Animals on the religious scene Religions flourished during the imperial age: as traditional religions thrived, foreign religions were imported and new cults invented. Although the Romans did not worship any gods in animal shapes, in the first centuries CE, animals swarmed on to the religious scene of the Graeco-Roman world | 5 THE RELIGIOUS VALUE OF ANIMALS Animals on the religious scene Religions flourished during the imperial age as traditional religions thrived foreign religions were imported and new cults invented. Although the Romans did not worship any gods in animal shapes in the first centuries ce animals swarmed on to the religious scene of the Graeco-Roman world Kotting 1964 Isager 1992 . Sacred animals were kept in the vicinity of temples and used as a source of income for sacrifices or as symbols for a god. At some temples there were parks with different species of animal as Lucian reports from the temple of Atargatis in Hierapolis The Syrian Goddess 41 . Fish with golden ornaments swam in the temple lakes well fed and marvelled at by onlookers ibid. . Pachomius who initiated the monastic movement in Egypt as a child was taken by his parents to the Nile to sacrifice to the creatures in the waters to the Lates fish which was held to be sacred in the region where he lived Frankfurter 1998 62-3 . Dogs and serpents were present in the temple of Asclepius in Epidaurus and Alexander of Abonouteichos even introduced a living serpent with an artificial human head as the new Asclepius in a cult that seems to have been a great success c. 170 ce . In Egypt sacred crocodiles cats ibises and other species were venerated by the natives and visited by tourists. In a depiction of a procession in honour of the goddess Isis in Rome one of the priestesses has an asp coiled around her arm while in a wall painting from Pompeii showing ceremonies to Isis that include between thirty and forty people two ibises are placed in the foreground. What did these non-sacrificial animals signify Some of the meanings and hermeneutic mechanisms behind the religious use of animals can be glimpsed in Apuleius description of a religious procession at cenchreae in Greece. The procession was held in the spring in honour of Isis The Golden Ass . Its purpose was the launch of the first ship of the year .
