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INTRODUCTION Idols and Other Cult Images Cambridge University Press 978-1-108-48734-4 — Roman Cult Images Philip Kiernan Excerpt More Information ONE INTRODUCTION Idols and Other Cult Images 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 1 © in this web service Cambridge University Press www.cambridge.org Cambridge University Press 978-1-108-48734-4 — Roman Cult Images Philip Kiernan Excerpt More Information 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 remark- ably 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 polythe- ism,” 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 © in this web service Cambridge University Press www.cambridge.org Cambridge University Press 978-1-108-48734-4 — Roman Cult Images Philip Kiernan Excerpt More Information 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 none- theless 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 © in this web service Cambridge University Press www.cambridge.org Cambridge University Press 978-1-108-48734-4 — Roman Cult Images Philip Kiernan Excerpt More Information 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.
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