Travel and Religion in Antiquity

II: Religion on the Road in Ancient Greece and Rome

29 II Religion on the Road inAncient Greece and Rome Steven Muir CONCORDIA UNIVERSITY COLLEGE OF ALBERTA They stir abroad [apodēmētai], while you are perfect stay-at-homes [endēmotatous]; for they expect by absence from home to gain something , while you are afraid that, if you go out after something, you may imperil even what you have. Thucydides 1.4–5 (contrasting Athenians with Spartans) There’s nothing worse for mortal man than wandering. Odyssey 15.343 These ancient sources show the ambivalent attitude of the Greeks and Romans toward travel. On the one hand, travel was necessary for business, war, or education and thus was seen positively. On the other, travel could be viewed with reservation or fear. Even self-chosen and purposeful travel separated one from the secure environs of family and city. 30 H O N O U R I N G T H E G O D S Since those social settings were essential for a person’s identity, travel might evoke anxiety. There was also the fear that purposeful and shortterm “travel” could devolve into purposeless and long-term “wandering.” In the ancient world, wandering was the fate of unfortunates who had angered the gods or transgressed social laws. It was the punishment of exiles to be rejected by the gods and permanently separated from family and city (see Montiglio 2005). Scholars have tended to analyze religion in the Greco-Roman world with reference to fixed urban locations, namely the home and temple. Much less analysis has been done on religious episodes away from those locations. Here I redress this imbalance by assembling evidence about “religion on the road”– –that is, rituals and episodes involving the gods that occurred while people prepared to travel, were travelling, or concluded their travels. In the first section of this chapter I identify two related issues as the contextual background for understanding travel and activities associated with the gods. These issues involve the social or dyadic nature of personality in the ancient Mediterranean and the importance of the venues of home and temple, where religious activities typically were practised. These factors clustered and interrelated in a pattern that I have detected and will discuss below– –namely, a tendency to link features of travel to the familiar conceptual setting of city (polis) and home. I argue that religious activity on the road drew from religion of the city and home in order to assuage the insecurities of travel. Such insecurities would have been of two sorts. The first relates to the obvious and practical hardships of travel, such as uncertainties associated with the journey, en route accommodation, and destination. The second –– perhaps less apparent to modern people –– has to do with how one’s social identity becomes precarious when one is separated from the primary social groupings of family and fellow citizens. Because so much of a person’s identity in the ancient Mediterranean world was socially derived, this separation could be an acute problem. It is my thesis that the gods were invoked and encountered on the road not only as powerful divine beings who offered protection, but also as omnipresent patron-witnesses who knew the person from “back home” and whose reassuring presence would help maintain a person’s identity while travelling. This chapter’s second section reviews primary evidence for religious activity in light of the above thesis. Generally, divine intervention while travelling could be placed in two categories. The first and most prevalent R E L I G I O N O N T H E ROA D / S T E V E N M U I R 31 involved various types of protection from the hazards of travel. That is, the god would deliver or save the traveller from peril (i.e., prevent a negative consequence). The second type was the granting of a positive consequence , such as giving guidance to an advantageous route, bringing unexpected success or good fortune, bestowing insight, or sometimes appearing in a dramatic epiphany or as a quiet and ongoing protective presence. Overarching each of these explicit divine interventions was an implicit element, one that has often been overlooked in scholarship. We must consider that the gods were thought to witness and interact with the travellers who were their devotees or clients. This interaction would maintain the traveller’s identity during the liminal period of travel. In my discussion I have set four categories of...