Chapter 3 considers the nature of provincial government, the role and legal responsibilities of governors, both legati Augusti and proconsuls, the management of Rome’s assets through the census and by direct intervention, for example, in managing the benefits and dangers of rivers. We look at the constitutions of municipia, and the nature of their laws and regulations, and Rome’s supervision of the infrastructure of local towns, and the consequences for local people. In the administration of justice there was a melding of local legal practice and Roman law. Did the Romans have an idea of what constituted fair and efficient government and how far did they achieve it? The evidence shows good intentions on the part of emperors and governors, but also many abuses, especially from the presence of soldiers, and problems in obtaining legal redress.

This chapter examines epiphany and its place in personal religion by focusing on narratives that feature Athena as the epiphanic deity across different periods, locales, and media. In all cases, Athena is construed as engaging closely with personal requests and concerns of particularly diverse nature from military excellence and political dominance to enhancement of socio-religious capital, and, perhaps more surprisingly, health. Athena’s epiphanies have thus been identified as particularly pertinent for our purposes, as they highlight the grey area that oscillates between personal and poliadic spheres of religious action, thus allowing us to witness the close and complex correlations between the two. Even if the two spheres draw from a common stock of religious schemata and behaviours, contrasting them reveals a wealth of useful information about how personal religious appropriation and innovation are situated in relation to more established forms or expressions of poliadic religious action. Above all, this contrast shows how even groundbreaking religious innovations needed to be anchored properly in easily recognisable, time-tested, and well-established religious schemata.

In these pages we have witnessed the deep degree to which architectural rebuilding, as a practice distinct from new construction, was embedded in the Roman patronage system and served as powerful social currency in cities throughout the Mediterranean in the centuries spanning the early imperial to late antique periods. Overall, architectural rebuilding continued to be publicly celebrated as an honorific virtue through the sixth century, though the reach and impact of architectural euergetism shrank as patronage patterns changed, the overall volume of architectural construction declined, and spending on it was increasingly directed toward ecclesiastical and monastic architecture. This, I suggest, was principally due to the unique ways in which rebuilding leveraged site- and audience-specific connections to past and future communities. The high public value placed on rebuilding was also due to the opportunities it offered emperors, bishops, and other patrons to inflect cyclical celebratory calendars that enacted present order and implied future stability through their regular renewal and reperformance. While events of architectural destruction sorely tested that stability and regularly signaled divine displeasure to contemporaries, rebuilding concomitantly asserted current and future security through the reaffirmation (and simultaneous opportunity for reframing) of the empire’s pious relationship to their god(s).

Ancient views of magic were extremely diverse. In order to examine the issue of personal religion this chapter sets out to bracket the over-familiar negative discourse, which sought to represent magic as the opposite of (true) religion, and shift the discussion to include the perspectives of actual practitioners. Of the many different types of historical practitioner, three are selected for longer discussion: ‘wise folk’, specifically ‘rootcutters’ (rhizotomists); the Hellenistic ‘Magian’ tradition ascribed to pseudonymous authors such as Persian Zoroaster; and the so-called magical papyri from Roman Egypt. Rhizotomists used ritualisation as their primary means of empowerment, with a clear sense of the divine origin of the potency of herbs. Drawing on this tradition, the Magian writers linked it to the materials made available through translation of the knowledge stored in Babylonian and Egyptian temples to create a sense of the inexhaustible powers of divine Nature. Ritual expertise and theological knowledge are most evidently in play in the hundreds of procedures included in the surviving Graeco-Egyptian magical papyri, exemplified here by the case of PGM IV 1496–1595.

Chapter 2, a pendant to the first, argues for the importance of temple anniversaries and other festivals associated with rebuilding for writing, experiencing, and synthesizing chronologies in time and space at the lived, local level.

Roman legal texts open a view onto the life and society of the empire at its height, its management, its peoples, their activities, interrelations, and problems, and their experiences when facing the juristic power of the state and its officials. Now, the first step in the study of these texts is the identification of the sources of the law. Sources are defined first as the mechanisms by which the law was introduced and regarded as authoritative by the Romans, and second the legal works transmitted to us by writers and compilers in the ancient world, which have been translated and analysed by modern scholars. This introduction offers a brief overview of these topics and some of the issues associated with the use of legal texts in the study of Roman social, economic, and political history.

As author and historical personality Xenophon is a fascinating case study for personal religion. He never wrote any programmatic treatises on Greek religion yet religion is omnipresent in his work. This chapter focuses on his Anabasis. The story of the Ten Thousand is one of the few autobiographical texts to survive from Classical Greece. Accordingly, it promises exceptional insights into personal religion. In this text, we encounter Xenophon in three roles. First of all, he is the author, who writes in the third person and pre-structures a field of religious assumptions and alleged self-evident facts. Second, he is the authoritative anonymous narrator who comments on the religious elements of the plot. Third, he stages himself as the protagonist ‘Xenophon’, whose individual religious beliefs and actions during the March of the Ten Thousand are described, commented on, and contextualised in detail. The extent to which these religious self-attributions can be regarded as historical facts is difficult to determine. In any case, the Anabasisis a testimony to the religious options that the author believes are available to the individual and from which individuals can make their choice.

The personal rather than the social or civic side of sacrifice appears throughout the evidence for this important rite. For all their many biases, Greek sources do not share any general bias in favor of personal as opposed to communal sacrifice; nor do they not share a bias in favor of animal as opposed to vegetal sacrifice, as ample epigraphic, unproblematic evidence demonstrates. This chapter also notices problematic examples found in Homer, Old and New Comedy, and tragedy, and ends with a contrast between Greek and Hebrew evidence for personal sacrifice, the Hebrew evidence being the place of origin for this scholarly subject.

Ancient audiences ascribed personal religious views to individual playwrights – a fact that confirms ‘personal religion’ as a meaningful category in the study of ancient Greek society in general and the theatre in particular. Aeschylus was especially devoted to Demeter; Sophocles was exceptionally pious; Euripides was hell-bent to show that there were no gods. The oeuvres of these playwrights inspired such inferences, to be sure, but other factors mattered too. Comedies staged the tragic poets as characters and ascribed various religious views to them. Face-to-face encounters with the playwrights gave rise to anecdotes and recollections, which no doubt circulated orally but were also occasionally written down. All this meant that the playwrights could build on their public personae and assume that audiences would recognize characteristic concerns in their plays. We uncover a dynamic set of interactions in which the poet shaped his plays but was also shaped by how audiences received them. We show that we should not construct an opposition between personal and polis religion: The religious views ascribed to the tragedians were personal and communally owned.

The long-lasting impact of Pheidias, antiquity’s master of religious art, especially his Zeus at Olympia, is considered in the context of the theme of personal religion. The chapter adopts a broad chronological perspective and explores how the great master was perceived during the centuries following his lifetime, with a focus on his chryselephantine masterpiece, which he completed in the later decades of the fifth century BCE. It considers how later generations have conceived of his personal religious life, its relation to his famed artwork, and the position his figure has come to occupy within broader cult practices and devotional experiences. Close analysis of Pausanias’ Description of Greece alongside other evidentiary materials shows that by the second century CE, Pheidias was a figure of religious significance in his own right. Greco-Roman authors ascribed to him the qualities of a visionary endowed with unparallel access to Zeus. He left his detectable trademarks in his masterpiece, and his presence was felt in communal cult practices. Centuries after his departure from Olympia, his artmaking has come to be understood as a form of devotional practice.