ABSTRACT
Now comes a crucial part of any enquiry into Domna’s life and significance as an historical figure. The question is how far she and her dynasty were instrumental in propelling Roman religion and in particular the imperial cult towards the oriental and the exotic. Such a Severan shift may be seen as a crucial part of a downturn in Roman political and cultural life for which the dynasty was responsible. These views were supported with material from the background of Severus himself as well as from that of Domna, suggesting that Severus came to know varieties of oriental cult when he was in command of a legion in northern Syria in 179.1 Art too has been a field of contention centring on the conceptions of ‘orientalization’ and ‘decline’, as opposed to stasis, reaction, or development according to internal formal dynamics. As to religion, the idea of a Severan shift takes two forms: the first concerns the dynasty’s introduction of exotic cults into the Roman pantheon, the second extravagant claims for the identity of the rulers as divine. The pervasive views of the early twentieth century have made scholars hypersensitive to special intensity and to anomalies in Severan religious ambitions, whether they took the form of introducing new deities associated or even identified with themselves, or of ratcheting up their own status in relation to the Graeco-Roman pantheon, both favouring the advance of tyranny. These two developments, and Domna’s role in them, will be considered in turn.2
