Religious discourse in Hellenistic and Roman times: content topoi in Greek epigraphic cult foundations and sacred norms

Abstract

The fact that ancient and modern studies on rhetoric of religion focus on hymns is very understandable because hymns include the main elements in any communication with the gods. 1 They include acclamation and praise to the gods with different elements and special topoi, and they include prayer, often based on arguments related to, or exposed in, the preceding praise. But besides hymns, religious content topoi can be found in other sacred texts written in prose from Hellenistic and Roman times. 2 My intention here is to analyze some texts dealing with private foundations of cults or with sacred regulations that share common topoi, and to compare them with hymnic rhetoric of the same period and, in a lesser degree, with legal and philosophical texts. The first aim is to identify old and new elements that are recognized by the community and by the gods as influential and persuasive, and the second aim is to identify the main conceptual elements in the religious discourse of Hellenistic and Roman times. 2The earliest text concerning a sacred foundation analysed here is Artemidorus' cult foundation in Thera (ATh), dated to the third century BC. Artemidorus, coming from Perge in Minor-Asiatic Pamphilia, erects a cult funerary foundation in Thera where Religious discourse in Hellenistic and Roman times: content topoi in Greek ep... Kernos, 30 | 2017 1 different divinities are joined together: divinities of the city, personal gods and abstractions. 3 Belonging to the same time or not much later is the so-called Delian aretalogy of Sarapis (SD). The priest Apollonius relates, late in the third century BC or beginning of the second, how he erected, following the instructions of Sarapis, a temple for the god in Delos, and how he won over the people who tried to avoid the building of the temple thanks to a miracle of the god. 4 As thanksgiving to the god, a verse hymn praising him follows the prose report, and tells the same event in a much more elaborated text. More than 150 years later, in the middle and during the second half of the first century BC, Antiochus I of Commagene commissioned a group of texts announcing the foundation of his funerary cult monument. 5 A very long inscription written on the back of huge thrones for himself and other divinities states his reasons for building a hierothesion (funerary cult monument) and founding a cult ritual in his honour to commemorate yearly his death (N). It also includes a hieros nomos to be observed by all persons participating in the cult ritual. Other shorter but related inscriptions were placed along the processional way from the city of Arsameia up to the hierothesion on the summit of an artificial tumulus built over the Nemrud Dagi (Np will be mentioned here). Furthermore, another two hierothesia and up to eleven temenos sites have been discovered, most of them with inscriptions. The hierothesion from Arsameia on the Nymphaion (A), dedicated to Mithradates I Kallinikos and Antiochus self, and the text in the temenos of Ancoz (Anz) will also be analysed here, since t...