Materialising imperial ideology and religion in the Roman world

The study of religion in the Roman Empire has traditionally been strongly based on literary and epigraphic sources with consequent disproportionate attention to the capital city of Rome and its state religion. This has to do with a bias in the sources: the literary sources have very little to offer on religion in the provinces. This paper seeks to draw a coherent picture of the religions of Rome, Italy and the provinces of the Roman Empire by integrating the archaeological evidence. It therefore consciously adopts a material approach to religion focussing on its material and performative aspects.

The first part of the paper investigates what role was played by religion in the legitimization of imperial power in Rome, and how this was articulated in material forms. It will be argued that in the age of transition between republic and empire the first emperor deliberately presented his military achievements as gifts from the gods and expressly associated himself with the world of the divine without actually claiming a divine status for himself. Statues of gods and men, and of altars and sacrifices were used as powerful tangible media to bring across the message of the divine foundation of the new political order.

The second part discusses the question as to how far the religions of subject territories were affected by the incorporation into the empire, and how these transformations become manifest in the material culture of cults in Italy and the provinces. Whilst there is compelling evidence for instructions from the imperial capital for the introduction of the imperial cult in the provinces, it is argued here that a crucial role was played by the provincial nobility, who translated the imperial ideology to the local context. At the local level, new cults, festivals and rites were introduced, but each community also kept part of its traditional religion. With conquest, the status, identity and hierarchical position of the old gods changed and new rites were created which did not exist before, neither in Rome nor in the provinces.