120
JOHN KARL EVANS
The lettering suggests that this inscription should be dated to the second century A.D. This was, however, a century of notorious religiosity. In the course of his sixth satire, a prolonged diatribe against married women published in or shortly after A.D. 116, Juvenal vividly describes how penitent followers of the goddess Isis atoned for their transgressions by plunging into the freezing waters of the Tiber and then crawling across Rome on blood-stained knees (Juv. 6.522-541). Some fifty years later, in A.D. 177, there occurred at Lyons one of the most terrible of the Christian persecutions, recounted at length by Eusebius in his Historia Ecclesiastica. One brief excerpt will serve to give a sense of the whole:
7
Then Maturus, Sanctus, Blandina, and Attalus were brought forth to face the beasts brought forth for a public exhibition of the inhumanity of the heathen, since the day for combat with wild animals had been specially set aside for our people. There in the amphitheatre, Maturus and Sanctus once again passed through every conceivable torture just as if they had suffered nothing at all before, or rather as if, having already overcome their opponent in the several preliminary bouts, they were now competing for the victor's crown. Once more they ran the gauntlet of the whips, in accordance with the local custom; once more they were mauled by the beasts; once more they suffered everything which the maddened populace, seated on one side or the other, howled for and cheered on, culminating with the iron chair that roasted their bodies and suffocated them with the stench. Even at this point their tormentors did not cease, but became more and more frenzied in their desire to overcome their resistance. Nevertheless, they heard nothing from Sanctus beyond the confession of faith that he had been accustomed to make from the outset (5.1.37-39).
A large body of comparable evidence for the heterogeneous religious attitudes to be found within the Roman Empire could be amassed without difficulty, but it would be pointless to do so. These few examples should serve to demonstrate just how wide the parameters of belief really were. Whether in Rome or a
120
JOHN KARL EVANS
The lettering suggests that this inscription should be dated to the second century A.D. This was, however, a century of notorious religiosity. In the course of his sixth satire, a prolong- ed diatribe against married women published in or shortly after A.D. 116, Juvenal vividly describes how penitent followers of the goddess Isis atoned for their transgressions by plunging into the freezing waters of the Tiber and then crawling across Rome on blood-stained knees (Juv. 6.522-541). Some fifty years later, in A.D. 177, there occurred at Lyons one of the most terrible of the Christian persecutions, recounted at length by Eusebius in his Historia Ecclesiastica. One brief excerpt will serve to give a sense of the whole:
7
Then Maturus, Sanctus, Blandina, and Attalus were brought forth to face the beasts brought forth for a public exhibition of the inhumanity of the heathen, since the day for combat with wild animals had been specially set aside for our people. There in the amphitheatre, Maturus and Sanctus once again passed through every conceivable torture just as if they had suffered nothing at all before, or rather as if, having already overcome their opponent in the several preliminary bouts, they were now competing for the victor's crown. Once more they ran the gauntlet of the whips, in accordance with the local custom; once more they were mauled by the beasts; once more they suffered everything which the maddened populace, seated on one side or the other, howled for and cheered on, culminating with the iron chair that roasted their bodies and suffocated them with the stench. Even at this point their tormentors did not cease, but became more and more frenzied in their desire to overcome their resistance. Nevertheless, they heard nothing from Sanctus beyond the confession of faith that he had been accustomed to make from the outset (5.1.37-39).
A large body of comparable evidence for the heterogeneous religious attitudes to be found within the Roman Empire could be amassed without difficulty, but it would be pointless to do so. These few examples should serve to demonstrate just how wide the parameters of belief really were. Whether in Rome or a
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