rites of the publica sacradesigned to link Rome and the communities of the
empire in proper relationship with their gods.
Stark’s market model treats the pagan cults indiscriminately as firms
competing for customers with religious products. For the public cults, this
makes no sense. First, as we have seen, the firms of public paganism were
not in competition. They were complementary elements in the religion of
Rome and its communities, each playing its necessary part in securing the
pax deorum.If we wish to retain the commercial metaphor, we might liken
public paganism in the Roman Empire structurally to some vast conglom-
erate, dedicated to a common mission (in the business sense) but operat-
ing through numerous local branches or franchises differentiated by their
particular deities—a sort of empire-wide “Gods-R-Us.” Organizationally, this
mega-firm was no rigid top-down hierarchy. Team management and local
branch-plant initiative in delicate negotiation with head office were its
characteristics. Its true leaders in product development were the city coun-
cils, provincial assemblies (the functions of which were mostly religious),
and individual aristocrats, not the emperor or the governors (Rives 1995,
96–99). This holds even for CEO-worship in the imperial cults (Price 1984).
Second, the product of public paganism was not primarily aimed at the
individual consumer. To be sure, an individual could generally use a pub-
lic cult for private ends, making a vow to the god and redeeming it with a
sacrifice or dedication as appropriate. But first and foremost, the users of
the public cults were the communities. Priests and magistrates performed
sacrifices, and the cult festivals were duly held on behalf of the common-
wealth. Religion was collectively produced for collective ends. For all his
emphasis on collective production in Christianity (a mode equally ger-
mane, as we have seen, to the cult associations of paganism), Stark’s reli-
gious consumer is an individual, and the definitive religious products of his
firms, such as the promise of victory over death, are personal. In rational
choice theory with a classic market model, it cannot be otherwise. The
player is the autonomous individual exercising choice, even when a monop-
oly situation drastically curtails the options.
In chapter 2, Philip Harland argues persuasively that an anachronistic
concept of individualism underlies the old scenario of polisreligion in
decline. Nuancing Harland’s perception, I would suggest that it was Chris-
tianity, together with certain of the mystery cults, notably, Mithraism and
Isism, which brought the mentality of radical personal choice and religious
self-definition into being, so that Stark’s paradigm of religious behaviour
in due course becomes germane. But, on the whole, the religious environ-
ment of the Roman Empire in the first three centuries of Christian growth
The Religious Market of the Roman Empire 243