ABSTRACT
What caused men in both the Western and the Eastern halves of the Roman Empire to look beyond simple contracts with the gods and aspire to a deeper, more personal relationship with them? Sometimes, no doubt, it was a matter of sudden conversion, inspired by dreams and visions. Frequently, emotional tensions and the anxiety of daily life will have stimulated the search for a divine protector. The lead tablets from Bath, Uley and elsewhere throw a little light on this, for although the link between the dedicator and the deity is still contractual, sometimes appeals to morality and the justice of the gods break through. Another step and we are in the world of Apuleius, the devotee of Isis, or of Aelius Aristides, who wrote of his close relationship with Asklepios. Greek physicians, for instance at Chester, may have felt something of the same commitment to Asklepios, Hygeia and Panakeia, the mighty Saviour gods (37).1 P.Mummius Sisenna Rutilianus, legate of the Sixth Legion in the Hadrianic period, became increasingly superstitious and allowed himself at the age of about sixty when proconsul of Asia to ally himself with the bogus oracle, Alexander of Abonuteichos-literally, for he married Alexander’s daughter, whose mother was said to be the moon. Lucian, in his satire, portrays Rutilianus as the very type of the ‘superstitious man’ of Theophrastus and the New Comedy, but it should be noted that official inscriptions from Tibur near Rome show that he took the rites of conventional religion seriously as a member of the college of augurs.2
