Data in an empiricist episteme must be susceptible to sense perception. Where Roman religion is concerned, one or the other of two things must be true: either the actions of the gods in this world in their effects, or the gods themselves, must be material. Of course, the former in no way requires the latter. But much of Roman ritual, and many strands of Roman religious literature, do, in fact, situate the gods in this world, whether as recipients of cult or as inhabitants of particular spaces. What is more, many but by no means all of those actions and...

Among scholars of classical religion, the termsinterpretatio Graecaandinterpretatio Romanacommonly refer to the “broad identification among Greeks and Romans of a foreign godhead with a member of their own pantheons.” These identifications are generally studied at the level of naming—not least because most easily collected evidence for them is linguistic, namely the epigraphically attested use of “theonyms as appellatives.” What is more, many argue that the central interest ofinterpretationeslies more or less exclusively in the act of naming, and not in the act of identification, and thatinterpretatioitself is “therefore a phenomenon in...

The two great codifications of law undertaken in Christian late antiquity are often presented as novel interventions in the history of religion. As the first such codification since the Twelve Tables a thousand years before, we are told, the Theodosian Code did more than advertise the maturation of imperial government; it aggressively highlighted that government’s adherence to Christianity. For Theodosius departed from the precedent of the Twelve Tables by including in his Code a book on religion—the sixteenth and last; while Justinian did him one better by placing his book on religion first.¹

Even crediting their brevity, it is...

The Flavian municipal law has been called remarkable for what it omits: the extant chapters make no allusion to priests and no reference to the concrete actions of the provincial governor or the emperor.¹ It is also remarkable for what it takes for granted. Consider, for example, the oath stipulated for town magistrates. Each was to swear openly “in an assembly by Jupiter, the divine Augustus, the divine Claudius, the divine Vespasian Augustus, the divine Titus Augustus, thegeniusof Imperator Caesar Domitian Augustus and thedei Penates” that he would act in accordance with the law and in the...

Killing is a serious business. The unleashing of fatal violence demands regard for the more-than-human. This is true regardless whether that violence is exercised privately or publicly, and never more so than in war. The religious communities of the ancient Mediterranean produced some of their most remarkable literature in grappling with the horrors of war and the sack of cities. Indeed, we cannot appreciate the resolutions they devised to these crises of meaning unless we recall how easy it was, in a world in which cultures and ethnic groups were imagined to be bounded by what we now call city-states,...

Historians of religion in late antiquity tend to adopt one of two perspectives. Either we seek to understand Christianization, a process ultimately reducible to acts of individual choice whose aggregate effects can be described in purely demographic terms, or we investigate the demise of paganism, a set of discrete rituals and practices, some of which survived in Christian Europe, robbed of their religious significance through cult acts and conciliar decrees.

Understood in these terms, the Christianization of the Roman empire passed a milestone in the early fifth century, the last age attesting a senator who publicly professed paganism. Similarly, paganism...