The Cult of Ceres and Roman Cultural Identity in Ancient Corinth

Barbette Spaeth (College of William and Mary)

This paper examines how the Roman colonists of ancient Corinth maintained their cultural identity in Greece through their religious practices, focusing especially on the cult of Ceres. The colony at Corinth was established by Julius Caesar in 44 B.C., after a long hiatus following the destruction of the city by the Roman general Lucius Mummius in 146 B.C. The current scholarly consensus is that the Roman colonists gradually abandoned their cultural identity as they "Hellenized" in their new cultural setting. One of the major supports of this theory is the proposal that the colonists revived many of the cults of the ancient Greek city in the early years of the colony andby the second century A.D. at least hadfocused their religious activities on Greek rather than Roman gods.

In this paper, I will show how this consensus neglects significant archaeological and epigraphical evidence indicating that the Roman colonists continued to practice Roman religious rites in honor of Roman gods up to at least the third century A.D., when our evidence becomes too scanty for definitive conclusions. I focus in particular on the colonists' importation of the triadic cult of Ceres, Liber, and Libera. This cult had very ancient origins in Rome itself, where its foundation was traditionally dated to soon after the foundation of the Republic. It was formed from the correlation of two native Italic cults, that of Ceres/Liber and that of Liber/Libera, and was later influenced by Greek conceptions of the divinities Demeter, Persephone, and Dionysus as they were worshippedin Southern Italy.

This cult became the focal point of plebeian religious and social consciousness in Rome and was imported to Corinth at the very foundation of the Roman colony, where the three divinities were among the early tutelary gods of the colony. This cult remained a focal point of the colony, and in the late 1st century A.D., a temple complex was built for this cult on the slopes of Acrocorinth, which was maintained until the fourth century A.D. I propose that the worship of these very Roman divinities helped the colonists to maintain their identity in their new cultural milieu. I will discuss the Italic/Roman origins of this cult, how the cult was exported to the Roman colony of Corinth, and its function in its new cultural setting.