immediately “useful” divinities (which is to say, divinities honored in exchange for expected services, such as healing or prosperity) as an important change in the religious life of the ancient city appears an over-interpretation of a simple fact: what is merely a consequence of an overall trend toward better documentation is taken as evidence of a profound historical evolution. It is only starting in the last two centuries BCE that we have sources available of sufficient detail and volume to get to know general aspects of religious life a little better, which is to say, the religious life of city-states, and also the religious life of subgroups within those city-states. As a correlate, this does not mean that the mere appearance of written evidence marks the appearance of a new “religiosity.” Nothing precludes the possibility that similar cults—of Apollo, for example, or of Minerva—had existed already at an earlier period.
Moreover, in the eyes of Richard Gordon, the advent of new forms of religious behavior does not cast in doubt the model of civic religion, since in general they lay within its framework. They reveal, however, opposition to the dominant model, insofar as they demanded of their participants religious commitment and development.20 It is at this juncture that the implicit and anachronistic opposition between civic and new religions is revealed as a theoretical postulate of critical scholarship. It is true, of course, that Greek and Roman authorities did not like secret cults, which imposed more or less stringent requirements on their followers, although it also needs to be emphasized that the “faithful” of these cults were not simply “the people,” but often well-integrated and well-off citizens. All that to one side, when one reads that these new practices represented “a revalued conception of piety,” questions are begged. A conception of piety is revalued in relation to what? In relation to a true “faith,” more ancient, original, in greater conformity with the Romantic model of “religiosity,” pure and true to its origins? Or in relation to what Minucius Felix called vera religio, “true religion,” which is to say, Christianity? We return to the criticism directed against Wissowa.
Other criticisms of polis-religion are more global.21 For example, polis-religion as described in the handbook of Louise Bruit and Pauline Schmitt-Pantel or the article of Sourvinou-Inwood granted a central place in the religion of city-states to cults shared among all the citizens.22 These cults were directed and controlled by priests drawn from the elite, which retained religious authority on this basis. From this point of view, Greek and Roman city-states were identical. The most perfect realizations of this model were located in the city-states of archaic and classical Greece and at Rome. Later, the notion of polis-religion being diffused together with that of the city-state, the history of ancient religion was implicated in the fall of the classical city. After the decline of the ancient city, religion would no longer be a form of conduct tied to the city-state but became one choice among many groups who offered their own doctrines, experiences, and discrepant myths.23 Here, again, one needs to nuance these claims. For one thing, it seems to me overly fast to date the decline of the city-state from the battle of Chaeronea in 338 BCE. This theory, which dates from the nineteenth century, has been successfully contested and overcome, first through the work of Louis Robert and Philippe Gauthier24 and by many other historians of the second half of the twentieth century, to the point where one could now qualify the Hellenistic Age as a golden age of the classical city. One might likewise point to a remark of John North, who in the course of his argument refers to the third century CE: one cannot be said to prove much about broad changes in the history of religion in preceding periods through interpretive claims about evidence of that late date.
Finally, the chief reproach voiced against advocates of the model of polis-religion is that they ascribe everything to politics and overstate the historical salience of Romanization as well as Roman resistance to foreign influences.
Alongside these supposed characteristics of Roman cults, further weaknesses and failures of the model of civic religion are enumerated as follows:
• It is difficult on the basis of such a model to account for the complexity of ancient religion. According to this critique, the model cannot explain why successive layers of deities and cults were not syncretized by the religious authorities, so as to realize a certain order and harmony within the pantheon. For the moment, let it suffice to emphasize that in a polytheist regime the collective has no need to rationalize its pantheon, because diversity is its raison d’être.
• The model does not leave space for other aspects of religion that were important for some, such as myth or popular cults like those of Silvanus or the so-called Mothers in Germania. The problem here is that, in the Greco-Roman world, myth was not part of religion. Moreover, there existed domestic and private cults (like that of Silvanus) or local cults (like that of the Mothers). There was no reason to introduce them into the civic pantheon of Rome. Once again, these cults were tied to their social context and to the very structure of polytheism.
• The model is not able to explain change. It responded to changes that took place within some Mediterranean koinê. Thus, if the changes arose principally in the private sphere, every perspective that marginalized non-public cults was perforce incapable of taking those changes into account. The difficulty here is that, even if a single one of such private cults turns out to have been the start of a religious revolution, the mode of analysis of the other private cults proposed by critics of civic religion offers no better means to understand the reasons for this revolution.
• Treating private cult as a secondary religious phenomenon does not allow one to explain why paganism remained popular even when public cult had been abolished. This fact is paradoxical only in appearance and can be easily explained: for a long time, private cult was not subject to the same prohibitions, and so it could endure after the promulgation of laws that in the first instance forbade only public cult.
• Greek myths antedated the city-state and were panhellenic; they were thus available to be used by the city-states that inscribed themselves within a framework greater than themselves. The great sanctuaries with which the city-states contended prove that cult sites were independent from their function within a specific city. Also, the oracles prove that there existed a religion superior to that of the polis. Finally, the temples of Asclepios at Epidauros and Pergamon, like the mysteries at Eleusis, were chiefly concerned with cult as celebrated by individuals. On these varied points, it is necessary to observe that the existence of federal cults or oracles external to the city is a banal given in the world of city-states. Nonetheless, one should also note that in the framework of panhellenism, it was not the Greeks who existed in federal union, but the Greek city-states, and moreover the cults and oracles functioned in a fashion closely homologous with the model of civic religion.
• Pilgrimage is also invoked, as well as human mobility, which would have led to the existence within city-states of numerous non-citizen inhabitants or metics. Because polis-religion is based on citizenship, it would have been less and less able to integrate the totality of religious actors, since these did not have citizenship. We will return to this question.
• There would have been a gap between public and private cults, and it is this gap that would have been the reason for change. It is through this gap that foreign cults would have inserted themselves. The very idea of such a gap or lacuna itself poses a problem. It seems to me to amount to the importation of an anachronistic “religiosity” rather than to the detection of a historically verifiable dissatisfaction experienced by participants in ancestral religions.
Overall, this series of claims is thought to demonstrate that, whatever its strength, polis-religion never in fact fulfilled its function, neither in the age of the archaic and classical Greek city, nor, certainly, in the age of the Hellenistic and Roman cities. It was a concern of elites, who tried thereby to impose their domination on the lower classes, without ever successfully colonizing their private lives. Not only would there always be cults outside and beyond the city, but individuals would have possessed religious activities more dynamic and enduring than those of the city. In sum, one has the impression that, below political and social institutions, existed
