Emperors of Rome: The Story of Imperial Rome from Julius Caesar to the Last Emperor by David Potter

Author:David Potter
Language: eng
Format: azw3, mobi, epub
Publisher: Quercus
Published: 2014-04-24T00:00:00+00:00

Eastern cults

The Romans also had the sense that Graeco-Roman culture was relatively young compared with the ancient cultures of Egypt and Mesopotamia. Tourists – including the emperor Hadrian – travelled to Egypt to marvel at ancient books of wisdom and sit at the feet of members of obscure cults. Egyptian temples were repositories of texts that dated back to the time of the Pharaohs, and Egyptians were more than happy to supply this tourist market with purported Greek ‘translations’ of books of ancient wisdom (usually the ideas were deeply Hellenized to suit the buyers’ tastes and bore only a passing resemblance to the original text). Another powerful Eastern influence on Roman religious thought was the ancient Persian sage Zoroaster; again, however, as with the learning of Egypt, Romans’ understanding of Zoroastrianism was not primarily based on scholarly study of the core texts, but rather on debased, mediated forms of the religion. This somewhat dilettantish interest in the wisdom of the East was part and parcel of educated Romans’ unquenchable sense of cultural superiority.

Their fascination derived less from a desire to learn from other cultures than from a smug satisfaction that the world under Rome’s control embraced the collected wisdom of sages from all eras and all places. The fascination with new religious understanding from outside the Graeco-Roman tradition lies behind the adoption of a number of Eastern cults in the first century AD, whose popularity continued to expand over following centuries. One of these was the cult of Isis and Serapis, originally invented, it seems, by the first Ptolemaic king of Egypt in the early fourth century BC. Supported by an extensive mythology and a large body of religious texts – especially hymns in praise of Isis – the cult took hold throughout the Roman empire. Another cult that gained a huge following was that of the Persian sun-god Mithras, which came to prominence in the later first century AD. The Roman form of Mithraism came via a sect in the area of eastern Turkey known as Commagene, who adopted traditions of Persian worship that had existed there since the days of Alexander the Great.

Mithraism is an especially interesting cult both because of the complexity of its belief system and the speed with which it spread around the empire, having been devised, it seems, by a rather small group of initiates in the first century AD – the parallel with another religious movement that developed in Palestine at roughly the same period is striking, and speaks to a need on the part of people living in the empire for certainties that came from outside the bounds of traditional classical culture. Mithras’ rites were based on a complex mixture of astrology and myth. Members of this all-male cult were arranged into a hierarchy of seven grades, with the highest grade usually reserved for the individual who had the highest social standing in the world at large. The seven grades, which corresponded to the seven planets known to ancient astronomy, were the

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