Paper short abstract:

This paper explores Rufinus’ appropriation of the sanctuary of Panóias through the introduction of Isis and Serapis and the technological development that the rituals performed at the site underwent. It also argues that Rufinus imposed a hierarchy between “his” gods and the local divinities.

Paper long abstract:

In Roman religion, the most exemplary form of divine appropriation was the ritual of evocatio–a military practice through which a foreign god was summoned, asked to leave the city that was under his/her protection and promised a new home and cult at Rome. Archaeological and epigraphical sources attest however that, in the Roman Empire, divine appropriation was not limited to the ritual of evocatio. Striking in this regard is the case of the rock sanctuary of Panóias where, in the late 2nd and mid-3rd century AD, the senator Gaius Calpurnius Rufinus imposed a new set of gods, namely Isis and Serapis. Their introduction in a place that, notably, had long been active before Rufinus’ arrival is far from being random. The inscriptions that the site has yielded attest to how Rufinus’ introduction of Isis and Serapis was not only masked under the façade of a religious respect that needed to honour even the local gods, but it was also coupled with a technological development of the rituals destined first to “his” gods and then to the local divinities. The deliberate establishment of a hierarchy within the rituals themselves is evinced by the textual preferences and ordination of the gods’ appellatives/theonyms that suggest that what we have at play here is a competition between Rufinus’ gods and the local divinities, the numina Lapitearum. Thus, the ordination of the gods and their specific appellatives/theonyms, as I will additionally argue, imposed a hierarchy both among gods and between their divine nature–an imposition that was possible due to the “abstractness” of the word numen, as opposed to deus, which in turn facilitated Rufinus’ appropriation of the sanctuary and, by extension, the technological development of the rituals.