The scale of the corpus examined in the study deserves emphasis. Around 11,000 inscriptions spanning roughly a millennium represent only a fraction of the dedications once made, since most votive objects were perishable materials such as wooden tablets, wreaths, cakes, and animals that left no written trace. Stone and bronze dedications, especially those with formal inscriptions, were more likely to be commissioned by individuals or groups with resources, and more likely to survive. This means that any computational analysis of votive epigraphy is necessarily an analysis of a biased sample of ancient religious behavior, skewed toward wealthier dedicants, urban sanctuaries, and regions with favorable conditions for stone preservation. The study’s authors are careful to frame their findings as patterns in surviving evidence rather than direct measurements of belief, a caution that applies to nearly all quantitative work in ancient history.

The concept of the epigraphic habit, which the study controls for, has become central to the field since scholars first observed that the sheer volume of inscriptions rises and falls dramatically across periods. The habit peaked in many regions during the Roman Imperial period, when literacy, civic monumentality, and stone-carving infrastructure were widespread, and declined sharply in the later centuries of Late Antiquity. If more inscriptions of all kinds were carved in the second century CE than in the fourth, then a raw count of votive formulae would simply mirror that curve and tell us nothing specific about religious expression. By normalizing votive terminology against the total volume of inscriptions in each period and region, the study attempts to isolate changes that are specific to dedicatory practice rather than to the general fashion for putting text on stone.

The deities that show strong positive associations with explicit votive language are themselves informative about the religious landscape of Roman Asia Minor and the Near East. Men, a lunar and protective god of Phrygian and Pisidian origin, attracted dedications from soldiers, merchants, and local elites across the Anatolian plateau, and his sanctuaries often served communities of mixed background. Meter, the Anatolian mother goddess related to but distinct from the Greek Cybele, similarly drew personal, emotionally inflected devotion. Theos Hypsistos, the Most High God, was venerated by a cult whose adherents adopted some practices resembling Jewish observance without full conversion, and whose dedications are scattered widely across the eastern Empire. Hosios kai Dikaios, a personification of piety and justice worshipped particularly in the Aegean islands and coastal Asia Minor, rounds out the group. That these figures, rather than the Olympian deities of classical literature, dominate the statistically significant correlations is a reminder that lived religion in the Imperial period centered heavily on local and regional cults.

The negative correlations are equally revealing. Athena, whose cults were among the oldest and most institutionally embedded in the Greek world, rarely received dedications described with the explicit vow language that became common elsewhere. Dedications to emperors, which flourished as an expression of loyalty in the Imperial cult, likewise tended to follow their own formulaic conventions. This suggests that votive terminology was not simply a general stylistic fashion that spread uniformly across all sanctuaries. Instead, it appears to have been tied to particular cultic environments, perhaps reflecting different kinds of transaction between worshipper and deity. A vow made and fulfilled implies a negotiated exchange, a request made in advance and paid afterward, and some cults may have encouraged or formalized this contractual framing more than others.

The relationship between votive formulae and stated motives, such as dreams or divine commands, points toward a similar conclusion. In many surviving dedications, the worshipper explains that the god appeared in a dream and requested the offering, a practice associated with incubation sanctuaries where the sick slept in hopes of healing, such as those of Asclepius. The finding that explicit vow language and explicit dream reports tend not to co-occur suggests two partly distinct modes of dedication: one framed as the fulfillment of a promised exchange, the other as obedience to a direct divine instruction. Ancient worshippers and sanctuary officials evidently drew on a repertoire of ways to narrate why an offering was made, and the choice among them may reflect the type of sanctuary, the nature of the favor received, or local epigraphic conventions.

The regional pattern, with explicit votive terminology far more common in Asia Minor and the eastern provinces than in mainland Greece before the fourth century CE, aligns with broader scholarly observations about the cultural distinctiveness of the Roman East. Anatolia in particular has long been recognized as a region of dense, competitive religious activity, where traditional Anatolian cults, Greek civic religion, Persian-influenced worship, Jewish communities, and eventually Christianity coexisted and interacted. The convergence of the epigraphic pattern with this picture lends credibility to the computational results. It also raises the question of what happened after the fourth century, when the regional gap appears to narrow. One possibility is that conventions spread from the East westward; another is that Christian dedicatory practice, which inherited and transformed earlier formulae, gradually homogenized expression across the Greek-speaking world.

The chronological rise of vow terminology through the Imperial period and into Late Antiquity intersects with a long-standing debate about the character of religion in these centuries. Older scholarship often described the Imperial era as a time of growing personal piety, in contrast to the supposedly civic and collective religion of the classical polis. More recent work has challenged this narrative, showing that personal devotion was vibrant in earlier periods as well, and that civic religion remained robust well into the Roman era. The quantitative pattern documented in the study does not settle the debate, but it gives it a firmer evidential footing: whatever the reality of personal religiosity in earlier centuries, the explicit linguistic marking of dedications as fulfillments of vows became markedly more prominent over time, and that change in expression is itself a historical phenomenon requiring explanation.

One plausible factor is the changing social composition of dedicants. In the classical Greek world, votive offerings were often made by cities, magistrates, and aristocrats commemorating military victories or civic achievements, and the inscriptional conventions reflected public, monumental purposes. By the Roman period, dedications more frequently came from private individuals of modest means, including women, freedmen, slaves, and occupational groups, seeking healing, safety, or prosperity. The formulaic language of the fulfilled vow, concise and standardized, may have suited these smaller, more personal dedications, which required less elaborate text and could be carved cheaply by semi-professional workshops. The spread of the formulae may thus track the democratization of the dedicatory habit as much as any change in religious sentiment.

The methodological challenges acknowledged in the study are worth spelling out, because they shape how confidently the results can be interpreted. Dating is the most serious. A large proportion of Greek inscriptions cannot be dated precisely; they are assigned to broad periods on the basis of letterforms, formulae, prosopography, or archaeological context, sometimes spanning a century or more. Any chronological analysis therefore smooths and blurs the underlying pattern, and a trend that appears gradual may in fact reflect the uneven distribution of securely dated material. Tagging poses its own difficulties: deciding whether a damaged or abbreviated text contains a votive formula, or whether a particular name refers to a deity or a person, requires interpretive judgment that can introduce inconsistency even when applied carefully. The study’s transparency about these limitations is a model for computational work in the humanities.

The deeper interpretive problem, separating epigraphic convention from religious mentality, has parallels in many domains of ancient history. Written formulae are conservative and can long outlive the practices or attitudes that originally motivated them; conversely, a new formula can spread because it is fashionable among stonecutters rather than because worshippers changed their behavior. When vow language increases in the inscriptions, this could mean that more dedications genuinely arose from vowed exchanges, or that scribes and carvers increasingly chose to describe dedications in those terms regardless of the underlying circumstances. The study does not claim to resolve this ambiguity, but by mapping the pattern precisely, across regions, deities, and centuries, it provides the empirical foundation on which such questions can be argued with evidence rather than impression.

The approach also demonstrates the value of the large digital corpora that have transformed the study of antiquity in recent decades. Projects that have gathered, digitized, and standardized hundreds of thousands of Greek and Latin inscriptions make analyses like this one possible at all, and the GIST corpus of votive texts in particular represents a substantial investment in making dedicatory evidence collectively visible. As comparable corpora grow for other languages and regions, similar studies could extend the analysis to Latin dedications, to Egyptian demotic evidence, or to the epigraphy of the early Christian church, allowing the Greek pattern documented here to be situated in a wider Mediterranean comparative frame.

Finally, the study speaks to a question that extends beyond antiquity: how religious expression is shaped by the media through which it is recorded. Inscriptions were a public, durable, and costly medium, and what people chose to carve reflected both their devotion and the conventions of the genre. The rise and fall of formulae on stone is thus a record of the interaction between belief, social practice, and communicative technology. Understanding that interaction in the ancient world offers a useful vantage point for thinking about how religious sentiment is expressed, standardized, and transmitted in any era, including one in which digital media are creating their own vast, biased, and convention-laden records of human practice.

Subject of Research: Distant reading of ancient Greek votive inscriptions

Article Title: Ancient Greek votive epigraphy: Ancient religion between individual choice and cultural trends

Article References: Blidstein, M. (2026). Ancient Greek votive epigraphy: Ancient religion between individual choice and cultural trends. PLOS One, 21(10), e0361143. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0361143

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0361143

Keywords: ancient Greek religion, votive inscriptions, epigraphy, digital humanities, distant reading, PLOS One, Roman Imperial period, Late Antiquity, dedicatory formulae, religious mentalities, Asia Minor, epigraphic habit

The numismatic evidence anchors the ritual activity firmly in time. The numerous coins recovered from the deposits range in date from the early second century AD to the late fourth century AD, with a clear peak in minting during the second half of the fourth century. That concentration matters, because it suggests the sanctuary flourished precisely during Late Antiquity, an era when traditional Roman religion was increasingly under pressure from Christianity and older cults were retreating into discreet, secluded spaces. A mine gallery, accessible only through a controlled entrance and plunged into permanent darkness, would have suited the Mithraic liturgy well. Mithraea across the Roman world were typically small, cave-like rooms without windows, and scholars have long noted that the cult’s reverence for the cave in which Mithras slew the bull made subterranean spaces especially attractive. Yet the Kropfsberg site holds a caveat: no direct depiction of Mithras, whether an altar, inscription, or metal plate, has so far come to light.

To test the ritual hypothesis, researchers turned to the animal bones. In total, 486 animal bones and teeth were recovered by hand from the Late Antiquity layers, of which 295 remains, weighing nearly 567 grams, could be identified to species. The analysis was carried out at the Natural History Museum Vienna, in its First Zoological Department and Archaeological-Zoological Collection, using the standard quantification methods of archaeozoology: the number of identified specimens, or NISP, and the weight of the material, the latter helping to estimate which species contributed most meat. The state of preservation was remarkably good, so good that fragile bones from birds and very young animals survived in high numbers, a fact that immediately hinted the assemblage was not an ordinary domestic refuse pile.

The species profile is dominated by domesticated animals, and the pattern is unusual. By fragment count, pig remains prevail at 47.5 percent of identified specimens, followed by chicken at 38.6 percent, sheep and goat at 12.9 percent, and cattle at a mere 1 percent. The weight analysis shifts the picture slightly, because heavier bones carry more mass: pigs still dominate at 50.5 percent, but sheep and goat follow at 20.7 percent, cattle at 15 percent, and chicken at 13.8 percent, indicating that after pigs the small ruminants were the most important meat suppliers at the site. Compare this with contemporary Late Antiquity settlements in northeastern Austria, such as Oberleiserberg, Drösing, Michelstetten, Zwingendorf, Potzneusiedl, and Podersdorf, where cattle typically make up 38 to 45 percent of identified remains and chicken rarely exceeds 5 percent. The Kropfsberg percentages fall entirely outside those ranges.

The age and sex structure of the animals sharpens the contrast further. Epiphyseal fusion of the bones shows that the overwhelming majority of pigs and sheep or goats were non-adult. Nearly 88 percent of the pig remains came from animals younger than two and a half to three years, with almost a third of them younger than one year. Tooth analysis confirmed the pattern: four of the five pig teeth recovered were milk fourth premolars from animals younger than six months, and the single permanent third molar belonged to an animal of roughly eighteen to twenty months. Sheep and goats tell the same story, with almost 89 percent of remains from individuals younger than three years and a third younger than one year. In ordinary settlements, animals were kept to adulthood because cattle, sheep, and goats had economic value beyond meat, in traction, wool, and milk. Slaughtering animals young is economically wasteful, unless the goal is a table of tender, succulent meat for a very specific occasion.

The chickens add a final, telling detail. Sex could not be determined for the mammals because too few adult bones were present, but the chicken bones could be sexed metrically. Comparing the Kropfsberg measurements, such as the greatest lengths of the coracoid, humerus, radius, ulna, carpometacarpus, and femur, with the large reference assemblage from the Avar-period cemetery of Vienna Csokorgasse, the researchers found that the values fall within the range of variation of male individuals. A dominance of male chickens, combined with the slaughter of juvenile pigs and sheep, matches precisely the faunal signature documented at Mithraea elsewhere in Europe, from older studies such as the classic mid-twentieth-century excavations to recent analyses of sanctuaries in Germany, Switzerland, Belgium, and France. Similar profiles have also been reported from the cult cave of Zillis in the Swiss canton of Graubünden, itself interpreted as a Mithraic site, and from sanctuaries of other deities, including the sanctuary of Jupiter Heliopolitanus at Carnuntum and the Apollo-Grannus sanctuary at Neuenstadt am Kocher, where chickens likewise play an outsized ritual role.

The bones also preserve the physical evidence of butchery and consumption. Chop marks far outnumber cut marks across all species. Pig crania were split in two, with additional chops removing the incisive bone, frontal bone, and maxillae, and severing the skull from the neck at the occipital condyles. Long bones were chopped diagonally at the joints, and one femur shows longitudinal blows for marrow extraction. Ribs were reduced to small portions, vertebrae were split mediansagittally or parasagittally, and sheep and goat carcasses were dismembered in comparable fashion, with cut marks above the teeth on the maxillae indicating careful separation of the head. Even the chicken bones carry oblique and transverse chops and cuts on the femur, tibiotarsus, furcula, coracoid, and radius. These marks demonstrate that the remains are food waste from meals eaten on site, while gnawing marks from scavengers show that at least some refuse lay exposed on the ground, or only partially buried, for a time. One pig rib bears new bone formation consistent with periostitis, the single pathological specimen in the assemblage.

Fire and sediment tell an even more intricate story. About 20 percent of the identified material, and many of the unidentified bones, show the black coloration characteristic of exposure to temperatures between roughly 300 and 600 degrees Celsius. Burning of animal remains is documented in numerous ritual practices across antiquity, including within the Mithras cult itself. Meanwhile, micromorphological analysis of soil thin sections revealed tiny bone splinters embedded in the matrix, mixed with charcoal and clods of sediment in a pit-like floor depression. A comparable phenomenon was first described at the Mithraea of Biesheim and Kempraten, where bone splinters embedded in floor layers were interpreted as evidence of multi-stage ritual activity. At Kropfsberg the splinters were not part of a renovated floor but were deposited in a deliberate depression, again suggesting ceremonies that unfolded in several phases, involving feasting, burning, and the working of bone fragments into the ground.

The teeth even offer a calendar. Age at death reconstructed from tooth eruption and wear, principally the milk fourth premolar and the unworn third molar of pigs, points to slaughtering around the summer season, though the researchers caution that the sample is small and the eruption timing of third molars in ancient pig populations may have been closer to that of wild boar, around 23 to 26 months, than to modern domestic pigs. Taken together, the evidence sketches a vivid scene: somewhere in the late fourth century, in the darkness of an old copper mine in the Alps, a small community slaughtered young pigs, sheep, and roosters, cooked and ate them in ritual meals, burned a fifth of the bones, and left the debris in a sealed underground chamber. Whether the Kropfsberg sanctuary ultimately belonged to Mithras cannot be proven without an image or inscription, and the authors acknowledge that comparable faunal profiles occur in other religious contexts. But the enclosed and lockable setting, the bench-like substructure, the votive sheets, the coins, and now an animal assemblage that mirrors known Mithraea north and south of the Alps make the Tyrolean mine one of the most intriguing new windows onto the secret religions of Rome’s fading frontier.

Subject of Research: Archaeozoological analysis of faunal remains from a possible Late Antique Mithraic sanctuary in an Austrian copper mine

Article Title: Faunal remains from the Late Antiquity ‘cave sanctuary’ (Mithraeum?) of Kropfsberg (Tyrol, Austria)

Article References: Saliari, K., Staudt, M., Cereda, S., & Goldenberg, G. (2026). Faunal remains from the Late Antiquity ‘cave sanctuary’ (Mithraeum?) of Kropfsberg (Tyrol, Austria). Annals of the Natural History Museum Vienna, 127, 95-104. https://doi.org/10.3897/anhmw.187321

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.3897/anhmw.187321

Keywords: archaeozoology, Mithraism, Late Antiquity, Kropfsberg, Tyrol, Roman religion, faunal remains, ritual feasting, copper mining, chickens, pigs, Natural History Museum Vienna

The study, authored by Rosa María Carreño Sánchez, a researcher at the Lucio Anneo Séneca Institute of Classical Studies at UC3M, was published in the Revista General de Derecho Romano. Rather than relying on literary sources or artistic depictions, which typically capture only the dramatic climax inside the arena, Carreño Sánchez turned to the legal record itself. Her analysis centers on two imperial constitutions from the Late Empire preserved in the Theodosian Code, the great compilation of Roman law issued under Emperor Theodosius II in the fifth century, and later carried forward into the Justinian Code. These legal texts, she argues, open a window onto everything that happened behind the scenes: the management of resources, the territorial conflicts between communities, and the enormous logistical effort required to keep one of antiquity’s most beloved entertainments running.

Among the most striking findings is evidence of what the researcher describes as a possible state monopoly on lions in late antiquity. As the population of big cats dwindled across the Empire’s territories, imperial authorities moved to guarantee supply for the emperor’s own spectacles and to shut out private competitors. In practical terms, this meant that all lions belonged to the emperor. The implication is remarkable: an animal that had once been hunted freely across North Africa and the Near East became, by law, an imperial asset, its capture and movement regulated with the same seriousness as taxation or military provisioning. The monopoly reflects both the growing scarcity of the animals and the political value the court placed on displaying them, since a spectacular hunt in the arena was a direct statement of the emperor’s power over nature itself.

Enforcing such a monopoly required manpower, and here the study highlights the surprising role of the Roman army. The military did not merely defend frontiers; it also fielded highly specialized units dedicated to the tracking, capture, and guarding of wild beasts along the Empire’s borders. Soldiers designated ad leones, literally assigned to lions, worked alongside specialists known as ursuarii, who handled bears, and vestigiatores, trackers whose job was to follow the spoor of exotic animals through difficult terrain. These designations, preserved in the legal and administrative record, reveal a professionalized hunting service embedded within the military structure, one that turned the Empire’s borderlands into a supply zone for the arenas of Rome and other great cities.

Capturing the animals, however, was only the first stage of a journey that could stretch across thousands of kilometers. Transporting lions, bears, leopards, and other creatures to the capital or to imperial menageries created significant logistical and economic challenges, and it is here that the two imperial constitutions examined in the study become especially revealing. The provinces were required to supply the transport personnel, and the costs were to be borne by local coffers. This arrangement placed a heavy burden on municipal budgets and, predictably, invited abuse. The legal texts document fraudulent practices in which communities or officials imposed undue delays on the transport convoys. Such delays were not merely bureaucratic friction; they could ruin the cities financially, and worse, they could conceal the fraudulent diversion of the animals to unauthorized private spectacles, effectively stealing imperial property for someone else’s show.

The imperial response was characteristically severe. To curb these abuses, the administration imposed heavy fines, payable in gold, on military commanders who failed to comply with the regulations governing animal transport. The penalty structure is significant for what it tells us about how the Empire viewed the trade in exotic beasts: the officers responsible for moving the animals were held personally and financially accountable, and the currency of punishment was the same precious metal that underpinned the late imperial fiscal system. In other words, the movement of a lion from a frontier province to an amphitheater was treated as a matter of state, policed by law, financed by provinces, and enforced against soldiers with monetary sanctions.

Understanding why the Empire invested so much in this system requires appreciating the cultural weight of the venationes. Unlike gladiatorial combat, which gradually died out under the combined pressure of Christian moral condemnation and the enormous cost of organizing fights, the animal hunts proved remarkably durable, surviving for centuries after other forms of arena entertainment had faded. The study frames their longevity in terms of what they symbolized: displays of human dominion over nature and of the grandeur of imperial power. Every beast paraded and dispatched in the sand was a living trophy of the Empire’s reach, evidence that its armies and administrators could extract wonders from the farthest provinces and deliver them to the crowd. That symbolism kept the venationes at the heart of public entertainment long after the gladiator had become a memory.

The phenomenon was not confined to the capital. The study emphasizes that this massive spectacle industry spread throughout the Roman Empire, including Hispania, the Iberian Peninsula that remains one of the richest archaeological landscapes for Roman arena culture. A prime example is the colossal amphitheater at Italica, near modern Santiponce in the province of Seville, one of the largest such structures in the entire Empire. Its sheer scale is astonishing given its setting: the building was capable of hosting the full range of gladiatorial spectacles, including venationes, in a city of barely 8,000 inhabitants. That a modest urban community could support an arena of such magnitude underscores how deeply the appetite for animal spectacles penetrated provincial society, and how far the supply network of captured beasts had to extend to satisfy it.

Methodologically, the research is a literature review grounded in legal history, and its central claim is about what the law can reveal where other sources fall silent. Literary accounts and cinematic reconstructions show audiences only the final outcome in the arena, Carreño Sánchez notes, whereas an analysis of Roman law makes it possible to understand what went on behind the scenes: the management of resources, the territorial conflicts, and the enormous logistical effort required by one of the most popular spectacles of antiquity. The two constitutions of the Theodosian Code at the heart of the study, examined in her article De venatione ferarum, function as snapshots of an entire industry, capturing in legal language the soldiers, trackers, provincial treasurers, transport convoys, and commanders whose coordinated work made the games possible.

The broader significance of the work lies in reframing Roman entertainment as an administrative and ecological enterprise. The decline of big cat populations in late antiquity, the imperial monopoly established in response, the militarization of wildlife capture, and the fiscal strains of long-distance animal transport together sketch a picture of an empire managing a natural resource to exhaustion. The venationes, in this reading, were not simply cruelty staged as spectacle; they were the visible tip of a system that connected frontier ecology, military logistics, provincial finance, and imperial ideology. By reading the legal codes closely, the UC3M study recovers the voices of the clerks, commanders, and communities who paid for the lions, moved them, and answered for them in gold, offering historians a far richer account of how Rome put wild beasts in the sand than any arena fresco or Hollywood epic ever could.

Subject of Research: Legal and logistical regulation of wild animal capture and transport for public spectacles in the Roman Empire

Article Title: A UC3M study reveals the military apparatus and laws that made it possible for wild beasts to be brought into the amphitheaters

Article References: A UC3M study reveals the military apparatus and laws that made it possible for wild beasts to be brought into the amphitheaters. (n.d.). Original publication

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: Not provided

Keywords: Roman Empire, venationes, Roman law, Theodosian Code, amphitheaters, lions, Roman army, imperial monopoly, animal transport, Hispania, Italica, late antiquity