On the 1st of May at The Electric Palace Cinema in Bridport the next Lectures on everything talk "The Cult of Jupiter Dolichenus in the Roman Empire and the power of Military Networks"
In this paper Anna Collar is going to explore the spread of the cult of Jupiter Dolichenus in the Roman Empire. Jupiter Dolichenus was the god of a small site in southeast Turkey, Doliche, just north of the modern Turkish city of Gaziantep. His cult dedications are, however, found across the Roman world, located most thickly along the military borders of the Danube and Rhine valleys, and along Hadrian’s Wall. The cult has been long associated with the Roman military, but the explanations for its success with the army have relied on assumptions that are no longer tenable. Network theory and the understanding of the social process of conversion demands that we rethink the reasons why people adopted new cults in the ancient world. Instead of assuming that there were intrinsic qualities of a cult that ensured its success, this approach focuses on the strength and connectivity of the social networks as the driving force for the spread of new religious movements. Using the epigraphic data for the cult of Jupiter Dolichenus, our speaker will reassess the way it spread, and conclude that the communicative networks of the officer class were the central reason the cult diffused so quickly and so profoundly through the Roman army.
‘what loneliness/ to be blind in broad daylight-/and deaf, what loneliness/ when the song’s in full swing.’
Anna Collar is a fourth year PhD student in the department of Classics and Ancient History at the University of Exeter. She studied Classical Civilisation and Philosophy at Manchester for her undergraduate degree, before going to Cambridge as a Master’s student in Classical Art and Archaeology. Anna has excavated at Gaziantep in Turkey for the last three years and it is from being involved in this practical excavation work that she became interested in the spread of the cult of Jupiter Dolichenus.
