Introduction
Perhaps the most well-known “fact” about the reign of Severus Alexander (222–235 CE) is that, in his syncretistic lararium, he kept an image of Christ alongside other figures, including Apollonius of Tyana, Vergil, Orpheus, and Achilles.Footnote 1 Surprisingly, the source of this interesting bit of information in the massively suspect Historia Augusta has often elicited scant critical questioning among modern scholars, who still frequently repeat it as a revealingly colorful detail.Footnote 2 Swallowed whole by classicists of the generation of Georg Wissowa, then fêted as a religious ideal by the likes of Adolf von Harnack, the tale remains enshrined as fact under multiple headings in the reference literature (including Der neue Pauly) and is blithely perpetuated as such by many writers, not least historians of religion.Footnote 3 The efforts of specialists favorable to the account have naturally worked more responsibly with the relevant range of sources for the Severan age, but here too judgments still appear overly sanguine about what the HA recounts.Footnote 4 Even as sophisticated and nuanced an expert as Cécile Bertrand-Dagenbach, responsible for the critical edition and commentary of the relevant text, somehow finds “rien d’invraisemblable” in the account.Footnote 5 Most recently, in 2017, the erudite study of Cristian Mondello on exactly this theme, while not inattentive to the delicacy of the question, is in the end entirely ready to entertain the report.Footnote 6 It is the purpose of this study to help retire such judgments, suggesting that this long-prized story must be treated still more cautiously. Indeed, it should be openly rejected not only as history but even as a plausible fiction.Footnote 7 Sustaining this claim means filling out an argument that has at best been presupposed but never forcefully made;Footnote 8 and a result of this process will be a new view of the privatization of late antique Roman religion.
After first presenting the pertinent passages and insisting upon a series of problems that should arouse grave suspicion at the level of the reporting, I will invoke pertinent archeological evidence to expose how bizarre such reported ritual behavior would have appeared, both cultically and materially.Footnote 9 Instead, in line with a basic orientation of HA scholarship, I will contend that the whole tradition is best understood as part of the late fourth-century polytheistic author’s fanciful reaction to an ascendant Christian culture that was gaining ground in the post-Theodosian world.Footnote 10 To that degree, the account of the lararium, at once improbable and yet somehow familiar for ancient readers, exemplifies what we might call an ironic sort of “innovative traditionalism” on the part of the author. By an imaginative reconfiguration and redeployment of recognizable motifs, he worked to support his specific religious and cultural aim of (playfully) mounting a conservative revolution. In the end, however, this mode of polytheistic resistance was a mere epiphenomena, the reverse image of a dynamic of privatization that the greater Constantinian revolution had already begun. To that degree, one may reasonably wonder where the lines between earnest engagement and simple entertainment in the HA lie.
The Testimony of the Historia Augusta
A. A Problematic Source
No scholar of third-century Rome is unaware of the enormous problems besetting the Historia Augusta as a historical source.Footnote 11 The long Vita Alexandri Seueri is the central life in the HA, and, as many readers have seen, it means to present the emperor as the “ideal prince” in something like the manner of a specula principum.Footnote 12 As such, the life of this chosen princeps occupies a place of particular and dubious interest within an already dubious work. Having exhausted his more reliable (travestied) sources, which conclude with Caracalla, and now outfitted with an exaggerated political agenda, the author gives free rein to his fancy in a work he attributes to the mock author Aelius Lampridius.Footnote 13 “C’est toutefois la fiction qui l’emporte, et de loin, dans la Vie d’Alexandre Sévère.”Footnote 14 The tale is, in fact, outrageous from the get-go. The burden of proof is by default on those who would extract salvageable historical material from this often ludicrous and openly agenda-driven vita. What Mondello thus labels as “radical hyperciticism” (“una ipercritica radicale”) on the part of those who distrust the text’s account might to others seem like sober common sense.Footnote 15
Like the other vitae in the HA, the account of Alexander Severus must be approached via a foundational heuristic insight. Since a landmark article published by Johannes Geffcken in 1920, it has been customary to understand the whole sprawling extent of the HA through a late-antique Tendenz whereby appeal is made to the new Christian state religion to show tolerance toward the traditional polytheistic cults.Footnote 16 The late fourth-century work of historical fantasy is, in this regard, to be classed together with the related efforts of figures like Symmachus and Porphyry.Footnote 17 Only in this light can the author’s agenda be rightly understood; for, as scholarship continues to show, the HA (besides simply having some ludicrous fun) betrays an ideological program, advancing a form of polytheistic resistance to the exclusivism of the ascendant Christian regime.Footnote 18 That an author so motivated should in consequence devote editorial attention specifically to the religious practices of his constructed “ideal prince” is, thus, a priori to be expected and, upon inspection, unmistakably the case.
B. Polemical (Private) Piety
Alexander is presented specifically as a pius foil to his immediate predecessor, Heliogabalus, who represents for the HA the precise opposite of the bonus princeps.Footnote 19 To reinforce the opposition, Heliogabalus even tries to kill Alexander in HA Hel. 13.1–8 (cf. HA AS 2.4). The lurid Heliogabalus is, indeed, an unspeakably wicked archvillain (cf. HA Hel. 1.1–3) whose crimes were many but especially connected with his monstrous religious mania and innovation. Heliogabalus, namely, worked to install in Rome the exclusive worship of his foreign, Syrian Sun-god, displacing traditional Roman cults with his eponymous favorite. The whole vita is, as such, “une caricature de Constantin,” to whom, with no surplus of subtlety, the fictional work is also dedicated (HA Hel. 2.4).Footnote 20 In this connection we must observe the following significant notice:
Heliogabalum in Palatino monte iuxta aedes imperatorias consecrauit eique templum fecit, studens et Matris typum et Vestae ignem et Palladium et ancilia et omnis Romanis ueneranda in illud transferre templum et id agens, ne quis Romae deus nisi Heliogabalus coleretur. Dicebat praetera Iudaeorum et Samaritanorum religiones et Christianam deuotionem illuc transferendam, ut omnium culturarum secretum Heliogabali sacerdotium teneret. (HA Hel. 3:4b–5; cf. 7.4–5)Footnote 21
He [i.e. Heliogablus the emperor] consecrated Heliogabalus [i.e. the god] at the Palatine hill, next to the imperial apartments, and he built a temple for him. He wanted to relocate the image of Magna Mater and the fire of Vesta, and the Palladium, and the shields and everything venerated by the Romans, so that no god would be honored at Rome except for Heliogabalus. He said, moreover, that the religions of the Jews and Samaritans, as well as Christian worship, ought to be relocated there so that the priesthood of Heliogabalus should guard the mystery of all the cults.
Such an incoherent, fictional assimilation/subjection of Judaism and Christianity to the emperor’s new monopolizing cult has a clear anachronistic affinity to the post-Constantinian and indeed post-Theodosian reality of the author.Footnote 22 That Alexander, though also a Syrian, adopts a very different, visibly polytheistic, but, in the end, strikingly private approach to exactly these same religious imports from the East entirely fits his role as the pius alternative to such an anti-hero. Alexander’s comparative “tolerance” towards Abraham and Christ is, in this light, a redactional conceit that plainly means to make a political point. Where the revolting Heliogabalus, like his later Christian ciphers, tried to impose a monopoly of Syrian devotion on the public ritual life of Rome, his successor’s praiseworthy attitude and actions point in a more discrete and humane direction.
The narration of Alexander’s demonstrative interest in and benevolence towards the Christians finds multiple expressions in the text (“Christianos esse passus est,” HA AS 22.4; cf. 45.7; 49.6; 51.7–8), but its most audacious illustration appears fairly late in the vita.
Christo templum facere voluit eumque inter deos recipere… sed prohibitus est ab his, qui consulentes sacra repperant omnes Christianos futuros, si id fecisset, et templa reliqua deserenda. (HA AS 43.6–7)
He [i.e. Alexander Severus] wanted to erect a temple to Christ and to receive him among the gods. . . he was impeded in this, however, by those who, in consulting the sacred things, understood that everyone would become Christian if he did it, and that the [i.e. polytheistic] temples would be abandoned.
It may well be that the genuine reality of some wider policy of leniency towards the Christians on the part of the Severan dynasty is reflected in the HA’s general presentation of Alexander. Marta Sordi, who accepts at face value even this dubious report about building a temple, is of this persuasion, for instance.Footnote 23 It is an arguable point; but one may thus also seriously question whether Severan tolerance ever went so far as this. Within the structure of the HA we plainly have here not only a further pius foil to Heliogabulus’s cultic centralization but also a direct forecast of the danger of lending state support to the Christian cult. Deeply sympathetic to the polytheistic cause, the passage is a conveniently improbable, prophetic explanation as to why the theological goodwill of the “ideal prince” remained in the end a private devotion. If you give the Christians a cultic inch, they’ll take a mile.
Christianity emerges in this configuration, above all, as an estimable ethical praxis and ideal. Alexander knows and admires the Golden Rule (HA AS 51.7–8).Footnote 24 He finds a good example for his own provincial administration in the Jews’ and Christians’ manner of preparing their ministers (45.7). He prefers the Christians’ godly piety to the behavior of men in a tavern (49.6). Rather than a ritual presence, parallel to or rivaling the polytheistic temples, Christ-devotion is at root much more like a philosophical way of life.
C. Alexander’s Lararia
It is with this perspective in view and against this whole broad redactional context that we must now consider the HA’s report of Alexander’s private religion. The specific account of the emperor’s lararium is recorded in two separate passages in the vita. Following an extended introduction celebrating the happy nature of his reign, the first passage appears in 29.2, as the author proposes to speak briefly of Alexander’s vita cottidiana et domestica (29.1) before coming to his expeditions and wars:Footnote 25
Vsus uiuendi eidem hic fuit: primum ut, si facultas esset, id est si non cum uxore cubisset, matutinis horis in larario suo, in quo et diuos principes sed optimos electos et animas sanctiores, in quis Apollonium et, quantum scriptor suorum temporum dicit, Christum, Abraham et Orfeum et huiusmodi ceteros habebat ac maiorum effigies, rem diuinam faciebat. (HA 29.2)
This was his manner of living: first of all, if the opportunity existed, that is, if he had not spent the night with his wife, he would offer sacrificeFootnote 26 in his lararium, in which he had both divinized emperors (but only the selected best ones) and most holy souls, among which was Apollonius and, to follow what an author of his age says, Christ, Abraham, and Orpheus and others of this sort, as well as the portraits of his ancestors.
Here we learn that, alongside the revered ancestral maiores and among an unnamed number of well-chosen imperial diui and holy animae, the emperor kept images of Apollonius, Christ, Abraham, and Orpheus.Footnote 27 The second lararium report is closely bound to this first passage and appears soon thereafter, adding some interesting new details:
Vergilium autem Platonem poetarum uocabat eiusque imaginem cum Ciceronis simulacro in secundo larario habuit, ubi et Achillis et magnorum uirorum. Alexandrum uero Magnum inter optimos et diuos in larario maiore consecrauit. (HA 31.4–5)
He called Vergil “the Plato of poets” and kept his image together with a likeness of Cicero in a second lararium, where were also [likenesses] of Achilles and of illustrious men. But Alexander the Great he enshrined among the great divinized [emperors] in the main lararium.
We learn now of a “second lararium” where simulacra of additional “great men” were also enshrined: Vergil, Cicero, and Achilles, among others. Alexander the Great, by contrast, belongs with the other great rulers in the shrine described as maior. As optimos et diuos in 31.5 is a clear verbal echo of the description in 29.2, we are led to see in this first and major lararium the place where Apollonius and the “holy souls,” together with the maiores, were housed as well. Before coming to this crowd of venerated figures in the emperor’s twinned domestic shrines, however, three preliminary points are in order.
1) First, the opening detail, offered in HA AS 29.2, that Alexander did not approach his lararium unless he was ritually pure by sexual abstention—i.e., had not slept with his wife the night before—must be viewed in a double connection. On the one hand, this unlikely presentation belongs to the HA’s wider celebration of Severus Alexander as innocens (6.3), castus (7.2; cf. 8.6), and usus veneris moderatus (39.2), a depiction obviously set in contrast with the sexually depraved Heliogabalus. The lararium motif, in other words, is immediately inserted within our author’s most overt redactional agenda in the vita. At the same time, if Salvatore Settis (following a hint of Emilio Gabba) is correct, behind this passage’s evident interest in sexual purity lies additionally an attention to Jewish praxis, as expressed in texts such as Lev 16:8.Footnote 28 Should this be so, it would harmonize well with Nardelli’s proposal that Heliogabalus intentionally defies the Levitical law by his disgusting diet of rats, weasels, and mice (HA Hel. 27.2).Footnote 29 The author’s polemical pairing is thus quite strongly present in the crafting of the lararium text.
2) As a second preliminary remark, we may straightaway note that the word lararium itself is late and extremely rare, attested only once (perhaps) outside of the HA.Footnote 30 More likely in any genuine sources of information (e.g. Marius Maximus?) would be the conventional language of sacrarium or aediculae. Nevertheless, by deploying this word and so appealing to the Lares—“an essential part of every household shrine,”Footnote 31 who curiously do not appear in this lararium or who at least go unmentioned—the author makes a very successful evocation of traditional Roman devotion, a move entirely suitable to his traditionalist agenda. He effectively enshrines in one of the most ancient and intimate spaces of Roman religious practice what we will find to be an extraordinarily improbable grouping of illustrious men and holy souls.
The explicit semantic evocation of the Lares in the HA might also be seen in another, closely related connection, for the Fourth Theodosian Decree (Genticilia constiterit superstitione), issued on November 8, 392, had explicitly targeted this form of private devotion:
Nullus omnino ex quolibet genere ordine hominum dignitatum vel in potestate positus vel honore perfunctus, sive potens sorte nascendi seu humilis genere condicione ortuna in nullo penitus loco, in nulla urbe sensu carentibus simulacris vel insontem victimam caedat vel secretiore piaculo larem igne, mero genium, penates odore veneratus accendat lumina, imponat tura, serta suspendat. (Lib. XVI.10.12)
No one at all, of any class or condition whatsoever, whether invested with power or charged with honor, whether nobly born or of humble estate, may in any place, in any city, sacrifice an innocent victim to senseless idols, or in a more secret rite worship a Lar with fire, or genius with wine, the penates with perfumes, light a sacred lamp, burn incense, or hang garlands.
The domestic lararium, no less than the public temple, was clearly a contested cultic space in the late fourth-century context, the site of more secret piacula (meaning “offerings/rites” and/or “crimes/sins”). To defend itself, traditional polytheism was compelled to respond. The HA did so by coopting the highest-ranking private citizen of all and depicting him in proleptic defiance of the new social order in a way calculated to challenge the new Christian Roman elite in their own attack on private devotion. Why may not personal Christ-devotion—even the emperor’s own—coexist with the most traditional Roman values, here embodied in devotion to the Lares? “Would that Constantine and his Christ-honoring successors had followed this traditional Roman model!” our author seems to say.
3) One final remark, before coming to the divi and viri illustri that Alexander venerated, concerns the phrase quantum scriptor suorum temporum dicit (“as an author of his age says”), which qualifies the specific mention of Christ, Abraham, and Orpheus in HA AS 29.2 and separates these figures from Apollonius. A clear distinction and implicit admission are signaled here.Footnote 32 The claim of Apollonius of Tyana to be found in the lararium, in fact, sounds much more trustworthy than the wilder claim about these other “holy souls,” and, as we shall presently see, this latter claim should be reckoned as bogus. The literary convention of appealing to the authority of a false source in order to cajole the reader’s belief accordingly belongs to the author’s game of make-believe. It is a technique well-known from other ancient texts, including, ironically, Philostratus’s Vita Apollinii.Footnote 33 The author is openly putting the reader on guard.
The Objects of Devotion
A. Vergil
Proceeding, then, to the reported contents of Severus Alexander’s supposed domestic shrines, we may conveniently begin with the second text and with the first of the figures it mentions, for the fingerprints of another revealing anachronism are here. Although an honorific reception of Vergil began immediately after his death (and in some ways even before it), the transformation of Rome’s national poet into an explicit source of sacred wisdom first emerges forcefully with Macrobius around 400, “in der Zeit des ausgehenden Heidentums” (“in the age of vanishing paganism”), when, as Marion Giebel observes, an alternative to the Christians’ Holy Scripture became an urgent desideratum in traditional non-Christian circles (cf. Macrobius, Sat. I.24.13 and Servius, Aen. 3.349).Footnote 34 When we accordingly find Alexander practicing the sortes vergilianae in HA AS 4.6 and again in 14.5 (cf. HA Had. 2.8), we can confirm that the HA is invested in exactly this late-antique project of creating Vergil as the author of a sacred text.Footnote 35 In making Vergil the “Plato of the poets,” moreover, the Mantuan is crowned with a radiant philosophical aura that recalls the description in Servius’ fourth/fifth-century Vergilii opera expositio:Footnote 36 “Totus Vergilius scientia plenus est. . . dicuntur aliqua simpliciter, multa de historia, multa per altam scientiam philosophorum, theologorum, Aegyptiorum. . .” (VI, preface; “The whole of Vergil is full of knowledge. . . some things are spoken simply, many things concerning history, many concerning the deep knowledge of the philosophers, of the theologians, and of the Egyptians. . .”). The mood here is consistently that of a late-antique polytheistic moment. Accordingly, apart from the HA’s typical incoherence in making Alexander Severus both a personal failure in Latin letters (HA AS 3.4) and a religious devotee of the greatest Latin writer, we have good reason to suspect that the sacralization of Vergil, symbolized by his appearance in the imperial lararium, is part of the same fourth-century movement otherwise apparent throughout the text. “Divinizing” the poet-philosopher ingeniously contributes to the author’s larger traditionalist cultural project of elevating Vergil to a prophetic status and thereby cultivating pre-Christian Roman memory: Romane, memento!Footnote 37
B. Cicero
The appearance of Cicero following Vergil sets in parallel the two classic “founding fathers” of the Latin literary tradition. It also rings another redactional bell, for Cicero is an “omnipresent” preoccupation of the HA.Footnote 38 A major part of the text’s interest in this second pater latinitatis seems to lie in his outstanding status as a defender of Rome’s ancestral ancien regime and indeed, more specifically, his service as “a stumbling stone for those supporters of the new [Christian] state religion.”Footnote 39 Providing in this way a useful instrument for reinforcing the polytheistic identities of the emperors in the HA, Cicero the philosopher-statesman appears five times in the vita of Alexander alone, more than in any other vita.Footnote 40 We are told that the emperor gladly read Cicero’s De officiis and De re publica (30.2), certainly to convince us of the good statesmanship that the “ideal prince” imbibed thereby. In short order, we indeed later find the princeps following the exemplum uertero, the “ancient example” that Cicero specifically describes for good administration (42.4). At the same time, Cicero serves as an image for the inevitable violent death suffered by good men, a foreshadowing of the coming murder of Severus Alexander himself (62.3; cf. HA Cl., 2.5).
The evocative force of placing the polytheistic “martyr” Cicero specifically in a lararium might also recall, particularly in the HA’s politically and religiously embattled context, a famous scene about the historical Cicero’s actual lararium, narrated in the De Legibus and De Domo sua. Briefly, after Cicero had been named a public enemy of the Republic, his house on the Palatine Hill was confiscated and, as the orator himself reports, “our familial Lares (nostri Lares familiares) were abused; in their place a temple to License was raised” (Leg.17). This refers to the shrine erected to Libertas that P. Clodius built on the site to prevent its reoccupation by its former owner. Bitterly Cicero asked: “Did that lovely Liberty of yours expulse my household gods (deos penates) and familial Lares (familiares meos lares) so that she might establish herself, as it were, in a place of captivity?” (Dom.108). For a dispossessed, fourth-century polytheist, such a history of sacrilegious displacement would have undoubtedly resonated with the loss of his own ritual home, of his gods and cherished ancestral worship. Could it be that piously effecting Cicero’s reunion with the Lares somehow symbolically reverses the new ritual abomination perpetrated by the Roman state against its own tradition?
Ultimately, the HA’s consecration of Cicero, a thing otherwise unknown in the reception of this Roman stateman, who was never publicly divinized like a Caesar, is not easily pried apart from the redactional aims and interests of the author.Footnote 41 Absent compelling external reasons to accept the HA’s report about Cicero-worship, we must thus conclude that Cicero’s introduction into the imperial lararium is yet another part of a growing literary trope in the construction of the HA’s “ideal prince.”Footnote 42 The good emperor should piously venerate the twin pillars of Romanitas.
C. Achilles and Alexander the Great
Following these two great Romans, the passage in HA AS 31.4–5 is filled out by the mention of two Greeks, Achilles and Alexander the Great. Although kept in the same “second lararium” with Vergil and Cicero, as a warrior spirit Achilles is very different from these two Roman men of letters. The natural pairing of Achilles with the warlike Macedonian Alexander may thus expose an internal connection that also helps join the two lararia. The link hints, in fact, at a story from Plutarch’s Vita Alexandri 15, already recalled in HA P 1.2. The conqueror, visiting the Homeric hero’s tomb in Troy, venerated it with garlands and libations. Venerating Achilles accordingly belonged to venerating Alexander.Footnote 43
Achilles, in fact, is a kind of adjunct to Alexander the Great in the HA, while Alexander the Great himself plays an outsized role within Severus Alexander’s vita’s larger program.Footnote 44 The young emperor is constantly compared with his namesake and must preposterously, repeatedly refuse the title Magnus (HA AS 5.5; 6.1; 11.2–5; 12.4). The Vita Alexandri is said to be the princeps’s favorite reading material, though he disapproved of this older Alexander’s cruelty (HA AS 30.3; cf. 35.1–4). The young Severan ruler masters the phalanx in 50.5, and in 55–56, he finally excels his model by victoriously invading Sassanian Persia at the head of 700 elephants (versus Alexander the Great’s mere fifteen pachyderms). In short, Severus Alexander tried always to emulate and outdo his great namesake, to show the great difference inter Romanum Alexandrum et Macedonem (50.4). It is enough, in such a contextual light, to see Achilles’s veneration in 31.4 as part of this whole imaginary presentation of the new “Roman Alexander.”Footnote 45 Together with the evocation of Cicero and Vergil, a transparently artificial construction is thus revealed. The ideal Greco-Roman princeps ought to be not only philosopher, poet, and statesman, but also a great military hero.
D. Apollonius and Friends
If the contents of the second lararium strongly invite a contextualization in the set agenda of the author, the authenticity of the first lararium looks more promising, at least at first. Alexander worship is not an absolute fiction nor is its Roman acceptance in the Antonine age.Footnote 46 Moreover, as hinted above, Apollonius of Tyana has a very strong claim to appear in connection with Severus Alexander. It was the Syrian empress Julia Domna, his great aunt, who had commissioned Philostratus’s Vita Apollonii, which was then completed after her death, sometime in the 220’s, during the reign of Alexander, though Philostratus himself was no longer in the imperial court at that time.Footnote 47 As Caracalla additionally built a heroon to Apollonius (Cassius Dio, Hist. rom. 78.18; Philostratus, Vita 8.31), devotion to this sage was clearly part of the culture of the Severan clan.Footnote 48 It is not the figure of Apollonius, then, that draws our attention—and raises our eyebrows—but the group of three figures following him in HA AS 29.2. It is, indeed, in this assemblage of persons that further anachronisms can be seen, and central to the grouping is clearly the figure of Jesus, for he bears the strongest connections to all the others.
The binding of Christ and Abraham requires little comment, unless it is perhaps to wonder why Abraham appears rather than Moses. It is best not to look too hard for an answer. Constantine did order the burning of a shrine and the demolition of its traditional cult statues at Mamre in Palestine in order to erect there a basilica in honor of Abraham (Eusebius, Vita Const. 3.51–53), a destruction that has been archeologically confirmed but that also failed to stamp out the polytheistic heritage, which lasted at least into the late fifth or early sixth century.Footnote 49 Still, this specific Constantinian provocation, only one of many possible explanations for Abraham’s presence, is an event that subsists on the margins and is impossible to bring into direct connection with the HA’s more “tolerant” perspective. At base, the Abraham-Jesus pairing simply maps onto the pairing of Christians and Jews, a collocation perfectly typical of the HA’s perspective.
More important are the links drawn to Jesus in explicitly polytheistic directions. In Apollonius of Tyana himself we confront the character of the so-called θεῖος ἀνήρ or, in the language of the HA, a “sage of immense prestige and reputation, a philosopher of ancient times, a friend of the gods, worthy himself to be honored like a divinity” (HA Aurelian 24.3). Apollonius was, indeed, a figure who enjoyed a fervent cult in the fourth century.Footnote 50 He was promoted by the “ardent polytheist” Nichomachus Flavianus the Elder (334–394) by either copying or translating Philostratus’s bios,Footnote 51 while the more tolerant polytheist, Ammianus Marcellinus (c. 330–400), also appreciated the holy man. A fourth- or fifth-century inscription from Mopseustia in Cilicia celebrates Apollonius as “shining forth from Tyana, extinguishing the errors of men” (SEG 28, 1251) and so on.Footnote 52 It is not coincidental, then, that Christ is explicitly linked to Apollonius for the first time in the early fourth century by Sossianus Hierocles, a zealous persecutor of Christians at the time of Diocletian, in his controversial work, the Philalethes (φιλαλήθης).Footnote 53 We know that this comparison was regarded as Hierocles’s own innovation from the explicit testimony of the treatise Contra Hieroclem, traditionally attributed to Eusebius of Caesarea:Footnote 54 “Only he [i.e. Hierocles], among all those who have ever written against us, has produced a formal contrast (ἐξαίρετος) and comparison of Apollonius with our savior” (Eusebius, Contra Hier. 1.2).Footnote 55 The same link, if less developed, was embraced by Porphyry of Tyre in his book, Adversus Christianos. In other words, the Christ-Apollonius pairing is not only significantly later than the Severan age; it has its attested home not in a pacific syncretism, but in an aggressive and polemical anti-Christian polytheistic context. It suits the author of the HA, not Severus Alexander.
Christopher Jones has observed that “more attention should go to differences between Apollonius reception in the Christian East and in the Latin West, especially during the all-important fifth century.”Footnote 56 At the same time he also notes that “among polytheists of late antiquity, both eastern and western, the tendency to treat Apollonius as a semi-divine figure, already evident in Philostratus, becomes more marked.”Footnote 57 Interestingly, within this movement towards an increasing divinization—and appearance in a lararium is certainly on the mature end of this trajectory—what does uniquely appear in the Latin West are contorniates, commemorative medals produced in late-fourth-century Rome, functioning as what Andreas Alföldi called a Propagandamittel in the traditional aristocracy’s Kulturkampf with the upstart Christians.Footnote 58 It may well be that Alföldi overstated his case and that a less polemical contextualization in the simple offering of public games obtains for these medals.Footnote 59 Regardless, these medallions from the age of the HA depict Apollonius not as a god but rather beside other western literary/culture heroes, such as Apuleius and Sallust. If this does little to link Apollonius to Jesus, it does illuminate the link to figures like Cicero and Vergil, again pointing a finger at the HA’s author rather than the historical Alexander.
E. Orpheus and Jesus
The association of Orpheus and Jesus also easily points in a fourth-century direction, for once again we find a very lively interest in and devotion to this figure flourishing precisely in the late-antique polytheistic context, even if Orphism as such, in some murky way, has very deep classical roots.Footnote 60 The Orphic Argonautica, Synesius, Proclus, and Damascius, and many other texts, traditions, and tradents all attest to this broad cultural context. The case of Orpheus is complicated, however.
First of all, as Miguel Herrero de Jáuregui notes, “At the end of Antiquity, while the Greek defenders of a dying paganism would make Orphism their banner, the Roman resistance (Praetextatus, Siculus) would not even mention it.”Footnote 61 This fact reflects a distinct “stigma of anti-Romanism” largely born of Orphism’s connections to Dionysian/Baccanalian rites, which were considered “intrinsically Greek, and accordingly, not Roman.”Footnote 62 Thus, although the Orpheus myth as such was long established in the Roman repertoire, not least through authors like Vergil (e.g. Aen. 6.645), Cicero (following Aristotle) denied the existence of Orpheus and the early Latin approach has a decidedly bookish rather than a genuine ritual flavor.Footnote 63 Even when signs of ritual life appear, Orphism remains a foreign import.Footnote 64 In this regard, the Latin HA strikes a somewhat discordant—or rather a clear foreign—note. To appeal to Orpheus alongside a philosopher from Asia Minor and a pair of Syrian holy men would have created a strong impression of air from the East, admittedly fitting for a Syrian emperor. At the same time, we must wonder if there is any genuine ritual praxis behind Orpheus’s appearance in a Latin lararium or whether this is not simply more bookish interest.
It warrants insisting upon this scholarly tone in the Latin tradition, for the same bookish inspiration is also plain behind the well-known Christian interest in Orpheus. Above all, fascination with the katabasis motif and the strong appeal exercised by the philosophical/monotheistic aspects of the Orphic tradition excited early Christians. This Christian interest was of course not confined to apologetic literary texts (e.g. Clement of Alexandria, Protr. 1.1–5), and by the early third century a pronounced Christ-Orpheus connection begins to emerge very clearly in Christian funerary art, but even here the Orpheus of the mysteries is not obviously in view.Footnote 65 Real cultic blurring, in other words, is hard to show. Orpheus as an evocative cultural symbol seems to be the driver of interest, at least from the Christian side.
On the other hand, a striking object like the undated seal once held in Berlin but sadly lost during World War II points in another direction. It showed a crucified figure with the inscription OPΦEOΣ BAΚΚIΚOΣ and indicates that more daringly syncretistic identifications were also possible via the Bacchic/Dionysian route (cf. Cels.7.53).Footnote 66 That a third-century devotee of the Orphic mysteries might accordingly link Orpheus with Christ, particularly in some magical context, is thus not to be excluded. When a very fine scholar like Herrero de Jáuregui goes on, however, and deduces from HA AS 29.2—with no evident concern about the credibility of the passage—that Severus Alexander’s lararium clearly demonstrates that, since the Roman Emperor himself might thus in his private devotions “put on the same level such different theoi andres. . . [it follows that] their superficial veneration was not restricted to low magic,” we have exposed the need to consider still more closely, and now from a different angle, the (im)plausibility of this late antique account.Footnote 67
The Material Turn: Fictionalizing Cultic Realia
By this point the key insight has already been won: the lararium passages are deeply entangled in a heavy-handed redactional project. Internal evidence thus strongly inclines us to interpret HA 29.2 and 31.4–5 as creative productions serving the author’s late-fourth-century interest in a polytheistic revival through the construction of an idealized prince. It remains merely to reject any overly facile acceptance of these particular accounts by considering directly the key material datum: actual lararia. This external control will quite conclusively show that the dual lararium of Severus Alexander as described is not only extremely improbable; it is an absolute anomaly. It cannot be accepted as information about the emperor himself, nor do good grounds exist for finding here a reflection of third-century “syncretism.” Even for the fourth-century author’s contemporaries, it would have appeared to be an invention (and maybe a joke). There is here, in point of fact, “rien de vraisemblable,” or at least “presque rien,” for the surrounding evocative mise-en-scène is, admittedly, credibly done.
A simple measure permits us to make this judgment. Thanks to a large number of archeological discoveries, we are well informed concerning the constitution of household shrines in the Roman world. A survey of this evidence provides a firm view of the normal constitution of a lararium.Footnote 68
A. A Standardized Sacral Space
Allowing for a large range of recognizable variations, the layout is highly standardized.Footnote 69 Within a purpose-built wall-niche or a temple-like standing structure (aedicula), decoratively made in wood or stone and stucco, a group of votive statuettes is ritually housed, typically in bronze but possibly in silver, marble, terracotta, or some other material. The imagines maiorem might also be associated with this space. On the wall is painted a fresco, normally depicting two Lares, each with a rhyton in hand, flanking a hooded genius, who is shown making a libation; one or two snakes are likewise conventionally pictured at the bottom of the field, along with a variety of ornamental additions.Footnote 70 Sometimes the niche or standing structure, along with the votive statuary, are entirely replaced by this wall painting which might then, on occasion, also include images of various other gods, whether alone or in groups, with or without the Lares.Footnote 71 Ritual implements for various sorts of offerings would, finally, also accompany the scene: e.g., an acerra and turibulum for incense, a gutus for milk or wine, a patera, a lucerna, etc. The rare but real possibility of multiple, conjoined lararia is confirmed by the so-called Casa del doppio larario at Pompeii, where two equally-sized, niche-style shrines are mounted vertically and set within the wall, one above the other. At the same time, following Federica Giacobello, one may now distinguish between the “lari principali,” distinguished by a cult rendered to the Lares specifically and typically situated in the zone of the kitchen, i.e. linked to the hearth, and the “lari secondari,” which are more the architecturally-complex structures placed near the atrium or open zones of the house, e.g., in the peristyle.Footnote 72
All of this and the possibilities it allows are implicitly evoked in the account of Severus Alexander. Structurally, for instance, though a double lararium in the stacked fashion of the Casa del doppio larario is imaginable, one is inclined instead to find in the phrase in larario maiore a native Roman version of Giacobello’s scholarly distinction. It remains difficult, however, based on HA’s descriptions, to decide if maior here implies a primacy in Giacobello’s sense, since no information about the shrine’s construction or placement is offered. The Lares themselves are also never mentioned. One of more prominent lari secondari is entirely possible for the emperor’s “main” lararium.
B. The Gods in Roman Lararia
The interest of the text is clearly in the unusual contents, not the familiar construction of these shrines. Alongside the portrait-like effigiae of the ancestors mentioned in HA AS 29.2, moreover, the language of imagines employed in 31.4 focuses attention specially upon the sacred images within the shrine-like structure(s).Footnote 73 This latter term might equally suggest either the typical paintings or small-scale sculptures. The use of simulacrum in the same passage, however, perhaps carries a somewhat stronger, if not exclusive, connotation of statuary (e.g., Tacitus, Hist. 2.3; Lucretius, Rer. nat.5.308; but cf. Livy, Ab urbe cond. 24.16.19), and this sense should probably be preferred. This is in part since the author elsewhere employs simulacrum with the meaning of statuary (e.g. HA AS 41.6), but still more in view of the great rarity of ever finding, beyond the Lares, more than one or two other divinities together in the frescos.Footnote 74 The size of Severus Alexander’s collection of venerated images thus leads us to imagine votive figurines, but here the verisimilitude soon begins to break down.
A highly repetitive canon of numina and deities is found in the hundreds of preserved lararia that have been discovered more or less intact. Over and over, we find the same figures represented in various permutations: Vesta, Janus, the Lares, penates, and genius loci, along with certain favorite Olympians, especially Venus (often with Cupid), Hercules, Bacchus, Apollo, Mercury, and Jove. Imports, such as Isis and Serapis, are also popular, together with Hygeia, Asclepius, Priapus, and Medusa. In the House of the Red Walls at Pompeii, for instance, a bronze lamp and six bronze statuettes, measuring between 14.5 and 27 cm, were discovered in situ in an aedicula: a Lar, Hercules, Asclepius, Apollo, Mercury, and another Lar.Footnote 75 Another grouping of seven bronze votive images, today held in the Walters Art Gallery in Baltimore, was recovered together in a villa at nearby Boscoreale. It is comprised of a genius, two versions of Isis-Fortuna, Mercury, a seated Jupiter, a standing Jupiter, and Alexander-Helios.Footnote 76
To some limited degree, the imperial cult had also penetrated these private household devotions. Such a thing was entirely normal insofar as the emperor cult was itself a cult oriented around the household of the pater patriae. While altars honoring the Lares Augusti were usually public displays erected by lower-class vicomagistri, one may imagine the Lares familiares in the home overlapping in various ways with this cult.Footnote 77 More directly interesting for our purposes, however, is a passage in Suetonius, in which the author mentions a bronze image of the young Augustus that finally found its way into the imperial lararium of Hadrian himself: “I once obtained a bronze statuette [imagunculum eius aeream], representing him [i.e. Augustus] as a boy and inscribed with that name in letters of iron almost illegible from age. This I presented to the emperor [i.e. Hadrian], who cherishes it among the Lares of his bed-chamber [inter cubiculi Lares colitur]” (Suetonius, Aug. 7.1).Footnote 78
Against this background, the HA’s generic appeal to Severus Alexander’s veneration of unnamed imperial divi arouses no special concern, even if the common man evidently stuck with more classic (and less human) deities. The dead and divinized Caesars were at once the maiores and ancestral gods of the reigning emperor’s own household after all.
One may file Augustus’s supposed statue of Germanicus, which Suetonius tells us the emperor kept and kissed nightly in cubiculo suo, under this same general devotion of/to the imperial house, noting that the image itself was actually cast in the guise of Cupid and that Livia placed the original effigy in the temple of the Capitoline Venus—who, of course, was also worshipped as an ancestor deity of the Julio-Claudian clan (Cal. 7). Suetonius’s further suggestion that Vitellius’s father venerated inter Lares the imagines aureas of two of Claudius’s favored freedmen is a bit dubious, being part of a gossipy depiction of the fawning man’s extraordinarily obsequious and singularly excessive devotion to the emperor and his court (Vit. 2). In any event, the report also fits into a pattern of (increasingly swollen) cultic veneration of the imperial house.Footnote 79
While it would be wrong to imagine this broad canon of household gods to be restrictive on principle or to suppose that set rules governed this world of private devotion—which, by its nature, carried a personal touch—the highly repetitive character of the material finds underscores the impressively strong role played by multiple centuries of tradition in informing and stabilizing this ritual space, which had roots reaching back to the early Republic. That household shrines from Spain to Delos to the Palestinian coast demonstrate the same basic features attests to amazingly pervasive assumptions about how a lararium should be outfitted and arranged.Footnote 80
C. An Improbable Innovation
Against this highly conventional background, as a confirmation that the riot of novelty imagined in the population of Severus Alexander’s two lararia would not fail to have been perceived, we might observe that among the “seltene Gottheiten” noted by Thomas Fröhlich in his study of the lararium images at Pompeii, we find no single hero or θεῖος ἀνήρ, only less-popular Olympians (or sometimes popular Olympians in unusual poses), plus a couple stray but entirely traditional figures: e.g. Neptune, Diana, Victoria, Romulus, an Aeneas group (i.e. with the penates), etc.Footnote 81 The most notable outliers are the Egyptian deities: Isis and Serapis, Anubis, and Helio-Harpokrates, the Ptolemaic child-form of the god Horus, son of Isis and Serapis, who appears in three paintings and multiple figurines.Footnote 82 But such eastern deities, with their widespread cults, can hardly be compared to individuals like Abraham or Vergil. The nearest thing in Fröhlich’s catalogue of statuettes to the wild contents of Severus Alexander’s double lararium is a collection of votives found in the atrium of a small house (VI, 14,27) containing a bronze image of an unidentified “old man” and a “gelagerte Figur” in terracotta, alongside bronze figurines of the Lares, Isis, and Anubis, a marble Venus, and a silver Harpokrates.Footnote 83 The comparison utterly fails.
While Pompeii and Herculaneum, as always, provide the most ample testimony, other relevant sites and finds allow us to extend the chronological and geographical parameters so that reasonably confident conclusions may be extended. The remarkably large collection of statuettes from Augusta Raurica expand the reach of the standard repertoire to a third-century Roman colony on the Rhein, for instance.Footnote 84 Besides dozens of familiar Olympians in countless poses—some Fortunas and Victorias, along with several Aesclepius, Harpokrates, and Isis figurines—the only real outliers are a couple of Gallic deities, a single Somnus statuette, and possibly an Apis Bull. Another mid-third-century find from the German limes like the Weißenburg Treasure, with its eighteen exquisite bronze statuettes, again confirms that the same familiar canon of deities remained stable for centuries across the empire and that it was still visibly in force at precisely the time of Severus Alexander. Contemporaneous finds in Ostia and elsewhere point in the same direction.Footnote 85 A very useful graphic in the study of Annemarie Kaufmann-Heinimann demonstrates the cohesion of this undeniable pattern of deity distribution for the entire inventory of in situ finds across four comprehensive geographical zones: Campania, the rest of Italy, Gaul, and the rest of the empire.Footnote 86 Beyond this, the immense corpus of non-provenanced votive statuettes in museum and private collections across the world further attests to the remarkably stable character of domestic devotion throughout the period. As a literary witness, moreover, the Theodosian legislation cited above provides a solid attestation that domestic cultivation of the lararium had indeed continued in its recognizably traditional form right down to the time of the HA. Should Greco-Roman votive statuettes of Abraham or Apollonius, Cicero or Vergil somewhere indeed exist (my searches of many museum catalogues have turned up nothing), they would be truly exceptional objects, a drop in the ocean of votive Olympians, Lares, penates, and Egyptian gods.
A hermeneutic result must follow from the gathering of all this data. The HA’s absurd convergence of so many unheard-of votive outliers, all clustered together in one man’s double shrine, asks the reader to accept and imagine a flagrantly unusual cultic situation. Do we not face here a blatantly over-the-top type of fiction, a sort of literary “over-kill” that also colors many other passages in the often-riotous HA?Footnote 87 In effect, the author has literarily transposed into a recognizable but unreal cultic space groupings of figures that have their proper association in a literary and cultural, not a cultic, world.
D. Real Life and Making Believe
If the author’s work of make-believe in fact includes a game of only half-making his readers believe, the modern reception of this passage shows that he does this all too well. Apart from the extra-cultic associations binding his heroes together in different ways, his technique gains its best external traction in the figure of Alexander the Great. Although the beloved conqueror can hardly be said to be a common appearance, we have, nevertheless, seen above an Alexander-Helios figurine from Boscoreale. Heroes like Achilles have a similarly plausible air, and he does occasionally keep company with demi-gods like Hercules in the epigraphic record (e.g. AE 1982, 712,11; CIL XIV, 4106), yet an effigia of the son of Peleus (like other Homeric heroes) is surprisingly difficult to place in a lararium, ubiquitous as his image in vase painting and in gymnasia certainly was (cf. Pliny, Nat. 34.18). As for Apollonius of Tyana, the existence of at least Caracalla’s heroon erected in the sage’s honor lends a credence at the cultic level, though such veneration, once more, has another character than what we seek. Isidore of Pelusium’s mention of the well-known magical “talismans” supposedly produced by Apollonius “for the protection of dwellings” comes much, much closer (cf. Contra Hier. 44.2; Pseudo-Justin, Quest. et Respons. 24; Basil of Seleucia, Vita Theclae 22). Still, such magical practices, though private, are distinct from venerating cast images in domestic shrines.Footnote 88
Orpheus is another figure who is cultically viable but hard to pin to this specific ritual space, though he also helps press the question about how permeable the lararium was to magic practices; “absolutely impermeable” is unlikely to be an accurate answer. But again, the presentation of the concrete domestic devotion that we find in the HA is of another and more “respectable” sort, if also sitting somewhere on the border of the imaginable. In short, “ein gewisser ästhetisch-moralischer Heroenkult, der im 2./3. Jahrhundert nichts Außergwöhnliches an sich hat” (“a certain aesthetic-moral hero cult, which in the 2nd and 3rd centuries was nothing unusual”) can easily enough pass for cultically inbounds, as Mondello and many others have repeatedly stressed.Footnote 89 But the material evidence of real lararia—consistently overlooked—tells a different, more carefully nuanced story. Meanwhile, the author of the HA’s self-interested accumulation of specific religious models explodes all conventional cultic limits.
Of course, Christ was also the recipient of a real-world cultic veneration, increasingly visible in the Severan age.Footnote 90 As a Syrian import, moreover, he recalls the Roman acceptance of Egyptian deities and suits the Severan family. Should this not affect our reading? Would encountering Christ’s image in a Roman house shrine, indeed the shrine of a Roman of Syrian stock, be any more strange than finding that of Harpokrates or Isis? Biblical anti-idol polemics and early Christian concern over idolatry naturally inhibited too ready an early embrace and production of small-scale statuary and painted images in the context of Christian worship. The third century had not yet simply escaped this aniconism and that should not be forgotten. Nevertheless, at least by the end of the third century a recognizable recasting of the traditional Hermes Kriopohros type appears in the Good Shepherd image, such as the marble statuette from Asia Minor dated to 280–290 CE and now held in the Cleveland Museum of Art (inv. 1965.241). Can any intersection be established between such early Christian art and polytheistic domestic worship?
The Cleveland Good Shepherd was allegedly found in a giant pithos, or jar, together with a series of four exquisite Jonah statuettes (inv. 1965.237–240), which place the collection in a coherently Christian context.Footnote 91 Other miniature marble statuettes of Jonah also appear around this time, and Jonah and the Good Shepherd are, in fact, attested together in a single, famous, fourth-century fresco cycle in the Catacomb of Sts. Peter and Marcellinus. The adoption of Orpheus in sacral art—both Jewish and Christian—also deserves mention in this connection, for it appears already in the third century and may indeed precede and influence the Good Shepherd motif.Footnote 92 Several fourth-century images of Orpheus amidst the animals appear in the catacombs, whatever interpretation one prefers. By the time of the HA this whole repertoire, especially the Good Shepherd motif, was widespread, especially on sarcophagi and other funerary art and in Church mosaics.Footnote 93 But the problem at this point is already plain: early cultic imagines of Christ (or Orpheus as Christ?) do not easily present themselves outside of Christian ritual contexts.Footnote 94
One final possibility, if not a simulacrum Christi, perhaps merits mention. It concerns a small stuccoed panel on the wall above the lararium in the second-story room of the Casa del Bicentenario in Herculaneum, where some scholars have interpreted a large cruciform indentation to be a Christian cross.Footnote 95 Is this not evidence of the same sort of syncretism imagined by the HA, albeit with an iconoclastic symbol, rather than a votive statuette of Christ? Although Christians were by this date probably already present in Campania, this supposed cross appears, in fact, to be simply a shelf support.Footnote 96 With this, any potential material mixing of lararia and Christian devotion vanishes.Footnote 97 The literary lararium of the suspect HA must stand alone against the archeological record.
E. A Conservative Religious Revolution
Despite the difficulty of archeologically linking patterns of Christian and polytheistic art and adoration, it is hard to avoid the suspicion that the worship of Christ largely controls the HA’s invention of Severus Alexander’s whole private cabinet of gods. In ostentatiously decentering the one who had become the exclusive center of the Roman cult, the polytheistic author fictively turns back the clock and creates an alternative cultic past in (vain) hopes of reimagining the religious present and future. Is it not of supreme interest that a place is generously found for Christ, but that he is openly relativized and relegated to the private sphere?
We witness here a rather remarkable innovation in the history of the privatization of religious practice. The various deities reflected in the archeological record of Roman domestic religion also received some form of public worship. This is reflected in the shape of the aediculae as nothing other than miniature temples.Footnote 98 Cicero himself had enunciated this situation as a basic principle of Roman religion: “No one shall have gods to himself (separatim), either new gods or alien gods, unless recognized by the State (publice adscitos). Privately they shall worship those gods whose worship they have duly received from their ancestors” (Cicero, Leg. 2.8.19).Footnote 99 Private and public ritual space are envisioned as intimately aligned.Footnote 100 By filling the imperial lararia with figures who never received such traditional public worship, however, the HA has effectively decoupled household devotion from this ancestral civic cult.
In a way, this expression of extreme privatization is but a mirror image of a process that the Constantinian revolution had somehow already begun. The new Christian order was decoupling traditional polytheistic practice from participation in the new Roman civic cult, essentially privatizing what had once been eminently public. Increasingly stripped of sacrificial worship itself, moreover—as of November 392 CE even in private—polytheist identity retreated apace into a lettered sphere of non-cultic cultural “values.” The HA accordingly produces a model lararium where fire offerings to the Lares, wine for the genius, and perfume for the penates have all visibly vanished from the picture. In place of all this stands a group of worthies that at once accommodates and undermines the new Theodosian order. It is, in any event, in this reconfigured, curiously non-cultic cultic space that the author of the HA thinks that Christ-devotion rightly belongs, carefully placed alongside other key cultural heroes. Should the foundations of Greco-Roman identity be here secured—through a veneration of classic sources like Vergil, Cicero, and Homer and by a theurgical syncretistic fashion in philosophy—then cultural assimilation of Judeo-Christian authorities, the Old and New Testaments, might also be accepted. Faced with “le triomphe du livre,” as Pierre Chuvin describes the late-antique polytheistic experience, what else should be expected from the reimagined Roman religion of an “ideal prince” who “passionately loved men of letters” (“amauit litteratos homines uehementer,” HA AS 3.4)?Footnote 101 It is not an accident if, in the end, Alexander Severus’s collection of great men recalls a library more than a lararium.Footnote 102
Conclusion
In contrast to those scholars who strain hard to sift out historical gold from the rank confusion of the HA, we have pursued the considerably easier task of arguing that a certain famous detail in this problematic text is in reality a fabrication. If mounting such a case has proven to be relatively simple, the exercise is not unneedful, for the tradition of Severus Alexander’s double lararium, here exposed as false currency, has passed as genuine for far too long. It is perhaps little wonder that scholars have often fallen under the spell of certain literary-level parallels and ostensibly plausible constructions, since the story is at some levels a somewhat sophisticated literary creation. With insufficient attention to the agenda(s) of the HA and with no material controls in place, scholars have nevertheless mistaken the parallels and plausibilities for more than they are. At the end of our study, the domestic devotion of this Severan emperor looks incontestably like the imaginary, idealized lararium of the author of the HA: a concentrated projection of his “ideal prince.” Resonance with real Severan syncretism implies no more than a suitable historical princeps to idealize through the mock-up of an intimate and eminently traditional Roman religious space.
Debunking the fanciful story does not represent a loss for historical research, of course. On the one hand, we are given a truer, more sober picture of late-antique domestic religion. If archeology and the testimony of the Theodosian code are to be followed (rather than the claims of the HA), household devotion continued very much in its traditional way, with no signs of any radically syncretistic third-century innovations. This clarification of the real state of affairs naturally also allows a more accurate perception of the place of pre-Constantinian Christianity in the empire. Whatever modes of syncretistic veneration of Christ might be imagined or demonstrated to have existed among common people or Roman soldiers, for instance, we are not in a position to insist or suppose that their devotional patterns penetrated such resilient, traditional polytheistic cult forms as the lararium. Nor can we simply posit or presume an open-armed ritual attachment to Christ at the highest level of the imperial house. Severan attitudes and syncretistic trends are admittedly interesting and germane, but insufficient precision on this score has not aided the discussion. Conceivably, Severus Alexander may have had some personal Christ-devotion, but the direct evidence for this is unreliable in the extreme, and one should exclude it being ritualized in an eclectic lararium of culture-heroes.
New historical precision and insight is obviously equally gained by positioning the HA’s report in the late-fourth-century context of its author. Indeed, we learn something positive and quite interesting here about the religiously traditionalist projects and perspectives of this period. One must note, above all, the striking irony of an author who concocts a bald-faced cultic innovation in order to defend an ancient polytheitsic tradition. This paradox may itself be read in contrasting ways. At one level, it suggests a certain continued vitality on the part of the late-antique world in adapting itself to the changing circumstances of life in an increasingly Christianized and monotheistic realm. Cornered by the Theodosian decree Genticilia constiterit superstitione, the HA succeeds in recasting Rome’s ancestral spirits—traditionally embodied in the Lares, penates, and maiores—as a set of revered cultural heroes. A new and yet not simply unknown pantheon of patrons is thus presented to Rome. At the same time, the entirely improbable and imaginary character of the response—however clever it might have seemed as an improved political/theological vision—might also be read precisely as a failure to adapt in actual lived praxis. Precisely because there was no place for Jesus alongside the penates in real life worship, a sort of reciprocal, polytheistic “exclusivity” helped doom this pre-Christian religious system. By time of Theodosius it was too late to promote any genuine program of old-fashioned Roman “tolerance,” whatever last-minute literary solutions were perhaps tried;Footnote 103 such efforts were belied by a real-live tradition that for far too long had found no real place for the worship of Christ.
On the other hand, it is not impossible that the HA’s entire far-fetched story about the lararium was never even meant to put up serious religious resistance at all. If the author knew the cultic game was up, the joke of this entertaining little tale might be on us.
