Naming the Gods in Roman Sicily: The Case of Enguium (original) (raw)

2022, C. BONNET, T. GALOPPIN, E. GUILLON, M. LUACES, A. LÄTZER-LASAR, S. LEBRETON, F. PORZIA, J. RÜPKE, E. URCIUOLI (dir.), Naming and Mapping the Gods in the Ancient Mediterranean: Spaces, Mobilities, Imaginaries, Acte du colloque (Toulouse, 10-12 Février 2021), Berlin, Boston : De Gruyter, 2022

While studying the archaeological record, scholars are often left puzzled by the attribution of cult places to the divine powers they were dedicated to. The question can be difficult to answer, sometimes even impossible, especially in the absence of written sources. But it is not entirely a modern one. Ancient worshippers could in fact have faced very similar struggles when having to identify a divine power associated with a given place to address it in cult. This was especially true in mixed cultural contexts, when said divine power could already have received a name in a different language. Sometimes, a widely recognized interpretatio provided an easy solution. That was the case, for instance, for the major deities of the Greek and Roman pantheon. But when dealing with less renowned powers, a more creative approach was needed. 1 To illustrate this process, I will analyse a case study from Roman Sicily during the Republic: a place of wide cultural interactions, too often dismissed by scholars due to the widespread misconception that the Roman conquest could only have brought decline in a world of Greek cities. On the contrary, I hope to show that the Romans played an active role in the religious life of the island, putting themselves in a direct relationship with its gods in a way that was specific to their culture and independent from the patterns already established by local worshippers. Thus, far from causing the decline of an immovable Greek culture, they added their own contribution to an already rich mix of various cultural influences. The sanctuary I will focus on belonged to a small inland city, called Enguium, and seems to have been fairly important, at least at a local level, in late Hellenistic times. There is no archaeological record for it, and the city itself has not yet been identified clearly: it could have been modern Troina, as most scholars agree, but definitive proof has yet to be found (Fig. 1). 2 On the other hand, the sanctuary is well known from three literary sources, two in Greek and one in Latin, all originating from the late Republic: Plutarch, who wrote in the 1 st Century AD but derives here explicitly from Posidonius of Apamea (2 nd-1 st Centuries BC); Diodorus of Sicily (1 st Century BC), and Cicero in his speeches against Verres (70 BC).