The Intolerance of Pagan Religion
Ancient religion was not an exhibition of peace, love, and tolerance
I have always found it baffling how some people can claim that pagan religion was peaceable, diverse, and tolerant. So it was the introduction of Christianity which created dogmas, the stigmatization of others, and made the Roman world intolerant of other religious minorities.
Whatever faults there were of Christianity when it became the official religion of the empire, that does not imply that paganism was a religion of nature and living at peace with one another. To the contrary, pagan religion was political, violent, hierarchical, and often xenophobic.
In our secularized age, we are accustomed to thinking of religion as a personal hobby or side-interest akin to CrossFit or Yoga. In antiquity, however, religion permeated everything, it was infrastructure and atmosphere. Communal life was religious and religious life was communal. The gods “were not simply up in heaven,” says Robin Lane Fox “but rather were all around - in the storm, in sickness, in battle, in the public spaces, in dreams, in stories.”[1] In a delightful analogy, Keith Hopkins imagines two time-travellers reporting just how god-saturated pagan cities were:
There were temples and Gods, and humans praying to them, all over the place: at the entrance to the town, at the entrance to the Forum; there were altars at the crossroads, Gods in the riches as you went along, with passersby just casually blowing a kiss with their hands to the statue of a God set in a wall. And of course, here in the Forum, the ceremonial center of the town, there were temples, altars, Gods, heroes just about everywhere we looked. ... Our end of the square was filled by the grand Temple to Jupiter, with Vesuvius magnificently snowcapped behind. And all the rest of the buildings looked as though they could be temples too.[2]
The inhabitants of ancient cities, then, did not believe in gods but spoke of having gods in the same way a city might have an Opera House or an Aquarium.[3] To disrespect them was like disrespecting a beloved local sporting franchise.