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The intellectual legacy of the Hellenistic Civilization could be approached from any number of points-of-view considering the diversity of evidence that has been recovered and studied. Some of the more obvious intellectual dimensions of this civilization were certainly reflected in the advancing technology. There were advances in both the technologies that produce the material culture (i. e., architecture, ceramics, metallurgy, textile production, etc.) as well as the technologies of the thought world (i.e., languages, grammar, logic, mathematics, etc.). If we had the time we could look at all the evidences of technological achievement in the Hellenistic period in order to gain a perspective on the intellectual achievement. Since time is limited we will focus on surveying the historical background of those aspects of popular intellectual culture which illuminate characteristic religious behaviors and account for the prevalence of ideas incorporated in the various Hellenistic world views.
Some readers may be inclined to dismiss this subject as inappropriate to the study of Christian history. Whether or not the Divine intention was for the hope and faith of the early believers to be considered by those about them as another religion is, I think, beside the point. Christianity did rather soon fill a role in human culture, a role defined by the previously existing religions, Judaism and Gentile polytheism. Certainly, we can learn a great deal about early Christianity by comparing it to the various religious attitudes and activities exhibited by groups of Jews. Cannot we also learn something about the attitudes and activities of the Christians by means of comparisons with the prevailing polytheistic religious groups?
To dismiss all types of polytheism as if it were a relatively simple, monolithic and intransigent hodgepodge of meaningless ignorance and confusion can result in distortions of our understanding of early Christianity! We at least need to take cognizance of some of polytheism's assumptions and the dynamics that made it relevant to human society. Otherwise we will take little account of the cultural motivations and traditions that initiated and nurtured those human assumptions and behaviors we call religion long before Jesus came. This prevailing cultural terrain was the context that enabled Jesus' teachings and actions to be understood and appreciated.
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Religious institutions of the ancient world centered on the local communities, the tribes, the clans, and later the families when they emerged from the clans. Religious institutions, like non-religious institutions, grew up gradually over many centuries. Very early on the local cultures were more isolated, but as centuries passed and the human population increased many of these local cultures with their local religious ideas came into contact with one another. As the cultures of a fairly contiguous region came to realize that they had more similarities than differences a kind of common culture combining elements of their earlier cultures emerged. The religious institutions and ideas were often times amalgamated as well. Modern scholarship talks about such amalgamation as an example of "syncretism". Since their were specific locations in the larger region sacred to specific localized gods the new common culture now retained most of the gods thinking of them as in some way related to each other in a socio-political order similar to that of the amalgamated community of men. Hence the religious focus of the community gave unity and cohesiveness to the community at every stage of its development. To summarize a long complicated development we can say that polytheism is a corollary of what today in our nation is called multi-culturalism.
Whereas once the unique religion of a locally confined culture had strengthened the local community's cohesion and self-awareness, the creation of the new larger-sized groupings relied on the prevailing polytheism to provide them with the same sort of cohesion and self-awareness. My point is that ancient religions were mostly understood as benefiting the groups, the clan, the tribe, and the state. Individuals received benefits from typical polytheistic religious activities only as they were members of the group and shared in the group's benefits. The compulsion to participate in the worship of the gods of the prevailing community was an expression of the neighborly spirit of patriotism and loyalty.
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Since the Greeks contributed so greatly to the Hellenistic civilization of the first century AD, lets note some of the important polytheistic developments associated with the Greek dispersion. From the middle of the fourth century BC, the rise of the Macedonian State under powerful leaders such as Philip and his son Alexander the Great served as a powerful catalyst. The Greeks, under Macedonian sway, were shuffled and sorted, scattered and resettled across the Macedonian Empire that stretched eastward across Persia, Afghanistan and Pakistan to the Indus River. Alexander's successors continued to recruit armies from the Aegean region and settle the veterans of their campaigns in their respective territories. These actions accelerated the cultural changes experienced by the Greeks and generated a whole species of new religious ideas and practices.
One of the things lost in the numerous scattered veteran colonies across the Middle East was that homogeneous urban environment of the earlier period. These veteran colonies threw Greeks from every corner of the Aegean together in the same community. They were living in a strange and foreign land where their rural neighbors jabbered in some local dialect and it was many miles through this foreign land to another Greek colony. It was even further to the Aegean.
Would the religions they had practiced in their ancestral home in the Aegean region be appropriate in their new home? Would the gods that had been worshipped by their Aegean forefathers still be available to worship in this new land, and if so which one's god should the new community worship? Or, should they perhaps seek to worship the gods of the land in which they resided? All sorts of answers to these questions surfaced.
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One type of religious expression that grew increasingly popular during the Hellenistic age could be traced back to only a few isolated instances in the period before 350. Such religious practices were called mysteries (Greek, mustérion, from, mustés, "close-mouthed"). Mysteries are usually introduced as secretive religions, but that is because many modern commentators do not understand what kind of knowledge these mystery religions were dealing with.
A few isolated communities across the Greek world had maintained religious activities that did not appeal to the community as social unit, but rather dealt with individuals one at a time and typically once in a lifetime. The most famous of these ancient Greek mysteries was that celebrated in the tiny village of Eleusis in Attica. Probably from the eighth century BC on, the annual mystery celebration at Eleusis drew a steady stream of relatively important visitors to Athens, first from all across Greece and later from around the Aegean region. Then after 350 BC visitors came from the whole Mediterranean world. Eleusis and the two or three other ancient or classical mysteries remained confined in their place of origin and never established multiple locations. You had to go to a classical mystery's original location to be initiated. The main deity among the several worshiped at Eleusis was the goddess Demeter.
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Each individual participated in the special rituals of the mystery for his own personal benefit. These rituals are sometimes described as an initiation process. The rituals were not open to anyone who was not serious about being initiated into the mystery. Hence neutral onlookers were unable to watch the initiation process--the source of the allegation that the rituals were secret. We are also told that all initiates were sworn to keep secret the knowledge they acquired in the initiation. This assertion, I believe, is once again a misunderstanding.
In order to understand what has been interpreted as secretiveness we have to put this initiation in the context of the Platonic epistemology built around the Parmenidean definition of reality. Plato taught that the highest and most reliable form of learning involved knowledge acquired without the necessary aid of any of our senses, knowledge that that does not involve words. This type of eternally unchanging knowledge, knowledge of true reality, could not be expressed or communicated to us in words. This was the kind of knowledge the mystery religion was attempting to foster.
Plato taught that an individual could gain access to such real truth only by tapping into the "memory of the soul". Plato believed that the soul was eternal, without beginning or end, and as such was part of the real world. Subsequently the unchanging soul has been incarnated in the human body. From that point the soul is bombarded with a constant stream of data from the bodily senses. This continuous bombardment often interferes with and confuses one's intellectual processes. In order to gain access to the soul's memory the individual has to keep asking questions that help identify the confusion and eliminate it.
Finally, in an instant the true knowledge is suddenly snatched up from the soul by the intellect. This true knowledge is always about that which is eternally real. For Plato that must always be non-material, that is, spiritual. How does a human being describe in words something no human being has ever seen, touched or sensed in any way? Such knowledge is of the sort that is literally inexpressible in words. Plato did not believe that such learning could be communicated effectively in words between individuals. One individual can help another individual acquire the knowledge for himself by asking the clarifying questions and providing him with intellectual approximations of the truth being sought. This happens in the same way that one draws an approximation of a equilateral triangle on a slate to help another in recovering the knowledge of the real equilateral triangle from his own soul's memory. Knowledge of this degree of perfection and truth leaves you speechless, close-mouthed. You can only describe what you now know as a "mystery". Words can only imperfectly approximate it in crude analogies, rambling round-a-bout accounts or parables which Plato calls "likely stories." Plato's Republic is an intellectual exercise in the form of a likely story designed to help the reader cut through the confusion in his thinking and grasp the true absolute meaning--the mystery--of "that which is the just." The dramatic initiation ritual of the mystery religion was a series of staged experiences designed to induce the initiate's intellect to grasp certain eternal truth, a mystery, by means of confusion-clearing questions and not terribly subtle suggestions and prompts.
Perhaps these ancient initiates may have understood also that the god or goddess that presided over the "mystery" celebration was one of the community of divine beings whose type of existence was unlike the eternal and unchanging existence Plato ascribed to ultimate reality. Such divine beings were surely part of the realm of things that seem to be, and/or to exist. Albeit such beings must certainly have some access to ultimate reality. While Plato does not, to my knowledge, discuss whether or not deities have souls, every entity in the realm of seeming possesses an eternal and unchanging "form".
Platonic thinking was by no means universal even though it had important religious applications. The epistemologies of Aristotle and/or Epicurus were based on a very different ontologies; hence, Plato's agruments were often refuted by the materialists. Learning for the materialist does not occur apart from the human senses and rational communication. So if a "mysterious knowledge" exists at all it must be knowable; hence, it is either a secret known only to the initiates or an illusive fantasy known only to the initiates. Either way the initiates aren't talking.
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The network of communication and trade linking all the Hellenistic cities with the Aegean region was not a one way street. Religious concepts and cultic practices from other parts of the Hellenistic world could take advantage of it as well. For example, out of Egypt came a Hellenistic mystery cult dedicated to the ancient Egyptian goddess named Isis. The mystery must not be confused with the traditional Egyptian cult of Isis that originated in very ancient times. That native Egyptian cult had grown very elaborate and multifaceted, but the mythical stories of Isis were quite well known to native Egyptians as part of the Egyptian heritage. They were certainly not in any sense a secret even if the Greek-speaking people living in Egypt might not be familiar with them.
In the third century BC the first of the Ptolemaic (Greek-speaking) rulers commissioned the development of a new hybrid Greek-Egyptian deity as a recognition of the achievements of the Greeks in Egypt. Timetheos, a member of the high priestly family at Eleusis in Attica and Manetho, an Egyptian priest who was familiar with the Greek language and culture, were given this task. This committee synthesized a new deity, Serapis, using an abandoned statue from northern Turkey, a collection of Egyptian symbols, and a synthesis of snippets of obscure mythology from both Egypt and the Aegean. In order to integrate Serapis more completely into the Egyptian pantheon he became the most recent consort of the goddess Isis. The associations with the Serapis cult evidently facilitated a transformation of the Isis cult into a Hellenistic mystery. As far as can be known this transformation of the Isis cult took place in Alexandria among the Greek-speaking inhabitants.
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From Alexandria the transformed Isis cult was disseminated successfully to a number of Hellenistic port cities around the Mediterranean. It was first reported at the central Aegean port on the island of Delos about 220 BC. By the first century BC shrines or places dedicated to Isis worship were reported standing in several Mediterranean ports and other cosmopolitan cities.
In order for Greek-speaking people unfamiliar with Egyptian traditions to understand the rites and symbols of Isis it was necessary to provide interested individuals special instruction and explanation; hence, the development of an initiation similar to the traditional mysteries. The specifically localized Egyptian understanding of the rites and symbols seems to have been deliberately downplayed in favor of explanations easily understood by Greek-speaking people. This gave the cult and the goddess a "world-wide" or universal appeal far beyond the borders of Egypt.
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This worldwide appeal is typical of the Hellenistic Mystery religions. These new mysteries were never established as official public or community religions because they didn't address the needs of groups. Individuals, however, were attracted to the mysteries because they offered the individual a way to approach a deity of the highest (cosmic) rank as an individual, not as merely a member of a group. Moreover, the special understandings and of the mystery promised to benefit the individual directly no matter where they lived or moved. Every mystery in the Hellenistic period that we know anything about seems to have addressed in some fashion the human anxieties about death and the destiny of mankind.
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Finally and of considerable significance, the rites of the typical mystery religion evidently gave the initiated a reason to believe that an intimate bond or relationship had been established between the initiate and the deity. The self-esteem of the initiated individual profited immeasurably from that 'mystical' experience of union or personal communion with the deity.
The important thing here is that the mystery is a personal religion, not a group religion, but it is important not to read very much monotheism into these phenomena. Those who were initiated into one mystery saw nothing preventing them from being initiated into a second, or third, or fourth mystery--except, perhaps, the time and expense.
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For a multitude of reasons, not least of which was the growing sophistication of civilization a new understanding of the nature and location of the deities of polytheism developed. Greek philosophy and science questioned the common beliefs of the past. The deities were surely not the friendly neighborhood ghosts everybody was acquainted with even if they had never actually seen them. As travelers with perfectly good vision repeatedly crisscrossed every mountaintop in the Aegean region the more sophisticated began to doubt that such places were indeed the abode of the gods. And the difference between a god and a man was certainly more than the mere matter of diet. The bodies of gods were surely not made with earthly elements, but rather of the heavenly element, aether. Real gods do not come any closer to the earth than the sun, the moon or the planets. Merchants returning from Iraq confirmed that religious scholars there had similar understandings. As these assumptions began to take root in the minds the urban masses there were a number of adjustments and compensations that took place.
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The "understanding" that real gods were not actually present on this earth undermined the confidence of many segments of the Hellenistic urban population. In the past they had assumed that their big-time patron deities made some sort of regular stopovers at their state's temples dedicated to the deity. In response to this sense of abandonment a new local urban deity appeared. It was first reported in Antioch, Syria, in the third century and then in many other Hellenistic cities in the east. Centuries later it came at last to Rome. These new deities were female, perhaps a reflex of the people back to the primitive mother goddess concept. When these goddesses first appeared they were known as Tyché in the Greek, or Fortune in the Latin. (In the Germanic speaking part of the world the comparable deity was Lyk, luck, or Hap, as in happy.) Before long each different goddess came to be called by the feminine form of the city name, e.g. Antiochea, Roma, etc. Tyché/Fortune was thought to be notoriously fickle, unpredictable and capricious.
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Another Hellenistic religious innovation that emerged along with the new assumptions about deities was the elaborate concept of angels as terrestrial messengers or agents of the now celestial great gods. While this development is quite obvious in Hebrew thought during the interbiblical period, it is also recorded at other Syrian locations with respect to various gods.
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The "need" for an immanent god in the perceived absence of the great gods who had slipped away unnoticed to live in heavenly places also resulted in the renewed and expanded use of the concept of the deified monarch. The short-lived Alexander the Great as well as his Macedonian successors, both the Ptolemaic dynasty in Egypt and the Seleucid dynasty in Syria, put much public emphasis on the divinity of the ruling monarch. The deified monarch was a regional stand-in for the now distant great gods. Hence the typical Hellenistic titles of royalty, terms such as kyrios and despotés, both of which translated into Latin as dominus, "lord", had all acquired divine connotations before the beginning of the first century AD.
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The preoccupation with demons was another growing trend in the Hellenistic religious picture. A demon was not one of the celestial gods. The (Greek, daimôn; Latin divus) was sometimes understood to be the surviving, soulless spirit-being, or "power," of some man long dead. The eternal soul had long since migrated along the milkyway to its home in the "aethereal" heaven, but the spirit-being was left behind to fend for itself. Only the more powerful spirit-beings have escaped the "air" below where they are invisible to be visible in the "aether" above. Every misery of human existence seemed attributable to the capricious acts of demons. The growing awareness of demons and their potential for disrupting human peace and quiet seems most easily explained as a result of the new assumptions about the patron gods. The difference between the gods who have departed and these beings who have remained behind was essentially one of magnitude or scope of power.
The assumption seems to have been that these great old deities have abandoned their posts on the mountaintops and moved far away into the cosmic celestial realm. This has allowed the demons to emerge from the caves, crevasses, hollow trees and other dark, secret places of the earth to play havoc in human communities without restraint. Most demons were insignificant, harmless and cooperative. Some, however, were mischievous and unpredictable. Others were unrelentingly obnoxious. No longer having to recognize the sovereignty of the great gods, the demons appear to have organized themselves into regional kingdoms under the domination of their most ruthless, aggressive and vicious members.
One simply had to learn to cope with the demons. Ordinary individuals bought and wore amulets and broaches specially designed to fend off ill-intentioned demons. Archaeologists find these amulets by the bushel. They practiced other simple rituals and cooked up potions to ward off demon activities. They also might resort to the aid of knowledgeable practitioners of the arts of demonology. By the first century AD such practitioners put out their shingles under various titles. In Latin one might be called a sorcerer (sortitor), a magician (Greek, magos, Latin, magus), or a Chaldean, i.e., one from Babylon.
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The analysis and understanding of the cosmos, that is, the world, as the human environment in all its dimensions is not a matter about which there has ever been universal agreement. Indeed, it has always inspired man's most probing questions. In the first century AD aside from the Hebrew world-view much of which was absorbed into and preserved by the Christian world-view there were other world-views in contention around the Mediterranean. The most commonly cited world-view assumptions in the Hellenistic age are drawn from the literate minority of highly educated scholars. These assumptions are usually discussed under the heading of Greek philosophy. To be sure the philosophical worldviews seem to have continued to exert a far greater impact in the Christian Era because the presentations emphasized logical and sensible explanations of human observation and action. Four of these world views, Academic and Peripatetic, Stoic, and Epicurean traditions are discussed in Appendix One.
There were, however, other less sophisticated sets of assumptions equally as attractive to the curiosity and gullibility of the teaming masses in the Roman World. The artifacts of the intelligence of ancient Egypt and of ancient Iraq, to say nothing of ancient Greece, offered impressive sets of assumptions about the origin of the cosmos and of mankind typically expressed in those enigmatic pre-rational narratives called myths. These myths (stories using the primitive vocabulary of personal and social awareness to recount the willful motivations and actions of named personifications of various perceived entities) had by no means been abandoned by the general public even though the philosophers generally rejected them (in favor of logical accounts using the impersonal vocabulary of craft work). The various practitioners of demonology and various cultic wisemen mentioned above, actively disseminated such ideas among the masses. For a more extensive discussion of this pre-rational view of the world see Appendix One. For a discussion of how primitive religion relates to the pre-rational outlook see Appendix Two
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The most coherent and literate form of the Greek mythological traditions from the Hellenistic age is preserved in a group of writings known as the Homeric Hymns. The legendary heroic figure of Orpheus presides over this body of ancient folklore and wisdom regarding the origin of the gods (theogony), of the cosmos (cosmogony), and of mankind (anthropogony) had survived the rejection and disdain of the Greek philosophers. Orpheus was first introduced in the Homer's Odyssey as a patron of the arts and especially of music. These hymns, attributed to Orpheus, synthesize the mythology of many Greek deities into a more or less coherent order; namely, everything proceeds from unity and is again resolved back into unity.
This Orphic theogony and cosmogony--explanation of the creation of the cosmos and the traditional gods--begins with a single god, Time (Chronos). Time created the One (Monos)--the cosmic unity, a silver egg. The Cosmic egg hatched. The firstborn of Time was a bisexual creature recognized as the creative principle and sometimes called Desire (Eros), sometimes Light, Bright (or Visibility) (Phanos). Phanos/Eros presided over Orpheus' "Golden Age". The bisexual Phanos/Eros gave birth to his/her own daughter, Night (Nyx). Phanos/Eros and his daughter, Night, had two offspring, Heaven (Ouranos) and Earth (Gé). The children of the union between Heaven and Earth, among others, included the Stretched or Tensed (Titanos)--perhaps in the sense of being tense like a bow string. One of the race of Titans named Kronos (whom we know under his Latin name, Saturn) overthrew his father, Heaven, and reigned in his place. Kronos had children by his sister, Rhea (whose name means Easy--a relaxed tension) but he swallowed all his children until Zeus was born. Then Rhea fed Kronos a stone in place of Zeus that made Kronos spit out all the previous children. Zeus grew up and swallowed Phanes, the creative principle, ending the "Golden Age".
The Orphic anthropogony--explanation of the origin of mortal man--is the second age of the cosmos. Zeus had several divine offspring but most importantly with Demeter his sister, he had a daughter, Persephone. (The Demeter mythology explains how Persephone became the wife of the Hades, ruler of the underworld). Zeus and Persephone then had a son named Zagreus. Zagreus ruled both the world and the underworld, but the Titans were jealous of his power and hated him. In a evil rage they killed Zagreus and ate him. When Zeus learned of this evil deed he singed the Titans with a thunderbolt which transformed them into ordinary men. Thus, mortal men have the evil physical nature of the Titans, sons of Earth and Heaven, but they have imprisoned within their bodies the divine soul of Zagreus whom the Titans had eaten.
Men are subject to Fate or Fortune (tyché), but must purge the Titanic aspect of their being in order to preserve or release the divine soul. As the tale goes, the Titans had eaten all but Zagreus' heart when Zeus zapped them. Athena recovered the heart and presented it to Zeus who promptly swallowed it. Zeus then had relations with Semele, the daughter of Cadmus the king of Thebes. She became pregnant by him but tried unwisely to catch a peek of the divine Zeus. Zeus' splendorous radiance killed her like a thunderbolt, but Zeus saved the unborn fetus by implanting it in his thigh to conceal it from Hera, his jealous wife. The semi-divine child of a god and a mortal woman was born in due time. This offspring was identified as a reborn Zagreus but he was called Dionysus. In the Orphic tradition Dionysus possessed a special measure of the divine not only through his father Zeus but also through the heart of Zagreus. Because of this divinity, Dionysus could help other men purify themselves of their evil Titanic origins and liberate their souls.
No evidence has survived of any Orphic cult organization, as such, but ancient observers indicated that the Orphic literature embodied all the concepts of both the classical mystery at Eleusis and the more recent Hellenistic mystery of Dionysus. Meanwhile the variety of ancient cults of Dionysus continued to be evident. The apparent emphasis of the Orphic material was to argue for an ascetic life style where the evil body was brought into subjection to the imprisoned divine soul.
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Rome as a localized Italian state was the product of a polytheistic society. The development of religion is a corollary of cultural development. When and where ever you have many different cultural traditions existing side by side and tolerating one another you also have many different religious ideas and practices prevailing as well. Saying Rome developed in a polytheistic society is the same thing as saying Rome developed in a multicultural society. From the very earliest moment of Rome's existence she was an amalgamation of divergent cultures. Latin, Etruscan, Hellenic, Sabine, and Samnite just to name a few of the more familiar heritages that were already themselves beneficiaries of divergent cultural experiences. The only way a state could expect to survive and grow with such a multicultural composition is to honor the unique religious heritage of every citizen with freedom of religious expression and ask every citizen to honor the religious practices that are closely identified with the state's existence and continuance. It is very difficult for students at the beginning of the twenty-first century to understand that religious freedom was an essential policy that Rome in her glory years had to guard in order to hold her Empire together.
The popular mythology that obscures our understanding of Rome would lead us to think of Rome as a place where religious freedom did not exist. After all, haven't we heard how the dastardly Romans were always persecuting the Christians? If the Roman world was, indeed, not like that in the first century AD where did we get the idea? We shall see that generally localized selective persecution of Christians and/or Jews did occur sporadically for a number of reasons during the first two centuries. It was not until the third century AD that the Roman government attempted to narrow religious freedom by imperial policies of manipulating the behavior or Roman citizens. The conversion of the first Roman Emperor to Christianity occurred in the early 4th century AD. Within a century from the reign of Constantine the laws of the Roman Empire were rewritten to make the practice of any religion other than orthodox catholic Christianity a criminal offense! All legal religious toleration and freedom had officially disappeared within the boundaries of the Late Roman Empire. Now the dastardly Romans were continuously persecuting the polytheists!
Furthermore, I doubt that most people today realize that The United States of American is the first modern nation-state to turn its back on the last 1600 years of western tradition in the attempt to re-establish and maintain as high degree of multi-culturalism, religious toleration and freedom within one nation as Rome attempted in her early Empire. What this means is that Christians today in the United States are living in more nearly the same kind of religious freedom that the Roman Empire provided the early Church eighteen or nineteen centuries ago.
Enough about us! Now back to Rome!
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As the Roman political and military machinery digested the Mediterranean world, Rome had to work at recognizing and honoring all the cultural-religious expressions they encountered. They did draw a few lines beyond which they would not go. They would not tolerate or allow random human sacrifice or the wanton destruction of property in the name of religious worship. There were no legal limitations on which gods you might worship, but how you worshipped those gods was restricted if it resulted in the deliberate taking of innocent lives, the unnecessary destruction of property or the disruption of peace and security. Such actions were criminal actions and did not go unpunished. The Druids of Gaul who resolutely defied Roman authority and practiced human sacrifice were forcefully, that is militarily, driven from Gaulic society. They were pursued to England, and finally cornered on the Island of Angelsy off the north Coast of Wales and massacred to the last man by Emperor Nero's Soldiers.
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In a polytheistic society there is nothing more insane, illogical or ultimately disruptive to the tranquility and stability of life than an individual or individuals who fanatically and superstitiously worshipped only a single god. It was a case of "possession" carried beyond civilized limits. Polytheistic society understood the concept of possession, or being possessed by a god. For them it was always a momentary or brief condition when an individual's rational capacities were short-circuited in order for the god to act and/or speak through the individual. Anyone who claimed to remain in that state for an indefinite period had either lost his sanity or did not have a very advanced level of culture or education. In other words he was crazy or didn't know what he was talking about. Such was the Roman reaction to the Jewish people's traditional monotheism--a primitive superstition.
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The city of Rome contained not only provincials and slaves from all corners of the empire and beyond who brought their cultural religious practices with them, the Romans officially imported religious practices for the benefit of the state from time to time. There were times when the city fathers attempted to limit the more bizarre practices to the suburbs where they might cause fewer disturbances. But on more than one occasion religious cults complete with priesthood were imported to Rome on behalf of the city because of official oracles that commanded as much. Some of the more savage were from what is now Turkey. The Cult of Magna Mater, the Grandmother of the gods, was by far the most strikingly savage as well as one of the most elaborately welcomed and eventually assimilated into the official Roman calendar which schedules all important religious functions of the state. The cult was translated from its native haunts on the slopes of Mt. Ida in Phrygia to a new temple on the Palatine Hill at Rome about 200 BC. For a century or longer Roman citizens were prohibited from becoming priests because the Romans abhorred the frenzied, bloody, self-emasculation rite which made one a priest. The priesthood lived at the Palatine temple, dressed as women, and begged for food in the streets of the City. Finally, about the same time the people in Antioch Syria started talking about the followers of Jesus as being "Christians", Emperor Claudius established the annual public celebrations of Magna Mater from March 15 to 27 in the official Roman State calendar.
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The Roman soldiers and politicians grew callused by the unending variety of gods and religious practices across their empire and came to treat the patriotic practice of the official Roman state religions as a matter of semi-conscious habituation. Indeed the continuing transfusion of non-Italian peoples converging into the masses at the city of Rome together with the death of so many of the leading native Roman families saw the disappearance of traditional religious practices long native to Rome during the turbulent revolutionary period that ended the Republic. Octavian, the first Emperor, did re-create many of the priesthoods, rebuild shrines and reestablish several of the official cultic practices in the proximity of Rome after he restored peace to Italy.
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The death of so many of the leading native Roman families during the Revolution had another effect, it weakened the resistance among the ruling class to adopting the eastern practice of ruler worship. This allowed Octavian to gradually introduce practices in keeping with those of the Seleucids and the Ptolemies but with a slight Roman twist. Octavian set the precedent by having the Roman Senate declare that Julius Caesar, now dead, was a divus imperatorus, a triumphantly divine conqueror. A shrine was erected and priesthood appointed to properly honor Emperor Octavian's uncle Julius. In due time of course Octavian died and was similarly deified by the Senate, so he became one of the divi imperatores. His widow, Livia, was the high priestess of his cult. Emperor Tiberius and later emperors encouraged all the provinces to establish priesthoods to the divus Augustus; frequently some of the local priests of the Roman state gods doing double duty. Only four emperors of the sixteen that ruled during the first and second centuries demanded worship while they were alive--Gaius, Nero, Domitian, and Commodus. These individuals embarrassed many Romans by their uncharacteristic -- perhaps insane -- demands. The Senate could not be persuaded to deify any of them if they were going to claim they were already gods. Both Emperor Tiberius and later Claudius specifically issued decrees prohibiting any worship of themselves as ruling emperors in spite of the eagerness of their subjects to worship them, especially in the eastern regions of the Empire.
Uninformed modern commentators incorrectly try to make Roman Emperor worship the one universal requirement imposed on every inhabitant of the Empire. However, most inhabitants of the Empire responded to Emperor worship about the way we respond to the American Flag when certain music is played. There were, however, certain places and at certain times when individuals were expected to evidence the appropriate "worship" response. Many of these were attended voluntarily by impressive numbers, but there was never until the third century AD an attempt to coerce such "worship" of every citizen. Indeed, in the first and second centuries, unless a person got hauled into the court of a Roman Governor by his enemies the average Roman subject was not likely ever confronted with the necessity of giving formal regard to the divi imperatores or other symbols of Roman authority. When it came to that the act of "worship" was motivated largely by fear and respect for the presiding Roman official who could terminate your life on the spot without hesitation or due process.
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In the broader perspective the seven centuries between about 350 BC and about AD
450 was a time when civilized man in the greater Mediterranean world sought in many different ways to organize and synthesize the accumulated knowledge from all these ancient sources into a coherent system. Many educated individuals tried their hand selecting ideas from various sources and putting them together in creative syntheses. When the synthesis drew together philosophical ideas from various schools it was called eclecticism. (We trace some of this in lecture/essay five.) By the second century AD when both philosophical and religious concepts, broadly defined, were synthesized together some of the results came to be called gnosticism. Finally, the prominent synthesis, which emerged from this long period of experimental reorientation, is the one historically called the Christian worldview. This Christian worldview that emerged by the days of Augustine of Hippo (d. 430 AD) had synthesized elements from many sources that were understood to be compatible with the basic Christian teachings.
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Return to the Lecture/Essay Table of Contents for Part I
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