Religion in Roman Phrygia: From Polytheism to Christianity

By Robert B. Parker

Phrygia in the second and third centuries CE offers more vivid evidence for what has been termed “lived ancient religion” than any other region in the ancient world. The evidence from Phrygia is neither literary nor issued by cities or their powerful inhabitants but rather comes from farmers and herders who left behind numerous stone memorials of themselves and dedications to their gods, praying for the welfare of their families, crops, and cattle. In Religion in Roman Phrygia: From Polytheism to Christianity, Robert Parker opens a rare window into the world of those Sir Ronald Syme called “the voiceless earth-coloured rustics” who have been “conveniently forgotten.” The period in which Phrygian paganism flourished so visibly was also the period in which Christianity was introduced by the apostle Paul and took root. Parker presents a rich body of evidence and uses it to explore one of history’s great stories and enigmas: how and why the new religion overtook its predecessor, with the Christian God meeting needs previously satisfied by Zeus and the other gods.

• Language: English
• Publisher: University of California Press
• Release date: Sep 19, 2023
• ISBN: 9780520395497

Robert B. Parker

Robert B Parker was the best-selling author of over 60 books, including Small Vices, Sudden Mischief, Hush Money, Hugger Mugger, Potshot, Widows Walk, Night Passage, Trouble in Paradise, Death in Paradise, Family Honor, Perish Twice, Shrink Rap, Stone Cold, Melancholy Baby, Back Story, Double Play, Bad Business, Cold Service, Sea Change, School Days and Blue Screen. He died in 2010 at the age of 77.

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The publisher and the University of California Press Foundation gratefully acknowledge the generous support of the Joan Palevsky Imprint in Classical Literature.

Religion in Roman Phrygia

Religion in Roman Phrygia

From Polytheism to Christianity

Robert Parker

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UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA PRESS

University of California Press

Oakland, California

© 2023 by Robert Parker

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Parker, Robert, author.

Title: Religion in Roman Phrygia : from polytheism to Christianity / Robert Parker.

Description: [Oakland, California] : University of California Press, [2023] | Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2022059277 (print) | LCCN 2022059278 (ebook) | ISBN 9780520395480 (hardback) | ISBN 9780520395497 (ebook)

Subjects: LCSH: Phrygia—Religious life. | Phrygia—Antiquities.

Classification: LCC BL2290 .P37 2023 (print) | LCC BL2290 (ebook) | DDC 200.939/26—dc23/eng/20230510

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2022059277

LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2022059278

Manufactured in the United States of America

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CONTENTS

List of Illustrations

Preface

Introduction

1. Contexts of religious life

2. Priesthoods, finance, authority

3. Phrygian polytheism I: The gods

4. Phrygian polytheism II: Differentiated powers?

5. Heavenly and imperial gods

6. Consecrations and confessions at the sanctuary of Apollo Lairbenos

7. Phrygian gods and death

8. Christianity and paganism in Phrygia

9. Retrospect

10. The masked ball: Interpretatio and its effects

11. Envoi

Appendix A. Myths and traditions of city origins

Appendix B. ‘Honoured by/consecrated to Hekate’ and related texts

Appendix C. τὸν θεόν σοι, µὴ ἀδικήσῃς

Appendix D. Paganism and Montanism

Appendix E. The prose inscription for Epitynchanos and family

Appendix F. Iconography and ‘recovering the indigenous’

Bibliography

Index

ILLUSTRATIONS

MAP

Ancient Phrygia

FIGURES

1. Dedication of Artemas to Zeus Ampeleites

2. Vow of Sateira to Zeus Alsenos

3. Dedication of Philopator to Zeus, Hosios and Dikaios, and others

4. Dedication of Chrestos to Zeus Chryseos

5. Hands raised to beseech healing of a leg

6. Hermas’ dedication to Zeus Alsenos for his wife Babeis

7. Dedication of Antipas to Hosios Dikaios from the sanctuary at Yaylababa Köyü

8. Funerary monument of [F?]emos and Ammion for their foster-child Beroneike and themselves

9. Stele of Mnennas, ‘honoured by Hekate’

10. Iconography of gods on coins

PREFACE

My first draft was complete when the work of G. F. Chiai (Phrygien und seine Götter: Historie und Religionsgeschichte einer anatolischen Region von der Zeit der Hethiter bis zur Ausbreitung des Christentums) appeared, though I knew several previous articles of this scholar. As the title indicates, it attempts a ‘longue durée’ approach from which I explicitly draw back in chapter 10, and in other respects, too, ranges widely; my own much fuller treatment of the Phrygian evidence from the Roman period, the period when the subject is suddenly and brilliantly illuminated by inscriptions, retains, I hope, its value. Peter Thonemann’s admirable The Lives of Ancient Villages. Rural Society in Roman Anatolia (Cambridge, 2022) appeared when my manuscript was already with the publisher. Stephen Mitchell’s forthcoming monograph on the emergence of Christianity in Phrygia is eagerly awaited; how much I already owe to his work on the topic will be clear from my footnotes.

Younger colleagues working on Anatolia study Turkish, as they should. I can only apologise that I first became interested in Phrygia at an age when I felt little hope of acquiring a usable knowledge of the language.

For sending me offprints when requested I thank N. Eda Akyürek Şahin and Hale Güney; for invaluable help over coins my New College colleague Andy Meadows; for photographs, Justine Potts. At the University of California Press my thanks go to the ever courteous and helpful Eric Schmidt and Lekeisha Hughes, also to Gabriel Bartlett for meticulous copy-editing.

I dedicate the book again, this time collectively, to the three women who have brought happiness to my life, my late mother Janet, my wife Jo and my daughter Lucy.

Ancient Phrygia, reprinted by permission from P. Thonemann (ed.), Roman Phrygia (Cambridge, 2013).

Introduction

Phrygia in the second and third centuries CE offers perhaps more vivid evidence for what has quaintly been termed ‘lived ancient religion’ (for what is unlived religion, or who has ever taken that as a subject of study?) than any other region of the ancient world; it can certainly claim primacy among Greek-speaking parts of that world with the possible exception of late antique Egypt. In contrast to Greece itself, the documents that illustrate this religion are neither literary nor primarily issued by cities or by powerful inhabitants of cities but by agriculturalists: they pray for the welfare of their families, their crops, and their cattle, and these last appear, mute and touching suppliants, in many votive reliefs: ‘lovely tawny workers, ploughers of the earth’ as an epigram describes them—to kill one was supposedly a capital offence. ¹

A rare window is opened into the world of what Syme called ‘the voiceless earth-coloured rustics’ who are ‘conveniently forgotten’. ² Unlike peasants in most historical periods, the farmers of Phrygia in the second and third centuries have left numerous stone memorials of themselves, both gravemarkers and also, what is crucial for our purposes, dedications to their gods. Some from central Phrygia are carved on the famous Dokimeion marble, precious and highly exportable in large slabs, but also inevitably yielding small waste pieces that almost anyone could afford.

FIGURE 1. Dedication of Artemas to Zeus Ampeleites. Kütahya museum, SEG XXXIII 1145, photo J. Potts.

Others from northern Phrygia used marble from the quarries at Soa, administered as a filial of those at Dokimeion. (But where there were no local workshops, the lights become much dimmer for us.) A little paradoxically, therefore, we owe much of this evidence for local life to exploitation of the Dokimeion quarries by the Roman state; the explosion of marble monuments in Phrygia from the second to the fourth century CE indeed ‘corresponds to the period of intensive Imperial quarrying in the region.’ ³ Rural sanctuaries were crammed with dedications; what were probably quite minor shrines can be known to us through dozens or even hundreds of pieces (some of them uninscribed but showing the dedicator, whom the god would recognise, presumably). ⁴ Occasionally, the contents have been excavated as a group; more often they have entered the art market through clandestine excavation and been scattered but brought back together on the page by scholarship on the basis of iconography and distinctive local epithets. Yet this enticing material is little known except to specialists.

FIGURE 2. Vow of Sateira to Zeus Alsenos. Phrygian Votive Steles no. 140

The period in which Phrygian paganism flourished so visibly to our eyes was also the period in which Christianity, introduced by the apostle Paul, took root, as early and as successfully as in any part of the Roman world. The sources seldom allow us to see the two world-views in direct confrontation, but it would be a strange limitation, a neglect of one of history’s great stories and great enigmas, not to consider how and why the new religion strangled its predecessor and tried to meet for Phrygians the needs hitherto met by Zeus and the rest of the gods.

But, before turning to religion, a word first about ‘Phrygia’. Phrygia and Phrygians have been commonly spoken of from (at least) the time of Homer to this day; in Greco-Roman iconography, one could always tell a Phrygian from his cap; but what exactly is one studying in studying Phrygian religion in the Roman period? ⁵ We are far removed from the glory days of the expansive early Phrygian Empire (eighth through sixth centuries BCE), but it left linguistic traces in the concepts of ‘Hellespontine Phrygia’ ⁶ or ‘Phrygia by the Sea’; the Roman Phrygia of this book, however, will be a landlocked region. The dominant language of inscriptions in Roman Phrygia, as in all Asia minor, was Greek, but in the late first century CE there appear inscriptions in ‘neo-Phrygian’ which are taken to attest to its survival as a spoken language. Can we then adopt a linguistic criterion? But to define Phrygia by neo-Phrygian would create a surprising result: it is unattested in much of the west and south-west of the ‘Phrygia’ of modern maps, but extends eastwards into their ‘Galatia’. ⁷ If, accordingly, we extend our Phrygia into Galatia (as doubtless we should, to some degree), we are abandoning, rightly, any attempt to make use of Roman administrative divisions to define Phrygia. ⁸ Galatia indeed raises special problems of its own. It only emerged (as a human reality, not until 25 BCE as a province) when, in the third century BCE, the incoming Celtic Galatians settled and became politically dominant, but without expelling the previous Phrygian inhabitants who still made up a majority of the population: ⁹ a Galato-Phrygian region, therefore, within which falls Pessinous, centre of the cult of the Mother.

We should obviously take account of what those alive in the relevant period judged to be Phrygian. By this criterion, the self-description under examination of one Hierax, martyred in Rome around 165 CE, shows that Iconium (nowadays assigned to Lycaonia) could still be seen as Phrygian at that date, as it had been for Xenophon (‘Phrygia’s furthermost city’) half a millennium before. ¹⁰ At home Hierax would have seen neo-Phrygian inscriptions in the cemeteries. If given to Phrygia, Iconium would bring with it Laodikeia Katakekaumene a little to the north, again mostly put in Lycaonia today. ¹¹ The Hellenistic funerary inscription on Rhodes of ‘Meniskos from Phrygian Neapolis’ will also give that town in the Kyllanian plain in the south-east to Phrygia, not Pisidia. ¹² Unfortunately, contemporary testimony, such as that of Meniskos and Hierax, is rare. One might attempt a definition by material culture, or selected aspects of the same. But it is notoriously difficult to align material culture exactly with the self-understanding of its users. An onomastic investigation could certainly be of interest; ¹³ but, again, a name inherited within a family need not correlate with the self-understanding of its bearer.

There may be some comfort in the fact that Strabo already found Phrygia, Caria, Lydia and Mysia ‘hard to distinguish’ (δυσδιάκριτα); he speaks of certain ‘part-Phrygian’ (µιξοφρύγιος) small towns ‘which also have a Pisidian element’. The naming of an important town in the south-east as Antioch ‘by Pisidia’ is in itself a revealingly hesitant designation. ¹⁴ Very likely the self-identification of inhabitants of some of these regions (and self-identification is all that is at issue) would have been hesitant or variable. Reference works arranged by province are obliged to draw firm distinctions, and the inscriptions from, say, Laodikeia Katakekaumene find themselves assigned now to Lykaonia, now to eastern Phrygia. LGPN VC finds it necessary to introduce a blurred category, absent from many entries but occasionally well-populated (see e.g. cases of Ιµαν listed as of ‘Phrygia (S.E.)—Pisidia (N.)’. Maps have the advantage over lists in that the regional identifiers can hover over the centre of each region in question, without any attempt being made to draw boundaries at the edges. I too shall hover mostly over what no one would deny to be Phrygian, while noting, and noting the status, of interesting material from the marginal areas.

A word should be said about a ‘koinon of Phrygia’ which appears on coins of Apamea in the first and again in the third centuries CE. Apamea was also an assize centre—that is, a place where the provincial governor periodically held court; the assizes were a major event in the city’s calendar, occasion for a major market and for the ephebes to compete in games. Two of the individuals who issued ‘koinon of Phrygia’ coins in the third century appear on different coins as agonothetes or panegyriarchs—that is, magistrates charged with organising games. The bold proposal has been made to conflate the games associated with the assizes with games presided over by the issuers of the ‘koinon of Phrygia’ coins. ¹⁵ If so, the coins tendentiously present the convergence of people from much of Phrygia on Apamea, a consequence of the assizes and thus of external domination, as an expression of ethnic feeling and an acknowledgement of Apamea’s privileged place within Phrygia (the relevant coin inscriptions in fact present themselves as being issued by ‘koinon of Phrygia, Apameans’). On that view the koinon of Phrygia is merely an ‘imagined community’, one imagined or rather invented in the interests of Apamea. Why it appears so intermittently is mysterious. But on no view is it an important institution.

Defining Phrygia is problematic, therefore; but more important is the difficulty of drawing sharp distinctions between the ‘religion of Roman Phrygia’ (whether at its smallest or greatest expansion) and the religions of its neighbours. Louis Robert often warned against all attempts to generalise about Asia Minor; but, equally, no attempts to segment it neatly in social and cultural terms can succeed. Two of the gods most prominent in Phrygia, Zeus and Apollo, are prominent throughout Anatolia; Mother and Men are not quite ubiquitous, but still present in much of the peninsula. So-called confession inscriptions—ones where an individual who has fallen ill or suffered in some other way sets up a monument to acknowledge fault and honour the offended god—are regularly seen as a prime symptom of Phrygian religiosity. A typical example: ‘I Sosandros of Hierapolis came to the shared altars when I had broken an oath and was impure. I was punished. I proclaim to all not to despise (Apollo) Lairmenos, since he will have my stele as warning example.’ But many more confession inscriptions have been found in eastern Lydia than in Phrygia, and within Phrygia none in the east or even in the Upper Tembris valley which is otherwise so prodigal of inscriptions. ¹⁶ Phrygia can, by contrast, claim a majority of dedications to the remarkable god or gods Hosios kai Dikaios, but Mysia Abbaitis, too, offers a good number and the cult spills over in other directions too. ¹⁷ At a different level, the village is the main context and focus of Phrygian religious activity in a way unfamiliar from mainland Greece and even some regions of Asia Minor (e.g. Caria, Lycia). But this emphasis is shared with (again) Lydia ¹⁸ and also Bithynia. The cult association of Xenoi Tekmoreioi brings together devotees from south-eastern Phrygia and northern Pisidia. In the plain of Karayük in the extreme south-east, tomb violators are threatened with the wrath of the ‘Pisidian gods’. ¹⁹ Not everything that will here be discussed is exclusive to Phrygia, therefore. And even within Phrygia there is local variation; not much is pan-Phrygian. ²⁰ But everything here discussed does indeed occur in substantial areas of Phrygia, whereas any generalisation about Asia Minor or even about an extended segment of it, such as ‘Phrygia, Lydia and Bithynia’, would, like the curate’s egg, be good only in parts.

The timescale for the presentation of Phrygian polytheism which is the core of the book is dictated by the evidence, which comes, a few early swallows aside, from the second century and first half of the third century CE. But, in trying to answer the question of how Christianity met the religious needs hitherto met by paganism, I look onwards somewhat in chapter 9; and chapter 10 is a brief retrospect to the little that can be known about religion in Phrygia in the pre-Roman period.

1

Contexts of religious life

Villages, associations

Where there is no church, the first question to be asked is about the various worshipping groups, the contexts within which religious activity took place. The home or household ought to be the starting place, but, rich and spectacular though our knowledge of the Phrygian extended family is, ‘the Phrygian house’ is an area inaccessible to scholarship; nothing can be said about domestic rites. Dedications at village shrines by or on behalf of members of these extended families are a different matter; they will form the bulk of the evidence discussed in what follows. ¹ Families aside, much the most well-attested worshipping body is the village (kome), from which at this date a ‘settlement’ (katoikia) or group of ‘settlers’ (katoikoi, katoikountes) seem indistinguishable. ² It is correctly observed that in Phrygia the dividing line between large villages and small towns (such as most Phrygian ‘cities’ were) was a fine one, demonstrably crossed by some communities and local groupings. ³ But it is the villages—usually individual villages, though groupings occasionally appear ⁴—that leave most traces of their religious life. Villages make collective dedications, and individuals dedicate for the well-being of (themselves and) their villages. ‘Village priests’ (ἱερεῖς κωµητικοί) occasionally appear; one claimed to be priest of two villages. ⁵ How village priests operated is not clear, given that the norm in polytheism was to be a priest of a particular god, not of a community: did they serve all ‘the gods who protect’ a particular village, and, if so, does this imply that such gods had shared sanctuaries? Or is a ‘village priest’ one of potentially several priests appointed by the village, what we might call a public priest?

Rather revealingly, whereas subdivisions of the cities are almost invisible in religious terms, various subgroups are active within or in close association with villages. Two remarkable reliefs illustrate the role of what the accompanying inscriptions term phratries at Thiounta, a village dependent on Hierapolis. ⁶ Phratries in Greece were hereditary associations notionally based on kinship; we do not know whether they were that in Phrygia, too, or whether the word just meant association. A top register of the reliefs shows gods and, perhaps, the proto-Phrygian cultivator Gordios; below are three rows each consisting of eight named phratores; below them are cattle, musicians and musical instruments. One of the reliefs specifies that the phratores are honoured ‘because they held the pannychis’ (all-night rite) ‘for Zeus for eight days and provided oil for eight days’. So, they organised (paid for?) for the village feasting (the cattle), pannychides, music, competitions (which are implied by the ‘oil’) over seven days. From another village of the region, that of the Motaleis, comes a dedication to the ‘gods of the Motaleis’ by the ‘hetaireia of Arzimneis’ consisting of at least seventeen, perhaps again twenty-four men; a similar dedication by a group of ten may well come from the same sanctuary; a text ‘copied after sunset in a courtyard, amid strenuous opposition and threats of violence’ by Ramsay at Kabalar, again in the region, appears to attest a phratry recruited from two villages (Salouda and Melokome). ⁷ A few more inscriptions show the existence, though not in detail the activities, of phratries; one dedicates to Men Plouristreon, one to Men Askaenos, another is specifically devoted to the worship of an unknown figure called Ouargasos; they are sometimes involved in setting up funerary monuments, though whether in these cases that was their primary function is not clear. ⁸ Syngenika (kin associations) also put up funerary monuments: Phrygian funerary monuments often contain long lists of relatives (very revealing for our knowledge of the structure of Phrygian families) who honour the dead, and one might think that syngenikon is just a portfolio term for such a group of relatives. But on one occasion a syngenikon makes a dedication; and in an unpublished inscription a syngeneia is reportedly responsible for building a temple of Zeus. ⁹

The much discussed term βεννος, on which are based βεννάρχης, βεννεῖται and the epithet of Zeus Bennios, probably indicates another such group, possibly one entrusted with a ritual act or form of celebration (of nature unfortunately unknown) of βεννεύειν. ¹⁰ Some other collective terms, mostly better attested in Lydia, also occur: ¹¹ συνοδία, δοῦµος, συµβίωσις. This last becomes vivid in a dedication which runs ‘With good fortune. The symbiosis to Alsenos. [May he be?] propitious to the settlement [katoikia]. [Then in hexameters] To Alsenos ancestral great Zeus nineteen men—distinguished Achaeans—, o bright Zeus, set up an altar.’ ¹² With its prayer on behalf of the settlement, this symbiosis reveals itself as not, or not only, a private society, ¹³ but one involved, like the phratries of Thiounta, with the religious life of the village. We glimpse this role of smaller groups of probably more prosperous villagers within village religious life only occasionally, but it may well have been common and important.

A cluster of dedications to Dionysus or Zeus Dionysus from the regions of Dorylaion and Nakoleia again reveal private associations integrated into the life of their villages: although the dedicants describe themselves as (new) mystai or new bacchoi, they also commonly identify themselves as belonging to a village and may seek favour for the village as well as for themselves: ‘the mystai of Korosea [?], new bacchoi, for themselves and for the village a vow to Zeus Dionysus’ is an example. ¹⁴ These mystai were clearly not seeking to set themselves apart. (The ‘mystai of the first sacred thiasos’ mentioned below from Acmonia look like a different phenomenon.)

Many villages were located on private or imperial estates. Their religious life looks much like that of other villages, ¹⁵ apart from occasional expressions of loyalty to controlling officials or the imperial house.

I turn to subdivisions of the cities. Eight (or nine) of the Phrygian cities are known to have been subdivided into tribes; more perhaps were, ¹⁶ but there is all but no trace that these subdivisions operated as worshipping groups, either with cults of their own or as an organising basis for public festivals; the only clear exception is that individuals endowing a post-mortem memorial fund for themselves might use civic subdivisions to perform the commemorative acts. ¹⁷ Professional guilds are attested in a few cities, most abundantly in Apameia and Hierapolis, but, again, any religious functions they may have had are almost invisible except in Hierapolis, where they were regularly involved with the tendance and crowning of graves. ¹⁸ At Aizanoi two brothers (?) made a dedication to Zeus Bennios ‘for the society of gardeners at Steunos’, while at Pessinous the officials of a similar society dedicated from the common funds to Demeter Karpophoros. ¹⁹ But neither text shows that the society functioned regularly as a worshipping body. At Acmonia the ‘mystai of the first sacred thiasos’ dedicated a hall and adjoining room to Dionysos Kathegemon (the god imported from Pergamum) ‘for their own use’. This is a tantalising text: it shows that there were several sacred thiasoi at Acmonia, but were they publicly recognised? And did they share a sanctuary, within which individual thiasoi had to mark out their own space? There were also mystai of Dionysus Kathegemon at or close to nearby Sebaste, but there, too, their relation to the public cult is unclear. At or near Acmonia, a group known as ‘Kouretes’, a name otherwise unattested nearer than Ephesus, has recently emerged: presumably the claim to have hosted Zeus’ birth, widespread throughout Anatolia, was here acted out in some way by a group imitating the Kouretes who danced at the god’s birth (unless the birth in question was that of Dionysus). ²⁰ In Hierapolis the ‘standard-bearers’ (σηµιαφόροι) of the great god of the city, Apollo Archegetes, were organised as a guild; but we hear of them only in the context of commemorative celebrations for their dead members. So, too, with the ‘mystai of the phyle of Zeus’ at Amorion. ²¹

Cities

The religious life of the Phrygian cities presents itself to us much less vividly than that of the Phrygian villages, or than that of the cities on the west coast. Literary evidence barely exists before late antiquity, and the types of inscription that illuminate other parts of the Greek world—calendars, ²² ‘sacred laws’, ²³ sales of priesthoods—are almost absent. The explanation is partly that, by the time Phrygian documents become numerous, inscriptions of these classes have become rare everywhere. Even at this date one might have hoped for a text regulating a festival in detail, such as the Demostheneia inscription from Oinoanda in Lycia, but nothing of the kind survives. The religious institution most abundantly attested in inscriptions is the imperial cult, but even here we learn much more of the high office in the cult held by individuals (or their forebears!) locally or provincially, than of the celebrations over which they presided. The imperial cult aside, we can often identify the chief god of the major, and some minor, cities, ²⁴ various agonistic festivals (but very few of any other type) can be named; ²⁵ a few civic sanctuaries are named in inscriptions; ²⁶ fewer still have been identified on the ground or excavated; and a rather haphazard selection of public priesthoods chance to be mentioned in honorary inscriptions. ²⁷ The evidence of coins is problematic. ²⁸ Some suppose that any god depicted on a city’s coinage received a public cult in that city. A more cautious view will accept only gods who fall into one of three classes: those who dominate a city’s coinage, as, for instance, Dionysus, predictably, on the coins of Dionysopolis; gods chosen to represent the city on homonoia coins; gods from outside the familiar iconographic spectrum, or depicted in distinctive ways, or given distinctive epithets, and thus probably locally specific. And, by their nature, coins can barely give details of the rites and worshippers of a given god.

Seldom, if ever, do enough of these items of evidence come together to create a clear and vivid picture. All those involved in the administration of a testamentary foundation set up by one Praxias in Acmonia were required to invoke as divine witnesses to their integrity ‘the theoi Sebastoi and the ancestral gods and Zeus Stodmenos and Soter Asklepios and Artemis Ephesia.’ ²⁹ Whether the trio ‘Zeus Stodmenos, Soter Asklepios, Artemis Ephesia’ comes from a civic oath or is the donor’s personal choice is unknown; if the former, it is a rare attestation of a civic grouping of top or representative gods. At Blaundos, which has been taken as an example of the small (and so typical) Phrygian city, a temple of Demeter and another temple complex are known on the ground, and inscriptions add dedications to emperors and members of the imperial family (nos. 9–10), a life priest of Athena Nikephoros and Homonoia (the former obviously derived from Blaundos’ founder Pergamum: no. 1), an annual priest of Dionysus Kathegemon (this too Pergamene), and a dedication to Sabazios (no. 11). ³⁰ Even if we suppose just five thousand Blaundians, only a fifth of whom lived within the city, this is a meagre supply of gods.

About Hierapolis, a much more important place illustrated by what is probably the richest epigraphy of any Phrygian city, there is naturally more to be said. ³¹ Many documents attest the civic primacy of Apollo Archegetes, owner of the one identified temple, honoured on an unidentified occasion by a guild of semiaphoroi, standard-bearers. Apollo is also worshipped in or near the city under four more epithets, two Hellenic, Pythios and Aktios, two local, Lairbenos and Karios. (I speak here and elsewhere of Apollo ‘Lairbenos’ because this is the form in which that epithet appears on coins of Hierapolis; but no fewer than eleven alternative spellings are attested. ³²) Two local forms of Zeus, too, the Zeuses Bozios and Tro(i)os, are known from coins and (in the case of Bozios) dedications; a distinctive iconographic type is perhaps Bozios. By contrast, the epithet under which Zeus received ‘annual libations and sacrifices’ performed and paid for by his priest Tiberius Iulius Myndos is not recorded. We also hear of temples and/or priests of Demeter, Aphrodite Ourania, Dionysus Kathegemon (served by a hierophant), and probably Heracles. Men and Sarapis both represent the city on homonoia coins. Other gods (Artemis, Hecate-Selene, Hera, Athena, Poseidon, Hermes, the Dioscuri, Asclepius and his team, Nemesis) appear on coins or on the abundant remains of architectural ornaments from various buildings, the theatre above all; some, no doubt, had cults, ³³ but coins and decorations in themselves prove no more than that they formed part of the cultural koine which the city shared. An inscription records a decree of council and people honouring a meritorious archigallos with a statue: that aside, there is no trace in the epigraphic record of the galli who appear prominently in literary evidence ³⁴ for the religious life of the city. And finally one should mention a ‘priest of the people’, a ‘priestess of the Dodekatheon’, a statue of the ‘goddess Euposia’, and the abundant evidence for priests in the imperial cult. I have extended this bare list to show the limits of what can be achieved; it is hard to get beyond listing, to put flesh on these bones. Such is the norm in the cities.

Hierapolis itself, as it happens, offers an exception to the dryness of the bones: dramatic accounts tell of the Ploutonion with its mephitic vapours deadly to all living creatures entering therein except the privileged servants of the Mother (whose cult in the city is thereby attested), the Galloi. We hear of all this only because the remarkable physical feature of the mephitic cave attracted the attention of literary sources. But brilliant excavations have now revealed the Ploutonion with its considerable architectural elaboration. ³⁵ The complex included a ‘cultic theatre’, and a late antique source speaks of ‘initiates’. Accordingly, ‘Mysteries’ can be tentatively postulated, a genus not otherwise attested in Phrygia. ³⁶ That the cult at the famous site was elaborated in this way is very possible. But we lack the material for a precise picture of what might have happened.

Several cities contained thriving and integrated Jewish communities. At Akmonia, the synagogue was built by a non-Jewish ‘god-fearer’, Julia Severa; she also served as ‘high priestess and agonothetis of the whole house of the theoi Sebastoi’. Jews probably served on city councils and might hold high civic office, as in other areas of Asia Minor. ³⁷ At Hierapolis, a remarkable funerary foundation provided for commemoration of the dead man and his family members (not necessarily Jews themselves) both at the Passover and Pentecost and also at the Roman Kalends. ³⁸ The extraordinary appearance of Noah’s Ark (Noah identified by name) on third-century coins of Apamea (a city whose byname Kibotos means box, chest) has traditionally also been explained by the influence of a Jewish community; the relocation of Ararat in Phrygia is also found in the Sibylline oracles, ³⁹ works generally believed to be of Jewish origin. But it has been pointed out that there is more abundant evidence for early Christianity in the city; Christians had no less incentive than Jews to connect their city’s byname with what for them, too, was sacred tradition, an association perhaps brought closer by the ‘brackish waters, fossilised shellfish and unstable hydrography of the Apamean district’, so suggestive of a once-flooded place. ⁴⁰

However that may be, myths and traditions of foundation are perhaps the aspects of Phrygian civic religion that become most vivid for us. In various cities there feature as founders or ancestors (or figures associated with the city’s prehistory in other ways) Phrygians such as Midas (free of his ass’s ears) and Marsyas, Phrygians who fought at Troy such as Otreus and Mygdon and perhaps Euphorbus (but not Trojans at large, ⁴¹ except Anchises and his descendants, a special case), and descendants of Greek heroes such as Akamas son of Theseus, even at Nacoleia Heracles himself or at Iconium Perseus. The characters involved, Phrygian, Trojan or Greek, are with few exceptions familiar from Greek myth or brought into genealogical connection with those who are: this second class includes many eponyms of cities: Dorylaos, an otherwise unattested son of Heracles; Azen, son of Tantalos; Akmon, father of Mygdon; Kelainos son of Poseidon. ⁴² Even cities named for monarchs of the historical period might acquire a ‘pre-foundation’ in the mythological period: so, for instance, Eumeneia, which, on one account, acquired its name because Hyllos son of Heracles ‘had a good stay’ (eu meinas) there. Several also joined the long list of cities in Asia Minor that put the infant years of Zeus on their coinage, apparently to claim that the birth occurred on what was later to be their site. ⁴³ The date of the various traditions is usually unknowable, though the prominence of Aeneas and Ascanius clearly betrays Roman influence; that Greek founders came more into vogue when the Hellenic league at Plataea attracted members from afar and Hadrian established his Panhellenion is highly probable. ⁴⁴ What is clear is that these myths acquired public resonance; many are known not just from poetic or antiquarian sources but are alluded to on coins or on public inscriptions: Heracles ‘the founder’, for instance, on a coin of Nacoleia, or a long verse inscription of Sebaste linking the city with Ganymede. A mythological origin was not de rigueur, however: the citizens of Blaundos and Peltai proudly declare themselves ‘Macedonian’ on their coins, those of Apollonia Mordiaion as ‘Lycian Thracian settlers’ (while also honouring ‘Alexander the Founder’). ⁴⁵

Above the level of the city, a koinon Phrygias is mentioned on three issues of Apamean bronze coins in the first century CE and again occasionally in the third century; the individual then responsible for the issue can be designated as agonothete or panegyriarch. The panegyris in question, it has been suggested, is none other than the great market associated with the annual assizes at Apamea, which had become by far the most important event in the Apamean calendar; the partial rebranding of the assizes, an instrument of Roman administration, as a panegyris of Phrygia would be a way of putting a nativist spin on an unattractive reality of empire. ⁴⁶ But we do not know what god the assize/panegyris might have been associated with, or what religious activities it might have contained.

A group falling into no other category, finally, is the association of Xenoi Tekmoreioi, which met to honour Artemis (and perhaps Men) at a site twenty kilometers or so north-west of Antioch by Pisidia (Barr. 62 F 5). ⁴⁷ The fairly wealthy individuals who could afford to become members travelled to the site from, in the main, unlocated villages which lay, to judge from the small number of recognisable towns mentioned, in south-eastern Phrygia and northern Pisidia; on arrival they feasted and, at least on some occasion, performed the mysterious ritual of τεκµορεύειν. Although other sanctuaries attracted devotees from several surrounding villages or towns, ⁴⁸ no other has a recognised and listed membership on this scale. It is therefore frustrating that the nature of τεκµορεύειν, also performed at the sanctuary of Men Askaenos near Antioch, remains completely unknown.

City and country

In Phrygia, as throughout Anatolia, the question arises of the relation between the religion of town and countryside. Town versus country is one of three overlapping two-tier models, alongside Greco-Roman versus indigenous and rich versus poor, which it can be tempting to apply to the material. It is certainly the case that not every god attested in a given region will have been familiar or of interest to every inhabitant of that region at every date. A full listing of the gods found in inscriptions from the territory of Aizanoi, for instance, will include Athena Polias, the Eleusinian goddesses, and Poseidon and Amphitrite. But these three gods or pairs of gods are known in Aizanoi exclusively from a single dedication set up by in 157 CE by the very grand M. Ulpius Appuleius Eurycles, the city’s representative in the Panhellenion from 153 to 157 CE, perhaps on his return from the meeting of 157; Athena Polias and the Eleusinian goddesses look like a gesture to Athens, the site of the meeting; Poseidon and Amphitrite perhaps thanks for a safe journey home. ⁴⁹ A good panhellene renowned for his culture, Eurycles chose gods who were panhellenic, not local. But that conduit from the larger world led only to Aizanoi: few other Phrygian cities belonged to the Panhellenion, and even within those few its doings were of interest only to a tiny minority of top people. Again, although we can probably assume that the free inhabitants of villages were in principle citizens of the city in whose territory the village lay, ⁵⁰ we find no trace in Phrygia of the kind of structural integration of countryside with city familiar from Attica, whereby villagers went to Athens to attend both political meetings and festivals.

But many cases can also be adduced that work against any crude two-tier model. ⁵¹ The cities did not turn their backs on indigenous deities or even pretend to do so: Men and Meter are present on many civic coinages; Meter Adrastou has a priest and priestess at Attouda; and though some gods who appear in civic contexts bear panhellenic epithets (Apollo Archegetes, Apollo Propylaios, Zeus Pandemos), those of others are more singular and seemingly local—Apollo Stodmenos or Karios, Zeus Bozios or Troios. ⁵² A citizen of Eumeneia in the third century assembled a remarkably miscellaneous portfolio of offices: lampadarches (in what cult we do not know), priest of Zeus Soter and Apollo and Men Askaenos and Agdistis mother of the Gods and Isis and the Pax Augusta. ⁵³ Confession stelai are usually seen as the supreme expression of an Anatolian village mentality, but (Apollo) Lairbenos, whose sanctuary near Motella has yielded