Introduction

Greek and Roman temples, like medieval Christian cathedrals, attracted the most innovative architecture and the largest concentration of investment, whether of labor or of money. The deities to whom super-human powers were ascribed were considered to deserve the best that human endeavors could achieve. Moreover, the size and elaboration of the buildings were rivaled by the length and elaboration of the ceremonial, as festivals extended over several days and processions paraded through the whole town or even across the whole city-state. As paintings of Christ and the saints became the icons of the medieval world, not only attracting worship and displaying miraculous powers but becoming its most widely disseminated images, so too statues of gods were the prime icons of the Greek and Roman worlds, held to display supernatural power and becoming widely known symbols of the place where they were set up—often through their representation on coins.

But if pomp of ritual and magnificence of cult buildings and cult images link the worship of the pagan gods of Greek and Roman antiquity to late antique, medieval and indeed some modern manifestations of Christian worship, they also mask profound differences. Take the fact that the most widely circulated icon of a god in the early Roman empire was the image of the deified emperor. Or take the fact that the central cult act to the Olympian gods was the killing of an animal (or of a hundred or more animals at major festivals) and that it was the carcasses of sacrificed animals which provided most people with their only regular meat meals. Or consider that the sacrifice took place outside the temple, and that worshippers had little occasion to go inside except to admire the sculpted image of the god.

These salient differences between Greek and Roman religious practices and the ways in which Christians worship indicate nicely the manner in which cult and

Ritual in classical antiquity related to other aspects of life. As the worship of Hellenistic rulers and Roman emperors shows, and as the presence of temples within the cities everywhere has already revealed, religion was not, and could not be, separated from politics. As the prominence of animal sacrifice indicates, civic ritual continued to revolve around the products of agriculture and to keep in the foreground the precarious provision of subsistence. As the way temples were showcases for the gods betrays, there were no privileged interpreters of gods to men, no religious teachers explaining the ways of god to assembled congregations, and worship was a matter of awe and wonder at the manifestation of the divine, not a preparation for the presentation of humanity to god.

This chapter looks at the ways in which the material remains of religious activity— sanctuaries, temples, votive offerings, the bones of sacrificial beasts—draw our attention not merely to the conspicuous display of material wealth in religious cult, but to the ways in which cult activity was inseparable from wider civic life, offering a vivid picture of civic and imperial priorities, secular as well as sacred.