Priests

Scholars have long imposed anachronistic stereotypes on the official ritual experts of the ancient world, based on positive and negative caricatures of religious leaders of their own day. A ‘‘priest’’ might represent a mystically-inclined and far-thinking hierophant, capable of satisfying the quotidian needs of the simple at the same time as directing the spiritual aspirations of the devout. Or a ‘‘priest’’ might represent a mindless functionary, a cynical producer of spectacle and deceit, or even - as blood sacrifice enters the equation - a cruel inducer of innocents’ pain for strange and uncompromising gods. To the degree that the reconstruction of Mediterranean religions involved the retrojection of anti-Catholic sentiments, the latter model might prevail; and to the degree that it involved an invented ‘‘pagan-romanticism,’’ the former might (for both, see above, section 1). Of course, the diverse sorts of priests in the Roman Empire and their functions in society were far more complex than modern caricatures allow. The interpreter of religions must begin with the perspective that, despite the many ways in which a ‘‘priest’’ might be set apart from other people in a culture, he or she will also perform duties within and on behalf of society.

In places like Rome and Carthage, ‘‘priesthood’’ was essentially a civic office. But in (e. g.) Egypt and the Jewish temple in pre-70 ce Jerusalem, the higher priestly offices were passed down through family lineages (Zadokim, Kohanim, Leviim) and even the lower ranks carried popular prestige in the wider community. In these and many other Near Eastern religions it was priests alone who had access to the interior of temple complexes, performing sacrifices and other ritual gestures apart from the wider population. Rome, on the other hand, while noted for a highly organized series of priestly institutions (collegia), allowed entrance to priesthood through election from the ranks of the free, usually male, and invariably elite citizenry. This fluidity between priestly rank and elite civic culture translated into a general overlap between political and religious spheres, at least as an outsider might demarcate these spheres. Priesthood was a form of prestige - a fact underlined when Roman emperors began to claim for themselves increasing numbers of priestly offices. Furthermore, the priestly functions extended to areas of law, the calendar, and civic order that historians might not typically categorize as ‘‘religious.’’ Yet Romans clearly invested the priestly spheres - their books, rites, authority, and responsibility - with religious importance. The lives of the flamen dialis and the Vestal Virgins, each unique priestly ranks responsible for certain public rituals, were in fact hedged in by taboos - where they could go, what they could do - in ways similar to other priesthoods of the ancient Mediterranean world, but only as long as the individual might inhabit the post. (It has been suggested, indeed, that the taboos around the flamen might derive merely from his unique performative position, since this priest served alone, without a collegium of alternates to replace him: Beard, North, and Price 1998: 29.)

The Roman priesthoods’ primary functions involved the performance of public sacrifices and divination, both as an extension of other forms of civic authority. Sacrifices, required to be performed in established places according to established procedures, signified civic cooperation with the gods at a great variety of events and crisis points in the life of the city and its colonies. Divination encompassed the interpretation of the books of the Sibylline oracles ( collegium of the quindecemviri), the observation and interpretation of prodigies like disasters and remarkable bird-flights ( augures), and such deliberate forms of divination ritual as the examination of the entrails of sacrificial victims (haruspices). Roman divination integrated notions of sacred boundary and divine authority - that is, what the gods wanted and where they might speak - with political and military decision making (Beard, North, and Price 1998: 19-24, 36-9; Scheid 2003: 111-26).

Elsewhere in the Mediterranean world, priestly responsibilities corresponded to the special status of the priests. Jewish priests in Jerusalem performed sacrifices on behalf of worshippers but according to biblically-established codes of ritual purity; others would sing hymns or blow trumpets to receive or celebrate the presence of the aniconic Jewish god. The purity and holiness of priests is likened to that of angels in the literature of the Dead Sea Scrolls, where hymns and hymnic descriptions of sacrifice are understood as substitutes for blood sacrifices. Egyptian priests likewise performed sacrifices (more often libations and food offerings than blood sacrifices), as well as caring for divine images and uttering prayers, invocations, and curses, always as representatives of the Pharaoh, the chief priest of the land. Such duties were usually performed within the temple’s private confines. Priests were also responsible for carrying divine images in procession among the various temples and shrines in the landscape. During such processions, movements of the image on the shoulders of the bearer-priests were understood as oracular (often occurring in answer to a particular question) and would be interpreted by a senior priest. In these ways, priests maintained the gods’ protection of the land and also brought the gods into public contact with its people.

For the more ancient Mediterranean priesthoods, texts represented the words of gods, and their interpretation and application were primary activities of priesthoods. In Palestine, Egypt, Mesopotamia, and Syria, as well as Rome, books and scribal institutions had become essential to the priestly maintenance of religion. Often the texts were deemed historically authoritative, providing either insight into current events or guidance in their interpretation. Priestly scribes around the Mediterranean produced a rich flow of new interpretive or revelatory texts on the basis of ancient authorities: Thoth, Hermes, Enoch, Zarathustra, Orpheus, and others. Genres included chronicles, often recounting legendary oracular pronouncements with commentary (Jewish Book of Genesis and its Roman-era apocalyptic interpretations; Egyptian Oracle of the Potter), collections of oracular pronouncements or divine omens (Sibylline Oracles), and manuals for interpreting portents and omens in the world. If the priestly consultation of texts in Rome carried comparatively less mystique than in Egypt or Palestine, it was all the more important for seeking and interpreting the ‘‘actual’’ communications of gods through omens - procedures essential for the maintenance of convention and civic order (see in general Gordon 1990a; Potter 1994; Daumas 1961; Frankfurter 1998a: 145-97, 238-64).

In those Mediterranean cultures where priests and literacy itself tended to be set apart as holy, priestly status carried with it a certain charisma in the wider social environment; and priestly training in ritual utterance, gesture, writing, and divination might thus be applied to everyday concerns outside the world of the temple: scorpion stings, childbirth, sexual attraction, competition. It has been suggested that Babylonian priests were carrying their techniques internationally already by the Classical Greek period, synthesizing new versions of temple lore for new lands and publics (Burkert 1992). Jewish priests seem to have been adept at providing amulets and spells in the early Roman period (Schwartz 2001: 82-7), and Egyptian priests - especially those of the ‘‘lector priest’’ rank - had long carried their facility with magical language beyond temple walls. Indeed, their additional appeal to exotically-minded Roman youths is documented both in Greco-Roman novels and in the body of Greek ‘‘magical papyri,’’ which reflect Egyptian priests’ endeavors to remarket temple traditions for a wider clientele (Frankfurter 1998a: 198-237; 2000a).