Roman Religion in the Danubian Provinces: Space Sacralisation and Religious Communication During the Principate (1st–3rd Century AD)

By Csaba Szabó

The Danubian provinces represent one of the largest macro-units within the Roman Empire, with a large and rich heritage of Roman material evidence. Although the notion itself is a modern 18th-century creation, this region represents a unique area, where the dominant, pre-Roman cultures (Celtic, Illyrian, Hellenistic, Thracian) are interconnected within the new administrative, economic and cultural units of Roman cities, provinces and extra-provincial networks. This book presents the material evidence of Roman religion in the Danubian provinces through a new, paradigmatic methodology, focusing not only on the traditional urban and provincial units of the Roman Empire, but on a new space taxonomy. Roman religion and its sacralized places are presented in macro-, meso- and micro-spaces of a dynamic empire, which shaped Roman religion in the 1st-3rd centuries AD and created a large number of religious glocalizations and appropriations in Raetia, Noricum, Pannonia Superior, Pannonia Inferior, Moesia Superior, Moesia Inferior and Dacia.

Combining the methodological approaches of Roman provincial archaeology and religious studies, this work intends to provoke a dialogue between disciplines rarely used together in central-east Europe and beyond. The material evidence of Roman religion is interpreted here as a dynamic agent in religious communication, shaped by macro-spaces, extra-provincial routes, commercial networks, but also by the formation and constant dynamics of small group religions interconnected within this region through human and material mobilities. The book will also present for the first time a comprehensive list of sacralized spaces and divinities in the Danubian provinces.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Oxbow Books
• Release date: Apr 6, 2022
• ISBN: 9781789257847

Csaba Szabó

Csaba Szabó is a research fellow of the University of Szeged (Hungary). His current research is focusing on materiality of Roman religion in the Danubian provinces, history of archaeology and classics in Transylvania and public archaeology in Romania.

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This book was supported by the Postdoctoral Research Grant PD NKFI-8 no. 127948 by the National Research, Development, and Innovation Office of Hungary (2018–2021). See also:

www.danubianreligion.com.

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Front cover: Roman Mithraic relief from Dacia (Dragu, Salaj county). Photo in custody of the National History Museum of Transylvania, Cluj-Napoca, Romania (inv. no. 15812).

Contents

List of illustrations

List of abbreviations

Foreword

1. Introduction

2. Emerging Roman religion: the beginnings

3. Lived religion and its macro-spaces in the Danubian provinces

4. Space sacralisation in meso-spaces

5. Religious experience in micro-spaces: housing the gods

6. Conclusion: beyond the materiality of Roman religious communication

Appendices

1. Sanctuaries in the Danubian provinces

2. Divinities in the Danubian provinces

3. Diagrams

Bibliography

List of figures

List of abbreviations

Foreword

During the course of my doctoral studies, I have participated in numerous international conferences, workshops and meetings focusing on Roman religion or the materiality of religion from antiquity. At most of these events, there were few – usually two or three – participants from Central-Eastern Europe. Very often, these scholars came from a classical archaeological background and had a very poor opinion of scholars of religious studies. Two worlds were meeting in these spaces: the world of classical, often outdated positivist and Kossinna-type archaeology of the provinces, and the highly theoreticised and often too-abstract field of religious studies searching for the obscure notion of material religion. Their theoretical conflict and methodological incompatibility were very provocative and appealing for me: I realised that uniting Roman religious studies with provincial archaeology represents one of the most innovative scientific methods – one that can unite Western and Eastern European scholarship and create a lived academic dialogue, perhaps ultimately attracting more young scholars from Central-Eastern Europe to the discipline.

The Danubian provinces have long occupied a well-established position in Roman provincial archaeology. These include the century-old Limesforschung (study of Limes) in this region; the historical link between Central-Eastern European scholarship and the Austrian and German archaeological traditions; the visits and infrequent but impactful connections between Sir Ronald Syme, Sheppard Frere, John Wilkes, Andrew Wilson and others in the Danubian region; and the general contemporary dialogue between archaeologists from this region of Europe. All of these provide a good start for the development of new methodological perspectives.

My previous work, which focused on the sacralised spaces and religious communication in Roman Dacia, was the result of an early attempt to unite these two often conflicting disciplines and to open a dialogue between religious studies and provincial archaeology in Romania and Hungary, where this tradition is still in its infancy. The work was received surprisingly well, although the interest came especially from Western scholars: from the 11 known reviews, just four were published in Central-Eastern Europe. Until recently, this book was one of just a few case studies in which the innovative methodology of lived ancient religion approach of Jörg Rüpke and his team from Erfurt was tested against the materiality of religion from the Danubian provinces of the Roman Empire.

A year and a half after the publication of my doctoral defence and having had numerous temporary jobs outside academia, I was lucky to receive a postdoctoral research grant from the Hungarian state (NKFI Postdoctoral Research Grant 127948) in autumn 2018. The project, entitled ‘Roman religious communication in the Danubian provinces during the Principate’ was hosted by the Department of Religious Studies at the University of Szeged under the supervision of Professor András Máté-Tóth. The stated aim of the project was to collect and map all the archaeologically attested sanctuaries (sacralised spaces) of the Danubian provinces in macro- and meso-spaces. I had been preparing this idea for many years and being able to finally work on it was a dream come true for a young researcher. Furthermore, I believe that continuing the work of great and unparalleled scholars of the Danubian region – such as Géza Alföldy, András Mócsy, István Tóth and John Wilkes – by writing a book on Roman religion in the Danubian provinces was an urgent necessity.

With this historiographical burden, I announced my work and sought the help of my colleagues from Central-Eastern Europe at the wonderful Limescongress that took place in Serbia in September 2018. At this coming-together of numerous scholars of Roman religion from the Danubian area, a small, ad hoc think thank formed, led by Professor Martin Henig. During the course of our discussions, we decided that a long-term collaboration was necessary in order to establish a new academic network and to renew the study of Roman religion in this region. This collaboration resulted in an international conference being organised in mid-October 2021, which focused on the latest archaeological results from religion and sanctuaries in the Danubian provinces. The hope is that such events will continue in the future with similar, productive initiatives.

My work – as is the case for many others worldwide – was overshadowed of course by this unusual pandemic. It has been a complex time of despair, digital transformation and the rise of dehumanisation, which on a micro-level has separated researchers from libraries, conferences and fieldworks. Prior to the onset of the pandemic in 2020, I was lucky enough in 2019 and the early months of 2020 to visit several important research libraries in Rome, Budapest, Oxford and Berlin, where I have amazing friends and colleagues, who helped me in this hard endeavour. This period proved just how hard the work of Central-Eastern European scholars is, since there are so few big research libraries east of Vienna. Without the existence of well-known online and open-access resources, our work during the pandemic would have been completely paralysed.

In the last three years, despite such hardships, I have published several works focusing on space sacralisation and the taxonomy of sacralised spaces, as well as on glocal aspects of Roman religion in the Danubian provinces. Some of these studies are included in this book.

During the course of this project, I have read and learned a lot, and my work is based on the canon of great scholars, many of whom helped me with my research. It is hard to list all of them – literally hundreds of scholars and colleagues, friends and relatives have helped me. However, in brief, I am very grateful to all my colleagues from the University of Szeged; the students of Lucian Blaga University in Sibiu; the archaeological institutes in Belgrade and Vienna; and my colleagues from Cluj, Alba Iulia, București, Pécs, Budapest, Berlin, Rome, Oxford, Erfurt, Frankfurt, Mainz and the many other cities in which I have lived, studied or researched in the last 10 years.

I am fully aware that this book is far from being a complete and comprehensive work on Roman religion in the Danubian provinces. I am not even sure if it is possible to write such a work. My aim with this modest, but unusual contribution is to shake the comfort zone of Roman provincial archaeology in Central-Eastern Europe and to create a new academic arena in which scholars of religious studies, archaeologists, sociologists of religions, and epigraphists can discuss the materiality of religion in a new, transdisciplinary way.

Time will tell whether or not this ambitious attempt will be followed by others.

Szeged

October 2021

1

Introduction

Caius Bruttius Goutus, son of Caius, from the tribe of Claudia, died at the venerable – almost Saturnian – age of 80 in the legionary canaba of Novae, in modern-day Svishtov, Bulgaria. Upon Goutus’s death, his tombstone was laid down by Caius Vibius Therapo, a Greek-speaking friend of his, in accordance with an agreement the pair had probably made long before the event. Thus Goutus was prepared for the Afterlife, and fulfilled his last important duty as a solider, as a citizen and as an old man, far away from his homeland.

Caius Bruttius Goutus was born a Roman citizen 1,200 km from Novae, in Virunum, the capital city of Noricum, probably in the time of Tiberius. The region was in the process of becoming a province at that time, although the Romans and especially their itinerant merchants and soldiers were already familiar with the Noricans. It is possible that Caius’s father, also called Caius, was born outside of Noricum, but we don’t know for sure since only his name has been preserved on a fragmentary and badly damaged tombstone far away from Virunum. Whatever his father’s origins, Caius Bruttius Goutus spent his childhood in Virunum in the age of Tiberius and Caligula and was recruited as a solider in the Legio I Italica, in the time of Nero or Vespasian. History didn’t preserve the adventures and major events of his unusually long life, but it seems that as a solider he was much luckier than many of his fellow legionaries, who died in the turmoil of wars, revolts and campaigns of the I Italica legion between 58 and 70 AD, when the legion was moved by Emperor Vespasian to Novae.

Our hero – a man who had probably had a fairly standard military career during the peak of the Roman Empire¹ – represents the voice of thousands from antiquity and survives as a name from 1,900 years ago thanks to the action of a loyal friend. The same is true of countless other the Roman citizens who had the will, the financial ability and the luck to immortalise their names on stone monuments. History was also kind to Goutus: his tombstone survived the vicissitudes of time and the turbulent history of Central-Eastern Europe.

By the time Caius Bruttius Goutus finally departed this world, the Roman Empire was radically different – and certainly much bigger – than it had been upon his birth 80 years previously. Close to the moment of his death, he perhaps marvelled at the new coins bearing the triumphal figures of Emperor Trajan, the Alexander of his age. What might he have seen during his long life in Virunum, Carnuntum or along the banks of the Danube in Novae? Did he have friends among the local population of Noricum or Moesia? How did he meet his Greek-speaking friend, Therapo? What gods did he evoke during his long life? How did the sacralised spaces he knew in Virunum from his childhood change during his lifetime? Did he have a lararium in Novae and what were the names of the gods whom he asked for help? How did the landscape of Novae, Virunum or other cities visited by him or by his fellow legionaries change in this period?

In a broader context, during the course of Goutus’s lifetime, major changes occurred around the world – changes that defined the history of Central-Eastern Europe not only for the period of classical antiquity but also today, having a long-lasting impact on modern urban structures, cultural heritage, linguistic specificities and cultural identities. During the course of those 80 years between about 30 AD and 110 AD,² the Roman Empire expanded significantly, englobing the Alpine provinces (Raetia, Noricum), the middle part of the Danubian area (Pannonia) and the lower Danubian region (Moesia, Dacia). While Goutus experienced a regular Roman childhood in the mountainous area of Virunum, the adventurous, dynamic and highly mobile lifestyle of a Roman legionary and the peaceful retirement of a veteran 1,200 km from his home town, the Roman Empire went through 11 emperors. In addition, due to its rapid expansion, it also assimilated a significant number of people and brought about long-lasting population mobility and mass migration in the form of dislocations of the army, organised colonisation and opportunist migrations.

These structural, demographic and political changes radically reshaped not only the life of millions in Central-Eastern Europe and the Mediterranean, but also the world of the gods. New divine agents, new sacralised spaces and new strategies of religious communication were used at micro-, meso- and macro-levels of individuals and groups. Indeed, it is almost impossible to present in a single book the major religious transformations that occurred in the first three centuries AD, during the Principate. Hundreds of sacralised spaces were formed in both pre-Roman and newly established settlements – whether urban or rural. Thousands of objects (altars, statues, statuettes, ceramic material, reliefs and small finds) produced in this period in the seven provinces analysed in this work served the successful maintenance of the newly established sacralised spaces and transformed the already existing ones, often resulting in the obliteration of the pre-Roman religious landscapes and languages of divine communication. New divine agents, such as Mithras, the cult of the so-called ‘Danubian Riders’ (Domna et Domnus) or reinvented traditions with attractive visual narratives reshaped the visual culture of Goutus’s generation.

This book cannot hope to answer all the questions raised above regarding the details of his daily life and his religious experiences, although these will constitute the guiding principles of my work. Good, provocative and in-depth questions will always guide the historian through the mute and silent history of materialities, revealing fragments of both local and global stories. Instead, this book will focus on three major aspects of Roman religion: 1) lived religion and strategies of religious communication; 2) forms of space sacralisation; and 3) glocalisation of Roman religion. These will be analysed using material evidence from seven provinces, commonly known today as the Danubian provinces: Raetia, Noricum, Pannonia Superior, Pannonia Inferior, Moesia Superior, Moesia Inferior and Dacia.

To highlight the importance of this region in the macro-history of the Roman Empire and beyond, however, it is necessary to first clarify some of the most frequently used notions of this book and to contextualise my work in the larger theoretical and historiographic framework of Roman religious studies.

Fig. 1.1 General map of the Danubian provinces. (Source: Glomb 2021 open access with the special permission of the author). https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0256356

Danubian provinces: history of a notion

³

The Scottish physician and poet William Beattie in his classical book on the Danube from 1844 describes the second-longest river of Europe as a ‘dark rolling Danube of the poet, which rivets the attention and conjures up a thousand associations. The Danube, the second river of Europe receives the tribute of sixty others in its course and rolls its majestic tide through empires, kingdoms and principalities. Its banks monumented with the glorious deeds of old and rich in magnificent scenery have been hitherto reserved as a free and open field for the pencil of the illustrator’.⁴ In his beautifully illustrated book, written during the age of Western intellectual travellers discovering Central-East Europe,⁵ Beattie thus created the ultimate version of the Danube and the Danubian region, described by him as the mystical, exotic and ancient part of the continent. This vision of the Danube and its region became highly influential not only in terms of 19thcentury cultural tourism, but also in various intellectual and even academic works. Indeed, the longevity of Beattie’s romanticised view and his notion of the cultural ‘unity’ of the Danubian region persists even today in numerous books, essays and travel guides.

So, just how did this romantic picture of the Danube and the surrounding region became the standard literary and scholarly view and how did this idea enter Roman studies and Roman provincial archaeology in the 19th century (Fig. 1.1)? To try to unpick this, we have to look at the meta-histories related to this notion from antiquity until modern times.

The Danube and the surrounding region in ancient Latin sources

The Danube (Danubius, Danuvius, Δανούβιος, Δανούιος, Δάνουβις)⁶ was well known by ancient Greek and Latin authors long before the age of the Principate (14 BC–285 AD).⁷ Most of the Latin texts mention very briefly just the name of the river in their ethnographic descriptions of the Barbaricum and the ‘northern people’ (i.e. north of the Alps): the laconic passages mention the river and its hinterland in connection with historical – mostly military – events, its populations and ethnic groups (Dacians, Germans, Sarmatians), and its monumentality.⁸ Probably the first mention of the Danube in an administrative context of the Empire and the Roman world⁹ appears on the monumental inscription detailing the life of Emperor Augustus, the Monumentum Ancyranum¹⁰: ‘… protulique fines Illyrici ad ripam fluminis Danuvi (μέχϱι Ἴστϱου)’.

The Danube in the age of Augustus had become a symbol of boundaries, represented more and more often in Roman Imperial propaganda as a bearded old river god. Pliny the Elder in his Natural History mentions 60 tributaries of the Danube¹¹ and considered the Danube to be a cultural and administrative division between the Roman and Barbaric worlds¹². The strategic military and commercial importance of the Danube was also mentioned in numerous literary sources, most famously Buildings 4.5.2. by Procopius. The name of the river also appeared in iconographic and epigraphic sources: ‘Danuvius’ appears on the column of Trajan, on a relief from Carnuntum and on votive inscriptions from Aquincum, where a possible shrine dedicated to the river has also been identified.¹³

With the exception of the Monumentum Ancyranum inscription, none of the ancient authors associated the Danube with an administrative unit of the Roman Empire, although its important role as fines and limes (the northern end of the Empire) can be interpreted as a cultural and administrative boundary that united these provinces.¹⁴ The notion that was used much more often as an administrative, fiscal and economic unit for this region was Illyricum or the publicum portorii Illyrici, the customs system of the north-eastern provinces of Rome.¹⁵ The entire region was united in the divine form of the genius publici portorii Illyrici, known from votive inscriptions from Poetovio or Porolissum¹⁶. However, although the inscriptions from the stationes and customs centres suggest a strong economic macro-unit within the Roman Empire, there are no traces in literary or epigraphic inscriptions of a common macro-regional identity. Indeed, the intense mobility of the legions along the Danube was mentioned numerous times by Roman historians, especially in the context of 192–193 AD, when Septimius Severus became emperor, helped by the ‘legions of Illyricum’.¹⁷

Donauländer, Donauprovinzen and the invention of a notion: the 18th–19th centuries

Europe was reshaped after 1648 in the aftermath of the Peace of Westphalia. Now, the Central-Eastern European area came to be dominated by the Habsburg Empire and was often called a Donaumonarchie, a monarchy of the Danubian area.¹⁸ The new political formation established in Central-Eastern Europe created not only a systematic unification of industry and German-speaking culture, but also influenced the evolution of classical studies and early examples of Roman archaeological research in the 18th century. It was this new type of political, administrative and cultural ‘unity’ in the region that created the notion of Donauländer, the Danubian countries. The Danube in this case became a geographical thread uniting the territories of modern Bavaria, Austria, Slovenia, Croatia, Hungary, Slovakia, the Czech Republic, Serbia, Romania and Bulgaria as well as serving as an important commercial channel, especially in light of the major political and infrastructural competition between the Habsburg, Ottoman and Russian empires for control of navigation on the Danube.

In fact, it was the more than 200-year-old military and political conflict between the Habsburg Empire and the Ottomans that gave a cultural legitimacy to the separation of the Upper and Lower Danubian areas – regions that were also divided by geographical specificities (especially at the Iron Gates gorge between Serbia and Romania). This geographic and cultural duality of the Danubian areas was present in 18th-century travellers’ literature as well as in the first papers on the Roman Danubian provinces, which appeared in German historical works by, for example, Johann Hübner, Johann Baptist Schels, Eduard Duller or Ferdinand Stiefelhagen (Figs 1.2 and 1.3).¹⁹

Fig. 1.2 Political map of the Danubian region. (Source: https://danube-region.eu/about/). Open access

Fig. 1.3 Danube river basin. (Source: https://www.eea.europa.eu/). Open access

It was thus following an early 19th-century encyclopaedic tradition²⁰ that Johann Jakob Herzog in 1861 used the notion of Donauländer in the context of the Augustan-Tiberian expansion of the Roman Empire in this region.²¹ This can also be interpreted as a historiographic manifestation of the translatio imperii, the imitation of Rome by the Habsburg dynasty and Imperial self-representation. The notion also appeared in the title of the first book on the area by Eduard Robert Rösler in 1864, although not exclusively in a Roman context.²²

Friedrich Kenner was among the first to dedicate an entire book to two provinces of the Danubian area, and he also used this geographic denomination in the title of his important work on Noricum and Pannonia.²³ Followed by the paradigmatic work of Theodor Mommsen on epigraphic studies in Central-Eastern Europe,²⁴ Julius Jung, the famous professor of classics from Prague, published an important synthesis in 1877, in which he presented for the first time the importance and enduring impact of Roman provincial administration in the Danubian area.²⁵ Indeed, the Danubian provinces as an administrative, political, cultural and military macro-unit of the Roman Empire was ‘canonised’ by the work of Theodor Mommsen, who in 1885 in his volume focusing on the provinces of the Roman Empire dedicated an entire chapter to the Danubian provinces (Raetia, Noricum, Pannoniae, Dalmatia, Moesiae and Daciae²⁶), presenting the area as ‘das Werk des Augustus’.²⁷ Mommsen’s writing established the major methodological frames and facets that would go on to characterise the study of the Danubian provinces in the following century of research: the area represented the edges of Empire; the provinces were highly militarised (the beginnings of Limesgorschung); and the region served as an a intermediary between the Western provinces and the Near East that united Latin, Greek, Celtic and local cultures.

A few years later, in 1890, Wilhelm Drexler used the notion of the Danubian provinces for the first time in the title of a monograph focusing on Roman religion in this region.²⁸ Although the intense military mobility between the Lower and Upper Danubian provinces was well known from literary sources, the emerging discipline of epigraphy and prosopographical studies and art historical approaches at the end of the 19th century stressed the regional networks between the Danubian provinces. In this period, the common denomination of the region also appeared in Anglo-Saxon literature, especially in historical, epigraphic and military studies.²⁹

The exotic area of the Empire: between centre and periphery in the 20th century

The Danubian provinces as a macro-unit of the Roman Empire was briefly mentioned in the first half of the 20th century, mostly in the paradigmatic works of Andreas Alföldi and Michael Rostovtzeff. The school of Alföldi – a leading figure of Hungarian classical archaeology in the interwar period³⁰ – was the first to analyse the Central-Eastern European classical antiquity and its material evidence in a holistic, supra-national view, focusing on global aspects and macro-units within the Roman Empire. As a result of this new vision based on archaeological evidence, several important doctoral theses were born. An important one was written by Árpád Dobó, who published a book on the publicum portorii Illyrici, one of the first comprehensive analyses of the customs system of this region.³¹ The book was well received by the Anglo-Saxon academic community, especially because the major works on the economic history of the Roman Empire completely ignored the Danubian provinces in this period.³² The same topic was presented in French in a much more cited and appreciated work by Siegfried De Laet.³³ The Danubian provinces as a macro-unit within the Roman Empire thus became a legitimate field in Roman studies after the publication of these two major works, followed later by several others, in particular the important monograph by Peter Ørsted.³⁴

The so-called Limesforschung, the study of the military history and dislocations of the Roman army in this region, contributed enormously to the inclusion of the Danubian provinces in the global contextualisation of the Roman Empire. The works of Nicolae Gudea and Zsolt Visy are paradigmatic in this sense. From the Anglo-Saxon literature, the most relevant papers