backgrounds,” once it has been determined that Christianity was a “cult”
in the defined sense and not a sect. In sum, “[t]he whole point of theories
is to generalizeand hence to escape the grip of perpetual trial and error”
(Stark’s italics).
This is all very liberating, but can we really shuffle off so easily our plod-
ding habit of case-by-case empiricism? I suggest not, and my reluctance
stems from a concern about the universe of cults and sects. The physicist’s
confidence in gravity (to follow Stark’s analogy), and his consequent inat-
tention at a baseball game to a fly ball’s monotonous habit of coming back
down to earth, rests on innumerable observed instances that what goes
up does indeed come down—and not just at the ballpark. There are, how-
ever, in absolute terms, not that many “cults” and “sects.” Therefore, espe-
cially when moving into the different arena of ancient society, I require
more than a single instance before placing much reliance on the applica-
bility of Stark’s generalization concerning class, cult, and sect. In particu-
lar, I wish to see the principle operating within the majority religion of the
times with an example of a “sect” or sect-like movement recruited from the
proletariat. But as soon as this modest desideratum is formulated, it becomes
apparent that it cannot be met. Try to imagine a class-based reform move-
ment in public paganism: the mental experiment simply cannot be achieved.
This is not because public paganism was not amenable to reform, or because
reforms were never undertaken. Rather, it is because reform or renewal
within public paganism was not a matter of group formation.
What, then, does “reform” mean in the context of public paganism?
What was the perceived problem, what was to be done, and by whom?
Here is what the Augustan poet Horace says about it in the opening of the
sixth of his great state odes:
Delicta maiorum immeritus lues,
Romane, donec templa refeceris
aedesque labentis deorum et
foeda nigro simulacra fumo (Horace,Carm.3.6.1–4)
“You’ll pay for your fathers’ crimes, Roman, though you don’t deserve
it, until you restore the god’s collapsing temples and their images pol-
luted with black smoke.”Horace’s answers could not be clearer: the gods are punishing Rome (wit-
ness foreign threats and the late civil wars) for neglect of their cult (in the
original ancient sense of that word). The solution: restore the publica sacra,
i.e., the apparatus of temples, priesthoods, festivals, sacrifice, etc., by which
the gods are served as they require, and by so doing renew the pax deorum.