Divine Intervention: Invocations of Deities in Personal Correspondence from Graeco-Roman Egypt

Researchers have already acknowledged the tendency among Graeco-Roman Egyptians to appeal in their personal correspondence to the gods of the locality from which they were writing, rather than to those of their hometown. Many studies that address this phenomenon have focused on Hellenistic and Roman influence on the indigenous religious tradition and seek a better understanding of the patterns of religious behavior that characterized the civilization of Graeco-Roman Egypt as a whole. Relatively little research, however, has addressed the significance of these expressions of religiosity in illuminating religious self-identification of the authors. Based on the appeals made to specific gods in 113 private letters composed on papyri and ostraca between the third century B.C. and the mid-fourth century A.D., I suggest that personal loyalty to a particular deity was not an essential part of an individual’s self-identification, but rather a fluid condition that changed with location and circumstance. Thus, rather than indicating a personal relationship with a certain deity, these invocations often instead allude to the author’s affiliation with the broader religious tradition of which that god was a member, an association that did in fact contribute to the writer’s process of self-identification.