Ports, roads and rivers. Religious connectivity in the Roman Strymon valley

This paper discusses religious connectivity in Roman Greece in relation to geographic interconnectedness (physical landscape, maritime routes, road infrastructure). The complex network structure that affected the diverse social features and religious experience of the agents local to the valley of Strymon River in eastern Macedonia is used as a working example. This area hosted urban settlements that were economic and cultural hubs welcoming, among other, different cults and amplifying religious exchange. The river Strymon flows through a fertile valley that includes smaller and larger sites. These sites communicated through the navigable river supporting the inland movement of products, people, and cults. The river reaches the Aegean shores where one of the most important cities of the area, Amphipolis, prospered, being one of the major ports of the region. The same city was one of the hubs of via Egnatia, crossing northern Greece on the west-east axis.

I focus on this geographical and cultural landscape in order to examine the religious network created along those aquatic and terrestrial routes and investigating cults that reached those lands from “overseas”, resulting in religious interactions. These cults bore and were the outcome of a combination of Greek, Egyptian, Roman, Eastern components. I first delve into how these cults are affected by the aforementioned network of ports, rivers and roads and then Ι visualize the network of cultural exchanges. I aim at understanding the social actors involved in these religious activities that shaped social or political balances and their status while structuring social memory. Emphasis is also put on ritual practices and cultic activities surviving through material evidence. The above are better conceptualized under a theoretical framework that understands these lands as part of a globalizing world that combined global and local features, highlighting cultural heterogeneities while emphasizing on local diversities.

Dafni Maikidou-Poutrino is an Early Career Fellow at the Center for Hellenic Studies, Harvard University, focusing her research on the Isiac cults and religious connectivity in Hellenistic and Roman Macedonia. She obtained her PhD at the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki, researching networks and religious connectivity, focusing on the Isiac cults (“The Isiac cults in Roman Greece. Religious connectivity in the mainland, the Aegean and the Eastern Mediterranean”). For her PhD studies, she obtained a scholarship from the Academy of Athens. She holds a Master's in Classical and Mediterranean Archaeology from Leiden University. She has received training in digital tools in archaeology from various institutions. She is a member of the Academic Excavation at Vergina, conducted by the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki. Dafni has participated in various academic and research projects and excavations at Marathon, Pompeii, and Thessaloniki.