Thefirst part of this book was concerned with the city of Rome itself.
We saw the degree to which religious changes during the Roman Imperial Age, which form the subject of this book, were local changes.
Under the conditions of high mobility prevailing in the Mediterra-nean world, with contacts extending far beyond its borders, certainly to Scandinavia in the north, India and Sri Lanka, central Asia and perhaps China in the east, and, in isolated instances, into Sub-Saharan Africa in the south, there was also a migration of religious signs and conceptions, and of people who used such signs. The outcome cannot be described in terms of a merely cumulative effect. How do signs thus transported alter when they come into a new cultural and social context, there to be used by both immigrants and native peoples? Such an event of course alters the complex phenomenon that we might call the religion of each city so affected: the process has been described for places like Rome, Athens, Pompeii, and Palmyra.1In the present volume, the accent has been on the alterations undergone by those transferred signs, sign systems, and institutions.
The second part focused on precisely this process of transfer, but in the reverse direction, centrifugal from the perspective of Rome, the corresponding centripetal movement having provided the back-ground for the chapters of the first part. The emphasis was not on migration and individual immigrants, but on the media of transfer.
These comprised laws conceived in Rome, Roman festivals and the Roman calendar, the so-called fasti, and literary forms in general, particularly ritual texts and theological treatises. For all the mobility of people and artefacts, we realized that there were nevertheless
restrictions to these vectors of transfer. Under the technical condi-tions of the Imperial Age with its scriptorial culture, able to replicate messages only by the production of individual copies, at most by simultaneous dictation to several scribes, with messengers and postal services by land and sea almost its sole means of distributing news, reports, and decisions, at journey speeds of only dozens of kilometres per day, communications using the media under discussion here were particularly precious, and at the same time perilous, difficult to monitor, and often inefficient. Lasting changes became more likely only with the institutionalization of intensively maintained, dense networks, and, above all, when these means were combined with the migration or displacement of entire groups of people.
And there were indeed such global changes, which is to say changes on the scale of the circum-Mediterranean region and the Roman European provinces. The Roman Imperial Age was without doubt an epoch of substantial religious change, which, with the advance of time, and particularly from the third centuryce onwards, became ever more visible even to contemporary witnesses. This is the theme of the third part of this book, the observations made in thefirst two parts having rendered more acute the question of causes and condi-tions, and, above all, that of the precise form of the change that occurred. What actually changed? Was it simply a question of more religions and increasing freedom of choice? Did religions themselves change? How did they cope with being selectable, and deselectable?
Did they even take account of this contingency?
These questions require us to alter our procedure yet again. First we must ask, as we did in Chapter 5, what categories of change were at all relevant. It will then be appropriate to examine the terms used in the period itself to describe religious phenomena and changes: the word religio plays a key role here. It will become ever clearer that the Roman Empire as a whole must be considered both as an arena of change, a theatre of religious change that increasingly assumed (in the sense used here) a global character, and as an actor, a factor in that process of religious change.
Probably the most electrifying conclusion we will arrive at is that these changes cannot be circumscribed by the notion of a contest between religions for the greater or lesser success in winning mem-bers: although there certainly was such a process, and it has been often enough described. In thefinal part of this book, however, I will argue for an understanding of religious change in Late Antiquity that
is not confined to a comparison of membership numbers, and their change over time. A careful study of institutions such as priesthoods, and media such as tomb paintings, shows that decisive changes occurred both beyond and within the bounds of religious groups or ‘religions’. It was ‘religion’ itself that changed. And the Roman Empire was a decisive factor in that change. In this sense,‘Jupiter’ and
‘Christ’ do not stand for competing ‘gods’ or ‘religious signs’, with one superseding the other, but for a change in what the participants, the people of the time, understood by religion. And there to this day lies the challenge of this epoch, and its interest.
NOTE
1. Rüpke 2001b (2007a); Mikalson 1998; van Andringa 2009; Kaizer 2002.