Pagans and Christians

Like nothing else, Alexandra’s question takes us into the world which the author of Acts assumed to surround his Apostles. Not only in Lystra, but in old civilized Miletus, the squares and colonnaded streets were stalked by the gods, bringing close encounters into the life of every man, woman and child. It also takes us into our world. Just as the visiting gods perplexed the Milesians, so the Virgin Mary, visiting often, is perplexing even now the village of Medjugorje in western Yugoslavia. In Medjugorje, only a very few privileged children see and talk with the Virgin herself. In Miletus, the gods did not discriminate: they appeared freely to young and old, man and woman.

We are not told why this rash of divine appearances had broken out. Alexandra connected them with the beginning of her priesthood and we know from inscriptions elsewhere how the virtues of priests could affect the moods of the gods. We hear of no rush to Miletus, none of the two million pilgrims who have travelled to Herzegovina in the past four years, hoping to sight the Madonna. In Miletus, the visits were slightly alarming, and they pose a problem of translation: were they appearances of “gods to the girls and women, children and men,” appearances which might be seen in dreams, or were they daylight appearances of gods “in the form of” women, children and men, an exact parallel to the belief of the men of Lystra? Each translation has been suggested, and to decide between them, we need to look into the forms of contact which pagans still accepted between men and gods. Alexandra was the priestess of Demeter Thesmophoros, whose festival, the Thesmophoria, was traditionally celebrated by women only. That fact, too, may help us to understand her question. For all its interest, this inscription was not brought to bear on the case for an “age of anxiety,” yet the discussion which first brought it to life stressed the apparent “religious crisis,” the “breathtaking anxiety” of the question, the note of “anxiety and exaltation” which seemed to match other evidence in contemporary inscriptions from Greek Asia. Is it, then, the missing proof of deep unease, the mood of a pagan city while the Christians were putting down their roots?

Like her fellow residents in Miletus, Alexandra had turned to Apollo himself for an answer. Like other oracular questions and answers which have been found in Miletus and Apollo’s nearby precinct, her answer was inscribed on the same stone as her question. We must allow for the expense and trouble of this display, but it did not stand alone: a second oracle was inscribed in an identical hand on the side of the same block, another reply from Apollo, which ran to some twenty lines, praising the goddess Demeter and her gifts of corn and other crops of the earth.² All men, it said, should honour the goddess who had saved mankind from a diet of nothing but meat, but the people of Miletus should honour her especially. They were noble and favoured by the gods and therefore performed their mysteries to Demeter. The surviving text breaks off with an address to a woman, “you, devoted to the secret honour and service (of the gods), who pursueth the end of stability in life”: were these words, perhaps, addressed to our same Alexandra, praising her devotion to Demeter’s cult and mysteries?

If so, we can understand the inscriptions’ origin. Just as cities inscribed judgements which were favourable to them, so Demeter’s priestess inscribed two texts from Apollo which praised her goddess and herself. The god’s reply to her first question is almost entirely illegible, but eight surviving words show that the text ran at length in hexameters, which spoke of the “coming and going of gods among mortal men” and their “watching,” it seems, for their honours on earth. The explanation sounds familiar, an echo of the epic poems whose metre it copied. Apollo, it seems, allayed anxiety by a style and metre which looked back to Homer, and if Apollo’s resort was to Homer, then it is from Homer, too, that we should still begin in order to pin down something in the religious sensitivities of a city a thousand years after his poems.

No one who knew his Homer could miss the easy company of gods with men. In the Greek epic, the gods were not merely a divine audience, who looked on like aristocrats from a distant grandstand. They visited their heroes, “standing beside” them as “evident helpers,” exact phrases which continued to pin down their presence until the end of antiquity. Homer’s picture helped to fix subsequent descriptions in literature and thus, too, men’s expectations in life.³ If they were already a pattern for Homer, they may look beyond his poems to a pattern already accepted in reality. To study them, then, is to look two ways, to beliefs which Greeks may already have accepted and to the imagery which helped to fix those beliefs clearly for posterity.

In the epic poems, the gods mixed with men by daylight, gods in disguise, like Paul and Barnabas, or gods made manifest by signs of their power. When Athena led Odysseus and Telemachus through the suitors’ hall, the sudden light from her lamp glowed on the rafters, alerting Telemachus to the presence of a god: “Hush,” said Odysseus, “for this is the way of gods who live on Olympus.”⁴ This “way” was not visible to all alike: Odysseus, but not Telemachus, could see his helper Athena, just as Achilles, but nobody else, could see his mother, Thetis, standing beside him. Once, in the Iliad, Ajax boasted that there was no difficulty in detecting the gods, for they were “easily recognizable.” However, his boast was made at a moment of departure when the gods did not care if they gave themselves away.⁵ When the gods were first encountered, they were much harder to unmask: it was one of Aeneas’s little distinctions that he detected Apollo in the guise of a herald, simply by the sound of his voice. Otherwise, men had to guess. They might deduce from the sudden prowess of a hero that a god was standing beside him in battle; the whole army might realize that a god was approaching because of the sight of a dark cloud in the sky or the omen of a sound or light from heaven. Like the white light at Medjugorje, these general clues of a “presence” were seen by crowds. Like portents, they were different from the clues of a god’s personal attendance in which he took on human disguise.

In either epic, this personal attendance was frequent, because the gods had favourites to whom they were helpful “protectors.” There were a few exceptions: until Sophocles’s play, no god is known to have “stood beside” the tenacious Ajax. At times, these helpers touched their friends physically: they pulled Achilles’s hair or held his hand.⁶ The heroes already had the “personal religion” for which historians have searched in later texts: the care of the gods for individuals was taken for granted. “Never have I seen gods so openly befriending anyone,” said Nestor of his guest Telemachus, “as Pallas Athena stands beside this man…” Befriending, then, was not uncommon, and only the degree of it, in this instance, was unusual.⁷ Old Nestor, so wise and pious, was the sort of man who could pick it up distinctly, whereas others were less favoured, even when the presence benefited them. The gods could also deceive their favourites, a habit which Homer exploited for irony.⁸ When Odysseus reached Ithaca, he failed to recognize his helper, Athena, whom he claimed not to have seen in all the years since he left Troy: cautiously, he greeted her as a goddess, although he had not realized who she was. At the end of the Iliad, old Priam, afraid and defenceless, had set out on his mission to Achilles’s camp, and on the way he met a handsome young man who turned out to be a friendly guide. “Some god,” Priam told him, “has held his hand over me,” in a phrase so favoured by posterity: he felt that he had been directed to such a happy meeting, for, to judge from the young man’s looks, he “must have parents close to the gods.” As yet, Priam had not realized he was talking to Hermes in person. Homeric irony is strongest in the dealings of gods and men, where it helps to confirm the picture of the gods’ superior power.

Irony was readily contrived, because the gods almost never revealed themselves by name when they first met men: only at the end of their encounter did Hermes declare his identity, unasked, to Priam. Usually, the god himself had to give the first clue, and he conformed to a typical sequence of changes.⁹ He would reveal his beauty and show that essential divine attribute, height. He would give off a sweet scent or a dazzling light and might speak in an awe-inspiring voice. His rapid enlargement was followed by departure in a sudden flash.

Without these voluntary self-revelations, gods could continue to escape human notice:¹⁰ “Who would ever see a god,” asked Circe, “going to and fro, unless he wished to be seen?” Just as gods could be missed, humans, like Paul and Barnabas, could be mistaken. When Athena cast a divine beauty over Odysseus, his son Telemachus jumped to the wrong conclusion and assumed the stranger to be a god: “Please be propitious,” he begged, mistaking his own father, “and spare us…” Like the Lystrans, he had been misled by a sudden miracle. Odysseus, however, was more artful. When he was first surprised by the young Nausicaa, he addressed her “cunningly,” using “gentle words.” Not knowing her name, he alluded to the possibility that she might be a goddess, to judge from her form and beauty: Nausicaa did not trouble to correct this compliment in her reply. Through Homer, the mistaking of beautiful women for goddesses passed into Virgil and the ancient romances. From there, it was picked up by Chaucer, Spenser and each of the heroines of Shakespeare’s romantic plays: “No wonder, sir,” Miranda answers, “but certainly a maid.”

These scenes are the work of a poet who is already a master of the convention that gods meet men. He can also, surely, assume his hearers’ familiarity with the theme. To Homer, our first poet, we owe the first expression of the idea of “accommodation,” whereby gods suit their presence to individuals’ capacities. Not everyone could see a god or sense his presence, unless the god appeared in an unusual weather sign above a crowd or an expectant army. Like Peter Pan, the gods were best seen by the pious or their special protégés, a limit which put their presence beyond refutation; those who failed to see them had only themselves to blame. When the gods did appear, they showed themselves in a pattern of signs which was fixed already for Homer: among them was beauty, the one sign which a mortal, too, might give off inadvertently.¹¹ There was no end to the gods’ human disguises, as old men and women, heralds and, frequently, young and beautiful people: in one of its two translations, Alexandra’s question makes sound Homeric sense. Did the gods also appear as animals? Occasionally, Homer’s gods appeared “like birds,” but there is no certain episode when a god turns completely into a bird, although he may become “like a bird” in a few particulars.¹² Essentially anthropomorphic, the gods stalked the world as mortals, disguising themselves so well that people could never be totally sure that a stranger was all that he seemed. Two famous scenes enlarged on these hidden depths, and neither was lost on posterity.

In the heroes’ world, we are only seeing the second phase of a very much older relationship, a subtlety which the poems maintain very cleverly.¹³ In an ideal past, we are told, the gods had behaved differently, and this past lived in Homer’s ideal community, Phaeacia, whose King Alcinous put the point very clearly. When Odysseus was guided suddenly into his palace as an unexpected guest, the King mistook him for a visiting god. “Always before,” he told his courtiers, “the gods appear clearly to us when we offer glorious hecatombs. They dine beside us, sitting where we sit, and if anyone meets them, even while travelling alone, they do not hide anything. For we Phaeacians are close to them, like the Cyclops and the savage tribe of giants.” Happy Phaeacia was a land of this ideal relationship, persisting between men and gods, but Odysseus’s arrival, said Alcinous, seemed to herald a lesser phase of it. He seemed to be a god by the manner of his entry, and if he was, said Alcinous, he did not bode well. He had not come openly, but in disguise: “the gods,” it seems, “are planning something new in the future,” an end to their days of open coming and going.

Back on Ithaca, this change in the relationship was openly acknowledged. When the leader of the suitors was rough to the stranger Odysseus, the rest of the pack rebuked him: “All sorts of gods,” they said, “in the likeness of foreign strangers range in their prime through men’s cities, watching over their insolence and orderly behaviour.”¹⁴ The belief was not a poetic fancy. Like the chorus in a tragedy, the suitors were plain witnesses who set off the epic heroes, and their remark, we shall see, recurred like none other on this subject in the literature of the next thousand years. The gods were not only an audience of watchers, eternal, impassive, but moved now and then to care for a human’s predicament. Their minions also spied and took notes, far into late antiquity.

These details are scattered through two long epics, but they cohere in a way which shows Homer to have had a subtle picture in mind. Was it only a poetic device? Alcinous was speaking in an epic poem where the gods met poetic heroes, wrapped them in clouds and granted them invisibility. This world of the heroes was not reality. Homer also used meetings with gods for irony and contrast, his own poetic effects. However, their details follow such a pattern and their phrases recur so precisely that it is hard to believe they are only his fiction. Can we confirm this impression? Scenes of a meeting between a god and groups of men or women are found on certain engraved rings of Minoan date (c. 1400 B.C.) and are among the earliest pictures of gods in the Aegean world.¹⁵ However, Homer’s debt to this remote Minoan religion is now highly questionable and we cannot be sure whether these scenes refer to a specific experience, let alone to one which survived some seven centuries into Homer’s own age. On their own evidence, the epics’ “close encounters” have also been upheld for their psychological coherence. They belong, it is said, with the poems’ distinctive vocabulary for mental and physical states, which “lacked” a word for man’s unified consciousness.¹⁶ This gap is said to conform to contemporary life, because people in the eighth century B.C. (it is said) lived at a particular phase in mental history, before a single consciousness imposed itself. Their minds were divided and their frequent encounters with the gods were simply the visions and voices of their divided minds. The Iliad’s theology was thus lifelike, because it was consistent with its primitive mental vocabulary. As the idea of consciousness arose, the gods retreated before it, taking their last bow in the Odyssey, which was composed at the end of the age of the “bicameral” mind.

This theory is an ingenious fantasy, but it is philosophically unsound and quite false to Homeric psychology, which amounted to more than the words for its separate parts. The rest of this chapter is a rebuttal of its supposed historical sequel. The gods did not retreat before some newly unified sense of the mind. They continued to appear in a manner close to Homer’s, long after human thought had explored its own subtleties.

Homer’s visions are better defended by the contemporary poetry of Hesiod, which was set outside the heroic world. Like the ordinary suitors in the Odyssey, Hesiod had no doubts that the gods were invisible spies who ranged the world of men.¹⁷ Like Homer, he (or an imitator, c. 550 B.C.) also knew of the ideal past when men and gods had dined and kept open company. The Homeric picture is also supported by its own remarkable consistency. Phaeacia enjoyed one type of contact, the heroes another, which was more oblique. We hear less of a more remote contact, meetings with gods in dreams. The gods do send dreams to the sleeping heroes, but they are never dreams of the god in his own person.¹⁸ Either the god comes in human disguise to a sleeping mortal or he sends a dream in the shape of a familiar friend: in the Odyssey, Athena enters Nausicaa’s bedroom “like a breath of air” and appears in her sleep disguised as one of her girlfriends. In a marvellous scene, she sends a dream to Penelope in the form of a sister who seldom visits her. Through a dialogue with her, the sleeping Penelope learns of Odysseus’s “divine escort” and wakes in joy at the “clear and evident” dream which has sped to her. By night and by day, therefore, Homer’s gods restrict themselves to the same type of contact. They do not appear openly, but they visit people in human disguises, whether they are awake or asleep. Surely Homer did not suddenly create this cautious and coherent picture, which, as we shall see, was distinct in certain particulars from later experience?

On one point, however, there is an obvious continuity: intimacy with a god was not easy. At Lystra, Acts said, the priest of Zeus had hastened to pay the new Zeus a sacrifice: “Be propitious,” Telemachus had begged, “and spare us…” It is quite untrue that Homer’s gods and men kept easy, fearless company: from the first awesome simile of the Iliad, when the Sun god came down “like the night,” to the last intervention of Athena in the battles of the Odyssey’s suitors, men trembled in terror before the presence of their gods.¹⁹ The gods themselves knew their power: “The gods are hard to cope with,” remarked Hera, “when seen very clearly.” This remark, too, was kept alive across the next thousand years. When a god unveiled himself, he could dazzle his favourites and show a most unpredictable power: Apollo struck poor Patroclus to death; Aphrodite took such a stand before reluctant Helen that she cowered and then “the divinity led the way.” After those three Greek words, the later language of “master” and “servant” for god and man was not a conceptual innovation.²⁰ Even to their favourites, the gods might be present because they were angry and resentful. “Perhaps it is some god,” remarked Aeneas at the prowess of an opposing hero, “who has conceived spite against the Trojans, angered because of the sacred offerings: hard, indeed, is the anger of a god.” These lines from the Iliad were not one of posterity’s favourite quotations, but they expressed ideas which continued to motivate people: they could stand as the epigraph to any study of pagans’ persecutions of Christians.²¹ When a god did reveal himself, we can understand why so often he began with the words “have no fear…” “I am Apollo,” he usually explained, or Poseidon, or a helping dream, a god or his messenger. This language of fear and reassurance became a fixed expression for the experience: “Peace be unto you. Why are you troubled?… Behold, my hands and feet, it is I myself.” In the third Gospel, written by a man of the Gentile world, the resurrected Jesus addressed a similar sequence of words to his Apostles in their upper room.

We should allow, then, for two sides to a hero’s encounter with a god. Once, he believed, the gods had been mortals’ companions with whom they had sported and joked, conversed and sometimes made love. Heroes had already lost the fullness of this intimacy, but it had survived in a lesser degree. It could lead to sudden chance meetings, but these close encounters were deceptive, and when revealed, they led to human awe. Awe does not exclude joy and exalted emotion, although in Homer’s poems, no hero confessed to elation when a god revealed his presence. The hero did not court the gods or strive to meet them. He chanced upon them, and as the first terror left him, he might beg for practical, earthly favours. It took a very special hero, a child of one of the gods, to dare to protest to a god face to face. Other heroes were more restrained, and mere mortals, naturally, would observe the greatest restraint.

Once isolated, this mixture of awe and intimacy runs through so much Greek writing on the gods, from Homer to the Acts of the Apostles. Did it derive largely from Homer’s poems? Looking for pagan “scripture,” we fasten on Homer’s epic as the “bible” of the Greeks. Every schoolchild in the Empire had encountered it, every educated person had had a chance to succumb to its picture. Even in wretched Olbia, on the Black Sea, the wandering orator Dio (c. 100 A.D.) flattered his audience on their passion for Homer and his poems.²² The “presence” of gods, however, is described in contexts where Homer’s influence is hardly plausible, and even among men of letters, his examples passed down in a few favourite lines, remembered and chosen out of many more. The language of later texts and inscriptions matches the language which is used in his epics, but their relationship may be subtler than a direct borrowing. The epics, perhaps, had themselves picked up everyday language and beliefs (we cannot ever prove this), enhanced them and passed them on more vividly to those who read or heard them. Others, meanwhile, kept the same unembellished beliefs, which surfaced independently in texts and monuments under the Empire.

They persisted, above all, in the many stories of myth. The absence of a connection with ritual allowed many stories to spread beyond one occasion or locality: both within and without ritual, many of them brought gods among men. As late as the mid-second century A.D., we can listen carefully to Pausanias’s informants during his travels around Greece and realize how these stories were still alive.²³ Myths had lost their surface meaning for sophisticated minds and had become a source of rococo decoration for many artists and poets, but these minds were still a tiny minority. Frequently, myths of divine punishment and “presence” explained the origins of the cities, cults and statues which lay on Pausanias’s route. They spanned the same two extremes, awe at the gods’ jealous anger and an ideal intimacy, shown in the gods’ special favours for heroes or pious mortals who had died or suffered nobly. In turn, these past mortals became heroes, themselves deserving cult and greatly multiplying the potential centres of godlike anger on earth. “Heroic temper” was central to their superhuman presence: localized and carefully appeased, they might have “no other claim to worship than their unrelenting anger with the world…”

These local myths of punishment and anger implied the wisdom of self-restraint and vigilant worship by mortals. Communities were well advised to respect these morals in view of their own visible past: moments of divine anger and divine friendship had created much of their surrounding landscape and some of their oldest monuments. Pausanias himself rejected the wilder stories and rationalized the details in many others, but his instinct was to accept, if possible, a large, historical core, and his travels strengthened his ability to believe. To learn these stories, he did not have to read: he heard them from local informants, just as any visitor to a shrine or festival could hear them too. Myth was not the preserve of professors and antiquarians, and since Homeric epic, it had enlarged the scope for divine encounters: it made them classless. The myths told how gods had visited the poor and the old folk as strangers in disguise, giving scope for yet another reversal and transformation by which gods showed their power: they helped the least likely people, who, we might nowadays add, were unlikely to be transformed, in the age of Homer or Pausanias, by any human agent. Myth also kept alive the idea of the “fall” from Phaeacia’s past and its possible reversal. Through myth, people knew the idea of a Golden Age, when men had been so pious that the gods moved freely among them. Unlike Phaeacia, this state might yet return, and thus it was a theme which Emperors in the later third century A.D. could still exploit in their publicity.²⁴ The Golden Age was to be accompanied by no Last Judgement, no setting of history to rights. It was potentially ever-present, not fixed by the will of God, and in it, man and god would again keep open company amid a generous, burgeoning world of nature.

If myth kept alive these possibilities, poetry helped to remind men how to respond if ever they should occur. In the Homeric hymns, as in the Odyssey, we find a further parallel for the men of Lystra: when the god reveals himself to unsuspecting mortals, they respond at once by offering to set up a cult.²⁵ To the Greek mind, cults began naturally from a close encounter: in that way, many of the oldest cults explained their origin and many newer dedications and cults came to exist. On the Attic stage, we meet gods through another dimension, the voice of a god, not his visible person. This aspect, too, was present in Homer,²⁶ and no Attic theatregoer could have accepted a modern view that meetings with pagan gods were essentially visual, whereas God, in the Old Testament, being one and remote, was encountered by his voice. The Jews’ God did indeed speak, not “appear”: when a Jewish dramatist cast the story of Exodus as a Greek tragedy in the second century B.C., God was played by a voice, not an appearing figure in the Greek manner.²⁷ However, polytheism, too, could be heard as well as seen. Among the Greeks, too, the voice of a god was a theatrical convenience, never more brilliantly exploited than by Sophocles in his Ajax.²⁸ Sounds from the gods were varied and familiar, the sounds of Pan in nature, the noises which counted as omens from heaven, the inner voice, even, of Socrates’s daemon. In the early fourth century A.D., Iamblichus still distinguished carefully the experience of hearing divine voices among the various types of epiphany.²⁹ As many pagans heard the gods as ever sighted them: perhaps, too, they smelt them, as awareness of a sudden beautiful scent was an accepted sign of a divinity’s presence.

The poets of archaic Greece continued to show the two sides to a divine encounter, the awe and the intimacy, not only because they were enshrined in Homer but because they suited the poets’ idea of the gods and allowed them to write the rarest of literature: great religious poetry which was not sanctimonious. These moods were beautifully expressed in Sappho’s two addresses to Aphrodite, in one of which she is the first poet to imagine herself “overheard by God”: Aphrodite comes to her with that exquisite feature of the Greeks’ religious imagination, a divine omniscient smile. To Christian readers, this intimacy has often seemed playful and its poems a literary conceit, but Aphrodite was nearer than the remote Father and Son, and nearness did not diminish divinity.³⁰ Pindar encountered it too, meeting one of the heroes on his road to Delphi: later traditions credited him with several encounters with gods and their images from which he began cults in their honour, as any pagan would.³¹

There is a clear difference between these epiphanies and modern accounts of a presence or encounter in Western culture. Nowadays, the sense of presence is connected closely with an “affective state” altering the subject’s emotional mood into joy or warm elation, fear, too, or inner contentment. The experience of “seeing” another connects, as Sartre argued, to the consciousness of “being seen”: the presence seems to be watching or helping the person who senses it. In antiquity, some of the same sensations were reported: fear, scent, light and sometimes touch. But in pagan culture, these presences were agreed to have their own existence, “gods in disguise,” independent of mortals who might intrude on them, to their cost. The experience of emotional warmth and reassurance and a sense of unity with surrounding nature were not the hallmarks of an encounter with a present divinity in early Greece.

In classical Athens of the late fifth century B.C., we might feel that the presence of the gods had become a convention to sophisticated minds. The experience had been exploited in the theatre, where actors appeared on an upper level of the scenery or flew onstage in theatrical machines. The force, however, of Greek tragedy was bound intimately with interventions of the gods, and they lie at the heart of Sophocles’s tragic art, in Athena’s visible presence to the deluded Ajax, Oedipus’s farewell in the sacred grove at Colonus and above all in the Antigone, where the chorus summon the gods to Creon’s city in a moment of distress, only to receive the “arrival” of a human messenger instead. The gods, as in Homer, are known more by their power than by their discrete personalities: “when gods appear at the end of a tragedy, their divinity is always recognized at once by the chorus, their identity never…”³² The angry presence of heroes and “gods in a small way” is taken for granted by the entire plots of plays, ascribing to the dead the “heroic temper” which is so manifest in Sophocles’s heroes.³³

When these interventions became trite, tragedy tended to melodrama, an effect which has often been found in Euripides: “on the whole, I should say, Euripides was not much interested in epiphanies, regarding them as little more than a dramatic convenience. He was not much concerned to invest them with any excitement or sense of mystery…” Yet the tone of some of his plays suggests that this “belief” had not been entirely diminished. In the Ion, the hero still fears to look on a god at the wrong moment and strikes a chord of sympathy in the audience. In the Bacchae, we can catch something of the poet’s own religious sensitivity in the hush which he casts on nature and the tremors he gives to the earth before the god Dionysus appears. The stage conventions of epiphany meant less to him, but not the underlying notion.³⁴

Nonetheless, these encounters were staged in plays and only brought their gods before mythical heroes of the past. When Euripides began to treat them as a convention, had they lost all connection with life and its expectations? Here, hymns throw a bridge between literature and religious life, and the hymns which were composed by Callimachus between the 270s and late 240s B.C. raise the problems of tone and sincerity in an age of sophisticated minds. Three of his hymns, especially, are connected with civic festivals, although their manner makes it hard to credit that they were meant for recitation on the festival’s day. Each, however, begins with a lively sense that the god or goddess is about to be present among the onlookers.

In the first of them, “sharp-eyed Athena’s” statue, we deduce, is about to be escorted from the goddess’s shrine in Argos for its yearly washing.³⁵ “Come out,” call Callimachus’s Argive women to the goddess who is lodged in her temple: her wooden image has been cleaned and polished and also, we must imagine, robed, for “whoever sees Pallas, keeper of cities, naked, shall look on Argos for the last time.” This prologue leads into the myth of Teiresias and Pallas at her bath: “the laws of Kronos order this: whoever looks on one of the immortals when the god himself does not choose, the sight shall cost him a heavy price.” The picture is brilliantly drawn in two contrasting tones. Although Athena pities Teiresias, she is obliged to blind him for his spying, as she must obey the divine law. Teiresias, therefore, is blinded, but he receives a special insight into the ways of the gods, and thus becomes a “seer.” The hymn ends as the goddess is at last coming out among her female worshippers who wait to “receive” her: her statue, we assume, is supposed to be visible in all its finery. “Welcome, goddess, when you drive out your horses and drive them back again: keep safe all the heritage of the Danaans.” Athena’s statue is emerging in her chariot for her yearly journey, like a Spanish madonna from a church in Seville during Holy Week.

In the hymn to Apollo, by contrast, the god’s statue never emerges. His presence is perceived through its effects on Cyrene’s great shrine: its doors seem to tremble and its laurel to shake: “Look,” sing the choir of young men, “Apollo is hammering at the door with his fair foot.” He is “visiting” his shrine, but not everyone can see him, as insight depends on the beholders’ own virtue and piety. As one person can see more than another in a child or a garden, a landscape or a painting, so the assessment of visiting strangers was an art for pious connoisseurs. As the god drew near to Callimachus’s crowds the young men struck up the song and dance. “We shall see you, archer Apollo, we shall see you, and then we will no longer be mean and lowly.” There is none of the awe, because the god is coming openly, to be seen of his own volition. There is intimacy and a note of exaltation, although the hymn ends before the god himself is seen.³⁶

Both of these hymns convey a crowd’s eager anticipation of the presence of their god: only at Argos does the song end with a sighting when “now, truly,” after several false hopes, Athena is visible in her statue. Together, these hymns express very neatly two poles of an epiphany, the sighting of a god in the form of his image and the sensing of a presence which only the pious can perceive. These two poles will recur in much we will examine, but first there is a question about the evidence itself. Callimachus was a sophisticated man from a sophisticated court, where a “visit from a god” was a familiar metaphor:³⁷ should we really take his hymns seriously? Opinions have divided sharply, but perhaps we should separate Callimachus’s own point of view from those of the spectators whom he wished to evoke. Personally, he might be detached from his poem, although he intended it to convey what these festivals meant to others.³⁸ His playful touches do not tell against this: once again, awe and intimacy stand side by side, but it is in the mythical sections, not the cults’ settings, that the wit and lightness are most obvious. Myth could prompt one tone, action and cult another, for the piety evoked in the hymn to Apollo at Cyrene is unmistakable. Like two other hymns on the gods’ presence, this poem was set in a Doric city where we might, on other evidence, expect the most traditional cults to flourish. We see them through the gods’ particular choirs and welcomers: in Cyrene, the young; in Argos, the women. These poems help us to sense what a detached, but acute, observer could attribute to a post-classical city on a public religious occasion. Callimachus and his sophisticated readers could enjoy the scenes of simple piety which the poetry conveyed. These readers, however, were a small minority, whereas the simpler, pious majority were not detached from the myths and expectations which surrounded their gods.

Far into the second and third centuries A.D., this piety of the majority survived the wit of poets and philosophers. The old hymns continued to be copied and sung, while the newer ones said much the same, though with more extravagance.³⁹ At Elis, Pausanias was assured by the residents that Dionysus attended their festival personally. His “visit” induced a flow of miraculous wine and we happen to have the old, enigmatic hymn in which the Sixteen Maidens of Elis called on the god to “come, rushing with foot like a bull’s.” Perhaps they sang it while driving a bull in the god’s honour.⁴⁰ At Argos, the site of Callimachus’s hymn to Athena, Plutarch told how the inhabitants “threw a bull into the deep and summoned bull-born Dionysus from the waters with a trumpet,” an instrument which had heralded many epiphanies of the god, not least in Callimachus’s own Alexandria.⁴¹ Homer had given no prominence to boisterous Dionysus, but his cult had added vigour to the patterns of Homeric belief. Appearances did not die away: they attached, as we shall see, to yet more gods in different periods, who were honoured freely as present and “manifest” divinities. It is not until the fourth century A.D. that we first hear of a great pagan festival of epiphany which had developed, on present evidence, in the Imperial period.⁴² Held in Alexandria, it celebrated the birth of the abstract god Eternity (Aion) and the revelation of the maiden goddess Kore in the form of her statue. This innovation in the city’s cults was celebrated on January 5–6 and was clearly a popular occasion. In the fourth century, the Christians spread their own festival of Epiphany, a very different rite. Its practice owed nothing to this pagan ceremony, but it is no coincidence that it was placed on the same date in the calendar.

Prayers and invocations match the language of hymns and they, too, throw an obvious bridge between literature and life.⁴³ We know them best from Greek lyric poetry, especially the lyrics of the great Attic dramatists, whose requests to a god to “appear” are modelled on the daily hymns and prayers of cult. The best, once again, survive in Sophocles: in the Ajax his chorus prays for Apollo to come “with kindly mind and in easily recognizable form.” The song was sung in a false dawn of joy and relief which was soon to be betrayed by the plot, and this context may explain its bold request. On the stage, as in cult, these songs were set off by the rhythms of dancing. “Pan, Pan…,” calls Sophocles’s excited chorus and we must imagine the call against that beat of the foot which Horace ascribed to his rural ditch digger, “beating the hated ground” thrice over in a welcome for Italy’s equivalent of Pan. These prayers remind us how the gods shared man’s elation and happier moments as well as his anxieties: in Aristophanes, as in Sappho, gods are invited to drink with the celebrants of peaceful rustic festivals, and in short songs of balance and grace, the choruses call on the gods to “appear” and “stand beside” the actors’ predicaments. These prayers have two particular features. They call on the gods by names which relate to their forms in their man-made statues; sometimes, too, they request in advance the manner or mood in which the gods should appear. Both these features had a long and influential life. “Advance requests” for a god to come in a particular mood were exploited by later poets, never better than in Milton’s L’Allegro. In antiquity, they did not become mere decoration: prayers of invocation continued to inaugurate a god’s new cult or temple or statue. The god was thought to respond to them literally, as we continue to find in cults of Asclepius, founded during the Imperial period.⁴⁴ As we shall see, the assimilation of a god to his cult statue also remained very close at all levels of society and experience. Gods were thought to attend individuals’ prayers, too, and we will find scrupulous individuals asking the gods’ own oracles how best to address a divinity in prayers. These scruples were still lively in the third century A.D. and are reflected in a series of hymns to the gods, composed in the Imperial period and ascribed to the mythical Orpheus.⁴⁵ People also wore carefully made amulets, engraved with scenes and legends which ensured that a particular god would come in the mood for a “good encounter.”⁴⁶ This euphemism was applied to the more awesome divinities, especially to goddesses, and above all to Hecate and other fierce female visitors by night. By invoking a goddess in a particular mood, mortals could limit the dangers of her presence. These features of prayer led naturally into the arts of the sorcerer and the spiritual “magicians” whom we know from texts of the first Christian centuries. They show how hard it is to draw a line between “magic” and “religion” in terms of magic’s techniques of compulsion. Religion used them openly too, a point which weakens the study of magic as a new type of irrationality.

When people prayed, they expected their gods to come, from the age of Homer to the last Platonists in the fifth century A.D. They did not expect to see them so much as to sense their “manifest” presence. Like a child to its parents, they tried to prescribe in advance the mood of their visiting superiors, for in gods and demigods, “irreconcilable temper” was anticipated and widely feared.

Were the gods also seen openly without a formal invocation? Here, too, we touch on patterns of psychology which our own modern case histories may not do much to illuminate: in antiquity, unlike our own age, “appearances” were part of an accepted culture pattern which was passed down in myth and the experiences of the past, in art, ritual and the bewitching poetry of Homer.⁴⁷ The ancients, however, did not see their gods without cause, and here the idea of “anxiety” does carry weight. In the ancient world, as in our own, the evidence suggests that people were most likely to see something when under pressure or at risk, though there is also a visionary current in their moments of peace with the natural world. Nothing was more hazardous or anxious than a journey, especially a journey by sea, and on this topic, life and literature met.⁴⁸ When the poets prayed to divine “escorts” for their friends at sea, they were not merely playing with a literary genre. Their poems attached to a continuing pattern of religious beliefs and acts which were as old, once again, as Homer, where so many of them can be detected in Athena’s guidance of Telemachus on his first sea voyage. There were fixed prayers for a fair voyage and fixed honours for gods at embarkation and disembarkation. Travellers honoured the gods of temples which were passed at sea and continued to believe that a god’s presence could attend the ship, guide it in a crisis or be seen, when the weather was rough, in the fire and clatter of a sea storm. Art and literature coincided in the monuments which sailors dedicated after a safe return. At sea, the gods were always near, and in the fire of a storm, Castor and Pollux were unmistakable, “flaming amazement” like Ariel on the prow.

As at sea, so in the crisis of sickness, the gods were agreed to come close to worshippers. Mostly, they were seen in dreams, as we can still discover from the double scenes on several votive reliefs which were put up in Attica during the fourth century B.C.⁴⁹ On one side, they show the sleeping mortal attended by a god, on the other the god and mortal in close contact. These reliefs have been well explained as a scene of the patient asleep and a scene of the patient and god as experienced in his simultaneous dream. The records of “miracles” at Asclepius’s shrines do include cases where a patient is said to have met the god or his agent in mortal disguise outside the temple.⁵⁰ Perhaps, in these emergencies, people did allege such encounters, and if so, the stories are not the elaboration of temple priests: the “road to Emmaus” had been preceded by the “road to Epidaurus.”

Divine sightings also throw light on those “touchstones of ancient piety,” the votive reliefs which were put up by individuals to a particular god. In Attica, the earliest-known examples centre on minor divinities, Pan, the nymphs and the river god Acheloös. Precisely these gods were later singled out as among the “visible” gods whom people were particularly prone to perceive with their own senses. Several of the reliefs show the mortal in divine company: “it is the rule in these dedicated reliefs for the mortals to be about two-thirds the height of the gods: the goblin, goat-god Pan is generally smaller than his fellow-immortals.”⁵¹ The neatest origin for these pieces is a vision or a meeting, although the presence of Acheloös raises fascinating problems. Half man, half bull, he shared with the Greeks’ other gods of water the ability to turn himself into terrifying animal shapes, and if he was seen, it can only have been in a dream. Pan and the nymphs were more accessible, not least in their natural haunts, where, perhaps on a warm or peaceful day, they spoke or seemed to appear. They also attracted particular devotees, or “servants,” who might live in their company in a rural retreat or pay regular honour at their shrine.⁵² These works of Greek art give meticulous, rational shape to events which, to us, are rooted in the irrational: they are utterly lost in our museums, those “aquariums of conditioned air.” Greek votive reliefs of all periods owe a large debt to sightings of their gods. They confess it in inscriptions which refer to their dedication “according to a dream” or “at the god’s command” and in reliefs which sometimes give us a snapshot in stone of the sighting which their patron had enjoyed. They have been found in all regions of the Greek-speaking world and although they have never been collected and fully described, a sample allows certain negative points.⁵³ Votive monuments were not restricted to freeborn donors: we have one from a slave who had seen the “mother of the gods.” Priests were sometimes the donors, but by no means always: there was no control over the inscription and dedication of these monuments and they multiplied the proofs of religiousness beyond any official priestly class. Women dedicated them too, though they did not give the majority, accounting for no more than a sixth of the fullest recent list. There is, of course, no correlation between the number of votive monuments and the number of dreams of gods which one class or sex enjoyed. We can, however, say that these dedications in stone were not the preserve of women and priesthoods, or the business of men only. Like Miletus’s visions, they span the sexes and the social classes, high and low.

As always, the “appearances” of gods did come under attack: Plato complained of Homer’s support for such absurdities and was inclined to see them as a particular delusion of women. Although we know of one Spartan woman who had tall stories to tell about her visits from divinities and although we can believe anything of Alexander the Great’s mother, here, too, other evidence does not suggest a female majority. At the healing shrines of Asclepius, stories of miraculous cures were posted up to impress the visitors, but women occur in only a third of the surviving texts and the priests who finally wrote them up were all men.⁵⁴ Convinced disbelievers were very few, and it is worth comparing the belief in fairies which flourished in Northern Europe until only recently. Here, too, we might feel that a presence which had seemed genuine to men of the sixteenth century faded away and died before the advance of reason. However, while Marx and Darwin wrote, the fairies lived for many more who never read such books. Unlike the Olympians, fairies lived in very close dependence on the human race.⁵⁵ In antiquity, the nymphs were said to whisk away small children from their parents’ homes, but unlike nymphs, the fairies depended on men for food and tools and for their special recruits, the babies which they stole and swapped for changelings. Fairies were nearby authors of human misfortunes and thus they were easily encountered. Like the gods, they haunted the wilder landscapes, but they favoured the forests and wooded roads which were such particular European hazards. Although Pan was revered as the “good guide” through rough country, in ancient literature there is a striking absence of Europe’s “pixie-leading,” the guiding of travellers through thick woods by supernatural guides. The ranks of the fairies were more clearly distinguished in order of merit: pixies were not mere brownies and those who saw them knew the difference. Around 1900, there were two classes of Manx fairy and there was no mistaking the lower order, who were smaller and more vindictive. They dwelt apart from other breeds and from men, “in clouds, on mountains, in fogs, on the hideous precipices or in caverns on the seashore where they were frequently heard to yell.” Like Homer’s gods, the fairies were prone to be partisan: “The little gentry take a great interest in the affairs of men,” remarked an Irishman in Sligo in 1908, “and they always stand for justice and right. Any side they favour in our wars, that side wins. They favoured the Boers, and the Boers did get their rights. They told me they favoured the Japs and not the Russians, because the Russians were tyrants. Sometimes, though, they fight among themselves. One of them once said, ‘I’d fight for a friend, or I’d fight for Ireland.’”

On this point, above all, the gods and the fairies agreed. Homer’s armies had sensed the presence of gods in the weather signs and clamour which surrounded battles, and they also believed that the gods stood by, assisting a warrior’s prowess. Throughout antiquity there was continuity on this topic, between life and literature, one age and the next. In the sixth century B.C., the Spartans took the “bones of Orestes” into battle as their military ally and accompanied the army with their images of Castor and Pollux. When only one of the kings went to war, they took either Castor or Pollux, but not both. The Spartans were more precise, but only slightly more “superstitious” than subsequent armies.⁵⁶ This presence is not a matter on which the opinions of the educated and the rank and file divide. In the First World War, troops and clergy alike believed in the “angel of Mons” who haunted no-man’s-land, attended their attacks and cared for abandoned bodies. Throughout antiquity, attempts to limit the presence of gods to the mystic belief of a minority or the delusions of women and the lower classes founder on the facts of war. In the 230s, the historian Herodian dwelt on this point while describing Maximinus’s recent siege of Aquileia. During operations, the soldiers saw the god Apollo appearing in the style of his image “frequently” above the city and fighting for it. It is not certain, said Herodian, whether they really saw it or whether they invented it to exculpate their defeat: “appearances” were sometimes alleged by generals in order to encourage their men. Significantly, Herodian did not reject the troops’ word, because the circumstances, he said, were so singular that anything was credible.⁵⁷ These old habits died hard. In 394, Rome’s pagans made a last stand by the river Frigidus in northern Italy and placed images of the god Zeus with golden thunderbolts as their visible allies on the surrounding hills. They lost the battle, and the Christian victors, said Augustine, parcelled out the thunderbolts and made a joke of them.⁵⁸ In the fifth century A.D., therefore, Zosimus’s pagan history was heir to a long tradition when he told his readers how Alaric had been astonished by the sight of Athena Promachos bestriding the walls while he started his siege of Athens. How Gordian would have applauded! She strode on the walls in her armour “exactly as she had been portrayed by Pheidias” and looked as threatening as Homer’s Achilles. The city survived, and Zosimus accepted the story, one of the last and best examples of the influence of art on pagans’ ideas of their gods.⁵⁹

In Homer, the gods had favourite places, just as they had favourite individuals, and it was believed that they would not see them go to ruin. To the end of pagan antiquity, this belief persisted. Gods “held their hand” over cities, as Solon had charmingly reminded the Athenians: they did not forget him, as we can see from the brilliant wordplay which the comedies of Aristophanes spun round the idea and its language. His jokes presupposed that the audience knew Solon’s words by heart.⁶⁰ Sieges brought these protectors into focus, just as sickness conjured up an individual’s god. They were “present” to the besieged and the besiegers alike, and it was because of this presence that Roman generals formally “summoned out” the gods when they began to besiege a city.⁶¹ Cities had their “presiding” divinities, and cities which had famous shrines continued to describe themselves as “dear to the gods.” The occasions of the gods’ appearances were listed in local histories and temple chronicles, where they had coincided, on the Homeric pattern, with dedications to the god: these books could be items of public concern, approved by the city assembly and based on patient research in older records and evidence. “Appearances” gave shrines prestige and antiquarians a job: meanwhile, they continued to feature in crowded civic life.⁶² At Magnesia on the Maeander, the local Artemis was said to have “stood beside” the entire people during the construction of a temple. Just as the prayers of the Athenians invited the gods to “stand beside” the mass meetings of their classical democracy, so Dio of Prusa, on his travels through the first-century Empire, told the men of St. Paul’s own Tarsus that their founding heroes, Perseus and Heracles, attended and watched over their public assemblies.⁶³

Through myth and Homeric poetry, the visits of the gods continued to draw on a deep reserve of potential experience, which poets and artists could exploit but which most people did not exclude from life’s possibilities. They were supported by actual sightings, which were not imagined from nothing, because they occurred at times of strain or anxiety when a “presence” was most readily set before the mind’s eye. These beliefs were not the strange fancies of a small minority. They were sensitive to the entire social and political climate and could lead to solid, persistent practice. We see this connection most clearly in the later third century B.C., when cities were beset by the warring Greek kings. In these times of collective tension, whole cities claimed sightings of their god, and once they had seen him, they would try to capitalize on the event. They sent their envoys on a tireless round of the neighbouring cities and kings, pleading for their town to be acknowledged as “inviolable” in the wake of this divine presence. If the envoys failed, the gods might appear a second time, encouraging a second diplomatic circuit to see if the great powers would grant “inviolability” to the gods’ favoured homes.⁶⁴ This age of persistent war had been good for visibility. Sightings of gods were indeed intertwined with anxiety, but the concept now loses its force as the characterization of any one age in antiquity. Like the gods and their anger, anxiety was ever-present. It was not the distinctive tone of the Antonine age: it was a constant strand in experience, bringing the gods into mortal view. The strand was a part of “following pagan religion,” apart from the ceremonies which had to be paid to the gods.

Close encounters had affected the various philosophies, not least because their masters were concerned to argue against them.¹ Plato’s concern with the vision of God, Aristotle’s account of the “friend of the gods,” the Stoics’ transposition of “visible” gods to the stars in heaven: in their different ways, these concerns owed something to popular ideas of the gods’ “presence” which they wished to refine or oppose. Their influence was particularly clear in the teachings of Epicurus, who offered his own account of why gods were “evident” and tried to explain their appearances by night: from these, he accepted, man had derived his entire, mistaken idea of divinity. In the Christian era, Platonists used analogies from Homer to explain their master Socrates’s guidance from an inner god: they ended by defending the Homeric “spies in disguise” whom Plato himself had ridiculed. Stoicism, meanwhile, allowed the Emperor Marcus Aurelius to continue to write of the gods as “helpers” and “assistants,” “visible” as stars in the sky but also present as friends and instructors in his dreams. Authors tended not to be sceptical about these assistants: Dio the orator and Dio the historian, Galen the doctor, Plutarch, who was never so sceptical as to withhold a story of the gods’ past appearances, and once again, Pausanias on his travels in Greece and the East. Though he tended to explain away the grosser features of certain cults, he respected the old tradition of the days when men and gods had dined together.² When he saw vapours rising from a hero’s tomb in Asia, he accepted them as a proof of the dead man’s presence. He knew his Homer and could quote with approval Hera’s words on the danger of seeing gods “manifestly.” They had been confirmed, he remarked, very recently, when a governor of Egypt had bribed a man to enter a temple of Isis without the goddess’s invitation, and she had punished him severely.

By the Christian era, “paganism” tends to be studied through its Oriental cults and mystery religions, its magical texts and the wisdom of “Thrice-great Hermes” and the art of “theurgy,” by which philosophers and educated men tried to work on their gods and compel their attendance. This emphasis is too restricted. Each of these aspects attached to the gods’ older “presence,” enlarging it, rather than limiting it. Since the Hellenistic age, the newer gods from the Greek-speaking East had helped to extend the old, familiar patterns of “encounter,” and in turn these patterns had helped their cults to spread. The “presence” of Isis was invoked to help mortals in lawsuits and on journeys,³ and was experienced by adherents who gazed fondly on her statue. Very soon after his creation, the god Serapis had spread widely because he was accessible in dreams and appeared and gave commands to people of all classes. Evidence for gods being thought to attend their own banquets and sacrifices is known from the sixth to fourth centuries B.C., yet it surfaces again for us in the small invitation tickets to the “couch” of Serapis, known to us from the second century B.C. onwards.⁴ Attempts to minimize these objects as cards for social dining clubs have foundered, finally, on the discovery of a ticket in which the god himself invites the guest. These feasts were held in temples or private houses and brought men to a worthwhile party under the patronage of their god. Serapis, said an elegant hymn, was both “host and guest” of his worshippers. His role as host has been verified, and his presence as guest deserves to be credited. From Palmyra, we have quantities of similar tickets, inviting visitors to dine with this or that god.⁵ They are not some Syrian curiosity. Unusually well preserved, these heavenly meal tickets are the pair to the parties which Serapis held throughout the Mediterranean. Entertainment of the gods was a familiar practice: in The Golden Ass, Apuleius describes how a baker’s wife set the dinner table lavishly in her husband’s absence and “waited for the advent of her young adulterer, like the advent of a god.”⁶

In the mystery religions, too, the old patterns of a god’s appearance were not displaced. There was an idea that gods might appear especially to people who had been initiated and would help them in their subsequent crises. This idea may not have been widespread, but the connection went deeper: so far as the texts tells us, the idea of an encounter was central to the entire mystery rite.⁷ Descriptions of an initiation suggest that it induced the compound of fear, revelation and reassurance which was already detectable in Homeric poetry: the initiate was “the one who has seen,” after “laborious circuits and journeyings through the dark, terrors of every kind… amazement… a wonderful light… songs and dances and holy appearances.” “I came into the presence of the gods below and the gods above,” says our one personal account of an initiation, “and I adored them from the closest proximity.” In this old area of vision, the mystery experience seems to have been concentrated. When we find spells and magical texts promising to summon and reveal the gods, they attach, once again, to an existing strand in conventional religiousness. Magic offered a technique for bringing close encounters to pass: it was a systematization of an older hope, not a strange innovation.

Evidence for these magical practices has been connected with a change of mood in the Imperial period, giving a new twist to possible visions of a god: “In an age of bureaucracy and of the pressures of material civilization like ours and material needs less tempered by charity, such religious individualism let men somehow think they saw the things above the iron heaven which shut them in.”⁸ However, the visionaries of the Antonine age were not oppressed, humble men and their “religious individualism” grew from less immediate roots. It extended right back to Homer and his epics’ awareness that “not to everyone do the gods appear”: it also shared common ground with the old forms of prayer. These visions were not a response to social claustrophobia. In no religious culture has there been a necessary link between “misery and mysticism,” least of all in the Antonine and Severan age. Pagans who strove to see the gods were often comfortable people, educated, ambitious and not unduly ground down by “bureaucracy.” Their visions were not a passive escape but a positive search for knowledge. People wanted to know the secrets of higher theology, not because they were oppressed, but because the schools and philosophers had raised so many more questions than they had been able to answer.

Homer had not explicitly linked visions of the gods with moral and spiritual excellence: the gods tended to be seen by friends or favourites to whom they wished to appear. Here, as elsewhere, philosophy added moral depth to an old Homeric form, and by the Christian era, the “vision” of a god was attached explicitly to pious spiritual effort. By the mid-second century, the new art of theurgy aimed to “summon” the gods by symbols which they themselves had revealed. Its masters distinguished it sharply from magic, because it required a spiritual and moral excellence in its practitioners.⁹ It appealed, then, to philosophic minds, especially to Platonists from the later third century A.D. onwards. In some remarkable chapters, the Neoplatonist master Iamblichus (c. 300) lists the exact distinctions between the appearances of gods, angels and demons. He and his select readership clearly knew the experiences of sound and light on which these chapters rested, although the sighting of a fully fledged god seems quite exceptional, on Iamblichus’s account of it. No mortal eye or mind, he says, could ever contain the size or beauty of a pure divinity’s arrival.

Shortly before the birth of theurgy, pupils of the wise pagan god, the Thrice-great Hermes, were already aspiring to a spiritual experience of God.¹⁰ Their texts vary in level and quality, but again, these aspirants were not only poor or lower-class devotees: they included people of education who could write good Greek and develop themes from Platonist philosophy. In their more spiritual texts, we meet a new note of mystical union with God, the god of the philosophers, not the “helpers” of Homeric epic. Here, the relation between a sense of presence and the “affective state” of the subject becomes more explicit: emotion is a criterion of an encounter with God. The subject’s identity becomes joined or merged with the Other he seems to encounter. The sight of Him, the texts taught, shuts out sound and brings stillness and immobility: it comes and goes, varying with the beholder’s capacity. It is an apprehension of God through the “eye of the soul,” not the eye of the body, and in this new sense, it develops the older types of encounter. “Everywhere, God will appear to you, at times and places where you do not look for Him, in your waking hours and your sleep, when you travel by sea and by land, when you are speaking and when you are silent… And do you still say, God is invisible? Say not so.” The Hermetists’ texts vary in their scope and advice, but “if I were to try to sum up their teaching in one sentence, none would serve the purpose better than, Blessed are the pure in heart, for they shall see God.”

Each of these options enlarged the range of divine appearances. Neither excluded the other or blocked out the traditional encounters of myth and Homeric poetry. In this proliferation, we can distinguish various levels of presence: an unseen presence, by night and day; an encounter, face to face, between god and man; visits of gods in unperceived disguises; the nightly “company” of god and man enjoyed in dreams. If we explore them in turn, we can place the predicament of the people of Lystra and Miletus.

Since Homer, all these hints of a divine presence had come under a single Greek word, epiphaneia. It raises a further development since Homer: the cult paid to living men and rulers, “gods” whom anyone might encounter without disguise. In 196 B.C., the title epiphanes had first been taken by a king, Ptolemy V, to mark the sudden show of godlike power which he had displayed in a particular crisis for his kingdom.¹¹ Neighbouring kings copied this honour and by the second and third centuries A.D. it was a conventional Greek title for a divine ruler. This level must be added to our picture, though more as a consequence than its cause.

The unseen presence of the gods is the most obvious and the easiest to document. Because the gods were an unseen presence, men had always questioned them in oracles and invoked them in prayers, oaths and curses. These practices flourished in the early Christian centuries and were most vividly expressed in the models of large ears which worshippers dedicated in many temples, especially those of Isis and Serapis, and to which they directed, or whispered, their requests. The gods were thought to hear silent prayers, and by the high Empire that frequent epithet “listening” was added to their names in hymns and vows.¹²

The unseen power of a god could be highly localized and concentrated, for instance in the area of “asylum” which was defined round shrines and temples. Within this limited area, the god was thought to protect suppliants, and those who moved inside it were often conscious of a nearer divine presence. In these precincts, gods kept a sharp eye on their own assets and treasures and exerted a local vigilance which was invoked or described in many inscriptions. The most vivid are found in the villages of northeastern Lydia, where violators of the god’s property, cutters of his trees, attackers of his birds or inadvertent thieves of his belongings proclaim their punishments and make amends by a declaration of their crime in public inscriptions. In the year 194/5, “Stratonicos, son of Euangelos, in ignorance cut down an oak of Zeus of the Twin Oak Trees and because of Stratonicos’s lack of faith, Zeus summoned up his own power.” He almost killed the offender, who “recovered from great danger and made this dedication by way of thanks”; “and I proclaim, let nobody ever belittle Zeus’s powers nor cut down an oak again.”¹³ Inscriptions from the same area refer to a process called “setting up the sceptre,” by which the villagers invoked the justice of their local god or goddess. The cases give us some of our liveliest glimpses of village life from the first to the mid-third century A.D.¹⁴ When an orphan was suspected of maltreatment or when clothes were stolen in a bathhouse, the villagers held a “trial by sceptre” and summoned an all-seeing god. When three pigs went missing from a herd, the suspects “did not agree” to this appeal to the sceptre, but the appeal occurred nonetheless, and before long the gods had killed every one of them. When a stepmother was accused of poisoning her stepson, up went the sceptre, and before long she and her own son died. We know of these cases because surviving kinsmen inscribed them on stone and put up their record in order to appease the gods. The “twelve sceptres” were invoked to protect tombs from violation, “implacable sceptres” which would punish an offender’s family forever. Here, the rods themselves had become agents, but behind them lay a divine presence, hunting down offenders by symbols which were modelled on the staffs which the priests of the gods carried. In the Roman governor’s absence, the gods had their own tribunal to settle villagers’ rumours and wrongdoings.

These texts of “confession” are vivid witnesses to a divine presence: are they, however, a local peculiarity in concept as well as form? We must not misread them as proof that a divine presence hung heavily over every life at every moment: they are only set up in the wake of an act which ignored the gods altogether. In these Anatolian villages, men were as willing as any Republican Roman to act first and risk payment later. They merely paid distinctively. They were not humble men either: the inscriptions were cut by specialists, and the stone and its carving were expensive. Their belief in the gods’ anger was no local peculiarity. Any city blamed it for famines and earthquakes, and as these misfortunes were ever-present, so were the gods.

In easier times, were the gods sensed as constant, invisible protectors, not only of cities but of men in their daily lives? It depended somewhat on the rank of god. Olympians belonged with Homeric heroes, and Zeus was too lofty for all but a king.¹⁵ However, Hermes and Heracles were less remote; Homer had already described Hermes as the most companionable god. They attended men on their travels and were thanked for their guidance in inscriptions after the event: “May you be kindly, Heracles,” as a traveller asked in his inscription, found in Rome, “since you are always present to me, as I pray to you, and always hold your hand above me.” The word “always” was not idle.¹⁶ In the Greek world we meet nothing quite like the possessive language of certain Latin inscriptions whose families refer to “my Minerva” or “our Hermes.” Instead, the gods were praised as “assistants” and “helpers,” recurrent words in the religious writings of the Emperors Marcus and Julian.¹⁷

By the Christian era, this invisible company had become connected explicitly with moral worth, a theme which was neatly developed by the orator Maximus of Tyre in one of the lively speeches which he published in the late second century A.D. and which are readily imagined in the setting of a public lecture to a city’s educated men.¹⁸ What, he asked, was the truth of that old mystery, Socrates’s divine guidance? Surely Homer had explained it best when he wrote how the gods appeared to his heroes? Just as Athena guided Odysseus, so a divine sign directed Socrates and other virtuous men. Of course, he went on, you are not so vulgar as to think that Homer meant these “gods” in a literal, physical sense: Maximus had a gift for discounting his audience’s commonsense views without argument. By gods, he said, Homer had meant divine powers, the daimones which accompany virtuous people, which “share their life” and, in that same charming image, “hold their hand” above them. Although Maximus allegorized one aspect of Homer’s epiphanies, he took the other at face value. He rounded off his speech with the Homeric suitors’ lines on the gods as “spies in disguise.”

This bright little sketch presupposes an audience who liked to reflect on man’s daemonic guidance. Written, surely, for performance, it was not divorced altogether from life, and its theme certainly was not new. It even attached to people’s birthdays.¹⁹ The Greeks ascribed certain days to particular gods and tended to honour them as the days came round in each month: they had an idea, too, of a man’s attendant daimon and also the idea of these general “patrons” of the days of their birth. The Romans had an old and lively belief in each man’s attendant “genius,” which was born with him and was honoured, therefore, by each individual on his birthday.

This sense of divine, invisible guidance can be followed in individuals’ writings, never more so than in those of the orator Aelius Aristeides, who lived with a heightened sense of the gods’ company. In his writings Aelius touches on so many forms of divine contact that his comments are better reserved for the moment, as an invisible presence is only one aspect of their whole. Instead, it can be followed through a lesser divinity, who warns us, once again, not to think that this “presence” died away with time.

No presence has been more haunting than Pan’s, and in the Roman world it was never better expressed than by Horace, who wrote so warmly of his protection by the gods and the attendance of Pan on the health of his country farm. Pan had visited Horace “often,” though he had never met him face to face. The hills echoed with his divine music: “the poet acknowledges the origin of his prosperity in a spirit kindred to that in which an Italian calls the bread ‘la grazia di Dio.’”²⁰ On one view, Horace had been hearing the god’s final cadence: Pan, a traveller told Plutarch’s friends, had died in the age of Tiberius.²¹ Christians later made much of this report. By a favourite pun, “Pan” was also the Greek “all,” so his death stood for the death of all demons. Their Pan pun was premature, for his was the one reported death of Tiberius’s reign which nobody believed. Cults of Pan continued in the very heart and identity of cities,²² the “Pan hill” in the middle of Alexandria or the grottoes and springs of Caesarea Panias, where the god’s person persisted on the city’s third-century coinage. Pictures of Pan abound on the coins of second-century Asian cities, too, although they do not entail a local cult, and in Gordian’s reign, Pan appears conventionally on the sudden burst of local coinage from little Arneae in Lycia, Pan with horns and a hand on a naked nymph.²³ Pan, meanwhile, had been discovered in new places, deep in the Egyptian desert, where pilgrims and travellers honoured his cave, Pan “qui affectionne les hémi-spéos.” He could guide travellers, “Pan of the good journey,” or rescue sailors on a becalmed ship. His presence had not faded, and in the mid-second century, Artemidorus’s great collection of dreams assumes that Pan was frequently seen by night. One of Artemidorus’s friends had been warned by Pan in a dream that his wife was trying to poison him through one of his best friends. The friend, it turned out, was having an affair with her.

At large in the landscape, Pan was still the god whose range of interests was to intrigue the Edwardian novelists. He was Pan the unhappy lover, Pan the mischief-maker, Pan the author of sudden sexual forays against girls and boys alike.²⁴ Proverbially, women who were said to have been pleasured by several men in sequence were still known as “Pan girls.” Sexually voracious, Pan was also the disappointed suitor. Up in the woods and hills, men still heard Pan’s bewitching music, a lasting intimation of his presence. “Pan était là, bien present, proche mais invisible, une voix sans corps.” In a song of exquisite sadness, he lamented to the mountains his loss of the nymph Echo.

Pan did not only surface in sounds and dreams. At midday, he was supposed to sleep on the hills, and it was then, at the hour of his keenest temper, that Hyginus saw him and was cured by his help, as his inscription of second- or early-third-century date expressed it when found in Rome, “not in a dream, but around the middle course of the day.” Pan, it seems, had appeared openly to Hyginus and (perhaps) “all his sons.”²⁵ In the early fourth century, Iamblichus still referred to “those seized by Pan” as a distinguishable class among people who had made contact with gods.²⁶ Pan’s caves in Attica continued to draw pilgrims long after Constantine’s conversion.²⁷

Nowhere is his invisible presence more evident than in the novels of the Imperial period.²⁸ In Longus’s Daphnis and Chloe, Pan’s presence was felt and heard more often than seen: he arrived in Longus’s plot to rescue his friends by an awesome power and music, clamouring all night and piping till the gates of dawn. In the adventures of Leucippe and Cleitophon, his presence took a local turn. This romance has retreated in date to the first century B.C. and perhaps further, but its final books contain Pan in an intriguing context. In a cave just outside Ephesus, the heroine was put through an ordeal which was reserved for servants of the goddess Artemis. Shut in the cave, the girls were tested by Pan for the presence or absence of their virginity. If the pipes of Pan were heard by those outside, the girls were adjudged intact; if a low moan was heard, their honour was impugned. The music, of course, sounded strictly in the minds of the onlookers: who was to say what a wind in the nearby pine trees signified? This ordeal reads true to life and is recoverable from an epigram which refers to the practice. When most dramatic, the novel may be most exact, and we do not know when, if ever, before Constantine, this practice ceased.

Like Callimachus’s hymns, these novels made use of a pastoral art, involving their worldly readers in the pleasure of simple rural happenings. However, their pastoral tales were not purely wishful thinking, like the tales of Pan which appealed to that childlike streak in Forster and Saki, James Stephens and Kenneth Grahame. In the second and third centuries, Pan was indeed both Friend and Helper, and for a living sense of his presence, we have only to ask the gods themselves. When a group of rural visitors asked Apollo’s great shrine near Miletus to explain a calamity, the god told them the cause in a splendid hexameter oracle.²⁹ Nine woodcutters had been found dead in the country, and in answer, Apollo explained that there had nearly been many more. “Golden-horned Pan,” the servant of Dionysus, had been charming the nymphs with his song. His staff, said Apollo, had been held in one hand, his pipes in the other, and as he passed by, the shrillness of his song had stunned all the woodcutters within range. The sight of the god had overawed them, and every single one would have died had Artemis not intervened. She was angry with Pan, so she checked him. “Pray to Artemis,” said the oracle, “if you want her as a protector.” The date of this superb oracle is unknown, but a second-or third-century date is attractive, as it stood in the collection of oracles which Porphyry compiled, c. 260–290 A.D. It brings together so many threads. Country dwellers had come to consult Miletus’s oracle, seeing no opposition between urban and rural piety; the god blamed the woodcutters’ deaths on a culprit who could not be pursued. Had there not been Artemis and a truly Homeric division in heaven, the disaster would have been much worse. The morals were piety and prayer and thanks to Artemis, which neatly avoided the hunt for a human scapegoat. Above all, Pan and his presence were pictured as artists typically showed them. Pan’s fellow gods had no doubt that he was still a living presence.

Up in the caves and hills, Pan still piped and was moved to anger, while around him, the gods kept watch on their property and spied invisibly on human wrongs. There were also the local heroes and “gods in a small way,” localized agents of spite and random temper, as well as of friendship and neighbourly help. Among them, in the Imperial period, were some of a community’s “very special dead.” Individuals honoured dead members of their families as “manifest heroes” or “manifest gods,” and in some cases, the epithet meant more than “distinguished” or “conspicuous”: it meant that these people had appeared in dreams and visions and, in one or two cases, worked wonders to help the living.³⁰ This “demonic” presence of special dead people was yet another Satanic snare among which early Christians lived: most of our evidence for it is evidence from the early Christian era. These beliefs traded on the general acceptance of potential “epiphany” and were a further complicating part of pagan religiousness; they were beliefs, not emotions, and were not evoked solely by rites or acts of cult. Acceptance of the gods’ invisible protection, “holding their hand” above men,³¹ was still a part of what it meant to be a pagan, and in towns, especially, their presence drew near through those lasting objects, the statues.

In classical Athens, the statues’ presence had impressed itself firmly on men’s image of their gods. The effects were already latent in the Iliad and evident in Aristophanes’s comedies, where men greet a god’s statue as their “neighbour” and speak freely of a statue’s hand as the hand of a god.³² By the Antonine age, we hear more of these responses, but they are not the proof of a new irrationality. Rather, we are seeing the same beliefs from a closer angle, and we will have to return to them to understand the gods’ visitations by night. The simple rustic was not the only person who identified a god with his image: Augustus, no less, showed his annoyance with Poseidon for a spell of bad weather by banishing his statue from a procession.³³ Because the gods were present through their images, petitions were pinned to their thighs and legs. In his speech of self-defence, Apuleius listed everyday acts of piety which would incur no suspicions of magic: would you think I was a sorcerer, he asked his judges, if I wrote petitions on the statues of the gods? His audience, clearly, thought it standard practice.³⁴

Two cities in Asia have left a less expected testimony, coastal Syedra and the Roman colony of Iconium, where St. Paul enraged the Jews by his preaching. In each city, fragmentary inscriptions have revealed the same detailed orders for a trio of statues in which the god Ares was to occupy the central place. He was to be bound by the chains of Hermes, who stood on one side, while Justice “passed judgement” on him, standing on the other. This remarkable group was not a decorative work of art. It was intended to keep Ares in check by showing him as a bound suppliant. These cities were afraid of attacks from the bandits in the nearby hills, people whom Ares was thought to assist as their local war god. This remedy might have passed as a local aberration, had the orders not been shown to derive from the high authority of Apollo at his oracle of Claros. Symbolically, the statues were thought to work on the god’s mood, and the remedy was not a vulgar superstition: Claros spoke the accepted theology of the age. Once, according to Homer, the gods had bound Ares in a jar; in Sophocles’s Oedipus, the people of Thebes had prayed for Ares, the deadly war god, to be sped away to the north and slaughtered by Zeus’s thunderbolt.³⁵ Perhaps he actually went there, for a Byzantine epigram refers to a statue of Ares which was believed to keep the barbarian Goths out of Thrace so long as it remained resting on the ground: Thrace, said the ancients, was also called “Ares’s Land,” after its prominent god.³⁶

Ares, however, was not the only god on whom the province’s safety depended. In 421, the governor of Thrace heard reports of a buried treasure in his province and learned from the inhabitants that its site was holy ground. It turned out to contain three silver statues which had been consecrated in the old pagan fashion in order to fend off northern barbarians. He wrote to ask the advice of the Christian Emperor, Theodosius II, who was probably his father-in-law: the Emperor told him to dig them up, three solid-silver statues with long hair and ornate robes and their hands bound symbolically behind their backs. They had been buried facing north, towards the barbarians, perhaps in the strategic Succi pass. No sooner had they been removed than the barbarians invaded, three different tribes, one for each statue.³⁷ Might these images have been ordered initially by Apollo at Claros, whose clients included cities in Thrace? When the Empire became Christian, were they buried, facing north, by inhabitants who wished to save them? In Thrace, the “decline and fall” of the Empire is directly linked with the symbolic presence of its gods.

If a statue of a god could keep off barbarians, it could also ward off plague and famine. Apollo at Claros prescribed his own statues and images as a defence against epidemics, while other oracles, too, prescribed statues against drought. The identification of god and image was very strong at all levels of society, and on some of their statue bases, the gods are made to answer the old forms of prayer which had “summoned” them. “I am come,” they say, “standing always beside” the citizens, the Emperor or the men in the city’s gymnasium.³⁸ We can understand why ambassadors, when they left their cities, took images of their gods to assist them, shipping them from Alexandria to Rome, or from Miletus to Syria. Statues accompanied litigants to court, or to the Emperor’s presence: in 217/8, we can read from the Emperor himself how he had venerated the image of Apollo which the city’s ambassadors had brought from Miletus to his audience.³⁹ At Side, “festivals of the disembarkation” of Athena and Apollo commemorated the “arrival” of the gods by sea, in the persons, evidently, of their cult statues. It was not, then, quite so peculiar when the Emperor Heliogabalus dragged the statues of various goddesses to Rome in order to be vetted for a marriage with the image of his favoured Sun god: the historian Herodian remarks that the marriage of his Sun god with a Moon goddess was privately celebrated throughout all Italy, presumably with the appropriate images.⁴⁰ If gods could come and marry in the person of their statues, there were fears, too, that they might depart without warning. It is to these fears, surely, that we can best refer the chains with which certain statues were held to their positions.

Statues were not only the symbols of a god’s presence. From the first century A.D. onwards, we know of secret rites which were thought to “animate” them and draw a divine “presence” into their material.⁴¹ Egyptian practice lay at the origin of this, and far into the Christian Empire, papyri still prescribed the spells which could be written on a slip and posted into a statue in order to “inspire” it. Yet this practice, too, was not “vulgar”: the philosophic arts of theurgy exploited it, while suspicions of it had attached to men of letters and figures in high society far earlier. It connected with the common assumption that a god could work “good deeds of power” through his graven image, a belief which is best brought out for us in a famous decree datable to the third century A.D., when it stood in the council chamber of the city of Stratonicea.⁴² The statues of Zeus and Hecate, in this same council chamber, are said to “perform good deeds of divine power,” for which all the people sacrifice and burn incense and pray and give thanks. Since that is so, these gods who are “so extremely manifest” deserve still greater honours in future: choirs of neatly dressed children are to sing daily hymns in Stratonicea’s council chamber and at the nearby shrine of Lagina. The miracles worked by these statues were celebrated daily by choirs in honour of the gods.

Stratonicea’s honours were not an “Oriental” oddity, but a particularly vivid instance of a general belief, which happens here to survive for us.⁴³ This belief had such vigour that it also encouraged fraud, a neat example of which was detected during a patient modern restoration.⁴⁴ A pleasant marble head of a Greek philosopher was found to have been remodelled so that a circular hole opened in the centre of its mouth. Puzzled by this reshaping, its Danish students tried “connecting this funnel-shaped hole with a twelve-metre bronze tube which was led through an almost closed door… [When they spoke down the tube] the effect was powerful and strange… the head acted as a verse-oracle, with a voice which would sound to an emotional mind both weird and mysterious.” Originally, the head had been a portrait of Epicurus, the philosopher who would have ridiculed this superstition, and perhaps the remodelling was mischievous. If so, it is not the only example of pagans’ revenge on the “godless” doctrines of Epicurus, but it is the most arresting.

Through such artifices, the gods were made especially “manifest” to those who looked on their images. Some of the best stories of pagan artifice were taken up by Christian authors who tell of temples with sky-blue ceilings, lights reflected in water and fireworks which suggested the fiery departure of a god.⁴⁵ These “special effects” were particularly vivid in the worship of Mithras, conducted in the chambers of his small, dark, subterranean shrines. Because men expected their gods to be “present and manifest,” who could blame the priests if they helped the gods to live up to expectations? Again, the line between religion and magic vanishes. A practical textbook by Hero of Alexandria included advice on making statues of the gods which moved automatically, doors of temples which opened by unseen mechanisms and optical devices which suggested the approach of a god. These devices traded on general assumptions. In pagan mysteries, frescoes at Pompeii imply a role for mirrors in the rite of initiation: the converts first saw the god “through a glass darkly,” then turned to his mask “face to face.” When Callimachus hymned Apollo’s arrival, he stressed the god’s impact on trembling doorways and opening gates. At Teos, a choir was appointed to sing a hymn each morning at just this occasion, the opening of Dionysus’s temple doors. It is a neat conjecture that the doors in the gables of certain Greek temples were made to fly open at festivals in order to reveal the god’s “presence.”⁴⁶ At Corinth, the excavators of the temple of Dionysus found a pattern of underground channels and piping which they considered to be the priests’ device for turning a stream of water into an apparent flow of wine. At Jerash and elsewhere, there were temples with similar “miracles.”⁴⁷

These devices relied on the acceptance of a god’s presence in or near the place of his image. The most articulate sources for this presence are Christians of the second and third centuries: “If you believe in your gods’ miracles through man-made statues,” asked Theophilus, “why do you not believe in God’s resurrection of the body?” Christians knew their way round these local miracles remarkably well: when Athenagoras remarked on the statues of Neryllinus, it was only one particular statue, he specified, out of many which had powers of prophecy and healing. Through these precise allusions, Christians show us what their pagan neighbours accepted. Through their statues, the gods did not undertake to punish the wicked systematically, a task which would have rapidly worn them out. Instead, they used some of their images for occasional “good deeds” whose very irregularity proved them to be divine.⁴⁸ So convincing were the deeds that Christians did not reject them. They merely referred them to another source.

This referral is very significant. Pan still piped, the gods still showed their anger and stood invisibly beside favoured men: to contemporaries, the evidence of the statues seemed indisputable. To account for it, the Christians cited the demons.⁴⁹ To their heirs, early Christians have at times seemed obsessed with these figures, who have earned them a black mark as “claustrophobic” or “guilt-ridden” individuals. There are many explanations, but part of the demons’ prominence derived from this simpler cause. Like pagans, Christians still sensed and saw the gods and their power, and as something, they had to assume, lay behind it, by an easy, traditional shift of opinion, they turned these pagan daimones into malevolent “demons,” the troupe of Satan. They were most demonic when they were most plausible, lurking under the statues and working wonders and visions as if from the gods who were represented. It was irrelevant that nobody ever saw them. Their power was manifest, but among Christians, too, only the pure and the virtuous could see their physical bodies. Far into the Byzantine period, Christians eyed their cities’ old pagan statuary as a seat of the demons’ presence. It was no longer beautiful: it was infested.⁵⁰

Now that the gods watched and worked through their statues, did they still need to prowl among mortals in disguise? The Homeric suitors’ words on “spies in disguise” did enjoy a long literary life, in Maximus’s speeches and Julian’s writings, biographies by Eunapius and the late Platonism of Proclus.⁵¹ The “spies” were “like strangers,” yet did people really believe what these men of letters continued to quote? There is no straightforward inscription or dedication to support them, and for evidence, we have to look to a difficult area, the romances of ancient fiction, and then assess their tone.

We can begin with a third-century theory which claimed to detect the gods in disguise among men. It stands in the fictional Ethiopic Tales of Heliodorus, a work for which two dates have been proposed, one around the 220s, the other in the aftermath of Julian’s reign, around the 370s. The case is far from settled, but of the two, the earlier is preferable, suggesting that the book may be connected with the literary sophist Heliodorus the “Arab,” who pleaded in the presence of the Emperor Caracalla and lived to an old age in Rome.⁵² His novel was artful and cannot be taken as a direct statement, but its many dreams and visions are of unusual interest. At Delphi, an Egyptian sage called Calasiris saw the gods Apollo and Artemis by night, “not in a dream but in waking reality.” Later, he explained to his questioners how he had recognized the gods so clearly and why these divine appearances were not unusual. The gods and the lesser divinities, he explained, often appeared in mortal form, though less often in the disguise of animals. Once again, Homer was proof of this. In the Iliad, one Ajax had told the other how the “shins” and paces of the gods left “traces” and how the gods were “readily recognized” by men. Calasiris expounded the meaning of this famous text. Men, he said, must be wise to perceive a god, for the gods remain hidden from those who are not “in the know.” To the expert, the eyes betray a divine intruder, because they stay open and never blink. When a god moves, his feet glide forwards side by side, just as they appear in the upright stance of his statue. Calasiris confirmed this opinion by revealing a double meaning in Homer’s words, which was only visible to the eyes of a wise reader.

Heliodorus gave these views to an Egyptian in a novel and did not endorse what he presented so obliquely. But it brings together themes of unusual interest. Once again, the gods are only to be seen by the wise or the virtuous, and again, Homer and Egypt combine with the types of statues and the hidden senses of poetry to produce a theory on the gods’ “traces.” These are revealed not only in dreams but in “waking reality.” Before long, the philosopher Iamblichus also ascribed his views on the presence of the gods to the wisdom of an Egyptian priest: by their dress and way of life, the priests of Egypt were believed to be especially favoured with visions of their gods. In this novel, these later discussions are anticipated, and although the speaker is artfully characterized, his view does not read altogether like a joke.

In our other ancient novels, the gods’ disguises serve a different, Callimachean purpose. They emphasize the charming, naive world which we, the readers, are lulled into sharing, while seeing through its fiction. So marvellous are the novels’ young heroes and so simple their spectators that cases of mistaken divinities abound.⁵³ Of the gods’ qualities, beauty is the most human, and the beauty of the novels’ heroines led to all sorts of wrong identifications and Homeric errors. In The Golden Ass (c. 170 A.D.), Psyche is widely honoured as a “new Aphrodite,” to the detriment of the cults of the old one. In the Ephesian Tales, the young Anthea is mistaken for Artemis or her creature, and when she and her lover reach Rhodes, their beauty persuades the Rhodians to pray to them and offer public sacrifice: they hoped, like Telemachus, to placate the visitors as “kindly” gods. The theme, naturally, dogged the fictional progress of the pagan wise man, Apollonius. Nowhere, however, is it better described than in a romance by Chariton, which was probably written in the middle to late first century A.D.⁵⁴

Chariton’s home was Aphrodisias, a particular seat of the goddess Aphrodite. In his novel, the fair Callirhoë was sold into slavery and transported to Miletus, where the onlookers are said to have mistaken her for Aphrodite herself. The goddess, wrote Chariton, was particularly “manifest” to the neighbours around her country shrine and also to visitors who came out from the city. Once again, these excursions to country gods linked pagan towns and their hinterland. Callirhoë looked like Aphrodite “made manifest,” and when a rich prospective buyer came out to see her, he at once called her a goddess and quoted lines from Homer to express his faith. After this welcome, all the people of Miletus are said to have rushed out and adored her as Aphrodite. When she entered the city for her wedding, rumour had raced through the city. “Aphrodite is marrying,” they all called out. The sailors bowed before her in terror, and the city had been garlanded since dawn. Everyone prepared to sacrifice before his own house while stories circulated about the bride’s identity. The “commoner sorts of people,” wrote Chariton, “were convinced by her beauty and her unknown origin and believed that she was a Nereid come from the sea, while the sailors spread the story that the goddess herself was present, come from the estates of Callirhoë’s husband-to-be.” When Callirhoë had finished making herself up, their last doubts vanished. “Aphrodite is marrying,” they all shouted at the first sight of her, and scattered their purple robes and garments, their roses and violets before her path. The city was emptied, even of its children. “The crowd was packed tight, as high as the roof tiles…” The story then took a sinister turn: “On that day, jealous divinity was once more moved to anger.”

Some of the details in this memorable scene can be matched with the real world. We have seen how the honouring of a fair or favourite woman as a goddess was a politeness which goes back to the Odyssey. From the cult of living rulers, we can match the crowd’s acclamations and the private altars which were prepared outside the houses along Callirhoë’s path. Above all, the girl’s appearance was greeted with fitting words from Homer. When her buyer first saw her, he repeated the words of Penelope’s suitors on the gods in disguise as “invisible spies.”

This scene in a pagan romance is the perfect match for the conduct of Acts’ men of Lystra and was narrated, most probably, at a similar date. The sailors and “more vulgar types,” wrote Chariton, were especially prone to mistake a human for a nymph or a goddess. Acts, too, ascribed this response to men who spoke Lycaonian or mumbled like “barbarians” on Melite. Just as Callirhoë’s rich buyer bowed down and hailed her as a goddess, so the well-meaning centurion, Cornelius, greeted Peter by bowing as if to a divinity. In the novel, this mistake stressed Callirhoë’s beauty; in Acts, it brought out Peter’s modesty and tact. Like Callimachus, these two authors were distanced from the simple mistakes which they chose to describe: were they themselves mistaken, repeating a stereotype of the simple peasant whom they did not understand? It seems unlikely. Acts’ author was present himself on Melite and knew Paul and Barnabas, the victims of the Lystrans’ mistake. Both stories may derive from Christian witnesses who were embellishing a central truth. Chariton does not seem to think that a god could never keep company with men: he merely wants us to smile at the Homeric error of his crowd in this one particular case. In Acts, the men of Lystra were misled by a miracle, performed in their presence. Their reaction, surely, is not untrue to life, no more than the reaction of the men on Melite. The dubious point in the story is not the crowd’s reaction, but Paul’s miracle of healing, a doubt which historians have not been able to settle.

With the help of Homer and the pagan novels, we have vindicated Acts’ illuminating scene. To all but a few of the highly educated, the gods were indeed a potential presence whom a miracle might reveal.⁵⁵ They might leave their traces or they might be those handsome strangers who had appeared at noon on the hillside. They were present, watching and visiting, and if few of Homer’s heroes had seen them without a revelation, who were second-century mortals to expect a clearer sign? They could only guess, but it was in the nature of these “gods” that the guesses, when exposed to proof, were invariably wrong. The postscript to Acts and to Chariton’s pastoral novel has now been found on stone. From northeastern Lydia, we have the votive monument and text of a man who made his dedication “on behalf of the traces of the gods” in the year 184/5.⁵⁶ The brothers Ajax had once discussed these “traces” in Homer’s Iliad: they are honoured in a few, but only a few, of the model stone footprints which worshippers left in shrines of the gods. This latest honour came from a person, Artemon, whose profession can only be restored as topiarios, or landscape gardener. Artemon had not quite seen the gods, but he had seen something almost as wonderful, their trail of footprints, traced into the very landscape which he loved and served. The novels and the men of Lystra were not so far removed from contemporary country life.

This level of epiphany added something, finally, to the cults of living men. By an inherited “culture pattern,” people looked for beauty and power, the sudden flash, the transformation in circumstance which hinted that a god was present. Consequently, flatterers and beneficiaries detected these qualities in the gifts and the “arrivals” of “divine” Emperors. When Diocletian and his fellow Emperor crossed the Alps in 291 A.D., a court orator played on the old potential themes. “For the first time, your holiness radiated from the eastern and western peaks of the Alps… all Italy was bathed in a glowing light… Watchers were moved with wonder and also with doubt, asking themselves what gods were rising on their peaks or descending by such steps from heaven… When you were seen more closely… altars were lit, incense was burned. People did not invoke gods whom they knew from hearsay, but Jupiter close at hand, visible and present: they adored Hercules, not a stranger, but the Emperor himself.”⁵⁷ It was glorious rhetoric, but it also attached the Emperors to the living belief that gods, in a show of power, might visit men. Its orator did not believe a word of it, but can we be so sure that all the spectators had been equally down-to-earth? That God could visit man was the least novel feature of Christian teaching in a pagan’s eyes.

III

For the purpose of Alexandra’s question, the idea of gods “in disguise” was surely not relevant. How could Alexandra and her sources be so sure that these strangers were really gods? Even in Homer, the heroes had needed signs and miracles before they could see through the gods’ concealments. Gods “in the form of young children” would be most peculiar: the other translation is surely right, gods “appearing not only to the girls and women but to the men and boys, too.” The emphasis in these words was very relevant. Like Quartilla, Alexandra was a priestess of rites which were for women only, yet here were the gods appearing to the opposite sex, men who did not take part in her particular cult. No wonder it seemed an omen, as if women had taken to sitting in the men’s gymnasiums.

How, though, had the gods appeared? Were they seen directly, as in happy Phaeacia, or were they seen at one remove, through the contact of dreams? This choice leads us to the two other levels of epiphany, open face-to-face meetings and visions by day and night. Then we can choose between them for Miletus’s precise experience.

We have seen the traditional settings for an open encounter: a crisis or a time of strain. In the Antonine and Severan age, battles and sieges were remote from most cities’ experience, but personal crises were more constant, the strains of sickness or bereavement. We have a fine account on papyrus, c. 100 A.D., of a vision seen by a sick young author, “not in a dream, or in sleep, of a very large figure with a book in his left hand, dressed in white”: he was a god, and he reproached the beholder for his long delay in publishing a promised account of his great deeds.² Near Nakrason, in northeastern Lydia, one Epicrates (c. 100 A.D.) recorded on two impressive stones his bequests and their financing of an elaborate funerary cult. They honoured Epicrates’s son, “not just at the wish of an affectionate father, but because the hero visits me very vividly in dreams, signs and other appearances.”³ In his bereavement, Epicrates did not only dream at night of the son he had lost. He believed that he still saw him “clearly,” and so far from being reticent about this, he inscribed it publicly “in seemly lettering,” believing that his readers would not consider it odd. Throughout antiquity, pagans believed that the spirit of a dead man might be visible beyond the grave: posthumous “appearances” were no novelty.

However, stresses and strains of this type cannot explain the events in Miletus. These stresses affected individuals, whereas Miletus was alive with glimpses of the gods, granted to all sorts of people “as never before.” Had magic and spells come into this collective process? In the Imperial period, magical texts did aim to “introduce” their followers to a divinity or to the attendant spirits whom their spells alleged that they could conjure up. Their chants and recipes did claim to draw Apollo and the Sun god into a worshipper’s presence: through piety and philosophy, the “eye of the soul” could eventually hope to contemplate a divine power.⁴ In the papyri of the later magical texts, we find detailed instructions for “autopsy” and direct sightings of the gods, but the one literary account of such a personal vision insists that it was very exceptional, the medical student Thessalus’s vision of Asclepius, which he obtained with the help of the elderly priest in Egypt.⁵ Only Thessalus’s tears and threats of suicide obliged the man to assist him by conjuring up Asclepius “alone in his sole presence,” after Thessalus had remained pure for three days: the tone of his narrative proves that this escapade was not granted to lesser men. In later papyri, we can still see the drawings which were thought to summon a god, a small squat figure with a sword gripped in his hand.⁶ The dark materials of these spells kept company with special effects, lights, flames and arts of autosuggestion: Thessalus seems to have gazed into the surface of a bowl of water.⁷

It is hard, however, to know how widely these arts and aspirations were practised. After an exorcism by Paul, said Acts, people in Ephesus burnt their magical books of spells on a bonfire, to the value of “50,000 pieces of silver.”⁸ Perhaps some of these spells did conjure up gods and make them visible in people’s lives, like the djinns who still haunt urban life in Cairo, but it seems unlikely. To find such a spell, Thessalus had to seek the only able priest in Egypt, and it is from Egypt and the Near East that most of the later evidence derives. The tone of Alexandra’s question implies that Miletus’s “visits” were spontaneous and quite exceptional. There is no connection, surely, with the world of sorcery and spells, arts which remained erudite, preserved in texts and libraries.

Miletus’s own situation may be relevant, as a city centre for travellers and visiting sailors who came in from the nearby coastline. In the Imperial period, sea journeys were still a spotter’s delight.⁹ In a final twist to one of his speeches, Maximus of Tyre told his audience how he, too, had witnessed Castor and Pollux and Heracles, “not in a dream, but in waking reality.” The words were emphatically placed, to close his speech with vigour. Sailors had lost none of their piety, and in places, their expectations were high. Every visitor to the Black Sea knew the special island of Achilles, and in his report on the area, a visiting governor, Arrian, informed the Emperor Hadrian how “some said” Achilles appeared to them in broad daylight on the prow or mast of their ships, “as did Castor and Pollux.” Maximus, indeed, knew a man after Homer’s own heart. Near the same island, visitors had “often” seen a young, fair-haired hero dancing in armour and had heard him singing a paean. Recently, one sailor had dozed off on the island itself, and Achilles had led him to his tent. Patroclus was there, he reported, pouring out the wine, while Achilles played the lyre. “He said that Thetis was also present, as was a group of other, minor gods.” Had this been the mood in Miletus, too, in the harbour, perhaps, or the turmoil of some equinoctial gale?

On these occasions, open encounters were not entirely dead, but they did tend to centre on certain sacrosanct places. After Homer, no place was more liable to them than Troy itself: Maximus also told his listeners that Hector was “especially manifest in the Trojan area.” For a sense of what this meant, we can look to a more remarkable work, Philostratus’s dialogue On Heroes. It is more often dismissed than discussed, but it suggests, like nothing else, what educated readers were prepared to enjoy without altogether disbelieving, while the Christian “contagion” was the faintest of stains in the pagan cities. Its author’s identity has caused problems, but he fits admirably as the Philostratus who lived from the 160s to the mid-240s and belonged among the literary sophists of his age.¹⁰ He enjoyed the company of the Emperor Caracalla’s wife and probably attended the court on its journey east in Alexander’s footsteps between the years 213 and 217. On Heroes drops one reference to an athletic victor, Helix (the “Creeper”), which dates it after 213 and almost certainly after 217, perhaps many years after. Philostratus knew the highest people in high society: once, he conversed with Gordian’s father on the topic of the Greek sophists. His book is extremely valuable as an insight into educated tastes.

Philostratus, friend of the Gordians, applied a notable gift to the style and context of his fictional dialogue. One day, he wrote, a Phoenician had come to Elaious on the Chersonese, across the sea from Troy. There, he met a resident farmer who tended orchards and vineyards of exceptional beauty. As the autumn weather was fine and the day stretched far before them, they sat in the shade of the trees and discussed the ways of Homer’s heroes and the personal details which their poet had omitted. The setting was imagined with singular art. The author knew literary men from the old Phoenician cities and stressed his Phoenician’s Ionic Greek dress and manner, which were cultural fashions in his age. The Phoenician, he said, had come with that frequent problem of polite society in the second and third centuries, a dream whose meaning he could not understand. He had dreamed of some lines of Homer, a type of dream which was not uncommon among the literary sophists, who knew the poems by heart. With Homer on the brain, the Phoenician had gone to Elaious in search of a “sign or saying” to interpret a dream which bore, he believed, on the prospects for weather at sea. If the Phoenician was artfully typecast, the vinedresser, too, was no ordinary rustic. He had been born a man of property, but had lost much of his estates to his guardians after his parents’ death. Just enough remained for him to live in the city and study with “teachers and philosophers,” but the slaves who farmed the land for him were corrupt. He had received such a poor return that he had decided to go back home and take the ground in hand himself. Like the Phoenician, the vinedresser appealed to the literary tastes of the age—a cultured student in the role of a simple peasant, a man who could use his Homer and Plato to bring out the beauty of his idyllic retreat while working peacefully in the fields.

The vinedresser had not been gardening alone. He was privileged, he said, to have the best advice, which was passed on by the hero Protesilaus, with whom, at Troy, he kept constant company. Homer’s old landscape was not a quiet orchard, but a noisy haunt of the ancient heroes, “present visitors” who called and strode across the plains, “standing forward” as companions and counsellors for those who pleased them. None was more favoured than the vinedresser, who enjoyed a special relationship with the hero Protesilaus, with whom, near his shrine, he kept constant company. He had been cross when the vinedresser had first returned from the city to his fruit farm, but he had softened when his new pupil took his advice and adopted the proper rustic dress. Since then, they had hit it off very well. Protesilaus gave tips on growing fruit and explained the little bits of Homer which the vinedresser had misunderstood and wrongly applied to his art. The picture was irresistible: the vinedresser turned to Homer’s poems for advice on growing vines, and when he mistook their meaning, the hero saved Homer’s credit by explaining what they really said. It book a Homeric hero to teach a former man of letters the arts of better gardening.¹¹ Others were less fortunate. Protesilaus retained a strong moral sense and had once set the dog on a pair of scheming adulterers who had come to visit him under false pretences.¹² Straightforward young lovers, however, touched his heart, because in them he saw a mirror of his former life. Even so, he preferred the vinedresser’s company and his garden of fruit. He “keeps me straight” with the farming, said the vinedresser, and whenever the animals fell sick, he acted as a wise vet. While the bunches of grapes hung as heavily as swarms of bees above them, the hero told his friend the Trojan stories which Homer had omitted or mistaken.

Philostratus had aimed his story at educated readers who loved their Homer and liked to entertain suspicions that there was more in nature and the universe than Aristotle had contrived to classify. He wrote with a style which showed the better side of his age’s Greek prose, artful, but never diffuse in the manner of its set speeches. His inspirations were obvious to men of letters: Homer and perhaps the miracles which Protesilaus performed while the Persians retreated in Herodotus’s last book. But it is particularly significant that he added his own local knowledge, stories which were told on his own Lemnos and traditions which were current in nearby Aegean islands.¹³ He also gave space to visible proofs of the heroes, especially the giant skeletons which had recently come to light on nearby beaches and headlands. Many passersby had noticed them, bones fit for fifteen-foot heroes, as tall as Protesilaus himself. To prove it, Philostratus took his readers on a grand tour of the old bones of the third-century Empire.

This evidence was not his invention. Similar skeletons had raised problems which only the oracles could solve: at Claros, Apollo had had to tell puzzled questioners the nature of huge bones which they had found in a riverbed. The reasons lay in geological history. Relics from the age of the dinosaurs were still plentiful in the third century, and were exposed by the winds, the seas and the farmers. Even the Emperors collected them. Carcasses of long-dead monsters had been mistaken for the bones of heroes at least since the mid-sixth century B.C.; Philostratus was heir to those Spartans who had first unearthed the Pleistocene bones of “Orestes.” Protesilaus, he said, had been asked about an eighteen-foot skeleton, while another, thirty-five feet long, had lain on the headland at Sigeum and provoked passing sailors to tell many stories about its identity.

The Christians’ Resurrection left no bones, no evidence, not even, at this date, a so-called shroud. Yet who could doubt the heroes’ existence when these Pleistocene corpses proved their enormous physique? When the Phoenician asked if the heroes were really visible in the plain around Troy, the vinedresser had no doubts. “They are seen, indeed, they are seen even now, large and godlike, by the herdsmen and shepherds on the plain.” They came striding and clattering over the fields, an omen for those in the neighbourhood. If they were dusty and worn, they foretold drought, and if blood was seen on their armour, it warned of sickness. Visitors had to tread warily and watch their tongues. Only recently a boy from the Near East had insulted Hector’s actions in the Iliad, and had promptly been killed in the river, on Hector’s instigation, as soon as he walked below Troy.

If they were seen at Troy, might they not have been stalking Miletus, too? However, the great German scholar Wilamowitz believed that Philostratus was merely sporting with his readers and agreeing with nothing that he wrote.¹⁴ We have had to allow for authors’ ironic detachment from the scenes they evoke, but although On Heroes has an obvious pastoral atmosphere, it does not read at all like a jeu d’esprit. It enchants its readers with a picture which they could still entertain, and from his other works, Philostratus is known to have excluded no plausible fancies; who was he to be sceptical when he had known a woman on Lemnos who insisted that she had slept with a satyr? Philostratus used a mass of local details and stories which bore on others’ good faith, while the tone of his dialogue is not ironic. The Phoenician trader comes to visit, doubting the heroes’ existence, and he leaves with a new faith, converted by a living protégé of Protesilaus. He no longer scoffs; he learns one of life’s lessons. Among his business and petty commerce, he is to trust what Homer tells him. He is still full of questions when evening descends on the dialogue, and such is the art which evokes the setting and engages our sympathy that we cannot be meant to laugh at him, as if he had been duped into faith by romance.

Reluctant to accept this implication, others have passed off On Heroes as a book for a special occasion. It belonged, they have claimed, with the Emperor Caracalla’s journey to Troy in 214, which retraced the tracks of Alexander the Great and his hero Achilles. Philostratus had indeed visited Troy,¹⁵ but although he had excellent contacts at court and may have followed the Emperor eastwards, there is no force in this suggestion. On Heroes was written at a date which is almost certainly after 217, and it shows no interest in the Emperor or his journey, already at least three years in the past.¹⁶ Later, Philostratus returned to these Trojan subjects in his “Life” of Apollonius, where the heroes also appeared. Surely, he wrote On Heroes because the idea appealed to him. The book was not a roman à clef alluding to contemporaries, or a text tinged with magic and mysticism. These theories mistake the cosy Homeric piety of a well-connected man of letters in the late Severan age. As night fell on the dialogue, the Phoenician was looking forward to a talk with Protesilaus on the topography and punishments of the old, classic underworld. His interests were quite straightforward, the problems of myth which Protesilaus, the reborn hero, could solve. There were no questions on mysteries, no interest in salvation. “Whoever does not think you, vinedresser, to be an exceptional friend of the gods, he himself is detested by them.”¹⁷ “Friendship” was still a “friendship” as Homer had understood it, no more, no less. We must allow for men who agreed with Philostratus at the head of the Greek cities, men who were keener to find their Homer proved true than to drift into monotheism or let a revealed religion invade their private lives. Philostratus’s readers and friends included the family of the future Emperor Gordian. On Heroes belongs with his games for the old Athena, belief in the old traditions and no sympathy with Christian “atheism.”

Was this Homeric potential realized in Miletus, not between one man and his hero but between people of all ages and the host of “visiting” gods? Indeed, this type of Homeric piety was not dead. It still had its literary uses, suggesting a charming picture which might be true: in the 380s, Eunapius gave a beguiling account of the two divine strangers who had visited the future philosopher Sosipatra and caused her father to quote the familiar lines of Homer on “spies.”¹⁸ More immediately, we meet this piety in writings of the Emperor Julian, for whom the gods were still manifest protectors, “standing beside” him to help him through life.¹⁹ In a magnificent myth, Julian hinted at his youthful encounter with the gods and his personal “ascent” to heaven, where they had commissioned his task among men. Julian told this myth because it stood for a serious truth, his own sense of divine company and guidance, based on a personal Homeric encounter. It is this “company” which is stressed repeatedly in the speeches to or about him which were made by the orator Libanius.²⁰ The gods, he says, assisted Julian in his marches to war; Zeus was his protector, Athena his “fellow worker”; they were “spies” to such good effect that they forewarned him of plots and conspiracies against his life, a heavenly system of counterintelligence. Some of these themes might only be flattery, but Libanius insisted on a more personal note. “You alone have seen the shapes of the gods, a blessed observer of the blessed ones… you alone have heard the voice of the gods and addressed them in the words of Sophocles, O voice of Athena’ or O voice of Zeus’…” On the heights of the great mountain behind Antioch, Julian had indeed seen Zeus himself, while sacrificing in his honour. The gods were his “friends and protectors,” Libanius insisted, “just as” Athena had once stood by Homer’s Achilles. Julian, the last pagan Emperor, has been studied for his interests in “Eastern” gods and magic, but these interests kept company with an older consciousness, the potentially visible presence of the traditional gods. To miss this presence is to diminish the man whom the Christians feared like no other for his resolute sense of mission.

Julian, however, was a king who offered frequent sacrifices and knew the Homeric poems in detail, a source of enhancement for his own life and writings. He, perhaps, might see the “forms of the gods,” but he was exceptionally blessed, their “special friend,” like the vinedresser at Troy. In Miletus, the old and the young were not so favoured or exalted: if the old potential had been realized and if the gods had been roaming in broad daylight, the Milesians would have had to be very brave or very pious to behold them so clearly. “Not to everyone do the gods appear…” “The gods are hard to cope with, when manifest…” It was one thing to read of the old Homeric intimacy, another to experience it “as never before.” Contact with the gods was likelier at a distance, in the safe privacy of sleep. To find the “visitations” in which gods “stood beside” the Milesians, it is right, surely, to look here, to epiphany’s most open level.

Its potential was never better expressed than by Synesius, while a philosopher. “None of the laws of Necessity stops me being more successful than Icarus while I am asleep, from passing from earth to soar higher than an eagle, to reach the highest spheres… and thence, from afar, to look down on the earth, to discourse with the stars, to keep company with gods, an impossibility in our world. For what is said to be ‘hard’”—here, again, he alludes to the words of Hera in the Iliad—“is then easy. The gods appear clearly’” (the Homeric words of Hera again). “They are not in the least jealous. A dreamer does not return to earth; he is there already.”²¹

In their dreams, pagans of all classes and backgrounds kept the closest company with gods.¹ From this type of experience, philosophers had derived man’s entire conception of divinity: they had been led astray, said the Epicureans, by their dreams of exceptionally large and beautiful figures whom they mistook for the gods’ images.² The ancients were not uncritical in their attitude to what they saw: no people ever has been. At many levels of subtlety, they distinguished dreams which arose from the worries of the previous day or from hunger or an unusually heavy meal.³ These “visions,” they knew, had no significance. The others intrigued them, to the point where their theorists multiplied schemes of the different types and frustrated our modern attempts to derive them all from a lost or half-known original.⁴ The source of dream images and their methods of contact with the dreamer’s soul aroused a lively debate: it is not quite true to claim that “antiquity was interested more in the outcome and less in the cause.”⁵ Dreams of the gods raised particular interest: were they sent by the gods themselves, or did the soul reach upwards while the senses were sleeping and somehow make contact with higher reality? Opinions divided, and only the Aristotelians wrote sceptically about the very existence of any “divine” dreams at all. Few paid any attention, and by the Imperial period, their views had been merged with the more positive statements of Stoics and Platonists. Plato had written some promising things on the contact of the soul and the lesser daimones, while the Stoics, more prosaically, sorted dreams into groups and left a special place for dreams of the gods. Many dreams, they accepted, were “heaven-sent,” and in one class, the gods themselves spoke directly with the dreamer: it is this belief that we find so clearly in the Meditations of the Emperor Marcus. There were also visions seen “not in a dream but in waking reality,” whose subjects might often be gods.

This Greek phrase was very old, and Homer had already known it, but it was not so simple as we might think. In the Odyssey, it occurs twice, but it does not contrast a dream with a vision which is experienced in waking hours.⁶ It applies to features within a dream itself, features which are either so realistic that they seem to occur or else of significance, a “happy reality” which will come to pass. The novels, too, copy Homer’s usage, although the phrase had a second meaning, as commentators pointed out in antiquity. It could also mean a “vision seen after daybreak,” and Iamblichus was usefully precise about this meaning. As sleep left a man, he wrote, and his mind became alert, he was prone to a heaven-sent condition which was quite different from a muddled and deceptive dream. The eyes remained shut, but the mind was free from earthly encumbrance, and as wakefulness returned, “the voices,” wrote Iamblichus, could speak directly to the soul. These “waking visions” were common in the last moments of sleep when the soul was not distracted by food or worry. Not everybody accepted their validity, not even in the fourth century A.D., but they persisted, visions which we would class as “hypnagogic fantasies” and which often brought gods or their voices to men:⁷ in modern encounters, too, the edges of sleep are particularly favourable moments.

So firm was belief in this nighttime “company” that men did their best to encourage it.⁸ Sorcerers offered spells for conjuring up prophetic dreams and considered the arts of “dream-seeking” and “dream-sending” to be a central part of their business. Men wore amulets of a god and travelled with them as if they were pocket divinities, fingering them or gazing on them before sleeping: Calasiris, in the Ethiopic Tales, poured libations and prayed at evening for propitious dreams. Fasting was a helpful preliminary, as was avoidance of the heavier foods: the Greeks’ diet, it was said, particularly favoured visions, because their food was light and dry. That view, admittedly, was expressed in the days before moussaka. Above all, dreams were courted deliberately in temples with special “incubatory” chambers, from the Britons’ Lydney in Kent to the great centres at Pergamum and Aigai in Asia.⁹ Serapis, Isis and Jupiter Dolichenus all encouraged dreams in their devotees, but no god was more prodigal than Asclepius, whose cult reached a new magnificence during the second century. Once again, this cult was not symptomatic of some new hypochondria or anxiety, let alone of the tensions of “colonialization,” as Greek culture spread into yet more areas of the East.¹⁰ Polite society had long been intrigued by medicine and places of healing and the Antonines’ literary interest in both was not novel. Rather, Asclepius flourished because, like Lourdes, the sites of his cult were being given a new splendour by benefactions in the Roman age of peace. The shrines improved and, in turn, they drew famous clients. There was no opposition from doctors to the practices of “incubating” and seeking cures in dreams from the god.¹¹ Since the later first century B.C., the surviving records of dreams of Asclepius say less about sudden miraculous cures and rather more about precise medical practices which the god prescribed. Doctors talked to Asclepius’s clients and visited his temples. They dedicated shrines to the god or paid for improvements in his facilities, seeing no inevitable clash between his “faith”-healing and their own. Asclepius, therefore, picked up his visitors’ science. In his temples, people shared surroundings which made dreams of the gods particularly frequent. Through Plutarch, we know of the compound of sixteen spices which Egyptian priests used to burn in the evening in order to encourage sweet dreams in their visitors. Like the “incense of Epidaurus,” this compound was a scent, not a drug.¹² When the ancient recipes of the compound were made up and tested, they had no effect, apart from giving wine the sharp tang of retsina. Priests were alive to the distorting effects of stimulants, a point which Philostratus brought out well, in the debate which he gave to his fictional hero Apollonius at the court of an Indian king. Wine, the sage explained, was avoided by those who wished to have prophetic dreams, and this was why dreams in the early morning were so much more revealing: by then, he said rather optimistically, the influence of drink had worn off.¹³ At Amphiaraus’s charming temple in Attica, the priests, he remarked, forbade the drinking of wine for three whole days before the client slept in the shrine and hoped for a dream of the god. The priests also forbade food for a day beforehand and required the worshippers to sleep on the skins of a sheep which had been sacrificed to the god.¹⁴

There is no undue mystery about the frequency of divine dreams in such shrines. They attracted clients from all the free social classes, many of whom had come from a distance to join a society of sleepers who were all hoping and striving for as clear a dream as possible. For several days, they had not eaten. They took no wine, and their stimulants were what they heard and saw. Shrines’ like Pergamum were frequented by priests and theologoi, men who wrote hymns to the gods and talked piously to visitors among the short stories of miracle cures which they displayed publicly. At Asclepius’s shrine below Pergamum’s hill, the temple had its own library and a small, elegant theatre for plays and recitations, staged, no doubt, on stories of the powers of the god.¹⁵ Long underground tunnels joined the various shrines, sleeping chambers, perhaps, though their exact purpose is uncertain. Aristophanes was not being mischievous when he described how the long, tame snakes of Asclepius’s shrines glided between the sleepers at night in their dark rooms: on Attic reliefs of the fourth century B.C. we see snakes licking the sleeping patient, and cures on display referred to this “licking” of the snakes. At Pergamum, as night fell, the worshippers had the choice of the Lesser incubation chamber or the Greater, for which the offering to the god was more expensive. Like certain nineteenth-century spas, some chambers, perhaps, were more polite than others. At Oropus, we know, the sexes were supposed to be segregated.¹⁶

In these chambers the entire company were urging each other to dream as divinely as possible. Even so, dreams came in fits and starts and missed some individuals altogether. These lean spells befell everybody, however responsive, and visitors who were becalmed in a bad patch had to ask a priest to dream on their behalf. Usually, however, the atmosphere was its own best narcotic. It was intoxicated, above all, by the presence of religious works of art.

Since the age of the epic heroes, statues and paintings had become a fundamental influence on the way the divine world was “envisioned.” It is particularly significant that the dreams and visions in Homer show none of art’s effects, for Homer had composed the epics before portrait statues had been widely available: we have seen how, by night and day, his gods appeared always in disguises, taking the form of other men and women. How else could they appear clearly, with separate identities? As Greek sculpture developed, it fixed mortals’ ideas of their gods as individuals: the distinct “personality” of the Greek gods has been questioned, but art was an enduring mould which helped to form it.¹⁷ By the Christian era, many of the gods’ best-known statues were old and classic images cast like enormous Buddhas in bronze or gold, with ivory eyes and silvered teeth. At last we can appreciate their impact, as we are the first generation since antiquity to see masterly bronze statues of divine Greek heroes. In 1972, the Italian seabed, off Riace in Calabria, restored to us two bronze heroes, nearly two metres high and larger and stronger than life: to look on them is to give shape to the idea of superhuman power.¹⁸ Both are the masterpieces of a classical Greek artist of the fifth century B.C., but the greater of the two has a gaze of confidence before eternity which distinguishes it from masterpieces of the Christian Renaissance. It survives with eyes and eyelashes, lips and teeth, and restores to us the facial expressions which so haunted the ancients’ imagination. Is the statue’s gaze welcoming or awesome in its boldness? The answer lies in the eye of each beholder.

In ancient temples and cities, statues of this type, if not quality, were abundant, even after the Romans had looted many of them, taking them, as Dio once told the Rhodians, to a “better” home where they would be seen and cared for in a capital city.¹⁹ Statues of the gods would sometimes be much larger than our two bronze heroes, reaching fifteen feet or more in an effort to express the gods’ superhuman size. Perhaps only those who have felt the awe of the great gold Buddhas, recumbent like stranded whales in an Asian temple, can begin to grasp what this colossal statuary meant to the eye and emotions. As cult statues in temples, these works were decked with the gods’ attributes and symbols, a further source of awe. Their authority provoked an interesting debate.²⁰ Were they products of the artist’s own imagination or of his attempt to render the image of the gods which was already enshrined in poetry? Were they revealed to the artist first, by the god himself in a dream?

The “presence” of these statues varied from region to region. In the temples of Syria and the Near East, cult statues of the gods were enclosed or curtained from worshippers’ eyes.²¹ Only on particular days did they come out on procession, borne in a litter or wheeled in a chariot. The sight of these secluded figures induced particular emotion in worshippers who would not see them otherwise, without special leave from a priest. In the Greek world, too, cult statues were sometimes curtained off or kept in locked temples. In their mystery cults, too, the Greeks seem to have exploited the power of a hidden image that was rarely and briefly revealed: in the fourth century A.D., the orator Themistius hints that in some mystery rites, robed statues were stripped bare to the sight of initiates. In other shrines, however, they were accessible to any visitor, while outside the shrines, the images were familiar in public places, even in public baths. In each region, the image of a god left a powerful, potential imprint on the mind: in the Near East, they were a seldom-seen mystery; in parts of the Greek world, familiar, constant companions.

In this varying company of statues great and small, dreams of the gods begin to seem less surprising. Their frequency has been ascribed to men’s vague ideas of what counted as a god’s appearance: when every figure dressed in white was construed as a god, “on comprend de cette façon que les épiphanies divines aient été nombreuses.”²² This view does not give due emphasis to works of art.

Thanks to one author, we happen to know the dreams of the early Antonine age better than any before or after in antiquity. In five remarkable books, Artemidorus of Daldis explained his theory of dreams’ significance, the meanings of their common types and how, in his experience, the accepted meanings had turned out to be true.²³ His interest was in dreams’ predictive power, not in their “analytical” relevance to diagnoses of a person’s past or present. He had spared no efforts to find out the truth. He had read his predecessors’ books and developed theoretical distinctions of his own. He had associated with the despised “street diviners,” with whom he had swapped experiences, and he had also visited the major games and festivals of “cities and islands” from Italy to the Greek East,²⁴ where he had questioned the spectators and competitors, the athletes, rhetors and sophists who attached such interest to dreams of their personal prospects.²⁵ He had travelled from Asia to Italy and Rome, where his conversation and notes embraced all classes, a well-to-do woman in Italy who dreamed she was riding an elephant, members of the upper classes in the Greek cities, orators, Roman knights, a tax collector, convicts and criminals, the poor, the sick and the slaves, among whom, said Artemidorus, he “knew a slave who dreamed that he had stroked his master’s penis,” and another who dreamed that the master stroked his. Like no ancient author since Aristotle, he had engaged in tireless empirical research. He had the stamina of a field worker with theories which badly needed proof: “for Artemidorus, experience was a kind of watchword.”²⁶

Research and observation, he insisted, were essential to the dream interpreter’s art.²⁷ In each case, he had to consider local custom, the oppositions of custom and nature and the dreamer’s previous thoughts and wishes. Many dreams were not predictive, because they merely duplicated thoughts and wishes in the dreamer’s own mind: sometimes, Artemidorus had had to discover details of his clients’ sex life in order to predict the meaning of their dreams correctly. The dreams of dream interpreters themselves were especially misleading, because they were people who thought constantly about the symbols which made others’ dreams significant: in antiquity, too, “interpreters” found that the greatest difficulty was to interpret themselves. Above all, these interpreters had to consider who their client was: the meaning of a dream varied according to profession and social class, and Artemidorus’s interpretations presuppose many of the social attitudes on which we have already touched in civic life. Older writers on dreams had stated that the poor were analogous to the places where men throw out dung. Artemidorus did not express disagreement, although a poor man could hope to profit from certain dreams, dreams of eating his own body or of growing extra feet, a type of dream which promised trouble for the rich, but for the poor, the acquisition of slaves. Woods, mountains and chasms signified fear and distress for everyone, but especially for the rich, “as in these places, something is always being cut up and thrown away.” The meaning says something for the fears of richer travellers, moving between their beloved cities. Although a dream of marriage stood quite bluntly for death, there was no fear of a wider “class struggle” in the dream interpreters’ art. The rich were at risk to fortune and hazard, not to their social inferiors. The symbols for their household slaves were cowering, timid mice: the more they saw, the merrier.

Experience, however, was not Artemidorus’s only guide. His interpretations also proceeded by analogy and wordplay and by associations which were based in myth and literature.²⁸ Sometimes, they could be simple: if a woman dreamed of a garden, for instance, she would be slandered for promiscuity, as gardens were full of seeds. Others could be complex, and they tell against the prevailing view that Artemidorus was a humble man. His Greek is a treasure house of rare, precise terms, but it is not demonstrably “lower-class” and his contacts went far beyond the simple, loquacious man in the street.²⁹ He was a citizen of Ephesus, either through his father or through a special grant to himself as a cultured man of learning.³⁰ His mother came from the Lydian city of Daldis, an “insignificant little town,” he said, which he thanked for “raising” him and to which he offered his first three books on dreams. Quite possibly, his parents belonged in their cities’ upper ranks. Their son had been well educated, but he knew details which befitted a man with links at Daldis; he was familiar with aspects of the local Lydian cult societies and with his local “ancestral” Apollo, Apollo Mystes, who had appeared to him “often” in dreams and “pressed” him to write his book.³¹ The god, however, had not resolved the tension between Artemidorus the dogmatist and the skilled researcher who had observed so much. The dreams of athletes and performers from his own Asia, the curious local cults of Dionysus, the various types of bullfighting and bull-leaping, the small cult associations, or symbioseis, which we find in his own Lydia—all this evidence he had to fit to his theories, and he shows the dogmatist’s strong resentment of criticism and disbelievers’ “envy” as he struggles to make his theory fit.

This range of research and inquiry has to be stressed, because it gives his books a unique value for the social history of his age. They also had a prolonged effect, being translated promptly into Arabic after the Muslim conquests and greatly widening the meaning which ninth-century Muslims found in their dreams. In England, by 1720, they had gone into twenty editions, and their influence was far greater than the use which historians now make of them. In all their interpretations, there are only two or three examples of the Emperor in a client’s dream: one man dreamed that he had pulled teeth from “the king’s” mouth, foretelling victory in a lawsuit in his presence; another dreamed of “King” Agamemnon, a Homeric image of the “Emperor” in Greek eyes.³² As the Emperors’ subjects petitioned them on such a huge range of topics, this relative silence in the evidence is unexpected. The energy which modern English people now divert into dreams of their royal family went in the Antonine era elsewhere, to dreams of extreme sexual detail and to dreams of the gods.³³ As we shall see, to read Artemidorus’s collections of sexual dreams is to realize the scale of the challenge which faced Christian views on chastity and “pure thoughts.” To read his dreams of the gods is to realize what their “company” and “presence” still meant. They are the clearest difference between ancient and modern patterns of night life.

Artemidorus grouped the visions of gods into types and classes, using a popular philosophic distinction, but he also repeated many of his own observations. They bear, therefore, on the wide public whom he had questioned.³⁴ “After long experience,” he said, he had come to know that dreams of sharing Hercules’s life, meals or clothing were very inauspicious. “Often” he had studied dreams of owning or wearing the clothing of a god. They signified a future appointment as a trustee, the appearance of riches, he explained, without the reality. This dream, we can see, was a dream for high society only, where Artemidorus must have studied it, questioning people’s trustees and taking down their dreams and their sequels. At a similar social level, he met a man who had dreamed that he was the Sun god: before long, he became chief magistrate of his city. Offenders, too, attracted his interest: people who dreamed they were stealing the stars “generally” turned out to be temple robbers, while he knew a man who had insulted a god and then dreamed that he was working off his crime by cleaning the god’s statue. Dreams of entertaining the gods were more ambiguous. To the rich, they signified misfortune, but to the poor, a sudden prosperity. Artemidorus gave no examples, and here his interpretation rested on the stories of myth in which the gods visited humble men. Artemidorus did not believe all myths indiscriminately; the battle of gods and giants and the story of Endymion and the moon struck him as absurd and out-of-date. However, he accepted the tales of the gods’ presence in disguise, and his acceptance is a significant support for men’s living belief in it.

How did the dreamers know that they were seeing a god, and if so, which god was visiting them? Large figures, dressed in white, were conventional types of divinity, but they bore no signs of personality, and unless they spoke, the question of identity was left open. Even when they did speak, they could not be expected to be direct, said Artemidorus: usually, they gave riddles and hints, which the interpreter had to explain.³⁵ The gods made excellent business for his profession. At times, the signs of a god do seem very slender: once, Artemidorus described how a dream of a boy would mean Hermes, two boys Castor and Pollux, three clothed women the Fates, three naked women the Hours. Yet the general drift of his theory is against these vague equations, because the gods are known by their attributes: if they appear without them, they signify trouble.³⁶ These attributes were known through art, and here Artemidorus assumes a direct influence of art on dreams.

Like the sleepers in Asclepius’s temples, his clients imagined the gods in the forms which their statues had sanctioned.³⁷ To dream of a god’s statue, said Artemidorus, was the same as dreaming of the god himself. The two looked the same, although a god was able to move, whereas an image could not: what mattered was not only the image but its exact material and attributes. Different meanings attached to the gods’ local types, to the “severe” Artemis of Perge and Ephesus, whom we can still see standing stiffly on these cities’ coins, or the more friendly Artemis who was known elsewhere. Artemidorus had observed the gods very carefully, because their manner and attributes were so essential to the meanings of what they said. “Whenever the gods are not wearing their customary dress or whenever they are not behaving as they ought, whatever they say is only a lie.” Gods seen without their ornaments and weapons, like our two bronzes from Riace, were very inauspicious.

In antiquity, statues of the gods did not usually carry an inscription to identify them: instead, men knew them by their style and attributes. In the Imperial period, they had never been more certain what their gods looked like. Their images crowded the squares and temples of their cities and were cast in a form which was not disposable: they had dominated ideas of divinity across many generations. Like Artemidorus, Philostratus, too, pictured the gods and heroes with the eye of an artist, attaching particular weight to the mood and tone of their expressions.³⁸ This emphasis on the gods’ expression was prominent in the orator Aelius’s accounts of his many dreams.³⁹ Were the gods looking awesome or joyous, downcast or welcoming? Once again, we can appreciate this concern anew with the help of our Riace bronzes, where the survival of a hero’s eyes and teeth has conveyed at last the full potential of a statue’s gaze. Like modern beholders, the ancients, too, felt the awe in their gods’ expressions: would they have seen only the confidence and optimism in our bronze’s mouth and eyes? Perhaps there was no single response, as Yeats well realized: “Pheidias gave women dreams, and dreams their looking-glass…” Observer and statue reacted on one another. The recovery of the two bronze heroes has been followed by the recovery of an appropriate text.⁴⁰ In the Lycian city of Oenoanda, continuing finds of a huge stone inscription have restored to us an Epicurean’s view of the gods and their images in the second century A.D. To contemporaries, Epicureans were “atheists,” but this text is true to their founder, Epicurus, when it dwells on the power of images on mortals’ ideas of their gods. “Some gods are angry with fortunate men, as the goddess Nemesis seems to be to most people. But the statues of gods should be made cheerful and smiling so that we may smile back at them rather than fear them.” The sight of the two Riace bronzes and the awesome gaze of the greater of the pair help us to see what the Epicureans meant.

Other observers, too, were sensitive, Pausanias on his travels, many performing orators and the authors of literary word pictures, describing works of art. Of several examples, the best comes from Syrian Antioch, which housed a magnificent statue of Apollo by the master artist Bryaxis, a colossal image of gold with jewels for eyes. We can still appreciate the upright stance of its Apollo in his long, fluted robe, a bowl in his right hand, a lyre in his left, while the weight is slightly lifted from his right leg: the statue was copied on types of the city’s coinage. In 362 A.D., this huge image was destroyed by a fire, and the pagan orator Libanius paid his respects in an emotional speech: “My mind sets its shape before my eyes, the gentleness of form, the tenderness of neck… the golden lyre: it seems to sing a song, as somebody once heard it, so they say, playing the lyre at midday… Ah, happy ear!”⁴¹

Colossal statues, too, combined awe with a friendly quality, never more than in the cults of Asclepius. His “far-famed” statue evoked profound emotions, an image into which “the god infused his own powers,” wrote the third-century man of letters Callistratus, “and within which the power of the indwelling god is clearly manifest… in a marvellous way, it fathers proof that it has a soul. The face, as you look at it, entrances the senses…” Callistratus had put into words what thousands had already felt in the god’s many shrines.⁴² “Continual contemplation” of a divine statue is best detected in the last book of The Golden Ass, where the hero, Lucius, gazes daily on the image of his new protectress, the goddess Isis. The quality of this piety has been well emphasized, but it was not so different in kind from the hours of contemplation by many worshippers at the healing shrines or by those who gazed on amulets and carefully fashioned images in order to conjure up visions of a god. The gods came in pocket-sized models, so that anyone could travel with them and keep them handy.

No discussion of this level of “epiphany” can omit the experiences of the best-known client of Asclepius. From the 140s to the 170s, we have a sequence of the divine dreams which the orator Aelius Aristeides recorded in his Sacred Tales, and although only five books survive out of many more, they show us this same impact of religious art. Aelius’s dreams and inner life have startled many of their readers.⁴³ They seem like a constant neurosis which is only typical of one verbose and unhappy individual, and indeed, they have a particularly monstrous conceit. They dwell freely on meetings with the Emperor, filling the gap which Artemidorus’s sources have left.⁴⁴ As if one royal family was not enough, Aelius’s dreams rose to dreams of two at once, the Emperor and the reigning king of Parthia, and with them, Aelius, making a speech by special invitation. Not even Alexander the Great was too eminent: “I dreamed that on the right of Pergamum’s temple, there was a monument for me and Alexander, divided by a partition… he lay on one side, I would lie on the other… I rejoiced and reckoned that we both had reached the tops of our professions, he in military, I in rhetorical ability. It occurred to me too that he was very important in Pella and that those here in Pergamum were proud of me too.”

Professional orators like Aelius spent their lives on a crippling course of memorizations, perfecting a style and vocabulary while learning the classics by heart. It is not, then, so surprising that Aelius dreamed freely of the classical authors and their presence with him: here, we can match his dreams to those of his literary contemporaries.⁴⁵ No more can his dreams of the gods be isolated and analysed as a personal complex. They were reinforced by a culture pattern, and differed in degree, but not kind, from those of the wider public whom Artemidorus had recently been questioning so tirelessly.

Like many literary men, Aelius was of sickly constitution, but his visits to Asclepius’s shrine at Pergamum were particularly prolonged. His career as a speaker imposed its own nervous strains, which we should respect and not belittle, and in the Sacred Tales he relates his dream experiences of Asclepius and the other gods. The old patterns of language and response run through these tales, as the gods “stand beside” him, “manifest” and often almost tangible. Aelius even dreams that he is dreaming of the gods, in a particularly intense pattern of experience: he knows the intimacy and something, too, of the terror and awe. In a famous passage, we also meet the accompanying emotion of joy: in a good night’s dreaming, Aelius noted, the gods would seem marvellously large and beautiful, bathed in the light which befitted them.⁴⁶

Occasionally, the gods did appear in disguise, on the old Homeric model: Hermes once appeared as Plato, and Aelius was quick to detect a god in the form of a mortal acquaintance. On the whole, however, they conformed to their images in art: Asclepius and Serapis in Athena, Hermes and the god Apollo as honoured in Pergamum.⁴⁷ Once, dreamed Aelius, he seemed to hold the head of Asclepius in his hands and try to force it to give a nod of assent; the god, however, held his head steady, presumably as he did in his statue. Once, Aelius dreamed that this statue had changed to another type with a downcast expression.⁴⁸ Once again, when Aelius lay very near death, Athena herself appeared “as Pheidias had sculpted her,” breathing a scent from her “aegis,” which looked like wax. Appropriately, her large, beautiful form seemed to quote lines from Homer’s Odyssey and tell her dying man of letters to “endure.” Aelius seemed to feel his body slipping away and to be “conscious of himself as if he was another,” yet even at this moment, others in his room, he said, could hear the words which Athena spoke. How Gordian, once again, would have applauded: as his life nearly ended, the orator Aelius dreamed first of the theatre, then of Homer’s Athena, quoting the Odyssey’s words of encouragement.⁴⁹ At another point, he wrote, “I seemed, as it were, to touch Asclepius and to see that the god himself was come, and to be ‘between sleeping and waking’ and to long to look up and to be in anguish that he might depart too soon and to strain my ears to hear some things as in a dream, others ‘in waking reality.’ My hair stood straight; there seemed to be tears of joy, and the pride of my heart gave no offence. Who could describe these things in words…?” When Aelius told one of the doctors, his favourite Theodotus, he “marvelled at how divine these dreams really were.” He did not think that they needed curing.⁵⁰

So close was the identity of god and statue and the relation of both to Aelius that once “I noticed in a dream a statue of me. At one moment, I saw it as if it were me, and then again it seemed to be a large and beautiful statue of Asclepius.” Once, he dreamed that other worshippers were ushered away by Asclepius’s statue, but that the god’s hand told him to stay. “And I was delighted by the honour and the degree to which I was being preferred and I called out, ‘The One and Only,’ meaning Asclepius, but he said, ‘It is you.’” Dreams reinforced his sense of a special relationship:⁵¹ of all ancient authors, Aelius comes nearest to Sartre’s observation that “being seen by another is the truth of seeing another,” and to our psychological notion that the “other” may in fact be a projection of the feelings and emotions of the observer.

The proper context for this vivid night life is not our modern myth of “analysis,” but the culture pattern which emerges from the solid evidence of votive sculptures and a brilliant series of chapters by Artemidorus. From Northumberland to Syria, Spain to the Black Sea, people continued to put up votive monuments and dedications in response to “warnings” or “visions” of their gods in dreams. A divine dream might motivate a city’s “people and council” to a public act: it might encourage a civic dignitary and his wife to revive a divinity’s civic cult.⁵² Frauds were a recognized hazard, especially in so-called dreams of healing, and people could be quite wary. We have the inscription of a man in North Africa in 283/4 whom the god Saturn had seemed to be “warning” in a dream. Evidently, the man had had his doubts, for he waited till Saturn’s “saving help” had proved itself and then he put up the monument which he had vowed, dedicating it “in return for having found faith.”⁵³ The tradition of these dreams could survive a considerable degree of wariness and minor scepticism, not least because it was supported by cases of divine anger: people who neglected a dream might be chastened and then make due amends. The dreams could be as complex as anything in Aelius’s tales. Like one devotee of Serapis (c. 50 A.D.), people might “receive” tokens from their gods, written letters, even, which they “found” next morning and read for advice on achieving their ends and excelling their rivals.⁵⁴ Not every sighting had a known origin in art: at Pergamum, a female hymn singer honoured Night, Initiation and Chance “in accordance with a dream”; other people in Pergamum honoured Virtue, Self-control, Faith and Concord, while one town council and citizenry in Thrace commemorated the pagan Most High god.⁵⁵ Had they seen these abstractions in person, and if so, had artistic traditions helped them to focus what they saw? We only have their monuments, hints at a lost experience.

We cannot “analyse” these dreams, not least because their cultural setting was so different from our own. Art and statuary, Homer, the poets and polytheism, ideas of the gods as “friends” and “helpers”: these patterns made the gods a frequent company to people of all classes, of whom Aelius only happens to be the most articulate. In Artemidorus’s terms, his dream of Athena would have been highly favourable.⁵⁶ It was seen by a man of high position, well educated and suited, therefore, for a dream of an Olympian god who was quoting poetry. Athena had come as a friend, with her proper attributes: her aegis looked “like wax,” but it was not waxen, a bad omen, as it would have suggested magic. Meanwhile, other clients, known to Artemidorus, hint at a range of dreams of divinities, beside which Aelius’s take a modest place.⁵⁷ To dream of Artemis, said Artemidorus, with no clothes on was most inauspicious: the myths supported that conclusion. Aphrodite was more ambiguous: if you saw her topless, said Artemidorus, that was a good omen, but a full frontal view was only auspicious for prostitutes. As for sex with the gods, that was a fine dream, so long as it was not sex with any of six goddesses from Artemis to Hecate. Sex with Aphrodite was propitious, but the act alone was not enough: it also mattered whether or not the dreamer thought he had enjoyed it.

Behind the portrait busts of Antonine dignitaries and the family trees which wind through their cities’ inscriptions lies this nighttime company, enjoyed with the gods. Men of all ranks saw them and heard them: the higher their class, the better their omen. They seemed to touch them and they even dared to go to bed with them. Historians have been slow to restore this night life to the men whom they study for administrative careers. As night fell, they recaptured the lost ideal of Phaeacia and the pre-Homeric past. If we miss this nightly screening of the gods, we reduce pagan religiousness to a “paganism” of cult acts, brightened only by personal cults which appealed to the emotions and made their worshippers “new.” We also miss the level at which the people of Miletus had been startled by their gods.

If Chariton’s romance matches the Lystrans, Artemidorus gives the context for Alexandra’s question. The gods had been “standing beside” the Milesians “with great clarity”: exactly these words were used by Artemidorus when he described how Apollo had inspired him to his great work. These “visitations” were not open encounters by daylight, but nightly visits in dreams. The gods had not retreated in the age of the unified mind: was this outbreak in Miletus really the sign of a new and anxious “exaltation”? Ultimately, perhaps, the city’s statuary was to blame, and then the dreams spread, for dreams are as catching as measles. One mother dreamed, perhaps, of a god and told her children; they dreamed too, and so did her husband, the family next door and the boys and girls at school. What did it all mean? they wanted to know. Apollo related it to Homeric habits of the gods. In a dream, the sight of a god was not necessarily dangerous, because he came of his own choosing in a manageable, visual form. He was not surprised against his will or seen in disguise, spying on human wickedness, that idea of Homeric divinity which had persisted from Homer to the Emperor Julian.

This long tour of the various levels in pagan “epiphanies” has emphasized how much endured since Homer’s age. Between life and literature, there was not a divide but a mutual relationship, in which the one, as so often, enhanced the other. One of the finest studies of later Greek piety has stressed Plato’s role as the “father of Hellenistic religion.”⁵⁸ This judgement considered religion to be a personal quest for God, a theme of which we do hear more in the works of Plato and which passed, under the Empire, into the devotional literature of the Thrice-great Hermes. Plato, in another sense, was not the most prolific parent. His Socrates had ridiculed the visits of gods in human form and dubbed them a mischievous notion of Homer, but Homer and the patterns which lay behind him survived such criticism. The revived Platonism of the second and third centuries accepted the visible appearances of gods as a fact to be courted and explained. Long after Constantine, a Platonist like Proclus was denying the opinions of Socrates and defending Homer’s grasp of the varying levels of epiphanies in a brilliant combination of this chapter’s themes. Reinforced by art, Homer and the Homeric “visitations” fathered many more children than Plato’s contemplation of God.

To cover these examples in art and fiction, poetry and life, is also to restore a sense of what the early Christians faced. “What is clear,” a fine theological study of visions concluded, “is that Christianity came into a world tantalized by a belief that some men at least had seen God and had found in the vision the sum of human happiness, a world aching with the hope that the same vision was attainable by all.”⁵⁹ The opposite, in fact, was true. Pagans kept nightly company with their gods and those who sported in dreams with Aphrodite needed no new route to heaven. Among pagans, these “visits” were freely enjoyed, and there was no restraining orthodoxy, no priestly authority which restricted the plain man’s access to a nightly contact with the gods. Art and the long centuries of literature had combined with myth and the general setting of its stories to contain these visions in harmless traditional forms. Their beneficiaries took no stand against authority and did not claim to know better than their civic leaders in the matter of pleasing the gods. The divine dreams of Artemidorus and his friends sounded no call for reform or orthodoxy and took no interest in history. In Artemidorus’s sample, they were not concerned to take men on a tour of the next world or to menace them with fears of what might happen after death. Dreams did predict people’s imminent end and its manner, but visions of the next world and its torments were most prominent in philosophic dialogues and perhaps in the theologies of small religious groups. Many people dismissed them, the absurd inventions of women and children.⁶⁰

Among pagans, visions and dreams continued to spread new cults to new places, seldom with missionary fervour, but nonetheless without the intervention of priests or a religious hierarchy. The old Homeric ideal of the “close encounter” still haunted men as a possibility, while the myths and the living tradition of a Golden Age sustained the belief that the gods might one day return quite openly, if only men would lay aside their own injustice and wickedness. These beliefs had their own subtleties, without any scripture to enforce them. Among pagans, too, “blessed are the pure in heart,” from Homer through Callimachus to the Hermetists and Iamblichus, “for they shall see God.” “Your sons and your daughters shall prophesy,” in Miletus as in Joel’s Israel, “while your young men shall see visions and your old men shall dream dreams.”

The Christians could not deny this. The “visits” were based on observable experience, not poetic convention, and if we had to choose one region in the second and third centuries where the evidence was most undeniable and the conventions reflected life, it would have to be Egypt, from Thebes to the Upper Cataract. There, stretched a land of immemorial antiquity whose temples and cults had the great prestige of history. In their temples, the priest still saw the gods: equipment for these sightings continued to be listed in their shrines’ inventories.⁶¹ Outside the temples, people turned to the experts for spells, but the epilogue to all epiphanies in this period is best found in a broken monument, the colossus which stood in the Valley of the Kings. An earthquake had unsettled this old, enormous statue in the first century A.D., and before long, its Greek visitors began to notice how the stonework gave off a sound.⁶² The statue, they believed, was their own Memnon, with whom they had connected the Pharaohs’ necropolis. By the later first century, visitors heard Memnon’s voice in the statue’s whisper. From far and wide they came to hear it, hard-bitten Roman soldiers, women, men of letters, the Emperor Hadrian and his entourage. There was no formal cult of Memnon and no oracles are known to have been sought from his voice. The Egyptians have left no evidence of any interest in the topic among all the material on the site. The statue was a wonder for Greeks and Romans only, a whispered intimation of their hero’s presence. Sometimes he spoke and sometimes he was silent: Hadrian’s followers had to visit twice before they heard him.

Those who heard carved their names and testimony on Memnon’s vociferous remains. They went to infinite pains.⁶³ It was not enough to place an inscription on the statue’s lower foot: we can see one such “first shot” recarved at a second attempt, higher up. For the visitors wished to carve their names on the side where they would bask forever in the rising sun, the hour at which Memnon spoke, while bathed in the light of dawn. In the year 122, one Charisius recorded his satisfaction and carved his memorial in east-facing sunlight: “I had heard as a child of the speaking ship Argo and of the whispering oak of Zeus. But only here have I seen and heard for myself.” Further south, by the Nile Cataract, we can match these texts with inscriptions which run on a temple to the god Mandulis, set at the frontier post of Talmis. In this puzzling divinity, Greek visitors saw a form of their own Sun god. As in the Valley of the Kings, so here at distant Talmis they experienced his presence, seeing him in the sudden beams of early sun. Here, too, their inscriptions covered the temple’s east-facing wall in order to catch the moment when the god revealed his power in the early morning light. Who were the Christians to deny these epiphanies? Memnon continued to speak throughout the Antonine and Severan period until his stones, we believe, slipped slightly and took away his voice. Mandulis drew pilgrims throughout the entire third century, people who recorded their particular moment, “today, I have seen,” in a flash of personal joy.⁶⁴ The two experiences have been contrasted, as if Mandulis, seen in the sunlight, was the true piety, while Memnon, heard at dawn, was only a traveller’s curiosity. Memnon was honoured in literary verses: “Le vrai dieu du Colosse,” concluded their editor, “n’était pas Memnon, mais Homère.” The distinction is rather too sharp. All we have seen, from Homer to Miletus, reminds us how literary language reflected and enhanced the experience of life. If men wrote like Homer on Memnon’s upper body, they did so because the Homeric language best did justice to the “presence” which they wished to record. From the epics to Egypt’s epiphanies, less had changed for most people’s religious life than historians have tended to believe. At Mandulis’s shrine, one Maximus inscribed a metrical tour de force, describing how he had dreamed that he was bathing in the Nile and hearing the song of the Muses: then the god Mandulis stood forward with Isis, and Maximus was inspired to write Greek without barbaric errors. After reading Artemidorus’s researches, how can we be so sure that this “vision” is only a literary convention, unsupported by experience? Its metre was no more ambitious than many oracles which nobody would call a literary fiction. At Talmis, the gods were seen in the sunlight; in the Valley of the Kings, a hero could be heard at dawn; everywhere, by night, the gods crossed the open frontier with the world of men. We have restored to the Christians’ contemporaries their visions and sightings, beliefs beside their ceremonies. It remains to tune our other senses and catch their gods as they spoke from their shrines.

4. Seeing the Gods

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