JEWS OR PAGANS? 159
Thenormalcy oflifein theJewishcitiesand townsseemsto haveextended
to religion, at least in part. The evidence for the existence of municipal cults
isfarfromnegligible,thoughitisimpossibletotellhowwidespreadparticipa-
tion was. The big temple of Hadrian and other Tiberian shrinesperhaps
ceased to be used by around 300; even if this is so, however, it does not tell
us anything about the extent of the citizenry’s enthusias min, say, 170. What
wecanbecertainaboutistheimportanceofthegodsinthewaysomesection
ofthecities’populationthoughtabouttheirownplaceinthecity,theempire,
thecosmos.Whenawell-to-doSepphoritewishedtodisplay—andtheculture
oftheGreco-Romancitywasoverwhelminglyacultureoftheatricaldisplay—
hiswealth,education,goodtaste,hisappreciationofvisualwit,hiscelebration
of the abundance his city provided, and of the state whose peace imposed
worldwide had helped make his city rich, like a seventeenth-century Dutch
burgherwithhisstill lifes,hedidsobyhavingscenes fromDionysiacmythol-
ogy depicted on the floor of his dining room, where his relatives, guests, and
clients would be sure to see them. When the city elites collectively desired to
celebrate some of the same qualities, they did so in a similar way, by having
images of the gods struck on their cities’ coins and by decorating their public
buildings, marketplaces, and main streets with statues and reliefs of emperors
andgods.Andprosperousvillagersbehavednodifferentlywhentheyhadtheir
relatives buried in mausolea richly decorated with mythological scenes and
publiclyjustifiedtheirdeath,indactylichexameters,byinvokingtheinscruta-
ble will of Moira, not that of Israel’s True Judge. Thus, entirely conventional,
perhaps somewhat allegorized, Greek mythology seems generally to have re-
placed, orat least supplemented,the Jewishmythology I discussedin chapter
2 as a way of accounting for the operation of the universe. Or perhaps what
it replaced was the Deuteronomic or covenantal ideology, also a theology of
prosperity and success.^104
I a marguing here that pagan art used by Jews had a specifically pagan
religious meaning, but not necessarily a simple one. Whether or not large
numbersofJewsregularlyworshipedtheGreekgods,theirubiquityassymbols
is profoundly important as an indication of the postrevolt collapse of any nor-
matively Jewish ideological system. Even where traces of the old system are
detectable, as at Beth Shearim, a site that is transitional between high and
late empire and atypical in the concentration of especially Jewishly pious
people buried there, these traces still coexist with standard urban paganism.
Certainly there are no grounds for a judaizing interpretation of the urban
material culture, of either the dismissive or the constructive variety. The for-
merisexcludedbytheveryoddityinvolvedinimaginingconventionallypious
Jews blithely using pagan imagery as decoration, even if urban paganismwas
(^104) Contrast, though, Fox,Pagans and Christians, p. 38, who emphasizes the “anger” of the
civic deities.