In his sixth satire, Juvenal deplores the pastimes of Roman women,
foremost of which is superstition. Speculating about how wives busy
themselves while their husbands are away, the poet introduces a
revolving door of visitors who include a eunuch of the eastern
goddess Bellona, an impersonator of Egyptian Anubis, a Judean
priestess, and Chaldean astrologers. From these religious experts
women solicit services ranging from dream interpretation and
purification to the coercion of lovers or wealthy acquaintances.
Juvenal's catalogue captures not only the popularity of these
"freelance" experts at the turn of the second century, but also
their familiarity among his Roman audiences, whom he could expect
to get the joke. Heidi Wendt investigates the backdrop of this
enthusiasm for exotic wisdom and practices by examining the rise of
self-authorized experts in religion during the first century of the
Roman Empire. Unlike members of civic priesthoods and temples,
freelance experts had to generate their own legitimacy, often
through demonstrations of skill and learning out on the streets, in
marketplaces, and at the temple gates. While historically these
professionals have been studied separately from the development of
modern conceptions of religion, Wendt argues that they, too,
participated in a highly competitive form of religious activity
from which emerged the modern-day characters not just of religious
experts but specialists of philosophy, medicine, and education as
well. Wendt notes affinities across this wider class of activity,
but focuses on those experts who directly enlisted gods and similar
beings. Over the course of the first century freelance experts grew
increasingly influential, more diverse with respect to the skills
or methods in which they claimed expertise, and more assorted in
the ethnic coding of their wisdom and practices. Wendt argues that
this class of religious activity engendered many of the innovative
forms of religion that flourished in the second century, including
but not limited to phenomena linked with Persian Mithras, the
Egyptian gods, and the Judean Christ. The evidence for
self-authorized experts in religion is abundant, but scholars of
ancient Mediterranean religion have only recently begun to
appreciate their impact on the Empire's changing religious
landscape. At the Temple Gates integrates studies of Judaism,
Christianity, mystery cults, astrology, magic, and philosophy to
paint a colorful portrait of religious expertise in early Rome.
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