A letter written by the Roman Emperor led archaeologists to an ancient temple with features of the Imperial cult, providing important information about the social changes in the Roman Empire from pagan beliefs to Christianity.
The monumental discovery was announced by Douglas Boin of St. Louis University, who is also the lead archaeologist on the dig.
Boin said he and his team had discovered three walls of a monumental structure that appears to have been a Roman temple dating to the reign of Constantine between 280 and 337 AD. During his imperial rule, Emperor Constantine outlawed the persecution of Christians and helped spread religion throughout the empire by funding church-building projects, according to the Encyclopedia Britannica.
The temple was found in Spello, a medieval hill town about two and a half hours from Rome and near the town of Assisi. A fourth-century letter from Constantine led Boin and his team to the site. The 18th-century letter said that as long as a temple was built, Constantine allowed the townspeople to celebrate religious festivals at the temple instead of traveling to another event.
Boin said the discovery of the pagan temple provided insights into the classical pagan world and the early Christian Roman world.
“Before our find, we had no idea that there were actual physical, religious sites associated with this late ‘imperial cult practice,’ but the inscription and its reference to a temple offered very tantalizing potential.”
According to Harvard Divinity School, the “cult of the emperor” refers to the belief that emperors and their families should be worshipped as divine. The practice began with the death of Julius Caesar in 44 B.C., and Boin said the 4th-century temple shows “the greatest evidence to date” of this practice in the late Roman Empire.
“There is evidence elsewhere in the Roman world that Christian rulers supported imperial cultic practices. We knew that pagans worshipped in their temples in the fourth century, but these findings were all small. We also knew that Christians supported the imperial cult, but we had no idea where this might have happened.”
The temple is said to be at the forefront of further research into imperial cult practices. The team will return to the site next summer for further excavation and research at the temple.
“This discovery changes everything about how we perceive the pace of social change and our impressions of the impact of social and cultural change. This building, in its own very radical way, shows us the enduring power of the pagan traditions that existed on earth for centuries before the rise of Christianity, and it shows us how Roman emperors continued to negotiate their own values, their own hopes and dreams for the future of the emperor and the Empire, without destroying or burying the past.”