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Essay plans for Roman religion practise essays...

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2. Were Roman colonies ‘mini-Romes’ in terms of religion? ● colonies worshipped a lot of their own gods - Syrian goddess with her own temple in a roman colony in Syria - ‘on the syrian goddess’ ● in Rome there were many people worshipping their own gods - cult of isis and jews ● religion very diversified everywhere and a variety of gods were worshipped on top of the standard roman gods - sacrifices and calendar festivals still applied and had to be fulfilled apart from jews who were exempt for some of roman history ● imperial cult in the colonies but not in Rome - imperial cult was the worship of rome itself - epigraphy sources from Greece ● mini-rome implies that all the same things are done with regards to religions - same deities worshipped in the same way - but in reality there was a lot of diversity across the empire and although the roman gods were worshipped everywhere there wasn't one standard form of worship 3. How foreign were Rome’s peregrina sacra? ● egyptian, syrian and persian cults that were practised in rome but were not part of state religion ● magna mater - equated with syrian goddess ● Aventine triad of ceres, liber, and libera 4. Why was the cult of Isis so successful across the Roman Empire? ● cleopatra and anthony brought a lot of visibility to the cult in Rome and styled themselves as reborn Isis and Osiris ● Upon her arrival in Italy, Isis became an attractive deity to many Romans since, among other things, she offered a bright future after death, and it was not just nonRomans and Romans of the lower-strata that worshipped Isis. Emperors like Caligula, Vespasian, and Hadrian, all succumbed to the lures of Isis showing that her attraction could appeal to anyone. ● The cult of Isis involved initiation and offered a more personal appeal than traditional Roman religion, consequently encountering opposition from various authorities ● Mark Antony, Marcus Aemilius Lepidus, and Octavian authorized the construction of a temple for Isis and Sarapis in Rome as a symbolic gesture toward deified Caesar ● Egypt is a large cultural and religious centre ● the army was a motor for spreading cults through their travel across the Empire they came into contact with local religions and carried them forward ● It was successful because it was taken to all corners of the empire by the army and it became visible and popular in Rome as it was embraced by Anthony, Cleopatrea and Caesar. The religious tenets offered by the cult were attractive in terms of the positive afterlife it offered. 5. To what extent does hostility to Jews and Judaism increase in the Roman world over the second century AD? ● no universal policy with regards to the Jews - in response to Jews in different parts of the Empire asking for help from the Emperor they would sometimes receive it - but toleration was not a centrally instituted empire-wide policy ● Final Jewish Revolt: The Jews of Palestine made their second and final attempt to escape Roman rule in AD 132 under the leadership of a man known as Bar Kokhba, believed by many to have been a messiah. Dio claims that the revolt was caused by

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Jewish anger against Hadrian's founding of a Roman city, Aelia Capitolina, in Jerusalem, while Eusebius says that Aelia Capitolina was a result of the war (Dio, 69, 12; Eusebius, Ecclesiastical History, 4. 6.). As the city certainly came into being after the war, the claims of both sources can be reconciled since Aelia Capitolina was planned before the revolt, which was where Dio's information came from, but it was not constructed until after, as Eusebius claims. A further cause for the revolt can perhaps be attributed to Hadrian's ban on circumcision, as reported by the Historia Augusta (The Scriptores Historiae Augustae, trans. David Magie (Loeb 139, 1921), Hadrian 14.2.). Smallwood, Schurer, Applebaum, and Bowersock all see a ban on circumcision as a main cause of the revolt, while Schafer believes it was a punishment implemented after. The primary objectives appeared to have been ridding Judaea of its Roman garrison and re-establishing the Temple and its cult there, meaning that they wanted to free Jerusalem from Roman rule. While the exact causes of the revolt have yet to be identified with certainty, there reaction of Rome to it is well known: the consequence of posing a serious threat to Roman domination was a serious punishment and this took the form of the new city built over Jerusalem, Aelia Capitolina, the renaming of the province of Judaea to Syria Palaestina, and the expulsion of Jews from the area. The gravity of this punishment was reinforced by the fact that no other province that had revolted against Rome in the past had been punished by losing its original name derived from the name of its people. Hostility did not necessarily increase, but we see a Roman reaction to political disorder that was caused by the Jews due to the revolt.

6. How far was imperial cult a ‘tool’ of Roman rule? ● imperial cult helped to integrate local population and local nobility into power structures of the Empire ● A tool of religion or politics? cynical view is that it was about politics and diplomacy we shouldn't be too quick to reject the possibility of a spiritual element ● Imperial cult was important in the army because of the iconography of the Emperor’s image which was carried on campaigns ● A tool of making people across the Empire feel that there were part of a unifying system ● Military calendar - promotes loyalty to the roman emperor - dura europos calendar ● Letter of claudius to the alexandrians - he had been congratulated on ascending to the imperial cult ● Sebasteion at Aphrodisias - temple to julio-claudians in modern Turkey ● A tool of roman rule - divinity of the Emperors legitimised the rule of the Emperors ● Coins - visual representation of roman rule - coin n.4. spanish coin shows how quickly imperial cult spread into roman provinces ● it was essentially a tool of roman rule because it legitimized roman rule and made roman rule stronger by making the inhabitants of the roman world feel that they were part of a unified roman empire 7. ‘Christianity was an imperial religion par excellence’. Discuss.

8. Was there any religious diversity in the Roman Empire? ● yes, but there were standard elements that everyone had to incorporate ● multitude of cults across the empire all adopted at different times ● continuous process of new elements being incorporated into roman religion and merging into existing religious structures ● the same god having many names: Jupiter, Jupiter Dolichenus (Eastern Jupiter); magna mater/io/isis - white cow as their attribute ● interpretatio romana ● Jews in rome and across most of the empire allowed to be exempt from roman religious practises and practise their own faith - exempted from military service until Tiberius, Roman respect of the Sabbath - no court appearances or corn collection ● Not every cult had the same level of importance or of toleration - festivals for Roman gods across the Empire took precedence before any other cults and toleration only existed on Rome’s terms 9. Is ‘syncretism’ a useful term in discussing religious developments in the Roman Empire? ● ‘syncretism’ - merging of things together ● interpretatio romana - a tool of standardizing other religions and putting them into Roman terms ● question ‘religious developments’ - what do we understand by this? 10. To what extent is it possible to talk about ‘religious identity’ in the Roman world? ● how people would integrate their religious cult into their way of life - vestal virgins, priests of the magna mater had to castrate themselves ● ‘At the individual level, it means that men and women were not faced with the need to make (or even the opportunity of making) acts of religious commitment; that in turn implies that they had no religious biographies, no moments of profound new experience or revelation such as to determine the course of their future lives. The crucial difference is that these experiences, beliefs and disbeliefs had no particularly privileged role in defining an individuals actions, behaviour or sense of identity. When we look, therefore, at the way in which religion and society interacted, we do not find special institutions and activities, set aside from everyday life and designed to pursue religious objectives; but rather a Situation in which religion and its associated rituals were embedded in all institutions and activities’ - Beard, North and Price ● Use of (so- called) interpretatio Romana— the common technique of asserting an identity between a foreign deity and a Roman one— contributed to the ethnographic construction of Roman religion. This was a practice that was necessary and common for polytheistic religious life: in the mobile world of the ancient Mediterranean, traveling Romans needed to know which god to worship when they arrived in far- off places. Similarly, provincial elites had an interest in relating local deities to the gods of the imperial power. Interpretatio, which was fundamentally a linguistic move of translation, also provided an intellectual tool for comparing and differentiating the Roman pantheon from the gods of other peoples. For example, Varro, as part of a quasimonotheistic argument for the supremacy of Jupiter, claimed that the Jewish god, Iao, was equivalent to Roman Jupiter. Varro had it both ways: his universalizing philosophical point buttressed the distinctiveness of Roman practice. Cicero also used interpretatio to support his theological points and to mark off “Roman” customs. In the On the Nature of the Gods, the skeptic Cotta points out that Juno in Rome

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looks nothing like Juno (i.e., Hera) in Argos, that Jupiter on the Capitoline is not like Jupiter (i.e., Zeus Hammon) in Africa.62 Here too Cicero asserted both the equivalence and difference of Roman and foreign deities. - MacCrae, Legible Religion Lieu: archaeological and literary reconstruction of the Christian identity were not necessarily very similar – this is also the case for Judaism (p. 6) -> this same point can be made with reference to Roman religion, as well Maybe it’s not the best approach to take to talk about a universal/shared religious identity - lots of people were doing lots of different things Also, the point that Roman religion was less about individualised spiritual experience (in contrast to Christianity, which was one of the things that made it attractive) and more about a system of doing the required things properly (orthopraxis)

11. Did the Roman state have any religious policies? ● imperial cult ● interpretatio romana ● policy of having everyone in the empire worship roman gods ● Issue that the Romans had with the christians was that they did not worship the roman gods rather than their own worship ● Monotheism problematic for the romans ● No universal policy against jews for example but romans had lots of local religious policies to deal with issues instead ● yes the romans had religious policies but these were not universal or fixed and were changed based on more local issues 1. “The central requirement of Roman religion was the correct performance of prescribed rituals.” Discuss. � 2. Either (a) How problematic was the introduction of the Magna Mater to Rome? Or (b) What did the Roman authorities find objectionable about the worship of Bacchus in 186 BC? � 3.

How should we explain the practice of dedicating votiv body-parts in sanctuaries of the Roman period?

4. Is Augustus best seen as a religious traditionalist? � 5. How far should imperial cult in the Roman provinces be seen as a “top-down” phenomenon? � 6. How far was religion a focus of resistance to Roman imperial rule? � 7.

Why, and by whom, were local deities in the provinces identified with Roman deities?

8. To what extent did Roman attitudes to Judaism change over time? �

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Account for the spread of the worship of Isis and/or Mithras in the Roman Empire. �

10. To what extent can we escape a traditional Roman perspective when studying the religions of the Roman Empire?

3 What do either (a) coins or (b) inscriptions contribute to our understanding of religion in the Roman empire? ● Imperial cult, festivals, ROman religious priorities that we can learn from inscriptions ● 4 What particular challenges are involved in studying the history of Christianity up to the midthird century AD?...