Over the past two decades, the topic of religious violence has received considerable scholarly attention, only partly in response to the role of religious extremism in the Balkan conflicts during the 1990s and the attacks on New York and Washington, DC, in 2001. Of particular concern has been what ways, if any, religious commitments are responsible for the performance of violence, as well as whether “religious violence” is a phrase that obscures more than it reveals. It is of no surprise that scholars of Mediterranean antiquity have also turned to literary sources associated with the Greco-Roman world to ask these and related questions concerning the historical legacy of religious conflict and violence. Religious Violence in the Ancient World enters this ongoing discussion, offering a series of interventions developed from a conference on the topic held at the Université de Montréal and the University of Ottawa in September 2017.What emerges from its 18 chapters (including the volume’s introduction) is a lively and highly productive conversation that engages not only the “variety of forms” religious violence took in antiquity but also the “diversity of factors” (13) that contributed to violence. More importantly, it requires us not to think of religious violence as a self-evident category that assumes some acts of violence are religiously motivated or sanctioned but rather to consider how acts and discourses of violence intersect with discourse about religion or cult practice. To fully consider these complex dynamics, the editors push their contributors and readers to expand their investigation beyond physical, or direct, violence to include structural and cultural violence. In the process, the contributors also make their discussions—and disagreements—about religion, violence, and religious violence as heuristic categories transparent. In this regard, the volume follows the arguments previously advanced by other recent studies on religious conflict and violence, some of whose contributors also contributed to the current volume.1 Yet, it also takes those previous efforts further by placing evidence from the earlier periods of Greek and Roman history in conversation with evidence from Late Antiquity.Following a general introduction and two chapters devoted to methodology, the first half of the volume focuses on violence targeting those marked by civic or imperial authorities as religious outsiders up to the reign of Constantine. The second half, introduced by two chapters that consider the changed social context of Late Antiquity, presents more varied landscapes of violence from the later fourth through sixth centuries. While each of the chapters has much to offer on its own, the dialogue across the volume offers important insights for scholars working in the ancient world across disciplines and encourages them to approach evidence about religious violence (and even religion) with greater nuance and texture.In their introduction, for example, Jitske Dijkstra and Christian Raschle outline the complex ways violence intersects with religion and affirm recent scholarly work to dismantle a notion traceable to David Hume, Edward Gibbon, and other early modern thinkers that monotheism is inherently intolerant and consequently more prone to violence. Several chapters address this inheritance directly, noting prominent, frequently cited counter examples (the Bacchanalia affair; the destruction of altars for Isis; and the expulsion and suppression from Rome of astrologers, Jews, and Christians), examples that, as Andreas Bendlin laments, too often “merely … roughen the edges of the irenic portrait of Roman religion one encounters all too often” (138). The contributors, however, largely resist recreating this portrait by focusing on the ways that Greeks and Romans invoked the gods or concerns about cult in political disputes, on the one hand, and by refusing simplistic assumptions about the causal relationship between not only monotheism but also religion and violence, on the other.These two moves allow other important considerations to emerge. One of the most significant is that occasions of what could be classified as religious violence also involved concerns or motivations about matters outside the immediate locations of cult practice. For example, the regulation or suppression of particular cult activities gave action to broader anxieties about the influence of foreigners within a city, as Jan Bremmer argues was the case in the Athenian trial of the non-Athenian woman Phryne. While xenophobia may similarly have been operative in the restrictions placed on the Isis cult in Rome, the limitations placed on the cult also functioned as political tools within the power contests of the Roman elite, as Christian Raschle observes. These forms of cultural and structural violence, which dominate the case studies in the first half of the volume, reveal that such violence served as a tool for maintaining civic order (and, it should be noted, provided a performative space for individuals and parties seeking to control the definition of civic order).The disciplinary aspect of violence becomes more pronounced in the second half of the volume, as case examples focus more on direct violence. In this context, Peter Van Nuffelen demonstrates that persuasion and coercion were not antitheses in late antique political philosophy but rather complementary tools for discipline, not only for individuals but also for communities. Persuasion could only work if the audience was receptive, and coercion, which could manifest as violence, was an important method for bringing an audience into a receptive state. What Van Nuffelen observes for Augustine’s treatment of Donatists can also be drawn out in other examples presented in the volume, even if the acts of persuasion and coercion intersect with other factors. Here, I think particularly of the aforementioned regulation of the Isis cult as an effort to mitigate destabilization among the elite, as well as ascetic violence examined in Fabrizio Vecoli’s chapter wherein the violence exercised to bring the local political body into order was turned toward one’s own body as a preparatory practice for ascent to God.In other words, as multiple contributors argue, religious violence cannot be an analytical category on its own. Rather, it is necessary to consider how interest in cult practice overlaps with other concerns and commitments (ethnic, civic, economic) or is used to support them. Even so, violence can take on religious significance, even becoming crucial for defining a social group in religious terms. James Rives offers as one example the role animal sacrifice assumes in marking Christian identity during the Decian Persecution in the mid-third century (not earlier, as often presented). Christians were not targeted because they rejected animal sacrifice, Rives argues; rather, they adopted the performative rejection of sacrifice because Decius was using it as a “marker of Roman imperial identity” (189). The narratives surrounding this seemingly retaliatory violence set the stage for the later Christian communities examined, discussed in chapters by Elizabeth DePalma Digeser and Christine Shephardson. The former notes that Gallic Christians in the fourth century, including Lactantius, imagine Constantine as the divine avenging warrior of Revelation, whereas the latter explores how these narratives reappear among fifth- and sixth-century anti-Chalcedonian Christians, who present their own suffering at the hands of Chalcedonian authorities as martyrdoms.Of course, questions arise concerning the relationship between literary representations of violence and real acts of violence. They have been particularly prominent in studies of late antique literature, in which violence seems endemic and the connections between religion and violence seem stronger. But, as Wendy Mayer notes, many recent studies have been careful to decouple “the rhetoric of religious violence from the historical reality” (261). The ideological framing of sources is clearest when we have multiple sources for an event, and even more so when later sources reshape earlier ones (see, for example, Dijkstra’s discussion of the destruction of Alexandria’s Serapeum in 415 CE). But, as Steve Mason reminds us in his examination of Josephus’s account of simultaneous massacres in Jerusalem and Caesarea in 66 CE, this point is also true for events for which we have only a single source. Attending to the literary constructions of violence, which themselves may constitute performances of cultural violence, does not erase the fact that direct violence occurred. But the constructed nature of our literary sources makes it difficult to reconstruct the circumstances and dynamics of direct violence without completely evacuating the significance of the evidence. Mayer’s approach is to consider how the rhetoric of violence can acquire its own agency, decoupled from the author’s intent. Violent rhetoric can lead to acts of violence, but it can also provide models for contemporary responses to violence (see especially Hans Kippenberg’s discussion of “sacred prefigurations,” 37).As with any book, even one of this size, there are limitations in coverage. For example, despite identifying its scope as “the ancient world” into “Late Antiquity,” the volume is only concerned about areas under broad Greek and Roman influence. Moreover, the progression of its chapters, from fifth-century BCE Athens and early imperial Rome to Judaism and then post-Constantinian Christianity, replicates a teleological narrative, even as the contributors are clearly resisting the narrative of degeneration from pagan tolerance to Christian intolerance. Including rabbinic, Persian, or Ethiopian sources could have disrupted this teleological tendency, while also providing a richer account of the performance of violence and its intersection with religion in Late Antiquity. Additionally, while several chapters, particularly those by Bremmer, Mayer, and Dijkstra, acknowledge the disparity between textual claims about the destruction of temples and the available archaeological evidence, and Erika Manders’s chapter examines numismatic evidence to consider motives behind the Diocletian Persecution, most of the contributions focus primarily or exclusively on textual evidence. More extensive discussion of the available material evidence would have added further texture to the volume’s already rich discussion.Nonetheless, Religious Violence in the Ancient World offers important contributions for the study of antiquity, not only for understanding the intersection of religion and violence but also for religion broadly. The contributors’ careful examinations of categories, attention to social and political contingencies surrounding instances of violence, and consideration of inherited representations of violence produce nuanced readings of the available evidence. Even its moments of disagreement are productive dialogues that push us to consider how analytical categories shape scholarly interpretations.2 While some readers will be attracted to the volume by the topic addressed in a particular chapter, I highly recommend reading the volume in its entirety and allowing its cross-conversations to speak.