Pagans and Christians

There are objections to both these approaches. To measure paganism by expressions of educated scepticism is to concentrate on a very small fraction of the cities’ upper classes. Such expressions are at risk to the chance survivals of our written evidence: the second century has itself been characterized as an “age of faith,” yet it is evident from scenes in its copious evidence that Cynics, Sceptics and true Epicureans still flourished, writing little that survives among the widespread publicity for the “providence” of the gods. Did these doubters really vanish in the third century, or do we only happen to hear less about them? How new, indeed, was the contrary current? The most evident rise in a literature of the “irrational” belongs much earlier, c. 200–150 B.C., where it coincided, significantly, with a demonstrable loss of civic freedom. By the Imperial period, people were sorting and organizing texts and practices which had begun far earlier: suggestively, their interest has been seen as a rationalization of the irrational, rather than a new surrender to it.² Arguments about the relative scale of scepticism also assume that authors, our evidence for it, continued to practise what they wrote. In the late first century A.D., Plutarch repeated the old arguments against “superstition” in a youthful work. He has been counted as evidence for a surviving, and significant, opposition to “credulity,”³ but we must remember that he spent his later life as a pious priest at Delphi, writing essays on divine punishment and the evident terrors of the next world. Readers of the Acts of the Apostles can only wonder how the second or third century could possibly be more “credulous” than the first, even among the highly educated. It is not, then, very helpful to divide the Imperial period into ages of relative irrationality.

The idea of anxiety is no easier to pin down. Anxious individuals can be found in any age with a personal literature: they are not the aptest characterization of the slaves and dependent workers on whom the burdens of Antonine civilization lay. In human relationships, indeed, we hear more about anger than anxiety.⁴ Philosophers in the second century showed a continuing interest in anger and its problems: the Emperor Marcus’s personal Meditations frequently mention his struggle with them; anger takes on a new dimension to attentive readers of Galen’s treatises. Galen had seen his mother fly into a rage and bite the servants: he describes his journey with an irascible friend who split the heads of two slaves when they muddled the luggage; anger was the man’s besetting passion, as it clearly was for others in their dealings with the servile classes. “Many friends” were reproved by Galen’s father when they had bruised themselves by striking slaves in the teeth: “They could have waited a while, he used to say, and used a rod or a whip to inflict as many blows as they wished, acting with calm reflection…” Should the Antonine “age of anxiety” be rephrased as an “age of anger,” rooted in the social order and its division between master and slave?

To sum up an age by a single emotion is to focus on a few individuals and to simplify even those few. However, the idea of an “anxious age” took this objection into account. It aimed only to characterize a minority in the educated class, and within their number, the Platonist philosophers in particular. If this minority had led their cities’ culture, this location might be significant. However, these philosophers were only a fraction of a wider, more disparate class of notables, and their written theories on the age-old problems of evil and its origins were neither distinctively “anxious” nor new to the Antonine age. Written opinions tell us nothing about philosophers’ own practice in life, let alone the practice of their social equals who made excellent fun of the eternal gap between philosophers’ writings and conduct.⁵ Anxiety itself is too vague a diagnosis, neither apt nor new. The major anxieties of this age were not spiritual, but physical and geological, the plagues and earthquakes which beset whole cities, not a few individuals in their inner life. We do hear of medical anxieties among some of the educated class, but it is not clear that these were signs of a new “hypochondria”: physical weakness and a concern for health had long been thought typical of men of letters, the main source, inevitably, of our evidence.⁶ If the idea of anxiety is to have any significant force, it must be narrowed to something more precise, the particular detachment of people’s inner life from an outer life of expected ceremonial and tradition. This type of detachment might indeed be a prelude to a greater age of change, just as a detachment from the “stage play” round of the external world among cultured Elizabethans and their authors can usefully be seen as a prelude to the great cultural changes of seventeenth-century England.⁷

To explore this idea of anxiety, we can best begin, not with “individuals’ thoughts in their loneliness,” but with cults as practised in their cities. The gods were known through their images, many of which resided in temples: in Egypt, the priests’ daily liturgy was to open the shrine, offer food to the god’s statue and attend to its cleanliness. In the Greek world, some, but not all, of the temples of civic gods were kept shut for the greater part of the year.⁸ There were notable exceptions, however, and some cities prescribed daily hymns to be sung by choirs at the morning opening of a shrine; otherwise, by finding the shrine’s keeper, a visitor could usually enter and pray before the god’s image. The central “cult acts” for the civic gods occurred on the days of their festivals. Then, people processed, sang hymns and sacrificed in the gods’ honour. Sometimes they processed from a fixed point in the city to a particular shrine or altar: cities and temples had their “sacred ways” and particular monuments along the route. By tradition, envoys would go out to summon other cities to attend certain festivals, a not inexpensive task whose cost, like the cost of secular embassies, was often borne by the envoys themselves.

Inside the city, participants in festivals generally wore clean white robes and accompanied their own chosen animals for sacrifice. The temples were hung with garlands and so, sometimes, were the private houses. Ritual worship was not confined to those who processed: people might pay libations or offer sacrifices on small altars beside their own residence.⁹ In a world without weekends, these festivals were the only “holidays.” Quite often, the statue of the god joined the tour, sometimes parading in its new robes, sometimes being escorted for a yearly washing.¹⁰ These occasions were familiar to Christian observers, who later used them as a setting for legends of their martyrs. In southwestern Asia, at Panamara, a statue of Zeus was taken from his celebrated shrine and brought on horseback for his “visit” (epidemia) to nearby Stratonicea. These occasions were matters of civic self-respect and supported a city’s identity. The tour of Zeus was shown on Stratonicea’s local coinage: in Gordian’s reign, the coins of Magnesia-on-the-Maeander show the city’s statue of Hephaestus, processing on its stretcher, with four bearers. It was a great honour to carry sacred objects in a civic procession, and, like other great honours, it fell to the most distinguished families. To live in a city was to be accustomed to these interruptions of normal life, which broke up the calendar and honoured the gods. We know something of the calendar for the shrine of Capitoline Jupiter in Egypt’s Arsinoë in the year 215. Only parts of it survive, but even in these fragments, we find that the statue of one or other god was anointed three times, crowned twenty times and taken on at least three processions between the end of December and the end of April in the year 215. Pagan cults created the divisions of civic time.¹¹

These processions and festivals were merry occasions and were alive with all sorts of music.¹² Bands played various wind instruments and every sort of drum, while even the smaller villages tried to hire themselves a “symphony” by binding travelling performers to a contract. Their music was often the cue for dancers, whose art is one of our saddest losses from the ancient world. Processions also meant hymns, old hymns recopied in the Imperial age, newer hymns and prose panegyrics whose authors were sometimes commemorated: at Thespiai, in Boeotia, we learn of a competition for the best marching hymns, to be sung in processions. As the poets never tired of celebrating, a festival was also the paseo, or promenade, of an ancient city. It brought well-bred girls briefly into the open, ripe for a well-aimed romance. It also brought on the whores, not just the sacred prostitutes of a few remaining cults but girls like those whose masters Dio cited, trailing them round Greece from one festival to the next. At the level of the procession, the impact of a pagan cult can still be sensed in the journeys of the Christian images through the cities of southern Spain during Holy Week. Their content and context are Christian, not “pagan” survivals, but they are similar expressions of religious honour, based on the quarters of the city. The elements are familiar to anyone who has tried to picture an Antonine festival, the art and antique sculpture, the flowers, embroidery and candles, the marching ranks of well-dressed children, the spontaneous singing, the acclamations of the crowd before the seats of the city notables, and once again, the prostitutes, those necessary supports for fidelity and virginity in a Catholic country.

As civic life spread with the growth of new cities and as the resources of Greek culture expanded, processions became attached over time to ever longer festivals. For days on end, even weeks in the agricultural off-season, people in a city could enjoy a programme of music and oratory, drama, all manner of athletic contests and that unstoppable inanity, the pantomime. Cities held their own competitions, which, in turn, competed for talent with the cities nearby. There were prizes for every kind of virtuosity, for acrobatics, conjuring, spoken panegyrics, announcing, blowing the trumpet, and “Homerism,” the valiant miming of scenes from Homeric epic. Already, in their Greek homelands, theatres endured all manner of non-theatrical uses, culminating in the vile contests of gladiators and the wild-beast “hunts.”¹³

At one level, then, the public cults merge into a study of the life which attached itself to religious occasions. Their festivals drew crowds, and the crowds, naturally, were good business. It made sense to combine festivals with local fairs and with the Roman governors’ assizes, involving the gods in two constant human activities: shopping and litigation. Cities, understandably, pressed hard for permission to raise the status of their festivals or somehow to join the circuit of the governors’ tours. Elevation was not only a matter of civic pride. It had great economic benefits. Touring governors and better festivals brought more visitors, needing services, food and lodging. In turn, the visitors increased the gods’ audience.

In this setting, the antiquarian culture of the cities’ men of letters was not “irrelevant.” A new civic pedigree could make the reputation of the least-known city, and no pedigree was more respected than a link with the gods and founding heroes of Greek myth. Ancient tradition was the touchstone of civic life, and where it did not exist, there was scope for inventing it. At Aizani, in Phrygia, we can still admire the results.¹⁴ This outlandish site claimed descent from the Arcadians of ancient Greece, along with several other cities whom the continuing process of Hellenization had offered a place in the geography of Greek myth. It was probably in the late first century A.D. that the people of Aizani began to build a splendid temple of Zeus; their envoys then persuaded other cities to take their city’s origin seriously, and Aizani entered the select company of the Panhellenic League, whose delegates met at Athens. Already, its antiquarians had done well by it, but their myth was backed by religion: just outside the city, they claimed they had the very cave in which the infant Zeus had been nursed. Claiming the infant Zeus, the city gained honour, visitors and a temple of particular design. The claim, naturally, was contested by other cities that had caves: Zeus’s birthplace, like his tomb, became a topic of keen intercity rivalry, giving scope to public speakers and, again, to antiquarians, who could oppose traditions as well as invent them.

At Aizani, a temple and its festivals made the city’s fame and fortune: did life in such a city become guided strongly by respect for the gods? Any activity, social, legal or political, could be preceded by prayers to the gods, but simply by association with a festival, these accompanying activities did not become “sacred.” Rather, the religious core of a festival were the offerings which were made to the gods: incense, libations of wine, cakes and animals for slaughter. Considerable care could go into the choice of the proper ceremonial beast: priests and city notables of all periods needed a practised eye for an animal.¹⁵ On Cos, admittedly in the late fourth century B.C., we learn how the divisions of the town’s citizen body each presented a well-groomed ox on parade in the marketplace while the magistrates sat and picked the prize animal for their gods. When they had chosen from nine or more candidates, they prayed and made a proclamation. Then all the oxen were driven back onto the agora, and if their chosen ox “bows his head, let him be sacrificed to the goddess.” In antiquity’s cattle shows, the same animal never survived to win for the second year running. Perhaps the parade continued on Cos as a “tradition” in the second century A.D. It is then that we still meet a rite called “the driving of the oxen” in the city of Miletus, whose purpose, presumably, was to pick the best victims for sacrifice. The animals’ horns were gilded; at Astypalaea, we know that the chosen animals were stamped, in case their owners tried to win the honour of processing with them while dodging the sacrifice at the end: such offenders were formally cursed. In Egypt, the “sealing” of suitable beasts was a constant task for the priesthood, which they rendered in return for a fee.

In the Greek world, the chosen animals were killed to the piercing cry of female spectators, “the customary sacrificial shout of the Greeks.” The animal was sprinkled with water, which caused it to shiver and thus signify its assent to the act. A hefty blow of the knife or axe then felled it, either “pre-stunning” or killing it. In practice, the ligaments of the legs might be cut, to stop it bolting, but there was no question of bleeding an animal to death while conscious. The meat was then roasted and distributed among priests and participants: a sacrifice was the one recognized occasion for consuming meat in the diet of the Greek (but not Roman) cultural area. Some people took the context very seriously. In the Imperial period, we have recently learned, the servants of Meidon ate “unsacrificed meat” and poor Meidon was struck dumb by the local god, Zeus Trosos.¹⁶ He only recovered his voice three months later after a dream had told him to put up a monument to the incident. It turned up recently in Pisidia. While Paul’s Gentile Christians were being told to avoid meat offered to idols, Meidon and his pagan servants were learning from hard experience to eat nothing else.

At this basic level, pagan cults did indeed satisfy the emotions; they allayed hunger. Sacrifices were one more festive element in occasions which were not in the least anxious: on every count, festivals were enormous fun, and their ordered piety was the recognized opposite to excessive fear of the gods. In their books, moralists did insist that gods were not swayed by lavish offerings: Pythagoreans and reforming groups did stand aloof from the cults of cooked meat which the cities patronized; emphasis was also laid on worship “with a pure heart,” a maxim which did extend to certain cults and shrines.¹⁷ In the cities, however, blood sacrifice was not passing out of fashion as a result.¹⁸ In the year 250, a pagan Emperor demanded it throughout the Empire and thus caused the Christians to be persecuted; in the fourth century, subsequent Christian Emperors deliberately tried to ban it. Its supposed “decline” is worth refuting. In texts and inscriptions, there is indeed plenty of evidence for pagans’ use of incense and candles, lamps and hymns in a constant “service” of bloodless piety. We can see this worship in the old daily liturgy of the Egyptian temples and we can document it thickly in the cults of Asclepius or in pagan cults of an abstract divinity or Most High god. From time to time, as we shall see, Apollo himself approved this bloodless worship in oracles which he delivered under the Empire. Christians, eventually, repeated much of it, but it was not a new or distinctive fashion. The burning of incense was as old as historical cult in Greek temples and its use in honour of Asclepius was quite conventional. The two types of pagan service did not exclude one another. In other oracles, Apollo listed detailed blood sacrifices which his client cities were to offer. The Egyptian gods also received their bulls and cows in due season and we now know that Asclepius’s major shrine at Pergamum required the offering of a piglet before entry into its Greater Incubation Chamber.

Was bloodless cult simply cheaper and quicker than the offering of an animal? If we think of cattle, sacrificed on civic occasions, the answer seems clear enough. Variations in time and place prevent certainty, but inscriptional evidence for their cost puts them in a price range which was only conceivable for people of a certain substance. In northeastern Lydia, we have the inscription of a worshipper who apologizes to his god for his stone monument, but asks him to accept it, as he is unable to pay the sacrifice which he had vowed previously.¹⁹ We might think that inscribed stones were much more expensive and troublesome than animals, yet how many other votive reliefs were put up as substitutes for bulls and cows? Pigs, however, were vastly cheaper, as were sheep, especially ewes: a pinch of good incense was no doubt cheaper than either, but it was not an everyday commodity. The bloodless alternative to sacrifice owed something to ease and economy, but nothing to growing scruples about shedding animals’ blood. When pagans could pay for it, they did, and the scruples of a few philosophers made no impact. Several temples preserved the skulls of exceptional carcasses, and rich people continued to offer them, not only Emperors like Julian and Heliogabalus but lesser persons of extravagance, like the aristocratic lady Polleinos, who sacrificed a hecatomb in Miletus in the early third century “in accordance with the divine oracles” of Apollo, or like the dutiful son near Leptis who sacrificed fifty-one bulls and thirty-eight goats, a true Iarbas, at his father’s tomb in the fourth century A.D.²⁰

The second and third centuries also saw a widespread interest in bulls’ testicles.²¹ Men and women alike offered these choice parts in private and public ceremonies, which are known from their Latin inscriptions. From 160 A.D. onwards, they are known to have been connected with the cult of Cybele, the Great Mother, and also with offerings “on behalf of the safety of the Emperor”: once, the Emperor Pius granted an exemption from legal duties to an individual who offered them in this way and no doubt local bulls greatly regretted the offer. Worshippers went to great lengths: in 160, one Carpus transported a pair of bull’s balls the whole way from Rome’s Vatican Hill to Cybele’s shrine at Lyons. We know that eventually, by the late fourth century, worshippers would sit in a trench and be spattered with the blood of a bull which was sacrificed above their heads. The date at which this highly prized “blooding” began is disputed, but it was not the rite of a culture which had started to soften on the topic of sacrifices. Animal bloodshed remained central to pagan cult, and when Christian Emperors banned sacrifice, they were aiming at the living heart of pagans’ cult acts.

Animals continued to be offered to the gods; the circuit of festivals continued to grow, increasing up to and beyond the age of Gordian. Processions were reorganized with ever greater detail and munificence, old processions like those from Miletus to Apollo’s great shrine at Didyma or from the city of Athens to Eleusis, new processions like the Komyria at Zeus’s great shrine of Panamara.²² In the early Christian periods pagan cults did not only shape civic time: they also shaped that well-worked category, “civic space.” On site after site in the Antonine age, we can watch shrines and altars absorbing yet more space and money. “Planning permission” did not prevent the gods from receiving some new and spectacular housing. This extravagance is the background to the philosophers’ writings on cult and religion, a background we would never guess from contemporary Christian attacks on “dying” pagan rites and mythology. New temple building is particularly well known in the civic and provincial cults of the Emperors. As this cult was prestigious and relatively new, the spate of new temples was not so surprising. Yet it was accompanied by new shrines for many of the old gods, too. From Asia through Syria to North Africa, the example of three cities may help to convey the scale of it.

At Gerasa (Jerash), in modern Jordan, we can only gaze and wonder at the scale of the second century’s religious architecture.²³ Off the centre of their colonnaded street, the Gerasenes found the money for a massive temple of Artemis whose precinct excelled anything in Baalbek or the Near East. So, no doubt, they had intended. Its outer portico was flanked by shops, “a true Burlington Arcade,” in an archaeologist’s opinion, and fronted the steps and open space of a temple precinct which was over two thousand yards square. The temple and its surrounds marked the peak of Antonine civic ambition in the 130s A.D. Artemis’s shrine was matched by a remodelled temple of Zeus at the far end of the main street, off the city’s famous oval piazza. It was a near-rival in the number of its steps and pillars, though not in area. At the focal points of the city’s plan, the gods changed the face of Jerash between the 130s and the 180s.

At Side, Longinus’s home town, the area of the second- and third-century city has only been excavated in part, but a strong religious presence is also obvious.²⁴ In the region of the agora stood an elegant rounded temple, surrounded by twelve engaged Corinthian columns. Dated to the middle or later second century, it was probably a temple of Fortune. At the southern end of the main street stood another, older temple, entered from the east: it was probably a shrine for an Eastern divinity, perhaps Men. From a handsome inscription, we learn of a cult of “Zeus Helios Serapis,” as at Jerash; another temple, outside the main city plan, contained a statue of Dionysus, and may have honoured this god. This shrine, too, has been dated around the mid-second century A.D. Near the “temple of Men,” at the end of the main street, stood two large temples, also of late second-century date. They overlook the sea by Side’s famous harbour and have been explained as the temples of Athena and Apollo, the divinities whom we know as Side’s protectors on her coins and inscriptions. A recently found inscription has revealed a “festival of disembarkation” for the goddess Athena, which was donated by one Audius Maximus to the “citizens of Side.” In another inscription, we find a “festival of disembarkation” for Apollo and “all the people of Pamphylia,” which was given by a man whose name points to a later date, after 212 A.D. These festivals have been well understood as festivals for the disembarkation of the statues of Athena and Apollo from the nearby shore. The first festival was restricted to Side’s citizens: the second went a step further, no doubt on purpose, and extended the occasion to all Pamphyliots. In the later second century A.D., we should picture the arrival of two great statues for the city’s large new temples. Shortly afterwards, a festival honoured Athena’s arrival, and then, a generation later, another festival commemorated Apollo’s. Both were the gifts of very rich men.

Further west, in North Africa, the city sites of this period are so large that archaeologists have not yet revealed any one in full. Surprises are in store, but at Sabratha, in Tripoli, we can appreciate the centre of a city which was not in the first rank but which relates very neatly to a literary text.²⁵ It was at Sabratha, in the year 157, that Apuleius, author of The Golden Ass, pleaded in self-defence against a charge of sorcery. His speech, as published, is a remarkable tour de force, and is well worthy of a great performing sophist. Here and there, it alludes to cults which we can see in Sabratha’s town plan. In the first century A.D., to the northwest of its Forum, Sabratha had had a modest temple of Serapis which was built of sandstone. A rather larger temple to Liber Pater (Dionysus) stood at the Forum’s west end. The customary temple of Jupiter overlooked the Forum off its platform and was probably dedicated to Jupiter, Juno and Minerva. The glory of the site was an enlarged temple of Isis, set some way to the east of the city centre. It rose on the very edge of the shore, where its portico of Corinthian columns still stands just above the beach. The site was particularly favoured for this goddess of the sea and her festivals which prayed for calm sailing. From inscriptions, we know this temple to have been rebuilt and dignified with the name of a governor of the province in the 70s A.D.

A century or so later, Sabratha’s temples had been greatly enlarged and improved. The citizens had imported marbles and remote Egyptian granite in honour of the gods. In court, Apuleius appealed to his audience’s initiations into the mysteries of Liber Pater. These rites were celebrated in Liber Pater’s enlarged shrine, which had recently been adorned with new stones and a smart new portico. Three grand new temples had entered the second-century city: a large shrine of unknown dedication to the south of the Forum, a lavish temple which was dedicated to the Emperors Marcus and Verus and an ornate temple of Hercules which had been dedicated in the year 186. In the second century, Sabrathan notables had suffered from acute lithomania, and their shrines were huge buildings for the gods. A Christian bishop is known in Sabratha by the 250s, but his converts lived in the shadow of this pagan magnificence.

This public flourish of the pagan cults is all the more interesting because at many sites it is a change from the preceding period. The cults and shrines of many Greek-speaking cities show signs of considerable disorder by the last decades of the first century B.C. Among several examples, none is clearer than a debate in Athens, perhaps to be dated to the Augustan era rather than the 60s B.C.²⁶ Not only had Athenians encroached on their gods’ precincts and taken over the temple land as if it was their own. Many shrines, it was feared, had been defiled by childbirths and other impurities during years of neglect. In their assembly, the Athenians voted on a proposal to restore and safeguard these shrines, and for once, we know the voting on a matter of religion: 3,461 voted in favour, while 181 voted against. The meeting had been large by the standards of this period: the consequent “revival” was not artificial.

This picture of disorder could be extended. By a neat irony, the lifetime of Jesus appears to have coincided with a temporary low point in the shrines and externals of much pagan worship. No sooner was he dead than they began to spring back to life in a resurrection which nobody could deny. In the second century, new buildings improved or created many of Christianity’s greatest enemies, not just the cult of Emperors, which was prominent, but not primary, in the known episodes of persecution, but other lasting seats of pagan cult, the huge temples of Baalbek in Syria, the revived shrine of Serapis in Alexandria, Pergamum’s precinct in honour of the healing god Asclepius, the great oracles of Greece and Asia. There were always some local exceptions, as Pausanias remarked on his travels in Greece. On major sites, however, the town plans are clear enough. In the second century flamboyant building for the gods succeeded an age of relative quiescence; it then slowed to a virtual halt in the mid-third century.

At a general level, reasons for this new flamboyance are not hard to find. It belongs with the “love of honour” and the “love of the home town” which we traced among the cities’ benefactors. Buildings like those at Jerash and Sabratha are a lasting witness to the peace of the Antonine age and the prosperity which it had brought to its leading citizens. In the pre-Christian era, their peace had been intermittent and insecure: by the mid-third century, it was once more in doubt. Between lay an age of surplus in which display and competition still flourished in the cities’ upper class. The home town was still a greater focus for these notables’ “love of honour” than a career in Roman service. Although the upper class of the bigger cities was itself dividing into an upper and lower layer, the numbers of potential competitors were not so few that display had lost its point. Their revenues arrived yearly from rents and sales of surplus crops, and there was little scope, or concern, for further investments seeking yet larger returns. The continuing cash surplus was better spent on public display. Buildings and decoration multiplied in the cities’ squares; the gods were beneficiaries from an age of peaceful agriculture, whose ownership was concentrated in a few hands. They also benefited from the Emperors, especially (in Asia) from the favours of Hadrian.

In two particular forms, we can connect this honour for the gods with mortals’ own “love of honour” among themselves: the forms involve “promising” and the sale of priesthoods. A recognized art of promising linked competition for civic office with material gifts to the town.²⁷ Some donors simply promised a gift to their cities on their own initiative, but most promises were not so spontaneous. They prefaced the promiser’s candidacy for a magistracy or a priesthood or his attempt to exchange an onerous magistracy for a lighter one. Competition with peers and predecessors kept up the momentum. We know most about these promises in Latin inscriptions from North Africa, where civic elections continued to be contested in the early third century, but we also find them in the Greek East, where we can glimpse the elaborate bargaining which lay behind them. As promises tended not to be fulfilled, city councils tried to force their donors to put them into writing. They were also aware that promises were exploited to escape still heavier burdens of service. Inevitably, these problems found their way to the Emperors’ notice, presumably by petition: they ruled that all promises which had been made to acquire, or avoid, office must be met by the promiser or, if necessary, by his heirs.

Like other interests in the city, the gods gained fine shows of stonework from the promises of notables who were seeking office. They also received promises which took far too long to complete. In the North African cities, promises of statues became a near-mania and temples were also very popular.²⁸ We can watch their fate over time, growing with a family’s happy events, expanding with personal rivalry or lingering on from father to son and finally passing to a poor granddaughter who added yet more funds and at last raised the promised temple to Apollo off the ground. The gods, one feels, took a back seat in these donors’ aims. Dedication day saw yet another round of presents, gifts for the city council, games and a feast for the citizens.

The cults of these temples created new priesthoods, and there, too, there were undercurrents which we can discern but not trace exactly. The burdens of a priesthood have not impressed historians of the Greek city: “the duties of priests were purely mechanical, their qualifications formal, and their posts were, as a rule, lucrative.”²⁹ Perhaps no position is ever quite so easy, and there were priests, as we shall see, who brought rather more to their job. The gains of others were tempered by the need to give and even, at times, to buy.

Unlike a magistracy, a cult often had funds of its own: gods received rents from land, offerings to their collection box, taxes on sacrifices and, sometimes, the right to legacies. With considerable skill, Greek cities then multiplied their priesthoods and put them up for sale. The practice is best attested in inscriptions of the third century B.C. from cities in southwestern Asia, but it is evident, from the governor’s ruling at Ephesus, that the practice had continued freely in the early Imperial period.³⁰ At Ephesus, complained the governor, priesthoods of the Imperial cult were being sold “as if in a public auction.” In the Egyptian temples, vacancies in the hereditary priesthoods were also sold, again to the distaste of the Roman administration. The practice was a neat evasion of a profound pagan scruple: the appropriation of sacred funds. By selling priesthoods, cities profited indirectly from their gods’ own riches. The priest paid the city: the gods repaid the priest by ceding him part of their income. To support these “offers for sale,” cities resorted to the arts of a well-judged flotation. In the first century A.D., a decree in Miletus put the priesthood of Asclepius up for sale and then prescribed the sacrifices which other magistrates were to offer to the god throughout the year. The priests received parts of these offerings: the hides, entrails and prime cuts of meat. By defining the calendar of offerings, the city ensured a good price for its sale of office: the practice scandalized the Roman governor at Ephesus. In some cases, priests are known to have been granted exemptions from civic service or the promise of free meals at the city’s expense. Evidence for these exemptions is pre-Roman, and they may have been curbed in the Imperial period, but they, too, were excellent reasons for bidding for a priesthood or regarding one as the summit of a civic career.

Simple in outline, the sale of office raises many more questions than we can begin to answer. The evidence for it is scattered from the third century B.C. to the second century A.D., but it is surely only the tip of an enduring iceberg. Bidders sometimes bought a hereditary right to the job; sometimes they bought it for only a few generations; at other times they sublet their purchase and turned it into a partnership. In some cases we find the god himself appointed to the high annual office at his shrine. The best-attested instance is Apollo at his oracle of Claros in the Antonine age: the god held office thirty-eight times in fifty-four years.³¹ The oracle was then at its peak, and it was presumably not because of financial hardship or indifference among mortal givers that Apollo took the honour so often. Rather, the temple had such exceptional funds that it could finance itself and keep up its own momentum. Elsewhere sales of office would promote ostentatious piety. Having paid for the job, a priest would wish to make the most of his cult and encourage others to make offerings. Equally, some priests had paid nothing for their title, and by the Antonine age, some priests must have been holding offices which an ancestor had artfully bought in the past. Their continuing gains from a cult’s income would help to support the “voluntary generosity” which their inscriptions then recorded proudly.

By no means every priesthood was sold, but there were pressures, nonetheless, to make a cult conspicuous. Priesthoods were a source of honour, and like its other sources, the magistracies, they could attract promises from willing candidates. Indeed, they were a much better bargain. Magistracies needed time and expense, but the gods’ own income contributed to the costs of their festivals. Priests did not have to pay for every animal which was offered to the gods, but they did receive parts from every beast which others presented. At the end of the ceremony, priests took the “table offerings” or those “placed at the knees or lap” of the cult image, cuts which were set aside for the god but which the god, very tactfully, never ate. In return, there was a social pressure and advantage in putting on a fine show. Like magistrates and benefactors, priests were impelled to make gifts and “distributions” to groups in their city. A favourite occasion for these festival gifts was the assumption of office by new incumbents.³² Generosity made them known to the city as a whole and gave their tenure a good start. They gave money, food and wine; they gave vintage wines, sometimes, and even “unmixed wine,” a gift for which a Greek word had to be specially coined. Roman governors were alert to the dangers of troublesome generosity by which civic notables could bid for favour and risk starting faction.³³ Priesthoods, however, remained an unregulated chance to give and win favour from fellow-members of a town. They alone brought an income back to the givers, in return for their display.

These undercurrents are not inconsistent with an enduring pious concern to honour the gods. That concern was more or less constant among the cities’ prominent citizens in this period, as the writings of philosophers did nothing seriously to dent it. But its visible extravagance varied from one period to another: these undercurrents help us to see why, and also to attach its rises and falls to the style of the cities’ social order. How, then, did generosity to the gods relate to donors’ other public gifts and how did it relate to their cities’ cohesion?

Interestingly, expenditure on pagan cults and temples is not prominent among the gifts of the two second-century benefactors whom we know best: Opramoas in Lycia or the great Herodes in Greece, of whom his biographer has concluded, “it is men, much more than gods, whom he strives to please.”³⁴ In his text of advice for a young notable (c. 100 A.D.), Plutarch repeated the conventional advice of the moralists and urged him to spend his money on the gods, the temples and their ceremonies. He was not, however, speaking for the habits which his class practised. He was complaining against contemporaries who were doing the opposite and wasting bigger fortunes on shows and gladiatorial games. In Ephesus (in 145) we see the problem: one Vedius had donated an impressive monument, but was then assailed for not having given games instead, and his munificence had to be commended by the Emperor. The stadium and the theatre were the major sources of instant popular honour.³⁵

However, their honours were impermanent. So, often, were foundations which were endowed with capital assets: public property, as Pliny observed, was neglected, as if it were nobody’s property. Educated donors might prefer to give a monument for cultural purposes: an odeon or a library publicized their own texts and attached their gift to the wider international world of culture. It is clear, however, from an artful letter in which Pliny introduced his gift of a library to Comum that the wider public did not necessarily welcome this type of gift. Why should they house a costly monument to one man’s literary taste or a small odeon in which a few hundred people could listen to highbrow music and oratory? Of the more practical gifts, harbours, aqueducts and new agoras were enormous projects, requiring space and joint subscriptions. For all but the very richest giver, the gods were an easier alternative. Temples could be large or small, and there were never too many for another to be unwelcome. They also allowed self-advertisement. “Who builds a Church to God, and not to Fame, Will never mark the marble with his name…” Not so the builders of pagan civic temples. In the classical democratic city, there had been firm restraints on inscribed dedications in the donor’s own name. In the Imperial period, by contrast, Emperors were required to rule that only the donors’ names, and no others, should stand on temples and civic buildings. Those who paid, therefore, were assured of an advertisement.³⁶

At the same time, temples had incontestable links with the wellbeing of the community, because the gods showed providence for the city as a whole. At a simpler level, the gift of a temple could be remarkably cheap. The best evidence for gifts and their prices derives from North Africa: there, games for a few days could cost up to 100,000 sestertii, though at that price, they included gladiators and the added excitement of panthers. In the little town of Muzuc, a temple of Apollo cost only 12,000: was this sum really the total cost, or did the donor give only part of a much larger whole? If it was the full sum, a little temple could be a very canny promise indeed.³⁷

Standing further back, we can also see how a city’s processions and festivals confirmed the social order. In a famous text, Aristotle had once advised oligarchies to urge the holders of civic office to meet expensive undertakings as part and parcel of their job.³⁸ They should offer splendid sacrifices, he suggested, and prepare public monuments so that the people should enjoy the feasting and admire their city’s adornment. Then they would gladly “see the constitution persist.” In Aristotle’s own day, few cities, he complained, observed this advice: the notables of the Antonine age were wiser. Ultimately, their dominance could rely on the support of Roman power, but they had to maintain good order, meanwhile, in populations which greatly outnumbered them. Festivals showed off the city in its social hierarchy: people processed in a specified order of social rank, the magistrates, priests and councillors and even the city’s athletic victors, if any. This ordered procession was seen as a continuing tradition, whereby the city had always honoured its gods and thus survived in their care for so long. The revivals, or inventions, of tradition were not “artificial”: they reinforced the image of an enduring city, true to the forbears who had helped to make it great. The bigger the city and the more fluid the audience, the more urgent was this image. The image of tradition also conformed neatly to the exercise of power. The notables ran in a very few families, so long as the accidents of birth and death permitted. “New men” could never be excluded entirely, as families did die out, but the style of the ruling order was emphatically one of traditional continuity. Civic cults mirrored their style. At festivals, the prominent families honoured the gods, evoking the sense that they and their ancestors had always done so on “their” city’s behalf. Their womenfolk, too, found a role, as priestesses in the public cults which required them: through religious cult, above all, the “silent women” of antiquity enjoyed a public place.³⁹ For the sake of the community’s well-being, the prominent families processed, old and young, male and female, showing those indefinable qualities of deportment and good looks which they combined with their honorary wreaths and robes. This type of display conforms closely to the “consensual pageantry” which historians have begun to discern in the festivals of other urban societies.⁴⁰ It also showed “love of the gods,” a quality which public speakers praised before their city audiences and urged as a reason for concord at times of civic tension. The role of the cults in displaying and supporting such “concord” was not necessarily explicit in the participants’ minds. However, the effects of an action are not confined to its intentions. Processions and festivals did not “legitimate” or “justify” the pre-eminence of the leading notables: there was no longer a real alternative. Implicitly, however, they reinforced it: we should remember how even the bigger cities were remarkably underpoliced. It is in this light that we can appreciate the social role of public cult. It evoked “strong collective images of concord” in the life of the town and its territory, implicitly supporting the social order and distinguishing the town among its competing neighbours.⁴¹ While evoking an image of the community enduring through time, cults and their honours also fed accompanying intercity rivalries. As these cults’ public face began to be dimmed in the later third century, we will expect to see changes in the cities’ social order and prosperity, rather than a growing indifference or detachment of men from the outer round of ceremonial: evidence for such detachment exists much earlier and there is no sign that it was rising or seriously impinging on most of the notables’ lives. Their building and “promising,” “bidding” and giving suggest the opposite. Seen solely as a social performance, the cults’ “consensual pageantry” could span the line between towns and their countryside. As a civic tradition, it helped, too, to pass the ideal of the good citizen from one generation to the next. In a fine decree, datable c. 220, the people of Athens resolved that in future the escort of the sacred objects from Eleusis to Athens and back again should be accompanied by the city’s youth, the ephebes, “crowned, walking in order” and carrying full weaponry.⁴² They were to join in the sacrifices, libations and paeans along the way so that “the sacred objects should be safer” (probably), “the procession longer and the ephebes should grow to be more pious citizens by following the city’s honours for the divine.” Characteristically, this decree was presented as a return to ancient practice. These same ephebes became the adults of the dark years after Gordian: it is not plausible that their former duties simply counted for nothing when their city and its gods came under stress.

Beside the gods of the civic festival calendar, there were also the temples of cults which had migrated into a city with this or that group or individual. If an individual bought a suitable site in a town, he could establish a cult of a god and lay down rules for its continuance. In the Imperial period, civic permission is not known to have been an issue on religious grounds, but there might have been local objections, based on personalities and factions.¹ In Lepcis Magna, in the early third century, the temple of Serapis must have begun in this way, perhaps as the cult of Greek immigrants from Cyrene or its neighbourhood: in second-century Attica, at Sounion, we have the rules which another migrant, “Xanthos the Lycian,” inscribed for a shrine of the god Men. Like Xanthos, the god was originally at home in Asia Minor, and Xanthos himself was a slave who was starting a cult for fellow slaves.² Here we find the level at which “outsiders” on public occasions could express their own honours for the gods: we cannot assume that outsiders were specially prone to Christian conversion because they did not have a personal role or reward from their city’s pagan calendar. They could reproduce cults for their own benefit.

Some of the great healing and “Eastern” gods had first spread and established themselves through these individual foundations.³ In turn, they came to earn public cults of their own, which were financed by the city and its priests. Of these “Oriental” gods, only Mithras remained a “private” god, worshipped by small groups who met in his subterranean shrines. His cult was the privately funded worship of a few males: “there was, if anything, less chance of the Roman Empire turning Mithraic than of seventeenth-century England turning Quaker. To say this is not to under-estimate Mithraism or Quakerism.”⁴

Less visible in the town plans is the worship which was paid by individuals in their homes or private properties. We meet the individual not just in his votive dedications, the model limbs, locks of hair, model feet, ears and footprints (usually signifying, “I stood and worshipped here”) which turned many ancient temples into lumber rooms as curious as shrines of the miraculous Virgin.⁵ The householders of Alexandria had their cult of the “Good Daimon”: houses and gardens had private altars; Greek households had their cults of the hearth, or of Zeus, “Zeus Ktesios” (Zeus of possessions). Family cults helped to define the circle of family membership: wives were expected to follow their husband’s family cults, and adopted heirs were to honour their adopted family’s cults and ancestors. In Roman religion, the cults of family and household were especially prominent: we find signs, too, of their export to the towns of the Latin-speaking West.⁶ The gods were also a persistent presence in schools. Their festivals were school holidays and their cults a companion to the rhythms of the school year. Around the year 200, the Christian Tertullian draws a vivid picture of a schoolmaster’s life in a North African town, the offerings to Minerva from the fees of the new pupils, the sacrifices at every turn and the days of prize-giving when civic dignitaries would come and join in paying conspicuous cult to the gods.⁷ In these schools, Christians, too, were taught their lessons.

Everywhere, the gods were involved in life’s basic patterns, in birth, copulation and death. The gods marked the various stages in human life, being honoured with “rites of passage” at moments of significant change: adolescence, marriage and childbirth. These mortal changes marked men off from their gods, and were marked, in turn, by the various pollutions which specific rites could dispel.⁸ Ritual observance restored mortals to a fit state for keeping company with the divine, and so these rites of purification continued, wherever people were born, had sexual relations and died. Ritual honours did not cease with a person’s death. Those who had property aspired to be honoured and remembered by ceremonies which were often performed at their tomb or grave and for which they left funds and properties. In the Imperial period, these duties were often bequeathed to the freedmen of the family or to an association which the donor had joined, or created for this purpose. Donors were acutely aware that their own families were likely to die out and thus, explicitly, they looked to these more enduring units to keep up their honour. Within a few decades, therefore, a dead man might expect to be honoured by people whom he had never known, and naturally, there was a tendency for these rites to lapse into neglect.⁹ There was a further motive, however, for endowing them generously. Properties which were attached to that “religious place,” the tomb, were argued to be exempt from a dead man’s creditors. The Emperor Trajan ruled that they were not, but there is a lasting gap between rulings of Roman law and continuing funerary practice. It is far from certain that Trajan’s ruling settled the dispute, and if it did not, cult after death remained a man’s best retort to the debts accrued in his lifetime.¹⁰

In the Imperial period, these funerary foundations were common practice. Like living benefactors, their donors aspired to continuing fame through their gifts, and to achieve it, they added to the groups, or associations, who met freely in pagan cities in order to pay cult to the gods.¹¹ These associations took various forms, varying between the Greek and Latin cultural zones. In the Latin West, groups of “humbler people” met specifically as “funeral societies,” celebrating a patron’s memory and contributing funds to ensure themselves a decent funeral when they also died. In the West, too, societies in honour of a particular god, or gods, grew like extended families beneath the presidency of the master or mistress of a household, like the four hundred worshippers of Dionysus who had grouped themselves beneath the patronage of one Agripponilla in second-century Tuscany. In the Latin-speaking towns, there were also groups of workers, associated by a common trade, who would meet and dine in honour of a divinity. They, too, were grouped beneath a richer patron’s care.

In the West, religious associations tended to assume the character of extended families and hence, like the Roman family, they sometimes included slaves and freedmen among their membership. In the Greek East, slaves were rarely members beside free men; the sexes, too, were almost always segregated. Women are sometimes found in a male club, but essentially as priestesses of a god who required female servants. Sometimes, too, they were honoured as benefactresses, but they were not therefore members of the club beside the men. Like men, they had religious clubs of their own.

In the Greek East, clubs for the sole purpose of burial were not traditional: funerary rites were only one purpose among many. On other points, however, there were similarities between the Greek and Latin areas. In the Greek East, too, groups would form round a common trade or round a donor who wished to be remembered posthumously. In both areas, the role of the rich donor was very important. Beneath him, members of a cult society held office, passed votes and decrees and honoured themselves with titles which were copied from civic life. The style of an association, both Greek and Roman, wore the clear stamp of the style of civic life: a benefactor stood at its head, followed by a range of “magistrates” and voting members, copying the civic hierarchy to which they were often too humble to aspire. In these clubs, the patron, like the civic benefactor, exerted influence and earned praise in return. Roman law, therefore, was concerned to control the clubs’ orderliness, and in the Empire it attempted to rule that a person could not belong to more than one club at a time. Slaves were only to be admitted with their masters’ permission and meetings were to be kept within reasonable limits. On the matter of multiple membership, the law, we can see, was freely ignored.

These associations did not influence the form of the Christian Church, but they are the obvious pagan model through which to bring out certain differences in the Christians’ own organization. For the moment, it is enough to evoke one example. Of the Greek religious associations, none is fuller or better preserved than the revised rules of the Iobacchi in Athens.¹² They worshipped the god Dionysus and have left a vivid inscription of one of their meetings, in April 176 A.D. First, they received a new high priest, the rich Herodes Atticus himself. The former high priest became his deputy after more than forty years of service and then read out the statutes which two earlier priests had drawn up. Those at the meeting were overjoyed. “Hurrah for the priest,” they shouted; “Revive the statutes: you really should,” “Long life to the Bacchic society,” “Engrave the statutes,” “Put the question.” The vote in favour of the statutes was unanimous.

Like a civic assembly in miniature, the Iobacchi voted and acclaimed their leaders. They had a hierarchy of officers, a president, a chief bacchus and a patron. The sexes were segregated: all Iobacchi were men. At this meeting they were reviving rules which had been drawn up by former priests but had then been allowed to lapse. Perhaps the election of the rich Herodes had given the society fresh heart. Like civic decrees, the rules were inscribed on a pillar: we begin to see the elements of a popular meeting and a “civic” organization which helped to make these societies a focus for people’s interest and support. The particular rules which they inscribed are also revealing. They set out the terms and expenses of membership and the reduced fees of enrolment for an Iobacchus’s son. New candidates had to be approved by a vote, not just the vote of some club committee, but a vote of all those members who attended. Members had to pay a “fixed monthly contribution” for the wine which was drunk at their monthly meetings, their society’s anniversary and the particular festivals of their god. Rules of conduct were very precise. Singing, rioting and clapping at meetings were all strictly forbidden and members who failed to attend without good reason were fined. Heavy penalties attached to anyone who started a fight or insulted a fellow member. If anyone came to blows, his fate was to be decided by a meeting of all Iobacchic members and a public vote. “Orderly officers” were appointed by lot, and when anyone caused a nuisance, he would find such an officer at his side, bearing the wand, or thyrsus, of the god. When the wand was laid beside him, the offender had to leave the room at once. If he refused to go quietly, he was entrusted to the Iobacchic bouncers, men with the apt title of “horses,” who shoved him out of the company. True, the Iobacchi were drinking wine, but these careful rules say much for the problems of insults and bad behaviour in a small society which restricted itself to men. All Iobacchi were meant to be friends, but their meetings were times of festivity and some of the members, plainly, found the effort too much for them.

At the meetings, the god received sacrifices and such offerings of drink as befitted the occasion. The priest had to offer a libation for the “return of Bacchus” and “pronounce the speech of theology” which the retiring president, during his forty years, had instituted “out of public spirit.” The meat and drink were divided among the various officials, some of whom bore the names of gods, titles like “Dionysus” and “Aphrodite,” which were distributed among the members by lot. These names have been explained as parts in a sacred drama which the members then acted, although this theory is not provable. During meetings, speeches were only to be made with the express permission of the priest or vice-priest.

We can sense very clearly what an Iobacchus found in these aspects of his club. Once a month, he felt that he was paying particular honours to gods who were “his” at that moment. These honours were laid down by rules and were more personal than those of a civic sacrifice at which he was only one in a crowd. Socially, he met and dined with fellow members whose behaviour was carefully regulated. His vote was very important whenever new members were discussed or older members were disciplined. He shared in the fortunes of fellow members’ lives, and if anything particular befell him, like marriage or fatherhood, selection for a civic office or the high honour of the Panhellenic Council, then he had to treat his fellow Iobacchi to drink offerings “worthy of his rank.” The Iobacchic group was much more than a burial club, but it also handled members’ deaths very neatly. When a member died, the society provided a cheap wreath in his honour “not exceeding five denarii in value” and one jar of wine for “all those who have attended the burial.” Those who did not attend were not allowed the drink.

The rules of conduct say less about the religious aspects of a meeting, but they do not allow us to conclude that religion was largely absent. The god’s “return” was a subject of special celebration honouring his “presence”; there was a speech on theology, and if there was a sacred drama, it may have concerned the worshippers’ souls in the next world. We do not know the details, any more than we know what it meant to be chosen as “Dionysus” in the lottery. These cult societies were clearly much more than the ancient equivalents of a good London dining club. The Attic Iobacchi were only one group among many small Bacchic societies throughout the world. We meet others in inscriptions, surviving from Italy to Lydia, and their officials and titles tell us a little more about the religious mysteries and rather less of the social programme. As the Iobacchi listened to the high priest’s speech of theology, they evidently felt they belonged to a worldwide company of worshippers. Their branch, they felt, was the best on earth. “Now you prosper,” they shouted as they passed the rules, “now, of all Bacchic societies, you are the First”: from place to place, the Bacchic cults’ practice was similar, but it was not identical. At Athens, the Iobacchi included people of high status who might rise to important civic positions: they met, almost certainly, in the shrine whose prominent ground plan lies between the Areopagus and the Pnyx hill. Were they not a rather exclusive group, like most other cult societies once they had been formed? A membership of up to forty was a normal size for these Greek-speaking groups in honour of a god, and it was customary to offer easy terms of membership to sons and descendants. Here we can already see a contrary social appeal in the Christian community: it was a bigger society, open to all comers, with no distinctions of rank and degree. The minor Iobacchus, meanwhile, had his Iobacchic vote and once a month he could exclude the people he hated most from the company which he most enjoyed. “Correctors of Greece” might lay down the law for Athens’s public courts; Herodes himself might struggle with his opponents in the Emperor’s distant presence. If he won, there would be more and better wine for the society. If he lost, the Iobacchi would still meet to celebrate the successes in lesser members’ lives. Boring speeches were banned, and all the while there were easy terms for members who put down their sons to be Iobacchi too.

In a passage of remarkable vehemence, the ageing Plato had denounced all private cults and proposed the death penalty for anyone in his ideal city who established a shrine on private ground or sacrificed to gods outside the city’s list. Private cults, he believed, would weaken a city’s cohesion and give individuals the means of pursuing success for their own selfish ends. The suggestion had a long literary life, from Cicero to Apuleius, who quoted it in his speech of defence in Sabratha.¹³ Yet, as often, Plato was out of tune with practice. In the Hellenistic period, cult societies had proliferated in many cities, giving citizens and non-citizens a focus for their loyalties and a non-political sense of community. By the early Empire, the household cults in cities like Pompeii and Herculaneum had confirmed Plato’s worst fears. Their private houses and gardens contained many small shrines which were dedicated not merely to the Roman forces of hearth and store but to the personal gods of the Greek East, Isis, Serapis and many others.¹⁴ Plato’s severity had found few supporters. Private associations flourished far and wide, from Gaul to Syria: in the Syrian cities, “companies” of worshippers were very prominent and at Palmyra, especially, they are attested by the copious “invitation tickets,” which asked members to attend their banquets. People did not feel a conflict between these cults and their civic gods. Like a philosophy, an “association” did not weaken the civic cults: it supplemented them. Often, its members met in dining rooms which were attached to major civic temples. Yet, in another sense, Plato was right, for these cult societies did represent a separate area of religious activity to which people turned specifically for religious ends. Some continued to turn to the Jews’ synagogues; rather more began to turn to the Christian community. It was through the household and the house church that Christianity and its otherworldly “assembly” first put down its roots, then grew to undermine the old civic values and the very shape of the pagan city.

Of the ceremonies themselves, we have also seen something in passing: the offerings of animals, the libations, or drink offerings, the speeches of the theologoi who praised the gods,¹ the processions, or “pomp of the Devil,” as Christian Latin called it,² the vowing of inscribed and sculptured monuments or other tokens of respect, fulfilled in return for, or hope of, divine favour. Pagans had their fixed patterns of prayer and hymns and their gods, too, received incense. These types of honour belonged to a “neutral technology” of worship which the Christians appropriated and set in a new context. Here and there, even the blood sacrifice of an animal has been practised by Christian communities. In the early Church, however, the imagery and language of sacrifice was diverted from blood offerings for the demons to the Christians’ own offerings of alms and first fruits to their bishop.³

What, however, was required beyond these ceremonies if a person was to “follow Greek (or Roman) religion”? So far, we have looked at the cults as detached observers, trying to catch their effect as social acts in a social order. Yet they were, of course, religious acts for their performers, consciously addressed to the gods. Naturally, a person had to believe that the gods existed; what else besides?

We can begin with the observable cult acts themselves: did the central ceremony, the offering of an animal, have further associations for a pagan, perhaps not an orthodoxy or even a single meaning, but a pattern of religiousness which it evoked? Generally, sacrifices followed rules and patterns. Different cults tended to receive different animals and the victims were generally divided into categories. Gods of the earth and underworld tended to receive dark animals which were offered by night and burnt in full, the origin of our word “holocaust.” Other gods, but not heroes, tended to receive light animals, while the people of first-century Mytilene, it has been aptly noticed, wondered how to accommodate the cult of the living Emperor and ended by offering him spotted animals, neither black nor light, for a figure who was neither quite human nor divine.⁴ There are exceptions to these categories, because no central priesthood enforced them, but in general, they persisted and remind us that the rites were not entirely haphazard and devoid of further associations. To “follow” pagan religiousness was, in part, to accept them, at civic sacrifices or at the offerings which individuals made in fulfilment of a vow to a god.

The difficulty, for historians, is to know how far to pursue such “meanings” and by what means. We can turn to the inscribed sacred laws and rules for the cults which cities or individuals organized. They specify certain types of dress and behaviour, as if the details were very significant: however, were they merely attempts to give a cult a recognizable form? Almost always they list prohibitions, not positive commands: worshippers must abstain briefly from drink or from sex and other temporary pollutions; sometimes they must avoid certain foods and exclude certain types of person. Obviously, the rules are concerned to observe the general limits of “impurity,” which mark off the world of men from the world of the gods. Less obviously are they concerned to reinforce deeper meanings in the cult acts themselves.⁵ How, from a record of these prohibited practices, can we deduce any more? The problems may become clearer if we look at one of the civic rites of the Antonine age. No source for their practice is clearer than Pausanias, who observed them personally while travelling in Greece, and of many examples, his account of a rite for Artemis, held at Patras in Achaea, is particularly vivid.⁶ Patras’s cult statue of Artemis the huntress had been a present from the Emperor Augustus. Every year, the people held a “festival of the Laphria” in the goddess’s honour “which was peculiar to their place.” They made a barrier of tall logs round the altar, “still green,” so that the stockade would not burn. They piled the driest wood on the altar, for kindling, and then smoothed the approaches to this pyre by laying earth on the altar steps. On the first day, the people walked in a procession of the “greatest grandeur” for the goddess. A virgin priestess brought up the rear, riding in a chariot which was drawn by tame, yoked deer. On the next day, the people made their offerings and threw living game birds onto the altar with wild boars and deer, gazelles, the occasional wolf and bear cub and other fully grown animals. The altar was stacked with fruit from their orchards and then they set fire to the logs. “Thereupon,” wrote Pausanias, an eyewitness, “I saw a bear and other animals forced out by the first leap of the flames, or escaping at full tilt. Those who had thrown them in brought them straight back to the fire and their funeral. The people have no record of anyone being injured by the animals.”

Perhaps we should not be too solemn about this festival’s details. They had obviously gained their own momentum and the animals’ antics were half the fun. Pausanias thought it a local peculiarity, and on that point, archaeology so far supports him. Every offering was burned up, so that nothing was saved for the participants, and perhaps we should look no further than the wish to pay Artemis especial honour by especially conspicuous consumption. The rite then acquired the impetus of a good day’s blood sports. Nonetheless, the details were not all haphazard. Artemis the virgin huntress was honoured by a virgin priestess and, like the goddess, the priestess had tamed wild deer. The animals were appropriate to Artemis’s natural interests and, to its participants, the details of this cult represented her appropriate honours. They were also a source of local pride which crossed all classes and all barriers of “superstition.” “The whole city,” wrote Pausanias, “prides itself over this festival and so, just as much, do the individuals.”

Once again, we return to the connection between a festival and a city’s sense of identity. It should not be minimized as a source of “meaning” in itself, but if we try to penetrate further, we come up against the absence of any accompanying myth. In their lack of one, the Laphria are not untypical. Sometimes antiquarians do try to explain by a myth why this or that city acted ceremonially in some particular way. Historians would seldom trust their opinion for anything else, and their explanations may well be their own speculation: did the Athenians really observe their festival of the Pitchers in silence because of an incident in the mythical past of Orestes? Without such interpretations, we can only try to interpret the rite itself.⁷ The details may cohere: its type of priest or priestess, its type of sacrifice, the accompanying conduct of the worshippers, which may be very distinctive. The best-known calendar of festivals is the Athenians’, and it is clear that many of the ceremonies evoked the concerns and relationships of citizens and families. Certain festivals were the business of women only, and it is evident that they concerned the due relation of the sexes and took contrasting forms to that end.⁸ Others concerned the prosperity of fields and crops and honours for the dead. These areas of reference were common to the civic calendars of other cities. Children and marriages, the family past and present, the vintage and the harvest: these “collective images” were evoked by cult acts, to a degree which histories of their “emptiness” or “irrelevance” in the Christian period have not fully taken into account. Just as a procession showed off the city’s social order in a “consensual pageant,” so the sequence of these rites in the calendar evoked an image of stable, enduring order, realized across generations and seasons, within families and between men and women. For example, the Athenians continued to celebrate their festival of the Anthesteria throughout the Imperial period: it was an occasion for giving presents to three- or four-year-old children; it marked a first stage in a citizen’s progress from birth to death; it celebrated the opening of the wine of a new year’s harvest; it allowed drinking, to be conducted, however, in silence at separate tables; the rites evoked an atmosphere of ill omen and then moved on to honour the family’s dead (probably) and to celebrate the fertility of the fields. These rites, and other, less obvious ones, extended over several days and brought the people to jostle and process through the city’s streets. This much we can grasp with some confidence, without exhausting the full range of the ceremonies.⁹ Different people responded at different levels to their sequence of possible references, but the sequence was not entirely lost in all the drinking and the fun. Unlike Imperial Rome, a city like Athens had both a real and an “ideal” continuity of membership, enduring through its history. Citizenship still defined a civic community to which these interwoven references could attach. They persisted because they evoked a pattern of relationships which was still relevant to the civic order.

Over time, practice in these civic cults could change or be reinterpreted. It might even continue to seem rather old-fashioned: antique ceremonies did persist, even when people recognized that they were rather quaint. Over time, the Anthesteria itself took a further turn at Athens. By the third century A.D., people would masquerade as nymphs and bacchants and recite “Orphic theology” during the festival.¹⁰ The rites had acquired more, not less, meaning with age, one further reason why they had continued to be practised.

This attachment of a myth to the ceremonies is very suggestive. Myth and ritual had generally developed separately in the Greek and Roman world: pagan critics and philosophers could thus belittle the gods of myth and poetry without upsetting the continuing practice of cult. When Christian authors borrowed their examples, their polemic was no more effective. Literal myth was irrelevant to practice and its credit was preserved by seeing it as an allegory, whose oddities concealed deeper truths. In the Imperial period, the Anthesteria was only one of the many cults to which a “theological myth” had been attached. The compound was also present in the widespread “Bacchic” cult societies, whose myth was expressed in an artistic imagery and was probably understood as a religious allegory.¹¹ In the cult of Mithras, the recurrent imagery of the shrines and monuments accompanied a suggestive set of titles for the cult’s officiants.¹² Gods like Serapis and Osiris, Attis and Isis also had myths of their past activities, which some of their worshippers would know and recall. These cults joined a myth and a ceremony together: the compound was particularly strong in cults which kept their “myth” secret. In the Imperial period, these “mysteries” abounded in many types of cult. They were paid as a preliminary to consulting an oracle, as part of the cult of Attis or Dionysus, as an element, even, in the worship of the Emperors.¹³ To Christian scholars, the mystery cults once seemed the “real” pagan religion, the most tenacious seat of opposition to Christianity. The perspective is itself a Christian one: mystery cults were no more tenacious than the gods of many civic shrines and festivals. In a mystery cult, however, the relation between a mythical “secret” and a cult act was very close. By definition, we do not know what the particular mystery was, but plainly, it varied from cult to cult, as people continued to be initiated into many mysteries, not into only one. Their myths did not necessarily concern the initiate’s own future, or even the fate of his soul. There were various interpretations of what a myth actually meant: according to one “naturalizing” theory, the myth of Isis and Osiris which was told in connection with their mystery rites symbolized the growth of crops and the fertility of the fields.¹⁴

By the Imperial age, the multiplication of these mysteries and the evidence for cults with a closer connection to myth do bring paganism into areas where Jews and Christians could offer a firmer and clearer compound. Where the Bacchic societies offered a myth of their god,¹⁵ Jews and Christians offered history; the pagan mysteries conveyed a secret experience, whereas the Jews and Christians offered a “revelation” based on texts. They also united cult and religious philosophy, and here, too, they could capitalize on common ground. Since the third century B.C., pagans had developed a type of religious philosophy by which they explained and directed man’s personal sense of God. This individual piety required no formal cult, and we find it expressed freely in the texts of Platonist philosophy; in the early Imperial period, it had spread further, to the “hushed lecture-room atmosphere” of the pagan Hermetists. These people met and studied the texts of revelation, which their divine guide, the Thrice-great Hermes, was believed to have bequeathed to them. We cannot place these groups socially, but their ideas do connect to higher religious philosophy.¹⁶ Their commonplaces dwelt on the various paths by which people could come to God. They could turn inwards and contemplate their soul, learning to approach God by the old Apolline principle of knowing themselves. Alternatively, they could turn outwards and marvel at the beauty of the world, its flowers and seasons, the order of its lands and seas and, above them all, the reasoned harmony of those divine watchers, the stars. Like the great hymn writers of the eighteenth century, authors in this branch of theology emphasized the proofs of God which were written large in the world’s natural beauty, whereas the other branch looked inward, to the mystery of the soul. These two fine paths became the neutral property of educated men, shared by pagans, Jews and Christians, although Jews in Alexandria first altered the pagan arguments. A man, they said, could not “know himself” and thus “know God.” First, he must “un-know,” or despair of knowing himself, and then resign himself to the “grace” of God. The aim, however, was the same: the “likening of man to God,” in a favourite Platonist phrase, and the consequent stability and calm which set a mortal beyond change and chance and above the rule of Fate.¹⁷ This philosophic religiousness was not an obstacle to the Christians’ theology. Gratefully, their authors borrowed it and fitted it to their new ideas of Christ and Redemption.

To be a “follower of pagan religion,” however, a person did not have to accept this philosophic theology. Nor did he have to attend a mystery cult, or a cult in which myth and ritual were closely compounded. They were options, no more, although their emergence does point to an interest which Christians, too, could satisfy. Myth, however, had a further and more widespread role: it confirmed men’s awareness of that constant presence, the anger of their gods.

To appreciate this role, we need only attend to Pausanias again on his tour round the Greek cities. Pausanias did not accept the odder stories of myth: he liked to rationalize their wilder details and retain only a manageable core. However, one type of myth neither he nor his informants doubted: the tales of the past anger of a god, which had been shown in famines or earthquakes and averted by oracular inquiry and an appropriate local rite or shrine.¹⁸ He and his sources remind us how fragile all civic life had remained, against the constant dangers of geology and the weather. To “follow pagan religion” was generally to accept this tradition of the gods’ appeasable anger. A few philosophers argued against it, but the vast majority ignored them, and it was precisely this fear which impelled people to persecute Christian “atheists,” dangerous groups who refused to honour the gods.

To Roman theorists, one role of religio had been to counter unwarranted fear of the gods, a fear which we know now in an individual type, anxiety about life after death. On the topic of an afterlife, however, “the sentiments of the ancients admitted of infinite variation.”¹⁹ Many of those who have left any word on the topic denied it altogether, in their epitaphs, their poems, their books: for all his interest in rites and shrines, Pausanias thought the idea of an underworld in which the gods kept men’s souls was absurd. Bodily resurrection was preposterous, as anyone knew who looked at the bare bones in a tomb. Where would the flesh come from? If the flesh did return, the problems, remarked that characteristic Antonine, Artemidorus, were unimaginable: how could all those resurrected people get their property back?

There were, however, less sceptical currents. If anything survived, it must be the soul, and the soul could ascend or descend after death. Public paintings showed the punishments of Hades and there were those who knew unease because of their stories; Lucretius’s great attack on them (c. 60 B.C.) had not been a war against shadows. Philosophy did not create these beliefs, but it helped to give them clearer form. Plato and Pythagoras had bequeathed to their followers a clear image of rewards and punishments in the next life. In Plato’s Republic, the elderly Cephalus admitted that since he had been growing old, he had been troubled by the fear that he might have to expiate in Hades the faults which he had committed during his long life. A “true Greek,”²⁰ however, he also suggested that this fear might only be a pathological consequence of old age. The Platonists were less sceptical: as Plutarch aged, he grew into a detailed concern for divine punishments and the fate of the soul after death.²¹ Other Platonists differed little, and their arguments concerned only details, whether the punishments in Hades were symbols for the pangs of an uneasy conscience, or whether people would be reborn as animals in their next life.

However, very few people were serious Platonists, and it is hard to judge how far these concerns extended to a wider public, Cephalus’s heirs. Epitaphs do not refer to the reincarnations which Plato had credited, but perhaps this silence is only a fact about epitaphs and their conventions. Art and funerary reliefs on the subject are also notoriously hard to judge: they have suffered from overinterpretation, seeing meaning where there may have been little or none. Archaeology is hardly more helpful. In the Imperial period, there was a growing tendency to bury the dead, not to burn them, but the cause of this change is quite obscure, and we cannot assume that it had a connection with changing views about a future life.²² Perhaps the best evidence for such a concern is the nature and spread of mystery cults themselves. Not every mystery cult related to the participants’ future after death, but it is evident that some of them did. Attacking the Christians, Celsus the Platonist (c. 170 A.D.) remarked that the idea of “eternal punishments” was accepted by priests and initiators into the pagan mysteries; Christian teaching on the afterlife was on a par with the terrors of the “mysteries of Dionysus.”²³ He implied that these mysteries, too, were concerned with a life after death, and here we can support him from a different angle. When Plutarch wished to console his wife in the face of death, it was to these Dionysiac mysteries that he referred her, as also to the “traditional account” of the Platonists: they would have taught her, he assumed, that death was not simply the end and a dissolution.²⁴ In the later second century, Celsus assumed that the rites of Mithras assisted the soul on its ascent through the heavenly spheres; at Eleusis, the rites do seem to have aimed at a happy disembodied future beyond the grave; at the end of The Golden Ass, the hero Lucius experienced a simulated journey above and below the earth in the mysteries of his goddess Isis.²⁵

People could worship a god without being initiated into these mysteries; not everybody bothered; open scepticism was still expressed. However, we hear more of the small Bacchic groups of initiates in the Imperial period and some of the other mysteries are themselves creations of that date.²⁶ A concern for life beyond the grave was perhaps more evident among more people than previously; to some people, it could seem compelling, as we can see from the Emperor Marcus’s own private Meditations, in which he positively struggles to maintain his Stoic philosophy and deny a personal afterlife against his strong urge, otherwise, to believe it.²⁷ In mystery cults, initiations offered reassurance, whatever the fate of the soul after death. If it ascended to the heavens, initiation helped to ensure its safe passage through the opposing powers: initiates sometimes learned a password. If it went down into a literal underworld, initiation spared the dead the chillier terrors and the gloomier halls of residence. Were initiates also commanded to continue to behave well, like confirmation candidates, in order to attain these blessings? Sometimes, perhaps, they were: the rites at Eleusis are twice connected with continuing “holiness and justice” on the initiate’s part, although these virtues were probably conceived in general terms: not to break oaths, not to kill or steal.²⁸ Among pagans there was no question of punishment for a passing evil thought in everyday life.

These types of belief were neither universal nor clearly defined. Only some pagans credited this future existence, and none, certainly, imagined a second life, body and all. There was a vagueness about what exactly bodiless existence meant for the individual: Plutarch, at least, thought that souls after death would still recognize their friends.²⁹ There were also the stories of punishments in Hades. Some people, certainly, assumed they would be eternal, a belief which Christians did not create. There was more doubt about the literal torments of the myths. Certain authors, especially Platonists, could argue that these tales were worth preserving nonetheless, as instruments with which to terrorize the ignorant. Plutarch, however, does also hint that “few” people believed them literally.³⁰ Spiritualized torment and vague oblivion were probably more widely credited, though Plutarch’s knowledge of public opinion is not likely to have been very broad.

On any view, this range of opinion had a lack of coherence and any orthodoxy which could begin to compare with Christian teaching. Nothing, therefore, in pagan culture ever corresponded to the deathbed scenes and prayers for the dead which surfaced so quickly in Christian company. Among pagans there was no concern to die with “sins” forgiven or to pray for the state of friends and family beyond the grave. Pagans met to honour the spirits of the dead, to commemorate a dead person or to appease and nourish his disembodied soul by offerings of drink and blood from a sacrificial animal. Pagans prayed to the dead, whereas Christians (like Jews) prayed for them. Fearing their own inevitable Judgement, Christians also asked the dead to intercede on their behalf. Among Christians, feasting and celebrating at the tombs of the dead persisted, but intercession joined the older commemoration and gave a new meaning to the occasion.³¹

In pagan religiousness and cult acts, we have returned repeatedly to the ideas of fear and constant insurance, responses which lent force to the argument from tradition. The gods had been honoured always, and who would say what would happen if they were not? Fear for an afterlife was certainly present, though not universally: the more general fear was the more immediate, one which polite religiousness in Europe has lost, the fear that the gods might intervene and be “manifest” in everyday life. This fear extended to the “divine” souls of the dead: for every person who feared his fate after death, there were more who feared the dead’s own anger in this world against the living. Here, pagans did hold beliefs, beside their religion of cult acts. Here, too, their religion connected with morality. The gods were held to be present, ready to uphold oaths or punish “impious” acts, beliefs which were present in both the Greek and Latin world.

The gods’ presence also raises the question of their identity. Under the Empire, it has been claimed, a generalized concept of “divine power” had begun to take precedence over discrete divinities.³² Certainly, people wished and expected their gods to work for them, or against others, through their prayers and spells, vows and offerings. Power was the essence of divinity, the bridge by which kings and rulers, too, had been granted “godlike honours.” Did this explicit concern with power efface a lively sense of the gods’ separate natures, leaving the Christians’ “divine power” to step into the gap? Did it undermine that central theme of religiousness, the presence of the gods and their forms of contact with men?

The nearness and distance of divinity are poles between which all religious experience wavers. We have seen the cult acts of the pagan cities and touched on their wider areas of reference, yet the picture of festivals, temples and votive monuments remains a picture of externals. It lacks a sense of where the gods were felt to be. The Christians were only too conscious of the gods’ presence, and the theme is particularly well documented in the second and third centuries A.D. It is especially through the themes of the gods’ presence that the idea of “anxiety” has been attached to the Empire’s religious life. In their ceremonies and civic life, pagans have so far resisted such a diagnosis: was it, however, more evident in this basic type of religiousness? The presence of the gods came to each generation with a long and hallowed prehistory, and the path to it is a long one, from the Homeric world to the Platonist philosophers of the fifth century A.D.

One early Christian witness brings out the theme very clearly, as he looks out at pagan communities in the Apostolic age. The scene is famous, the visit of Paul and Barnabas to the Roman colony of Lystra, that “thriving, rather rustic market town” which had been founded some sixty years earlier in the Augustan age.³³ There, the Acts of the Apostles describes how Paul and Barnabas were believed to have healed a cripple “lame from his mother’s womb.” At once, the crowds acclaimed them in their native dialect, saying, “The gods have come down to earth in the likeness of men.” Barnabas they called Zeus, and Paul, Hermes, because of his gifts as a speaker. The priest of “Zeus before the city” prepared to sacrifice a group of bulls at the god’s shrine before the gates, until a speech from “Hermes” disillusioned him.

This scene, the delight of Raphael, has received rough justice from biblical critics. It can be argued convincingly that the author was not present himself on the Apostles’ journeys, but it is a further step to claim that he invented the scene to suit his purpose. Critics have quickly stepped so far, until the scene has become lost as a literary fiction, part of the author’s subtle aim in constructing a story which passed as history. “Is it really conceivable?” asked Acts’ greatest modern commentator. “It is highly improbable that the priest of Zeus would immediately believe that the two wonder-workers were Zeus and Hermes, quite apart from the fact that the animals had first to be brought from the pasture, and the garlands woven… In applying to Luke the yardstick of the modern historian, we do him an injustice.”³⁴ His fiction has been traced to the influence of a pagan myth and left to moulder there. In Ovid’s Metamorphoses, the gods are said to have been entertained unawares in Phrygia by two elderly peasants at the time of the great Flood. On the thinnest evidence, this myth has been located by modern scholars near Lystra and accepted as the source of Acts’ incident.³⁵ The author, it is said, cast this local legend in a new Christian dress in order to fill out a journey of whose details he knew nothing.

This theory has enjoyed a long life, but it never had anything to recommend it. Its geography is wrong, and although Acts’ author has been given some odd disguises, none is odder than that of a man who knew fragments of Ovid and their Greek sources and distorted them to suit his picture of St. Paul.³⁶ Although he himself was not present at Lystra, he can be shown to have known and accompanied the Apostles elsewhere. Was he merely padding out their earlier days in Lystra with a plausible incident, another in his artful series of the misunderstandings which people attached to the Christians and their teaching? Might he not, instead, have heard the story from Paul and Barnabas themselves? The men of Lystra were said to have spoken Lycaonian, a language which no Apostle understood. Yet they were also supposed to have acted visibly on their error, while most, perhaps all, of them could also understand Greek. Is, then, the story true or is it what Paul and Barnabas liked to say of pagans in a “rather rustic market town”? The story named appropriate gods.³⁷ A statuette of Hermes and an eagle, bird of Zeus, have been found near Lystra; the two gods are coupled in an inscription from this general region; on a sculptured relief, we can see how people locally pictured these divinities, round-faced and solemn, with long hair and flowing beards, a searching gaze and the right hand held prominently across the chest. Such a Zeus looks uncommonly like our image of a wandering Christian holy man: in these reliefs, we, too, can sense the elusive features of a Paul or Barnabas.

These local reliefs do something to make the Lystrans’ error intelligible. They were not alone in their mistake. Later in Acts, the author was present in person on the island of Melite, where “barbarians” saw Paul shake a serpent off his hand into the campfire.³⁸ They waited, expecting him to fall sick; when he survived, they changed course and hailed him “as a god” for his miraculous power. Like others, not least the Lystrans, they had to be convinced before they jumped to the wrong conclusion: the “barbarians” were not deceived without reason. Nobody has yet found this incident in Roman poetry. Like his informants for the scene in Lystra, Acts’ author believed this response was natural. Nor, indeed, were pagans alone in it. In Caesarea, said Acts, the “God-fearing” centurion, Cornelius, had been guided by a vision to Peter’s presence: on seeing him, he bowed and made a gesture of worship. “Rise up,” said Peter, “for I too am a man.”³⁹ In Acts’ view, he had greeted Peter as if he was a visiting angel. Here, the author was not present himself and could only draw on hearsay. An earlier chapter in Acts tells the story of the serving girl Rhoda, who called on the disciples’ rooms in Jerusalem to inform them that Peter had escaped from prison. Peter, she said, was on his way to them, but at first they disbelieved, “saying that it could only be his angel.”⁴⁰ In Acts, the smallest details are often the most revealing: when John Chrysostom published his homilies on Acts in the later fourth century, how natural, he thought, had been the Apostles’ error, for “every man, it is true, has an angel.” How wise, too, had been their author: first the Apostles mistook Peter for a heavenly being; then they saw him in person and realized their mistake. If they had not begun by making this mistake, said John, they might have made it when Peter departed: then they might never have realized their error.⁴¹ The comment was revealing: so close, for John Chrysostom, too, did the world of angels lie to the world of men.

In the view, then, of an early Christian, pagans might think at any moment that they were seeing and welcoming a god; the first Christians, meanwhile, thought that they might be entertaining angels, not always “unawares.” If this view of pagans is accurate, it shows us beliefs which they held, quite apart from their evocative ceremonies and their widespread building of temples. When the ceremonies and buildings faltered, these beliefs would not necessarily weaken. Are these Christian episodes accurate, and if so, how and where was this presence of the pagan gods supported, if not by some general anxiety at the core of pagan religiousness?

3. Pagan Cults

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