The Cults of the Roman EmpireThis book is about the multiplicity of gods and religions that characterized the Roman world before Constantine. It was not the noble gods such as Jove, Apollo and Diana, who were crucial to the lives of the common people in the empire, but gods of an altogether more earthly, earthy level, whose rituals and observances may now seem bizarre. The book opens with an account of the nature of popular religion and the way in which the gods and myths of