Religion in the Roman East 447“Roman” Religion in the East
That is not to say that “Roman” religion as such was completely absent in the east.
There are three main aspects which need to be mentioned in this regard, although
the division was maybe not always as clear-cut as we would like. First, with the foun-
dation of a Roman colony came, traditionally, a certain religious export package, in
order for the colony to mirror the imperial capital not only in an institutional but
also a cultic sense: a set of Roman gods (headed by the Capitoline triad of Jupiter,
Juno, and Minerva) and also some specifically Roman priesthoods, such as pontifices
and augures. In the Near East, this process can be traced, for example, at Berytus
(present-day Beirut), a city founded as a colony under Augustus which later became
famous for its Roman law schools, and at Jerusalem, refounded under Hadrian
as the colony Aelia Capitolina, the first part of that name being a reflection of the
emperor’s family name. Other places in the Near East acquired colonial status only
later in the Roman period, simply by imperial grant, without veterans of the Roman
armies settling there. In such cases, Roman gods and priesthoods were often hard
to find. Thus, at the Syrian desert city of Palmyra, which officially became a colony
in the early third century, the indigenous divine world or “pantheon” remained
unaffected when the new institutional structures of the colony were implemented.
Secondly, with the one-man rule that came over the Roman world with Augustus,
the so-called “imperial cult,” in the form of sacrifices and other rituals focusing on
the emperor himself “as on a god,” swiftly spread over the empire’s eastern
provinces. The very designation “imperial cult” is something of a misnomer. On the
level of the Roman state cult, the living emperor was head of the important college of
pontiffs (pontifex maximus), but not himself a god. Only after his death could he,
if the senate voted so, become a divus. On any other level, however, the emperor’s
subjects could grant him divine honors as they wished (Gradel 2002). That being
said, there are of course well-known instances where a request on the part of pro-
vincials for worship was turned down, or at least adjusted, by the emperor, in a
public show of moderation. Tacitus, for example, paraphrases a speech supposedly
given by Tiberius in reaction to an application from the provinces for permission to
build him and Livia a shrine (Ann.4.38), and an inscription from Gytheion (on the
south Peloponnesian coast) quotes a letter from Tiberius to that city recording his
satisfaction with “honors more modest and of a human sort” (EJ^2 102b, with Sherk
1988: no. 31). But in general our evidence overwhelmingly suggests that the
living emperor commonly received a cult in the eastern provinces, and the modern
question of whether the inhabitants actually “believed” that their emperor was a “real
god” is the result of looking through Christianized glasses, and obscures more than
it reveals. Contrary to what happened in the western provinces, which seem to have
had imperial cult more thrust upon them, the existing civic structures in the Greek
east were such that worship of the emperor, both the living one and his predecessors,
was incorporated more easily, and also more eagerly, into local religious frameworks
(Price 1984). For citizens and provincials alike, treating the emperor in the same
way as one would treat a traditional god was one way to accommodate the new power