PAGANS AND CHRISTIANS, Robin Fox, Penguin, Harmondsworth, 1988
(1986)

This voluminous work, containing some 650 pages of text and one
hundred pages of notes, begins with a preface stating it took about
a decade to write and making the traditional acknowledgements to
British Classical studies and their eminent high priests.

Chapter One, "Pagans and Christians" (pp. 11-23), offer glimpses of
the lives of three pagans (Gordian III, Aurelius Longinus and T.
Flavius Glaucus) and three Christians (Cyprian, Constantine and
Hilarian). It introduces pagan literary and civic concerns, and
Christian charity and intolerance.

Chapter Two, "Pagans and Their Cities" (pp. 26-63), begins with the
antiquity of the gods, the existence of penetrating early insights
into their nature and worship, and the most likely meaning of the
word "pagan" and its significance.

   Pagani were civilians who had not enlisted through baptism as
   soldiers of Christ against the powers of Satan. By its word for
   non-believers, Christian slang bore witness to the heavenly
   battle which coloured Christians' view of life. pp. 29-30

Pagans were more concerned with ritual than with doctrine. There is
a selected survey of the awesome variety of pagan practices from
Hadrian (117-138 C.E.) to the last Severan (222-235). There were the
hereditary Egyptian priesthoods and the one hundred and fifty days
annually required befittingly and in detail to worship the crocodile
god in the village of Soknopaiou Nesos. In Syria there were
processions, dietary regulations, tattooing and ear piercings.
Deities co-existed in the same temple and shared the same priest.
Concepts existed of combined deities and of subordinate deities
within one high one. The view of the foreignness of the Oriental
gods is noted as an exaggeration.

   The so-called Oriental gods, Mithras, Serapis, Isis and others,
   were themselves Greek creations...Their cults were too varied to
   be compressed in one way, and their new importance should not be
   exaggerated. Some of them remained gods with strong local
   constituencies, although travellers took them far and wide: none
   had a strong missionary drive or an aim of excluding other
   cults. p. 36

Magic was not opposed to, but within, religion, although its aims
could be ethical or otherwise. There was the concept of giving to
the divine givers, and that of the unpredictability of the gods.
There is mention of the worship of the emperor and the lack of
modern scholarly unanimity as to its scope in religious thought and
life. Then come pagan pilgrimmages, and the ideal rural setting of
the homes of the gods and goddesses. This leads to sacred groves.

Then there are cities, large and small, with advantages and
otherwise, including period conditions of health and life
expectancy. There were assemblies of citizens, an institution
declining through the Second Century. There were town councils.
There were social divisions from aristocrat to slave. The honours of
office required contributions from one's personal resources and from
170 C.E. fewer were able and willing to so aspire. The donors
provided grain and games and heated baths. And they breathed
culture.

   There was no division between the upper class, the men of taste,
   and the people who studied and wrote, practised philosophy and
   indulged in public speaking: the one group comprised almost all
   of the other. Style was the man, a mirror of his moral worth, and
   top people cultivated it keenly. Books were reviewed fiercely for
   their errors of vocabulary; displays of oratory were a valued
   public entertainment: masters of the art assumed that their
   hearers had come equipped to note down their finer turns of
   phrase. The age's most spectacular feud between two great public
   figures was thought to have started from a dispute about taste in
   music. Above all, taste was expressed in architecture, where
   designs broke with pure classicism and indulged in a splendid
   baroque vitality. p. 56

There is mention of the hunting and the philanthropy of pagan
aristocrats and to associations of those with more slender means to
ensure even such needs as appropriate funeral and burial.

Chapter Three, "Pagan Cults" (pp. 64-101), begins by questioning
assumptions that there was increased credulity and anxiety at the
time. Anger seems a greater concern in Second Century sources, and
anxiety more centred in plagues and earthquakes than in personal
psychology. Then there's a look at the gods and goddesses.

   The gods were known through their images, many of which resided
   in temples: in Egypt, the priests' daily liturgy was to open the
   shrine, offer food to the god's statue and attend to its
   cleanliness. In the Greek world, some but not all, of the temples
   of civic gods were kept shut for the greater part of the year.
   There were notable exceptions, however, and some cities
   prescribed daily hymns to be sung by choirs at the morning
   opening of a shrine; otherwise, by finding the shrine's keeper,
   a visitor could usually enter and pray before the god's image.
   p. 66

There are the special festivals: processions, clean white garments,
sacrificial animals, garlands, libations, music, dance, competitions
and trade fairs. There were, naturally, rival claimants to such
prestigeous honours as birthplace of Zeus. Sacrificial animals
provided participants with meat. Sacrifices, festivals and
possessions continued and increased through the Third Century C.E.,
as did the impressive building of shrines, exampled at Gerasa, Side
and Sabratha. There was the sale of priesthoods, the befitting image
of a city, displayed by festivals and fine temple architecture, as
well as the public recognition of the nobility of aristocrats
conspicuously supporting the deities.

Next comes cults founded by immigrants, worship in the home and on
private property.

   Family cults helped to define the circle of family membership:
   wives were expected to follow their husband's family cults, and
   adopted heirs were to honour their adopted family's cults and
   ancestors. In Roman religion, the cults of family and household
   were especially prominent: we find signs, too, of their export to
   the towns of the Latin-speaking West. p. 83

Then comes the role of religion at school, in rites of passage, and
after death. Then is described a meeting of the worshippers of
Bacchus held at Athens in April 176 C.E. and the rules of this
association of these worshippers, including fines for those who
missed a monthly meeting or got into a fight at one, and decreed a
a wreath and a jar of wine for everyone attending a member's
funeral. There follows myth and symbolic meaning, philosophy and
both appeasing divine anger and avoiding excessive fear of the gods.
There is reference to the great difference between pagan and
Christian views of the afterlife.

   Among pagans there was no concern to die with "sins" forgiven or
   to pray for the state of friends and family beyond the grave.
   Pagans met to honour the spirits of the dead, to commemorate a
   dead person or to appease and nourish his disembodied soul by
   offerings of drink and blood from a sacrificial animal. Pagans
   prayed to the dead, whereas Christians (like Jews) prayed for
   them. pp. 97-98

Chapter Four, "Seeing the Gods" (pp. 104-167), refers to the
presence of deities in epic poetry, dreams and oracles. Mortals
might not notice divine beings, or they could mistake each other as
divine. The great moments of need (such as undertaking a sea voyage,
during illness or a war) drew special prayer and enhanced awareness
of divine presence. There is reference to a too narrow focus in
studies of paganism in the Christian era on mysteries, magic and
theurgy. There is reference to Neoplatonism, to Thrice Great Hermes
and to concepts of union with God. Then there is the inscription in
Lydia where a guilty one apoligized to Zeus for cutting down a
sacred oak, thanked him that his subsequent misfortune did not
include death and advised others to spare oak trees.

   Inscriptions from the same area refer to a process called
   "setting up the sceptre," by which the villagers invoked the
   justice of their local god or goddess. The cases give us some of
   our livliest glimpses of village life from the first to the
   mid-third century A.D. When an orphan was suspected of
   maltreatment or when clothes were stolen in a bathhouse, the
   villagers held a "trial by sceptre" and summoned an all-seeing
   god. When three pigs went missing from a herd, the suspects, "did
   not agree" to this appeal to the sceptre, but the appeal occurred
   nonetheless, and before long the gods had killed every one of
   them. When a stepmother was accused of poisoning her stepson, up
   went the sceptre, and before long she and her own son died. We
   know of these cases because surviving kinsmen inscribed them on
   stone and put up their record in order to appease the gods. The
   "twelve sceptres" were invoked to protect tombs from violation,
   "implacable sceptres" which would punish an offender's family
   forever. p. 128

There is reference to companionable gods, to daimones and to the
Roman individual's genius. There is Pan, often seen, in and out of
dream. There is reference to placing written prayers on the legs of
statues, and of statues whose bound arms were intended to deter
those gods from leading enemies across the border. The novels are
cited and Biblical Acts for human protagonists mistaken for divine.
Philostratus' "On Heroes" is told. Dreams are considered, the
fasting and libations preceeding divine dreams, and the frequent
appearances of Asclepius to dreamers at his shrines.

   There was no opposition from doctors to the practices of
   "incubating" and seeking cures in dreams from the god. Since the
   later first century B.C., the surviving records of dreams of
   Asclepias say less about sudden miraculous cures and rather more
   about precise medical practices which the god prescribed. p. 152

Next come statues, the dream book of Artemidorus of Daldis, later
influential through early Arabic and English translations, and the
dreams of Aelius Aristides.

Chapter Five, "Language of the Gods" (pp. 168-261), begins with the
widespread nature of facing east to pray, the text at Oenoanda and
the nature of divinity.

   Self-born, untaught, motherless, unshakeable,
   Giving place to no name, many-named, dwelling in fire,
   Such is God: we are a portion of God, his angels. p. 169

This leads to the oracle of Claros:

   This priest heard only the number and the names of the
   consultants; then he went down into a "cave" and drank the sacred
   water. Although he was "generally ignorant of letters and
   poetry," he gave responses in verse on the "topics which each
   questioner had in mind." p. 172

There may have been originally one priest, sent from Miletus, an
oracular site of its own. Later he had assistants, including one
skilled in rendering the god's initial utterings into decent verse.
The priest prayed and fasted before becoming enthused at night.
Archaeologists have uncovered the passage taken by initiates, and
the some three hundred inscriptions at the shrine have begun to be
studied, permitting an estimate of the oracle's influence.

   These clients extended widely: west, in a year of crisis, to
   Stobi in Macedonia, south to certain cities inland in Caria,
   north to the northern coast of the Black Sea, quite often to
   Thrace, to the cities of Pontus and, here and there, to places in
   Phrygia and Cilicia. The delegations came mostly from the lesser
   or more recent centres of Greek city culture: Oenoanda was
   keeping appropriate company. Usually, they lacked an oracular
   cult of their own and any connection with Delphi or Miletus at
   the time of their foundation, and so they turned to Claros,
   rather than to these old, alternative shrines. p. 178

Choirs of children, poets, tutors, and choir masters attended the
city delegates to the oracle, and some made multiple visits in
varying roles as the years passed.

The other great oracle of Apollo in Asia, that of Didyma outside
Miletus, was not viewed as a rival of the one at Claros. The statue
of the god at Didyma was old, having been taken to Susa by the
Persians in 494 B.C.E. and returned by Seleucus, who had Apollo as
his patron. At Didyma, the god spoke through a priestess. She prayed
and fasted for three days, before sitting where the water wetted her
feet and she breathed its vapour, but drank not. An assistant
prophet turned her utterances into stately hexameters.

Then there is Delphi, three dialogues of Plutarch, and Delphic
connections to Egypt.

   Like many shrines, oracles had libraries and archives, while
   attracting talk of local history and natural wonders from their
   many clients and travelling visitors. They gave scope to one of
   the most persistent and distinctive types in Mediterranean civic
   life: the antiquarian. p. 188

Apollonius of Tyana is said by Philostratus to have spent seven days
consulting with the god at Delphi, and emerged with a book on the
highest philosophy, a volume possibly sent to Hadrian, "that
connoisseur and patron of oracles and oddities." (p. 189) There is a
return to the influence of the shrine at Claros and inscriptions
attesting this at Nora in Sardinia, in Dalmatia, in North Africa, at
Hadrian's Wall, and along the Nile.

There follows mention of THE CHALDEAN ORACLES, their origin in the
second century, their influence and their fraudulant nature. The
emperor Julian's role as prophet of Apollo at Didyma is mentioned.

In the early Second Century C.E., shrines and oracles were enhanced
by benefactions, some from emperors, at Delphi, Didyma, Alexandria,
Apamea, Pergamum, Patara, Claros, Ephesus and Siwah. This leads to a
look at undying sibyls, and at the role of individual and of place
in oracles. There were street prophets, pythonesses, children very
close to the god or to the intermediary bearing prophecy, people
attaining prophecy by drinking the blood of a bull or by covering
themselves in sheepskin.

And, there were the various foretelling tools, such as taking out
earplugs and noting the first words heard, tossing dice placed at
statues, performing alphabetical divination, consulting an almanac
such as "The Fates of Astrampsychus," astrology and physiognomy. One
could study, faces, eyes, thickness of hair, even gait.

There is a look at the kinds of questions on papyrus and stone: the
usual concerns over romance, marriage, health, employment, etc. Not
surprisingly gods approve honours for themselves. There is Apollo's
preference for song, perhaps occasioned by the attainment of Aelius
Granianus Ambeibios Macer to the post of prophet.

   Cities passed honorary decrees "testifying" to the virtues of
   their magistrates: the gods caught the habit and "testified" to
   their servants. p. 223

Apollo also approved those of other divinities, and he advised on
such sacred perplexities as what to do with old images one found, or
giant bones that turned up, or the appearance of gods in dreams, or
how to proceed when his prophet died while overseeing a construction
project.

   we can appreciate a marvellous question and answer, given c.
   150-200 A.D., which stood on the walls of Miletus's temple of
   Serapis. "Apphion, also known as Heronas, from Alexandria" asked
   Apollo about his prospects in the arena. He was beautifully aware
   of the gods' constant assistance in his life: he was a theatrical
   "star" and his ancestral gods, he said, "stood by" him, "as you
   do too, master, in whatever business he undertakes. His question
   was this: would he "acquit himself gloriously at all times in his
   act of dancing on tiptoe and training bulls and will he be
   serving (Apollo?) with a fair name?" Apollo told him to pray to
   various gods and enjoy them as his "protectors": Apphion, it
   seems, was a bull tamer who danced on the bulls bare backs. He
   needed the gods' reassurance on the "glory" of his act, and when
   he received it, he was so proud that he inscribed it prominently
   on the shrine of Serapis, the god whose "swift eye" Apollo told
   him, once again, to "propitiate." The text has the clumsy style
   and construction which we would expect from a bull tamer using
   his own words. Once again, it was not enough to receive an oracle
   which praised a questioner, a place or a cult. It was as well to
   inscribe it for others to read and admire forever: did the
   priests, perhaps, of Serapis encourage the carving of this
   pleasant text? p. 227

There were sensitive imperial questions to answer with appropriate
ambiguity. There was consultation in war, draught and disease, and
statues built in response to attract rain, keep away enemy soldiers
or drive away plague.

   These questions were not born in a static, indifferent age.
   Mostly, they arose from the central problem of religious
   innovation, on which there is a clear division between the Greek
   and the Roman world. At Rome, innovations were generally
   supervised by the board of "fifteen men" who had access to the
   collections of Sybilline books. These old oracular sayings were
   consulted for advice on new cults or changes in existing worship,
   and often their meaning relied on their human consultants'
   judgement: in principle, they were a closed "canon" of divine
   wisdom. In the Greek world, however, these questions were put
   directly to the gods. p. 237

Next comes the prophet Alexander and his pet snake who attracted
people to the distant town of Abonouteichos on the Black Sea coast.
This new cult of Asclepius is examined in some detail, largely on
the basis of Lucian's satire. One interesting point is that besides
Greek, questions could be asked here, in the mid to late Second
Century C.E., in Syriac and in Celtic. The book continues with a
look at the revival of temples in the early Second Century C.E.

   Word spread from these occasions that Apollo was back into his
   stride: at Didyma, Apollo was at one point granted the right by
   the Romans to receive mortals' bequests. Roman lawyers cite him
   as a prime example of a god who enjoyed this privilege, and
   evidently, the grant was an official ruling, probably from an
   Emperor. Did Trajan or perhaps Hadrian, another benefactor,
   confirm it at the shrine? Inspired verse oracles needed financing
   to maintain their staff, and these rights were very valuable.
   p. 251

There is a rejection of the notion oracles were a means of
controlling populations. Apollo did praise the Jews, while he
criticized those who forsook their ancestral ways and became
Christians. And, when in time of peril, the oracles prescribed
sacred remedies, only to be opposed by Christians unwilling to
comply, the scene was set for moves against these atheists.

Thus concludes the specifically pagan section of this book. It
contains many fascinating details and should richly reward anyone
interested who plunges into it.

Michael McKenny August 7-12, 2002 C.E.



Solarguard Pagan



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