What’s in a name? : Cocidius and the Epigraphy of Local Deities in the Roman Empire

Cousins, Eleri (2024) What’s in a name? : Cocidius and the Epigraphy of Local Deities in the Roman Empire. Religion in the Roman Empire. ISSN 2199-4471 (In Press)

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Abstract

Local cults and regional deities in the Roman provinces, especially the northwest provinces, are often known primarily through epigraphic evidence. This presents methodological challenges for reconstructing the social functions of local gods. Scholarship has often turned to etymological analyses of theonyms that are linguistically Celtic or Germanic in origin, or to aligning names on inscriptions with unlabelled local iconographies or with material that is geographically or chronologically remote from the inscriptions’ Roman provincial context. These methods, often rooted in flawed conceptions of ‘Celtic’ culture in the western provinces, are understandable but frequently problematic attempts to ‘make more’ of our fragmentary evidence. In this article, I use the cult of Cocidius, a god attested primarily through epigraphy from Hadrian’s Wall, to explore a more holistic approach to small bodies of epigraphic material. In the case of Cocidius, this approach allows us to see how the god’s epigraphy was being harnessed by the Roman army to reinforce landscapes of militarized power and place. More broadly, this case study offers a road map toward a more nuanced and contextualized understanding of the diverse social roles of regional gods in the Roman provinces, and how we can access those roles through epigraphy.