Christopher A. FRILINGOS. Spectacles of Empire: Monsters, Martyrs, and the Book of Revelation. (Divinations: Rereading Late Ancient Religion.) Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. 2004. Pp. 184 and ANDREW BELL. Spectacular Power in Greek and Roman Politics. New York: Oxford University Press. 2004. Pp. vi, 289

Abstract

It would be hard to find two books on the same topic—spectacle in the ancient Mediterranean—that differed more. Andrew Bell focuses on “the impress of presentations of power upon the senses, emotions and memories of all citizens, … including the complicitousness, of civic audiences in determining and sustaining the authority of political leadership” (p. 11). Bell's interest lies in the “normative habits” that guided how citizens viewed their leaders in city-states where there was competition among leading actors that precluded a monopoly of the attentions of their humbler fellow citizens; hence, his book focuses on democratic Athens and republican Rome, ending with the arrival of Caesarism (p. 15). This is pretty much when Christopher A. Frilingos's book begins; like Bell, Frilingos is interested in the political dimensions of spectacles, but his aim is to elucidate The Book of Revelation, the visions of John of Patmos. But, Frilingos contends, Revelation must be read not simply as a critique of the dominant imperial order. Rather, its imagery, themes, and rhetoric need to be understood as products of Roman culture that “shared with contemporaneous texts and institutions specific techniques for defining world and self” (p. 5). Hence, for Frilingos, ancient spectacles infiltrate Revelation in ways that defy making sharp divisions between Roman and Christian. While it is informative to read these books together, the focus and approach of each is so different that I will discuss them separately. In the end of this review, I will draw some conclusions about their contribution to our understanding of ancient spectacle.