This chapter examines the spread of specifically Roman cults to the provinces. Its argument proceeds with two concerns foremost in mind. First, I concentrate on the religious life of Roman citizens. For it is among communities of citizens that we should expect Roman cults to have spread first, both because Roman religion was first and foremost a religion of and for a juridically defined community of citizens (Scheid 1985b: 47-76; 1985a), and because, naturally, it is through the movement of adherents that cults must in the first instance themselves move.
Second, I seek to problematize the very assumption that what cults do is spread or, perhaps, that what the religious do is proselytize. For historical reasons - some, indeed, quite powerful - this expectation both governs and complicates the study of religion in the ancient Mediterranean as perhaps nowhere else. The latter part of this introductory section and the conclusion to the chapter both take up this issue.
Bracketing that problem for the moment, the chapter falls into two parts. The next two sections examine the topic empirically, by considering in turn the religious life of two types of communities principally in light of provincial evidence. The first of these sections studies colonies of Roman citizens, who were thought to remain in some fashion in the populus Romanus and whom one might expect, therefore, to remain participants in the Roman people’s religious life. The following section turns principally to municipalities, and seeks to characterize the degree of control - and extent of autonomy - granted them in religious life. In both sections I argue for a high degree of change over time in Roman and local practice. Indeed, at a high level of abstraction, perhaps the chief way in which local practice mirrored Roman practice was in its sheer fluidity.
The second half of the chapter turns to Roman theory or, perhaps, Roman theology, and argues above all that there were substantial structural impediments to the spread of Roman cults. (The historical origin of the question why we should expect cults to spread is examined below.) I concentrate there on two bodies of evidence: first, the bodies of religious law concerned with geographic aspects of priestly action and authority and, second, Roman historical accounts of their own attempts to move cults. Such actions are often described, as we shall see, as attempts to move the god himself or herself; their success is therefore seen as contingent upon the willingness of the god to move and, often enough, concurrently to accept not just any, but quite particular, new worshipers. However we might wish to redescribe those concerns in light of our own theoretical postulates, the framework within which Romans conceived the spread of cults and adhesion of individuals to them is clearly radically different than our own.
This reflection returns us to the problematic expectation on the part of Christian and post-Christian scholars that religions spread, an expectation that exists within the study of religion more generally, and within the study of Roman religion more specifically, largely through the influence of two related forces. The first of these is the awareness that the Roman empire provided a context for the diffusion of many religions, most famously the so-called oriental or mystery cults. This view of the empire’s religious history has itself a long tradition. For the most famous of those mystery cults was, of course, Christianity, and the Christians developed very early a theory of history by which to understand relations between religion and empire. Their most significant move was to assent to imperial propaganda in equating the accession of Augustus with the foundation of the empire. By ignoring, in other words, the long history of the empire’s acquisition and privileging instead the constitutional change from democracy to imperial monarchy as a historical nodal point, the Christians could associate in time and therefore in causation the establishment of the empire and the birth of Christ. God himself had so provided, the argument ran, in order that the new religion might spread more rapidly in a unified world (Melito of Sardis, Apologia frag. 1; Eusebius, Triakontaeterikos [Tricennial Oration] 4.2 and 16.5-8; see Ando 2000: 48; see also Momigliano 1987: 142-58).
There were of course those who dissented from this view, and contexts in which the arguments for it seemed less cogent, but this is not the place to review the history of that debate. Its contours are relevant here because it was that debate, together with the ecclesiastical histories that adopted its framework, which naturalized the proposition that what religions do is spread.
The second force contributing to the prominence of this proposition in religious historiography derives from the early modern experience of empire, as well as from the historical and polemical literatures to which it gave rise. These urged that empires were agents of cultural change, and that pre-eminent among their ambitions - or, perhaps, their instruments - was the imposition of their own law, language, and religion (Pagden 1995). Empires, in other words, should have a Reichsreligion, an imperial religion, whose furtherance might constitute an important part of some imperial project, even as it contributed directly to empire’s justification. For late medieval, Renaissance, and early modern Europe, of course, that religion was Christianity. But the theories of empire that developed in those periods and later did not regard Christianity’s role in European imperialism as novel. On the contrary, they connected it directly with the providential role assigned the Roman empire in the original success of Christianity itself (see, e. g., Engelbert of Admont’s “On the rise and end of the Roman empire,” esp. chs. 15 and 18).
On this understanding, the Roman empire presents something of a paradox. For the empire did witness an extraordinary efflorescence of religious activity, particularly among utopian cults, and there can be no doubt that the political stability and social order provided by the empire contributed very directly to that phenomenon. But neither the imperial government itself, nor the empire’s governing class, contributed in any concerted and sustained way to the propagation of any particular religion. The only exceptions might be imperial cult, on the one hand, and on the other the intensification of public displays of loyalty through oath-swearing that followed upon Caracalla’s grant of universal citizenship, the most famous of which took place under Decius (Rives 1999; Ando 2000: 206-15). But these are not true comparanda, for reasons that will emerge across this chapter and which I revisit in its conclusion. Thus might it be said, not untruthfully, that the Romans gave the Mediterranean world all religions but their own.
World History
