200 THE ROMAN EMPIRE
aux religions orientales dans l’Empire romain (Leyden, 1962–1986), which was
explicitly devoted to the re- inscription of Franz Cumont’s conception of the oriental
religions, dating from 1906, as the creatively destructive spear- head of
Christianization. We may take the publisher’s decision in 1991 to re- name the series
Religions in the Graeco-Roman World as the symbolic point at which this enfeebled
grand narrative lost all credibility outside certain conservative New Testament
circles. Nevertheless, it has proved much easier to criticize the narrative than to fi nd
convincing alternatives.
Religion has been a main benefi ciary of the shift of academic interest towards
cultural history, itself fuelled by the symbolic and linguistic turns of the 1970s (see
Chapter 12). The study of Roman religion in the narrow sense (that is the religion of
the City of Rome), which was traditionally devoted to purely antiquarian issues and
often stopped abruptly with Augustus, was (rightly) considered by most historians as
an irrelevant specialism incapable of addressing signifi cant theoretical problems. The
essential step here was to re- envisage the task, to shift from describing ‘Roman
religion’ to setting up a problem, namely how to conceptualize the ‘religion of the
empire’ (Ando 2008, 95–148). One result has been to begin breaking down the
institutional and ideological barriers – which are also mental and conceptual
limitations – between ancient history, Jewish studies and New Testament scholarship
(Goodman 1998, Belayche and Mimouni 2003, Rajak 2002, Perkins 2009), which in
turn has encouraged efforts to establish common theoretical terms and perspectives
that might provide the basis for shared projects (cf. Smith 1990 on ‘locative’ versus
‘utopian’; North 1992, on the ‘religious market’; Sandwell 2007 on ‘identity’;
Belayche and Dubois 2011 on ‘co- habitation’). Sacrifi ce offers a similar opportunity
(Knust and Várhelyi 2011), as do small groups (see below). Further questions involve
re- thinking the settled assumptions that provide the implicit substructure of much
empirical work. Why not view religion not as a kind of minor background activity
but as itself a medium of change, in the creation of new types of group, in the
pluralization of local cultures? Would it be possible to write a cultural history of
Roman religion? Or a social history of religion in the empire? Could we not turn the
tables and focus upon individual instead of group religious action (Rüpke and
Spickermann 2012, Rüpke and Woolf 2013, Rüpke 2013)? At the same time, it must
be said that conceptual innovation is fi tful: the study of individual cults remains
popular; in some countries, working on religion still means little more than drawing
up lists of inscriptions mentioning gods. Nevertheless, religion now enjoys a presence
in the specialist literature of the empire unimaginable in 1987, a shift marked by the
existence since 1997 of very detailed triennial review- essays (Bendlin and Rüpke
2000 and 2003, Bendlin and Haase 2007, 2009, 2012), two collections of re- printed
articles (Ando 2003, North and Price 2011), a synthetic Companion (Rüpke 2011)
and an admirable retrospective covering the past quarter- century (Rives 2010).
Two attempts to tackle the problem of ‘the religion of the Roman empire’ in the
past two decades stand out. One is the most successful single work in this area,
which has been re- printed almost every year since it was fi rst published in 1998 and
has come to defi ne ‘Roman religion’ for generations of students, namely ‘Beard-
North-Price’ (Beard, North and Price 1998). They no longer work with a diffusionist
centre–periphery model but speak rather of the integration and interaction of
religious traditions, of local perceptions, the play of interests and advantage – the
inhabitants of the provinces, and especially their elites, are viewed as active partners
in a complex process of cultural appropriation. Religion is viewed in essentially