The Agency of Civilians, Women, and Britons in the Public Votive Epigraphy of Roman Britain

Abstract

The Roman army has long been understood to have been centrally responsible for the spread of Roman religious material culture and practices in Britain, especially in public epigraphic contexts. The epigraphic corpus, especially Roman Inscriptions of Britain (RIB) (Vanderbilt 2022), provides some of the best evidence for understanding what role individual agency played in religious practice, because many of the inscriptions record the occupation, gender, or origins of the dedicator. Despite the fact that public religious epigraphy in Roman Britain is overwhelmingly militarised and masculine, as well as an imported technology of conquest, it still offers a unique opportunity to investigate alternative perspectives. We examine how the worship of native deities survived in public Latin epigraphy, either on their own or in a syncretic context, and how civilians, women, and local Britons participated in this new technology of worship, especially relating to newly imported deities. We track three large categories: inscriptions to deities imported from the Mediterranean with the Roman conquest of Britain; inscriptions to deities whose origin or cult centre likely lies in Britain or the north-west provinces (e.g. Germania, Gallia and Hispania); and inscriptions that invoke deities from both cultural categories, especially through processes of syncretism and cross-cultural exchange. We catalogued, restructured, and interrogated the data from the RIB Online database, examining the geographical context and textual contents of the public religious inscriptions from Volumes I and III. In agreement with previous studies of military religion, we find that civilians and local Britons were not prolific contributors to the public Latin epigraphic tradition and imperial soldiers held primary agency in inscriptions to local deities on the island. This influence is particularly visible in the militarised area around Hadrian's Wall, where Roman soldiers created more religious inscriptions than dedicators from any other occupation - a pattern found throughout the province. The agency of civilians, women, and people from Britain, however, changed according to the cultural affiliation of the deities to whom they dedicated, as well as the location of the inscriptions. People dedicating to deities whose worship was focused in Britain or north-western Europe were less likely to include information about their occupations (especially military connections) than were people dedicating to deities imported from the Roman Mediterranean (including Eastern mystery cults). On inscriptions that involved religious syncretism, civilians (and especially men, who were overwhelmingly responsible for this category) were particular about how this syncretism was executed in the text, always incorporating interpretatio and making no inscriptions that keep the deities' identities separate. Significantly, while Hadrian's Wall seems to have acted as the cradle of religious epigraphy in Roman Britain, civilians (and therefore, women) did not create syncretic epigraphy in this area.