As Wilson points out in the introduction to this fine volume, ‘religion has been almost totally absent from most discussions of the Roman economy’ (p. 1). Although the six-page bibliography of relevant scholarship with which his paper concludes might seem to belie this assertion, it is indeed the case that scholars of religion in the Roman world have generally paid scant attention to the economic dimension of their subject, while scholars of the Roman economy have paid even less attention to religion. It is the purpose of this volume, which originated in a conference held in Oxford in September 2016, to make a case for remedying that absence.
Wilson's introduction and a concluding essay by G. Woolf bracket ten strikingly diverse papers. The only one not presented at the Oxford conference is J. Rüpke's paper ‘What Did Religion Cost in Ancient Rome?’; first published in German in 1995, it surveys the annual expenditure and revenue of a priestly college in Rome, the pontifices, as a case study in the financing of public cult. Rüpke concludes that ‘the economic importance of the public priesthoods for the economy and those areas deeply involved in religion is small’ (p. 39). The following paper by C.R. Potts, ‘Investing in Religion: Religion and the Economy in Pre-Roman Central Italy’, is one of the best in the volume. Potts gathers a wealth of material data from the sixth and early fifth centuries bce that demonstrates the role of Mediterranean sanctuaries as sites of consumption, production and trade as well as ‘repositories of knowledge and power’ (p. 57). She argues that major sanctuaries provided economic as well as devotional motivations for travel and exchange and that a desire to participate in the resultant network may have stimulated the elites of central Italy to construct similar sanctuaries of their own. With the next paper, J. Domingo's study of ‘Cost Differences in Temple-Building between Rome and the Provinces’, the temporal focus shifts to the first century and a half ce. Domingo first describes a methodology for calculating the costs of building and then applies it to the particular question that he wants to address, by comparing the costs of the Templum Pacis in Rome and the upper terrace of the Provincial Forum in Tarraco. Through a detailed analysis of the materials and labour involved, he demonstrates that building costs were considerably lower in the provinces than in Rome. In contrast to Domingo's specific focus, D. Wigg-Wolf, in ‘Moneychangers in the Temple? Coins and Religion in the Roman World’, provides a broad survey of, first, the role of religion in determining the imagery on coinage and, second, the role of temples in finance. Temples served as secure storehouses for cash and valuable objects, belonging not only to the temple but also to public bodies and even private individuals, and in some times and places made use of these funds to act as lending houses.
The role of temples as economic agents is also the topic of the next two papers. That of M. Horster, ‘Cult Economy in the Eastern Provinces of the Roman Empire’, is a wide-ranging survey of issues relating to cult economy, with sections on expenditure, sources, revenue (broken down into a number of subcategories) and demography. Although the material is very rich, I found it difficult to follow a clear line of thought or to identify a substantive argument. In contrast, M.-P. Chaufray's ‘Impact of the Roman Conquest on Temple Economies in Egypt: a Case Study of the Temple of Soknopaios in Dime’ offers a case study that investigates in one specific context some of the themes that the previous two papers raise in more general terms. The temple in question is well documented in the papyri, with a range of Greek and demotic documents providing detailed information about its economic role. Chaufray's particular focus is the impact of Roman measures regulating temples and priests, which she argues did not significantly undermine those institutions but instead served to define their role in relation to the Roman empire, for which they began to function as economic intermediaries.
The two papers that follow concern the role of animals. The focus of M. MacKinnon's paper, ‘Animals in Roman Religion: the Economics behind the Rituals’, is animal sacrifice, in funerary as well as divine contexts. MacKinnon rightly draws attention to the sorts of practical questions about expense, supply and funding that have often been side-lined by a concern with the symbolic dimensions of the practice. He offers a stimulating and wide-ranging exploration of the data, both zooarchaeological and textual, and the sorts of questions that we can ask of it. A.C. King, in ‘Sacred Flocks and Herds? The Implications of Animal Sacrifice at Rural and Suburban Romano-Celtic Shrines’, is interested particularly in issues of supply, especially the question whether temples in these regions maintained their own herds for ritual purposes. He convincingly argues that many of these temples owned animals for offering, either directly or through tenant farmers, and thus played a significant economic role in their region.
M. García Morcillo, in ‘Sacred Gifts, Profane Uses? Transfers and the Roman Religious Sphere’, investigates the practice of offerings to the gods within the wider context of Roman views on gift giving. She draws on a wide variety of evidence, but grounds her investigation above all in Roman legal theory. Her main theme is the ambiguous status of gifts, as simultaneously an expression of liberality and a financial transaction. Although legally gifts to the gods were outside human ownership and commercial transactions, in practice they could be converted into financial resources. K. Verboven's paper, ‘Guilds and Gods: Religious Profiles of Occupational collegia and the Problem of the dendrophori’, is based on the epigraphic material collected in the ‘Ghent Database of Roman Guilds and Occupation-Based Communities’. The first part of the paper assesses the extent to which these associations highlighted their cultic dimension, and the shorter second part focuses on the dendrophori, the ‘tree-bearers’, who had a role in the cult of Mater Magna. He concludes that, although religion was important to all these groups, ‘it was neither the reason why professional collegia were formed, nor did it define their identity’ (p. 302). Rather, collegia served to integrate individuals into larger social groups, both the local city and the overarching imperial order: ‘with the likely exception of ethnically specific deities among foreign resident groups, religion was about integration and protection, not about identity or separation’ (p. 303). In the final contribution G. Woolf provides an effective summing up, which complements Wilson's opening paper; his broad and deep knowledge of Roman imperial religion and society allows him to map out major patterns. In contrast to the significant economic developments that took place in the last two centuries bce and the first two centuries ce, the role of religion in relation to the economy remained fairly static. The most significant change was structural: control of religious institutions gradually shifted away from autonomous priestly orders to a Roman style socio-economic civic elite.
Like many volumes of collected papers, this book is more of a sampler than a coordinated study (as Wilson explicitly notes, p. 16), but in the present case that is exactly what is needed. The variety not only in topic but also in approach and data sets provides readers with a vivid sense of the possibilities. It thus admirably meets its stated goal of ‘opening up further lines of enquiry both into the economic aspects of Roman religious practice, and into the religious component of the economy as a whole’ (p. 16).
