Centers

Religions of the Roman Empire were fundamentally expressions of‘‘place’’ - evolving combinations of rites, myths and legends, and structures located at a particular site in the landscape and articulating the traditional power of that site. Because of their still-visible remains, we are most accustomed to imagining great temples - the centers of official ritual - as the epitome of religious center. Often temples did represent a point of orientation for people over very large territories: for example, the Jerusalem temple was very much the center of the cosmos for Jews around the Roman world. But individual temples could fluctuate in their political importance;

Many Near Eastern temple cults comprised ritual operations entirely separate from the lives of those who paid occasional homage there. For these reasons, as well as the comparative guidance provided by modern ethnography, we must consider a more complex series of overlapping and concentric ‘‘centers’’ for religious activity in the Roman world: minor temples, modest shrines, cultic places afforded by the landscape (springs, mountaintops), and the home itself - the perennial anchor of religious activity even when it involves pilgrimage to distant temples. This section will cover three ‘‘concentric’’ aspects of religious center: the official temple, the shrine (covering both natural sites and minor temples), and domestic altars. We will use the word ‘‘cult’’ here to designate a set of traditions governing the collective ritual devotion to a deity, usually including both a rank of experts or leaders and an established place for this ritual devotion to take place.