Barstool History - Pagans
‘Paganism’ isn’t a word you’ll find used anywhere in either the Republic or the Early Empire period of Rome and was only ever used by later Christians to describe the polytheistic practices of people who were neither Christian nor Jewish.
The word ‘pagan’ comes from the word ‘pagus’ (Late Latin - ‘paganus’), meaning a villager or a country dweller. It’s the opposite of ‘urban’ and implies someone who is unsophisticated and simple. A country bumpkin, if you like.
By contrast, for the Roman polytheist, there was no word used to describe their common set of shared beliefs. For them, apart from the odd Jew or Christian or those who liked to tie themselves in philosophical knots, what they believed was as self-evident and as unassailable as understanding that the Sun came up and the Sun went down. There simply wasn’t any need for a word to define what they were, because they just were.
In contrast to post Reformation Europe and to some extent the Empire after Constantine legitimized Christianity in 312AD, the Empire was not a hotpot of religious turmoil. Whilst it was absolutely possible to have religious freedom and to make choices about what you believed in, most pagans simply never saw the need to.
So accepted was the religious status quo that there was virtually no challenge to the uniquity of the polytheistic model. And because there was no challenge, there was no competing message to spread around. As a result, there was a lack of theological literature used to explain the minutiae of the pagan belief system. Word of mouth was enough in a world where nobody ever raised any objections. This was in stark contrast to Judaism, which relied heavily on the texts for its liturgy and was something later expanded on by Christianity which not only needed the previous texts to reinforce its Judaist origin, but also to help spread the message among the pagan masses.
All paganism had to do, by contrast, is dot a few priests around the empire and let the people get on with it.
Whilst literary sources do exist, they’re not always necessarily concerned with theological matters. In Human and Divine Antiquities and On Religion, Varro writes extensively about matters relating to religion, but his focus is more on the origin of religious practices than on musing about the nature of the divine. It’s more history than theology. Similarly, Cicero’s ponderous ponderings on the nature of the gods is more philosophical beard stroking than anything else and Plutarch’s brief flutter with superstition and oracles is along a similar vein.
To find anything close to the religious contexts of Jewish or Christian literature, you need instead to turn to the world of Roman fiction, notably in Apuleius’ novel The Golden Ass. In it, the character of Lucius is devoted to Isis with such passionate intensity that it’s only reasonable to surmise that this reflects the experiences of the writer himself:
I fell prostrate at the goddess’s feet, and washed them with my tears as I prayed to her in a voice choked with sobs that convulse my speech
(The Golden Ass 11.24)
These are not the actions of someone who is going through the motions of religion simply because everyone else does. This isn’t a tradition as regular as washing clothes or baking bread. These are deeply personal, emotional and even painful religious experiences.
But this brief description doesn’t represent the various practices and beliefs of ancient polytheism. For that, we need to look at the relatively extensive archaeological and epigraphic evidence which gives us a broader picture of the scope of different cult practices, their popularity and where they flourished.
We can also use iconography and interpretation of prayers on funerary inscriptions to try and build a picture of religious practices, expectations and beliefs, although we must always be careful to try and avoid allowing Judeo-Christian experiences to influence our conclusions. When pagans talk of ‘afterlife’ and ‘spirit’, it’s easy to picture them in ways we understand through a modern, Abrahamic, lens, and to see religious practice as just church, but with togas and a bit more drinking. But this is a problem for all historical interpretations, not just religion. There are also several examples of poetry and prose from around the empire which survive in both manuscript and in the epigraphic record, extoling the virtue of various deities.
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