this post was submitted on 11 Sep 2025
34 points (100.0% liked)

RoughRomanMemes

98 readers
92 users here now

A place to meme about the glorious ROMAN EMPIRE (and Roman Republic, and Roman Kingdom)! Byzantines tolerated! The HRE is not.

RULES:

  1. No racism, sexism, homophobia, transphobia, bigotry, etc. The past may be bigoted, but we are not.

  2. Memes must be Rome-related, not just the title. It can be about Rome, or using Roman aesthetics, or both, but the meme itself needs to have Roman themes.

  3. Follow Piefed.social rules.

founded 2 months ago
MODERATORS
PugJesus@piefed.social
34
Interpretatio is way simpler than monotheist theology (media.piefed.social)
submitted 1 day ago by PugJesus@piefed.social to c/roughromanmemes@piefed.social
4 comments fedilink hide all child comments
 
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[โ€“] lvxferre@mander.xyz 3 points 23 hours ago (1 children)

That was often a political matter. For example, the powers in Rome zig-zagged quite a bit their tolerance towards the cult of the Egyptian goddess Isis:

  • 54~53 BCE - the Senate demands temples to Isis in Pompeii and Rome to be demolished. Nobody volunteers to the task.
  • 43 BCE - the second Triumvirate votes for a new temple to Serapis (basically Osiris) and Isis in Rome. I smell the finger of Mark Anthony on this, he was a bit of an Egyptaboo.
  • 28 BCE - Octavian decrees against Egyptian cults. That was four years after the Second Triumvirate was dissolved, it smells like revenge against Mark Anthony.
  • 19 CE - Tiberius kills the priestesses of Isis in Rome, and throws her statue into the Tiber. Note throwing things into the Tiber was associated with the cult of Vesta (a native goddess), and it had implications of "purification" - as if Egyptian influence was filthy in Tiberius' eyes.
[โ€“] PugJesus@piefed.social 5 points 23 hours ago

This is true - though such political considerations could also be leveled against native gods, such as the suppression of the cults of Bacchus-Liber in the 2nd century BCE.

Point of it being that the Romans (and Hellenic polytheism in general) were inclined to see "foreign" gods as more "our gods but seen from dirty, foreign eyes" rather than something divorced from their theology entirely. They aren't worshipping the wrong gods, they're just doing it in their own, non-Roman way.

How absolutely barbarous!

That being said, some specific gods were regarded, either permanently or just for a time, as 'new' entities, as given in your example with Isis, and in earlier (though more positive) instances with the cult of Magna Mater and the ritual of evocatio.