credibility of religious leadership in the Roman Empire on this bipolar
scale.
Of equally dubious relevance to public paganism is the concept of
“compensators,” whether used in the sense of the peculiar rewards or of the
sacrifices demanded of the religious life. The rewards of public paganism
were all direct, mostly material, and realized in the here and now: the pay-
out of the philanthropic exchange and communal prosperity consequent on
propitiation of the gods. Sacrifice in the metaphorical sense of self-denial,
the acceptance of stigma, and perseverance even to a martyr’s death, was
not an option, still less a requirement.
There are almost no exceptions where we can observe a religious life
played out within a public cult according to the Starkian paradigm of the
choice and acceptance of compensators. Significantly, the clearest case
occurs in the context of a healing cult, where religion is most obviously per-
sonal. In the Sacred Tales(Behr 1968), the aristocratic orator and valetudi-
narian Aelius Aristides has left us a record of his endlessly sought cures at
the great shrine and medical arts establishment of the god Asclepius at
Pergamum. The cult was a high-profile public institution, but within it
Aristides forged a deeply personal and (as he sensed it) reciprocal rela-
tionship with Asclepius. Eric Robertson Dodds (1965, 39–45) has drawn a
wonderful portrait of this “anxious pagan,” showing, by reference also to
his dream life, how Aristides religion functioned as compensation for the
ruin by ill health of a promising career (see also Remus 1996). Even his ill
health was converted to religious ends, for it sanctioned his dependency and
claims on Asclepius’s services. Through it all, Aristides loved, and felt him-
self loved by, his saviour god.
In the Starkian sense, Aristides received as “compensator” a properly
religious reward. Compensators in the sense of tough demands were also
part of the deal. Granted, nothing in his relationship with Asclepius required
loss of wealth, worldly status, or life. Though, in a strange way, loss of life
was indeed called for—and met, but by substitution. As Aristides tells us
in the Sacred Tales(Or.48.27), a finger could be substituted for the whole body
and, in turn, a ring for the finger. Likewise, the deaths of two of his foster
kin were interpreted as substitutes for his own death (Or.48.44; 51.19–25).
The required sacrifice was he himself, but the compensator could be off-
loaded. Even so, physical ordeals were called for, and although these can
easily be dismissed as prescribed cures (doctor’s orders), the more accurate
view is to see in them the conditions of Asclepius’s favour, for directly or
indirectly the god was the prescribing physician. Here is a not untypical
example:
The Religious Market of the Roman Empire 247