JEWS OR PAGANS? 153bly also an allusion to his military prowess) and Menogenes, having “lived
life,” still lives for his friends. But our text goes further still in attributing
to Amandus a characteristic I could not find paralleled in other epigrams:
Amandus’s life was equivalent to a god’s.^84
Perhaps this is an idiosyncratic expression of a religious value not foreign
to ancient moralists, Greek, Roman, or Jewish—a theodicy of good fortune
(in Max Weber’s formulation), the conviction that the fortunate ipso facto
enjoy divine favor. Perhaps Amandus thought that it was precisely his enjoy-
ment of luxury that had made his lifeisotheos(equivalent to a god’s), just
as his military valor had given him immortalareteˆ. Surely the display and
celebration of wealth, the sharing of it with friends, clients, and the city, and
theattributiontoitofreligioussignificancewereessentialpartsoftheideologi-
cal fabric of the Greco-Roman city. And it is in such a cultural nexus that the
sentiments, both commonplace and unusual, that Amandus had carved on
hissarcophagusbelong,evenmorefirmlyandunmistakablythantheepitaphs
of Siricius and Marcellinus.
The content of Amandus’s epitaph makes it unsurprising to find the statue
of a goddess dedicated as a gift by a Tiberian called either Ismenos son of
Ioenos, or Ismaelos son of Ioanes, to the Tiberianstatio(trade office) in the
Romanforum,probablyinthemiddleorlatersecondcentury.^85 Yet,acentury
or two later, Tiberians resident at Rome were identifying themselves as “He-
brews” and burying their relatives in the Jewish catacombs.^86
The Villages of Galilee
Most excavated re mains fro moutside the Palestinian cities fro mthe second
to the fourth centuries are of burials, for reasons that may have something to
do with an enduring bias of Israeli archaeologists for the monumental or,
alternatively, with the character of ancient village life. There are, however,
important exceptions from Lower Galilean villages like er-Rama, with its big
bathhouse; Capernaum, containing a variety of structures of uncertain and/
(^84) The wordisotheosappears not infrequently in imperial Greek inscriptions commemorating
city councils’ resolutions to offer emperorsisotheoitimai“divine honors” (i.e., a sacrificial cult).
See Veyne,BreadandCircuses, p. 308 n. 43.
(^85) Schwabe 16 = di Segni 19. The stone is lost and Schwabe observed that the names as
transmittedareunparalleled(thoughIoenoscouldconceivablyrepresenttheLatinIovinus,ifthe
etawas already pronounced ıˆ) and suggested that they were mistranscribed and should be read
as the common Jewish names Ismael and Ioan(n)es.
(^86) CIJ1.502=Noy,JewishInscriptions,2.561;cf.CIL3suppl.1,10055,fromSalona,Dalmatia
(in Latin, in Greek letters):AureliusDionysiusIudeusTiberiensisAnXXXX,filiorumtriumpater.
For the dating of the Roman Jewish inscriptions, see Rutgers,HiddenHeritageofDiasporaJuda-
ism, pp. 45–71.