The second part of this volume is concerned with the export of religion through the medium of laws and calendars. The method I will pursue is based on the concept of religious‘signs’, which will form the reference points for my examination of the question of spread: how were religious signs transported? The question presup-poses the analytic separation of two complexes:first, the determin-ation of the spread of particular signs; second, the assumption of identical contexts. Provocatively, with reference to a passage in the Historia Augusta that was probably invented, concerning the vener-ation of Christ by Roman emperors of the Severan dynasty,1I will propose that the existence of an image of Christ does not indicate the presence of a Christian community.
The problems involved in arriving at appropriate conclusions will become evident on the basis of one example I will examine more fully.2The nameless catacomb in the city of Rome at 258 Via Latina and Via Dino Compagni3 was a private complex, built largely be-tween 320 and 360, and perhaps used by several families. The com-plex is generously proportioned, and only partlyfilled with burials. Its decor is of interest with respect to the distribution of religious signs, each chamber being characterized by its own high-qualityfigurative theme. The repertory is unusual, and certainly innovative for the mid-fourth century. The walls and ceilings bear motifs not found in catacombs before this date. Stories from the Old and New Testaments are particularly frequent themes.4The presence of motifs from trad-itional, pre-Christian stories is, however, also considerable, even if
such images from myth remain in the minority in respect of the total number of motifs and of rooms thus decorated.
The usual interpretation of the latter mythic category assumesfirm congruencies between signs and both practices and practitioners, and proposes that particular family members who had not become Chris-tians were buried in these particular chambers. One might even think of reconversions under the emperor Julian (361–3): this would ex-plain why such motifs appear predominantly in the latest chambers, and so can by no means represent a figurative world that is being gradually displaced.5Antonio Ferrua, however, correctly points out that these chambers too can be understood only as belonging to unified figurative programmes in associated groups of chambers.6 Any correlation between the religious convictions of those buried here and figurative programmes is thus out of the question.7 It is difficult to imagine how the allocation of each niche, and the convic-tions held by the future occupant, would have been foreseeable at the time of painting. Similarly, there are no indications of subsequent alterations, such as the painting over of an inappropriate Diana with a Lazarus, after the accommodation of the corpse of a convert. There are, in any case, no grounds for assuming that it was normal practice for burials to be separated on the basis of belief group in the Medi-terranean world of the Imperial Age.8
For a big city like Rome, which attracted images in various forms, various speculations as to their origin present themselves, with little prospect of deciding between them. However, the question of transport becomes more pressing when we turn our attention to the entire Roman Empire, with its metropolises and great military roads such as the Via Egnatia,9 as well as its sparsely settled provinces, frontier regions, and large and small islands. Here the question also arises as to whether image content was transported in the form of texts,10or as concrete symbols. Material for further discussion can be found in recent studies.11The question of the media by which signs were spread leads us, further, to ask whether they were transported by ordinary users or by specialists. In the event these would have been, on the one hand, such people as soldiers, merchants, and slaves, and, on the other, religious specialists such as priests and craftsmen. It may be undeniable, in this connection, that the mobility of slaves, economic migrants, and soldiers (who also have leave and write letters) differed quantitatively from
the opportunities enjoyed by officers, senior members of the provincial administration, senators, and orators and other‘intellectuals’.12
If we approach the concept of‘cultural exchange’, as represented by Peter Burke among others,13‘diffusion’ appears not only as a vector of varying magnitude and direction, but as a two-sided process. Just as a sign has an origin, which may be at the centre or the fringes of a culture, it also has, conversely, a reception, and so we are obliged to contextualize the bearers and recipients of the sign in question.14 Where do the imported religious signs find resonance? How are their bearers observed, and how do they feel themselves to be ob-served? Whether we speak of‘identity’, which may be constituted by such signs (one thinks of immigrant cults), or of exoticization (one thinks of the extension of the spectrum of religious practice accept-able to local elites), in either case the pragmatic aspect, the use made of the sign, acquires both an external and an internal communicative function.15 Studies published by Valentino Gasparini and Dirk Steuernagel show how internal communication processes in city contexts acquire significance in external communications too.16 Lucian, in his Alexander the False Prophet, offers an ancient (and satirical) analysis of such processes.
The picture painted by Lucian, of an interplay of individual initia-tives, vague familiarity with equivalent signs, patronage, and net-works of opponents, prompts the question as to whether individuals can successfully transport and implant new religious signs, or whether success requires the mobility of entire groups. The investi-gation completed by Katja Wedekind into imagined missionary strategies in early Christian narrative texts17 has demonstrated the importance such texts ascribe to integrating with local structures of authority, and linking with local conceptions and institutions.
It appears that we should neither underestimate the significance of individual initiatives nor overestimate the chances of success of enduring institutions. The minutiae of the studies presented in this volume demonstrate the considerable local differences and rapid changes that may be discerned in seemingly stable systems of reli-gious signs.18 This applies all the more to conceptions of higher complexity such as soteriological, anthropological, or ethical systems.
We must distinguish clearly here between an Empire-wide intellec-tual discourse and local reception. Even in the case of intellecintellec-tual discourse, however, we must keep in mind the limitations of a handwritten literary culture, where texts cannot be replicated
mechanically, but only copied individually (even if by copyists within hearing distance of a reader). Research into oral poetry and folk tales has made it sufficiently clear that oral tradition produces for the most part undramatic (because unnoticed) adaptation rather than precise reproduction, while academic descriptions of such material, including those undertaken in the area of the history of religion, easily tend towards‘completion’, or ‘reconstruction under conditions of perfec-tion’,19seeing the transference of entire‘religions’ where only isolated elements or signs are in fact affected.
NOTES 1. Scriptores historiae Augustae, Heliogabalus 3.5.
2. See ch. 14.
3. So referred to in Pergola 1999: pp. 171–4 for a summary description;
fully and lavishly illustrated in Ferrua 1991.
4. Cf. the repertoire of figurative themes in the catacomb of SS Petri e Marcellini: Guyon 1987, 300; see also Guyon 1987a, 293–310. On the more narrowly theological content of such images see Prigent 1996, 613–29.
5. As proposed by Pergola 1999, 174.
6. Ferrua 1991, 156–7.
7. But thus Ferrua 1991, 159.
8. Rebillard 2003 discusses the few indications since Cumont that might have led to a contrary assumption.
9. See e.g. Steimle 2007.
10. See ch. 9.
11. See the contributions in Bricault 2005 and Rieger 2007.
12. On the concept of‘intellectuals’ see Bendlin 2006, 170–81.
13. E.g. Peter Burke 2009.
14. Cf. Rüpke 2001a.
15. The work of Steuernagel 2004 and Egelhaaf-Gaiser 2000 provides good examples.
16. Also in Gasparini 2007; Steuernagel 2005, 2007.
17. Wedekind 2012.
18. See e.g. ch. 3.
19. Gladigow 2005.