Augustan Religion and the Reshaping of Roman Memory (original) (raw)
2016 On Roman Religion: Lived Religion and the Individual in Ancient Rome
2016
“On Roman Religion” will add the perspectives of lived ancient religion and individual appropriation to the study of Roman religious institutions and ritual. Lived religion and the individual appropriations need not to be sought at the margins of orthodox religious practices, in the niches of civic religion. These phenomena are identifiable at the heart of rituals like praying, vowing, dedicating, and reading. This book confronts the very different, strategic, and even subversive forms of individual appropriation with traditions, their normative claims, and their institutional protections. Thus the precarious state of institutions and traditions comes to the fore. These are as much means of expression and creativity for their inventors and patrons as spaces and material of experience and innovation for their users and clients. Lived ancient religion is as much about variations or even outright deviance as it is about the attempts and failures to establish or change rules and roles and to communicate them via public authorities or literary discourse. It is such roles and rules, the variations and their limits, the establishment and communication to oneself and others that constitute the material under consideration in “On Roman religion”: priesthoods, practices related to images or classified as magic, literary practices. Observations of contemporary authors like Propertius or Ovid or the author of the “Shepherd of Hermas” on religious experience are analyzed. These authors, in very different ways, reflect on individual appropriation of religion among their contemporaries, and they offer these reflections to their readership or audiences. Other chapters concentrate on the role of literary texts and inscriptions in informing practionners of rituals. The chronological arch is from the second century BCE to the second century CE. “On Roman Religion”offers a history of ancient religion that is not compartimentalized into a number of confessional histories.
2007 - Religio and Religiones in Roman Thinking - Ètudes Classiques 75
Despite the continuity of the term, the concept of "religion" as used in the history of religion and contemporary political discussion, is not identical with the concept implied in the Latin word religio. 1 To explore the conceptual differences, I will analyse the meaning and maybe the history of meaning of different terms that might pertain to our concept of "religion" as far as the Roman empire is concerned. The body of texts thus analysed is limited and restricted to Latin texts, as I am interested in the main lines of thought that determined political and juridical and religious action on a larger scale.
The Journal of Ecclesiastical History, 2017
It is the opinion of the New Testament scholar, Larry Hurtado, that there has been an understandable tendency in scholarship to emphasise the similarities of earliest Christianity to its surrounding environment rather than its differences. The book under review is a short and pronounced effort to rectify that situation, as Hurtado sees it, by playing up its distinctiveness. Hurtado begins by claiming that his thesis is one that would have been appreciated by the earliest pagan writers on Christianity, men like Suetonius, Tacitus, Pliny, Galen, Lucian and especially Celsus. They were clear, Hurtado contends, that Christians were different from other religious groups, and for some dangerously different. This difference is the subject of the next four chapters. Hurtado's book is a fluently written, accessible volume, and he writes for a broader audience than that for the scholarly monograph. This means that much of what he has to say about Christian distinctiveness is probably well known to specialists: Christian religious exclusivism is played up, as is the non-ethnic character of Christian affiliation (it is an important claim of Hurtado that Christians broke the well-attested tie between religion and what he terms 'national' identity, something which Jews, who shared so much with Christians, broadly endorsed: 'Jewish religious identity was always connected in some way or other with the Jewish people, who were thought of in the ancient setting as a "nation"'). Reflecting his own interest in the study of the text of the New Testament and early Christian manuscripts more generally, Hurtado also emphasises the extent to which Christians were a strangely bookish group, generating a mass of literature from early on, some of which was itself distinctive in form. Significant, too, in this respect was their adoption of the codex rather than the scroll as the usual form in which they would present their works. This was a means, Hurtado maintains, of marking themselves out from others, and cannot be explained, as it often is, on purely practical grounds. Hurtado's concluding chapter is devoted to a discussion of Christian ethics. In a time when 'religion' comprised the enactment of particular rituals rather than the teaching of moral obligation, Christian insistence upon the latter was another distinctive marker. Distinctiveness was also found in aspects of Christian ethicsobjections to child exposure, and customary sexual behavior (pederasty and prostitution), among other things. He is clear, however, that in many of the things that Christians said and did, they were not necessarily that distinctive (some philosophers would have agreed with large parts of their ethical emphasis, as seems to have been the case with Galen; as did many Jews). Where Hurtado in particular locates their distinctiveness is in their desire to take such teaching to the streets and disseminate it among all in society, what some have referred to as Christian proselytism. Elements of this distinctive identity meant that there could be a considerable cost to becoming a Christian, a cost which Hurtado also marks out as a distinctive element of Christianity of the first three centuries CE. Hurtado concludes by noting that many things which we would now associate with religion arise from distinctive
2011 A Companion to Roman Religion
2011
A comprehensive treatment of the significant symbols and institutions of Roman religion, this companion places the various religious symbols, discourses, and practices, including Judaism and Christianity, into a larger framework to reveal the sprawling landscape of the Roman religion. - An innovative introduction to Roman religion - Approaches the field with a focus on the human-figures instead of the gods - Analyzes religious changes from the eighth century BC to the fourth century AD - Offers the first history of religious motifs on coins and household/everyday utensils - Presents Roman religion within its cultural, social, and historical contexts