Texts in Context:
Hellenistic Religion
By Gabriel Blanchard
We here take final look over the Hellenistic age, focusing on the religious atmosphere between Alexander and Actium.
5. Hellenistic Religion: What It Wasn’t
Last week we discussed four of five major aspects of the Hellenistic period (conventionally dated from around the death of Aristotle in 322 BC to the Battle of Actium in 31 BC): language, socio-political institutions, higher learning (especially philosophy), and the arts. A fifth topic, Hellenistic religion, was set apart for special treatment; we may now turn to a few of its important features. To get a proper grasp on them, however, a word of caution is called for.
Most of our US readers—whether or not they or their families were or are religious—have grown up within a set religious framework, whose basic “options” are Christianity and a certain scientistic1 type of atheism, with perhaps a smattering of other elements (from astrology to voodoo2). The mental “furniture” is fairly familiar: God, Jesus, angels, priests and nuns, miracles, the cross, the Bible, the Ten Commandments, the Second Coming, heaven and hell.3 Its primary contrast is between believing and not believing. Faith is conceived by most people as a virtue, and the material proposed for belief is easily specifiable; additionally, it is an individual, personal thing. It can even be a kind of personal adventure.
Religion was not like this in classical antiquity. This was partly because religion was a public, social affair. By the standards of its day, the pinch of incense Christians were asked to offer to the genius of the emperor was not a prostration before a gargantuan ego: on the contrary, it was adopted as a litmus test because it was normal to the point of banality—and, furthermore, could be understood almost any way the worshiper chose. Piety might be a sort of “fifth virtue” (i.e., in addition to the cardinal four), depending whom you asked; but faith was not really a virtue to the ancients, because belief was not a primary element in religion.
A Glimpse of What It Was
This may seem incomprehensible at first, for reasons which lie in religious history. Christianity claims to be what is called a revealed religion. Most religions referred to as “paganism,” or what may loosely be called “unorganized religions,” are not. They may have books of immense cultural importance, as Homer was to Hellas, and those books might be about the gods; but these books were not dogmatic authorities, because classical paganism didn’t have dogmas! The beating heart of classical paganism was not a given set of ideas that could be arranged into a creed, but given sets of actions that could be arranged into rituals. If theories or stories came in at all, they did so as imaginative scaffolding onto which ritual could be hitched, not as things about which the chief question is “Is this true?”
Incidentally, this is also why, outside the memorable example of Socrates (and even he was probably not martyred for genuinely religious reasons), classical philosophy and classical religion rarely conflicted. They were doing essentially different things, in answer to essentially different impulses. Calling anything a “conflict between science and religion” of the modern sort in antiquity would be kind of like calling horses “a pre-mechanical type of automobile.” However, then as now and regardless of its underpinnings, religion was a response to certain hard-to-define feelings and ideas that most human beings do share.4 We may make special note of four aspects of religion in the Hellenistic world: the mystery cults5; syncretism and “orientalism”; ruler worship; and the unique societal position of Second Temple Judaism.
5a. The Mysteries
Mystery religions were a sort of “optional extra” that mostly arose within the context of classical paganism (or possibly of classical paganism’s Mycenæan predecessor, which we don’t know much about). The best-known and best-researched groups today are the devotees of the Eleusinian, Orphic, and Mithraic mysteries, and perhaps those of Isis as well. Less survives about other mystery cults. Most of the mystery religions do seem to have had something in the way of doctrine, but they also forbade initiates to disclose their secrets to outsiders. Whatever doctrines the assorted mysteries possessed, we know little about them. Some seem to have believed in immortality or reincarnation, either as a general reality or as a divine gift to initiates into their mysteries. Many mystery cults were, or perceived at the time to be, of “Eastern” origin, which brings us to our next point.
5b. Syncretism and “Orientalism”6
We touched, quite briefly, on syncretism in our review of Alexander’s career. It’s essentially the blending of two or more religious traditions; this is quite common, worldwide and throughout history. In the ancient Mediterranean, syncretism was made easy by interpretatio Græca, or interpretatio Romana, the practice of deeming the gods of foreign pantheons to be equivalents of the Græco-Roman pantheon. This was itself the product of just such an equivalency, despite several striking contrasts between the two sets of deities: for instance, the Greeks tended to view the war-god Ares with disgust and even something like scorn, but to the Romans, Mars was a beloved god whose province included farming as well as warfare! By means of interpretatio Græca, the Mesopotamian goddess Ishtar might be called “the Babylonian Aphrodite,” or Gaul’s Lugos as “the Gaulish Mercury.” Syncretism proper came in with the blending of older deities to form new ones, either within a single tradition, like Serapis (a fusion of Apis with Osiris), or across traditions, like Zeus-Ammon (a fusion of … you know).
At the same time—and this too was linked to the mystery religions—there was a flow of religious ideas from the East toward Rome, an increasingly prominent regional power (or was it only regional?) since it narrowly won three successive wars against its southern rival, Carthage. Many upper-class, traditionally-minded Romans disliked the change to the religious landscape, and it was even subjected to legislative curbs, but it could not be stopped. Many, including the early Julio-Claudians7 themselves, also disliked another trend that came from the East, and also found themselves almost forced by their subjects to adopt it.
It is expedient that there be gods; and as expedient, that we believe in them.
5c. Ruler Worship
It may have been due to Alexander’s plans, or the precedent set by the Pharaohs, or some other cause—whatever the reason, the worship of the head of state was a normal feature of religious practice in the Anatolian, Syro-Phoenician, and Egyptian parts of the Mediterranean. (The little strip of land in between the Syro-Phoenician and Egyptian coasts was a local exception, of which more in a moment.) The tradition predates the days of the Roman Empire, though we are most familiar with it in the form of the Roman imperial cult. Despite his personal lack of enthusiasm for the idea, temples were built to Augustus in his own lifetime in the province of Asia, notably at Pergamon8; moreover, by assuming the office of Pharaoh after Cleopatra’s death, the populace considered him ipso facto the embodiment of the god Horus.
All that said, in the Roman conception of these things, “ruler worship” is a bit of a misnomer. The usual object of this cult was not the emperor’s person, but his genius, a protective deity that was a little like a guardian angel; men in general, not just emperors, had genii, and women had distinct but equivalent spirits, the junones (singular juno). Especially in earlier times, the genius was the god and life-force of the family as a whole, not unlike the lares and penates.
However, thanks to policies first introduced by Julius Cæsar, one ethnoreligious group (originally from the East, but with a substantial and thriving community in Rome by the first century BC) was exempted from a number of normal laws, including any expectation to offer even the most formal religious rites to the imperial genius. That group was the Jewish people.
5d. Second Temple Judaism
In order to do real justice to this topic, we will need to pause and go back to an earlier point in history (as we have occasionally done before). However, we’ll need to do the same for Rome itself first—and to an even greater depth of time—so we can at least sketch the contemporary significance of Judaism.
As seen from without, Judaism was a bizarre tradition. Their resolute refusal to eat shellfish or pork was, to most people, merely arbitrary and ridiculous; their rite of circumcision, appalling to nearly all Gentiles, except the Egyptians. Stranger still, Judaism utterly forbade any depiction of its deities, an almost unheard-of practice. In 63 BC, the Roman statesman and general Pompey the Great confirmed (by forcibly entering and thus defiling it) that the innermost chamber of the Jewish Temple had no cult statue—not even an inhuman one, like the bætyl of Elagabal.9 Or rather, that should say deity, in the singular: they only had one! Equally unheard of—well, all right, there are a few philosophical schools that have been toying with an idea along those lines, but still, it isn’t normal. Neither is their fixation on just one Temple—stone goes on top of stone everywhere else in the world too; just build another one and you won’t have to pilgrim so far. What was more, they got exceedingly offended at the mere mention of using interpretatio Græca or adding a few other beneficial divinities to their … well, it’s not really a pantheon, is it. In fact, according to them—though surely this was just an exaggeration on the part of hardliners; nobody could really think this—but what they said was that their deity was the only real one. Even among the strange customs of the mystic East, this was baffling.
But. The fact that Judaic customs were inherited from their forefathers, and kept out of ancestral loyalty, gained the Jews considerable respect from the Romans. This mattered a lot; it was more than they generally got from their Hellene neighbors. For instance, although individuals who professed it might be suspected of doing so under false pretenses, the Judaic religion was never banned by Rome, not even during the Jewish Wars of the first and early second centuries AD. By contrast, in the middle of the second century BC, the Syro-Hellene Seleucid Empire under Antiochus Epiphanes attempted to Hellenize the Jews and exterminate their religion. The ensuing conflict was known as the Maccabee Revolt; you can guess which side won based on how many Seleucid emperors you’ve spoken with lately.
As mentioned, we will be coming back to this in greater detail. First, however, we must go back for a different purpose, almost as far back as the beginning of Archaic Greece, in a different sort of promised land.
1Scientism is a name sometimes used for the philosophical view (typically assumed and implied rather than stated) that only the modern sciences give accurate knowledge of the world, and/or that only the knowledge they give is worth having.
2Voodoo properly refers to a syncretic Afro-Caribbean religion, native to the environs of New Orleans. It is related to Haitian Vodou, Santería, and Hoodoo; these are often confused by outsiders. (The so-called “voodoo doll” is rare in, if not entirely absent from, these traditions.)
3This is “religion” in the sociological sense, or as a social phenomenon. Sociological religion is the reason why, and sense in which, “everybody knows about” ideas like Purgatory or the Rapture that are controversial among practicing Christians, while this “everybody” may at the same time be ignorant of universal elements of Christian theological religion, e.g. the general resurrection.
4Rudolf Otto’s 1917 book Das Heilige, or The Idea of the Holy, remains a landmark study of the concept of the numinous, which (he argued) lies at the core of most if not all religious experience.
5In the academic study of religion, cult simply means a system of religious practice. It has none of the negative implications of modern use.
6For the Romans, “the East” began with Anatolia—as in phrases like the Near East or the Middle East. The modern term orientalism usually refers to a negative attitude toward this region, either hostile or patronizing; there may be a historical connection between the modern attitude and our classical topic, but the two shouldn’t be conflated.
7The Julio-Claudians were the first imperial dynasty of Rome. They were so named because they were the heirs of two cadet branches of a pair of gentes (patrician clans): the Cæsares branch of the Julii, who claimed direct descent from Æneas (and through him, Venus herself); and the Nerones branch of the Claudii, an old and wealthy patrician family of Sabine origin.
8Some scholars believe that the book of Revelation alludes to this in its message to Pergamon.
9A bætyl is an uncarved stone used as a cult statue; some may have begun as meteorites, revered for their heavenly origins. (The name, filtered through Greek and Latin, comes from the same root as the name Bethel, “house of God.”) Elagabal was a sun god, worshiped mainly in and around the city of Emesa in western Syria; the third-century emperor Elagabalus (sometimes altered to Heliogabalus) was a priest of Elagabal and named in his honor.
Gabriel Blanchard has a degree in Classics from the University of Maryland, College Park, and is CLT’s editor at large. He lives in Baltimore, MD.
If you enjoyed this piece, you might like our series on the great ideas: try these essays on authority, magic, necessity and contingency, and prophecy—or indeed, God.
Published on 12th August, 2024. Page image of a domestic mural from the Villa of the Mysteries in Pompeii, possibly depicting Pudicitia (goddess of modesty) and/or Verecundia (goddess of humility).