A letter written by a Roman emperor helped lead a team of archaeologists to an ancient temple, and experts recently announced that a letter written by a Roman emperor helped lead a team of archaeologists to an ancient temple, providing “important insights into the social changes” in the Roman Empire from pagan beliefs to Christianity.
Dr. Douglas Boyne, the expedition’s chief archaeologist, announced the “monumental discovery” at the annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology, according to the research report. news release Boyne is a professor of history at Saint Louis University.
Boyne and his team said they had discovered “three walls of a monumental structure” that may have been a Roman temple from the reign of Emperor Constantine, from 280 to 337 AD. During Emperor Constantine’s imperial rule, he persecuted Christians. He spearheaded the spread of the religion throughout the empire, including illegal and funded church building projects. According to Encyclopedia Britannica.
The temple was discovered in the medieval hilltop city of Spello, near the town of Assisi, about two and a half hours from Rome. His fourth-century letter from Constantine helped guide Boyne and his team to the region, he said. The letter, discovered in the 18th century, suggests that the townspeople would celebrate religious festivals rather than traveling to different events, as long as Emperor Constantine built temples to what he considered “sacred ancestors.” It was permitted to do so.
Boyne said the discovery of this pagan temple “demonstrates that there was continuity between the classical pagan world and the early Christian Roman world, but they are often separated from overarching historical narratives. “It has been blurred out or written down.”
“Things didn’t change overnight. Until our discovery, we had no sense that physical religious sites associated with this late ‘act of imperial worship’ actually existed,” Boyne said. He continued. “However, with its inscriptions and references to temples, Spello offers the very interesting possibility of a large-scale discovery of imperial worship practiced under Christian rulers.”
“Imperial worship” refers to the belief that the Emperor and his family should be worshiped as gods. According to Harvard Divinity School. The practice began with Julius Caesar’s death in 44 B.C., and Boyne said the fourth-century temple presents “the greatest evidence in history” of the practice in the late Roman Empire.
“There is evidence from other parts of the Roman world that Christian rulers supported cult practices in their empire,” Boyne said. “Although it was known that pagans worshiped in temples in the fourth century, the discoveries were small and insignificant, and that Christians supported imperial worship. I knew and I had no idea where it was. It would have happened.”
Boyne said the temple would feature prominently in further research into the practice of imperial worship. He said he and his team plan to return to the area next summer to conduct further excavations and research on the temple.
“This changes everything about how we perceive the pace of social change and our impressions of the impact of social and cultural change,” Boyne said. “This building shows, in its own very radical way, the staying power of a pagan tradition that had been in the land for centuries before the rise of Christianity, and how the Roman emperors It shows how the emperors and the empire continued to negotiate their own negotiations, without destroying or burying the past, their values, their own hopes and dreams for the future of the emperor and the empire.”