"Enslavement to fate," "cosmic pessimism" and other explorations of the Late Roman psyche: A brief history of a historiographical trend

Abstract

This article investigates the intellectual connections within a community of international scholars active in the first half of this century. Franz Cumont, André-Jean Festugière, E. R. Dodds and Arthur Darby Nock all shared a conceptual and methodological approach to the religious "attitudes" of the Late Roman period. These scholars maintained that "cosmic pessimism" or a sense of having been "enslaved" by the inexorable influence of fate resulted in a religious environment that gave rise to various soteriologically oriented religious movements, of which Christianity served as the culmination. This article reviews the assessments and methods of this cadre of scholars, noting the influence of "enslavement to fate" and "cosmic pessimism" as tropes in later scholarship, and briefly offers an alternate way to understand religion and religions in Roman antiquity.