Csaba Szabó. <i>Roman Religion in the Danubian Provinces: Space Sacralisation and Religious Communication during the Principate (1st–3rd Century AD)</i>

At the start of this work, Csaba Szabó sets out his intention to highlight the importance of the provinces surrounding the river Danube within the Roman Empire, and at the same time to draw attention to the work of scholars working on this time and space who are themselves from the region. A publication in English that not only references but expands upon those published in a variety of Central Eastern European languages, especially Hungarian, Romanian, and Serbo-Croatian, is a gift to archaeologists and historians more accustomed to working with Romance languages, and so does much to further his ambition.As with many academic works, Szabó’s title hinges on a colon: the grand ambitions of the first clause are refined in the second. To write about Roman religion in the Danubian provinces would be an enormous enterprise in space, time, and subject matter. The river itself travels some 1,700 miles from source to mouth. Rome’s Danubian provinces duly encompassed vast and diverse areas, from modern-day Austria to the Black Sea coast of Romania and Bulgaria. A study of the Roman presence in this region might engage with a period spanning Rome’s early contacts in the form of trade and diplomacy in the mid-third century BC through to the fifth century AD at a minimum. And finally, religion takes one from domestic spaces to some of the most public in the ancient world, from inscribed prayers to theological treatises, from birth to death and beyond. The subtitle limits us to the first three centuries of the modern era (the Principate), when the empire was at its greatest extent and our evidence is most abundant. More pointed, however, is the focus on “space sacralisation and religious communication.” This is the essence of the book: “sacralised spaces,” where people communicated with and about gods, and the things we find in them. The interest in spaces and communication also serves to concentrate our attention on material culture—the “stuff” of religion—and the communities that produced and used it.Despite these refinements Szabó’s task remains daunting; but is it worth doing, and why? His aim is “to break the traditional spatial, theoretical and chronological limits used in the analysis of Roman religion in Central-Eastern Europe, which have until now been focused on individual divinities, settlements or provinces in a short period of time” (14). Perhaps understandably, Szabó does not dwell on the perceived inadequacies of this work, though it would have been useful to read—at this stage—what precisely is to be gained from his own approach. We might also ask whether it is achievable. Part of the issue is whether we are right to think of the “Danubian provinces” as a region in the first place. Szabó offers some preliminary justifications, most of which cite the scholarly habit of treating these parts of the Roman world as a more or less coherent region, particularly in works that are not directly concerned with religion (3–5, 8–9). Whilst this argument from authority does not provide the strongest case, in Szabó’s defence the book at large is an attempt to justify the merits of this spatial frame.He means to do this through the adoption of “a systematic model of space sacralisation” (17), developing the work of archaeologist Peter Biehl in particular. This model subdivides sacralized spaces into micro, meso, and macro units, whether human-made (from the human body to large sanctuaries), natural (trees to forests, springs to seas), or imagined (individual dreams to commonly held beliefs). These divisions form the basis of the book (chapters 3–5), with a variety of spaces categorized along these lines.In addition to this spatial model, Szabó points to two further methodological approaches, namely those of lived ancient religion and glocalization. Lived approaches have developed from their beginnings in the late twentieth century, not least with the University of Erfurt’s Lived Ancient Religion project (2013–17) of which Szabó was a part. This approach emphasizes the value of understanding individual experiences of religion as it is lived rather than aggregating or treating as aberrations responses to an imagined norm. In a similar vein, glocalization is an approach to the spread of culture that expects diversity through adaptation. Developing notions of globalization that to an extent presume cultural homogenization, a glocal approach anticipates change in local environments as a consequence of the spread of common cultural phenomena across time and space. Heterogeneity is expected, and as “one of the most divided and culturally heterogeneous regions of the continent” (22), the Danubian provinces do not disappoint.Despite referring to them as methodologies, lived and glocal provide less of a frame than space sacralization for how evidence is analyzed and the book as a whole is organized. They act, rather, as means of describing the forms of religion—and specifically religious communication—that we encounter. Glocal especially is used throughout as an adjective: “Noricum was thus a truly glocal province” (49); “the central role of Carnuntum as a major conurbation and the largest glocalised metropolis of Rome” (117). In essence, items and collections of evidence can be described as demonstrating the importance of individual, lived religion, incorporating glocal characteristics that are both specific to times and places and redolent of broader forms of communication.Following the methodological introduction, the second chapter is an overview of the Danubian provinces prior to the first century AD. Unlike the rest of the work, the region is dealt with not through the spatial categories previously set out, but as the soon-to-be or early provinces of the Empire: Raetia (from page 27), Noricum (34, 48), Pannonia (38, 56), Moesia (41, 70), and Dacia (67). As a means of finding our feet, these more familiar spaces are convenient. However, we might note that the description of religious phenomena as lived and glocal occurs throughout the chapter. If it is both possible and fruitful to treat the region prior to Roman rule as composed of distinct subregions, and equally possible to apply the terms lived and glocal to religious contexts, it somewhat undercuts the importance of the spatial categorizations advocated for at the start. Nevertheless, an important aim of the chapter is to introduce the complicated contexts that will be returned to throughout; it does this well, functioning as something of a touchstone for the rest of the work.The third chapter, “Lived Religion and its Macro-Spaces in the Danubian Provinces,” launches the methodologically structured part of the work. The beginning and end both focus on macro-spaces as defined by the movement of people. Those operating as part of the publicumportoriiIllyrici (tax and customs collection in the Illyrian provinces) are a particularly interesting group (90–97), the existence of which more or less defines a macro-space (i.e., a network as a form of space) in the Danubian provinces. The movement of officials along the Danube and frontier towns—making dedications to gods as they went—had implications for the spread of various forms of religious communication and knowledge. This is well demonstrated in the discussion of the second-century AD tax collector and priest Titus Iulius Capito (135, 137). A slightly different order of macro-space are places of pilgrimage produced by networks of people that are nevertheless comprised of distinct locations (98–104). The majority of those in the region are hot springs, with interesting examples at Aquae Iasae, Pannonia (102), and Germisara and Aqua Herculis, both in Dacia (103).The middle, and much the largest part of the chapter, is dedicated to the development of urban centers in the region (106–26). Szabó advocates the use of another model (110, fig. 3.7), where “urbanity as a living agent in religious communication has eight major factors: demography . . . , multiculturality . . . , economic variety . . . , interconnectivity . . . , building density . . . , [a] high level of visibility and accessibility . . . , legal and administrative control[,] and historicity” (109). As important as these aspects of urbanity might be, they cannot possibly be covered in sufficient detail. Attention is paid to Aquincum, Carnuntum, Micia, Novae, Sarmizegetusa, and Virunum, but it is not clear how this model of urbanity is applied to the evidence described. Nor is it entirely clear whether these spaces are to be thought of independently from the other macro-spaces treated. As with chapter 2, we are provided with useful and interesting information, but the work’s utility as a reference guide somewhat supersedes its analytical value.Chapter 4 finds Szabó on familiar ground, discussing small religious communities in the context of meso-spaces. A great deal of his work up to this point in his career has concentrated on Mithraic communities (worshippers of Mithras in the Roman world), who feature prominently throughout the chapter. He begins by discussing the evidence for networks of individuals (153–65) before moving on to considerations of spaces, experiences within them (165–73), and how the development of religious narratives might relate to the spaces in which they were formed (173–78). The chapter concludes with a discussion of dynamic, changing forms of religious communication—particularly for the worship of Mithras—across the region. This is the strongest, most succinct chapter of the work, which shows clearly the value of lived and glocal understandings of religious phenomena. What is less clear is the analytical value of “meso-space” as a descriptor, beyond or as a result of their categorical distinction from more public temples on the one hand and domestic shrines on the other.Chapter 5, on micro-spaces, comes to just six pages (190–96), mostly consisting of a lament that more cannot be done with the meager evidence for personal and domestic forms of religiosity that survive or have been excavated in the region (repeated in the conclusion, 204–5). In his introduction, Szabó aims to break “with the now much-discussed ‘private–public’ dichotomy” (19), through the use of his alternative spatial terms. More room might be given to a discussion of how micro-spaces could be created within or as part of the meso- and macro-spaces he has discussed. As it is, the private-public dichotomy seems only to have been broken by the introduction of a semi-public, semi-private space in the form of the meso-, rather than considering, for example, the way in which spaces might function differently depending on who engages with them, how they did so, and when.The commendable scale of Szabó’s ambition has its pros and cons. A consequence of broad coverage is a loss of depth; fewer examples given adequate space might have proved more useful than a great many sites being described but not discussed in detail. Ultimately this means that the specific advantages of the methodological project Szabó explicates are not clearly demonstrated. In the conclusion, he poses some excellent questions: “How was a part of the natural or human-built, visible geography sacralised and transformed into a sacralised space that was labelled a ‘templum,’ ‘aedes,’ ‘fanum,’ ‘spaeleum’ or other denomination? What were the strategies, tools and agencies involved in the process of space sacralisation? How were these sacralised spaces maintained? Why and when did they fail or become desacralised?” (201). Although some are touched on at various points in the book, they are not articulated in the introduction nor consistently addressed throughout (some of these technical Latin terms make their first appearance in the text here). Szabó’s focus oscillates between sacred spaces and religious networks, which have received increased attention as of late.1 The two are no doubt intricately connected, but the depth of discussion does not give much space to unpack this relationship. Whilst the macro-space frame for cities and urban foundations is of use for pushing beyond provincial or cult-specific models, much of its utility appears to lie in the study of networks of individuals. As the chapter on meso-spaces demonstrates, these are not limited to macro-spaces in terms of physical sites, and so it is unclear what the specific spatial model is bringing to the discussion.These remarks, however, should not detract from the importance of Szabó’s project and the overall usefulness of the work. Considerations of sacred space, and indeed networks of individuals, in new and provocative ways are to be welcomed in a field whose members have a tendency to become overly comfortable with their paradigms. The work covers an enormous range of evidence across a diverse region, and it will be of use to everyone wishing to familiarize themselves with the subject of religion during this period of Roman rule. More than this, connections to comparable bodies of evidence are made throughout the work, highlighting the degrees of interconnectivity that are Szabó’s focus. It would also be remiss of me not to point to the extensive appendices of sanctuary sites and divine names (208–46), which will be of use to all those working on the region and religion in antiquity.

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