The Oxford Handbook of the Second Sophistic

by Daniel S. Richter

  Initiation rites for pilgrims continued to be provided by Eleusis and Samothrace; Eleusis remained popular right through to the third century CE, to judge from the fact that five Roman emperors were initiated there: Augustus, Hadrian (apparently before he became emperor; later Antinous was also initiated), L. Verus, Marcus Aurelius together with Commodus Caesar, and Galienus (see Clinton 1989; Halfmann 1986, 116–117). Ordinary people must been initiated as well; it was considered extraordinary that Apollonius of Tyana was initially turned away on the ground that he was an imposter (Philostr. V A 4.18; cf. 5.19). The cult of the Kabeiroi on Samothrace was popular with Rome because the island was regarded as the origin of the Penates and Romans are recorded as having regularly been initiated there until the end of the second century CE (Cole 1989, 1584–1585), among them several provincial governors of Macedonia (for an example, Dimitrova 2008, no. 104), though no emperors, as far as we know. Forms of initiation are also attested elsewhere, for example in the context of the oracle at Claros. Apuleius says in his Apologia (55) that he participated in many initiations in Greece.

  Another important context for pilgrimage was that of healing cults. The sanctuary of Asclepius at Epidauros continued to be popular (see in particular the detailed epigraphic record of the pilgrim Apellas of Mylasa [IG 4.2.1.126])5, but it was eclipsed by the sanatorium of Zeus-Asclepius at Pergamum, where visitors and long-term residents were drawn mostly from Asia Minor.6 The physician Galen worked there for a while, but its most famous patient was for two years (145–147 CE) the rhetor Aelius Aristides, who chronicled his tenure (kathedra), as well as the surrounding years of his life, in the aretalogical autobiography the Sacred Tales.7 He spent his time there communing with the god via incubation, receiving treatment and on a variety of other religious and cultural activities with his fellow pilgrims (sumphoitetai). Another Asclepieum very important in the Roman period was the one at Aigeai in Cilicia, apparently still a thriving center when it was closed down by Constantine in 331 CE.8 Many others are known.9 There were also major healing sanctuaries in Egypt, such as the Sarapeum in Alexandria and the temple of Imhotep-Asclepius at Deir el-Bahari near Thebes (see Łajtar 2006).

  Aelius Aristides’s autobiography also gives us a great deal of information about smaller healing pilgrimages he makes, both during the kathedra, when he started from Pergamum, and after it, most of them motivated by dream communications from Asclepius. He traveled to Elaia south of Pergamum, to the River Meles at Smyrna (2.48.80), to the River Caicus (48.48), and to Chios, an abortive trip, as it turned out (48.11ff.). He traveled twice to the River Aisepos in North Mysia, first in 143 AD, when his illness started, and again seven years later via a temple of Asclepius at Poimanenos. On another occasion his destination was a place referred to in a dream as “the Land of Zeus,” which he initially interpreted as Pergamum, but which proved in the end to be a small temple of Olympian Zeus near his estate. From all of this, one gets a sense of the rich religious topography of the region, and the possibilities for religious travel within it (see Rutherford 1999).

  39.3

  Another major focus for pilgrimage was festivals. The great festivals at the major Greek sanctuaries were still being held: Aulus Gellius describes the Pythian festival as the “meeting of almost all Greece” (NA 12.5.1); Aelius Aristides gives a vivid account of the Isthmian festival; and recent epigraphic discoveries from Olympia have confirmed that the Olympic Games was still flourishing into the fourth century CE.10 Smaller festivals also continued; for example, Polemon the physiognomist reports that he made one of his diagnoses at the festival of Artemis at Perge in Pamphylia where, according to the Arabic translation, “people would visit on pilgrimage from the ends of the land” (R. Hoyland ap. Swain 2007, 457).11 The cult of Ephesian Artemis was said by an imperial writer to be the most widely disseminated Greek cult, and there must have been an intense tradition of pilgrimage there, especially from Western Asia Minor, though in this case the evidence is mostly indirect, in the form of cult statues in the distinctive style of the goddess, iconography on coins or amulets.12

  New festivals established in Italy in the early Roman period were also a draw, particularly the Italica Romaea Sebasta Isolympia in Naples and the Capitolia in Rome established by Domitian; there was an Aktia festival at Nicopolis in Acarnania at the site of the Battle of Actium (see Newby 2005, 27). One might have expected that these festivals would have attracted visitors from all over the empire, rather as the Athenians or Ptolemies used festivals to regulate their empires, but the evidence for this is very limited: for example, the city of Barca in Libya sent a delegation to the Captiolia under Antoninus Pius in 156 CE and was reprimanded by the emperor for trying to upstage its neighbor Cyrene (Rutherford 2013, 272–273).13 Possibly the Roman Empire was just too extended to support the emergence of a pan-imperial festival network.

  Many new athletic and musical festivals were established by cities in Asia Minor, some on a major scale, and endowed by the emperor (see Mitchell 1993, 217–25; Robert 1982), some much smaller, such as the Demostheneia at Oenoanda in Lycia, named after a local citizen C. Iulius Demosthenes who endowed it (Wörrle 1988). The first enactment of a newly endowed festival is likely to have been particularly well attended; thus, a record of new festival at Aphrodisias established in the mid-third century CE lists delegates from neighboring cities who have engaged in “joint sacrifice” (sunthusia), a common term in this period (Roueché 1993, 182–187). For a city, the award of the status of neokoros could also be the occasion for a celebration which justified the presence of delegates from abroad; thus Ephesus received delegations from a number of cities when it was awarded its third neocorate in 211 CE, among them one from Carthage, which Louis Robert suggested was reciprocating one sent by Ephesus to witness the inauguration of the Carthaginian Pythia festival (Robert 1978, 468n41).

  In traditional Greek festival culture a major dynamic had been the celebration of Panhellenic identity via common sacrifices and participation in athletic competitions. Panhellenic identity remains important in the Second Sophistic, although somewhat transformed: one focus was the Eleutheria festival at Plataea, where delegates from Athens and Sparta still commemorated the defeat of the Persians six centuries before.14 Another was institution of the Panhellenion in Athens, established by Hadrian in 131–132 CE and linked to the imperial cult; member states (we are not sure how many there were) sent delegates to make sacrifices and to take part in a common council (see Jones 1996; Romeo 2005). They wore crowns dedicated with the bust of the emperor (Riccardi 2007). To be a member, a city had to have a proven Greek pedigree, and there seem to have been two different degrees of Greekness (Jones 1996, 53).

  Journeys to sanctuaries are also a theme in the Greek romance, sometimes providing a context where the lovers meet, usually set in an idealized past. Achilles Tatius’s Leucippe and Cleitophon is structured round a series of festivals attended by sacred delegations held in Byzantium, Tyre, and Ephesus. A particularly clear example of that is Heliodorus’s Aithiopika, where the heroine, Charicleia, is a temple official at Delphi, and the hero, Theagenes, is leading an elaborate theoria from Hypata, the capital of Ainis in Thessaly (see Rutherford 2013, 349–354). The purpose of the theoria is to honor the hero Neoptolemus, son of Achilles, to whose family Theagenes himself belongs. The culmination of the theoria is a moment of erotic gaze between the hero and heroine. Theagenes subsequently elopes with Charicleia, and the out-of-control behavior of his comrades causes the Delphians to ban Hypate from sending a theoria again. However, there is reason to think that in the third century CE Hypate actually was involved in the administration of the Delphic sanctuary (see Weir 2004).

  39.4

  In the literature of the Second Sophistic, a common pattern is that of the educated elite (pepaideumenoi) visiting sacred places and discussing the history and significance of what they find (Galli 2006). Obvious examples are Plutarch’s Delphic Dialogues and Pausanias’s Periegesis. (Although the best evidence for this is from the
Second Sophistic, it is difficult to say for sure whether this is entirely new, since we know so little about Hellenistic literature that precedes it.) Some might see the activity presupposed by these works as a form of secular intellectual tourism, not far removed from that implied by the lists of the “Seven Wonders of the World” that circulate in this period; it is telling that the lists include two of the most important Greek religious sites: Phidias’s statue of Zeus at Olympia and the Artemision at Ephesus (see Brodersen 1992).15 On the other hand, Pausanias does not just describe what he sees, but presents the Greek landscape through the lens of traditional polytheistic religion. For example, he makes a special trip to see the cult statue of Demeter Melaine at Mt. Elaious near Phigalia in Arcadia, although it proved to have disappeared (8.42.21); in describing the altars at Olympia, he presents them in liturgical order, not the order in which they stand (5.14.4, 10). In some he cases he claims that dreams that tell him what he can and cannot reveal (about Eleusis: 1.38.7; and about Messene: 4.33.4–5). He witnesses a festival to Demeter on Mt. Pron near Hermione, but reports that only the cult insiders are allowed to see the image (2.35.11) (see Elsner 1992; Rutherford 2001).

  A pattern related to this is that of the elite explorer who travels to foreign lands for the sake of “inquiry” (historia) in matters of history, geography, or religion. The chief characters in Plutarch’s De defectu oraculorum are of this type, including Cleombrotus of Sparta, who had “made many excursions in Egypt and about the land of the Cave-dwellers, and had sailed beyond the Persian Gulf; his journeyings were not for business, but he was fond of seeing things and of acquiring knowledge; . . . he was getting together a history to serve as a basis for a philosophy that had as its end aim theology, as he himself named it.” (De def. or. 410a–b). Similarly, the preface to a work on herbs (probably dating from the first or second centuries CE) relates how Thessalus of Tralles visited Egypt, first to Alexandria, were he studied the work of Nechepso, and then Thebes, where he experienced a vision of Asclepius.16

  Now when he had shut me in the room and commanded me to sit opposite the throne upon which the god was about to sit, he led me through the god’s secret names and he shut the door as he left. (24) Once I sat down, I was being released from body and soul by the incredible nature of the spectacle. For neither the facial features of Asklepios nor the beauty of the surrounding decoration can be expressed clearly in human speech. Then, reaching out his right hand, Asklepios began to say: (25) “Oh blessed Thessalos, attaining honour in the presence of the god. As time passes, when your successes become known, men will worship you as a god. Ask freely, then, about what you want and I will readily grant you everything.”

  A step beyond the religious explorer is the wandering wise man, such as Apollonius of Tyana, whom Philostratus in his Life represents as traveling widely, and visiting many sacred places in Anatolia, mainland Greece, and elsewhere, and sometimes participating in local religious rituals. Jaś Elsner (1997a has argued that pilgrimage is one of the models that Philostratus draws on in composing his life, representing him as both engaged in pilgrimage, for example in his account of Apollonius’s journey up the Nile (end of book 5)

  In several places they took boats across the river in order to visit every sight on it; for there was not a city, temple or sacred site in Egypt that they passed without discussion. For at each they either learned or taught some sacred story, and any ship on which Apollonius embarked resembled the sacred ship of a religious embassy.

  The ship is like the ship used by sacred embassies (the theoris) because Apollonius is engaged in theoria, a complex word that covers sacred missions to sanctuaries, philosophical contemplation, and exploration of the sort Solon engaged in. Similarly, Apollonius actually seems to become himself an object of pilgrimage, as in the Asclepieum in Aigeai (V A 1.8) where the people of Cilicia are said to flock to see him, or in Olympia, where more people came to see him than to any Olympic festival (V A 8.15).

  39.5

  Some of the journeys of Roman emperors also had a religious dimension.17 Just before he became emperor in 70 CE, Vespasian visited the Serapeum at Alexandria, where he saw a vision which he took as an omen of his future rule,18 and at about the same time went to consult the oracle of Mt. Carmel in Judaea where he received another favorable prophecy;19 thus, Sarapis and Baal could be presented as providing public support for the future emperor just as Alexander the Great has received endorsement from Zeus Ammon when he visited the Siwa Oasis. Caracalla is said to have cultivated Apollo, Asclepius, and Sarapis because of physical and mental illness (Cass. Dio 78.15; Rowan 2013, 162), and to have visited several healing sanctuaries: one of Apollo Grannus (perhaps at Phoebiana in western Raetia), that of Zeus-Asclepius at Pergamum,20 another Asclepieum at Aigeai in Cilicia (Haymann 2010), and the Serapeum at Alexandria (see Cass. Dio 78.22). Septimius Severus is said to have enjoyed taking part in the worship of Sarapis in Alexandria (Aelius Spartianus 17.4).21 The sacred mountain of Mons Kasios in northern Syria22 drew Trajan (113 CE), Hadrian (129 CE), and Julian (363 CE). The mountain was believed to be the home of the deity Baal Saphon, in Greek interpretatio “Zeus Kasios,” whose cult had spread to various places in the Mediterranean; Nero sacrificed to him on Corcyra before coming to Greece (Suet. Ner. 22).23 Several members of the Julio-Claudian family are known to have visited Troy, not so much in emulation of Alexander the Great as because of their family connections with the city. Later emperors were not as keen; Hadrian when he passed through the area is not said to have visited Troy, though he made special trip to pay his respects to the tomb of Telamonian Ajax at Rhoitaeum (Philostr. Her.8.1). The exception is Caracalla, who is said not only to have visited Troy but to have staged a lavish funeral for his freedman Festus in imitation of Achilles’s actions in the Iliad.24 Caracalla’s visit may have inspired Flavius Philostratus who in his Heroicus (55) narrates the long history of sacred delegations sent by Thessaly to honor the tomb of Achilles; Philostratus says that this practice went back to the heroic age, and had several times fallen into neglect and then revived over the centuries (see Rutherford 2009; 2013, 347–348).

  39.6

  Pilgrimage and tourism to and within Egypt in this period is widely attested in the form of graffiti, particularly ones recording the “adoration” or proskunema of the visitor, sometimes transmitted on behalf of others (see Geraci 1971; in general Rutherford 2012; Foertmeyer 1989). In another common form of graffito the writer says that he “remembered” such and such a person. Sometimes the inscriptions contain complete poems commemorating the visit or praising the deity. One such poem from the temple of Mandoulis at Kalabsha in Nubia, by a certain Sansnos, actually advocates pilgrimage: “Sansnos son of Pseno . . . wrote: revere the divine, sacrifice to all the gods, visit each sanctuary making an act of adoration” (Bernand 1969, no. 165)

  The fullest dossiers come from Upper Egypt: the Memnonion at Abydos, for some time a center for the cult of Sarapis, but later an oracle of Bes; the sanctuary of Imhotep-Asclepius at Deir-al-Bahari in Thebes, a healing-pilgrimage center for the region; the temple of Khnum on the island of Elephantine, where a yearly festival seems to have marked the beginning of the inundation of the Nile (see Maehler in Jaritz 1980); and the temple of Isis at the nearby island of Philai, which was traditionally the southernmost point of Egypt (during the Roman period Egyptian territory extended south along the so-called Dodecaschoenus). A good example from Philai is an inscription on the South Pylon of the temple of Isis which records the pilgrimage there of three Alexandrians in 191 CE: Serenus, Felix, and Apollonius the painter.25 Similar patterns must have existed in the north of Egypt, though evidence has not survived.

  During the third century CE, Philai also received sacred delegations from the kingdom of Meroe. It is now believed that the first temple on Philae was built when Egypt was ruled by Ethiopian pharaohs in the 25th Dynasty (early seventh century BCE), and it was probably under Ethiopian control again in the third century BCE. The tradition of pilgrimage from Ethiopia
could be ancient as well; a poem written on the pylon of the temple in the first century BCE to first century CE refers to the sight of Ethiopian ships bearing temples (see Bumbaugh 2011; Dijkstra 2008, 132–137; Rutherford 1998; the poem is Bernand and Bernand 1969, no. 158). Philai is thus a rare example of a sanctuary where pilgrims from different ethnic groups seem to have mixed.

  In other cases, we may prefer to talk about tourism. A good example is the singing statue of Memnon (originally one of the two colossal statues of Amenhotep III), which seems to have become a major draw for visitors in the late first century BCE when it started to emit a characteristic noise around sunrise. This and the statue next to it are covered with inscriptions, many of them dating from the time of Hadrian, including poems by Julia Balbilla commemorating Hadrian’s own visit in 130 CE.26 The hundreds of visitors who left graffiti in the royal tombs (suringes) in the Valley of the Kings should probably be classed as tourists as well (though cf. Hunt 1984, 405–406).

  39.7

  Similar things may have been going on in the East. Lucian says that the sanctuary of the Syrian Goddess at Hierapolis-Bambyke on the Euphrates attracted dedications from Arabia, Phoenicia, Babylon, Cappadocia, Cilicia, and Assyria (De dea Syria 10).27 He says that pilgrims would shave their heads and eyebrows, sacrifice a sheep, all of which they would then eat, except for the fleece, which he would kneel on, and the feet and head which he would put on his own head; he would also wear a garland, and put garlands on the heads of his fellow pilgrims (De dea Syria 55; see Lightfoot 2005). For the cult of Zeus Heliopolitanus at Baalbek, there seems to be indirect evidence of pilgrimage from the region in the form of medallions which may have been taken home by returning pilgrims.28