The preceding discussion of the specific contexts of religious experience in antiquity leads me to my final topic: the diversity of ancient religions. Indeed, some modern scholars choose to speak in terms of a plurality of Greek and Roman religions, thus emphasizing their difference from the organized unity that the singular noun religion implies. Compared with the unified systems found in Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, ancient paganism presents a variety that borders on the anarchic. This is most obvious in the case of myth, where very different stories could be told - even about apparently central myths, such as the destruction of Troy (Erskine 2001: 2-6) - in a way that flies in the face of Judeo-Christian notions of canonicity. Moreover, gods could have specific areas of responsibility at certain sites that did not wholly align with their more general representation. While Poseidon was generally associated with seafaring, he could have responsibility for other areas of life: at Athens he appears in the form of Poseidon Hippios, and was specifically associated with horses; at Delos he appears as Poseidon Asphaleios, and was regarded as keeping the island safe from earthquakes (Mikalson 2005: 33-34).
Such diversity increases when we turn to look at the world of the Roman empire, which encompassed an astonishing variety of cultures and, with them, a range of different religious traditions (Mellor 1992). This provoked various reactions. On the one hand, Roman public religion displayed, from the earliest times, an inexhaustible capacity to absorb new cults: we have already seen the example of Asclepius, but there were many others (Beard, North, and Price 1998: 1.64-98). At the same time, through a process of syncretism, deities with broadly similar characteristics could be regarded as diverse forms of the same divine power. The second-century ad novelist Apuleius provides a striking account of how the Egyptian goddess Isis was identified by different names in different places:
My sole divine power is adored throughout the world in manifold guise, with varied rites, and by varied names. Hence the Phrygians, first born of humankind, call me the Mother of the Gods at Pessinus; the autochthonous Athenians call me Cecropian Minerva; the sea-girt Cyprians call me Paphian Venus; the arrow-bearing Cretans call me Dictynnian Diana; the trilingual Sicilians call me Stygian Prosperina; the Eleusinians call me their ancient goddess Ceres; some call me Juno, others Bellona, others Hecate, others Rhamnusia. (Apul. Met. 11.5)
Syncretism, although it is especially pronounced in the Hellenistic world and Roman empire, was a feature of ancient religions from very early times. Archaeological evidence from Rome suggests that Romans were identifying their gods Vulcan and Minerva with the Greeks’ Hephaistos and Athena already by the sixth century (Cornell 1995: 147-48, 162). Shortly afterwards, we find Herodotus trying to draw equivalences between the religious systems of Greece and Egypt (2.42-50; T. Harrison 2000b: 182-89). These instances indicate how ancient religion was diverse not only across space, but also through time. New cults arose as the Greeks and Romans encountered the deities of other peoples; the system was endlessly dynamic.
This astonishing adaptability was not, at first, dented by paganism’s encounter with more intractable monotheistic systems like Judaism and Christianity (North 1992). An astonishing series of inscriptions from the Eastern Roman empire records the presence in Jewish synagogues of “god-worshipers” (theosebeis), apparently pagans with a sympathy for, or perhaps just a lively curiosity in, Jewish cult (Levinskaya 1996: 51-126). Elsewhere in the East, there is evidence for a pagan cult of the Most High God (Theos Hypsistos) with clear monotheistic tendencies (Mitchell 1999). This evidence points not only to the diversity of ancient religion, but also to how it does not always fit into the neat categories that we would wish to impose upon it: if polytheism is thought to be an essential characteristic of paganism, then what are we to make of the worship of Theos Hypsistos?
Another example, with which I will finish, similarly shows how the evidence for ancient religion cannot be as easily pigeonholed as modern scholars might wish. At
Mamre in Palestine stood an oak tree where, according to Jewish scriptures (the Christian Old Testament), the Hebrew patriarch Abraham met with three angels. (Genesis 18:1-8). In the fifth century ad, we know of a festival celebrated here that attracted Jews, because they claimed descent from Abraham, and Christians, because they regarded the three angels as a biblical sign of the Holy Trinity. Such Jewish and Christian attendance hardly occasions surprise, but our late antique report also notes that the festival was frequented by many pagans also, attracted by the story of the angelic apparition (Soz. HE 2.4.2-3). The festival at Mamre clearly had different meanings for different groups, and cannot simply be described as either Jewish or Christian or pagan: it was all three of these at once. In this blurring of the boundaries of religious identity at the very end of antiquity, we gain a particularly dizzying insight into the potential, and problems, presented by the study of ancient religion, in which simplistic interpretations derived from modern religious assumptions should have no place.
World History
