Temples

In Rome itself, religious practice, experience, and cultural significance rested on the location of cult sites - within or beyond Rome’s sacred pomerium, or city boundary, for example - and on the myths that legitimized these places in the names of heroes and gods. Restorations of earlier temples with new iconography might link a traditional cult with the increasingly central figure of the emperor. The inclusion of new temples and cults within the pomerium signified the broadening of supernatural protectorship for a holy city: Magna Mater, Apollo, Isis. In a city like Ostia, ‘‘foreign’’ cult sites were likewise set off on the urban periphery, while the chief temples deemed traditional occupied the center forum (Beard, North, and Price 1998: 167-210; Scheid2003: 60-76).

Cult places in Rome, its environs, and colonies served primarily as the locations for public ritual - sacrifice, feasting, prayer, vows - and their layouts reflected this ‘‘occasional’’ function. Raised on a platform, a cult statue was partially enclosed in a cella, a house for the divinity (conceptualized according to regional ideals of domestic habitation) with a porch (pronaos) and stairs, before which stood one or more sacrificial altars. The ‘‘priests’’ who officiated in these rituals invariably came from the ranks of the civic elite - who combined cultic with political leadership - rather than a segregated class of ritual experts. In the precinct of the cult place might be found votive stelae, rooms for feasting in honor of the god, theaters, and, in the case of healing sanctuaries, rooms for incubants (Derks 1998: 185-213; Scheid 2003: 66-73). Outside Rome, the location of temples and sanctuaries depended on landscape features (hilltops, rivers and springs, forests), economy (the edges of cultivated areas, towns and districts seeking the favors of particular gods), and cultural or local identity (the boundaries or pilgrimage centers of agricultural, pastoral, warrior, or mercantile peoples). In this way, cult places both integrated and demarcated social identity (Mitchell 1993: 19-31; Derks 1998: 132-44). Furthermore, while Hellen-ized or Romanized cultures tended to adopt Greek or Roman names for their indigenous gods - Zeus, Heracles, Diana - the strongly regional character of cult places remained, whether through localizing titles - Zeus Narenos or Men Selmeanos - or iconographic features or simply through local meanings (on Asia Minor, Mitchell 1993: 19-31; on Gaul, Derks 1998: 73-130). In this way, as anthropologists have observed for village India, the shrine images function as both local versions of a ‘‘great’’ deity and universalizing forms of a local deity (see Redfield 1956: 67-104; Frankfurter 1998a: 97-106).

In the Near East, temples had a more distinct separation from economic and civic life, supported as they were by full-time priestly institutions and often maintaining essential rites and images of gods beyond public view. In the extensive cult precincts of Egypt and Syria, often comprising sanctuaries to several gods, ritual professionals would adorn images of gods and carry them in procession, perform prayers and hymns for cosmic protection on a perpetual cycle, study and copy ancient texts, and manage an often thriving temple economy. A popular piety also flourished by such temples, oriented towards specific shrines in the precinct and conducted through the literate, creative facilities of certain priests.

For Roman and Greek observers the temples of Hierapolis in Syria, Jerusalem in Palestine, and Thebes in Egypt were the awesome spectacles of the ancient world, radiating antiquity, mystery, and authority (e. g. on Egypt: Strabo 17.1; on Hierapolis: Luc. Syr. D.; on Jerusalem: Ep. Aristeas 83-120; Mk 13:1). Temple professionals sought to cultivate Roman popular and imperial patronage both by showing their disinclination to rebellion and through innovations: the development of new oracles (e. g. that of Bes at Abydos in upper Egypt), the proffering of‘‘mysteries’’ to spiritual pilgrims, the translation of traditions and texts into Greek, and the ‘‘syncretism’’ of temple gods with Greek or Roman divinities - an endeavor often facilitated through iconography (Egyptian Isis as Demeter, Syrian Atargatis as Hera). Here was a more active, systematic attempt to mediate between ‘‘great’’ (Hellenistic) and local forms of divinity than what one finds in Asia Minor and the western Roman colonies, where the indigenous gods did not have a millennium of temple-based traditions behind them and thus profited considerably from a Roman guise. Moreover, established temple cultures, such as the Egyptian, Syrian, and (before 70 ce) Jewish, were able to retain traditional iconography - or, in the Jewish case, a relative aniconicity - while still absorbing aspects of Hellenism and offering due attention to the Roman emperors.