Empires of Faith in Late Antiquity

Abstract

The study of the ancient Mediterranean world has traditionally been a hotbed of ancestralist rivalries and competitive modern genealogies (nationalist and cosmopolitan, Christiano-centric and anti-Christian). This is especially true for what have beenfrom a European viewpointthe privileged cultures of Greece and Rome. No account of Roman religion can be free of centuries of layered debate on these issues: consciously or unconsciously, the field is a tangle of constantly outdated 'presentisms' deriving their authority from accounts of a special, shared and collective past. 1 But Roman religion has a very special place within these narratives: it is not Christianityit represents the past before the continuing Christian present, which Western scholarship has either upheld or detested since the Enlightenmentand it is not Greece, wherein the highest cultural and philosophical ideals of Europe were always vested. In no other field with which this book is concerned are the self-contradictions of a long history of varieties of investments more directly manifest, than in the subject of visual and material culture in relation to Roman religion.Let us begin, as histories of Roman religions never begin, with an object. Of all the types of object we have from the Classical past, perhaps none so typifies our sense of ancient religion as the altar (Figure 3.1). 2 Altars are everywhere, with an impressive spectrum of possible artistic embellishments, inscribed ancient languages and contextual settings. They impel us 1 For the classic philosophical account of 'presentism' in the writing of history ('all history is contemporary history'), see B.