Stark virtually ignores when he treats of Christianity’s pagan rivals.^3 Pub-
lic religion, as it functioned in the Roman Empire, simply cannot be accom-
modated within a model of a market economy of competing religious firms,
whether loosely or strongly regulated.
At the heart of the problem is the fact that the state was not, as the
model implies, merely the market regulator, a regulator that happened to
favour and subsidize certain pagan firms. Rather, the state itself, through
the public cults, was directly engaged in the business of religion. It gen-
erated a religious product. That product, the goal of public religion, is sim-
ply stated: the pax deorum,the “peace of the gods” or their goodwill, from
which communal prosperity and harmony would flow. In the production
of this communal good, principally through sacrifices to the gods and the
due observance of their festivals in the calendar, the cults of public pagan-
ism did not function as stand-alone religious enterprises—let alone com-
peting enterprises—distinct from the secular state enterprise. Rather,
public paganism in its totality was the state itself operating in the reli-
gious mode.
This is quite different from the sort of monopoly situation exempli-
fied in historic Christendom, where church and state remained distinct
entities, however Christian the state claimed to be and however all-encom-
passing and exclusive the authority of church over society might have been.
The pope was not the emperor, nor the emperor the pope. But in ancient
Rome the emperor was Pontifex Maximus, and that high religious office was
and always had been an office of state. The essentially lay nature of the
Roman priesthoods, largely mirrored in the priesthoods of the cities of the
Greco-Roman world, cannot be overemphasized. Priests, by and large, were
citizens of the elite political class performing public functions, not a pro-
fessional clergy, even a very worldly one (Beard and North 1990). Con-
versely, at Rome the most important religious functions connected with
ongoing public business were performed not by priests at all but by mag-
istrates acting ex officio.The great priestly colleges were advisory rather
than executive. Thus there was no distinct institutional state religion as we
would understand it—that was the joint invention of Christianity and the
Christianized empire—but, rather, merely the myriad regulated cults and
242 PART III •RISE?
3 Again, this follows from Stark’s reliance on MacMullen (1981) as Stark’s primary guide
to paganism. MacMullen, of course, does not ignore the workings of traditional official
paganism, but it is not his focus. Better guides on this score would have been Liebeschuetz
1979; Wardman 1982. The full picture is now admirably presented in Beard, North and
Price 1998. A local cross-section (for the city of Carthage, then a Roman colonia), equally
well displayed, is presented in Rives 1995 (cited by Stark).