Centers

While many archaic cults held fast through late antiquity, the Roman period saw numerous shifts to new centers. The consolidation of Roman authority in some Mediterranean regions led to a view of Rome itself as the religious center, a shift away from the traditional sacred city (Jerusalem is thus left behind in the early Christian Book of Acts). Yet for Romans themselves the archaic cults of the ‘‘Orient’’ began to look increasingly like centers - origins, sources - of religious meaning by virtue of their profound differences from Roman religion, their textual traditions, and the exotic ‘‘wisdom’’ proffered by their ritual experts (Beard, North, and Price 1998: 196-201, 263-6, 278-87). In the countryside there is evidence of shifts from ancient temple cults to seers and holy men, although this evidence is inconsistent and must be compared to the evidence for temples thriving into the Christian period (Brown 1978: 1-26; Frankfurter 1998a: 153-79). With the Christianization of mortuary space and the triumph of the saintly relic came abundant new religious centers in the necropolises or, by the mid-fourth century, in the martyria and basilicas built at the center of cities (Caseau 1999; Frankfurter 2005).

Another shift was intellectual: the eschewing of terrestrial centers for the goals of mystical ascent: union with the divine, the heavenly city of God, or a perfection independent of place (A. Segal 1980; Himmelfarb 1993; Athanassiadi 1993; S. I. Johnston 1997; Smith 2003: 30-4). Of course, these sentiments were hardly typical of intellectuals in late antiquity, who usually revered traditional holy places (Frankfurter 2000a: 184-92). For rabbinic Judaism, which began to form in the late first century following the destruction of the Jerusalem temple (see Eliav, this volume), the ‘‘center’’ was supposed to be the Torah, the book from God, placed at the front of some synagogues and celebrated in study; yet Jews continued to venerate tombs and regional holy places. Economic decline of major regional temples in some parts of the empire occasionally led to a centrifugal shift of religious authority and orientation-points to local shrines and subsequently, if these too dwindled (or suffered destruction by Christian monks), to the domestic shrine. At this point, traditional rites maintained only in the domestic sphere could be revitalized through Christian idioms of power (Frankfurter 1998a: 142-4).