The Destruction of Rome's Pagan Temples

This is the so-called Temple of Concordia at Agrigento, Sicily. Along with the Hephaistion in Athens, it's one of the best preserved Greek temples anywhere in the world. Little but the roof is missing. The building owes its excellent state of preservation to the fact that it became a church in late antiquity and was carefully maintained. Few other pagan sanctuaries were When Constantine converted to Christianity, there were, by one count, 424 temples in the city of Rome. Tens of thousands more were scattered across the provinces. They soared heavenward like the Temple of Jupiter at Baalbek. They crouched beneath the earth like the Oracle of the Dead at Ephra. They housed flocks of doves and sacred fish, mammoth tusks and meteorites, shapeless idols of age-black wood, and chrysolophantine statues with glowing eyes. They were the most spectacular, most expensive, most famous buildings in the known world. And within two centuries of Constantine's reign, virtually every one was abandoned or destroyed. Some temples were attacked by Christians. Martin of Tours burned shrines and felled sacred groves in the Gallic countryside. On the other side of the empire, Bishop Porphyrius of Gaza demolished the Temple of Zeus Marnas. The Egyptian abbot, Chanute, led squads of monks against pagan sanctuaries and images. The violence came to a crescendo during the reign of Theodosius I, when a Christian mob sacked the Serapium of Alexandria, and the orator, Libanius, begged for an end to the rampant destruction of pagan shrines around Antioch. The vast majority of Roman temples, however, were not destroyed violently. The imperial government discouraged indiscriminate destruction. Even after public worship of the old gods was prohibited, temples remained public monuments. A series of decrees stipulated that they were to remain open and forbade their demolition for building material. The upper classes, including Christians, were generally sympathetic. A bishop of Ilion gave Julian a tour of his city's temples. Christian ire tended to focus less on temple buildings than on the cult images they contained. Pope Gregory I, writing centuries later, would urge missionaries in Anglo-Saxon England to preserve shrines but destroy their idols. At Ephesus, for example, statues of the deified Augustus and Livia were mutilated and had crosses cut into their foreheads. Nearby, a wealthy citizen named Demaeus set up an inscription commemorating his replacement of a likeness of Artemis with a cross. The most famous statues of the gods, however, were respected as works of art. Phidias's Olympian Zeus was moved intact to Constantinople. So was the colossal bronze image of Athena Promachus, which had stood beside the Parthenon. The goddess would guard the form of Constantine until the time of the Fourth Crusade. We'll discuss the ultimate fate of Rome's temples after a brief word about this video's sponsor. Whenever I step into an ancient ruin, I wonder what it once looked like. Now, with Portal, I don't have to just imagine it. Portal is a groundbreaking app that transports you directly into the ancient world. Using historically accurate reconstructions and photorealistic CGI, it creates immersive XR experiences that let you walk through history. In Rome, for example, witness a triumphal procession at the Colosseum or feel the energy of thousands of spectators at the Stadium of Domitian. Scan the QR code on screen with your mobile device and you'll receive five free tickets with the app, enough to watch some of Rome's greatest monuments come to life. And with Portal, Rome is only the beginning. Returning to our topic, many temples were maintained for decades after being closed for worship. In most cases, they were finally ruined by some combination of earthquakes and pillaging. As early as the mid-4th century, only a generation after Constantine, Libanius complained that the citizens of Antioch were stripping stone from temples for reuse in their homes. Eventually, the emperors condoned the practice. It was rumored that Justinian built columns from the Temple of Artemis at Ephesus into Hagia Sophia. Only a small minority of temples were converted into churches. This was partly a matter of incompatibility. A church is a congregational building where people gather to worship. Temples, designed to shelter only the intended to be too dark and cramped for Christian services. An additional problem was the widespread belief that temples were haunted. Christians assumed that the pagan gods were malevolent demons sent by Satan to mislead mankind. These beings lurked in the strongholds of the old religion, waiting to tempt or possess the unwary. To be rid of them, a temple had to be thoroughly purified, ideally by a resident holy man. In most Roman cities, the first monumental churches were built on the outskirts, often near a martyr's tomb. It was only later, from the mid-4th century, that they began to appear in city centers, and the first temples were converted. In Rome, no temple seems to have become a church before the Pantheon, consecrated in 609. The Pantheon, with its huge open rotunda, needed few architectural modifications. Most converted temples, however, were more like the Parthenon, which was substantially altered when it became a church around the end of the 5th century. An entrance was punched through what had been the back wall, an apse was built into the former Pronaus, and the mythological sculptures were systematically defaced. In the massive temple of Apollo at Didyma, a church was simply inserted into the cella, which had been left open to the sky. A basilica, likewise, rose in what had been the second court of Ramses III's mortuary temple. The most common method of converting a temple into a church, however, was to fill the spaces between the colonnades and partially or wholly dismantle the cella within, creating a three-aisled basilica. The best-preserved Greek temples, the temple of Hephaestus at Athens and the temple of Concordia at Agrigento, were both remodeled in this way. Other temples underwent more radical adaptations. In Rome, the medieval church of San Nicola in Carcere was built over three adjoining temples. The central temple became the nave. The outer walls engulfed the colonnades of the temples on either side. A circular shrine of Isis is embedded in the seven chapels that make up Bologna's Basilica of Santo Stefano. The temple of Aphrodite at Aphrodisias was almost completely disassembled. Only the lateral colonnades were left in place and lengthened with stone from facades to form the nave of a new cathedral. A few buildings underwent the double conversion from temple to church to mosque. The Duomo of Syracuse, initially a temple of Athena, became a church, then a mosque, and finally a church again. The Great Mosque of Damascus replaced a church of John the Baptist that had been built into a Roman temple of Zeus. At the Parthenon, the call to prayer was heard for centuries over the Christian frescoes clinging, ever more precariously, to the walls of Athena's temple. To learn more about temples, churches, and the broader transformation of Roman cities in late antiquity, check out my podcast interview with Dr. Luke Lavin, linked on screen and in the description. On the Told-in-Stone Patreon, I recently posted a new episode of Rome in Review, my series exploring movies and TV series set in the ancient world. Check it out by following the link in the description. You might also enjoy the content on my other channels, Thanks for watching!