historical, political, and cultural contexts which varied extremely from one end of
the empire to the other. The cities of Greece and Asia Minor had retained their civic
pantheons into the imperial era. When, under Trajan, Dio of Prusa (Speeches39.8)
praises the gods of his city, Nicaea, he mentions the old, ancestral gods, whose main
role, so he tells us, is to ensure concord within the community: “I therefore pray to
Dionysus, first ancestor of this city, Hercules, founder of this town, Zeus Polieus,
Athena, Aphrodite Philia, Homonoia, Nemesis and the other gods.” In the same
way, Athena and Artemis remained, unchanged, the great patron goddesses of
Athens and Ephesus. Indeed, the Greek and Roman gods were part of the same fam-
ily and the same religious culture, as the texts sometimes state: a letter addressed by
Trajan Decius to the Carian city of Aphrodisias specifies that the close links tying
Aphrodisias to Rome find their justification in their shared religious tradition
(J. Reynolds 1982). Was not Aphrodite/ Venus, from whom the city took its name,
also the mother of Aeneas, founder of Rome?
It is true that the foundation of colonies under Caesar and Augustus had some-
times led to significant changes: for example, the goddess of Calydon, Artemis Laphria,
whose temple stood on the city’s acropolis, was moved to the other side of the Strait
of Corinth to the colony of Patras. However, these interventions were only occa-
sional and related to the organization of the provincial system at the very beginning
of the empire – they were certainly no longer undertaken in the second centuryad.
On the other hand, the public spaces and main sanctuaries of the Greek cities were
progressively encroached on, if not taken over, by cults and images representing the
emperor and the imperial family, as seen in the case of the 136 statues of Hadrian
erected in the sanctuary of Zeus at the Olympieion of Athens (Alcock 1993). It is
obvious that, in these regions, Rome’s sway over local religion was very different
from that it had in the west, taking the form of cults that connected imperial power
with the traditional civic cults through subtle combinations (Price 1984). In a reli-
gion characterized by a multiplicity of gods and divine representations (Petronius
17.5; Seneca, Naturales quaestiones2.5), it was only logical that the integration of
religious forms relating to imperial power also took the form, as is normal for poly-
theistic religions, of multiple images and religious manifestations.
The same can be said for Egypt, which had also preserved its ancestral sanctuar-
ies and religious organization (Frankfurter 1998a; Willems and Clarysse 2000). Under
the empire, sacred animals continued to be mummified and buried according to the
funeral rites of the old kings. Titus was even present at the enthronement of a new
Apis bull inad 70 (Suet. Titus5). Suetonius reports that he wore a royal diadem
for the occasion in accordance with the traditional rites of the Egyptian religion,
though it caused great consternation among the Romans. Despite the undeniable
persistence of traditional rites, Kaper and others (e.g. Frankfurter 1998a) have
brought to light changes which indicate that the Egyptian gods, like the other gods
integrated in the empire, were in step with their times, in which Rome dominated:
for example, one notes the importance which Serapis came to have alongside Isis in
Egypt – an association well known in the rest of the empire, notably in Greece and
Italy, but less so in Egypt itself, where tradition normally associated Osiris with Isis.
In the same way, the success in Egypt of the cults of Bes and Harpocrates, the son
Religions and the Integration of Cities 85