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Temples and Priests of Sol in the City of Rome

2010; University of Toronto Press; Volume: 10; Issue: 3 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1353/mou.2010.0073

1913-5416

Steven E. Hijmans,

Archaeology and Historical Studies

It was long thought that Sol Invictus was a Syrian sun-god, and that Aurelian imported his cult into Rome after he had vanquished Zenobia and captured Palmyra. This sun-god, it was postulated, differed fundamentally from the old Roman sungod Sol Indiges, whose cult had long since disappeared from Rome. Scholars thus tended to postulate a hiatus in the first centuries of imperial rule during which there was little or no cult of the sun in Rome. Recent studies, however, have shown that Aurelian’s Sol Invictus was neither new nor foreign, and that the cult of the sun was maintained in Rome without interruption from the city’s earliest history until the demise of Roman religion(s). This continuity of the Roman cult of Sol sheds a new light on the evidence for priests and temples of Sol in Rome. In this article I offer a review of that evidence and what we can infer from it about the Roman cult of the sun. A significant portion of the article is devoted to a temple of Sol in Trastevere, hitherto misidentified.