Laudator Temporis Acti

Ramsay MacMullen, Paganism in the Roman Empire (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1981), p. 63 with note on p. 176:

This is the kind of mixed bag of facts that renders general statements about religious life so hard to frame or so easily criticized if they are framed too narrowly. What, for instance, can one make of the assertion that oracles, "it is true, enjoyed a recovery in popularity in the second century"—for which a single inscription is cited, recording help sought by a city in Sardinia from Apollo in Claros?⁹ Such characterizing of the feelings and thoughts of fifty million people on any day out of thirty-six thousand has something ludicrous about it, as if one were to measure the pulse of the western world on the basis of a single headline in the St. Albans Sentinel. Worse than that, perhaps: since religious feelings are not something to talk about in public, in some of their aspects, they must prove all the harder to assess from the outside. The more need for care.

9. Cumont (1929) 285, quoting Taramelli. Taramelli in fact ventures no indication of date for the inscription, and it is actually not of the second century. Cumont goes on to claim, here adducing no facts at all, that oracles "in the 3rd century fell under complete disbelief."

Cumont (1929) = Franz Cumont, Les religions orientales dans le paganisme romain, 4th ed. (Paris: Librairie Orientaliste Paul Geuthner, 1929).

Taramelli = Antonio Taramelli, "Inscrizione romana dell'antica Nora, ricordante l'oracolo di Apollo Clario," Notizie degli Scavi di Antichità, ser. 6, IV (1928) 254-255 (Dis deabusque / secundum interpreta/tionem oraculi Clari / Apollinis).