INTRODUCTION Idols and Other Cult Images

Cambridge University Press 978-1-108-48734-4 — Roman Cult Images Philip Kiernan Excerpt More Information

ONE

Ceterum et plateae et forum et balneae et stabula et ipsae domus nostrae sine idolis omnino non sunt: totum saeculum satanas et angeli eius repleverunt. Why, even the streets and the market-place, and the baths, and the taverns, and our very dwelling places, are not altogether free from idols. Satan and his angels have filled the whole world.1 Images of pagan divinities, which Tertullian terms here idols (idola), were omnipresent in the Roman world, and the archaeological record more than confirms Tertullian’s statement. The world’s museums preserve many thousands of representations of gods and goddesses from the Roman Empire, which in turn provide some of our most salient evidence for ancient myth and religion. These representations include statues and other objects that once sat at the very heart of Roman temples, and were not just decorative, but were worshiped as divine things. These objects were idols. The concept is so difficult for the modern Western mind to grasp, and so fraught with controversy, that it has proved remarkably easy for the scholarship of ancient art and religion to ignore. But the Romans saw their gods and communicated with them by means of images and objects, and it was primarily for this reason that the early church fathers like Tertullian and later Christian holy men fought so hard against them. This book considers the topic of cult images and idols in Roman temples as a religious and archaeological phenomenon. It looks at idols and other cult images in their original temple contexts, treating them as objects endowed

2 INTRODUCTION

with social agency and possessing biographies, and not just as artworks to be classified by stylistic attributes and interpreted for their iconography. The focus is on Western Europe in the imperial period, a large part of the Roman world that is curiously neglected in many studies of Roman religion. The book is also structured like a biography, with three main parts, on the birth, life, and death of cult images. Chapters 2 and 3 address the births of cult images, including their iconographies, and explore how cult images found their forms. Chapters 4 and 5 consider the functional lives of idols, starting with their place at home in temples, and then turning to the question of how human worshipers interacted with them. The final chapter deals with the destruction of cult images at the hands of barbarians, Christian iconoclasts, and even pagans themselves. As with any aspect of ancient religion, we are faced with the problem that the surviving evidence for belief and ritual action in the Roman Empire is remarkably uneven. Information about large public cults and the views of authors from the first centuries BC and AD overshadow a myriad of local divinities and private practices that were just as important a part of the whole system. Moreover, there was no such thing as a unified or consistent pagan religion for us to reconstruct. The term “paganism,” or less frequently “ancient polytheism,” is routinely used to describe a variety of common practices and beliefs, and to distinguish them from ancient Judaism and Christianity, but a unified and homogenous belief system comparable to the modern construct of a religion did not exist. The Roman sense of religio included practices that were customary and proper for both individuals and the state to follow to maintain good relations with the gods. We may detect common traditions and patterns over wide geographical and chronological ranges, but unlike Christianity or Judaism, there was no single official creed or rule book. This makes the reconstruction of ancient religious experience remarkably difficult, since individual belief and practice was naturally varied.2 Idols and cult images were certainly a major part of Roman religious life, but with a few exceptions, most introductory and comprehensive books on Roman religion have either completely ignored their place in ritual and daily life or have greatly downplayed it.3 While the topic of image worship has recently become of interest in studies of Greek religion, very little attention has been paid to the Roman evidence, especially in the imperial period.4 It may well be that there is a certain reluctance to ascribe to the founding cultures of Western civilization a practice that is now considered repugnant and illogical by the modern Western mind. A similar tendency to downplay the role of images in ritual is a well-documented problem in modern studies of Hinduism.5 Discussions of idol worship are just as absent in the scholarship of Roman art and archaeology.6 Since Winckelmann, the primary focus of classical archaeology has been on the forms, style, iconography, and semantics of

IDOLS AND CULT IMAGES 3

ancient works of art. The past century has seen enormous advances in our ability to “read” the messages of Roman sculpture, especially state reliefs, and to understand them in their historical context. Today, we can not only recognize and date different artistic trends and styles, but can also detect the intentional use of older styles to add a particular shade of meaning to an artwork.7 While these are all very significant achievements, the social function of Roman art has been neglected, and the study of art’s place in society, especially in terms of its environment, function, and viewer response, is still very much in its infancy.8 The dominance of traditional art historical approaches to ancient sculpture has resulted in a bad case of the so-called museum effect, in which objects removed from their original physical and social contexts are admired for, and are understood by, traits and details that would have been secondary, and perhaps even invisible, to their original users.9 For example, Hindu cult images are, and Roman images probably were, routinely covered with flowers, gar- lands, and other organic trappings which are not preserved in the museums in which they are now displayed. Yet the scholarship of Roman sculpture nonetheless concentrates on the durable physical aspects of cult images, without pausing to consider the issue of their visibility.10 The attributes and postures of ancient images of the gods allowed divinities to be identified, and may have conveyed other messages besides, but these meanings were largely independent of their main functions as cult objects.11 Though the Romans were perfectly capable of appreciating the artistic qualities of religious sculpture, and could certainly read their own iconographic messages, they would not necessarily have understood either aspect as the most important characteristic of their idols. These were first and foremost objects that that granted them access to their gods – objects that were prayed to by individuals, and that were the focal point of communal rituals. Before going any further into these functional aspects of Roman idols, two controversial points need to be addressed. First, my choice of terminology, and the use of the word “idol,” and second, the assumption that the Romans even made a distinction between idols and other cult images, believing some cult images to be divine, or at least more worthy of worship than others.

IDOLS AND CULT IMAGES Derived from the Latin idolum, and the Greek eidolon, the English word “idol” refers speciﬁcally to objects that are perceived of as divine and are the direct recipients of worship by communities and groups of people. We also tend to think of idols as the objects and images that were displayed in the most prominent location in temples and holy places, making the term ideal for the purposes of this book. But the word also brings a good deal of ideological

4 INTRODUCTION

baggage with it, stemming from its use in translations of early Christian texts that condemn idolatry, and in the writings of European colonial anthropolo- gists and ethnographers in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries who employed it in descriptions of the “primitive” religion of living cultures outside of Europe.12 Both saw “idols” and “idolatry” as sinful or else barbaric. For these reasons, the word “idol” has fallen somewhat out of favor in recent scholarly literature, and is often replaced with the more generic and, arguably, more neutral term “cult image.” Unfortunately, the term “cult image,” or “cult statue,” as well as the German equivalent “Kultbild,” and the French “image de culte,” are all problematic as well, since their meaning is ambiguous. While they are often used to denote worshiped images (especially statues), the same terms are also used to describe votive offerings, small figurines, architectural sculpture, and other religious artworks that were not worshiped, and were certainly not the main attractions or focal points of temples.13 In a conscious effort to avoid this confusion, Ioannis Mylonopoulos recently employed the term “divine images” as opposed to set some images apart from mere “images of divinities.”14 But the first of these terms implies a universal acceptance of divinity, when ancient belief in the divinity of the idols varied. More importantly, both terms exclude objects that were not images, but that were nonetheless the recipients of worship. Some of the most important idols of the Greek and Roman world were aniconic, that is, they were not figural representations, but were objects such as sacred stones, animals, and trees, and yet were functionally just as important as figural representations. Conveniently, the word idol can also be applied both to figural artworks and natural or aniconic objects. I suspect that the modern hesitation to employ the term idol lies as much in our own difficulty in admitting that the Romans were “idolaters” as it does with any sense of political incorrectness of the term. The word idol is also routinely used by Indian writers in English to translate the word murti,animage of a divinity that receives worship.15 Anthropologist Alfred Gell and classicist Jörg Rüpke have both recognized the utility of the term idol as an unambigu- ous reference to a worshiped object, with the former suggesting that its rejec- tion sacrifices a useful term for the sake of being overly politically correct.16 In this book, the word idol is used to refer to an object that was the focal point of worship in a temple. Idols belong to the broader category of “cult images,” which include other representations of the gods, such as votive offerings, temple decorations, or the relief carvings on altars. Unlike other cult images, however, idols possessed three distinguishing attributes. They were stored in the most prominent place of a Roman temple or sacred enclosure, they received regular worship from large groups of people or communities, and, perhaps most importantly, they were perceived to possess agency. That is to say that their worshipers believed that idols could both receive their

ANCIENT TERMS AND DISTINCTIONS 5

petitions and act upon them. This last point may be equated with the belief that the idol was somehow divine, but, as we shall see below, the nature of that belief was probably varied in nature. While all cult images could be used in rituals, and some could even evolve into idols, most were not initially the objects of worship or perceived of as having a divine aspect. Within temple sites, these other cult images were not the prime attraction for visitors. Arguably other objects may be seen as having idol-like qualities, such as the ﬁgurines in Roman household shrines (lararia), or the images of the emperor that appeared in law courts and other public places. Both could be the recipients of libations, food offerings, prayers, and other forms of veneration. This book, however, is concerned only with idols and other cult images found within public temples and comparable holy places.

ANCIENT TERMS AND DISTINCTIONS An alternative to the English word idol might conceivably take the form of some ancient Greek or Latin term that distinguished between worshiped objects and other cult images, but studies of both Greek and Latin vocabulary have sought such a distinction in vain. Most recently, Sylvie Estienne and Peter Stewart considered various Latin words used for sculpted images and statues: simulacrum, signum, effigies, imago, and statua. The words statua and imago are mostly used to denote representations of humans and imago usually refers to a bust or partial representation. Signum and simulacrum most frequently describe representations of divinities, while effigies could refer to images of either gods or humans.17 Estienne found that the terms simulacrum and signum were used interchangeably for depictions of divinities by Livy, but that Suetonius and Tacitus strongly favored simulacrum.18 Stewart rather more confidently argued that signa were normally dedications to the gods, while simulacra were the actual idols of Roman temples.19 There are, of course, many exceptions and inconsistencies to these defin- itions, as well as changes in word choice over time. Estienne noted that Cicero referred to the statue of Diana stolen by Verres from the Segestans in Sicily with the word simulacrum in four instances, with signum in three, and in four more instances simply used the name of the goddess.20 When ancient authors use the names of divinities alone to refer to statues, whether referring to idols or other works of art, this is an indication of just how easily the Roman mind could equate artworks with the divinity. A similar use of the names of divinities to refer to statues exists in the modern Hindu world as well. The need to insert the words “representation of” before a deity’s name is one that is more natural to the modern Western reader than it is to those who venerate images in polytheistic societies, where at times the image simply is the divinity.21

6 INTRODUCTION

Even more effort has been expended on the terminology of ancient Greek religious statues than for the Latin speaking world. The Greek words ágalma, xóanon, eíkon, andriás, hédos, and brétas have all been considered in great detail. None of them unambiguously and consistently refers to an idol in opposition to other cult images, or even exclusively to representations of divinities.22 The word ágalma (pl. agálmata) is comparable to the Latin simulacrum, in that it usually denotes an idol, as does xóanon (pl. xóana), which normally refers to older wooden statues.23 But as with Latin, there is no word in Greek that is so consistently used for divine images and objects in temples that we might adopt it in the place of “idol.” The lack of a clear term to set idols apart from other cult images in both Greek and Latin has led to the proposal that no such distinction between different kinds of representations of the gods even existed in antiquity.24 Alice Donohue went so far as to argue that the need to distinguish between cult images and idols is an entirely modern and invented necessity. The distinction, she believed, was derived from Christian reactions to idolatry, the debate about the nature of ritual and imagery in post-Reformation Christianity, and early anthropological concepts of fetishism. Moreover, if no such distinction existed, presumably any representation of a god could receive veneration from pagan worshipers, or else images were simply not an important part of Greek or Roman ritual practice.25 From an archaeological standpoint, this confusion is increased by the fact that Roman temples contained not just one image, but many. In the Roman ritual of undertaking a vow, individuals brokered deals with the gods and made payments to them that often took the form of altars, statues, and even entirely new temples or ancillary shrines. These votive offerings (vota) were displayed for long periods within temple buildings and on temple grounds, and could themselves become the focus of ritual activities. The donation of lavish votive offerings could afford private individuals the opportunity for self-aggrandizement. Thus the sculptural dedications displayed in any Roman temple would have quickly outnumbered the original idol or idols of a temple, and could have outshone them in quality and size. This point is a recurring theme in this book, posing the question of how archaeologists can distinguish between the two types of cult image when looking at the sculptures from a single temple site. Approaching cult images from the standpoint of dictionary entries alone, however, ignores the human element of ancient religion. The lack of a Greek or Latin term to denote an idol does not mean that the concept did not exist. Nor does the fact that multiple images could be worshiped in a single temple, or outside of one, show that all cult images were equal or unimport- ant. If idols were no different from any other depiction of a divinity, then what was the point of the temples that were built to house them? Moreover,

ANCIENT TERMS AND DISTINCTIONS 7

Roman historians present several instances in which a distinction was made between different classes of religious images. The most compelling examples are those situations in which the two types of statue have become unintention- ally mixed up. One such situation can be found in Livy’s account of the decision of the Roman senate in 210 BC to inﬂict a set of severe punishments upon the defeated Capuans and their allies, who had aided Hannibal against Rome in the second Punic War. In addition to auctioning the land and livestock of the Capuans, and reducing a large portion of their population to slavery, the Romans were also faced with the issue of statues that had been taken from Capua as booty. Rather than selling the statues off at once, or melting them all down, the Senate decreed that the College of Pontiffs should ﬁrst decide “which of the statues were profane and which were sacred.”26 Unlike some other less important cult images, the idols of traitors were still too holy to be destroyed or sold, and the highest religious authorities in Rome were needed to deal with them. In this case, a distinction was being made between idols and other cult images, or perhaps between those images which belonged to the gods and those which did not.27 In 187 BC, a similar situation arose: a delegation of Ambracians complained to the Roman Senate that M. Fulvius Nobilior had unjustly pillaged their city. Amongst their other complaints:

... quod se ante omnia moveat, templa tota urbe spoliata ornamentis; simulacra deum, deos immo ipsos, convulsos ex sedibus suis ablatos esse; parietes postesque nudatos, quos adorent, ad quos precentur et supplicent Ambraciensibus superesse ...... what disturbed them most of all, was that the temples throughout the city had been stripped of their ornaments; the images of the gods, or rather the gods themselves, had been torn from their seats and carried away; bare walls and doorposts, they said, had been left to the Ambracians to adore, to pray to, and to supplicate ...28

These images were clearly essential to the worship of the Greek Ambracians, and this was something that could be recognized and understood in Rome. Note that these image (simulacra)were“the very gods themselves” (deos immo ipsos), and were essential for adoration, prayer, and supplication. The senate eventually passed a decree in favor of the Ambracians, ordaining once again that the College of Pontiffs should decide how to handle the statues (signa aliaque ornamenta) upon the return of Fulvius to Rome.29 Presumably some kind of distinction needed to be made between different types of statues, perhaps so that they might receive appropriate treatment while in Rome, or perhaps because Fulvius had dedicated some of them as offerings in other temples since sacking the Greek city. In either case, the difference between two types of

8 INTRODUCTION

images was real and important enough that the pontiffs themselves were needed to decide what to do. The Romans also recognized the divinity of the idols of their enemies. When at war, the Romans sometimes resorted to the ritual of evocatio, in which a general called upon the gods of enemy cities to abandon their homes and move to Rome, where they were promised temples and honors. It was not unknown for idols in some ancient cities to be chained to the floor to prevent the divinity from accepting such offers. Livy provides our only detailed descrip- tion of evocatio, discussed in more detail in Chapter 2, in which the goddess Juno Regina was moved from the defeated city of Veii to a new temple on the Aventine Hill in Rome.30 These rites of evocatio called upon specific divinities, or specific idols, and the countermeasure of chaining was also applied to specific idols, not to all images of the same divinity. Evidently it would have disturbed the relationship of the state with the gods, the pax deorum, to destroy or mistreat certain statues that were inhabited by gods, even if they were living in the temples of Rome’s immediate enemies. Other enemy statues that represented the gods, however, were mere decoration and could be legitimately taken as plunder. Elsewhere we read of the appropriateness or inappropriateness of actions involving different kinds of statues, including where emperors placed their own images. Suetonius tells us how Tiberius insisted that his own images should not be displayed amongst the images of the gods, but with the other ornaments of temples.31 Likewise, Pliny praised Trajan for being content with having his image displayed on the steps of temples, and outside their cellae where images of the gods belonged.32 This suggests that certain ritual treatments and areas of display were reserved for particular kinds of statue, and these did not normally include representations of emperors. In the eastern Roman world, where the practice of ruler worship was already established, the emperor’s image could be placed amongst those of the gods without hesitation. Sylvie Estienne has convincingly demonstrated that one major distinction between different statues and artworks in Roman temples was based on their legal status as property. Statues could be either consecrated, and described as simulacra deorum, or else belong to the ornamenta deorum, the temple decorations. The latter category includes votive statues and other temple equip- ment, which, critically, could be moved, sold, or otherwise disposed of by a temple’s administration.33 An inscription dating to 58 BC from Furfo set out guidelines by which the surplus goods in a temple of Jupiter Liber could be disposed of, stipulating that the proceeds from the sale of ornamenta were only to be used to pay for further ornamentation or main- tenance of the temple.34 Both Rome and her allies would occasionally draw upon the ornamenta of temples at times of crisis.35 In the other category were those statues that belonged to the original endowment of a temple and that

THE DIVINITY OF IDOLS 9

were considered sacred (sacra), and which could not be sold or taken out of the temple. A temple’s idol clearly belonged to this latter group of inviolable temple possessions. We have no information about what criteria the pontiffs used to separate the different types of statues of the Capuans or the Ambracians. Obviously they must have been required to do more than just recognize artworks that depicted gods. Presumably they were distinguishing between simulacra deorum and ornamenta, or between idols and other cult images, but how could they tell the difference? Perhaps some of the pontiffs had personal experience of the temples and idols of Capua and Ambracia, or had access to people who did, but we should not rule out other ritual possibilities. In the ﬁfth century AD, one Heraiskos of Alexandria claimed to have the ability to distinguish between cult statues (agálmata) that were alive and those that were dead, a claim that we will revisit in Chapter 6.36 Evidently there were other mystical distinctions that went beyond the ofﬁcial or legal status of statues in temples. Clearly some statues in Roman temples had a different status than others, in legal, religious, and moral terms. At the very least, there was a scale of importance amongst representations of the gods. Some images were more holy and more divine than others, if indeed there was not a clear dichotomy between idols and all other images. So just how did this divinity or sacred value of idols function?

THE DIVINITY OF IDOLS

Quis autem adorat vel orat intuens simulacrum, qui non sic afficitur, ut ab eo se exaudiri putet, ab eo sibi praestari quod desiderat speret? Does anyone worship or pray gazing on an idol, without being persuaded that it is hearing his petition and without hoping that it will give him what he wants?37 The nature of the divinity of cult images is a topic that Ioannis Mylonopoulos recently described as “an endless story about theories, methods and terminolo- gies.”38 No ancient pagan author gives a definitive or comprehensive theology of cult images and idols, and we have seen that there is no easy linguistic definition either. By its very nature, ancient polytheism lacked the sort of official documents and statements of belief that unify and delineate modern Western religions, so it is not surprising that we have no ancient statement setting out the nature of either Greek or Roman idols. The shortest answer to this endless debate is that different beliefs were held by individuals about idols, ranging from those who thought the idols were themselves gods to those who did not believe in their divinity at all. A similar diversity of belief existed in the Greek and Roman world about the existence and nature of the gods

10 INTRODUCTION

themselves, and Dietrich Boschung has argued that one critical function of idols was to afﬁrm the very existence of the gods.39 Though textual evidence for Roman idol worship is anecdotal in nature, it nonetheless provides a glimpse into the range of this belief and the actions associated with it. In the Roman imperial period, some of the most direct and detailed sources for what pagans believed and did can be found in the works of those Christian writers who attacked them. This includes direct statements like those of Augustine reproduced above, an author who had no doubt that the pagans really believed their idols to be divine. Clement of Alexandria, Origen, Tertullian, and Augustine of Hippo all wrote extensive assaults on idol worship, their texts sometimes taking the form of dialogues with real or imagined pagan disputants. How, the Christian apologists repeatedly demand, can lifeless and unhearing material be considered divine? Idols, they observe, are composed of base and corruptible materials, subject to theft and decay, whereas the gods are supposedly all-powerful, vengeful, and eternal.40 How can things made by base and fallible humans be the same as the gods who are immortal and perfect?41 Some of the idols, the Christians even asserted, were intentionally designed to deceive, hiding their baser nature beneath gilding and paint, being hollow, or, in the case of acrolithic statues, consisting of nothing more than wooden frames inside.42 The imagined pagan disputants had, of course, no satisfying answers to these questions and charges. Christian authors gleefully recalled that even some Stoic, Pythagorean, and Neo-platonic philosophers agreed that the belief in the divinity of idols led to more erroneous ideas about the gods and super- stitious practices.43 As Baynes noted long ago, the Christian authors were, in fact, themselves using the very rhetorical arguments of these pagan philosophers to make their case against idolatry. The nature of cult images, and the related question of whether the gods had a physical form, had been debated long before the birth of Christ.44 But the existence of such extensive philo- sophical arguments against the divinity of idols must also conﬁrm that such beliefs were real for some, even if they were not for those who protested them. Otherwise the issue would not have arisen at all. For a more complex philosophy of idols, beyond the mere statement that they are somehow divine, we may look to Arnobius. A teacher of rhetoric in Sicca Veneria (Numidia) in the early fourth century AD, Arnobius wrote a seven-book attack on paganism entitled Adversus Nationes. His sixth book concerned temples and idols, and drew heavily on Clement of Alexandria and another Christian source that is now lost.45 Arnobius makes the usual arguments about the lifeless nature of idols, their corruptible materials, and their powerlessness, all of which can be found in other Christian authors, but then goes on to make several more detailed points about individual pagan beliefs about idols. These are summarized in the table below.