RELIGION 195composition and values as it was possible to get after a decade and a half of
destructive civil wars.
The heritage of Augustus was hard to shake off. In the fi rst place, the
status of the emperor and the imperial ideology do not show a decisive
change before the end of the second century. We might contrast the relation
between on the one hand the Flavian dynasty, on the other the Severan, and
the Egyptian gods. The devotion of the Flavians to Isis and Serapis was
exceptional.^14 Vespasian represented himself as the elect of Serapis on the
basis of certain miraculous experiences he had undergone in Alexandria in
the critical early days of his bid for power. Domitian owed his life to Isis,
having escaped Vitellius’ men by dressing as a priest of the goddess. Yet the
Flavians, a new family lacking charisma and authority, drew a fi rm line
between their personal religious choices and the offi cial religion. The
Severans were also arrivistes , but their conception of themselves and of
the imperial persona was suffi ciently elevated to enable them to reorganize
the state religion in accordance with their own preferences. The uninhibited
(or megalomaniacal) behaviour of the last Antonine emperor, Commodus,
in his last years had shown the way. Commodus had represented himself as
Hercules, participated fully and openly in the festivals of the Egyptian gods,
incorporated a prayer to Serapis in the offi cial prayers of the new year, and
saluted Serapis Conservator Augusti on his coins. All that was left for
Caracalla to do was to introduce the Egyptian gods into sanctuaries within
the sacred boundary of Rome (the pomerium ) and reconstruct the offi cial
Pantheon around them. Where the gods of Egypt had entered, Syrian gods
could follow.^15
Secondly, the conservative governing class that Augustus bequeathed to
the Roman state acted as a restraint on religious innovation. In the two
centuries that followed his death, the social base of the upper classes
broadened, but not the social outlook and religious values of their members.
Isis and later Mithras as new, lower- class religions had virtually no appeal
for the senate of the Principate.^16 The antipathy of senators of the late
Antonine and Severan age for the religious developments of their period can
be read in the pages of Cassius Dio. The advice offered by ‘Maecenas’ to
‘Augustus’ in Dio’s history is at one level an endorsement of Augustan
religious conservatism by a Severan senator reacting against the rapid pace
of political and religious change in his world:
Therefore, if you desire to become in very truth immortal, act as I advise;
and furthermore both yourself worship the Divine Power everywhere and
in every way in accordance with the traditions of our fathers and compel
all others to honour it. Those who attempt to distort our religion with
strange rites you should abhor and punish, not merely for the sake of the
gods, but because such men, by bringing in new divinities in place of
the old, persuade many to adopt foreign practices, from which spring up
conspiracies, factions and cabals, which are far from profi table to a