Evidence of Mobile Religious Practice from Roman Coins
November 9 @ 7:30 pm - 8:30 pm
700 E. Broadway
Monmouth, IL 61462 United States
AIA Society: Western Illinois (Monmouth)
Lecturer: Jane Sancinito
Ancient temples appear regularly on Roman coins, celebrating the piety of the Roman populace and the generosity of republican and imperial builders. They offer invaluable evidence for structures that have been lost to time, but they tell us relatively little about ancient religion that we would not know from texts and surviving structures. A handful of coins, however, show a different, now-lost kind of worship-space: mobile temples and shrines that could be carried or lifted in processions or on pilgrimages. Ancient polytheistic religion was flexible and worshippers had access to multiple ways of honoring their gods. Still, it was usually expected that humans would travel to the gods, not the other way around. These coins suggest that that was not always the case, and that sometimes the gods would hit the road and see a bit of the world. This paper looks at these portable shrines and attempts to reconstruct both the practicalities of their physical forms and the purposes they might have served for religious Romans.
William E. Metcalf Lectures in Numismatics
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