CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE
Exporting Roman Religion
Clifford Ando
This chapter examines the spread of specifically Roman cults to the provinces. Its
argument proceeds with two concerns foremost in mind. First, I concentrate on the
religious life of Roman citizens. For it is among communities of citizens that we
should expect Roman cults to have spread first, both because Roman religion was
first and foremost a religion of and for a juridically defined community of citizens
(Scheid 1985b: 47–76; 1985a), and because, naturally, it is through the movement
of adherents that cults must in the first instance themselves move.
Second, I seek to problematize the very assumption that what cults do is spread
or, perhaps, that what the religious do is proselytize. For historical reasons – some,
indeed, quite powerful – this expectation both governs and complicates the study
of religion in the ancient Mediterranean as perhaps nowhere else. The latter part of
this introductory section and the conclusion to the chapter both take up this issue.
Bracketing that problem for the moment, the chapter falls into two parts. The
next two sections examine the topic empirically, by considering in turn the religious
life of two types of communities principally in light of provincial evidence. The first
of these sections studies colonies of Roman citizens, who were thought to remain
in some fashion in the populus Romanusand whom one might expect, therefore, to
remain participants in the Roman people’s religious life. The following section turns
principally to municipalities, and seeks to characterize the degree of control – and
extent of autonomy – granted them in religious life. In both sections I argue for a
high degree of change over time in Roman and local practice. Indeed, at a high level
of abstraction, perhaps the chief way in which local practice mirrored Roman prac-
tice was in its sheer fluidity.
The second half of the chapter turns to Roman theory or, perhaps, Roman theo-
logy, and argues above all that there were substantial structural impediments to the
spread of Roman cults. (The historical origin of the question why we should expect
cults to spread is examined below.) I concentrate there on two bodies of evidence:
first, the bodies of religious law concerned with geographic aspects of priestly action