A Merchant-Geographer's Identity? Untangling the Layers of Religious Affinity in the 'Expositio Totius Mundi et Gentium' (original) (raw)
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This essaye xamines earlyC hristian literaturea se vidence for at rend in religious movements with an increasinglyl iteraryo ro therwise intellectual profile. Self-proclaimed authorities on Christ clustered in the urban spaces of the empire wheret hey joined and rivaled assorted aspirings pecialists who boasted ar angeo fs kills and, in some cases, derivedw isdom or mysteries from the samewritings. All partook in abroader phenomenon of religious innovation that was propelled by urban resources: the book industry,agrowth in libraries, the heightened status of writings, and awidespread enthusiasm for paideia. Iargue that Christian authorsare prime,ifunexceptional, examples of this more general religious development.Thus situated, their writingshold important clues for theorizing the activities of non-Christian religious actors and groups that are less well attested in this earlyp eriod.
Memories of the Subaltern: 'Ethnicising Religion' in Roman Imperial Literature, c. 100-300
The context of the Roman Empire, in addition to fostering the tradition of writing about the ‘barbarian’ groups outside the empire, proved to be a fertile ground ethnographical or ‘ethnographicising’ accounts about the provincial groups and their past. But why was the religious past of the provincial groups still ‘good to think with’ in the second or third centuries of the empire? What were the primary aims for writers in a wide variety of genres and registers as they referred to the religious practices and antiquities of provincial – essentially subaltern – groups in an ‘ethnicising’ fashion? What difference did the spread of Christianity, with its strong and exclusionary religion-based but occasionally ‘ethnicised’ identity, make? My paper will focus upon the Roman discourse that sought to portray the provincial groups as ‘remembering’ their pre-Roman pasts even in the context of the High and Late Empire. Memory of the past cults and heroes could, on occasion, be portrayed as a holding of grudge towards the Romans, and some uprisings in the provinces seem to have been imagined to have strong religious, even millenarian, motivations. Generally, however, the empire of peoples, regions, and practices was much more useful for rhetorical or knowledge-ordering purposes if its varietas could be maintained – but for this purpose, it was necessary to relegate the provincials to their ‘ethnic’ roles, about which centuries-earlier material could still be circulated. Such a mind-set is essentially colonial, and thus amenable to readings informed by Subaltern Studies, but it can usefully be studied from the point of view of the Greco-Roman tradition of religious ethnography – or perhaps more aptly ‘ethnographicising outgroup religiosities’. This is the particular ‘relocation of religion’ that my paper explores. The portrayal of what provincials ‘remember’ about their past displays even broader linkages when bearing in mind that during the second and third centuries the concept of religious communities as an ethnos became a more widespread notion – partly through the increasing Judeo-Christian influence, as well as the recirculation of originally Hellenistic ideas about ‘barbarian wise men’. Both inside and outside the empire, peoples’ religious practices and antiquities were suspended in a rhetorical state of ahistoricity, while the only religious change imaginable was the inexorable progress of Christianity’s linear time. For the pagan writers, on the other hand, exploration of the religious traditions of their own past or those of the far-away foreign groups’ supposed present (as in the case of the Brahmans) appeared as an attractive, prestige-building option.
2011 - A Companion to Roman Religion
2007
Rome matters. Roman religion is, basically, the religion of one of the hundreds of Mediterranean city states. Many features of this type of territorially bound religion, centred around a politically independent community, characterise Roman religion down to the end of antiquity. However, Roman cults, gods, iconography, rituals, texts, were exported to many places throughout the Roman Empire. A change of the point of view produces similarly ambivalent results. Many of the religious traditions or concepts that attracted people in Rome originated outside of Rome and were shared by many non-Romans. At the same time, even the major religious traditions of antiquity gained distinct features at Rome and these Roman varieties informed developments outside Rome. After all, Rome was a capital, politically for the Imperium Romanum, religiously not only for the cult of the Capitoline triad, but for Isis or Christianity as well. It is one of the many attractions of the theme of “Roman religion” that in dealing with the traditions of a metropolis (and its growing “hinterland”) we are able to look into transformations reaching far beyond. At the same time we are reminded of one of the truths of modern globalisation: place and local culture matters. Religion matters. Ancient religion is not longer the object of – at best – antiquarian research, interested in “Altertümer” and pre-rational behaviour, i. e. the European exotic. With the cultural and the following “turns,” religious institutions, signs and practices, religious mentalities and language, have come to the centre of mainstream historical and literary studies. Thus, analysis of religion itself can no longer be handled as an isolated sector of culture but has to be contextualized within its cultural, social, and economic setting and has to be analysed for its political function and its use in legitimating power or resistance. Aims The volume aims to help its readers - put the manifold religious symbols, discourses, practices, which they encounter in literally every field of ancient studies, into a larger framework; - offer a broad range of methodological approaches to seemingly intransigent phenomena; the presuppositions and limits of these approaches will be made explicit; - offer basic information about the most important religious symbols and institutions; and - attempt at coherent narratives, yet not to formulate new orthodoxies, but rather to suggest that narrative is an important form of historical explanation and a didactically useful tool.
Gremium, 2022
The synthesis edited by Jörg Rüpke and Greg Woolf and authored with seven further authors represents the latest volume in the famous Kohlhammer series on World Religions, one of the oldest and most prestigious series on history of religions in German Religionswissenschaft. The volume entitled Religion in the Roman Empire (and not "Roman religion" in the empire, which is a great difference as we will see) presents the major religious changes, transformations, and specificities of religious communication occurred in the first four centuries of our common era. The book is the result of a fruitful and paradigmatic collaboration between the ERC Advanced Grant winner Jörg Rüpke and his team from Erfurt (Lived Ancient Religion project 2012-2017) and Greg Woolf, who had a research project focusing on sanctuaries and religious experience in the ancient world in the Max Weber Kolleg. 1 This book-as most of the volumes of the series-intends to be a companion, a synthesis and detailed introduction in the topic, addressing the greater public, students but also the specialists. The book proposes also a new methodological approach, well-known already in the previous, paradigmatic books on Lived Ancient Religion: the relativisation of ancient Roman religiosity, a special focus on individual religion, urban religion and citification of religion, and the appropriation of various religious ideas in the context of an empire. The introduction by Jörg Rüpke and Greg Woolf also proposed a relativisation of the literary sources, interpreted here as a "momentary crystallization of discourse" and not as authoritative sources, as it was interpreted in the 19th century and early 20th century scholarship. The authors emphasize also, that the contemporary approaches of social sciences can open new doors in the research of ancient Roman religion too. The second part of the introduction is focusing on the problematic terminology of
2006 - Urban Religion and Imperial Expansion: Priesthoods in the lex Ursonensis
There is no doubt that -in a certain sense -the Imperium Romanum, the ancient Mediterranean and the many regions beyond dominated by the Romans, formed a space of intensive cultural interaction. Any look at the history of religion in Roman times could confirm that. Dozens of volumes of the Études préliminaires aux religions orientales dans l'empire romain, EPRO, collected the evidence for the diffusion of cults from different religious centres. A certain religious homogeneity existed. People travelling from one end of the empire to another were able to recognize local religious practices like animal sacrifice, could identify temples, know about religious concepts like 'priests'. This homogeneity was furthered by the political integration, but its development preceded the Roman empire. Cultural interaction from Mycenean and Phoenician times onwards had prepared for this situation. At the same time it is difficult to talk about the borders of this cultural space and about its differentia specifica. Judging from the texts, it was difficult for the Romans to recognize what we would call Indian religion, 1 even if the reception of Mediterranean statuary and iconography radically influenced the development of Buddhism as the Begram treasure and Gandhara art or the new imperial culture of the Kushan and even the Gupta empire at the eastern end of central India attest. 2 At the same time, Greek and Roman ethnography managed to identify a lot of cultural practices of Celtic and Germanic tribes as "religion". Again, the degree of cultural interaction is even more prominent if judged by the reception and assimilation of Mediterranean cultural techniques by Scandinavians. 3