periods: 23
Book ID: 171 Page: 83/84
Section: 2B2
In reality, it is the melding of several gods into one chief: “Zeus Helios the Great All-God Sarapis,” This on an altar from second-century Carthage.{35} Zeus is worshiped as Papa and Attis, all at the same time, in Bithynia; he is “Zeus Greatest Helios Olympian, the Savior,” in an inscription from Pergamon: “Zeus Sarapis” often on gems and amulets, “Zeus Dionysus” in Phrygia or Rome.{36}More commonly still, supremacy is concentrated in the sun, natural and visible master of at least the eastern skies. So in Mithraism the sun, in hyphenation with Mithra, is the supreme deity. Inscriptions from the western provinces make that clear. They also call the sun “Helios” more often than “Sol,”
Quote ID: 3733
Time Periods: 23
Book ID: 171 Page: 84/85
Section: 2B
Sol as invictus, whose invincibility is as specific as the beneficent power of his raised right hand, appears on Antoninus Pius’s coins first (and about that time, too, in inscriptions); then on Commodus’s coins; and on Septimius Severus’s (and at that point the epithet is first applied to an emperor himself on his coins): then on Callienus’s and with great but not exclusive emphasis on Aurelian’s; briefly, on Probus’s; again, in A.D. 305-310, minted by Galerius and (in many issues) by Maximin Daia, with Sol bearing the special title, “Guardian of the Emperors and Vice-Emperors,” conservator Augustorum et Caesarum, on issues of both Maximin Daia and Constantine; and finally, after the Tetrarchs had all been destroyed (all but Licinius), Constantine and Licinius each resumed a specially advertised relationship with Sol, Constantine carrying it forward to a point some years beyond Licinius’s death.{42}
Quote ID: 3734
Time Periods: 234
Book ID: 171 Page: 85
Section: 2B
It may seem only the last stage of a logical development that finally subordinates the many of traditional paganism to the one, Sol.
Quote ID: 3735
Time Periods: 2
Book ID: 171 Page: 86
Section: 2B
Its obliteration was no doubt due to the unpopularity of its author, since in the 270s Aurelian renewed the experiment, and under his hand its history can be traced long after his death, in the form of a sun temple he built in the capital. It honored a Syrian deity, from Emesa or Palmyra (the story is confused); and games and priesthoods were established; and the cult announced on the currency through the most emphatic legend possible, “Sol Master of the Roman Empire,”{45}These reigns and their particular religious focus are often thought to support the view that “if the solar cult had not had not succumbed to Christianity, … it could well have become the permanent religion of the Mediterranean area.”{46}
Pastor John’s notes: author disagrees
Quote ID: 3736
Time Periods: 23
Book ID: 171 Page: 86
Section: 2B
Dio Chrysostom reminds his audience that “some people say Apollo, Helios and Dionysus are all one, and so you,” the citizens of Rhodes, “believe; and many people combine into one strength and power absolutely all the gods, so that there is no difference in honoring one or the other.”
Quote ID: 3737
Time Periods: 12
Book ID: 171 Page: 87
Section: 2B1
God is one, but his force, vis or duvamis, is many, expressed through the various familiar divine personalities.Pastor John’s notes: Trinity precursor
Quote ID: 3738
Time Periods: 0
Book ID: 171 Page: 87
Section: 2B2
It appears thus to be a part of the intellectual heritage of the times that god might be one; all “gods,” simply his will at work in various spheres of action; and the interpretive structure, as accommodating of Zeus at its center as of Sol or of any other traditional deity, no matter which.
Quote ID: 3739
Time Periods: 23
Book ID: 171 Page: 87
Section: 2B2
An unknown Cornelius Labeo, a writer who is perhaps most easily dated in the earlier or mid-third century, sought interpretation of an Orphic verse: “Zeus is One, Hades is One, Helios is One, Dionysus is One.” What did the poet mean? “The authority of this line rests on an oracle of the Clarian Apollo, in which another name for the sun, too, is added, who is given among other names, in the same holy lines, that of Iao. For the Clarian Apollo, upon being asked which of the gods was meant by Iao, spoke as follows: ‘Initiates must hold their secrets – yet know! Iao is Hades in the winter, Zeus in spring, Helios in summer, and Iao in autumn.’
Quote ID: 3740
Time Periods: 23
Book ID: 171 Page: 87
Section: 2B2
Cornelius Labeo teats in his book titled On the Oracle of the Clarian Apollo.”{50} So, like others before and after him, Labeo had asked the gods to speak for themselves. He had sought truth at the source. And if the results was more Clarian than clarity, at least it did not conflict with the wisdom passed down from the philosophers: many gods were really aspects of a single god. That finding had been brought out of the schools into the open.
Quote ID: 3741
Time Periods: 23
Book ID: 171 Page: 88
Section: 2B
We must first confront the very term “monotheism.” Like most big words, and “-isms” worst of all, it is no friend to clear thought. It indicates acknowledgment of one god only. Very good. But it suggests no definition of “god.” That, as we have seen in our discussion of demons, was a crucial point of disagreement between the Jews and Christians, on the one hand, and most other people in the empire, on the other.Pastor John’s note: good
Quote ID: 3742
Time Periods: 2
Book ID: 171 Page: 89
Section: 4B
The later empire loved hyperbole. It loved shouted phrases of clarion superlatives: “the very best!” “unique!” “savior!”, offered to the mayor or governor as enthusiastically as to the god above.{54}
Quote ID: 3743
Time Periods: 34
Book ID: 171 Page: 90
Section: 2B2
One practice hard to understand but very commonly found at all levels is polyonymy. Some triple forms have been noted: Zeus Helios Sarapis, for example. But a local goddess, Perasia in Cilicia, was addressed in inscriptions as “Selene or Artemis,” Hecate, Aphrodite or Demeter, all the same to the dedicant, who thinks to magnify her in this fashion.{56}
Quote ID: 3744
Time Periods: 23
Book ID: 171 Page: 90
Section: 2B2
In Apuleius’s novel, the hero hesitates whether the goddess who saves him is Artemis or Persephone (Proserpina), the latter called “polyonymous” in inscriptions (and so, sometimes, is Cybele); but he rightly settles on her being Esis. After Zeus, she was the most truly polyonymous of all gods in antiquity {57} –witness what survives from the beginning of our period: hundreds of lines of an address to Isis (the opening and closing of the text being lost), “…ruler of the fleet, of many guises, Aphrodite,…savior, ruler of all, the greatest,” Persephone (Kore), Athena, Hestia, “in Lycia, Leto,… in Sinope, of many names…in Caria, Hecate,” and so on, through city after city round the empire to Italy; “first in the festivals of the gods…thou, of things moist, dry or cold, from which the whole is created,” and a great deal more to the same effect, typical of the genre of extended prose hymn.{58} The editors suppose the author was a priest, a likely conjecture. He evidently enjoyed a congregation patient of long sermons.
Quote ID: 3745
Time Periods: 123
Book ID: 171 Page: 90/91
Section: 2B2
The priest taught a very simple lesson: isis was great! He wished before his listeners only to magnify her name. Isis was great! – or Zeus or Sarapis, Asclepius or Liber. How did he know? Clearly, because so many people said so, in one city after another all over the world. They worshiped her even under other names. To report and repeat them was a work of magnification, not theologizing.
Quote ID: 3746
Time Periods: 23
Book ID: 171 Page: 91
Section: 2B2
The people of Rhodes, inquiring of an oracle, were given a little hymn to sing in which Attis was hailed as Adonis and Dionysus, both; in Africa, it was the new god Antinous, Hadrian’s younger friend, who at his death was hailed as Dionysus – more correctly, as Liber and Apollo, too. {59} So pervasive and vital and itself polymorphous was the practice of discovering one god to be another.
Quote ID: 3747
Time Periods: 23
Book ID: 171 Page: 91
Section: 2B2
Hence, the equivalent of polyonymy should be discoverable in art. As might be predicted, the earliest signs show up in the east. Mints of cities like Mylasa and Alexandria, even before our chosen period, jumble Zeus and Poseidon together, or Zeus, Poseidon, Ammon, and Neilus (the Nile river personified) – later followed by more and more inventions and combinations all the time.{60}
Quote ID: 3748
Time Periods: 23
Book ID: 171 Page: 92
Section: 2B2
Discussions of the phenomenon are very likely to include a favorite item, the emperor’s chapel. Alexander Severus, we are told, for his private prayers set up the images of ancestors and predecessor, Christ, Abraham, Orpheus, and Apollonius of Tyana.{64}
Quote ID: 3749
Time Periods: 23
Book ID: 171 Page: 93
Section: 2B2
Examples abound of ministrants of one sort or another erecting an altar or a plaque or themselves signing some honorific inscription, in worship of a god other than the one they served. The practice can be observed without distinction of honor and, whether Roman, traditional Greek, Oriental, or Celtic; without distinction of area; and only circumscribed in time, perhaps. It may be that such actions are more often attested in the period after A.D. 150 than before. But even that is not sure.{67}
These apparent betrayals of one’s god were of course not only open, else never known to the present; they were divinely authorized. “By the interpretation of the rites of Sol,” a worshiper honors Liber and Libera. Obviously the priest himself had overseen whatever was done; or a village honors “Zeus Galactinos according to Apollo’s command”; a “priest of Sol invictus saw to the dedication to holy Silvanus, from a vision”; and so on, by direct order from Hercules or Men or Apollo.{68} It can only have been priests who guided these acts, seeing in them no betrayal at all.
Quote ID: 3750
Time Periods: 23
Book ID: 171 Page: 93
Section: 2B2
Tolerance in paganism operated at both levels, until Christianity introduced its own ideas.{70} Only then, from Constantine on, were gods to be found at war with other gods.
Quote ID: 3751
Time Periods: 34
Book ID: 171 Page: 94
Section: 2B2
They did not reduce Christ, Abraham, Apollonius of Tyana, and Orpheus to a single figure in the emperor’s chapel (if that ever existed); rather, Christ and Iahveh were drawn into polytheism on the latter’s terms, simply as new members in an old assembly. There, awaiting fuller incorporation, for a long time they stood at the edges, in magic and folk belief.
As to emperors of the period like Aurelian or Diocletian, making great show of close relations with Sol or Jove, at the most they asserted for their patrons some relative superiority, not a power sole and unique. Jove had succeeded Sol as Sol had succeeded to the position once occupied by Hercules under Commodus, or Apollo under Augustus. Had Constantine not intervened, why should the series not have been extended further still?
Quote ID: 3752
Time Periods: 34
Book ID: 171 Page: 96
Section: 4B
And many extremely emphatic statements about exorcism by Christians should not be forgotten. Some have been reported, earlier. Their point in common was the simplest: announcement of supernatural powers new in the world it would be quite irrational to credit, without proof of their efficacy before one’s own eyes. That was what produced converts. Nothing else is attested.
Quote ID: 3753
Time Periods: 234
Book ID: 171 Page: 96
Section: 4B
By the same logic Marcus Aurelius was reduced, or raised, to his own faith: “If anyone should ask where have you seen the gods or how have you persuaded yourself of their existence, so that you are so devout, I answer.., from the continual proofs of their power I am convinced that they exist, and I revere them.”
Quote ID: 3754
Time Periods: 2
Book ID: 171 Page: 99
Section: 2B2
Overall, expatriate cults seem to have lost at least some of their native character within a generation or two.
Which raises the question of control and uniformity. Was there in fact such a thing as Isiacism, without further qualification? Was there a Sarapis or a Saturn?
Obviously not.
Quote ID: 3755
Time Periods: 234
Book ID: 171 Page: 101
Section: 2B2
The typical attributes with which deities were portrayed – a bushel basket for a crown, a two-headed ax in the hand, wings on the feet, and so forth – remain remarkably consistent and in wide use. Enough, however, on such familiar topics.
Equally diffuse but not so often discussed is the evidence for the lack of uniformity in cults. Again, a sampling suffices to show the outline of the subject. In Cicero’s day, as his readers know because he took such pains to tell them, that wretch Clodius defiled himself and jeopardized the very life of Rome in no act more expressly than in attending the rites of the Bona Dea.
Quote ID: 3756
Time Periods: 0234
Book ID: 171 Page: 101
Section: 2B2
So far as the evidence indicates, no one enjoyed authority more than anyone else over questions of correct liturgy, iconography or temple construction.
Quote ID: 3757
Time Periods: 34
Book ID: 171 Page: 101/102
Section: 2B2
“The greater part of the people,” said Seneca of common Roman rites, “know not why they do what they do.”{32} He could as well have meant Isiacism or Cybele cult, in which all sorts of conflicting episodes and interpretations of the divine story circulated.{33} It was not from neglect that the religious heritage had become, over the centuries, festooned with airy, blowing, trailing tales and customs. Rather the opposite: too much attention.Pastor John’s notes: for women only
Quote ID: 3758
Time Periods: 234
Book ID: 171 Page: 102
Section: 2B2
Everything mentioned in earlier pages concerning polyonymy should be superadded at this point, everything about the various levels of understanding among believers and everything implied in the “national” origin of the larger cults. The sum was confusion. No counterforce for order existed.
Quote ID: 3759
Time Periods: 34
Book ID: 171 Page: 102
Section: 4B
It is, of course, conventional to talk about “state cults.” I cite a few illustrations of that, about (chapter 2, section 3, n.42). Beyond that, modern accounts commonly attribute to one or another emperor the advocating or imposing of one or another cult. If such a phenomenon could really be discerned, it would present us with just the force most logical for the attaining of uniformity in religious beliefs. None, however, can be found.
Quote ID: 3760
Time Periods: 1234
Book ID: 171 Page: 103
Section: 4B
we are bound to ask where the very idea of “official” or “state” cults comes from. Surely they have been attributed to the Roman world by reasoning from alien, generally modern and Christian, times. Search for them therefore proceeds with tell-tale indirection, effort, and paucity of proof. In paganism uninterpreted, at any level lower than the throne, zealots were hard to find.
Quote ID: 3761
Time Periods: 12347
Book ID: 171 Page: 103
Section: 2E5
It was perfectly acceptable to favor one deity more than another. One could speak of “Domitian’s god” (most likely Isis), meaning whichever he was known to honor specially or which especially aided him.Pastor John notes: John’s note: like the Pope’s Mary
Quote ID: 3762
Time Periods: 1
Book ID: 171 Page: 104
Section: 4B
Though the whole family of the Severi have been portrayed as “Orientalizers,” there is no evidence that any but the mad boy Elagabalus wanted or tried to change anyone’s religion.{40} From his reign we pass to others in which Sol and Oriens were advertised or favored. The sequence of events was sketched above (pp. 84-85). Until after 312, however, there is no sign of imperial pressure for uniformity in cult. The independence, not to say license and shapelessness, of paganism had suffered no disturbance from above.
Quote ID: 3763
Time Periods: 34
Book ID: 171 Page: 104
Section: 2C
The priest of Hercules Augustus in Apulum in Dacia was installed by the governor and other priests in Smyrna by the emperor and Roman senate.{42}
Quote ID: 3764
Time Periods: 2
Book ID: 171 Page: 105
Section: 2C
in Teos. There, the senate and people laid down the rules for the honoring of “the god presiding over the city, Dionysus, on each day, by the priest and the ephebes,” and so forth. The details are spelled out fully, including the matter of who pays (the god, form temple resources).{50} At Ephesis, it was the society of Elders (gerousia) that oversaw most religious concerns; elsewhere, it was usually the same bodies that are found at Teos.
Quote ID: 3765
Time Periods: 0
Book ID: 171 Page: 125
Section: 2E1
Altars had cut-out crescents with glass in front, to be lit from behind by lamps or candles; or they had cut-out halos or sun rays over a deity’s head, or whole figures of deities cut out – in short elaborate provisions for unexpected lighting effects, the more certain to impress because of the ordinary darkness of the windowless surroundings.{37}Pastor John notes: John’s Notes: halo
Quote ID: 3766
Time Periods: ?
Book ID: 171 Page: 126
Section: 2D3B
The question raised on a previous page, “how can the exceptional faith be explained that reaches across a hundred miles, or turns up whole provinces “away?” can perhaps best be answered through another question: “What made converts?” – converts of any sort, near or far. To that latter, the answer was seen to lie in the visible show of divinity at work (above, pp. 95-97).
Quote ID: 3767
Time Periods: 1234
Book ID: 171 Page: 129
Section: 5D
To offer certain sacrifices was out of the ordinary man’s reach, when five months of his labor were needed to make up the price of an ox.{49}
Quote ID: 3768
Time Periods: ?
Book ID: 171 Page: 129
Section: 2E2
The sense might be challenged: “What sort of religion is it that takes money?” asked the Apologists in derision (above, pp. 96-97). A fair question – if it is also fair to ask, What is especially good about a religion that costs nothing? Why should the hollow-cheeked St. Anthony stare down the Buddha? Eating and drinking may be a form of worship, and dancing and singing, building and painting, writing and reading.
Quote ID: 3769
Time Periods: 23
Book ID: 171 Page: 132
Section: 4B
Much of the epigraphic record on which we depend for an estimate of paganism reflects not only what people believed but whether or not their belief was likely to raise them in others’ eyes. For the same reason, then, that few Christians declared their faith during the third century, few pagans can have cared to do so, once the emperor, and with him, those who sought his favor, changed allegiance.
Quote ID: 3772
Time Periods: 34
Book ID: 171 Page: 132
Section: 3C
For Constantine ushered in a new age, in which for the first time there was such a thing as a state cult.
Quote ID: 3773
Time Periods: 4
Book ID: 171 Page: 132
Section: 4B
At the very towering peak of their appalling rage and cruelty against Christians, pagans had never sought to make converts to any cult – only away from atheism, as they saw it.
Quote ID: 3774
Time Periods: 123
Book ID: 171 Page: 133
Section: 2E1
What could be more genuine, what could better testify to the confidence of pagans even under a Christian emperor, than the celebrations at Emona when Theodocius visited the city? There went out to meet him “senators notable in their snow-white dress, the flamens venerable in city-purple, the priests standing out because of their peaked hats.”{7} It was officially a pagan reception.
Quote ID: 3775
Time Periods: ?
Book ID: 171 Page: 133
Section: 4B
The Danube lands suffered such destruction in the third century from barbarians and so much more, from Christian ardor, in the forth and fifth, that idols and temples of the late Empire are hard to find in one piece.
Quote ID: 3776
Time Periods: 345
Book ID: 171 Page: 133
Section: 2B2,4B
In Egypt of the mid-forth century, an army commander had plenty of Christians, including priests, who were in courteous correspondence with him; but in his headquarters’ chapel an image of the goddess Nemesis presided, and his personal servant took oath by the gods, plural. Perhaps that meant nothing. A deacon of the Church toward the same date “swears by the divine and holy Tyche of our all-conquering Lords,” the emperors.{11}
Quote ID: 3777
Time Periods: 4
Book ID: 171 Page: 134
Section: 1A
First, as Peter Brown has said, “the historian of the later Roman church is in constant danger of taking the end of paganism for granted.”{13}
Quote ID: 3778
Time Periods: 456
Book ID: 171 Page: 187
Section: 2B
46. Grant (1968) 173 speaks of the moment around A.D. 309. Cf. Merkelbach (1962) 234: “The last stage of ancient paganism is the syncretistic Helios cult. In the 3rd cent. It was for long periods the official religion of the roman state; all other religions were to be subsumed in that of Helios.” The statement is in accord with the importance most scholars attribute to the cult.
Quote ID: 3780
Time Periods: 234
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