Hellenistic age, which had continued their role in the city, but as a sort of reinven-
tion of tradition instead: as a deliberate form of highlighting a Greek past, along the
lines of the phenomenon of the Second Sophistic, which we have encountered above.
As regards the period in which Dura-Europos was part of the Parthian empire, we
seem to be on firmer ground. Many of the temples still in use when the city was
under Roman control, and the gods worshiped inside them, go back to the Parthian
centuries. However, not one of them can be viewed as typically “Parthian.” A fair
number of the gods and their cults who first appeared in Parthian Dura-Europos
actually came from Palmyra, the above-discussed Syrian desert city, c. 200 km to the
west, which had strong cultural links with Dura-Europos, especially thanks to trade
(Dirven 1999). Others came from villages along the Middle Euphrates (for ex-
ample Aphlad, who is identified in one inscription as “god of Anath, village of the
Euphrates”), or were local versions of universally known deities, such as Artemis and
Adonis. In the Roman period itself, a further number of temples were constructed,
some for deities who had entered the city with the Roman soldiers who were now
stationed there. To this category belong a small mithraeum, that is, a shrine of the
bull-killing god Mithras, and a temple where Jupiter Dolichenus was worshiped. The
arrival of the Roman garrison will certainly have had consequences for the clientele
of some of the existing sanctuaries. At least a part of the temple of the goddess
Azzanathkona, which had been built in the Parthian period, was converted into an
archive for the military cohort. But as we have seen above, the soldiers took part
also in the traditional religious life of the town.
Dura-Europos is probably best known to the larger public because of its syna-
gogue and its baptisterium, reconstructed in the National Museum of Damascus and
the Yale University Art Gallery in New Haven respectively. As regards the synagogue,
its extremely well-preserved wall paintings, which depict a series of scenes from the
Hebrew Bible, go of course directly against the Jewish prohibition of figurative art. As
regards the Christian baptisterium or house church, its unfortunately worn frescos
depict instances from both the Old and the New Testament. Both communities
seem to have used Greek and an Aramaic dialect alongside each other, suggesting
contacts with their co-religionists in west and east. It is often argued that serious
religious competition between the various religions and cults musthave taken place,
and that the wall paintings in the synagogue and the baptisterium played a major
role in putting up resistance against the otherwise-minded. However, there is no
good evidence that in this situation co-existence provoked any religious interference:
differentiation of religious choices does not necessarily imply competition. And from
our own times we know that preaching exclusiveness on a theological level is one
thing, but ecumenical practice, or at least living together in peace, quite another.
Concluding Remarks
The evidence from Dura-Europos has often led to general conclusions about the
nature of worship in the normal small towns of the Roman east. In contrast to
monumental buildings in cities such as Ephesus, Antioch, or even Palmyra, properReligion in the Roman East 455