(October 28, 2010 at 4:51 pm)padraic Wrote: @Min
MY understanding is it was Roman policy to always accommodate local/new religions as long as they respected Roman gods and were not a political threat. I think the comment about elitism and rebranding is a reasonable observation. It's also irrelevant. Seems to me the most successful religions invariably become part of the status quo.
I think in earlier days of the Empire the Romans tended to respected local religion locally, or amongst the part of the original ethnic group that had migrated to other parts of the Empire. But they did not always accommodate the spread of local religions to other ethnic groups in other parts of the Empire unless local dieties can be merged with classical Roman deities and presented to the empire as being different names for the same thing. So the Gallic godess of Sulis was deemed to be one and the same as the Roman godess Minerva, and Sulis cult was allowed to spread. Egyptian godess of Isis was deemed to be alien to Roman pantheon, and its cult in Rome was suppressed by Tiberius.