The Roman Empire was home to an extraordinary variety of sacred sites, from monumental temples at the heart of imperial power to mysterious shrines hidden beneath the streets of its cities. In this extract from Sacred Places of the Ancient World, historian Philip Matyszak explores four: the Pantheon, the Capitoline Temple and the Ara Pacis, all in Rome, and London’s Mithraeum, each revealing something different about the beliefs, ambitions and rituals of the Roman world.
Giovanni Paolo Panini, Interior of the Pantheon, Rome, c. 1734. oil on canvas, 128 x 99 cm (50 3/8 x 39 in.) © National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC. Samuel H. Kress Collection.
1. The Pantheon – For all the Gods of Rome
The name of this, one of the most iconic buildings in Rome, is actually Greek. It is the fusion of two words, pan meaning ‘all’ and theoi meaning ‘gods’. Given that Roman religion alone recognized dozens of gods, this title is not strictly accurate – the first of many fudges related to this building. More precisely, this temple was a sacred space for the state gods of Rome, especially the gods of the Olympic pantheon. […]
To a large extent the Pantheon has always been more about public relations than the gods within. Even its construction had an ulterior motive that was far from divinely inspired. The Pantheon stood on the Campus Martius – the ‘Field of Mars’ – which had, from the earliest days of Roman history, been dedicated to the war god Mars. Immediately adjacent to the fast-expanding urban conglomeration of Augustan Rome, the field served as a sort of green lung for the denizens of the crowded city. […]
It is uncertain whether this building was actually a temple, because the Romans preferred their temples to be dedicated to a single god. That way, any prodigies or omens could be correctly attributed to the divinity concerned. As with the name of the Pantheon, Augustus seems to have fudged its identification somewhat. Contemporary Roman writers agree that this was a sacred building but shy away from calling it an aedes, the formal name for a temple. […]
Within the Pantheon pride of place was given to Venus, whom the family of Augustus claimed as the founder of their line. Perhaps Jupiter, king of the gods, resented being given second place, because a fire destroyed the Pantheon seventy years later. It was rebuilt by the emperor Domitian (r. AD 81–96), but not long after completion another thunderbolt from the heavens caused such damage that work had to start all over again. […] Rebuilding started under the emperor Trajan (r. AD 98–117) but was enthusiastically taken up by Trajan’s successor Hadrian. […]
The Pantheon survived because it became a church at some point in the seventh century. Some items from the interior were removed – the glorious porphyry columns were replaced with granite and of course all the ancient gods had to go. […]
C.R. Cockerell, Imaginary View of the Temple of Jupiter Capitolinus , 19th Century. Watercolour, 679 mm x 1022 mm. © Royal Academy of Arts, London
2. The Capitoline Temple – A Great Temple for a Great God
Roman legends reassure later generations of the piety of their ancestors. Many of these legends featured the patron god and protector of Rome. Unsurprisingly, given the huge empire over which Rome was later to rule, this god was none other than the king of the gods himself, Jupiter, or as the Romans familiarly referred to their mighty protector, ‘IOM’ – Iuppiter Optimus Maximus, ‘Jupiter the best and greatest’.
The greatest god of the greatest empire needed a temple befitting that status and, according to Roman legend, the city’s kings planned it that way from the start. That first temple vowed by Tarquinius Priscus (traditional dates r. 616–579 BC), fifth king of Rome, was planned on a scale that rivalled the temples of the wealthier and more sophisticated civilizations of Greece and Etruria. […] the Capitoline hill on which the temple was to be built (at that time known as ‘The Mount of Saturn’) had been a sacred place since time immemorial, even before the foundation of Rome. Numerous other temples had accumulated on the hill, and their priests required careful consultation and incentives before the resident gods allowed their places of worship to be moved.
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Because in the ancient world three was the number of the sacred and divine, the temple was built to house a triad – Juno, the wife of Jupiter, Jupiter himself, and his child the goddess Minerva. Each had their own separate cella (inner shrine) housing a cult statue – an arrangement which remained through later iterations of the temple, even though the building became known in the popular mind as the ‘Temple of Jupiter Capitolinus’. Partly to accommodate the triple gods, the temple was built on a foundation of some 60 by 55 metres (197 × 180 feet), making it one of the largest in Italy at the time.
It was just as well that the temple was built on a splendid scale, because over the centuries Rome went from strength to strength. Victorious Roman generals – and there were a lot of them – finished the extravagant ceremonial parade of a Roman Triumph at the temple, where they ceremonially handed over a portion of their spoils to Jupiter. Between the years of 220 and 70 BC alone Rome celebrated over one hundred triumphs. Consequently the temple became crowded with statues and its coffers bulged with captured booty. This overcrowding may have led to the disastrous fire of 83 BC, when not only was the temple destroyed but also the sacred Sybilline books of oracles which had guided Rome to its greatness thus far.
Giovanni di Stefano Lanfranco, Sacrifice for a Roman Emperor, ca.1635. Oil on canvas. Height: 181 cm; Width: 362 cm. © Museo Nacional del Prado, Madrid
3. The Ara Pacis – Augustan Altar of Peace
From a secular perspective, if anything is to be sacred then peace and prosperity ought to be very high on the list. And indeed, there is an altar dedicated to peace. It was built in Rome between 13 and 9 BC to celebrate the end of the civil wars that had raged for over a century and ended the Roman Republic. The winner of the latest conflict and Rome’s first emperor, Caesar Augustus, wished to persuade the Roman people that life under his sole rule was a huge improvement on the chaos that had gone before.
The Altar of Peace was part of that effort of persuasion. In one monument this altar combines religion, propaganda and sublime art. As such it illustrates the cultural mood of the Augustan era and provides a trove of complex symbology for later artists and historians to untangle. […]
The altar itself is not large. It stands within box-like walls; each wall is just short of 11 by 12 metres (36 × 39. feet) and less than 5 metres (16. feet) high. […] As one might expect of an edifice designed to please an emperor, the Ara Pacis is made of the finest marble, in this case Carrara stone from Tuscany, which the Romans called ‘Moon Stone’ for its pale, blue-white colour. […]
The Ara Pacis was originally situated in the Campus Martius, a grassy area to the north of Rome where young men practised military drills. Owing to a lack of public space within Rome, Augustus increasingly used the Campus Martius for his propaganda in stone. […]
After the fall of the western Roman empire in AD476, poor riparian management led to the Tiber river repeatedly flooding and the Ara Pacis was largely buried in silt. Rediscovered centuries later in the Renaissance, it was taken apart by aristocrats eager to display parts of the splendid artwork in their own mansions. […]
Today, located in the Ara Pacis Museum in Rome, the altar stands not only as a monument of ancient art but also as a symbol of the enduring legacy of Roman culture and of humankind’s quest for peace and prosperity.
Alan Ernest Sorrell, Interior of the Temple of Mithras. © Museum of London
4. The London Mithraeum – Mysterious Mithras
Few Roman deities are as mysterious as Mithras, the god worshipped across the later Roman empire, especially by members of the army. […]
The climactic event in the story of the god involves his slaying a bull. This event took place in a cave and it is speculated that the slaying symbolized the destruction of the powers of darkness and the bringing of light and order to the world. As a result, from the beginning – which seems to have been around the time of the emperor Trajan (r. AD 98–117) – places of worship of Mithras were built as cave-like structures, preferably underground or partly underground and, for reasons not now understood, near running water.
The London Mithraeum was not the only or the first such temple constructed in Britain – for example, another has been found close to Carrawburgh, a Roman fort on Hadrian’s Wall. However, the London Mithraeum was a somewhat larger and more costly construction, something which has intrigued modern archaeologists as the Roman army did not have a particularly large presence in third-century London. […] Therefore it is assumed today that this particular Mithraeum was attended by civil servants and merchants as well as soldiers. What is certain, though, is that these worshippers were all male – the mystery cult firmly excluded women from its rites.
In the present-day City of London, Walbrook is a ward containing such edifices as the Bank of England and St Paul’s Cathedral. The origin of its name is a brook which, until the modern era, ran close to the city wall and into the river Thames. This brook provided the running water that followers of Mithras preferred to have adjacent to their place of worship (despite the challenges which damp unstable soil presented to those building partly underground). The temple was designed so that such light as shone into the ‘cave’ came from small windows set high in the walls – if indeed any light was admitted into the main room at all. As was the case with most Mithraea the temple was set on an east–west axis, perpendicular to the stream outside. As was most of Roman London, the Mithraeum was north of the Thames, in this case just to the west of the Forum Basilica.
Sacred Places of the Ancient World by Philip Matyszak is available now.
