Gods with Two Names

Roman religion in Britain frequently identified a local deity with a Roman one and used both names together, and the practice tells you a good deal about how the province worked. Sulis Minerva at Bath is the best documented case: a hot spring already sacred to a British goddess acquired a Roman style temple, a bathing complex and an inscribed altar, and the goddess was addressed under the paired name.

R. S. O. Tomlin's edition of the lead tablets recovered from the spring shows what people actually brought to her. More than a hundred texts survive, most of them complaints about theft, asking the goddess to afflict whoever took a cloak, a ring, a pair of gloves or a quantity of money, sometimes listing suspects by name, sometimes assigning the stolen property to the goddess so that pursuing the thief becomes her business. They are written by ordinary people, several are in a Latin that betrays a first language elsewhere, and they are among the most direct evidence anywhere in the empire for the religion of people who left no literature. Other pairings are attested across the province, and local deities also appear on their own without a Roman equivalent attached. The pairing of names was not a compromise between two religions or a sign that either had given ground. It was how Roman religion normally absorbed a local cult, and it happened in Gaul, on the Rhine and in North Africa in the same way.