indigenous deities. They either continued to sacrifice to the ancestral gods of their
hometown, as for example many Palmyrene soldiers who were enrolled in auxiliary
units in Roman Dacia (present-day Romania) or north Africa did, or they made offer-
ings to the gods of the locality where they were now stationed. Involvement in local
cults took place on all levels, from an ordinary soldier of the fourth legion, based in
Syria, who dedicated a small altar at Dura-Europos “to the ancestral god Zeus Betylos
of those by the Orontes river” (SEG7.341), to the Roman governor who traveled
to Jerusalem to attend a Jewish festival (Josephus, Antiquitates Iudaicae18.5.3 [122]).
When the Roman authorities were called in to act as arbitrators in the event of a
clash between city and sanctuary, which happened regularly, their general attitude
seems to have been one of sympathy toward the local cults. We can follow some of
the stories through epigraphic dossiers, compilations of related inscriptions, often
inscribed on the walls of the temples (Dignas 2002). When in the middle of the
first centuryad, the governor of Asia was called in to mediate between the famous
temple of Artemis in Ephesus and those civic authorities who had borrowed money
from the temple without repaying their divine creditor, he took sides with the temple
in dissolving the administrative controversies. And a later governor of the province
acted on behalf of the emperor when in the early second centuryad the priests of
a local Zeus at Aezani, a minor place situated inland in western Turkey, complained
to the Roman authorities that some of the town’s citizens held plots which
belonged to the sanctuary without paying rent; in this case the governor wrote a
letter in which he urged the restoration of the so-called sacred land. However, Rome
could easily leave its positive attitude behind when the situation required different
politics, especially when a place had backed the wrong horse in a situation of conflict:
for example, because Tegea in Arcadia had supported Mark Antony in the civil war
against Octavian, the later Augustus, the latter robbed the sanctuary of the town’s
local Athena of its sacred objects once he was established.
Interaction between local cults in the Roman east on the one hand and aspects
of imperial religion on the other can also be encountered on a very different level.
Some of the so-called toponymic deities in Syria, gods who were named after
one particular locality, were given by their worshipers the epithets “Best” and
“Greatest,” originally belonging to Jupiter Optimus Maximus, the leading god of
Rome, who had his temple on the Capitoline Hill in the imperial capital. In such
cases the inscriptions, written in Latin (instead of Greek, which was the common
language in Rome’s eastern provinces) applied standard abbreviations (IOM) to
label the gods. The two most famous examples are the local lords of Heliopolis
(Baalbek in the Bekaa valley in Lebanon) and of Doliche (now a small village in
eastern Turkey), both of whom were also depicted with a very recognizable, nearly
canonical iconography. IOMH(eliopolitanus)was mostly portrayed as a beardless
figure wearing a kalathos(some sort of fruit basket) on his head, standing on a plinth
flanked by bulls, and enclosed in a sheath which was divided into a large number of
sections displaying busts. He held a whip in his right hand and an ear in his left
(Hajjar 1977, 1985). IOMD(olichenus)stood, characteristically, on the back of a bull,
wearing a tiara and a tunic, and wielding an axe in his right hand, in an image which
went back to Hittite precedents (Hörig and Schwertheim 1987). The worship of
Religion in the Roman East 449