Journal of Biblical Literature - Society of Biblical Literature

Friesen: Myth and Resistance in Revelation 13 301
mention seventeen elite men from throughout the province who provided the
statues from their respective cities. Most of the men’s names are preserved
(four names are fragmentary or missing), demonstrating that five were Roman
citizens and eight were not (the other four are uncertain). These men held
important civic offices in their cities, for the inscriptions indicate that their
offices included a grammateus of the demos, four to six archons, a strategos, a
city treasurer, and a superintendent of public works. These same men also held
religious offices: two have offices related to temples, one was a priest of Pluto
and Kore (at Aphrodisias), and one was a priest of Domitian, Domitia, the
imperial family, and the Roman Senate. 56
The careers of these seventeen men demonstrate that those who promulgated
imperial cults in Asia also had extensive governmental responsibilities in
the cities of the province. The list of seventeen differs from the Aphrodisian
material in that all the individuals are male. Since we know of many women
involved in imperial cult activities, this gender differential is probably due to
the fact that the seventeen are drawn from materials about the initiation of an
extremely prestigious provincial temple. In such instances, men tended to hold
all the offices. The data are also different because there is no longitudinal data
across generations in this source; all thirteen inscriptions were executed
between 88 and 91 C.E. Given these two differences, the overall picture is quite
similar: wealthy men and some wealthy women controlled local government
and religion through their collaboration with Roman authorities.
The inscriptions from Ephesos also mention another category of individuals
whose status was even higher than the people surveyed so far; I refer to this
group as the “provincial elite.” These individuals were the high priests of Asia
who were active in their cities but who also served in the imperial cults of Asia,
representing the region in its provincial and imperial affairs. The temple of the
Sebastoi was the third provincial cult in Asia, which was the only province to
have more than one such cult at this time, so these high priests and high
priestesses were in the highest-level status in the province. 57 The inscriptions
from Ephesos mention three of these high priests of Asia. One of them,
Tiberius Claudius Aristio, is well attested and provides an individual case study
of someone who influenced the deployment of myths in imperial cults. Aristio
is mentioned in more than twenty inscriptions from Ephesos, which portray
him as a major player in Ephesian and Asian affairs for a quarter century. He
was, among other things, high priest of Asia (perhaps more than once), 58
56 Steven J. Friesen, Imperial Cults and the Apocalypse of John: Reading Revelation in the
Ruins (New York: Oxford University Press, 2001), 57–59.
57 For a complete listing of the known high priests and high priestesses, see my database at
http://web.missouri.edu/~religsf/officials.html.
58 Regarding Aristio’s high priesthoods, see Friesen, Twice Neokoros, 102.