PERGAMUM pûr’ gə məm (Πέργαμος, G4307). Pergamum is located fifteen m. from the Aegean sea, with the hills around Smyrna and Lesbos in distant view, on a great humped hill that dominates the Caicus plain. This eminence formed Pergamum’s first acropolis. The foundation of the city was contemporary with the beginnings of urban life in Asia, but little is known of the first centuries. It is certainly pre-Gr. in origin, and its name pre-Gr. Also applied to Troy, it means “a citadel,” and Pergamum was preeminently that. Coinage goes back to the 5th cent. before Christ. The city’s royal estate goes back to the year 282 b.c., when Philetaerus threw off allegiance to Lysimachus, who ruled the land after the breakup of Alexander’s empire. Philetaerus’ dynasty endured only twenty years, but the kingdom of Pergamum thus founded lasted until 133 b.c., almost exactly a cent. and a half. Over this time, the frontiers advanced or retreated as the power of the greater rival successor-state, Syria, ebbed or flowed. When Rome was forced to intervene in Asia Minor, to protect her eastern flank from the imperialism of Antiochus of Syria, Pergamum was a useful ally, and an equally useful buffer state, when Antiochus was decisively checked in 190 b.c. at the battle of Magnesia. It was then that Pergamum reached its highest point of power. The major event of the early royal history of Pergamum was the struggle against the Gallic tribes, who left their name in Galatia.
Like Smyrna, Pergamum read well the signs of history, and when Attalus III bequeathed the kingdom to Rome in 133 b.c., the legacy was no doubt approved by his people, who saw little future for independence in the growing chaos of the Middle E. It was shrewd policy to seek early protection, as the Mediterranean world moved obviously nearer to an era of great rivalries and power politics on a far grander scale than the centuries of the citystates had known. Rome, in such peril, was the better wager. The Republic saw the advantage of a strong bridgehead beyond the Aegean, accepted the royal bequest, and organized the kingdom of Pergamum into the Province of Asia. For another two and a half centuries, Pergamum remained Rome’s official center in the province. The city was therefore a seat of sovereign government for four full centuries.
Over a period of almost a cent., Pergamum has been extensively and expertly excavated, and it is possible to gain a better picture of the city, with its sweep of temples and public buildings crowned by the great altar to Zeus, than of any other Asian city.
The imperial cult, the worship of the spirit of Rome and of the emperor, with its loyalty test of formal incense burnt at the foot of Caesar’s statue, found a center, appropriately enough, in Pergamum, and colored the city’s life. The first temple of the cult was located there in 29 b.c., and is shown as a device on coins down to the principate of Trajan at the end of the 1st cent. In Trajan’s honor a second temple was built, and a third was dedicated to Severus. Only the first temple functioned when John wrote his letter from Patmos, but its presence and its ritual was enough to make Rome’s authority oppressively apparent in the city. In his imagery of One “who has the sharp two-edged sword,” John wrote in reference to the imperial power that challenged Christianity so strongly in this important center of the State religion (Rev 2:12-17).
The implied hostility to Rome shows how far the clash of Church and State had gone. It is a far cry from Paul who, a generation before, had hoped that the Empire might find in Christianity the social and political cement, which imperial authority had sought since Augustus’ day, to bind into unity the states and cities of the Mediterranean world. The Christians of Pergamum lived in the presence of the dire alternative, for Rome had made her choice, and the Christian religion had been officially proscribed for twenty years. They dwelt, says John of those who followed the faith in Pergamum, “where Satan’s throne is.”
The significance of that phrase has become apparent since archeology opened up a more detailed knowledge of the life of Pergamum and the structure of its pagan cults. Paganism lay in three strata. There was an Anatolian substratum represented by the worship of Dionysus, the god of vegetation, and Asklepios, the god of healing. Snakes, and the handling of reptiles, were associated, as the Bacchae of Euripides shows, with the cult of Dionysus. Snakes were the symbol of Asklepios. A Pergamenian coin shows the emperor Caracalla standing spear in hand before a great serpent twined around a bending sapling. He raises his right hand in the salute that Hitler’s Nazis brought back to another world. Pausanias, who has left descriptions of his journeys in the Mediterranean lands, describes the same god enthroned with a staff in one hand, and the other on the head of a serpent. Christians must thus have found the cult of the god of healing, and his serpent-infested temple, peculiarly revolting.
Pausanias in his account of Pergamum, also described the throne-like altar to Zeus on the top of the crag above the city. It was discovered in 1871 and taken to Germany, where it stands reconstructed today in the East Berlin Museum. The structure, a perron of steps leading to a great altar, commemorated the defeat of a Gallic invasion two centuries before. The wandering Celts who reached Rome and Delphi in the era of their folk-wanderings also infiltrated Asia Minor. Pergamum, strong enough to drive them off, celebrated the deliverance with the altar to Zeus. Its frieze represents the gods of Olympus battling with the giants shown in the sculpture as a brood of muscular warriors with snake-like tails. The Zeus to whom the altar was dedicated was called Zeus the Savior, another offense to Christian minds. Perhaps the altar was actually the “Satan’s throne” of the letter’s apocalyptic imagery (Rev 2:13).
The second stratum in Pergamum’s religious history, represented by the Hel. kingdom, shows the worship of Zeus and Athene. The third stratum represents the Rom. period and the imperial cult. Perhaps Antipater, the Antipas of the letter, was the first to suffer martyrdom for rejection of the cult. He died by burning in a brazen bull, says tradition, in Domitian’s day, and he must have been one of many in this place of pervading paganism. Wherever the Christian turned, he met the flaunting symbols of the things he hated. It perhaps helped to realize that One knew “where he lived,” but for those whose daily lot it was to live in such oppressive proximity to the mingled cults of paganism, there was deep temptation to compromise.
The spirit of the city’s paganism prompted this. Pergamum synthetized the deities of three races, and of three successive periods in the history of the State. There were pagans, no doubt, who thought that their complex scheme of worship could absorb yet another faith. There were also Christians who thought that the notion was not without merit. Could Christianity avoid a head-on collision with the pagan world, at least with the simple imperial cult, by a little judicious compromise? The thought had its temptation in a place where dissent was more likely to be viewed with hostility than anywhere else in Asia. Perhaps Dionysus, Asklepios, Athene, and Zeus could be avoided as objects of worship, impossible though it was to escape their presence in shrine and image. To avoid the worship of the emperor in the center of his cult, where that worship was thought to conflict with no other, and to be also a test of loyalty, was not so simple.
Hence, the popularity of the sect of “the Nicolaitans” in Pergamum. Little is known about them, but it is clear enough that they were those who thought that a measure of compromise could be worked out, perhaps only in the comparatively harmless sphere of the state cult. The apostles saw with clarity that no compromise at all was possible. Allow the pinch of incense before the emperor, and the landslide would begin. The guild-feasts would follow, a problem for Christians in Thyatira. Then would come the immoralities of Corinth’s worship of Aphrodite and the breakdown of Christian morality—the whole challenging distinctiveness of the Christian faith, the whole purpose of its being.
Those who stood firm, in spite of misunderstanding, misrepresentation, the harsh criticism of less rigid friends, and the fierce resentment of a corrupt society, held and passed on the integrity of the faith. Nowhere was it more difficult to stand thus lonely and execrated than in Pergamum, where Christianity and Caesarism confronted each other face to face.
Bibliography G. Cardinali, Il regno di Pergamo (1906); A. H. M. Jones, The Cities of the Eastern Roman Provinces (1937); M. Rostovtzeff, The Hellenistic World (1941).