Roman North Africa Research Articles

An archaeometric contribution to the study of ancient millstones from the Mulargia area (Sardinia, Italy) through new analytical data on volcanic raw material and archaeological items from Hellenistic and Roman North Africa

The main quarrying area of the Mulargia ignimbrite, used mainly to produce rotary millstones during the Hellenistic and Roman age, has been identified and sampled in order to update and complete the petrographic and geochemical database by employing standard analytical methods (optical microscopy and ICP-AES/MS spectrometry). The combination of petrographic and geochemical data concerning the Tertiary rhyodacitic to rhyolitic ignimbrites outcropping in central west Sardinia, previously very poor, form a helpful tool for future work on this important typology of volcanic millstones. The data bank obtained has been used to verify the geological source of eight millstones discovered in different rural settlements of Hellenistic Numidia and Roman Africa Proconsularis supposed by archaeologists to be made of ignimbrite from Mulargia. The results of the petro-archaeometric study confirmed a Sardinian origin for these millstones and represent one of the very few analytical proofs of their effective export to North Africa.

Many paths to walk. The political and economic integration of nomadic communities in Roman North Africa (I-III cent. A.D.)

The colonial image of endemic political and economic antagonism between nomadic and sedentary groups in the context of Roman North Africa should be discarded. Likewise, the rigid adherence to symbiosis and cooperation in more recent studies is based on a rather one-sided reading of anthropological literature. For the analysis of literary, epigraphic and archaeological sources, supported by insights derived from anthropology, shows that political and economic integration trajectories of nomads were much more complex, diverse, and dynamic.

Christians and their Many Identities in Late Antiquity: North Africa, 200-450 CE. By ERIC REBILLARD.

This slim but well-researched volume asks what it meant to be Christian at two different periods in Roman North Africa—how a person’s membership of the Christian church related to his social engagement and wider identity. A brief introduction sets the study within recent developments in historiography and sociology. Rebillard starts from the now common recognition that religions in Roman Africa were not the sharply demarcated groups represented in their texts by Christian clerics (whose writings sought in part to generate such divisions). While this has led to a welcome study of the interaction between Christians, Jews, and those traditionally categorized as pagans, Rebillard draws on the work of the sociologists Rogers Brubaker and Bernard Lahire to argue that study of early Christianity remains flawed through its continued treatment of religious groups as (what Brubaker terms) ‘basic constituents of social life, chief protagonists of social conflicts, and fundamental units of social analysis’ (p. 2). For Rebillard, the ‘findings of Brubaker and his students regarding ethnicity and nationhood … suggest that we should no longer assume that the behaviour of Christians was predominantly determined by their religious allegiance (despite the demands of bishops)’. Rather, we should ask ‘how and in which contexts Christianness became salient in Christians’ everyday life’ (p. 3).

Religion and Violence in Late Roman North Africa

Religion and Violence in Late Roman North Africa Clifford Ando The articles in this special section had their origin in a seminar held at the annual meeting of the American Philological Association in Seattle in January 2013. The aim of the seminar was to pay homage to Brent Shaw’s Sacred Violence: African Christians and Sectarian Hatred in the Age of Augustine, which had been published not long before.1 Shaw’s volume is more than a monumental study of the conflict of Catholic and Donatist that came to a head during the episcopate of Augustine. It is a reminder that the literary and material evidence for North Africa between the Great Persecution and death of Augustine is more voluminous than that for any other region of the empire–save perhaps northern Syria–and a call, a summons, even, to use the massive corpus of North African Latin not just for biographies of Augustine, but for social historical inquiry.2 In that spirit, the contributors, all of whom publish their seminar papers here, were asked not to review or critique Shaw’s work but to evaluate and explore the social history of violence in late Roman North Africa in light of his achievement. Catherine Conybeare, Hal Drake, Cam Grey and Noel Lenski responded to this challenge by broaching topics and offering theorizations that build upon Shaw’s work but also qualify it and in important ways assess and address some of its lacunae. Conybeare demands that we identify violence to bodies in particular as an ethical problem and observes the startling unwillingness of Augustine to describe such violence. She then takes up two features of his texts, his interest in the spaces where violence occurs and the power he seeks to assign to communal norms and public speech to constrain it, and finds echoes of this conjunction in Arendt’s concern for the geography and publicness of political action, articulated in Arendt’s work on the space of appearance. But while Conybeare’s close readings reveal how much profit might still be gleaned by close attention to Augustine’s language, she ends, like Shaw, in ethical lament and epistemic aporia. For though Conybeare provides [End Page 197] significant resources for giving moral description to what she terms “the shift from words to blows,” her respect for an enduring antinomy between speech and violence might just foreclose a properly historical-sociological account of particular crossings of that divide. For his part, Grey worries that shock and horror, to wit, ethical and aesthetic responses to violence, too often work to estop inquiry into the historical particularities of contexts for violence. Although he cites Shaw’s concern that violence is undertheorized, he declines to name violence a thing in itself. Rather, following Walter Pohl and Ari Bryen, Grey urges that we ask “what violence [was] doing in the societies” we study.3 Although, like Shaw, Grey addresses this question in part by exploring the normative codes available at the time for evaluating particular instances of violent action, he imports two distinctions toward that end that enable more fine-grained analysis: one between violence and force, the other between vertical and horizontal registers of normative evaluation. Whereas violence is irrational and illegitimate and demands ethical (and often violent) response, force is sanctioned, legitimate, and follows rationally upon authorized forms of deliberation. (Grey very usefully declines to name only physically destructive action as violent and shies from himself employing distinctions sanctioned by his objects of study, instead using the term force–violence as a catch-all.) In a vertical conversation, those in power seek to draw and enforce distinctions between legitimate and illegitimate force–violence, as between legitimate and illegitimate purveyors of such. In horizontal conversations, individuals and groups within particular localized communities evaluate and respond to violent action. Scholars in other fields engaged with legal and ethical pluralisms might analyze these dynamics somewhat differently, but Grey’s terms, which he adopts from Guy Halsall, are very well suited to a context of empire.4 Much light is thereby shed on their ethical quandaries. As Grey acutely observes, in so operating one risks collaborating in the elision of forms of violence that were noncontroversial then...

Public feasting, elite competition, and the market economy of Roman North Africa

This article explores the economy of Roman North Africa, particularly the province of Africa Proconsularis, in an attempt to illuminate how the area grew to become one of the most prosperous areas of the Roman Empire. Looking specifically at the institutional role played by competitive, ostentatious spending on public goods by elites in the region, I contend that this elite competition and the money this injected into the regional economy was a major factor in the development of market forces and monetisation throughout Roman Africa. Further, this perspective helps to explain also how the urban spaces and the agriculturally productive rural areas of Roman Africa were linked together, forming an active regional economy that operated alongside, and partly in competition with, the export-oriented economy focused on supplying the city Rome.

Shock, Horror, or Same Old Same Old? Everyday Violence in Augustine’s Africa

Recent studies of violence in the ancient Mediterranean world have stressed just how radically undertheorized the phenomenon is in modern scholarly literature. In response to this, they have identified a particular aspect or expression of violence, then used that as a foundation for generating a theoretical framework for understanding violent behavior more generally. But what relationship does general, generalized, or everyday violence have to the more reified, bounded forms of violence that have been the subject of scholarly attention to date? How should we best interpret the place of violence within communities, and its relationship to “nonviolent” means of communication and interaction? Earlier literature on the place of violence in ancient societies focused upon quantifying whether the ancient world was “more violent” than modern society. This article eschews a quantitative approach and focuses instead upon the role that violence might have played, rhetorically and strategically, in social interactions. It considers two short vignettes drawn from the writings of Augustine of Hippo and uses the consonances and dissonances between the presentation of violence in those texts to propose and problematize some theoretical positions on the strategic and heuristic value of violence in late Roman North Africa. In particular, it explores the utility of the concept of reciprocity and the ethical distinction between (reasonable or justifiable) force and (illegitimate or irrational) violence as tools for understanding the role of violence in everyday interactions in the period.

Violent Words, Violent Ways : Brent Shaw on Catholics, Donatists, and Jews in Late Roman North Africa

Violent Words, Violent Ways : Brent Shaw on Catholics, Donatists, and Jews in Late Roman North Africa

Ties of Resistance and Cooperation. Aedemon, Lusius Quietus and the Baquates

Abstract Gaius’ decision to dissolve the protectorate of Mauretania and to depose its client king, Ptolemaeus, led to the outbreak of the Revolt of Aedemon (AD 40). This paper will develop a number of innovative thoughts and hypotheses concerning the extent of this rebellion and its possible impact on the deposition of Ptolemaeus, as well as the role of the Romans in its suppression. The main aim is to explore the connection between this revolt, Trajanus’ famous general Lusius Quietus (cos. AD 117?), and the Baquates, an indigenous Mauretanian tribe. I will suggest that Lusius Quietus was descended from a chief of a (semi-)nomadic tribe who supported the Roman cause during the Revolt of Aedemon. Considering the setting and dimension of this revolt, as well as the unrest in Mauretania at the time of Lusius Quietus’ execution by Hadrianus, I argue that this tribe can be identified as the Baquates. This reconstruction suggests a long-lasting and particularly positive relationship between this tribe and Rome. It allows for a further reconsideration of the relationship between (semi-)nomadic and Roman/sedentary groups in Roman North Africa, to the detriment of one-sided analytical schemes that stress endemic hostility.

Saharan trade in the Roman period: short-, medium- and long-distance trade networks

This paper examines the evidence for Saharan trade in the Roman period in the light of recent fieldwork in the Libyan Sahara by the Fazzan Project and the Desert Migrations Project and by the Italian Mission in the Acacus. The results of these projects suggest that trade between the Roman world and the communities of the Sahara was substantially greater than believed a few years ago and highlight the transformative effect that contact with the ancient Mediterranean had on Saharan society, especially on the Garamantes of Fazzan. But this paper also argues that in focusing chiefly on trans-Saharan commerce, much previous research has misunderstood the nature and importance of Saharan trade in antiquity. Relatively few types of goods were traded all the way across the Sahara from south to north or vice-versa in the Roman period. Rather, we should be thinking principally in terms of a network of interdependent sub-systems, of short-, medium- and long-distance exchange; the trans-Saharan traffic was only one part of this network. Moreover, Saharan trade — and especially the short- and medium-distance subsystems — also provoked transformations in the frontier zones of Roman North Africa. The abundant evidence of Roman imports to Fazzan discovered by British fieldwork there also calls into question the universal assumption that trans-Saharan trade in the medieval and modern periods exceeded the scale of trans-Saharan trade in antiquity; this is based on no good evidence at all and may be entirely false. Comparison with better documented periods suggests that the Roman world was capable of absorbing a trans-Saharan slave traffic at least as large as that of the medieval period and the evidence of Roman imports points to a substantial trade, of which slaves were probably a major component, via the central routes across the Sahara. Saharan trade in antiquity was organised around a set of drivers that were very different from those of the medieval trans-Saharan trade, with a key role played by the development of a substantial agriculturally-based trading state within the Sahara itself, the Garamantes. The collapse of Saharan trade in late antiquity is related to the decline of Garamantian authority and is linked in part to the emergence of new tribal conglomerations in the frontier zones between the fourth and sixth centuries AD.

Water management in late antique North Africa: agricultural irrigation

In 1984 Brent Shaw looked at a number of issues connected with water management for irrigation in North Africa in his paper ‘Water and society in the ancient Maghrib: Technology, property and development.’ This study greatly improved our understanding of water management and exploitation in rural areas of Roman North Africa, but some of Shaw’s conclusions need to be reconsidered, particularly with reference to archaeological evidence. Important questions that need to be addressed are how water was exploited for agricultural production, and who was responsible for this; and whether or not there was a conscious policy to develop Africa’s agricultural potential either through the extension of an existing hydraulic technology or through the introduction of new water technologies. The paper investigates these problems by analysing archaeological evidence from the Kasserine survey and in particular the data from irrigation systems in the uplands and lowlands. The main focus is on late antiquity and the transition from the Roman to Vandal periods, tracing continuity in the exploitation of land and irrigation technologies. By combining the archaeology with ancient texts, and in particular a Vandal-period archive of private documents, the so-called ‘Albertini Tablets’, this investigation examines irrigation systems and the private use of water in the light of Roman legislation.

SOME THOUGHTS ON THE DEMISE OF ROMAN INFLUENCE IN NORTH AFRICA, 5th/ 6th CENTURY AD

When one thinks of the once mighty Roman Empire, a vision of the proverbial “eternal city” of Rome with its beautiful white colonnaded marble buildings comes to mind. However, Rome did not last eternally, in fact, more than 200 years before the traditional date of the “fall” of the Roman Empire in the West (AD 476), the Golden Age of Rome had shifted towards the southern shore of the Mediterranean, to the previously rather neglected provinces of North Africa. From the 2nd century AD until it was overrun by the Vandals in the 5th century, Roman North Africa enjoyed a period of unequalled prosperity; during the Vandal reign Roman influence still endured in small measure, followed by a brief renaissance under the Byzantines in the 6th century, but after the Arab conquest in the late 7th century it vanished as completely as if the Romans had never set foot in North Africa. The exceptional prosperity of North Africa at a time when the rest of the Empire was already in a state of decline, and the complete disappearance of any Roman influence whatsoever on the culture and language of a region which was at the time the most Romanized of all the Roman provinces, will be discussed in this article.

Apuleius and Antonine Rome: Historical Essays by Keith Bradley (review)

Reviewed by: Apuleius and Antonine Rome: Historical Essays by Keith Bradley Stephen Harrison Keith Bradley. Apuleius and Antonine Rome: Historical Essays. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2012. Phoenix supplementary volume 50. Pp. xviii + 397. US$75. ISBN 9781442 644205. Bradley here collects a series of important essays on the historical and cultural context of Apuleius, which forms a welcome counterpart to the largely literary study of this author in the last generation. His general claim is that the works of Apuleius, not only the forensic oration Apologia, which has an established date and place in Roman North Africa in 158/159 ad and the Florida, extracts from speeches made in Carthage in the 160s, but also the novel Metamorphoses or Golden Ass, which he dates to the 160s, can tell us more about the cultural and social context of their composition than has previously been recognized. This is undoubtedly so, and Bradley, as a distinguished Roman social historian, is well placed to argue the case. The 12 essays in this book fall into three categories: those on the Apologia, those on the Metamorphoses, and those on the other works and the more general cultural context. The three essays focusing on the Apologia (Chapters 1, 3, and 8) rightly emphasize the importance of this speech as “a document of social and cultural life” (3) and give us a good idea of the kind of community for which the speech was written. In Chapter 1 Bradley (alongside others, at least for Apuleius’ wife, Pudentilla) is keen to flesh out the social positions of the characters involved in the court case and brings in some new and fascinating local evidence. Here and elsewhere Bradley makes good use of art and archaeology alongside literary sources, a key benefit of this book, as of his knowledge of ancient magic, a major element in the speech. Especially important is his insistence that Apuleius was perceived as a “hostile intruder” into the local elite: Bradley’s expertise in Roman family history allows him to tease out in Chapter 3 a tight local structure of property and marriage, which the interloper disturbed (in particular his suggestion that levirate [End Page 119] marriage was a local custom is attractive), and he rightly sees that Apuleius in the speech presents himself as a model of elite Roman culture in order to impress a provincial audience. Chapter 8 provides an interesting analysis of Apuleius’ presentation of his own dress and appearance in the speech as befitting a hard-working orator as well as an ascetic philosopher, pointing to “the code-like capacity of dress and demeanour” in the Roman Empire (151) and rightly suggests that Apuleius sought impact by claiming to embody the Roman tradition of the learned orator as established by Cicero and Quintilian. These essays are an important addition to the literature on the speech. The five essays focusing on the Metamorphoses (Chapters 2, 4, 5, 11, and 12) look at some important cultural and historical themes of Apuleius’ fiction. Chapter 2 argues that religious conversion to the cult of a particular deity, so often deployed in analyzing Metamorphoses 11, is a Christianising anachronism not really appropriate to polytheistic pagan antiquity, and points to the switch between Isis and Osiris in Book 11 as evidence; this is certainly worth thinking about, though some may think that it does not do justice to Lucius’ intense (if sequential) monotheism. Chapter 4 brings in another part of Bradley’s expertise, looking at the analogy between slaves and animals as subhuman in Roman culture and as recipients of bad treatment in the novel and elsewhere: Lucius-ass’s retention of human feelings and values is nicely seen as mirroring the retained human dignity of the resistant slave. Chapter 5 again employs Bradley’s family researches in arguing that “the diversity of family life on display in the Metamorphoses is to be regarded as an authentic representation of the diversity of family life in the Roman world of the high imperial age in which Apuleius lived” (88). Here one can agree that the cultural values and models deployed are indeed those of Antonine Rome, but the particular prevalence of adultery in the novel (for...

Roman Labyrinth Mosaics and the Experience of Motion

Standards of realism developed for the study of painting have long dominated the scholarship of Roman mosaic floors. Few have considered mosaics as horizontal surfaces underfoot, touched as they are seen and often experienced by a mobile observer. Large-scale labyrinth mosaics were especially popular in the baths of Roman North Africa, where the demands of their traversal and their peripatetic viewing prompted broader, metaphoric meanings to come into play. These pavements interact with both architecture and their spectators, deliberately eliding boundaries between life and myth for those who crossed their surfaces.

Augustinus en de Joden: een inleidend overzicht

The article explores how Augustine of Hippo (354-430) deals with the Jews and Judaism. First it investigates the occurrence and meaning of the word �Iudaeus� in Augustine�s works. It turns out that Augustine, unlike many a predecessor, does not make a sharp distinction between �Hebrew�, �Israelite�, and �Jew�. Mainly on the basis of The City of God the role of the Jews in history is discussed. According to Augustine, all true believers (even those living before the time of Jesus) are �Christ believers� and are considered to belong to Christ�s body, the Church. The diaspora of the Jews is evaluated both negatively and positively: negatively as a consequence of �their putting Christ to death�; positively since through the dispersion of the Jews their Scriptures have been dispersed as well and so provide �testimony to the truth taught by the Church�. The so-called �mark of Cain� can not be interpreted as a predominantly positive sign: it provides protection indeed, but this divine protection is, once again, �for the benefit of the Church�. Contrary to some current opinion, it is stressed that Augustine knew contemporary Jews in Roman North Africa quite well.

Map Resources for Roman North Africa

This is the early draft of a collation of the map resources that are available for the study of Roman North Africa. It is hoped that, even in this early stage of presentation, it will be of some use to those who are seeking cartographic resources for research on the region.

Birds and Artisans of the Roman Mosaics of Tunisia: Species, Symbolism and Origins

Abstract: The mosaic pavements of Roman North Africa contain both African and Italian bird species, amongst others, but it was not possible to attribute pavements to mosaicists from either country on the basis of the avifauna depicted. Forty-one species of birds were recorded, the most commonly occurring being the Indian Peafowl Pavo cristatus, Barbary Partridge Alectoris barbara, Pheasant Phasianus colchicus and Mallard Anas platyrhynchos. Birds appear in a variety of ways: representing the seasons, game to be served to guests dining at a banquet, hunting including falconry and disguises, immortality and the gardens in paradise, myth, ritual as well as for decoration. Pavements containing birds spanned the first to the sixth centuries and have been found in twenty-nine locations in Tunisia. El Djem was the third century centre for birds in mosaics, shifting to Carthage and Thuburbo Majus in the fourth, then Tabarka in the fifth, with a notable decline in species diversity. The pavements preserve an ornithological treasure.

To Have and to Hold: Marrying and Its Documentation in Western Christendom, 400–1600 (review)

Reviewed by: To Have and to Hold: Marrying and Its Documentation in Western Christendom, 400–1600 Stuart A. Morgan To Have and to Hold: Marrying and Its Documentation in Western Christendom, 400–1600. Edited by Philip L. ReynoldsJohn Witte, Jr. (New York: Cambridge University Press. 2007. Pp. xvi, 519. $88.00. ISBN 978-0-521-86736-8.) The volume studies “premodern” European marriage documents, analyzing the function of these documents and what they reveal about marriage. The collection of essays is marked by its breadth. Liturgical material, “marriage contracts,” and church court records are discussed. It takes the reader from the later Roman Empire to John Calvin’s Geneva, and from Iceland to North Africa. Scholars from a wide range of disciplines contribute, and they often interact with each other’s material. Most chapters end with translated documentary appendices that allow the reader to look at much of the material on which the individual studies are based. This will be particularly helpful to students wanting to understand the primary material. The study opens with a clear introduction to the subject. Reynolds sketches out the process by which consent alone made a marriage and the extent to which the clergy were involved in marriages. He also gives a brief history of “dotation” and surveys the types of documents that are discussed in this anthology. The chapter on later Roman law is particularly useful, given the regular references to Roman law in the rest of the volume. Other themes that are discussed throughout the volume include degrees of separation, concubinage, consent, the role of the paterfamilias, betrothal, and dotation. Some marriage documents had a more religious and ideological function than others. David G. Hunter’s work on Roman North Africa demonstrates that there was nothing to distinguish a Christian from a pagan marriage, but that Augustine used tabulae matrimoniales as moral indicators to advance his definition of sex and marriage. Philip Reynolds’s chapter on Frankish dotal charters focuses on their theology, which is not distinctively Augustinian. Sacramental language appears clearly in the five dower charters from Laon and Soissons, which are the focus of Laurent Morelle’s chapter; he also finds in them “a new maturity and depth in the pastoral message about marriage” (p. 177). Morelle argues that the bishop’s chancery monopolized production of these charters and used them to proclaim the Church’s teaching about marriage in opposition to antimatrimonial heresies circulating at the time. In contrast, Cynthia Johnson does not think that the documents she studies served a didactic purpose. The marriage agreements in question were concerned with properties given on the occasion of marriage. In a very convincing chapter Richard Helmholz compares secular and spiritual marriage contracts and demonstrates the importance of the family in the choice of a marriage partner. This is a striking theme of the volume, and it stands out particularly strongly in the chapters on Florence, Geneva, and Iceland. Local variation is another significant theme. Frederik Pedersen’s study of lay and ecclesiastical court shows the laity engaging opportunistically with [End Page 91] the courts. The chapters on Ireland and Iceland depict the slow advance of canon law in Gaelic Ireland and Iceland and the presence of local variation. The volume ends with a study of the topic in Reformation Geneva. The chapter demonstrates continuity and change. Church weddings became essential for marriage, interestingly as they would with the Council of Trent in 1563. Given that references to Trent run throughout, it is a pity that a chapter is not devoted to it. In general, the anthology has been thoughtfully compiled, and chapters follow each other in logical progression. Authors often mention other chapters to highlight common themes, continuity, and divergence, which give the book coherence and helps readers appreciate the bigger picture. Stuart A. Morgan University College, London Copyright © 2009 The Catholic University of America Press

Incorrectly Political: Augustine and Thomas More (review)

Political: Augustine and Thomas More. By Peter Iver Kaufman. (Notre Dame, Indiana: University of Notre Dame Press. 2007. Pp. viii, 279. $35.00 paperback.) Incorrectly Political is not a conventional study of influence and intellectual debts (p. 232). There is no doubt about that. What is less clear is what it is; still less, what it is for. It is neither an obvious nor an easy book. It offers a powerfully if digressively argued case against interpretations of the writings of Augustine of Hippo and Thomas More that cast them as committed exponents of political engagement with serious hopes for the amelioration of the human lot on earth. Kaufman proposes that such readings reflect the aspirations and preoccupations of modern intellectuals, especiaEy Christian inteEectuals, rather than the thinking of Augustine and More. He concedes that for each author, such a case can be made aspects of their work, but insists that the grain of their thought is in a very different direction-that of a fundamental pessimism about the possibility of justice in social and political relationships and structures. Kaufman's work is, as ever, clever, learned, and intricately constructed, as well as more than a little puzzling. There are not many scholars who could usefully contribute to discussions on both these writers on the evident basis of familiarity with the relevant secondary literature on both the authors and their contexts. Throughout, the author delivers a torrent of obiter dicta that, while often stimulating and even provocative, flow strangely the pen of one who chides Quentin Skinner as overly fond of eye-catching claims (p. 169). The book, therefore, almost defies review. Two problems strike the half-informed reader. The first is whether it really does make sense to write a book on Augustine and More that is not arguing for any particular influence of the former on the latter. Kaufman suggests that it does, as they are both reading from the same page. But are they? The City of God and Utopia are such very different books, late Roman North Africa and early Tudor England such very different contexts, and the battling bishop and the laughing lawyer such very different men, that the claim comes across more as an excuse. True, both men were plagued by similar bugbears. The Protestants of the sixteenth century were far closer than they liked to admit to the Donatists of the fifth. But even that passing similarity fails as a yoke.The Protestants, after all, were willing or at least had the opportunity (as the Donatists were not or had not) to forge a working relationship with the temporal power. This book, then, is simply two essays on a common theme-political pessimism (or realism, as its exponents would doubtless insist). And this leads to the second problem. If the politically engaged Augustine and More of some twentieth-century readings are simply reflections of twentieth-century progressivism, might Kaufman's pair of pessimists be nothing more than reflections of an intellectual disenchantment that looks on the works of Bush and Blair in despair? Or even of that more widespread erosion of respect for traditional institutions and authorities which afflicts Western society and fuels its increasing tendencies toward romantically rationalized terrorism and random violence? The third and greatest problem with the argument, however, is that it seems to push its pessimism far beyond that of the authors under consideration. The hermeneutical key to Kaufman's reading of Augustine is the famous story of the pirate who, hauled up before Alexander the Great, told him that remota iustitia, a great empire was no better than a gang of thieves. …

Limitations of “Jewish” as a Label in Roman North Africa

AbstractSelective attentions to “normative” Jewish archaeological materials and exclusions of ambiguous or complex evidence from Jewish archaeological compendia have diverted attention from those artifacts that might otherwise have yielded more productive observations about the cultural ranges of ancient Jewish populations. Application of more critical approaches to the classification of archaeological evidence, contextual approaches for the analysis of archaeological materials, and the replacement of essentialistic or syncretistic cultural models with more realistic ones, yield vastly improved understandings of ancient Jewish archaeological materials, and, by extension, better articulated pictures of the continua between early Jewish and Christian cultural identities.

New Images for Old Rituals: Stelae of Saturn and Personal Cult in Roman North Africa

New Images for Old Rituals: Stelae of Saturn and Personal Cult in Roman North Africa