5 - Making Sanctuary Communities

Summary

While most accounts see worshippers of Saturn as indigenous Africans or rural peasants, this chapter argues that stele-dedicants used stelae to articulate positions for themselves within the frameworks of the wider empire. Unlike earlier stelae, which worked to imagine stele-dedicants as a horizontal community of equals, stelae dedicated from the first century BCE onward became billboards that asserted the prestige of dedicants in the deeply localized but also vertically structured world of the Roman Empire. This can be seen in the adoption of new anthropocentric iconographies that adapt a koine of imagery, the composition of stelae, and new titles for worshippers like sacerdos that are borrowed from a civic sphere.