Ramsay, William Mitchell: The cities and bishoprics of Phrygia: being an essay of the local history of Phrygia from the earliest time to the Turkish conquest (Band 1,2): West and West-Central Phrygia (Oxford, 1897)

504 XII. CHRISTIAN INSCRIPTIONS OF S.W. PHRYGIA.

'patriotism was another form of adherence to the national religion1.'
Thus it was necessary for the city either to keep up the forms, or to
break with the Imperial government and proceed to extremes. How
the State religion was maintained in practice, we are denied all
evidence; how far some Christians might go in acceptance of the
recognized Roman forms we need not speculate ; opinion and conduct
varied widely, as we know, and as is natural; some doubtless con-
demned as sinful what others justified as mere acceptance of outward
forms of politeness. The courtesies of society and ordinary life, as
well as of municipal administration, had a non-Chr. form; and a wise
toleration will always permit great variety of opinion as to how far
politeness might honestly be carried in accepting the ordinary practices.
In the course of the following centuries the forms of politeness became
Christianized; but the process was only beginning in the third
century. Probably the same policy which placed on the gravestone an
appeal to ' the god,' leaving the reader to understand in his own sense
a term common to both Chr. and Pagans, modified in similar slight
ways many of the other forms of social and municipal life. But one
thing we may take as certain : if Chr. entered the Imperial service or
the municipal career, some sacrifice of strictest principle was required
of them, and as magistrates they had to comply with many non-Chr.
religious forms in a public way, for religion entered far more closely
into the details of life in ancient times than it does in modern society
and government. The simple fact that so many Chr. senators at
Eumeneia are known to us, shows that the spirit of accommodation
ruled there.

It has perhaps some bearing on this topic that so many of the Chr.
inscr. are found at the villages near the site of Attanassos2, marked
by a fine old mosque with the tomb of a Dede3. The centre of the old
Phrygian religion seems to have become also the centre of Chr. feeling.
Religious emotion always clings to the old localities, taking on
a Christianized form. It was doubtless this deep-lying religious
feeling that made Attanassos the seat of a bishopric, as is mentioned

1 Church in B. E. p. 190. among the Turks, is often a mere

2 Dede-Keui, or the Dede, is the now expression of vague religious awe,
solitary mosque, which probably marks inspired by striking natural surround-
the site : Aidan is close to it: Tchivril ings or by the presence of a decayed
and Yakasimak are a little further W. ancient civilization. See my paper on
Fourteen of the 30 Chr. inscr. in App. the Permanent Attachment of Religious
were found in these villages (including Veneration, fyc. in Oriental Congress,
373). London 1892. Above, pp. 29 f.

3 The Dede or heroized ancestor,