Beyond Priesthood

Richard L. Gordon, Georgia Petridou, Jörg Rüpke, Richard L. Gordon, Georgia Petridou, Jörg Rüpke

• Publisher: De Gruyter
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9783110447644
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Religion

The last decade has seen a surge of scholarly interest in these religious professionals and a good number of high quality publications. Our volume, however, with its unique intercultural character and its explicit focus on appropriation and contestation of religious expertise in the Imperial Era is substantially different.

Unlike the rather narrow focus of earlier studies of civic priests, the papers presented here examine a wider range of religious professionals, their dynamic interaction with established religious authorities and institutions, and their contributions to religious innovation in the ancient Mediterranean world, from the late Hellenistic period through to Late Antiquity, from the City of Rome to mainland Greece, Asia Minor, Syria and Egypt, from Greek civic practice to ancient Judaism.

A further advantage of our volume is the wide range of media of transmission taken into account. Our contributors look at both old and new materials, which derive not only from literary sources but also from papyri, inscriptions, and material culture. Above all, this volume assesses critically convenient terminological usage and offers a unique insight into a rich gamut of ancient Mediterranean religious specialists.

Part I:Innovation: Forms and Limits

Jörg Rüpke and Federico Santangelo

Public priests and religious innovation in imperial Rome2

This paper is devoted to the ‘public’ priesthoods of imperial Rome and their contribution to the wider patterns of religious innovation. It focuses on two key areas of interaction: between priests and the wider public in the city of Rome, through a close reading of the evidence of Cassius Dio, and between priests and emperor, especially in the first decades of the Principate. In focusing on the impact of priesthoods ‘beyond duty’, and looking beyond the setting of priesthoods within the elite networks of Republican Rome, it focuses on two key issues: choice and power. What degree of choice could be exercised in testing and exceeding the remit of collectively-defined prerogatives? What range of options were open, both to agents who exceeded the remit of their duty and to those affected by their actions? What powers did religious experts dispose of, which allowed or enabled them to exceed the remit of their duty? What factors prompted them to seek to modify the tasks that they were expected to perform? Any decision to exceed the remit of one’s duty implied some degree of challenge to existing power arrangements or institutional frameworks.

1.Introduction

Whereas the role of religious specialists in furthering religious change during the Empire is widely acknowledged, that of the so-called ‘public priests’ is much less clear. Late Roman Republican thinkers acknowledged that this group – usually conceptualised as sacerdotes – was of great significance for the opposite of religious innovation, that is, the upholding of tradition. M. Tullius Cicero saw public priests as defending the ancestors’ religious practices against individual innovations; M. Terentius Varro understood them as resisting oblivion (neglegentia). Although Cicero’s short account of religion in his dialogue On Laws ignores many significant issues, it does include a complete list of all the main priesthoods.3

The status of the religious knowledge of public priests might also be affirmed e negativo. In the early second century BCE, for example, the senatus consultum on the Bacchanalia imposed severe restrictions on their priests and similar functionaries.4 The priesthoods of Venus Erycina and Cybele were limited to foreigners; astrologers, like other purveyors of technical knowledge, such as philosophers and rhetoricians, were occasionally banned from the city of Rome. In relation to change, however, the notion of ‘religious knowledge’ is thoroughly ambiguous. It may help to shore up genuinely traditional practice, but may also continue ‘tradition’ that turns out to be merely invented. The transformation of religious practices into knowledge is one of the most important innovations of the late Republican period.5

It is easy to find corroboration of the views of Cicero and Varro in other literary evidence for the Republican period. From the third century BCE onwards, the number of priestly positions was increased and their duties differentiated: important steps in that direction were the integration of plebeians in 300 BCE, the foundation of the Epulones in 196, and the enlargements of the colleges under Sulla, Caesar, and finally Augustus. The decemuiri (later quindecimuiri) sacris faciundis, who interpreted the Sibylline Books, introduced many new cults and ritual practices into Rome, as did the pontifices and the haruspices, albeit on a smaller scale. One of their major tasks and most visible activities was the identification, interpretation, and ritual treatment of the ‘prodigies’ that were deemed to have public relevance. Thus, a degree of change was institutionalised in the realm of publicly-financed cult, ritual practices, and the ritual infrastructure provided for the dominant political group, which we define, for the purposes of the present discussion, as the aristocracy.6 Public priests did not need to be ‘intellectuals’, but from their ranks there emerged several experts who wrote treatises dealing with problems arising within their specific ritual field. Cicero became an augur roughly at the same time as he was working on On Laws; Varro never held a priesthood, but represented priests as bearers of knowledge, a view that was taken up and developed by authors like Valerius Maximus in the early Principate.7

Neither during the Republic nor during the imperial period did ‘public priests’ enjoy a monopoly on religious knowledge and innovation. At least in the second or third generation, the worship of the so-called Egyptian gods, including Isis and Sarapis, was often conducted by specialists with ritual and linguistic knowledge, who could claim the range of competences described by Apuleius in Metamorphoses Book 11. In many cases religious professionals were probably not instrumental in the spread of practices and symbols, but soon came to be involved in organising groups and developing distinctive practices. The same is surely true for Mithras or the god of Jerusalem.

The activities of these specialists, and especially their interaction with their clients, are generally invisible to us, if they did not produce individually ‘authored’ texts (like Manetho or Appian or Suetonius). On the other hand, texts permit us to reconstruct the actual communication with the auditors (or exceptionally readers) and their responses only to a very limited extent. Other forms of interaction, of which there must have been many, have left hardly any traces. Durable testimonies of such interaction survive only in exceptional cases: to mention just two notable instances, the treatment of patients by specialists in sanctuaries of Asclepius is sometimes documented in their dedicatory inscriptions; the ‘confession inscriptions’ from Lydia were set up after a consultation with a priest about one’s sin in cases of chronic ailment. The concept of ‘religious specialists’8 denotes individuals as different as small-time organisers of informal religious groups, prophets or seers, diviners, wonder-workers, magicians, ‘wise folk’, i.e. people who offered religious services and knowhow and might even earn their living by such means – in other words, religious entrepreneurs of one sort or another. For those individuals, ‘religion’ was not an occasional and interchangeable option or instrument,9 but a profession (in every sense of the term), a way of life and a means of making one’s living. Given the precariousness of the divine and its representations,10 and its problematic accessibility, such people were not in principle indispensable, but were frequently helpful and occasionally necessary. It is, however, not their theological reflection (known to us usually only if it was put into writing of some kind) in which we are interested, but their role in mediating religion, in dealing with or producing religious change, and interacting with other people and their ‘lived religion’.11

The stern caveat that Albert Henrichs has issued against the use of the word ‘priests’ in the study of Greek religion applies, in some measure, to the study of any polytheistic religion.12 The call for further differentiation is also relevant to the Roman context, where the complexity of cultic activity cannot be narrowed just to the cultus publicus. While it is important to recognise that the category of ‘religious specialists’ encompasses public priests, as well as other categories, the enduring presence of the priestly college remains a distinctive aspect of Roman religion. Speaking of ‘priests’ in Republican and Imperial Rome is a methodologically sound and historically accurate operation: they are a well-identified cluster of individuals, with clearly defined statuses. That does not amount to viewing them as a static corps in which new clusters of expertise have to be created and trained, and does not of course amount to denying that the situation becomes inevitably more complex when one turns to provincial contexts. There is even scope for surprising solutions: in first century CE Asia we find cities competing over the title of neokoros, effectively arguing for their entitlements to host and run the imperial cult as communal entities.13

Against this background, our interest in the contribution of such ‘public priests’ concentrates on the ‘public’ priesthoods of imperial Rome. What was their contribution to the upkeep as well as to the alteration of religious practices that were appropriated by groups and individuals in the city of Rome under the specific conditions of the Principate? What was the impact of the advent of monarchy on the standing and influence of public priesthoods, and on the role that priestly expertise played in the religious life of Rome? If we start looking ‘beyond duty’, beyond the setting of priesthoods within the elite networks of Republican Rome, two issues readily present themselves: namely, choice and power. What degree of choice could be exercised in looking beyond the remit of collectively defined prerogatives? What range of options were open, both to agents who exceed the remit of their duty and to those affected by their actions? Or again, what powers did agents dispose of, that allowed or enabled them to exceed the bounds of their duty? Which factors prompted them to try to modify the tasks that they were expected to perform? Conversely, any decision to go beyond the remit of one’s duty implied some degree of challenge to an existing power-constellation or regime.

Our discussion focuses on two key areas of interaction. First, we examine interaction with the wider public during the imperial period. We then look more closely into interaction with the emperor, as it took shape during the first decades of the Principate.

2.Interaction between priests and people under the Principate

2.1.Public priests in Cassius Dio

Before we begin, a methodological clarification is in order: our first text is by a contemporary observer who has not hitherto figured prominently in the history of religion, but ha...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Table of Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Bibliographical Note
• List of Illustrations
• Notes on the Contributors
• Introduction
• Part I: Innovation: Forms and Limits
• Part II: The Author as Religious Entrepreneur
• Part III: Filling in the Blanks
• Part IV: ‘Written on the Body
• Index rerum