Following his masterful exploration of Greek Gods Abroad (2017), Robert Parker presents in this monograph an in-depth discussion of religious life in Roman Phrygia. As rightly emphasised in the introduction, this region, better than any other of the ancient world, ‘offers perhaps more vivid evidence for what has quaintly been termed “lived ancient religion”’ (1). The sources available mostly consist of inscribed materials that served both as grave-markers and as dedications to the gods from people largely living in the Anatolian countryside between the second and the third centuries c.e. The quantity of these inscriptions is truly enormous and has naturally attracted the attention of some of the finest scholars working on the epigraphy of Asia Minor. Beyond their robust epigraphic corpora and the constant publication of new inscriptions that continues to enrich our knowledge of the region, this enticing evidence, in the words of the author, is little known except to specialists (4). P.’s work should bring an end to this.

The book is divided into eleven chapters and six appendices. The first chapter studies the regional context in which the materials were produced, emphasising the importance of village organisation for our understanding of religion in Roman Phrygia. The second deals with the structures of that religious life through priesthoods, finance and authority, although the information is not as illuminating as in more urbanised areas of Asia Minor where public honorific inscriptions rather than personal experiences dominate. Chs. 3 and 4 are centred upon Phrygian polytheism both in terms of the gods attested in the evidence and the powers attributed to them. The fifth chapter offers a short analysis of Roman imperial cult in the region and the sixth provides a case-study of the evidence from the sanctuary of Apollo Lairbenos, near Hierapolis. Ch. 7 aims to approach local conceptions of the afterlife through the analysis of ‘graves with a door façade’ which are visually very rich and particular to certain areas of Phrygia. The next chapter tackles the spread and consolidation of Christianity, exceptionally documented by inscriptions during a period in which evidence for pagan cults was also very abundant. The ninth chapter is a retrospective take on the importance of previous influences (Hittite, Persian, Greek, Roman …) for the reality emerging epigraphically after the first century c.e. Ch. 10 clearly shows the importance of the process of interpretatio as a gate to understanding the hybridity of Phrygia that the final chapter elucidates.

P.’s monograph deserves praise for making religion in Phrygia accessible to those interested in the provinces of the Roman Empire but unfamiliar with the epigraphic gems that Asia Minor has to offer. Similarly to Thonemann’s take on north-eastern Lydia in The Lives of Ancient Villages: Rural Society in Roman Anatolia (2022), these thematic approaches expand our understanding of key aspects of local experiences that normally escaped literary evidence and traditional Classical scholarship. In this case, such an analysis is particularly welcomed from a leading specialist of Greek religion who is able to make comparisons and draw conclusions that can be shared by anyone more accustomed to the Olympian gods, their mythology, and cults. Accordingly, this reviewer commends wide-ranging and honest (sometimes even enthusiastic!) observations such as: ‘the model of a pantheon Greek-style, where gods have delimited spheres or modes of action, does not fit; an alternative model often invoked, whereby any local top god can do anything, also does not cover very well the messiness of the evidence’ (196). Other interesting conclusions about ‘a hybrid religious system which was not, however, experienced as such by participants’ (195) or the innovative emphasis on ‘community solidarity’ as a factor for the spread of Christianity in Phrygia need to be highlighted. Likewise, I find particularly appealing the caveats against the ‘masked ball’ approach (i.e. where the scholar becomes an observer ‘trying to see beneath the mask of the figures passing in front’) that has sometimes been applied to previous studies of religion in Roman Anatolia (174).

My positive review needs to end with some factors that must be taken into consideration by those rightly convinced to read this book. A warning must be made about the system of citations used, with a combination of abbreviated titles and authors in the footnotes that can be confusing at times. The choice to transliterate some Greek words and not others does not appear to be very consistent, and I believe that some of the appendices could have been integrated more neatly into the main discussion. Readers should also be aware that further complementary studies of religion in Roman Phrygia emerged shortly before the publication of P.’s monograph: F. Chiai, Phrygien und seine Götter (2020) and S. Mitchell, The Christians of Phrygia from Rome to the Turkish Conquest (2023).