The earliest Christians were Jews. According to the New Testament, the first to believe in Jesus’s resurrection were his eleven disciples (Judas Iscariot no longer being on the scene) and a handful of women, including Mary Magdalene (see Matthew 28; Luke 21; John 21). They were all from rural Galilee, the northern part of the land of Israel. One of the Gospels, Matthew, indicates that the disciples came to this belief (although some “doubted”) sometime after Jesus’s execution, when they had returned to Galilee (Matthew 28:16–17). That seems reasonable: they had made a pilgrimage to Jerusalem with Jesus to celebrate a Passover festival; things had not gone well there; and Jesus had been arrested, tried, and crucified for crimes against the state. It seems unlikely the others would have stayed in the city to see if the authorities would come for them next. They went back home, possibly in some haste.
Once these followers came to believe, they presumably told others in Galilee that Jesus had been raised, and these people converted. Eventually, when the heat died down, some of the disciples, if not all, returned to Jerusalem. We are not sure why. Did they, already at this early date, expect Jesus to return there? Whatever their reasons, we find them in Jerusalem in the book of Acts (Acts 1), and that’s where Paul locates them as well (Galatians 1). It appears the city became the base of the Christian operation, with Jesus’s disciple Peter and then his brother James taking charge of the small but growing community. That community would have principally comprised locals in the capital—that is, all Jews. Paul indicates that the earliest believers had undertaken a mission to convert Jews to the faith, headed by Peter (Galatians 2:7–8). That too is completely plausible.
It is usually assumed, then, that the first Christian community was located in the principal city of Judea. We do not learn much about the group in later sources, apart from the names of their leaders and a scant few legends associated with them. The truth is that, for reasons we saw in the previous chapter, the Jewish mission was never a huge success. In sources over the next four centuries we occasionally learn of a Jewish group of Christians here or there in the empire—in the Transjordan, in Egypt—but they never played a huge role in the ongoing life of the church at large. They were almost always on the margins.
The Jewish Christians were probably heading to the margins by the second part of the first century. We have seen that Paul himself was intent on establishing communities of believers on pagan soil, and he is the only massively effective evangelist we hear of in our first-century sources.1 His churches, which appear to have grown even after he relocated to evangelize elsewhere, comprised exclusively or almost exclusively pagan converts. And not just the churches he founded. The one surviving letter from his pen sent to a community he did not start is to the Christians in the city of Rome, a church he had yet to visit. He explicitly addresses the Christians there as “gentiles” (Romans 1:13; 11:13). Scholars frequently argue that it was a strongly “mixed” church of Jew and gentile. It may have been that, but the letter itself indicates that the vast majority of the congregation were converts from paganism. In the greetings in the final chapter Paul names twenty-six people, several of whom indeed may have been Jewish: we can’t tell just from their names. But he identifies six of them specifically as “of my race”—that is, Jews (Romans 16:7, 11, 21). That this is an identity marker of just these six seems to suggest that they stood out, for reason of their heritage, from all the rest.2 The other twenty were probably former pagans.
Much the same can be said about the churches addressed by most of our earliest Christian writings. The vast majority of the New Testament books—including that “most Jewish” of our Gospels, Matthew—appear to be directed largely if not exclusively to gentile audiences, and most may well have been written by gentile authors.3 The church by the second half of the first century was probably made up of predominantly pagan stock.4
We have already seen some indications of who such people were and what they believed in connection with Constantine, the most famous and significant pagan convert in the history of Christendom. We can now explore the matter in greater depth, as a prelude to showing, in the chapters that follow, how Jesus’s followers managed to convince so many of these pagans to abandon their ancestral religious traditions in order to worship the Christian god alone.
Paganism, scholars have long argued, was not a single thing. Or, to put the matter differently, there was no such thing as paganism. What we call paganism was numerous things.5
The word itself would have made no sense to ancient people, including the very ones we call pagans. No one called themselves or thought of themselves, religiously, as a pagan—not because it was a derogatory term, but because it was not a term with any religious meaning. The idea that all the hundreds or even thousands of ways of honoring the gods involved some kind of unified “system” was simply not part of the ancient intellectual landscape. The religious designation “pagan” came into existence only after customs for acknowledging and worshiping the gods had been in place for millennia. It was deployed by Christians in its religious sense as a way of referring to others who did not follow their own practices of religious observation. Christians had to call non-Christians something. Worshipers of the god of Israel were no problem: they could be called Jews. But what of everyone else? What of the 93 percent of the rest of the human race?
There are different theories about why Christians settled on the term “pagan” to describe the non-Jewish other.6 Most commonly it is thought that the word derives from the Latin term paganus, which refers to a person who resides in the countryside. The idea, in this case, is that as the empire became Christianized in the fourth century and later, the sophisticated city folk were more likely to see the clear superiority of the Christian faith. Only country bumpkins (the pagani) continued to observe the backward customs of their ignorant ancestors.
Other scholars have argued, instead, that the term “pagan” originally referred to “civilian,” as opposed to “soldier.” In that case it would stand in contrast to the few, the strong, the brave: the soldiers of Christ. Those who were not in Christ’s army were weak and morally out of shape.
Whatever the origins of the term, “pagan” was not a self-identity marker: in the early Christian centuries, no one in the Roman world would say, “I am not a Jew, I am a pagan.” Being not a Jew—or later not a Christian—simply meant being what everyone else was: a person who accepted the existence of gods and worshiped them by following customs that had been followed since time immemorial. There were innumerable such localized customs. Modern people might call each of them a “religion.”
As we have seen, ancient people would not call them that, since there was also no word for “religion.” And in fact what we typically think today about religion simply did not apply to ancient modes of worship. If we were to define a religion as a coherent system of thought, belief, and practice, with a clearly demarcated set of theological views about the divine being(s) and a prescribed set of rituals to be practiced in reference to them, then none of the so-called pagan religions would probably qualify.7 Certainly the totality of all the customs followed over the expanse of the Roman Empire cannot be lumped together into a unified whole and considered a solitary religion.
In Roman paganism (I will keep using the word for the sake of convenience) there were no set gods. Because the standard Greek and Roman mythologies are generally known, people today often still imagine there was just one ancient pantheon: for example, with Jupiter, the head god; Juno, his wife; Mars, the god of war; Venus, the goddess of love; and so on. It is true these gods were widely worshiped in the empire. But there was no set pantheon. Instead, there were different gods and various ways to worship them, depending on whether a person lived in North Africa, Egypt, Syria, Asia Minor, Greece, Gaul, Spain, Britain, or anywhere else. As a result, there was no universal mythology. Moreover, there was no single way to talk about the gods. There was no sense of a community of worshipers throughout the empire to which one would “belong.” There were no organizations with empire-wide oversight over religious practices—no religious authorities who transcended particular localities. Trying to wrap our minds around this totality is difficult.8
It is often thought by people casually acquainted with the ancient world that Roman religion (and Greek religion as well) was focused on the famous myths that we still read today—that books such as Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey functioned as the pagan Bible. The logic behind this view is that these literary works, along with writings of Hesiod and Euripides on the Greek side, or Virgil and Ovid on the Roman, reveal what people believed about the gods. The pagan myths seem comparable to the stories found in the Christian Bible, whether in the Old Testament with God’s interactions with Israel or in the New Testament with the stories of Jesus. Since religion involves principally how we think about God or the gods, in this view, the myths tell us what ancient religion was like.
That common sense would not have made sense to most ancient Romans. It is true that myths were very important for helping people think about the gods. But ancient religion was less about what one thought and more about what one did. Traditional myths played little part in most ancient religious customs. Stories about the gods in great works of literature were usually taken to be just that: great stories. The educated classes in particular insisted they were not to be taken literally. Myths were not so much accounts of what happened in the past as amusing and always entertaining tales, or possibly highly allegorical narratives. As such, the myths formed the basis for a good bit of ancient literature, theater, and art, but they were not the “theological basis” for ancient religion, the equivalent of the Jewish Scriptures or the New Testament writings.
Pagan religions were almost entirely about practice, about doing things, about giving the gods their due—not through mental affirmations of who they were or what they had done, but through ritual actions that showed reverence and devotion.
In trying to conceptualize Roman pagan religions, one of the most important points to stress is that they differed enormously from how we think of religion today, at least in the context of the great monotheistic traditions of the West: Judaism, Christianity, and Islam.
To begin with, Roman religions were all polytheistic, accepting the existence of many gods and promoting their worship. As just mentioned, there were Romans, certainly at least among the highly educated, who did come to believe that one ultimate divine being ruled over all. But these were the exception to the rule, and even they acknowledged the existence of numerous other divinities that varied in grandeur, power, and function. Many Romans did acknowledge a pantheon of the “great gods” known from the famous mythical tales: Jupiter, Juno, Mars, Venus, Minerva, Pluto, and the rest. But this was not the full extent of the divine realm.
On the contrary, there were gods for every municipality and every family; gods with all sorts of functions: gods connected with love, war, livestock, crops, health, childbirth, and weather; gods associated with specific locations: mountains, streams, meadows, homes, hearths; gods of various abstractions, such as fortune, mercy, and hope; gods connected with elements of nature, like the moon, the sun, the sky, and the sea. Less grand and powerful divinities existed as well, including those known collectively (in Greek-speaking areas) as daimones. These were not “demons” in the later Christian sense of fallen angels that inhabit human bodies and force them to do unpleasant things. They were low-level divine beings who were more active in humans’ daily lives than the greater gods and who could be either nefarious or beneficent, depending on circumstances and their character or mood.
How many gods were there? They could not be counted. There were many divine beings in many places. And the same god could be in many different places. A god such as the Greek Zeus was worshiped in cities hundreds of miles apart, in different ways, and with different appellatives (Zeus Kasios, Zeus Ammon, Zeus Bennios). In any city there would be temples to a wide array of gods. The Roman architect Vitruvius recommended that a Roman city have temples to the gods of the Roman Capitol—Jupiter, Juno, and Minerva—as well as to Mercury, Isis and Serapis, Apollo, Liber Pater, Hercules, Mars, Venus, Vulcan, and Ceres. That was just to start. As one modern scholar has pointed out, we have coins from the city of Nicomedia (northeast Turkey) that advertise the worship of forty deities there. Those are just the ones mentioned on the city’s surviving coins.9
Polytheism in Roman antiquity was normally an open and welcoming affair. New gods could be added and worshiped at will. It was simply accepted that people would worship the gods they chose: gods supporting the state, gods of the municipality, gods of various functions, gods of various locations, gods of the family. The gods themselves were at peace, which is one way in which Roman religion was at odds with Roman mythology, where the gods were constantly at one another’s throats. Moreover, the god worshiped in one locality was often identified with a different god called by a different name worshiped in another locality.
Romans would frequently assimilate the gods of the people they conquered. This shows the remarkable openness of religious perspectives, and it made it possible for conquered people to continue living their lives with less cultural disruption. It also had the effect of submerging the identities of the other gods into the Roman system, just as the conquered people were also brought into a new form of governance and control.
Because of the open nature of polytheism, there was virtually no such thing as “conversion.” Anyone who chose to begin worshiping a new god was welcome to do so and was not required or expected to leave behind any previous practices of worship or make an exclusive commitment to this one deity. Outside the world of Judaism, exclusivity—the insistence that only one god be worshiped—was practically unknown.
Many people today wonder what might have happened if Christianity had not eventually taken over the empire. Could another religion have done so? Some have argued that the mystery religion called Mithraism (discussed more later in the chapter) was Christianity’s “competition”—that if the world had not become Christian, it might have become Mithraist. That is an intriguing idea, but on closer reflection it simply cannot be right. No one who started worshiping the god Mithras was required to stop worshiping Jupiter, Minerva, or Apollo. Mithraism may have spread, but it could not have destroyed anything to become the one and only option.
At the same time, as we have seen, there were increasing numbers of pagan henotheists in the Roman world who maintained that situated above this mass of divine beings and the cults that honored them was one ultimate divinity. We observed an example already in chapter 1 with Constantine, who, prior to his Christian conversion, committed to the worship of Sol Invictus, the Unconquered Sun. Such a move would not have seemed a complete oddity in his world. Those who did acknowledge one ultimate divinity and chose to focus worship on that one alone, however, were not expected to deny either that other divine beings existed or that people were justified in worshiping them.10
Pagans who tended toward henotheism did so for a variety of reasons. Sometimes, out of awe and wonder, a pagan worshiper would lavish such abundant praise on a particular god for being so incredibly powerful, wise, caring, merciful, just, and so on that there would be nothing left to attribute to any other god. So why not simply worship this one? Sometimes these various attributes would be converted into names or epithets for the divinity—he is the Greatest, Most Magnificent, Healer of All—to the same effect: there was no need then to name any other god. Possibly more frequently the hierarchy of power thought to exist among the various gods was taken to its logical extreme. The gods worshiped in large city festivals were greater than the daimones a farmer had to appease for the well-being of the crops; so too the great gods of the Roman pantheon residing on Mount Olympus were greater than the gods distinctive to individual cities. This pyramid of power could be imagined as going all the way to the top, above the great gods of state, to one who was the most glorious and powerful.
There cannot, of course, be two or more gods who are “most” glorious and powerful. And so sometimes this greatest god was worshiped as the One. In fact, he sometimes went under the name Theos Hypsistos (Greek for “the Greatest God”). We have abundant evidence that this god, sometimes alternatively called Zeus Hypsistos, was worshiped in parts of the empire by devotees who still recognized that it was perfectly legitimate to worship other, lesser gods should anyone choose to do so. For all pagans there were lots of gods, and all deserved adoration for their greatness, whether absolute or relative.
In the modern West, and most especially in some forms of Christianity, religion is all about what people believe and how they behave. Someone is in a right standing with God by acknowledging the validity of certain conceptual truths and by living as God wants. It is all about doctrine and ethics.
Traditional Roman religions were not like that. Pagan religions were about cultic acts. The word “cult” comes from the Latin phrase cultus deorum, which literally means “the care of the gods.” A cultic act is any ritualized practice that is done out of reverence to or worship of the gods. Such activities lay at the heart of pagan religions. Doctrines and ethics did not.
That does not mean that pagans did not believe anything. Pagans had all sorts of views of the gods—different pagans with different views, often very different views. But these views were never collected into a set of propositional statements to be affirmed by the worshiping community or even by individuals in it, as eventually happened in Christianity (“There is only one God, the creator of all things”; “Christ is both fully human and fully divine”; “The death of Christ alone brings salvation from sins”; and so on). As Christianity came to develop, it was largely about the “faith”—that is, about affirming these statements. Pagans never had to affirm anything. As odd as this seems, pagans were not required to believe truths about the gods. Paganism was instead about performing the proper, traditional cultic acts.
Roughly speaking, there were three kinds of activities in pagan religions: sacrificial offerings, prayer, and divination.11 Sacrifices involved offering an animal (which was then butchered), a less expensive food stuff (such as grain or wine), or some other gift (such as flowers or incense). Prayer involved invoking a god—for example, to give thanks or to make a request. And divination involved ascertaining the will of the gods through natural phenomena, such as the ritually observed flight of birds or, particularly alien to modern ways of thinking, the ritual examination of the entrails of sacrificed animals (for example, to see if the sacrifice had been accepted by the god).
Participating in pagan religions meant engaging in these activities, or—especially with animal sacrifice and divination—observing someone else do so. These various cultic acts did, of course, involve some basic ideas and beliefs about gods: the gods did appreciate offerings, for example, and could be influenced by them; they did answer prayers; and they did communicate their will through birds in the air or the entrails in bulls. Still, no one cared whether a participant actually believed these things were true. There were no propositional statements about a god that a participant in a cultic act had to affirm. There really were no doctrines. As a result, there was no such thing as “orthodoxy” (right beliefs) or “heresy” (false beliefs). There was instead an enormously varied set of ritual practices, each one formed by many years of custom and tradition.
Moreover—and this seems even more strange to many moderns—there was a scant role for ethics in the pagan cults. It is not that ancient people were less ethical than people today; it is that ethics had little to do with religion. If it had a “location” in ancient life, it was in philosophy. Philosophers talked a lot about how people should act toward one another, as members of a family, in relationships with friends and neighbors, as citizens of a city. Good behavior was part of being a worthwhile human being and a responsible citizen.
But it generally was not a part of religious activities. It is true that the gods would not accept some rather extreme forms of criminal activity: they condemned parricide, for example, and sometimes profligate licentiousness. And in a vague way the gods were thought to approve proper behavior and to disapprove bad. But most ethical activity had no relationship to cultic practices. Someone could mistreat their siblings, ruin their business associates, or carry on extramarital affairs, and it would have little real bearing on their religious life. The gods were principally concerned with prayers and sacrifices, and would reveal their will through natural phenomena.
Another key difference between traditional Roman paganism and some modern faiths is that, for most ancient religions, the afterlife was not a concern.
Ancient textual sources attest to a wide range of views about the afterlife. The classical writings of Homer describe a shadowy and vague type of existence for departed souls. Virgil speaks of the utopian existence coming to those who made it to the Elysian Fields. Philosophers differed widely among themselves concerning what would happen to a person after death. Those who followed Pythagoras held to the transmigration of the soul. Adherents of Plato talked about rewards for the good and punishments for the wicked. The Epicureans were infamous for taking a hard line: there would be no life after death at all; instead, the body would dissolve into its original state as a mass of atoms and whatever there was of the soul would dissipate.
It is very hard indeed—impossible, actually—to know what most people thought. The vast majority of the population could neither read nor, more important, write, so we have no written record of their fears of death or anticipations of what, if anything, lay beyond. But we do have some material remains that are suggestive. Archaeologists have found numerous pagan tombs with “feeding tubes” through which nourishment could be occasionally funneled. This suggests the idea that some kind of divine spark continued its existence in the grave.
Ancient tombstone inscriptions are particularly fascinating. Many of them suggest that people expected death to be the end of the story, with no existence in any kind of great beyond. Today we are familiar with the funereal abbreviation “RIP” (“Rest in Peace”). Ancient Romans had something comparable, a seven-letter abbreviation that spoke volumes: “n.f. f. n.s. n.c.” When spelled out, it stands for non fui; fui; non sum; non curo, which means “I was not; I was; I am not; I care not.” The meaning is clear. There was no existence before birth. A person existed only after being born. After death there once more was no existence. And so the person could not be upset. The payoff: you have nothing to fear. You did not find it distressing before you were born, and you will not find it distressing after you die.
If that was the case—if there were no rewards or punishments—then gods were not worshiped to secure blessings in the afterlife. Worship was about the present life.
This life, for most ancients, was lived very near the edge. Simply surviving, let alone thriving, was an enormous struggle. This was a world that provided no protection from the ravages of weather: if it did not rain one year, the village would die of starvation the next. This was a world filled with disease and no way to handle it: a tooth abscess was often a death sentence. This was a world in which life itself was a life-threatening proposition: many children died in infancy; many women died in childbirth. Every childbearing woman in the Roman world had to bear an average of six children in order to keep the population constant.
There were numerous aspects of life that mere mortals simply could not control because of the forces of nature or of communal life: climate, the growth of crops, the fertility of livestock, health, personal safety in the home or while traveling abroad, acts of war. But the gods could control these things. That is largely why gods were worshiped: the gods had significant power and could provide what people could not provide for themselves. Gods worshiped properly would give the community and the individual what was needed to survive and thrive.
Some scholars have argued that ancient religion was principally concerned with averting the gods’ anger.12 But this divine anger was aroused almost always because of neglect. The gods—or at least one of them—had not been respected and worshiped properly or sufficiently. That was the main logic behind Roman persecution of the Christians. Because this group of miscreants refused to worship the gods, there was hell to pay. And so we have the revealing and oft-cited words of the Christian defender of the faith Tertullian:
They think the Christians the cause of every public disaster, of every affliction with which the people are visited. If the Tiber rises as high as the city walls, if the Nile does not send its waters up over the fields, if the heavens give no rain, if there is an earthquake, if there is famine or pestilence, straightway the cry is, “Away with the Christians to the lion!” (Apology 40)13
To think that pagans worshiped the gods only to abate their anger, however, ignores far too much that we know about traditional religions. These were practiced not only as a kind of preventive medicine but also for positive outcomes, the many beneficences that gods could supply to those who could not provide for themselves. Consider the advice of one of the most famous elite agriculturalists, Cato, for addressing a god after an appropriate sacrifice had been offered on a field:
That you may prevent, ward off and avert diseases, visible and invisible, death and destruction, ruin and storm, and that you permit the crops, corn, vineyards and plantations to grow and flourish, and that you keep safe the shepherds and their sheep, and grant good health and strength to me, my house, and our household.14
Chief among the beneficences sought, judging from surviving inscriptions and other material remains, was bodily health—so much so that one prominent scholar of antiquity has claimed that “the chief business of religion, it might then be said, was to make the sick well.”15 Virtually every god of the Roman pantheon, whatever else his or her primary function, occupation, or interest, could be and was invoked for healing. Even today people feel nearly helpless against the ravages of one epidemic, disease, or illness or another; prior to the invention of modern medicine, everyone felt that way, against each and every one of them. The gods had the power to help, though. As they could help in all other matters, personal, familial, civic, and imperial, if honored and worshiped appropriately.
We today are accustomed to global religions. That does not mean that religion is practiced, or understood, the same way everywhere. Christianity in the hills of Croatia will differ significantly from Christianity in the hills of Kentucky. Even so, major forms of Christianity are widely considered transnational, with Greek Orthodox, Roman Catholic, Anglican, Lutheran, and other communities sharing practices, beliefs, and even leaders worldwide. So too, mutatis mutandis, with forms of Judaism and Islam. But it was almost never like that in the Roman world. Religious cults varied from one place to another. The few exceptions were notable principally because they were in fact so rare.
There was no “religion of Zeus” that could be found throughout the Greek-speaking eastern part of the empire. No head priest of Zeus or governing council had any say or any concern over how the practices were carried on in various localities. No international religious organizations of any kind existed.
Even those cults practiced in similar ways throughout the empire were the same more by the accident of propagation than by intention and design. The worship of Mithras mentioned earlier, for example, appears to have comprised a number of consistent elements whether practiced in Rome, Gaul, or Syria. But that was because of how it was spread: principally through the Roman army, as soldiers who adhered to the religion were reassigned to a different part of the empire. Moreover, Mithraism was a relative newcomer on the religious scene, not an ancestral tradition that had been in place for centuries. Most cults were age-old practices that had grown up locally. As international travel became more popular, there might be some influence of one regional cult over another—for example, in the taking over of the name of a god or the practice of a cult that worshiped him. But it did not happen consistently or regularly. Traditional religions were local affairs.
Modern Western monotheisms are all religions of the book: the Torah, the New Testament, the Qur’an. There was nothing like them in the Roman world.
There were, of course, books. I have already mentioned influential works of literature that helped provide ancient Romans with their various mythologies. There were even, in a few religions, sacred books. The famous Sibylline Books, for example, allegedly recorded prophecies of an ancient prophetess, a sibyl, and were consulted by especially appointed and trained priestly experts to determine the proper course of action for the leaders of the city of Rome in times of crisis. But there really was nothing like a Bible, a book that would give instructions about what to believe and how to act in one’s daily life.
Instead, the many and various local religions practiced rituals that had been handed down for years or centuries. Customary observance was canonized in the sense that it came to form a body of tradition, but it was most often cited to justify or condemn specific religious practices. In particular, in Roman circles, specific appeal was made to the mos maiorum, the “custom of the ancients”—the established custom that determined proper behavior and practice. It was such oral tradition, rather than written texts, that normally provided guidance and precedent.
Because most cults were viewed as proper and acceptable, few efforts were ever made by state authorities to restrict them. It did happen on rare occasion: merely a handful of known instances over centuries in which thousands of cults were in constant practice. This handful of exceptions is worth noting, however, especially given the fate of Christianity at the hands of Roman authorities in the years before Constantine. These exceptions show that the Roman state was massively tolerant, but not infinitely so. If religious practices were deemed socially dangerous—either causing physical harm or creating infectious social problems—the authorities might act.
The most famous instance occurred in Rome in 186 BCE, when the senate intervened to quash the cult celebrating Bacchus, the Roman god of wine and religious ecstasy. The suppression of the Bacchanalia is recounted two centuries later in the history of Rome produced by Livy (59 BCE–17 CE), in a passage some scholars have argued exaggerates the profligate activities of the group.16
Livy indicates that the Bacchic cult had come to Rome from Etruria and then spread “like an epidemic.” It was, he claims, a wild and licentious affair that involved nocturnal sex rituals and ceremonial murder. Livy states that Bacchic meetings occurred at night under the cloak of darkness. They began with gluttonous banquets where the wine—Bacchus’s drink—flowed freely and the sexes mingled promiscuously so that “all sorts of corruption began to be practiced, since each person had ready to hand the chance of gratifying the particular desire to which he was naturally inclined.”
But it was not all fun and games. The evening events, Livy claims, would lead to “wholesale murders” that were concealed from public knowledge by the loud revelries: “No cries for help could be heard against the shriekings, the banging of drums, and the clashing of cymbals in the scene of debauchery and bloodshed.”
It was through the testimony of an eyewitness that the Roman senate came to be alerted to these dangerous rites. Under threat of punishment the witness revealed that new inductees in the cult were always under the age of twenty. One of them would be introduced to the cult priests as “a kind of sacrificial victim.” This hapless youth would then be taken into the midst of the frenzied Bacchics, who were shouting, singing, clashing cymbals, and beating drums to cover over the ultimate cultic act: ceremonial rape. Moreover, “anyone refusing to submit to outrage or reluctant to commit crimes was slaughtered as a sacrificial victim.”
The senate was especially shocked to hear these practices were not a small-time affair but a massive movement involving not only the lower classes but also “men and women of rank.” Moreover, they came to think it was growing at an alarming rate.17 The senate stepped in and issued an edict to bring the festivities to a halt, rounding up those who had actively participated in the Bacchic rites—there were said to be seven thousand of them—and those who had “polluted themselves by debauchery or murder . . . were condemned to death.” The senate then ordered the destruction of all the shrines dedicated to the worship of Bacchus, not only in Rome itself but throughout Italy, except, Livy indicates, those that had an altar or statue that “had been consecrated.” This surely must mean that some sanctioned Bacchic cults were accepted as innocuous and thus allowed to continue. In fact, Livy goes on to say that anyone who considered Bacchic ceremonies “hallowed by tradition” and essential could submit an official request to be allowed to follow them. But “there was to be no common fund of money, no president of the ceremonies, and no priest.” That is, there could not be a Bacchic organization, funding, or leadership. This edict, in effect, killed the cult, at least as insofar as it entailed drunken festivities involving rape and murder.
In sum, even though by modern standards Roman religion was incredibly diverse and tolerant, it was not endlessly so. There were limits. The limits were set by acceptable social norms. Degeneracy and criminal activities were not allowed and could be punished to the extreme.
Roman officials were generally, or at least publicly, opposed not only to morally degenerate and socially dangerous cults but also to what they saw as a kind of pseudo-religion, the false manipulation of divine forces for selfish and often antisocial ends that went under the name “magic.” Magic in antiquity was not a matter of tricks performed by a master of sleight-of-hand and deception. Magic was understood to be very real. It was thought to involve illicit and unsanctioned interactions with daimonic powers who could be swayed to accomplish miraculous results that might harm others or induce them to behave contrary to their own wishes.18 These interactions might involve spells and invocations of dark forces in order to curse and even kill an enemy, to provide personal supernatural powers, or to make the village beauty fall helplessly in love at one’s feet.
Scholars have long wrestled with how to define magic, especially in relationship to sanctioned “religion.” The older view was that magic compelled divine powers to act but religion humbly petitioned them; that magic manipulated the powers of darkness but religion submitted to the powers of light.19 In the second half of the twentieth century, however, scholars came to realize that it was difficult indeed to draw a clear and definitive line between practices one might call magical and others that might be called religious. Magic involves many of the same techniques and strives to attain many of the same ends as religion.
And so scholars had to reimagine ancient magic and began to think of it as the dark side of religion. Magic, in this understanding, would involve religious practices that were considered by mainstream opinion to stand on the margins, unauthorized, esoteric, secretive, nefarious, and dangerous, as opposed to cultic practices that, even if they look very much the same, were socially approved, public, open to scrutiny, licit, and, for the most part, wholesome.
However magic is defined, it clearly was known to exist in antiquity, as there is considerable evidence for it in both literary sources and archaeological finds, such as lead “curse tablets” in which a person invokes a divine attack on an enemy and papyrus texts that prescribe rituals and prayers that could have great magical effect.
In addition to forms of cultic practice perceived as socially dangerous, two religious extremes were widely disapproved of on both the state and popular levels: atheism and superstition. In a sense these phenomena were on opposite ends of the spectrum.
If we use the term in the modern sense, atheism was an exceedingly rare phenomenon in antiquity: very few people believed there were literally no gods. The word “atheism” itself, however, simply means “without the gods,” and one could be “without” them while still acknowledging they existed. As Roman religion specialist James Rives has pointed out, atheism applied more normally to “anyone who rejected or neglected the traditional modes of honoring [the gods].”20 That is to say, anyone who abjectly refused to participate in the worship of divine beings could be labeled an atheist. Such a person could expect a good deal of opprobrium and sometimes civil action. The Christians were often accused of being atheists. Obviously that was not because they denied the divine realm but because they refused to acknowledge (and act as if) it was inhabited by more than the one being they worshiped and refused to interact with it in traditional ways.
Christians also came to be accused of superstition, which for most Roman ancients was on the other end of the spectrum from atheism.21 Superstition involved excessive fear of the gods and what they might do, leading to extreme and immoderate attempts to avert their anger.22 In a scathing attack on superstition, Plutarch labels it as “a fear which utterly humbles and crushes a person, for he thinks that there are gods, but that they are the cause of pain and injury.” He notes that fear of the gods gives a person no escape: it invades even sleep and death itself. Death in some ways is that which is feared the most, because of what might come afterward: “Rivers of fire . . . specters of many fantastic shapes . . . judges and torturers and yawning gulfs and deep recesses teeming with unnumbered woes.”23
Unfortunately, the superstitious person thinks all this misfortune is deserved because “he is hateful to the gods, that he is being punished by the gods, and that the penalty he pays and all that he is undergoing are deserved because of his conduct.” Such a one “assumes that the gods are rash, faithless, fickle, vengeful, cruel, and easily offended; and, as a result, the superstitious person is bound to hate and fear the gods . . . As he hates and fears the gods, he is an enemy to them. And yet, though he dreads them, he worships them and sacrifices to them, and besieges their shrines.”24
For Plutarch, this is far worse than atheism, and much more despised by the gods themselves. As he puts it in a clever and convincing comparison:
Why for my part, I should prefer that people should say about me that I have never been born at all, and there is no Plutarch, rather than that they should say “Plutarch is an inconstant fickle person, quick-tempered, vindictive over little accidents, pained at trifles. If you invite others to dinner and leave him out, or if you haven’t the time and don’t go to call on him, or fail to speak to him when you see him, he will set his teeth into your body and bite it through, or he will get hold of your little child and beat him to death, or he will turn the beast he owns into your crops and spoil your harvest.”25
Of all the features of Roman religion I have delineated here, those most analogous to modern experience are atheism and superstition. There are today, of course, many atheists who do not believe in any divine being at all and many other people who live their lives without giving any particular thought or attention to the divine. There are also plenty of monotheists who are highly superstitious in Plutarch’s sense, stricken by dumb fear of what the divine ruler of the world will do to them either in this life or the world to come. At these points we are on familiar turf.
But Roman religions are highly unfamiliar in so many other ways. They involved many gods; they were all about practice, not about belief; they had no orthodoxy or heresy, no doctrines, almost no ethical requirements (with a few exceptions, such as a proscription of parricide), and no sacred “Word of God” giving instructions about theology or daily ethical practices. There were no trans-regional religious organizations or leaders. The religions on the whole were massively inclusive and highly tolerant. They principally entailed cultic activities of prayer, sacrifice, and divination. These are religions that would be scarcely recognizable in the modern Reform synagogue, the neighborhood mosque, or the Baptist church on the corner. Yet they were the dominant form of religiosity throughout all of Roman antiquity.
Their dominance was not restricted to some realm that we can wall off and call “the religious sphere.” It is always to be remembered that throughout all of antiquity—in fact, until the eighteenth-century Enlightenment, and still in most parts of our world today—the religious and sociopolitical realms were not kept distinct. The state not only promoted and encouraged religious cults, it staffed them. In Rome itself, the priests of the major state priesthoods were political appointments held by professionals trained in affairs of the state. The emperor himself was the pontifex maximus, the “chief priest” over the state cults. As we will see in a moment, his predecessors were revered as gods. Religion infused the state; it infused life; it was virtually omnipresent.
Religion could be seen everywhere, in the temples and cult statues that dominated the landscape, both in the cities and in the countryside. We have a list of buildings in a papyrus document from ancient Alexandria. It enumerates 845 taverns, 1,561 baths, 24,396 houses, and 2,478 temples.26 That would be nearly one temple for every ten houses. If that were true in my neighborhood, there would be five temples—or, in my Christian environment, churches—just on my relatively short street.
Numerous other holy places could be seen, apart from permanent temple buildings in the cities. Shrines could be located almost anywhere and could be small and roughly constructed—for example, at a crossroad or in the middle of virtually nowhere in the countryside. A typical home would have a small shrine to the Penates and Lares, who were gods of the family. (The Penates, for example, watched over the larder.)
The self-contained temples in the Roman world functioned differently from church, synagogue, or mosque buildings today. They were not places where the congregation would come together for worship. They were houses of the gods. The cult statue, representing the god, would be kept there, in a specially appointed room that normally was closed off and not accessible to the public. Sacrifices would take place not in this room, in the presence of the statue, but outside the temple, in front, on the altar. That is where people would gather together for the ceremony to hear prayers and music and to observe the slaughter.
These were normally festive occasions. Most people could not afford to eat meat on a regular basis, and a public sacrifice provided a rare and welcome exception. The priests who performed the ritual sacrifice would then butcher the animal in the temple precincts, after an expert examined the entrails to be sure the offering had been accepted by the god. Most temples had dining rooms, and if it was a large public ceremony with a number of sacrificial animals, as opposed to a small private occasion, there might be a distribution of the meat. On the inside, those celebrating were often joined for the meal by the god, in the person of the cult statue.
A temple to one divinity could house numerous cult statues of other deities as well. Statues could also be found in numerous other places. The surroundings of a middle-size temple, such as the Tychaean in Alexandria, Egypt, might be taken as typical. Not only did it have numerous gods within its walls; it was located near a bathhouse that held gods, and buildings nearby with niches in the walls for places for statues, “probably upward of a hundred different images of gods in and around this one intersection.” Larger temples obviously would be associated with many more. The Acropolis in Athens was “absolutely packed with nearly one thousand years of dedicatory statues honoring both men and gods.”27
As already intimated, cult statues were not actually worshiped. They were a kind of physical representation of the god to help focus the attention, or even a site through which the god could make himself present. As a rule, divine images had little to do with the sacrificial activities that played a central role in most cults. But they were often treated as holy objects: washed, dressed, and cared for; paraded through town with music and dancers; brought out to the god’s worshipers on special occasions—special objects of reverence.
Among all the kinds of religious cults in the empire, two have struck specialists interested in the spread of Christianity as particularly significant and interesting: the various “mystery religions” and the imperial cult—the worship of the emperor.
The term “mystery religion” or “mystery cult” is normally applied to a range of cults that came from various eastern climes and that sponsored the worship of a foreign god or goddess, such as Demeter (in Greece), Isis (from Egypt), or Mithras (from Persia). To participate in the full range of religious activities in one of these cults (in addition to their public processions and sacrifices) a person was required to undergo a sacred initiation ceremony.28
Despite what one sometimes reads, we actually do not know a good deal about how these cults were organized, what specific cultic practices they entailed, how people were initiated into them, what these people were taught to understand about the deity at the center of the cult’s worship, and what kind of myths were told about that deity. There is good reason for considering them “mysteries”: only initiates could participate in the secret rituals of these cults, and initiates were sworn to silence, evidently with threats of serious divine reprisals and punishments for breaking their vow.29 As a result, hardly anyone did.
For that reason, scholars deeply interested in these cults have had to base their views—and sometimes the highly detailed descriptions they spin out, often from whole cloth—on very slight evidence, including highly allusive references made in passing in ancient texts and the material remains that have been uncovered through archaeological discovery. In some instances, such as the worship of Mithras, archaeological finds are by far our most extensive and telling (though often ambiguous) evidence.
These cults naturally differed from one another in numerous ways, both in how they were practiced and to whom they were open. The mysteries of Mithras, for example, were restricted to men. No women were allowed. That, naturally enough, limited its appeal: it is hard to imagine Mithraism “taking over the world” if half the human race could not participate. Consistently among these cults, however, it is clear that an initiate in one could participate in others as well. None of them was “exclusive” in the way that Christianity was. Anyone who worshiped Mithras in an underground cave, where the god’s sacred sites were always located, could also worship in a temple of Isis. Initiates participated widely in all kinds of other cults as well: civic cults, imperial cults, family cults, and so on.30
Even though initiation appears to have been a constant feature of mystery cults, the procedures would have differed significantly from one cult to the other. Becoming an initiate was thought to place a person in an unusually close and intimate relationship with the god or goddess at the center of the cult. A kind of personal relationship with a divine being was not something promoted or fostered in public cults. This may well have been the major attraction of the mysteries. This relationship was supposed to improve one’s life in the present, and in some instances the relationship was understood to continue into the afterlife. It is not necessarily the case that the mysteries promised an afterlife to those who otherwise would simply not have one. Instead, for those who believed that life existed beyond the grave, a mystery cult maintained that the intimacy obtained with the deity in the present would continue after death, making the afterlife a far more enjoyable and pleasant experience.
Some of the mysteries—for example, Mithraism and the Isis cult—had communal leaders and a kind of “graded” membership by which initiates could “rise up” through the ranks, both to have greater authority in the community and to attain a yet closer relationship with the divinity. It appears as well that part of the periodic celebrations of these cults involved sacred meals that were shared together.
From all these features, as vague and underdetermined as they are, it should seem obvious why mystery cults have sparked the interest of scholars of early Christianity. Christianity too involved an initiation rite (baptism) that brought particular intimacy with the deity (Christ and God himself) and a hope of a greater afterlife; the Christian church had clear grades of authority, and one of its major rituals involved a weekly shared meal (which became the Eucharist). As a result, scholars have often wondered whether we should consider Christianity another mystery cult—this one from another eastern region, Israel—and whether some of the other mysteries played any role in the development of Christianity.31
Those who have rejected such a suggestion have pointed out that Christianity is stunningly different in many ways from each of the mystery religions. Unlike Mithraism, for example, it was open to all people of both genders, not just to men, and in fact women played significant leading roles in the early years of the church. Unlike the others, it was exclusive and did not allow participation in other mysteries. Moreover, unlike them all, it also emphasized the importance of doctrine and ethics.
These are all strong points, but it is worth noting that any one of the mysteries could be selected—say, the cult of Cybele that is associated with Anatolia (modern Turkey)—and shown to be different in numerous ways from all the others. Each had its own distinctive features, sometimes extremely distinctive ones, such as only men being allowed to worship in underground caves. The fact that Christianity differed from other mysteries does not alter the fact that it also shared numerous features, probably more than it shared with other cults scattered throughout the empire.
For many modern persons, the form of ancient cult that seems most alien involved the worship of political leaders. Such worship could take a variety of forms, but the one best known is the imperial cult: the worship of the emperor.
In trying to make sense of the worship of mere mortals, it is important to remember that ancient people had a sense of the divine that was different from what we have today. For the monotheistic traditions of the modern West, an enormous and unbridgeable chasm exists between the divine and the human. God is the Almighty and Eternal Creator of All “up there”; humans are peons fated for a brief and painful mortal existence down here. Ancient people, on the other hand, understood both the divine and the human realms to involve gradations of grandeur and power, and sometimes the two realms overlapped. There may have been the one ultimate all-powerful divine being over all, but below that one were the great gods and goddesses of ancient mythology and worship; below them were local divinities who were more closely connected with daily life; below them were family gods; below them were daimones; and so on. The divine realm was a continuum.
So too was the human. Some people are fantastically, even preternaturally brilliant, beautiful, or powerful. They are not like the rest of us mere mortals. In that light, who could be more powerful than the Roman emperor? He was able to accomplish feats the rest of us could barely even imagine. The emperor was not Jupiter or one of the great gods. He was the emperor. But he, like other amazingly elevated human beings, could have a touch of the divine.
The worship of the emperor was precipitated by Julius Caesar, who advertised his family line as physically descended from the goddess Venus. After Caesar was assassinated in 44 BCE, his adopted son, Octavian, helped promote the claim that he had ascended to live now with the gods in the heavenly realm as a divine being. Caesar had been made a god. Octavian’s declaration was not personally or politically disinterested. If his own father was a god, what did that make him?
Some fifteen years later, Octavian was to become the first of the Roman emperors, renamed Caesar Augustus. When he died, after a reign of just over four decades, he too was declared by the Roman senate to have become a divine being, and he was worshiped as such. The imperial cult that developed worshiped deceased emperors who had been declared deified by the senate. The senate did not actually make anyone a god but rather officially recognized that a deification had occurred. Deification came, of course, only to “good” emperors. The hopelessly inept or morally degenerate ones—think Nero or Caligula—did not receive the honor. Ironically some of the “bad” ones, including Caligula, were deemed awful precisely because of their megalomaniacal insistence that they were gods while still living.
It is often argued that the imperial cults offered prayers and sacrifices only to the deified, deceased emperors, not to the living. For the living emperor, offerings were made to his genius. The term “genius” is a little hard to define, but it means something like “guardian spirit,” which, in the case of the emperor, inspired him and directed the course of his life. Thus, for example, we have a calendar of festivals observed by the Roman army from the third century CE that indicates that anniversaries of deified emperors were to be observed through sacrifices, whereas anniversaries of the current emperor were marked either by offerings to his genius or offerings to other divinities connected with his rule, such as the trio of divinities associated with the Capitoline Hill in Rome: Jupiter, Juno, and Minerva. Two centuries earlier, from 15 CE, we have an inscription found in a town near Sparta, Greece, that speaks of a festival on one day “for the God Caesar Augustus, son of the god, our Savior and Deliverer” and on the next day “for the emperor Tiberius Caesar Augustus, father of the fatherland.” The wording is very important. Caesar Augustus, who had died the previous year, was God and son of God, the Savior and Deliverer. The current emperor, Tiberius, was “father of the fatherland.” It was a big difference.32
There are other instances, however, especially in provinces in the East, where the living emperor was indeed worshiped as already divine. Scholars have long tried to make sense out of this discrepancy. Possibly the most persuasive view takes into account the fact that most people living in the empire, until the time of the emperor Caracalla (ruled 198–217 CE), were not actually citizens of Rome. Being a citizen was an enormous privilege and honor. In the provinces the honor was almost always granted only to highly placed and wealthy members of the local aristocracy. As a result, the majority of people living in the provinces were not citizens of Rome but still subject to Roman rule. One way to explain the discrepancy in the way the cult to the living emperor was practiced is to say that Roman citizens were not expected to worship the living emperor but Roman subjects—like most people in the eastern provinces—were. Most provinces in the West, on the other hand, followed the lead of the city of Rome itself by offering cult just to the emperor’s genius.33
A previous generation of scholarship took a rather cynical view of the imperial cult and maintained it was a ruse foisted on non-citizens in the empire as a way of bringing them under control. There was a clear logic to this idea. If people throughout the empire were required to participate in the worship of the ultimate ruler as a divine being, were they likely to rebel? They may have wanted to resist the authority of a mere mortal, but who would want to cross swords with a god?
Despite the attractions of this view, it has waned over time as scholars have realized from abundant evidence that most cults to the emperor were not imposed on distant populations by the central authorities in Rome but derived from local initiatives. It was a mark of distinction to be allowed to build a temple in honor of the Roman emperors. Cities competed for the honor. Local aristocrats who sponsored the movements and paid for the temples experienced exalted personal status, as they were seen to be uniquely connected with the mighty emperor himself. For local regional aristocrats who valued status and prestige above all things, few honors could be considered comparable.
The imperial cults, therefore, were localized affairs, and participation was voluntary. Apart from the fact that a city or region needed official approval to start a cult, there was no centralized control, no detailed set of rules they had to follow or leaders who oversaw the entire operation empire-wide. In this, imperial cults resembled all other cults of Rome. Roman religion did not involve interregional organization, leadership, and governance. It was always carried out on the local level.
At the same time, there was a general sense, promoted by authorities both in Rome and throughout the provinces, that faithful adherence to the worship of the gods was vital to the healthy working of the empire. People were expected to participate, even if this meant simply showing up on an occasional feast day to watch a sacrifice and enjoying a meal of good meat and plenty of wine afterward. The worship of the gods was not intellectually, emotionally, or theologically separate from the sociopolitical realities of daily existence. Religion was part of life, fully integrated and interwoven with governance, social order, and daily experience.
In many respects, the enormously wide-ranging cults of the Roman world represented different ways for different people in different parts of the empire to worship the gods. At the same time, there are a few features these cults do seem to share. They all subscribed to the existence of many gods and all were based on cultic acts of worship, such as sacrifice, prayer, and divination. As such, they were by and large inclusive. None of them insisted their god was the only divine being, or that this god was to be worshiped in only one particular way everywhere. As a corollary, these religions were highly tolerant of differences. So too was the Roman government, both centrally in Rome and throughout the provinces. There were exceptions, but only when a cult was judged to be morally degenerate or socially dangerous.
These exceptions help to prove a very important rule. Throughout the empire it was understood that the worship of the gods, in ways handed down through ancestral tradition, was important both for the proper working of the state and for the success and prosperity of the people who lived in it. The gods supported the empire, the city, the family, and the individual. The gods provided help for people who could not help themselves. They averted disaster. They showered beneficences among those who revered them and worshiped them properly.
It was in that context that Christianity arose. One of the leading questions historians of early Christianity have always tried to answer is how such a different understanding of religion could sprout, grow, and thrive in such an environment. Christians opposed the gods of the state, city, and family. They did not believe there were many gods but only one. They rejected the claims that emperors were divine. They did not accept the validity of other forms of worship. They did not think the traditional gods provided any benefits. They thought the gods were demons who had deceived virtually everyone in the known world.
The Christians themselves were widely considered strange. They were also known to revere, as the savior of the world, a lowly day laborer who had been crucified for crimes against the state. For a pagan in the early empire, it would have been virtually impossible to imagine that these Christians would eventually destroy the other religions of Rome. How they did so will occupy us in the chapters to follow.