Moving from revised buildings’ monumental texts to their material surfaces and spatial arrangements, the book’s final section expands our investigation into "unmarked" ways in which new contexts reframed old elements. Chapter 7 argues that change over time was regularly characterized and symbolized in terms of vividly contrasting architectural substances, in which marble (especially) was used to chart (and critique) urban progress and to modulate a balance between tradition and innovation.

The suite of chapters comprising Part II homes in on monumental building inscriptions as central means through which individual buildings shaped perceptions of their own architectural histories and of temporal change more broadly. The first of these, Chapter 4, investigates assemblages of epigraphic records of architectural interventions that accumulated on buildings over their long ancient lives. The chapter’s analysis of these encrusted epigraphic environments charts a range of strategies that benefactors adopted in setting up their own commemorative texts vis à vis those of earlier patrons and considers the effects of those decisions on the inscriptions’ reception by contemporary audiences.

This opening chapter sets out the framework for a more systematic discussion of ancient Greek personal religion in the subsequent chapters. It starts from a working definition of personal religion by clarifying its relationship to the much better documented civic dimension of ancient Greek religion. Its core consists of a substantial historiographic section that grounds the study of personal religion in the larger trends that have shaped and continue to shape the study of the religions of the ancient world – including parallel developments in the study of Roman religion. Taking stock of where we stand helps us to sketch out what is at stake in foregrounding individual religious beliefs and practices and how they fit into our understanding of ancient Greek religion more broadly conceived.

This chapter explores the personal dimension of Greek religion through the archaeological evidence for votives in Archaic and Classical Greece. Dedications serve as a prime example of how ancient worship could simultaneously be personal, civic, individual and collective. They point to how these aspects can and should be studied together to achieve a more comprehensive understanding of how people communicated with the gods. Traditionally, small dedications have been more closely associated with the individual, while large dedications (e.g. statues) are frequently studied as civic monuments. Through two case studies – textile dedications at Brauron and korai on the Acropolis – the chapter breaks down these divides. We consider the varying ways in which we can define ‘personal’ in relation to different types of dedications and in relation to different aspects of the dedicatory act. Using a combination of embodied, sensorial, emotional, theological and experiential perspectives, the chapter shows how worshippers used dedications to negotiate the relationship between personal engagement with the divine and their understanding of the communal aspects of religion.

Chapter 3 considers the nature of provincial government, the role and legal responsibilities of governors, both legati Augusti and proconsuls, the management of Rome’s assets through the census and by direct intervention, for example, in managing the benefits and dangers of rivers. We look at the constitutions of municipia, and the nature of their laws and regulations, and Rome’s supervision of the infrastructure of local towns, and the consequences for local people. In the administration of justice there was a melding of local legal practice and Roman law. Did the Romans have an idea of what constituted fair and efficient government and how far did they achieve it? The evidence shows good intentions on the part of emperors and governors, but also many abuses, especially from the presence of soldiers, and problems in obtaining legal redress.

This chapter examines epiphany and its place in personal religion by focusing on narratives that feature Athena as the epiphanic deity across different periods, locales, and media. In all cases, Athena is construed as engaging closely with personal requests and concerns of particularly diverse nature from military excellence and political dominance to enhancement of socio-religious capital, and, perhaps more surprisingly, health. Athena’s epiphanies have thus been identified as particularly pertinent for our purposes, as they highlight the grey area that oscillates between personal and poliadic spheres of religious action, thus allowing us to witness the close and complex correlations between the two. Even if the two spheres draw from a common stock of religious schemata and behaviours, contrasting them reveals a wealth of useful information about how personal religious appropriation and innovation are situated in relation to more established forms or expressions of poliadic religious action. Above all, this contrast shows how even groundbreaking religious innovations needed to be anchored properly in easily recognisable, time-tested, and well-established religious schemata.

In these pages we have witnessed the deep degree to which architectural rebuilding, as a practice distinct from new construction, was embedded in the Roman patronage system and served as powerful social currency in cities throughout the Mediterranean in the centuries spanning the early imperial to late antique periods. Overall, architectural rebuilding continued to be publicly celebrated as an honorific virtue through the sixth century, though the reach and impact of architectural euergetism shrank as patronage patterns changed, the overall volume of architectural construction declined, and spending on it was increasingly directed toward ecclesiastical and monastic architecture. This, I suggest, was principally due to the unique ways in which rebuilding leveraged site- and audience-specific connections to past and future communities. The high public value placed on rebuilding was also due to the opportunities it offered emperors, bishops, and other patrons to inflect cyclical celebratory calendars that enacted present order and implied future stability through their regular renewal and reperformance. While events of architectural destruction sorely tested that stability and regularly signaled divine displeasure to contemporaries, rebuilding concomitantly asserted current and future security through the reaffirmation (and simultaneous opportunity for reframing) of the empire’s pious relationship to their god(s).

Ancient views of magic were extremely diverse. In order to examine the issue of personal religion this chapter sets out to bracket the over-familiar negative discourse, which sought to represent magic as the opposite of (true) religion, and shift the discussion to include the perspectives of actual practitioners. Of the many different types of historical practitioner, three are selected for longer discussion: ‘wise folk’, specifically ‘rootcutters’ (rhizotomists); the Hellenistic ‘Magian’ tradition ascribed to pseudonymous authors such as Persian Zoroaster; and the so-called magical papyri from Roman Egypt. Rhizotomists used ritualisation as their primary means of empowerment, with a clear sense of the divine origin of the potency of herbs. Drawing on this tradition, the Magian writers linked it to the materials made available through translation of the knowledge stored in Babylonian and Egyptian temples to create a sense of the inexhaustible powers of divine Nature. Ritual expertise and theological knowledge are most evidently in play in the hundreds of procedures included in the surviving Graeco-Egyptian magical papyri, exemplified here by the case of PGM IV 1496–1595.