ABSTRACT
The relationship and the frontier between public and private religious activities, and between public and private religious spaces, have varied in different religious cultures and also within the history of Christianity. The Athenian busybody and would-be legislator in Plato’s Laws would have forbidden the possession of domestic shrines on the grounds that they encouraged faulty ideas about the gods.1 He was well aware that his ideas were very much at variance with the common practice of his society, as indeed they were with the common practice of Mediterranean antiquity in general. There were temples built and maintained by the ‘state’ and cults which exacted participation from the citizen, but at home his ancestors and household gods demanded attention, as the spirits of grove, field and spring might also do. The Roman state possessed its own religious spaces and made its religious stipulations, but these did not have a monopoly. What additional pious impulses you might feel were largely your own affair. Born into this world, Christianity came to present an interestingly different spectacle.
