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Roman Maps explains

Religion & the Sacred Landscape

A polytheist empire that absorbed local gods faster than it exported its own.

Rome in 117 CE did not have an official state religion in the modern sense so much as a state cult layered over hundreds of local ones. Every city kept its own patron gods and civic priesthoods alongside whatever temples Rome itself required — chiefly the imperial cult, the formal worship of deified emperors (divi) and, in the provinces, of Roma and Augustus together, administered by a provincial high priest and centered on one designated temple per province.

Local religion ran far deeper than the imperial overlay. Egyptian temples at Karnak and Philae kept performing the same rites they had for two thousand years, now under Roman imperial patronage instead of a pharaoh's. Druidic practice, officially banned under Claudius, persisted in remote parts of Gaul and Britain. Jewish communities were established across the empire from Alexandria to Rome's own Trastevere district — Alexandria's alone may have made up a third of that city's population before the Kitos War devastated it in the very years this map is set.

Newer cults were spreading fast along exactly the trade and army routes covered elsewhere on this map. The Egyptian goddess Isis had temples from Pompeii to Rome to the Danube frontier. Small Christian communities were attested in Rome, Antioch, Corinth, Ephesus, and enough towns in Pontus and Bithynia that the governor Pliny the Younger wrote to Trajan around 112 CE asking how to handle the sheer number of people denouncing themselves as believers — the earliest outside account of Christian practice to survive.

Below: the empire's provincial imperial-cult centers, and the religious communities so far mapped by tradition and by how firmly each is attested for the year 117 itself.

18 provincial imperial-cult centers
27 religious communities, by tradition
christian — Rome, Antioch, Alexandria, Corinth, Ephesus, Smyrna, Philippi, Thessaloniki, Jerusalem, Samsun
jewish — Alexandria, Rome, Cyrene, Antioch, Sardis, Delos, Ostia, Pozzuoli
isis — Alexandria, Pompeii, Rome, Delos
cybele — Rome, Pessinus, Ostia
other_mystery — Eleusis, Samothrace

Sources

  • Pliny the Younger, Letters 10.96-97 (to Trajan, on the Christians of Bithynia)
  • S.R.F. Price, Rituals and Power: The Roman Imperial Cult in Asia Minor
  • Public data: public/data/religions_117.geojson, public/data/imperial_cult.geojson
  • CAH XI, The High Empire, 70–192 CE (Cambridge Ancient History, 2nd ed.)
  • Fergus Millar, The Roman Near East, 31 BC–AD 337
  • Barrington Atlas of the Greek and Roman World

More to read

Roman Maps shows the empire frozen at 11 August 117 CE, the day Trajan died — its moment of greatest territorial extent. Explore the full map →