I. van der Graaff and S.J.R. Ellis "Minerva, urban defenses, and the continuity of cult at Pompeii" (original) (raw)
Related papers
Review of Ch. Williamson, Urban Rituals in Sacred Landscapes in Hellenistic Asia Minor, Leiden 2021
ARYS, 2023
This book provides an interdisciplinary discussion of the life of four sanctuaries in ancient Caria and their relationship with the cities that came to exert control over them in the Hellenistic period. The main purpose of the book is summarised by the question of "why autochthonous, local or regional sanctuaries were so vital to the development of poleis in Hellenistic Asia Minor even though they were located at great distances from the urban center" (p. 411). This implies envisaging city-sanctuary relationships as bidirectional, considering both the way cities appropriated and functionalised peripheral sanctuaries and their administration within a civic framework and how these sanctuaries contributed, both physically and symbolically, to the process of development and identity building of a growing city. The selected case studies-Mylasa WILLIAMSON, CHRISTINA G.
2015
Rome rapidly expanded in the Republican period, and conquered the entire Italian peninsula with its wide variety of city-states and tribes. The impact of Roman imperialism and expansionism on religious life in the newly incorporated areas has often been regarded as minimal, following the axiom of Roman ‘religious tolerance’. However, literary and epigraphic evidence points at the political and ideological importance of cult sites especially in conflict situations. Moreover, during the period of conquest and political incorporation, incisive changes in religious practices as well as in the cult sites where these were performed, are documented all over the peninsula. The causality between Roman expansionism and these trends is much discussed, and the ‘religious Romanization’ of Italy is currently a key debate. This volume explores the development of religious practices and cult places in the conquered Italic areas, and the role of Rome and its colonies in it. Rather than denying Roman impact and intentionality altogether, it assesses the potential influences of Roman expansionism on the sacred landscapes of ancient Italy in wide and variegated terms. The studies brought together in this volume draw on different types of evidence and approaches, reflecting also the diversity of different national and disciplinary traditions and schools of thought that often have remained isolated in current debates. It presents important new evidence from the inland Italic areas, as well as synthetic discussions addressing key scholarly controversies, such as the agency of Roman magistrates and the role of Roman colonization in ritual change and votive practices. By focusing on the dynamic interaction between authorities, local communities and wider trends in Hellenistic societies, the volume opens new perspectives on religious change in Italy and its relationship to the rise of Rome. BICS SUPPLEMENT 132 ISBN 978-1-905670-58-1 viii + 332 pp, colour and black and white images, index http://store.london.ac.uk/browse/extra\_info.asp?compid=1&modid=1&deptid=158&catid=86&prodid=1219&searchresults=1
Ritual Form and Urban Space in Early Modern Rome
Late Medieval and Early Modern Ritual Studies in Italian Urban Culture, 2013
This paper considers the role of ritual forms in presaging, even constructing, early modern Rome’s urban development. Its overarching argument is that processional routes, arches, floats, decorations, and performances often formed the living tissue from which new art, architecture, and urbanism drew in its reinvention of Rome. These evanescent and ephemeral forms, through the familiarity of a calendar repetition, forged an identity with the urban spaces in which they took place, in the eyes of their viewers. Inexorably, ritual marked the city’s material fabric with ‘memorative’ spaces, imbued with the collective memories of their iterative enactment. Much of the change in ritual activity in early modern Rome was driven by its popes, as was the city’s urban development. This intertwining of ritual and urban forms in the hands of the papacy worked to remake Rome’s civic fabric in the image of the popes. Spaces reclaimed by reinvented ritual forms became then permanently reconfigured by an attendant architecture, art, and urbanism. Key ritual spaces were widened, regularised, paved, in concert with their ceremonial roles; their surrounding buildings drawn into a choreographed urban scenography by means of new façades and fountains; while the memory of ritual decoration was latent within the forms of their sculptural ornament. Early modern Rome’s urban developments thus embodied in perpetuity the ritual histories out of which they grew. Finally, the paper argues for the potency of visual cultures, both ritual and artistic, in reinventing the identities of urban space.
Divine Politics: Temple Construction in Archaic Rome.
Temples and temple building have, unsurprisingly, featured prominently in recent discussions on religion and the state in Archaic Rome. As the most apparent and imposing archaeological remnants of the early city, their impact and influence on our understanding of early Rome go without saying. However, increasing insight into their construction, accessible through both the archaeology and more critical approaches to the literature, has hinted at new aspects of Central Italy’s society, culture, and economy. In particular, evidence increasingly suggests that the construction of temples in sixth century BC Rome was not only part of a much wider cultural discourse than usually thought, as discussed in works like Hopkins 2016 ‘Genesis of Roman Architecture’, but the construction of these structures was part of an important negotiation between the growing urban centres and a wider, regional elite which seems to have had a fluid, and often ephemeral, connection to the community. This paper will discuss this negotiation, and the effects that the resulting temple construction had upon the state and religion in Archaic Rome. In particular it will explore how the construction of temples helped to transform both space and religion in Archaic Rome, how these elites (many of whom were ‘outsiders’) were able to inform and influence these ‘internal’ transformations, and how temples are indicative of the social and communal hierarchies which were being formed within central Italy, notably though elite competition. Paper presented as a part of the conference at Princeton University on 'Religion and the State in Classical Greece and Rome' September 2017.