The study of religion has come increasingly to emphasize practice and performance as the central feature of religions; and despite past efforts to discuss the beliefs and doctrines that led to - or resisted - Christianity, the Roman world also requires a practice-centered approach to religion. In Rome, North Africa, Gaul, Syria, Asia Minor, and elsewhere, ‘‘religion’’ revolved around action - gesture, performance, and the fulfillment of ritual responsibilities - whether in the public realm of civic drama or in the privacy of a ‘‘magical’’ rite. ‘‘Irreligion’’ and atheism were understood in similar terms: not disbelief or philosophical skepticism but rather the avoidance of ritual responsibilities or even the pursuit of ritual practices that could subvert the social order. Only with the rise of Christian orthodoxy in the fourth century does ‘‘right belief’’ come - in some quarters - to carry the same critical importance for civic and cosmic stability as did orthopraxy in the Roman Empire (C. R. Phillips 1986: 2697-711, 2746-52; Beard, North, and Price 1998: 42-54).
Although there is an enormous range of culturally-inscribed gestures and utterances that allow people effective mediation with holy things, we may capture much of this range through three general patterns. The official cult of temples and cities revolved around sacrifice, often an elaborate public drama, or around the festival presentation and procession of the god’s image. Divination, sometimes (as in Rome) an extension of official cult, comprised those ritual means by which gods’ intentions might be known (and across the Mediterranean world these means were as diverse as they were vital to quotidian life). And pilgrimage and devotion cover private, familial, or group expressions of allegiance to a god in a shrine. Whether carrying supplicants to distant lands or - more often - involving the festive or desperate visit to a regional shrine, pilgrimages and the appeals or vows people made on them reflect the ‘‘popular’’ dimension of religious expression in the Roman world.
World History
