JEWS OR PAGANS? 161altar. These items remind us that a sharp distinction between public and pri-
vate, self-evident to us and presupposed by the hypothesis that the paganizing
of the wealthy had no significant resonances down the social scale, was not a
normal feature of life in the Roman city, at least not for the better-off.^108 The
contents of the privately owned house were scarcely less on display than the
publicbuildingsborderingthemarketplace,andthefactthattheyweremeant
to impress the (ipso facto) poorer dependents of the city elites confirms that
interestinand/oradherencetothevaluesofGreco-Romanurbanculturewas
not limited to the rich—a point perhaps further strengthened by the seating
capacity of the Sepphorite theater and by the use of pagan imagery on the
crude limestone sarcophagi produced at Beth Shearim in imitation of high-
qualityandexpensiveimportsmadeofmarble.^109 Wewoulddowelltoremem-
ber that civic paganism incorporated magical and paradoxical elements that
partly compensated for its status as a theodicy of good fortune,^110 just as Juda-
ism, in its covenantal form no less a theodicy of good fortune, had done in
the Second Temple period: both systems cut across class lines.
Thesecitieswere,finally,notsimplyGreekbutGreco-Roman:unlikemost
classical Greekcities butlike otherGreco-Roman cities,the Palestiniancities
were oligarchies characterized by euergetis mrather than de mocracies in
which expenditure was state controlled; rhetoric was used mainly for enter-
tainment, not politics;^111 citizenship in the city apparently did not exclude
possession by individuals or subgroups of other types of formally constituted
ethnic identity. Furthermore, the cities’ values (their ideology) were influ-
enced in specific ways by Rome.^112 Some of the citizens were also Roman
citizens even before the universal grant of citizenship by Caracalla in 212,
manyhadLatinnameswhetherornottheywereRomancitizens,andlegion-
ary servicewas aneffective wayof acquiring notjust wealthbut prestige—not
unsurprisingly in cities whose population probably consisted of descendants
of refugees fro mthe devastation the legions had wrought in Judaea.
(^108) On the Roman house as public space, see A. Wallace-Hadrill,Housesand Society atPom-
peiiandHerculaneum(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994), esp. pp. 17–37.
(^109) For a similar observation about the romanization of Gaul, see G. Woolf,BecomingRoman:
The Origins of Provincial Civilization in Gaul(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998),
p. 81.
(^110) This point is brilliantly made by Gordon, “Religion in the Roman Empire.”
(^111) SeeE. L.Bowie, “TheImportance ofSophists,”YCS27 (1982):31–38 (art.29–60), onthe
relative unimportance of sophists(which is not quite the same as rhetoric)in city politics includ-
ing, rather surprisingly, embassies.
(^112) Cf. Millar,RomanNearEast, passim.