38.5 RELIGIOUS TRENDS?
There are changes in the use and description of the religious setting that can be traced in the language and atmosphere of the various literary works of the Second Sophistic, from novels to orations to short or long treatises. Some have called this a new “ethics of conjugality” of the Antonine period, referring not only to human social relations but also the relation between gods, heroes, and humans.39 Philostratus’s Heroicus is a good example of this emotional and social interaction between humans and a hero: divine epiphany and the real presence of the gods are part of the world created by literature and oratory.40 Aelius Aristides often describes his relation to Asclepius in terms of a personal relationship: he has conversations with him and he feels his presence and understands his messages both while awake and in dreams. Epiphany, therefore, is “real” not only in the Heroicus.41
Especially Aristides’s Hieroi Logoi and Philostratus’s Lives of the Sophists and Life of Apollonius reveal the importance of sanctuaries and so of the cult context as a setting for intellectual life in the late first to the early third centuries (Galli 2001, 2002), whereas in Pausanias and Plutarch the educated reader learns that sanctuaries, as the most important monumental reference points of the past, can be read and understood only with the help of antiquarian knowledge and paideia.42 Sanctuaries are guarantors of historical and cultural continuity, but so are the names of deities and heroes, or local myths and histories, which may explain the specific forms of commemoration in festivals, processions, sacrifices, or the special requirements for the priests and priestesses (Alcock 1993, passim; Bowie 2013). In the mind of Apollonius and his intellectual friends the panegyris, the festival at Olympia, is not just a matter of financing and imperial permissions: it is also composed of buildings and rituals together with wisdom and antiquarian knowledge (Philostr. V A 8.18). If education is the most important way to get to the core of the cults and the essence of Greek religion and culture, then only the elite (Alcock 1993, 210–212)—or, I would rather say, the philosophers and sophists—can engage in that field; the literary narrative of a biography or novel may even match the religious process with an intellectual journey (Platt 2009, 133, on the Life of Apollonius of Tyana). Apollonius, the inspired and true philosopher, therefore has knowledge superior to that of any priest on matters concerning cult and religion (Miles 2006).
Beyond that intellectual setting, cult and religion gained more attention during the second century, as can be seen in the reemergence of local cults on Greek civic coinage (Horster 2013, 247), and in the pervasiveness of the so-called confession inscriptions of the late first to early third centuries, which attest a deeply rooted religiousness in Phrygia, Lydia, and Mysia.43 This is no “intellectual” phenomenon, though the confession texts often refer to abstract deities; the context referenced is “morality”; the subtext is the personal interactions between the divine world and one individual; and many of the texts attest a kind of mono- or megatheism, with one supreme god or a very unique deity (Chaniotis 2010). These inscriptions illustrate that the pagan monotheistic aspect of Greek religion in the imperial period is not only based on the monotheism “commonplace in mainstream Greek philosophy since the Classical period” (Mitchell and van Nuffelen 2010, 3), but is also part of some rural religious traditions of the eastern Roman Empire.44
FURTHER READING
Anderson 1993 and Whitmarsh 2005 provide excellent introductions to the Second Sophistic and the many aspects of cult, religious settings and attitudes both in the “real” and in the narrated and literary worlds created by the intellectuals of the Second Sophistic. The prosopographical aspect is treated by Puech 2002, while the literary aspects on single authors’ attitudes toward religion are discussed by Brenk 1987 for Plutarch, Pirenne-Delforge 2008 for Pausanias, Platt 2009 and Rutherford 2009 for Philostratus. A fresh view on common and diverging (not only religious) attitudes of sophists, philosophers and Christians is exposed by Eshleman 2012.
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CHAPTER 39
PILGRIMAGE
IAN C. RUTHERFORD
39.1
IN the Second Sophistic religious travel was widespread, facilitated and no doubt encouraged by increased ease of mobility within a pacified Roman Empire.1 People traveled to established religious centers to take part in festivals, to consult oracles, to undergo incubation in a healing sanctuary, or to be initiated into cults. Alternatively, in some cases the motivation may just have been to see and marvel at places of cultural significance, what we would call “tourism.” Most of our evidence for it comes from areas where we happen to have relatively rich epigraphy—Greece, Anatolia, and Egypt—but it must have happened in other parts as well. Often it seems to take place within a defined political or geographical area, such as Anatolia or Egypt, but sometimes the scope is broader, in the case of the sanctuary of Syrian Goddess at Hierapolis-Bambyke (see below, section 39.7). Religious travel to and from the areas outside the empire is not well attested, with the exception of the sanctuary of Isis at Philai on the southern border of Egypt and the Dodecaschoenus (see section 39.7).
A question arises to what extent the modern term “pilgrimage” is applicable to all or any of these forms of religious travel. Some scholars, following a pattern of usage in anthropology and the history of religion, seem to be comfortable with using the term in application to Greco-Roman paganism, while others prefer to reserve it for the context of Christianity or Islam.2 Certainly, monotheistic pilgrimage shows some distinctive features;
for example, the journey itself seems more ritualized, imagined as a process that takes the pilgrim outside normal life and culminates (at least in some cases) in a perceived transformation. On the other hand, traces of some of the same things can perhaps be found in polytheism as well, for example in Thessalos’s visionary experience of Asclepius in Thebes (see below, section 39.4). My own preference is to use “pilgrimage” in a very general sense, covering pretty well any journey of unusual length undertaken (to a sanctuary or any other place) for the sake of participating in a religious activity. There seems little risk of harm in using the term, as long as we keep in mind that this is a broad category comprising many types which may be more or less closely related.
39.2
In the classical and Hellenistic Greek world, the four major focuses of religious travel had been healing, initiation into mystery cult, oracles, and festivals (Dillon 1997). All four of these continue in the Roman period. Oracles flourish like never before, none more conspicuously than that of Apollo at Claros, which drew delegates from cities all over Asia Minor and to some extent the Aegean; one factor in the growth of its popularity may have been the plague that afflicted the region in this period (Jones 2005). Many Anatolian cities sent regular delegations there, which were often accompanied by choirs of children (Busine 2005; Ferrary 2005; Lane-Fox 1986, 171–180), and verse oracles survive from Claros which recommend that enquirers set up filial cults of Apollo Clarios in their cities, an effective way of promulgating the cult (Merkelbach and Stauber 1996). Didyma and Delphi are also active into the third century CE (for Didyma: Fontenrose 1988). A newer form of oracle was that of the snake god Glycon, located at Abonoteichos in Paphlagonia, and satirized by Lucian in Alexander or the False Prophet.3 According to Lucian, the oracle began by attracting locals (Alex. 15), but news spread to Bithynia, Galatia, Thrace (Alex. 18), then the broader world (Alex. 24), including eventually Italy and Rome, where the superstitious P. Mummius Sisenna Rutilianus was taken in by it (Alex. 30).4
The Oxford Handbook of the Second Sophistic Page 97