Religious Individualisation: Archaeological, Iconographic and Epigraphic Case Studies from the Roman World

By Anthony King

The Roman world was diverse and complex. And so were religious understandings and practices as mirrored in the enormous variety presented by archaeological, iconographic, and epigraphic evidence. Conventional approaches principally focus on the political role of civic cults as a means of social cohesion, often considered to be instrumentalized by elites. But by doing so, religious diversity is frequently overlooked, marginalizing ‘deviating’ cult activities that do not fit the Classical canon, as well as the multitude of funerary practices and other religious activities that were all part of everyday life. In the Roman Empire, a person’s religious experiences were shaped by many and sometimes seemingly incompatible cult practices, whereby the ‘civic’ and ‘imperial’ cults might have had the least impact of all. Our goal therefore is to rethink our methodologies, aiming for a more dynamic image of religion that takes into account the varied and often contradictory choices and actions of individual, which reflects the discrepant religious experiences in the Roman world. Is it possible to ‘poke into the mind’ of an individual in Roman times, whatever his/her status and ethnicity, and try to understand the individual’s diverse experiences in such a complex, interconnected empire, exploring the choices that were open to an individual? This also raises the question whether the concept of individuality is valid for Roman times. In some periods, the impact of individual actions can be more momentous: the very first adoption of Roman-style sculpture, cult practices or Latin theonyms for indigenous deities can set in motion long-term processes that will significantly influence people’s perceptions of local deities, their characteristics, and functions. Do individual choices and preferences prevail over collective identities in the Roman Empire compared to pre-Roman times? To examine these questions, this volume presents case studies that analyze individual actions in the religious sphere.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Oxbow Books
• Release date: Mar 23, 2023
• ISBN: 9781789259667

Book preview

Chapter 1

Introduction: the dynamics of religious individualisation

Ralph Haeussler, Anthony King, Francisco Marco Simón and Günther Schörner

The concept of person is … an excellent vehicle by which to examine this whole question of how to go about poking into another people’s turn of mind. (Geertz 1974)

The Roman world was diverse and complex. And so were religious understandings and practices as mirrored in the enormous variety presented by archaeological, iconographic and epigraphic evidence. Conventional approaches, like ‘polis religion’, look for similarities, principally focusing on the political role of civic cults as a means of social cohesion, often considered to be instrumentalised by elites. But by doing so, religious diversity and contradictory evidence are frequently overlooked, thus marginalising, for example, household cults, ‘private’ cults, magical activities, Graeco-Oriental cults, the wide range of non-Latin and non-Greek theonyms and epithets, the ‘deviating’ representations of gods that do not fit the Classical canon, as well as the multitude of funerary practices and other religious activities that were all part of people’s everyday life. In the Roman Empire, a person’s ‘religious’ experiences were shaped by many and sometimes seemingly incompatible cult practices, whereby the ‘civic’ and ‘imperial’ cults might have had the least impact of all on individuals.

Our goal therefore is to re-think our methodologies, aiming for a more dynamic image of religion that takes into account the varied and often contradictory choices and actions of individuals and social groups, and which reflects the discrepant religious experiences in the Roman Empire. Is it possible to ‘poke into the mind’ of an individual in Roman times, whatever his/her status and ethnicity, and try to understand the individual’s diverse experiences in such a complex, interconnected empire, exploring the choices that were open to an individual, if any? This also raises the question whether the concept of individuality is valid for Roman times. We need to consider chronological and geographical variability: in some periods individual actions seem more frequent than in others, and in certain periods their impact can be more momentous: for example, the very first adoption of Roman-style sculpture, cult practices or Latin theonyms for indigenous deities, as we frequently see around the Augustan period, can set in motion further long-term processes that will significantly influence people’s perceptions of local deities, their characteristics and functions. Do individual choices, decisions and preferences prevail over collective identities in the civitates of the Roman Empire when compared to the late Iron Age or Hellenistic period?

To examine these questions, this volume presents a series of case studies that analyse individual choices and actions in the religious sphere.¹ In Chapter 2, Ralph Haeussler aims to set the agenda for this volume by discussing a range of methodological issues regarding the validity of the concept of (religious) individualisation in the Roman Empire, advocating a bottom-up approach to understand religious developments. Magical activities, revealing the tension between public and private as well as the dynamic nature of religious individualisation, are explored in Francisco Marco’s paper on ‘discrepant behaviour’. His paper provides an insight in cult activities and religious development that predate and contradict the Roman-style civic cults in Hispania and Gaul (Chapter 3).

The next section explores the individual’s choice of specific deities. Jaimé Alvar explores initiation and mystery cults as particular areas of personal choice in the Roman Empire, including conversion as an inner personal experience (Chapter 4). This leads us to other local deities, like the study of the mother goddesses in Roman Britain by Elizabeth Blanning, showing, inter alia, how individual social agents made the decision to associate the matres with military understandings (Chapter 5). For the north-eastern Adriatic provinces, Marjeta Šašel Kos shows how personal choices of Roman colonists and other immigrants preserved and gradually transformed the existing local cults: while the worshippers’ diverging cultural knowledge may lead to a reinterpretation of a deity’s function, due to a shortcoming in understanding a god’s divine essence, the environment equally influenced the actions and ritual practises (Chapter 6). A comparable situation can be encountered in Gaul: based on epigraphic and archaeological sources, Isabelle Fauduet explores cases of personal choice at sanctuaries in Gaul, from an individual’s personal relationship to his/her deity to the dedicant’s choice of votive offering, anatomic representation, figurine, sculpture and theonym, emphasising the role of individuals and their own religious experience, education and level of literacy (Chapter 7).

Also in a funerary context, we can often recognise a variety of practices employed simultaneously, taking up a range of elements from Graeco-Roman and indigenous practices – these choices reflect the beliefs and cognitions of the deceased’s heirs, not necessarily of the community. Jake Weekes’ paper investigates the crossover between tradition and personalisation of burial practice in the case of Romano-British funerary contexts at Canterbury, looking for innovations in funerary practices, with some innovations going on to become traditions, thus revealing the individuality and uniqueness of each burial (Chapter 8). Gil Burleigh analyses the diverse religious activities in the context of a Romano-British small town, exhibiting an enormous variety of cult practices relating to a range of classical and indigenous deities; pre-Roman and Romano-British cemeteries reveal a considerable range of burial practices, suggestive of varied religious beliefs and superstitions (Chapter 9). In his study of human remains in ritual sites, notably temples and sanctuaries in Britain and Gaul, Anthony King not only discusses the evidence for human sacrifice, but also the extreme aspect of religious individualisations and their relationship to orthopraxical rituals in these cult places where individuals – including some high-ranking individuals – became permanently associated with a sanctuary after their death, seemingly contradicting the collective zeitgeist of the Roman world (Chapter 10).

Fernando Alonso Burgos focuses on the creation of particular symbolic languages in north-west Spain, by exploring ethnohistorical references, regarding emulation processes and criollo/mestizo religions (Chapter 11). Jesús Arenas-Esteban’s study of the Roman villa of Cuevas de Soria in Central Spain in the longue durée also discusses a domestic context, but equally public display: conscious personal choices of the villa’s owners to use Celtic theonyms and onomastics were instrumentalised to create the image of a common ‘indigenous’ ancestry to define their social position in a rural context (Chapter 12). Günther Schörner focuses on the relationship between social and spatial behavior in the Roman house. With household religion being firmly tied to an individual family’s tradition, the religious topography of each house appears to be specific for each familia (Chapter 13). Within the interconnected world of the Roman Empire, the individual is faced with a myriad of deities and divine concepts, prompting the individual to interpret unknown divine forces, by identifying them with, for example, Graeco-Roman deities, or translating epithets and theonyms, as shown by Patrizia de Bernardo Stempel (Chapter 14). The final chapter by Ralph Haeussler focuses on the choices that the individual – whatever his/her status, gender, age or ethnicity – had at his/her disposal in the entangled, almost ‘global’ Roman world. The aim is to scrutinise our archaeological and epigraphic evidence: which finds do really constitute religious individualisation? And what scope for interpretations do our finds provide: from individual choices within a certain ‘repertoire’ to expressions of ‘Otherness’ by diverging from a community’s ‘official’ cults and creating religious places that reflect a certain religious emancipation from the civic authorities (Chapter 15)?

We have to thank all our contributors for their stimulating papers. Our thanks are also due to the whole team at Oxbow Books.

Note

1Several papers in this volume were originally presented in the session ‘The dynamics of religious individualisation in the Roman empire (200 BCE–300 CE)’, which Ralph Haeussler, Anthony King, Francisco Marco and Günther Schörner organised at the Roman Archaeology Conference at Oxford University. All the papers were received in revised form in 2021/22.

Reference

Geertz, C. (1974) From the native’s point of view: on the nature of anthropological understanding. Bulletin of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences 28 (1), 26–45.

Chapter 2

Religious individualisation: a bottom-up approach to religious developments in the Roman world

Ralph Haeussler

Individual and collective

Our material and textual evidence seems to paint a complex picture of religious life in the Roman provinces of the first–third centuries CE that appears extremely diverse, pluralistic and multicultural. It is both traditional and innovative, concurrently local, supra-regional, imperial and one may even classify religious life as competitive, with some cults, deities and sanctuaries competing for followers. Having become subject to Roman rule, the societal structures and cultural understandings of hundreds of communities, civitates, nationes and gentes were undergoing significant adjustments and transformations. Most notably, people were exposed to and eventually became integrated in an intricately connected, interdependent and entangled world. Despite the efficacy of Roman imperialism and the magnitude of communication across the Roman Empire, this did not lead to a homogenisation of cultural or religious expressions but resulted in ever more diversity. Although the surviving archaeological and epigraphic evidence merely present the tip of the iceberg, we recognise thousands of gods and goddesses and a staggering number of monumentalised cult places as well as religious centres and sacred sites, some of which became the focus of empire-wide pilgrimages.

How was this possible? The traditional top-down model of social and religious organisation hardly suffices to explain this diversification. The increasing individualisation of social life across the Roman world must have been one major factor that needs to be explored further, notably during the first to third centuries CE (see below; cf. also Haeussler and Webster 2020). We already see some earlier developments, like ‘the differentiation of religious groups’ – in the words of John North (1992, 181) – as in the famous case of Bacchus worshippers spreading across the cities on the Italian peninsula in the early second century BCE, prompting the Roman state to curtail the cult(s) in 187 BCE.

Over the past 30 years, the predominant model of religions in the Roman world presumes that magistrates, decuriones and municipal elites were almost exclusively responsible for the nature of local cults and for controlling and financing local sanctuaries (see, e.g., Dondin-Payre and Raepsaet-Charlier 2006 with review by Haeussler 2008a; cf. Beard et al. 1998). Similar to the idea of the ‘polis religion’ in Classical Greece, one takes for granted that the councillors of a civitas, colonia, municipium or polis had the exclusive responsibility to install a religious system and arbitrate the relationships between mortals and gods, as stipulated, rather clearly, so it seems, in the Roman lex for the new colonia Genetiva of Urso in the Baetica (§64): ‘All duumviri (…) shall bring, within ten days next following the commencement of their magistracy, before the decurions (…) the question as to the dates and the number of festal days, the sacrifices to be publicly performed, and the persons to perform such sacrifices’ (translation by Gabba and Crawford 1996).

Even if not explicitly stated, many studies on provincial cults accept this notion of ‘polis religion’ (e.g. Van Andringa 2002). John Scheid clearly defines this view of ancient religion: not religion in a polis, but religion of the polis, ‘la religion est liée à l’idéal de la cité’ (Scheid 1998, 22; 1999, 385–7; cf. Rüpke 1999; on Scheid’s approach see Ando 2009; for ‘polis religion’ and critique of the concept, see Sourvinou-Inwood 1990; Woolf 1997; 2003, 138; Kindt 2009; Haeussler 2011; Rüpke 2013, 3–6). Based on this model, the rituals and religious festivals are meant to create a common identity for the inhabitants of a city or polis/civitas, binding them together in collective events, thus consolidating social hierarchies. In many academic works of the past 20–30 years, we can see that cults, sanctuaries and deities were not interpreted as local religious beliefs, but as political and ideological tools of a civitas, with each deity and cult having their role to play for social cohesion (see also Derks 1998, 185–99, on the role d’aggrégation of rural sanctuaries).

This concept, however, does not appear fully convincing for a number of reasons when applied to the Roman world.

First, there is the unprecedented level of interconnectivity and mobility in the Roman world, which has an impact on all aspects of life for people from all strata of society, as we shall discuss later in more detail.

Second, one easily forgets that the so-called ‘local elite’, thought to oversee civic cults, was far from being a homogenous group of wealthy landowners and decurions with a common interest. In any one civitas, the decurions consisted of a group of individuals with very different backgrounds, interests and motivations, further diversified during the Principate: even in a Roman colonia, the epigraphic record generally shows that the ‘local elite’ consisted of wealthy landowners of both Italo-Roman and local, indigenous origin, of newcomers from other provinces, of individuals with careers and socio-economic interests far beyond the local community, as well as of individuals who acted as decurions, magistrates, priests or patroni in several civitates (see e.g., Haeussler 2013, 234). This implies not only that any one member of ‘the elite’ may not have necessarily identified with a particular civitas or polis, but we can also hardly imagine a consensus in religious understandings, apart perhaps from acknowledging the political inevitabilities of the day to honour the emperor, at least in public. Moreover, we can identify individual elite members taking advantage of existing ‘civic cults’ to display publicly their authority and wealth (dare I say, ‘philanthropy’ or euergetism): this represents less collective cult interests of the community, but individual endeavours to improve or consolidate one’s standing in the community. There are countless cases of wealthy elite members making unprecedented donations to cults and sanctuaries, thereby not only supporting (or rather, manipulating) existing cult places, but also promoting new cults. For instance, a large inscription from the colonia Nemausus, Nîmes, in southern Gaul commemorates an unknown wealthy ‘benefactor’ who made very generous donations to the religious life of the city, including the dedication of a temple for Isis and Sarapis and handing out a stipend of five denarii for each of the decuriones (councillors) so that they can dine in public (CIL XII 3058; Wierschowski 2001, 174, no. 213a). Such ‘generosity’ shows blatant impositions. Whether subtle or direct, these individual acts are likely to generate changing religious understandings, perhaps not instantly, but in the course of one or two generations (see e.g., Haeussler 2012a). Some sanctuaries of pre-Roman origin, like Nîmes’s spring sanctuary ‘La Fontaine’, became appropriated as a venue for elite self-display (Haeussler 2011). Sometimes, a local landowner may promote rural cults to strengthen his/her social and religious authority over a series of villages and farmsteads, carving out his/her little ‘domain’ within a civitas territory (see Haeussler 2008b; King 2020; see also Arenas-Esteban in this volume). In other words, (seemingly) ‘public’ cults may be considered the ‘plaything’ of individual members of the elite (see also Gordon 2015, 370 showing the role of religious action for inner-elite competition as basis for ‘individualisation’).

Third, certainly during the Principate (and in some regions already during the late Republic), we need to emphasise the actions of individual social agents and their capacity in making their own choices in religious matters, given that we seem to be dealing with a society in which the majority of people were required to look after themselves and thereby create – sometimes inadvertently – their own identities. We will return to this issue later, but let us just explore the situation of crafts(wo)men and trades(wo)men who were becoming increasingly visible in Roman times and for whom the existing cultural ‘repertoire’ was often not adequate to express their place in society (Haeussler 2013, 51 with further bibliography): these emerging social groups did not just ‘emulate’ the elite, but often a craftsperson decided to adopt a variety of features, objects and media, perhaps also to promote the cult of a particular ‘patron’ deity. At the outset we can imagine how these acts of individuals were subsequently setting in motion group dynamics that can lead to the establishment of new identities, new cultural repertoires and new local cults; in turn, these locally created features may become part of a wider discourse beyond the original ‘catchment area’ (for a discussion of bricolage and the mechanisms of group dynamics, see Haeussler and Webster 2020). We can also allude to the various forms of diaspora identities that were emerging across the provinces, like that of Batavian soldiers on Hadrian’s Wall, who were also making their own distinctive religious choices, not to mention the Palmyreans/Tadmoreans who installed their ancestral cults and deities for example in Rome, Sarmizegtusa (Dacia) and Messad (Numidia) (see Eckardt 2010 on diaspora identities, Nesbitt 2014 on multiculturalism on Hadrian’s Wall; for the Palmyrean temple in Dacia, see Piso and Tentea 2011).

If we take into account the societal developments of the Principate, then the focus on a small number of civic cults (i.e. those financed by the collective, the vicani, ordo or boule) ignores the multifaceted religious world that people were subjected to, both in their local community and the wider world. Instead, it is necessary to emphasise the active role of individuals, whatever their gender, status, rank, profession, ethnicity or identity, both elite and sub-elite, and the ways in which they took their own religious decisions and how their actions – individually and put together – could shape local cults, cult practices and religious beliefs to such an extent that traditional and/or collective religious understandings may even have become contested and marginalised. As we shall see, individualisation must be considered an important factor in creating the enormous diversification of cult activities that we can recognise across the Roman Empire. Indeed, this diversity of cult practices and rituals as well as the myriad of sculptural representations, deities and theonyms (and divine names in the widest possible sense, see e.g. Bonnet 2021), which we find at many cult places, apparently contradicts the image of elite-controlled ‘civic cults’ that one may have expected in the Roman Empire; instead, it reflects personal decisions, often of contradictory nature, by individual social agents.

For those personal religious decisions and activities that stand outside, in the words of Kindt (2015, 36–7), ‘the polis paradigm’ and reflect ‘more personal engagement with the supernatural’, the term ‘personal religion’ has become increasingly popular (Rüpke 2013; 2016; Kindt 2015). However, the term personal religion itself is controversial: first, it is hardly personal or private, but was ‘acted out in public’ (for the term sacra privata in Roman law, see e.g. Rüpke 2013, 7); second, it was hardly a ‘religion’, but reflects the individual’s religious understandings, interests and activities – many of which complement the existing ‘polis religion’. But we must avoid the view that ‘personal religion becomes fully subsumed into polis religion and vice versa’ (Sourvinou-Inwood 1990). Kindt (2015, 42) convincingly argues that subsuming all religious activities under one ‘heading’ ‘renders both concepts meaningless by making them interchangeable’. If we consider the increasingly intertwined, interdependent and mobile Roman world, which makes the idea of a more or less coherent community almost meaningless, then it appears that the gap between publicly funded civic cults and all other cult activities in any given civitas increasingly was widening as we move from the first to the third century CE. We only need to look at the staggering number of individual votives, theonyms and of new cult places appearing in towns, in their suburbs and across their territories, like the concentration of temples and shrines at sites, such as Altbachtal (Trier), Thun-Allmedingen (Martin-Kilcher and Schatzmann 2009) and Viuz-Faverges (Piccamiglio and Segard 2005) (Fig. 2.1), not to mention religious actors from other regions and cultural background.

Fig. 2.1. Plan of sanctuaries with several shrines and temples: (a) Viuz Faverges (after Rebiscoul and Serralongue), (b) Thun-Allemedingen (drawing by Robert Hagmann; from Martin-Kilcher and Schatzmann 2009) and (c) Altbachtal (after Cüppers 1990).

What shapes the individual’s religious experience?

This leads us to the next theme, religious experience. We do not limit ourselves to examples of ‘expressions of awe’, like gigantic, monumental statues, created, one might say, to satisfy (and promote) the ‘superstition of the masses’ (see discussion in Gordon 2015, 373–4 on Rüpke 2011; the idea of superstitio of the ‘masses’ can be seen, for example, in Cicero’s de divinatione 2.70 [33]). Instead, we are interested in the whole picture when it comes to the forging of an individual’s religious experience. This starts of course with processes of socialisation into a particular group at various stages in life, like the socialisation into a family with its household gods during childhood or the participation in coming-to-age ceremonies (see e.g., Rüpke 2013, 8); talking of which, we may allude here to Van Gennep’s concept of rites de passage which focuses, in the words of Michaels (2016, ch. 5), on ‘the constant overstepping of borders, as the individual moves in other groups and classes, indeed must move in them’. In fact, during adulthood, our hypothetical individual may decide to become a member of various institutions that shape his/her experience, such as a collegium or ‘guild’, the army, and many more.

Moreover, an individual’s religious experience includes the visits to shrines during one’s travels, or the deliberate pilgrimage to a particular sanctuary or holy site; even emperors sought their personal religious experience, for example by climbing Mount Kasios in Syria, sacred to various ‘religions’ (Williams Reed 2020); also sites in Gaul became ‘supra-regional phenomena’, like Apollo Grannus at Grand (Woolf 2003, 139). Pilgrim ampulla, for example, help us to get a glimpse into the extent of pilgrimages in the ancient world (Anderson 2004; Rutherford 2020).

And throughout one’s life, there are the passive and active experiences of religious events, festivals and processions, from being a mere bystander or perhaps an engaging observer (perhaps wishing to touch sacred objects, like sacred stones or trees, or being struck by the luperci’s leather straps during the Lupercalia – see Plutarch, Caesar 61) to becoming an active participant. For an individual this may involve, for instance, to be chosen (or volunteering) to help carrying certain sacred items in a procession, decorating divine statues, providing the sacrificial animals, re-enacting mythical accounts, putting on particularly ‘religious’ garments, performing religious dances, entering a state of trance, and many more. In addition, the individual is confronted with literary works that shapes religious comprehension, from Homer and Vergil to Stoic or Neoplatonic works, whether reading them personally and/or engaging with them in oral form, like in theatre performances or forum gossip.

Indeed, any individual would have been bombarded by new religious expressions and media during his/her lifetime, many of which were taking place in the public sphere, like the omnipresence of altars, statues, religious iconography, the display of votive offerings, civic festivals and public processions (even for initiation cults, like Isis and the Eleusian mysteries), or engaging with wandering religious practitioners, miracle workers and prophets (see e.g. Koskenniemi 1998 on Apollonius of Tyana as θεῖος ἀνήρ; Rawson 2020 discusses the evidence for private religious practitioners and private initiation). The engagement with a large variety of religious features was even more diverse for people regularly travelling to other cities and provinces, be it on business or in the army, and those building up a private or business network of contacts. For these individuals, there was a constant need to interpret and re-interpret what they experienced; in turn, they must have found ways on how to address foreign deities to whom they addressed a prayer or offering.

In this context, we must be careful not to marginalise rural communities as they, too, could not escape the zeitgeist of their time. We are dealing with a predominantly agricultural society and many city dwellers owned land, some of them were important landowners; moreover, there is continuing demographic change in rural areas since newcomers and veteran soldiers were acquiring land in rural areas; on the other hand, farmers – of whatever status – had to travel to market places to sell their produce, engage with other landowners or landlords, participate in (and cater for) urban lifestyles, and perhaps consider offering their own children different career options. In other words, people who lived in a rural context were equally faced with a wide range of religious ideas.

There can be hardly any doubt that the individual’s religious experience in the Roman world must have been shaped by many and sometimes seemingly incompatible cult practices. ‘Civic’ and ‘imperial’ cults might have had much less impact on individuals than has been traditionally supposed. People’s diverse religious experiences may imply that the large civic festivals might have been increasingly exposed as what they really were: an orchestration to display the status and socio-religious authority of municipal, equestrian and senatorial elites. They were large gatherings that provided diverse forms of entertainment, like processions and ludi, including gladiatorial games, altogether perhaps not too dissimilar to a village festival, fête votive or Kerwe/Kermesse today. But how important are they really for shaping the individual’s religious experience? This may have been different from the more engaging, personal experiences in other cults and in the mysteries. The many healing sanctuaries in the Roman world have inspired thousands of votive inscriptions and offerings; amazingly, many of the ‘spas’ are particularly indicated iconographically on the Tabula Peutingeriana, like Aquae Sextiae, Aquae Bormonis, Aquae Segetae or Andesina (Grand) (see also Grünewald 2018, 45).

In addition, whatever the size of a cult place, many local deities – be it a fertility, chthonic or celestial deity – would offer the individual a more active spiritual experience: not just the act of making a personal offering or vow (for heath, childbirth, etc.), but also the participation in acts of purification and ritual bathing, the experience the state of intoxication or trance, abstinence and ascetism, the promise of salvation or theurgy; many of these cults would also have required volunteers to take action, from making daily offerings or libations, cleaning the temple, to rehearsing musical or dance performances, and practising to carry a portable altar or effigy for a forthcoming procession, perhaps even up a mountain or into the sea.

It is therefore no surprise that much of the material evidence for religious activities derives from cult places that were more ‘popular’ with a wider public who donated diverse offerings and votives to their favourite deities. In the words of Greg Woolf (2003, 139), ‘cults that flourished outside the civic context, cults sustained not by existing social institutions but by their power to attract adherents from within the vast choices offered by polytheism’. This reflects a certain competitive nature, leading us to the idea of a ‘marketplace’ which John North already suggested in 1992. This ‘marketplace’ is perhaps more apparent when one talks about ‘autonomous religions’ (in the words of North): we might think here of the competition for followers between Christianity versus the ‘traditional’ cults (Pliny epistulae 10.96.9–10 from 112 CE on the abandonment of temples in cities and rural areas of Bithynia due to the spread of Christianity; see also Chiai 2020, 334). But ‘autonomous religions’ hardly existed in Roman times: the ‘religious marketplace’ was predominantly concerned with an ever increasing number of deities, cult places and mythical accounts whose ‘propagators’ (e.g. priest(esse)s, self-declared holy (wo)men, local councillors, etc.) were competing not only for worshippers and pilgrims, but also for economic resources.

Already the absence of any real frontiers within the empire must have contributed to an increasing market-like competitiveness between distant places of worship. We are not just talking about localised travelling, like within a civitas or province, but of individuals who could afford visiting far-flung sanctuaries. Apart from major Greek sanctuaries, made accessible to the wider public by Pausanias’ Description of Greece (see e.g., Funke 2010), we also find many other important centres of pilgrimage in the Roman West. In the western provinces, important supra-regional sanctuaries can be identified at Aix-la-Chapelle, Aquileia, Aquae Sulis/Bath, Fontes Sequanae, Grand, Hochscheid, Sanxay and Thun-Allmendingen, to mention just a few in alphabetical order, many of which also had hostels or guesthouses, like the explicitly mentioned hospitalia of the Mercury and Rosmerta santuary at Wasserbillig near Hochscheid (CIL XIII 4208; on pilgrimage in the Roman west, see Kiernan 2012; Grünewald 2018; for Grand, see Bertaux 1993). We even see emperors making dedications to presumed ‘native’ deities, like Diocletian and Maximinian to the god with the Celtic name Belenos in Aquileia (CIL V 732 (add. p. 1024) = ILS 625, c. 286–293 CE). Many deities may only have acquired unique epithets or surnames in Roman times in order to distinguish their cult from other ‘rival’ sanctuaries. In this competitive environment, votive offerings and votive inscriptions seem to have become an important means to advertise the powers of a healing deity; at the same time, they are generally the result of an individual’s vow, votum, rarely of a household or community, which seems so different from the evidence of other societies (e.g. pre-Roman Iron Age Europe, see Haeussler, Chapter 15).

In addition to healing sanctuaries, oracular sanctuaries also attracted travellers from far away, just like the personal pilgrimages to particular initiation cult places, like Eleusis, that were open to a wider group of wealthy travellers. Many sites across the Roman world seem to acquire several functions through time that appear to have gone beyond a deity’s original meaning, like astrology, cursing, oracles, etc., and many include baths and guest houses.

In order to survive in a changing world, many local shrines or sanctuaries had to be adapted and updated, for instance by investing in monumental architecture and monuments, in adopting new rituals in accordance with the zeitgeist, such as introducing the habit of writing curse tablets (defixiones) at the sanctuaries of Bath and Uley, or the astrological tablets of Egyptian origin at the Gaulish sanctuary of Grand (Goyon 1993; Kropp 2008). As in the case of defixiones and astrology, ideas were spreading across the empire, and it was down to individual ‘culture carriers’ (‘Kulturträger’) to transmit the knowledge across this interconnected world in which an individual can theoretically be instrumental in promoting and introducing innovations.

But who is the human actor who is responsible for such innovation? Was it the local priest who decides to go beyond existing orthopraxic rituals and introduce new features? Was it the regular devotee or worshipper? Or was it perhaps the spontaneous act by a visitor or passer-by that sparked off a new development? We can often imagine a combination of different factors. If we look at modern Japan, for example, we can identify many Shinto shrines that are being reimagined or reinvented to suit contemporary concerns, such as the idea of a natural power spot where visitors from the cities can absorb the energy of nature and the divine (Carter 2018, 151–3). In a period of uncertainty – here the anxieties about nature and one’s life in the modern, urbanised world – we see a bilateral/dialectic relationship between the concerns of a shrine’s priesthood and those of pilgrims and devotees: on one hand, preserving traditional practices (ritual practices, priestly garments, purification rituals, etc.), while at the same time expanding or re-interpreting divine functions (ibid.). And in modern-day Japan, as in the Roman world, it is difficult to establish who initiated the process –priest or worshipper, local or outsider? Perhaps individual acts created a certain group dynamic that led to innovation, notably in periods of societal stress and uncertainties when existing sociocultural and behavioural models fail to convince.

It is therefore no surprise that certain cult places kept developing and expanding in Roman times, adopting new features popular with worshippers, mirroring the ever-changing sociocultural understandings. In this respect, we can think of the well-known case of the snake-god Glycon, invented by Alexander of Abounoteichos in the second century CE, which became popular because it offered the worshippers three major ‘services’ – reflecting the zeitgeist – combined in one cult: (1) healing from illnesses, (2) prophecy and (3) salvation from fear of death by initiation into the mysteries (Chiai 2020, 334): the cult even spread from Anatolia to Syria and to the Danube provinces (see e.g. Šašel Kos 1991; on the concept of zeitgeist, see Haeussler and Webster 2020). This case shows the importance of a single individual, like Alexander as self-declared religious leader.

In our attempt to re-think the existing approaches to religious life in the Roman Empire, we need to develop a dynamic model that takes into account the varied and often contradictory choices and actions, in the line of the ‘Balkanisation of the brain’, a term coined by P. Veyne in his ‘Did the Greeks believe in their Myths?’ (1983) to describe the ‘plurality of modalities of beliefs’. Even more so in Roman times, individuals and social groups held different ‘beliefs’ side-by-side, which reflects the diverging religious experiences that people acquired in the Roman Empire. Ted Kaizer (2002, 27) similarly suggested a dynamic ‘model of an additive extension of an open system’ (see also Bendlin 1997). But instead of considering the different autonomous religious groups, cults or systems that were mutually aware of each other, exchanging ideas and/or resenting each other (see also North 1992, 176), we should aim for a bottom-up approach at the centre of which is the social agent’s experience and actions – and each individual’s religio-cultural understandings and experiences did not stop at artificial boundaries between ‘religions’ and/or ‘cults’.

Individualising the ‘global’ Roman world

The term ‘religious individualisation’ opens up a wide range of problems (Gordon 2015, 367–75). From a monotheistic viewpoint, individualisation is a much more ‘radical’ concept as it may involve acting against one’s community and family, breaking with norms, and/or rejecting established traditions and rituals (see e.g. Kippele 2008). But in the religious world in Roman times, pluralism was always the norm, but so was participating in collective events where a certain group pressure might force individuals to attend a community’s large civic festivals.

When we talk about ‘individualisation’ in the Roman world, we need to understand the changing societal structures within which any individual and/or social agent was acting in. Let us first consider the concept of an ideal ancient state, whether civitas, polis, natio or ‘tribe’, notably prior to the Roman conquest. This would be an autonomous community with a(n imagined) common ancestry, its own laws, behavioural patterns, its own deities and myths, demarcating itself from neighbouring communities. In such an ideal community, the choice of deities is hardly arbitrary: they were often considered active agents in a community’s history and present in a community’s sacred landscape. In Athens, for example, the entire landscape commemorates, so to speak, the divine presence, starting with the eponymous goddess Athena, to Artemis and Iphigenia at Brauron, and to the goddess Demeter who initiated the construction of her own sanctuary at Eleusis. The city of Rome was equally full of historical-religious associations, like the lacus Curtius and of course the lupercal, the den of the she-wolf who rescued Romulus and Remus (Cançik 1985–86). We see how closely intertwined a community, its history, deities and myths can be. In societies where religious, political, social and historical understandings can hardly be separated from each other, people were celebrating collective events for the safety and wellbeing of the entire community, whilst strengthening the bonds between individuals and consolidating existing hierarchies; and in some societies it would probably have been difficult for outsiders to become part of that community (e.g., on the question of restrictions imposed on the metics participating in Athenian cults, see Wijma 2014). In Iron Age Europe, we notice the construction of (probably seasonal) ceremonial and feasting enclosures that must have served these socio-politico-religious purposes, like at Corent (Poux and Demierre 2016). Whether in the Greek, Roman or Celtic world, ostentatious display by some individuals may also mean social exclusion for others (for the case of Hinduism, see Michaels 2016, ch. 6). And if we believe the Classical accounts on the druids, then it seems likely that they were very much in control of any religious acts since, e.g. according to Caesar, the druids oversee both private and public sacrifices in Gaul (de bello Gallico 6.13). In the Classical world, individual deities and sanctuaries were at the heart of a polis. At Ephesos, for example, social, political and religious life converged for centuries around the cult of Artemis. And in Roman times, the high priestesses, responsible for the provincial cult of the emperor, were also the high priestesses of Artemis. An interesting case is a dedication to Claudia Crateia Veriana which lists six generations of women who were priestesses in Ephesos, notaby hiereia and kosméteira of Artemis, high priestess (archiereia) as well as prytanis and gymnasiarch of the polis (see e.g. Van Bremen 1996, 318, n°10; Haeussler 2012b).

Whether this idealised concept of ‘polis religion’ ever existed in such a pristine form, even in Classical Greece, is another question, since aspects like magic, curse tablets and mystery cults were equally part of people’s religious experience in a polis (v. supra). Since Hellenistic times, and certainly in the increasingly ‘globalising’ Roman world, the very meaning of a ‘polis’ and ‘polis identity’ were gradually losing their significance not only for the economic and land-owning elites, who clearly looked beyond polis or civitas boundaries when it came to economic interests, political ambitions, inter-marriage, and so on, but for all strata of society. Yes, religion continued to be closely embedded in society, being used to promote municipal identities, but we see new developments that complement (and contradict) existing understandings and traditions, and go beyond the control of the established authorities.

Certainly by the first century CE, the available evidence allows us to identify countless individuals who endeavoured to better their social and economic situation. Individuals decided to invest in new businesses, adopt new production methods, find niche markets, start trading across provincial boundaries, even move production centres to new places, or they took the risk to move to a distant Roman province to start a new life (see e.g. Wieschowski 2001; Haeussler 2013, 155–7; Haeussler and Webster 2020). There is no doubt that social agents from across all social strata could (theoretically) take a decision that would change their destiny. And this also relates to people’s religious experience. Let us just imagine those roughly 10,000 provinciali who, each year, chose to join the Roman legions and auxiliary units. For each of them, it meant engaging in new structures, experiencing aspects of Roman (military) religion (as we see in the example of the feriale Duranum, P.Dura 54), engaging with colleagues of culturally and ethnically diverse origin, being moved around the Roman Empire, even in peace time (see study by Herz 2017). After retirement, some decided to return home, while others made the decision to marry and found a family in far-away lands, like the Palmyrene Barates who married his freedwoman, Regina, a Catuvellaunian, setting up a bilingual Palmyran-Latin inscription in South Shield (RIB 1065 = ILS 7063 = CSIR-GB I.1. 247). Sometimes, ex-officers even enjoyed a civic career, like Gaius Valerius Clemens, a primus pilus, who achieved the high-ranking office of duumvir quinquennalis, as well as being a flamen of the emperor and patronus of the colonia Augusta Taurinorum (Turin) in the late first century CE (CIL V 7007 = ILS 2544).

During their years of service, soldiers were not just experiencing and exchanging a variety of cultural and religious ideas, but they can also be instrumental in promoting cults: on Hadrian’s wall, soldiers set up dedications to the local mother goddesses of their home countries; other soldiers were instrumental in promoting Mithras or Jupiter Dolichenus in military contexts (e.g., a legionary donating aram [[et templum]] to Mithras: CSIR-D II.14, 14 from Bingen; see Collar 2012; 2013). For Richard Gordon, the cult of Mithras allowed ‘individual mystagogues to create their own personal religious constructions’ (Gordon 2015, 378, id. 2013), while John North (1992, 189–90) focusses our attention on the individual in the Mithras cult, trying to achieve a higher grade of initiation, even suggesting that Mithraism ‘may have been far more subversive of the normal assumptions of ancient life’ (North 1992, 189–90).

Is there any place in the Roman Empire where people were not affected by this process of individualisation, of having to take one’s own decisions, and sometimes against existing local ‘traditions’? One may assume that rural communities reflect a close-knit society where ‘traditions’ survived much longer, being handed down from one generation to the next. But was this really possible in the Roman Empire? Rural communities were far from being isolated: apart from being part of a web of contacts, like patronage networks, landlord-tenant and buyer-seller relationships, not to mention the sons of farmers who joined the army (e.g., the large number of Batavians: Roymans 2004), we also see innovations, like the need to specialise on profitable products, which in turn creates more dependency of the rural population on imported goods and thus their need to engage with markets where they engaged with town dwellers, traders, craftsmen, as well as with urban cults and performative events. Our rural dweller might buy a mass-produced Venus or dea nutrix terracotta figurine – a simple object like that may influence people’s religious understanding in the long run.

Cities like Alexandria, Antioch or Rome had become huge cosmopolitan and multi-ethnic hubs where different ‘religions’ were peacefully co-existing for generations (North 1992). On a smaller scale, we can find these cosmopolitan hubs across the Roman world, from the Roman foundations, notably coloniae consisting of citizens of various ethnic origin, to towns and cities at the empire’s margins (see for example Shaw et al. 2016; Leach et al. 2010 for Britain; Chiai 2020 for Phrygia). Multiculturalism must have been the norm in most parts of the Roman world.

In such a world, it seems hardly possible that local elites managed to keep control over social, economic and religious affairs in their community. There might have been some attempts by local elites to create an identity for the Roman-style civitates, like the ordo financing public sacrifices and festivals in a Roman way, as stipulated by the lex de colonia Genetiva, but we have to question just how successful they were and how long these attempts survived beyond the initial phase of (re)foundation as a Roman community (Haeussler 2011).

In the context of this volume, religious individualisation is embedded in a society in which the individual, i.e. the social agent, could make his/her own choices. Just like moving to a new town or acquiring property in another province or investing in a new business, individuals could also make religious choices regarding the worship of deities or the private initiation into a mystery cult, or provide their own ‘interpretatio’ of a local cult or sacred site, or introduce new types of votive offerings or even new deities. We just need to look at the available epigraphic, archaeological and sculptural evidence from across the Roman world to see the hugely wide range of deities and cults from which an individual can choose from.

The important premise for religious individualisation is the availability of choices. In virtually every region of the empire, various religious options were available simultaneously, contributing the religious ‘marketplace’. We may categorise them – at the risk of oversimplification – as:

1.Local or autochthonous deities and divine entities, often – but not necessarily – originating from pre-conquest times and frequently associated with ethnic identities, topographical features and local myths. Pre-Roman deities habitually survived, most notably in the ‘Greek East’, sometimes virtually unchanged, but often adapted to new socio-cultural environments and the use of new media. One often talks about an indigenous substratum for many local religions, be it a Hittite substratum in Asia Minor, Celtic substratum in much of Europe, Semitic in Syria, and so on. The idea of a substratum, however, is not only unhelpful (Kaizer 2002), but also very vague; such a substratum may not even have been recognisable to the contemporary worshippers. Moreover, we need a more constructive approach to religion: for example, what does a ‘Celtic substratum’ look like: is it just a theonym in Celtic? But if so, we need to consider the possibility that this theonym may not have existed in pre-Roman times (Haeussler 2012a; see Šašel Kos and Fauduet, this volume).

2.Graeco-Roman deities can be found in numerous forms outside the Greek world and the city of Rome. We may find ‘proper’ Graeco-Roman deities, for example, in Roman coloniae and castra (see also the feriale Duranum, v.supra), often side-by-side with local gods; moreover, local gods were interpreted or identified by a Graeco-Roman deity (on interpretatio Graeca, Romana, indigena, see Chiai et al. 2012). Sometimes, the iconography of a Graeco-Roman deity was adopted (and adapted) to represent a local divine entity – this depends also on the cultural and religious identity of each worshipper and how he/she interprets a particular deity or cult. Is it possible that individual acts of interpretatio led to the suppression of a deity’s ‘native’ theonym and identity?

3.The worship of the emperor and the divine house (traditionally assumed under the term ‘imperial cult’) can be found across the Roman Empire. But the form can vary enormously, ranging from the mere mentioning of the numen Augusti and domus divinae to actual dedications to individual emperors, from a political tool symbolising loyalty to an organised cult with priesthood and sacrifices.