Marnас is an otherwise obscure deity whose name appears on remarkably few provincial bronzes from Asia Minor, making its presence in the Ephesian civic coinage under Domitian a genuine puzzle. The cult connections are uncertain — the name has been linked to a Syrian rain-god worshipped at Gaza, though how or whether that association reached Ephesus remains unresolved in the scholarship.
Domitian's reign saw aggressive intervention in provincial religious life, and Ephesus was a city acutely sensitive to imperial favor, having competed fiercely with Smyrna and Pergamon for the title of neokoros.
Marnас is an otherwise obscure deity whose name appears on remarkably few provincial bronzes from Asia Minor, making its presence in the Ephesian civic coinage under Domitian a genuine puzzle. The cult connections are uncertain — the name has been linked to a Syrian rain-god worshipped at Gaza, though how or whether that association reached Ephesus remains unresolved in the scholarship.
Domitian's reign saw aggressive intervention in provincial religious life, and Ephesus was a city acutely sensitive to imperial favor, having competed fiercely with Smyrna and Pergamon for the title of neokoros.