Reconstructing Honor in Roman Philippi: Carmen Christi as Cursus Pudorum. By JOSEPH H. HELLERMAN.

Abstract

This is an interesting book that recasts the interpretation of aspects of Acts 16 and Philippians in terms of issues of honour. To get to the point (very late on in the book) of being able to argue his case on these passages, Hellerman gives us an unusual mixture of rather general introduction and very specific, and illuminating, use of inscriptions from Philippi. There is a chapter on Roman social organization, stressing stratification, followed by one on preoccupation with honour and the cursus honorum. This chapter argues that structures analogous to the senatorial cursus were present at many levels of society, including ones well below the élite. The analogy works well for cases which clearly do involve replication of life at Rome: municipal politics and, at one further remove, many voluntary associations. However, Hellerman sometimes casts the net too widely (such as the use of Polybius on p. 72). Chapter 3 is on Philippi, the Roman army, and the imperial cult. He illustrates these last two topics by use of Philippian inscriptions, drawn from Peter Pilhofer, Philippi. Band II: Katalog der Inschriften von Philippi (Tubingen: J. C. B. Mohr, 2000).