OUP (2023) h/b 384pp £83 (ISBN 9780192883537)
This is another of those books which have been spawned by a conference—this time at an Oxford Roman Economy Project in 2016. It forms part of an OUP monograph series devoted to the economic aspects of the ancient world.
The aspect which is concentrated on here is the economic activity generated by religious and ritual transactions in the Roman republic and empire up to the adoption of Christianity. Having established that religious activity in this period was primarily site based rather than dogma driven, the twelve contributors (mainly from European universities) spend little time on the reasons for or the nature of the religious activity itself. They examine primarily publicly based religious activity (whether via temple/site events or festivals) rather than private religious activity, which mainly took place in domestic surroundings.
For these public events they examine who organises them, who pays for them, how much and how—also the tangential economic activity which is generated by the organisation required for the events themselves. Their sources are surprisingly diverse, ranging from the literary (Cicero De Officiis and Pausanias) and legal texts, through epigraphy, papyrology (particularly in Egypt) and iconography to archaeology (including the analysis of bone fragments). Inevitably the sources are fragmented and need to be approached with care. As one contributor remarks ‘Records are incomplete, disparate, skewed, inconsistent, biased, transformed and manipulated …..’. The detail uncovered by some of the sources, however, is extraordinary. Found in a ritual site at Springhead in Kent, for example, 39,000 animal bone fragments from sacrifices have been examined. Similar analysis at Uley, a ritual site in Herefordshire, shows that four times as many goats than sheep were sacrificed there, whereas at a similar site at Harlow in Essex the position was reversed—moreover that 90% of the animals sacrificed at both sites were between 6 months and one year old.
The first and last of the individual contributions (Wilson and Woolf) are short insightful summaries of what has been achieved and what remains to be achieved in this field. Five of the others (Rupke, Potts, Morcillo, Domingo and Wigg-Wolf) examine costs, incomes and other financing structures together with the tangential economic activity generated at or near the sites. Two (MacKinnon and King) discuss the particular role played by animals in sacrifice. Two (Horster and Chaufray) discuss the adaptations made by sites in the Eastern provinces and Egypt, which gradually adopted the common Roman model of activity. A final contribution (Verboven) discusses the parallel, but slightly separate, activity generated by the collegia which, whatever their main reason for association (e.g. a trade guild), always contained a strong religious/ritual element. The contributions include 35 illustrations and 18 statistical tables; each contribution ends with its own list of refences but is relatively parsimonious with footnotes.
Each section is packed with facts, which are lucidly explained; the style is uniformly free-flowing and commendably free from jargon. The non-specialist will have no difficulty in appreciating the points that are being made. Because the Romans made no attempt to dictate the organisation of individual temples or festivals, information about individual localities is just that, and the authors are scrupulous not to infer greater generalisations from individual practices.
There are, however, some broad similarities and they appear to have changed remarkably little over the period. Costs were both capital and current. Capital costs were met mainly pro bono by individuals (here one should mention the validation of a formula which, given information about the design and structure of a temple, can reliably calculate what it cost to build). Running costs were met by a mixture of fees/tithes, payment for services rendered by the priesthood and donations. Some sites had their own flocks from which sacrifices might be purchased or artisan centres which could produce votive offerings. The greater physical security of a temple (coupled with its sacral aura) made it a natural home as a safe deposit site for valuables, whether donations to the temple itself or the valuable property of the general public. Very occasionally the valuables of both groups were despoiled, e.g. Sulla’s looting at Delphi in 86/85 BC. (One might note in passing that, when St Paul’s Cathedral was destroyed in the Great Fire of London, those citizens who could afford to store their valuables in the crypt did not suffer loss, while those who could only afford to store them at ground level lost the lot.) Some sites used their store of valuables to finance some small-scale bank lending, but they do not appear to have used those deposited by the general public. Priests normally paid for their positions, although sometimes a family controlled the entry system. Their obligations were not doctrinal but rather to organise rituals and festivals.
In many ways the economic activity of Roman religious sites was remarkably like that of those of the Christian church. Discounting the advent of doctrinal orthodoxy and greater control from the centre, there appear to be almost no ways of spending or acquiring money in the mediaeval church which were not known or practiced in the Roman period.
As the authors say, this subject will benefit from a great deal of additional attention, and at some point a book of great interest to the general reader will undoubtedly emerge. Given the quality and approachability of their scholarship, these contributors have undoubtedly provided some of the essential building blocks for such a work.
Roger Barnes