The title of this book may cause readers to pass it over without much consideration, but that would be a mistake. T. conducts an in-depth regional study that has direct implications for how we understand the processes of interaction and assimilation involving Hellenic and Roman influence on Anatolian traditions from the fall of the Persian Empire to the institution of the Tetrarchy. Although his focus is on religious practice, he consistently connects this to a broader historical context, producing a volume that adds important complexity to narratives of the spread of Hellenism and Roman imperialism, both in Pisidia and more generally.
The first to undertake a comprehensive study of Pisidian cult, T. aims to reconstruct how it is embedded in urban and rural landscapes, with attention to economic impact and how religion reflects social order and identity. He also proposes to understand how ritual changes over time through the lenses of Hellenisation and Romanisation, which he provocatively defines as ‘the ideological responses to the coming of Alexander the Great and Augustus’ (p. 4). As such, he attempts to situate a relatively unknown region in Asia Minor within larger debates surrounding, first, the nature and extent to which non-Greek peoples of the eastern Mediterranean (and beyond) became ‘Hellenised’ after Granicus and, second, the impact of Roman rule on its subjects’ sense of belonging to the empire. His conclusions offer part confirmation, part modification of the accepted narratives.
T. studies religious practice in terms of its components: subject (pantheon), place (sacred landscape), personnel and actions (ritual). Each of the three main parts of the book is divided accordingly into four sections. After an introduction outlining methodology and geographical and historical context, Part 1 discusses the evidence for cult in Pisidia from the Neolithic Age to the Iron Age, emphasising commonalities across and past this time frame, including the central role of a mother goddess, the sacred nature of mountains and springs, and communal sacrifice, all of which he identifies as the ‘indigenous’ layer of Pisidian religion, excepting Phrygian and Persian influence. In Part 2, T. turns to Hellenistic Pisidia and traces evolving religious practice as a reflection of the Hellenisation of the region, by which he means the spread of the ‘societal model … of the polis’ (p. 77). T. rejects the view of Hellenisation as a process that happens to passive non-Greeks: after an initial impetus from Seleucid and Attalid imperial policy, change occurs more through local agency on the part of Pisidian communities wishing to become part of the process of ‘peer polity interaction’, a concept first applied to the Hellenistic network of connected poleis by J. Ma (P&P 180 [2003], 9–39). Thus, the importation of Greek deities, the urbanisation of sacred space and the switch from autonomous to state-controlled priesthoods were self-imposed developments, symptomatic of the independence displayed by Pisidian communities in the literary sources.
The heart of the book, Part 3 on the Roman Imperial Period, continues to stress the role of locals (mostly elites) in effecting religious and socio-cultural change, but implements the concept of Romanisation more sparingly than expected. Because the Roman emperors relied on local elites to keep low-level government running smoothly, Roman religious influence was restricted to coloniae and the imperial cult. T.’s thorough discussion of the evidence reveals striking continuities (or expansion on earlier trends) in sacred landscape, personnel and ritual practice. Yet the section on imperial cult tells a different story of Romanisation that culminates with prominent and prevalent displays of loyalty and belonging to the imperial project, as T. traces a fascinating relationship between the presence, broadly construed, of the emperor in Pisidian cities of the second and especially third centuries and local initiatives to establish, expand or perpetuate aspects of imperial cult in Pisidia. It is clear that religion during the period helped to create strong bonds of loyalty and belonging to the central state within many Pisidian communities (or at least their leading citizens). His findings serve as a corrective to the traditional narrative of third-century decline and disaffection and exemplify how regional studies not only fill in knowledge gaps, but also can improve the ‘big picture’.
This book thus admirably champions the inhabitants of Pisidia as major actors in their own destiny, against the still persistent trend to narrate cultural change as the product solely of conquerors and hegemons. Nonetheless, it falls frustratingly short of its potential, in large part due to a fuzzy framework and superficial theorising. Pisidia is a difficult region to define, as T. acknowledges, since it is not home to a single ethnic group – the term ‘Pisidian’ does not seem to have any ethnic valence other than for outsiders until the Imperial Period – and geographically shades into neighbouring regions. With nothing else serving as a marker of coherence, the boundaries established by T., and so his idea of Pisidia, come across as arbitrary. This is not just a pedant's complaint. The concepts of Hellenisation and Romanisation depend on being able to identify an indigenous religious and cultural layer with which Greco-Roman cultic ideas interacted, but because of the incoherence of ‘Pisidia’, T.’s notion of indigeneity is unsatisfactory. He (again) arbitrarily chooses a particular moment in time (c. 1000 b.c.) before which migrations (e.g. of Luwians) do not disqualify newcomers from native status, but after which all arrivals (Phrygian, Greek etc.) are considered foreign. Such oversimplification is itself a product of under-theorising. Despite defining religion as non-static, he treats ‘indigenous’ cultic elements as inherently unchanging except when ‘Hellenised’. Moreover, his use of the concept of ‘identity’ is at times cavalier. Nowhere does he lay out what he means by the term and, more importantly, he fails to explain how religious changes impacted the ethnic self-perception of those affected (this contrasts with the excellent treatment of civic and elite identities). Further precision here would help clarify the role of Hellenism in the Roman period, described both as evolving/spreading and as a pillar of continuity.
Of course, Hellenisation and Romanisation come with ideological baggage, of which T. is aware (p. 4) but under-appreciative. As a result, he replicates the oversimplistic and hegemonic assumption that polis society was inherently Greek and understood to be so by all ancient individuals and communities; in other words, much of his basic argument relies on ignoring the ‘trans-ethnic’ existence of the polis and its concomitant culture in the Iron Age Mediterranean – Phoenicians are only the most obvious example – and on conflating the etic with the emic. In doing so, T. misses or underplays important continuities between pre- and post-Hellenistic religion as an explanation for the notable spread of urbanised cult practice within the Pisidia. Terms like urbanisation and globalisation seem better suited to depict this process; though in certain cases self-conscious adaptation of foreign religion may have occurred, T. needs to provide proof without imposing ethnic categories grounded in a priori assumptions.
Other criticisms can be marshalled – the predilection to cite one page of a source or an introductory work to support a controversial or complex claim, the incompleteness of the single map, the lack of a topical index – but this would distract from the value of the work both as a highly skilled synthesis of archaeological and epigraphical material that has been relatively inaccessible in English, and as a beacon for future dialogue on and study of an important region and subject. T. masterfully presents and interprets the material evidence, allowing readers who wish to understand the mutual relationship between Pisidia and the broader Mediterranean world to draw their own conclusions even when they disagree with his.
