Pagan Inscriptions, Christian Viewers

Many of us may think we know the stories of the destruction that accompanied the conversion of the Roman Empire. That after “the triumphant banner of the cross” was erected “on the ruins of the capitol,” as Edward Gibbon famously put it, Christians remade the world in their own image in a project known as “Christianization.” Perhaps by relying too heavily on later hagiographers, we assume that this conversion represented a complete turn, and that the Christians of late antiquity fully did away with the vestiges of a “defeated,” pagan past.

Yet if this transformation was total, if the new “sacred canopy” was set on undoing the paganism of the empire, then why, Anna Sitz asks in her book Pagan Inscriptions, Christian Viewers: The Afterlives of Temples and Their Texts in the Late Antique Eastern Mediterranean, does the Parthenon and its pagan marbles still exist? Because Christians throughout time made a “series of decisions” to keep them. Time and again Christians chose “not to remove or edit much of the figural imagery of this pagan temple at the heart of Athens” (xvii, emphasis original).

By analyzing the relationship between Christians and inscriptions, Sitz sets out to “interrogate ‘Christianization’” and provide a fresh look at “the enduring value of the classical past” within the “Christian world-building project” (xviii-xix). Inscriptions were present from the beginnings of Christianity, Sitz points out. Even Saint Paul, in his famed sermon upon the Areopagus, referenced a nearby altar that bore the inscription “To the unknown god.” This reference not only alludes to the centrality of pagan inscriptions, but also to the enduring link between religions and cityscapes. Sitz’s book is a great example of how religions are built up and out, not just metaphorically and theologically, but physically. Religions take on a built, citied form that must be renegotiated with the onset of new gods and worship practices. What is that renegotiation like? Sitz's answer, in short: “it’s complicated” (xvii).

Sitz's is an archaeological examination of the project of Christianization. What she finds is that Christians (and others, including a Jewish community at Sardis [188] and a Muslim community in Ankara [275]) had three distinct ways of “dealing” with ancient pagan remains: preservation, spoliation (the repurposing of pagan materials in new building projects), and erasure. What Sitz shows is how deeply Christians engaged with the religious cityscape of antiquity. Chapter 2, for example, is a thorough and engaging survey that convincingly argues that inscriptions in antiquity were not mere “wall dressing” but were, in fact, read and taken seriously. As such, inscriptions are ideal sites for investigating the nuances of how later Christians—specifically in the Eastern Mediterranean, but Sitz seems to think it may be representative of a larger trend—interacted with pagan cities.

Sitz’s longest section, chapter 3, underscores the main point of her findings: preservation was the dominant theme of Christianization. Temples and texts from Ephesus to Delphi, from Athena to Zeus, were left in place to coexist alongside newer Christian spaces. The church at Didyma, for instance, was actually built inside the older Temple of Apollo (141). Preservation appears to be so prominent for Sitz that even her final two chapters on spoilation and erasure keep returning to the larger point that neither entails the full destruction of pagan monuments. Inscriptions may be “scrambled” (broken apart and reconstructed in a different order) and particular deities may have their names chiseled away (especially if they occupied prominent places, like entry points to buildings or cities), but even in such cases, much of the content remained intact.

Sitz’s answer as to why these spaces were preserved seems to be threefold. First, pagan history could be a useful means of obtaining historic legitimacy. In one case, an inscription hailing the “god Augustus” was spared erasure because reign of Caesar Augustus marked a pivotal overlap between pagan history and sacred history. (Augustus was a focal point in Luke’s Gospel account of Jesus’ birth.) By preserving a prescription that noted Augustus as a historical figure, even a divine one, Sitz argues that Christians lent historical weight to their communities (105).

The need to connect to antiquity speaks to the second defense of preservation, which reveals a tension at the heart of Christianization that classicists and historians have long grappled with, namely, that Christians were just as classical as pagans. Hence Christianization venerated antiquity even though Christianity was not the religion that defined the era (231).

Christians were both compelled and repulsed by ancient texts, and they actively looked for a way to resolve the tension—a way to have the ancient history and not the ancient religiosity. Hence the third reason for preservation: late antique Christians realized that destruction was not the only way to desacralize, and thus neutralize, ancient sites. Sitz argues that Christians relied on “museumification” to reframe temples “as a work of art rather than of worship” (83). By altering rather than destroying inscriptions, Christianization relied on a transformation of context, a process that resonates with other times. Louis Ruprecht, Jr. identifies a similar process at work in the mid-18^th century. In Ruprecht’s recent Journal of the American Academy of Religion article, he argues that the art historian Johann Joachim Winckelmann also saw the value of museums in defanging the threat of paganism. To “domesticate the profane,” Ruprecht argues, Winckelmann and others suggested that ancient remains were not religious but “art.” In a similar fashion, by desacralizing inscriptions, Sitz argues, pagan texts could be “fictionalized away” and thus included in the new, Christian world (259). Yet in doing so, Sitz provocatively points out that Christians separated the “civic,” or the “secular,” from the “sacred,” thus obscuring the ways in which “the civic was the sacred” (17, 273).

Sitz’s lively and accessible work will be a welcome inclusion for all interested in the history of religion in late antiquity, the interplay between sacred and secular, and the nature of conversion. Indeed, it would appear that when cities convert, much like people, it is rarely a full turn away from the past.

Kristofer Stinson is a PhD candidate in history at George Mason University.

Kristofer Stinson

Date Of Review:

October 26, 2023