Chapter 7 reconstructs when post-Roman kings and their officials went to church and considers the significance of church membership in shaping their positions in post-imperial palaces. This is (unsurprisingly) much easier to do for Nicene as opposed to Homoian rulers. Prominent officials accompanied Nicene Burgundian and Merovingian kings to church. Brief glimpses of life in Homoian royal palaces imply the potential participation of Nicene courtiers at regular religious observances. It may be that officials were not expected to go to church with the king; concerns for religious accommodation may have shaped the character of these events and allowed Nicene officials to justify attendance. Those who served the king could also be subject to the local bishop. Yet two episodes of excommunication make clear that the ultimate judgement over the continued standing of royal officials—both in palace and church—remained with the king himself. Post-Roman bishops may have been keen to claim the presence of ‘our people’ in the palace (as Victor of Vita put it). Dependence on the king, commitment to legal procedure, and membership of this separate Christian community seems normally to have trumped the claims of church affiliations even when courtiers and bureaucrats interacted with clerics.

This chapter argues for the role of collective cognition in creating Roman religious reality. Inauguratio, through which priests were created, was no empty orthopraxic ritual but a means of generating collective belief in order to create socio-religious status and power. Ideally, when Romans judged the ritual of inauguratio efficacious, they collectively believed that Jupiter had sent auspicial signs approving a candidate and that the candidate was therefore a priest. Collective belief was what made the priest a priest, with all the powers and duties concomitant with that status. But the Romans were typically blind to the collective-intentional nature of their social reality. Thus the standard Roman explanation of inauguratio mystifies sacerdotal ontology, holding that priests were priests as a result of Jupiter’s nod. Constitutive beliefs are distinguished from non-constitutive, merely religious beliefs. The Romans’ collectively held constitutive beliefs about sacerdotal status and power actually constituted priests as priests. Although Jupiter’s agency could not be constituted by Roman collective belief, it was a genuine religious belief and part of Roman conceptions of the basis of sacerdotal authority.

Chapter 3 considers how evolving demands for uniformity fit into the cultural norms of political institutions in late antiquity. It uses reports on (supposed) pagans, heretics, Jews, and Samaritans in service to sketch out the contours of those demands in practice. While these exemplary stories cannot be used to substantiate the presence of these groups in administration, they can help us understand when and why the perceived divergence of a ruler’s subordinates from his version of correct religion mattered. Their continued service is, in part, a reflection of the continued capacity of rulers and their subordinates to put requirements for religious uniformity to one side. This chapter argues that it was also a result of the precise framing of those requirements. Late ancient laws tended to portray orthodox Christian officials as necessary to ensure laws on correct religion were enforced. It is easy to see how those heterodox officials willing to uphold a Christian political dispensation could continue to serve in political institutions. In that sense, the appointments of non-Christians and heretics should be seen, not as a breach of requirements for uniformity, but a product of their specific contours.

Chapter 8 considers a radically different version of the dynamic explored in chs 6-7: the relationships between provincial governors and Christian communities across the Mediterranean world. For much of this period, these governors were outsiders with short terms of office, who relied heavily on resident office staffs and local grandees. Recent revisionist work on the Christianization of the Roman world has thus stressed the tendency of provincial appointees to prioritise those local elite interests over the demands of bishops and ascetics in the context of religious conflict. As Brent Shaw has put it, the governor could ‘give rather short shrift to a person whom they thought had no standing to intervene in the running of the state affairs over which they had authority’ (Shaw 2015, 58). In this chapter, I seek to modify this picture by suggesting that membership of the church and relationships with provincial Christian communities, institutions, and authority figures played a more significant role for governors than has been appreciated. In this sense, bishops and ascetics were, in fact, amongst the local interest groups whose collaboration these Christian appointees had to pursue.

Contemporary analytic philosophers of religion have tended to focus attention on epistemological questions about the grounds for religious belief, or on analysing the precise cognitive content of claims about God. But there is reason to suppose that the actual practice of religion depends less on intellectual inquiries of this sort and more on a lived tradition of observance, including participation in various kinds of ritual, and public and private acts of worship. This chapter, drawing on some attitudes manifest in the poetry of Horace, examines what may have been a prevalent approach to religion in the educated Roman world, involving conformity to religious praxis, combined with an ironic or sceptical attitude to the existence of supernatural forces, or the power or influence of the gods, in human affairs. Such an attitude certainly has its counterpart in our own contemporary culture, but it is argued that such a stance inevitably creates a certain psychological dissonance in the religious practitioner. Detached orthopraxy alone cannot satisfy our deepest human needs. The chapter concludes with reflections on the intimate relation between praxis and belief in matters of religion.

An assessment of the metal tools available for working wood and stonework contributes tangible evidence to overarching questions about Mycenaean construction and significantly augments previous publications on Mycenaean tools. Implement patterns raise questions about tool availability, artisan status and mobility, and the administrative oversight of stonework.

The epilogue explores how later Greeks understood the notable Mycenaean remains from the regions under study and probes why, during the post-Bronze Age, Tiryns was much celebrated while Mycenae’s reputation was deliberately suppressed.

The introduction fits the religious identities and entanglements of imperial and royal officials into recent work in critical fields of inquiry in the study of late antiquity. It sets the approaches and arguments of the book in the context of previous work on the conversion of the senatorial aristocracy, the religious identities of pagans and Christians, the development of asceticism and episcopal authority, the prevalence (or otherwise) of religious intolerance and violence, patterns of imperial churchgoing, and forms of Christian observance within the household. It also contextualises and justifies the chronology of the book and the specific definition of the ‘state’ and ‘officials’ used within it.

The introduction highlights geopolitical questions about Mycenaean society and reviews the limited evidence available from textual sources. It considers sociopolitical developments in Mycenae and the Argolid before probing the intersection of power, state-sponsored labor, and the production of stonework.

Vigorous debate about the advantages and disadvantages of using the term ‘belief’ regarding ancient states of mind and cognition has had a profound effect on the field of ancient history (and others, such as anthropology) in recent decades. This chapter considers which of these are still relevant and which are mutual misunderstandings, and which issues have, in effect, been resolved indirectly (such as injunctions to use different words for greater clarity). The opportunities offered by cognitive science of religion (and some limits) are set in a broader context of the study of religion. Behind many of these debates (and misunderstandings), it is argued, secular hegemony intrinsically seeks to ‘contain’ religion (taken pragmatically to be the assertion of the actual existence of divinities). This insoluble tension exerts an unceasing influence on our formulation of questions and answers in history. Recently, we have seen a fruitful greater sympathy for religion and ‘believers’ develop, while an appropriate secular distance from empathy is still maintained, notwithstanding the fact that empathy may contribute to an openness to greater sympathy and understanding: the tension does, and will, persist.