ABSTRACT
By the time the early Christians began to build monumental churches during the reign of Constantine the Great, there had been a recognizable, public religious architecture in the Graeco-Roman world for over a millennium. For people living in the Hellenistic-Roman world the norms of religious architecture would have been well known and readily recognizable both in the public and private spheres. From the late archaic to the Hellenistic period the center of religious life in a Greek city became the monumental podium temples associated with particular deities or mythic foundations. While the elements of such public and official religious activities and their architectural forms were monumental and distinctive in style, the continuum between public and private forms of religiosity was not clearly differentiated in the Hellenistic-Roman world. In contrast to modern cultural distinctions between public/civic and private/domestic, a number of recent archaeological and cultural studies have shown that many elements of domestic life were considered part of the public sphere.
