and authority and, second, Roman historical accounts of their own attempts to move
cults. Such actions are often described, as we shall see, as attempts to move the god
himself or herself; their success is therefore seen as contingent upon the willingness
of the god to move and, often enough, concurrently to accept not just any, but
quite particular, new worshipers. However we might wish to redescribe those con-
cerns in light of our own theoretical postulates, the framework within which
Romans conceived the spread of cults and adhesion of individuals to them is clearly
radically different than our own.
This reflection returns us to the problematic expectation on the part of Christian
and post-Christian scholars that religions spread, an expectation that exists within
the study of religion more generally, and within the study of Roman religion more
specifically, largely through the influence of two related forces. The first of these is
the awareness that the Roman empire provided a context for the diffusion of many
religions, most famously the so-called oriental or mystery cults. This view of the empire’s
religious history has itself a long tradition. For the most famous of those mystery
cults was, of course, Christianity, and the Christians developed very early a theory
of history by which to understand relations between religion and empire. Their most
significant move was to assent to imperial propaganda in equating the accession of
Augustus with the foundation of the empire. By ignoring, in other words, the long
history of the empire’s acquisition and privileging instead the constitutional change
from democracy to imperial monarchy as a historical nodal point, the Christians could
associate in time and therefore in causation the establishment of the empire and
the birth of Christ. God himself had so provided, the argument ran, in order that
the new religion might spread more rapidly in a unified world (Melito of Sardis,
Apologiafrag. 1; Eusebius, Triakontaeterikos [Tricennial Oration] 4.2 and 16.5– 8;
see Ando 2000: 48; see also Momigliano 1987: 142–58).
There were of course those who dissented from this view, and contexts in which
the arguments for it seemed less cogent, but this is not the place to review the
history of that debate. Its contours are relevant here because it was that debate,
together with the ecclesiastical histories that adopted its framework, which naturalized
the proposition that what religions do is spread.
The second force contributing to the prominence of this proposition in religious
historiography derives from the early modern experience of empire, as well as from
the historical and polemical literatures to which it gave rise. These urged that empires
were agents of cultural change, and that pre-eminent among their ambitions – or,
perhaps, their instruments – was the imposition of their own law, language, and reli-
gion (Pagden 1995). Empires, in other words, should have a Reichsreligion, an impe-
rial religion, whose furtherance might constitute an important part of some imperial
project, even as it contributed directly to empire’s justification. For late medieval,
Renaissance, and early modern Europe, of course, that religion was Christianity. But
the theories of empire that developed in those periods and later did not regard
Christianity’s role in European imperialism as novel. On the contrary, they connected
it directly with the providential role assigned the Roman empire in the original suc-
cess of Christianity itself (see, e.g., Engelbert of Admont’s “On the rise and end of
the Roman empire,” esp. chs. 15 and 18).
430 Clifford Ando