Allmächtige Götter und fromme Menschen im kaiserzeitlichen Kleinasien der Kaiserzeit

• Main Author: Chiai, Gian Franco
• Publication Date: 2009
• Format: Article
• Language: ger
• Source: Repositórios Científicos de Acesso Aberto de Portugal (RCAAP)
• Download full: https://hdl.handle.net/10316/117221

The sacred inscriptions from the rural temples of Roman Asia Minor are an useful source to reconstruct the characters of the local cults and religious phenomena in these remote corners of the Roman Empire. The epigraphic texts reveal a world of powerful gods, such as the secular kings ruling over a territory and its inhabitants. After the request of their worshippers, these gods have the power (dynamis) to acknowledge and punish sins and criminals by giving terrible diseases, as the confessional inscriptions display. In the inscriptions, the power of these henotheistic gods is expressed by sacred formulas, such as, for example, Great is the power of Men Axiottenos who rules over Tarsi, which are used by the worshippers to praise the gods and to announce their divine power to the other visitors of the temple. On the basis of a selection of epigraphic data, this paper aims to reconstruct the mechanisms of religious communication in the rural Anatolian sanctuaries and the character of the worshipped gods.