Roman Religious Research Articles

Establishing Self-World-Relations in Socio-Religious Practices. Looking at Roman Religious Communication

Partiendo de la noción de religión como comunicación y resonancia, este artículo analiza los detalles y las variedades de la comunicación religiosa en la antigua Roma. Ampliar el foco de atención tradicional en el “sacrificio” admitiendo que sacra facere era mucho más que “sacrificar” nos permite utilizar la abundante documentación que atestigua las múltiples facetas, relaciones pragmáticas y asociaciones cognitivas de los rituales para analizar las relaciones entre el mundo y el yo individual que se establecen en la ejecución de tales ceremonias. El artículo aborda el ritual religioso como una relación triangular entre los agentes humanos (tanto en papeles activos como pasivos), sus receptores “especiales” o “divinos” y los animales u objetos empleados en dicha comunicación no simplemente de manera casual, sino como elementos constitutivos de la misma. Sostiene, además, que las prácticas religiosas tienen una cualidad relacional específica que las hace particularmente importantes para establecer relaciones, poniendo en primer plano el carácter reflexivo y auto-observante de estas prácticas “intensificadas”. Con este telón de fondo, el cuerpo del estudio investiga las numerosas asociaciones e implicaciones conceptuales y materiales del ritual religioso romano, defendiendo así la maleabilidad individual y cultural de las relaciones rituales. Se construye un marco heurístico dentro del cual es posible afirmar que las relaciones entre el mundo y el yo se establecen y se vuelven habituales en prácticas que se caracterizan por incluir destinatarios no incuestionablemente plausibles y, en consecuencia, por ser más intensamente mediatizadas y más autorreflexivas que muchas otras prácticas sociales.

ANALISIS NILAI-NILAI KEMANUSIAAN DALAM NOVEL �DEBU YERUSSALEM� KARYA QUODVULTDEUS BAGASKORO

The value of humanity is an attitude or behavior among fellow human beings that is related to mutual tolerance, freedom, openness, fairness, fairness, honesty, between religious communities. Novel Dust Dust Jerusalem tells the story of a difference that occurred between Roman religious, Christian, and Jewish. This difference resulted in a disaster for humans at that time. The method used in this research is Qualitative Descriptive. The approach used is the Sociology of Literature approach. The research data source is the novel DebuYerussalem by QuodvultdeusBagaskoro. The research instrument uses tables of lattice instruments of human values and corpus data. Data collection techniques using text analysis techniques. The validity used is a flowing technique that includes three components of activity namely data reduction, data presentation, and conclusion drawing. The stages of research carried out consist of several stages, namely the initial stage, the implementation phase, and the completion phase.Based on the results of the study, it can be concluded that in the novel DebuYerussalem by QuodvultdeusBagaskoro contains human values that are very useful for the readers. Humanity values contained in the novel cover three aspects of aspects, namely the aspect of justice, fair in deciding a case based on the law and religion that has been determined. Not taking sides with one party but prioritizing peace, choosing for the common good for peace between people. Aspects of suffering, physical and mental suffering with acts of torture include hitting, kicking, killing carried out on humans. Feeling a sense of hurt in humans.The aspect of love, the realization of compassion, compassion, attention expressed by responsible behavior.Providing a sense of devotion and comfort for others.Keywords: Values, humanity, Dust of Jerusalem

SYMMACHUS' VARRO: LATIN LETTERS IN LATE ANTIQUITY

Abstract Symmachus opened his first book of letters by writing to his father Avianius, whom he depicted as a ‘new Varro’ writing learned epigrams on seven famous men in imitation of Varro's lost work, the Hebdomades. Symmachus was not alone in using Varro's work as an intertext. Based on my study of allusions to Varro and his works by late-fourth and fifth-century writers, I argue that Christian polemicists renewed their attacks on the Augustan scholar in the last decades of the fourth century. Consequently, Symmachusȧ choice of Varro was a forceful response in support of Roman religious as well as literary traditions in the late 380s or early 390s, the period in which I would date the dissemination of the first book of Symmachus' letters and the conceptualization of his seven-book letter collection.

Caput Mundi: An Analysis of the Temple of Jupiter Optimus Maximus as a Case of Etruscan Influence on Roman Religious Architecture

While Roman architecture is often generalized as being primarily of Greek influence, there are important periods where other influences can be clearly identified. This paper considers the Etruscan, Greek, and Villanovan influence on Roman religious architecture through an examination of the Temple of Jupiter Optimus Maxmius, also known as the Capitolium, and argues that the temple is ultimately of primarily Etruscan influence.

Mercury in the Middle: SERMO between the Discursive and the Divine

With renewed interest in the “momentary” gods of Roman religion, scholars have argued that Pistoclerus’ enumeration of a veritable host of such gods at Plaut. Bacc. 114-5 has important implications for our understanding of Roman culture, particularly in relation to religious representation. For example, Denis Feeney (1998, 88-92) points up how the deification of abstract concepts is “one of the specialized ways of conceptualizing and harnessing the power of divinity that was available to state, group, individual, and artist”, arguing that the Roman understanding of divinity “did not rigidly impose demarcations between words, qualities, and instantiations”, while Anna Clark (2007, 18-25) maintains that the conceptual boundary between any particular divine “quality” and the abstract concept that corresponds lexically to that divinity was “highly fluid”, so that “once the quality was a god, there was no point at either end of that spectrum at which both divinity and concept were not in play”.In this paper, I seek to complicate further the picture of Roman religious and linguistic representation, collapsing distinctions between word, concept and divinity altogether by demonstrating that there is not only an inherent indeterminacy to this category, as Feeney and Clark suggest, but also that this indeterminacy permits a kind of seepage between linguistic and religious meaning. Focusing on one member of Pistoclerus’ erotic pantheon – SERMO – , I first argue that this seemingly mundane category of language in fact belongs to the sphere of the divine. Through a re-analysis of terms marked by the suffix -mō, -mōnis (cf. Diaz y Diaz 1960) I show that this suffix defines a category of that which is inspired or inhabited by divinity, while folk beliefs in gods embodying different modalities of speech (see Perfigli 2004), as well as the divinization of particular “occurrences” of speech (i.e., Aius Locutius), provides a context in which to understand this dimension of how SERMO is conceived. Next, I argue that through an etymological and functional equivalence of (the god (of)) SERMO with the Greek Hermes (explicit in Hyg. Fab. 143), the sacred character of SERMO motivates its close association and even identification with Mercury as the god quintessentially “in the middle”. Finally, I demonstrate how SERMO’s association with Mercury creates a sort of semiotic feedback loop in which specific aspects of Mercury’s divine personality appear to determine linguistic meanings of SERMO, and specific usages of SERMO in literature can be seen to imply meanings that belong to the religious representation of Mercury. Specifically, I show that meanings of the idiom medius sermo – both as a technical term denoting words whose basic sense stands “in the middle” of two connotations or speech “in the middle” of two possible interpretations, and as a literary formula describing interruptions of speech – systematically correspond to representations of Mercury, first as “the mythic embodiment of ambiguity and ambivalence, doubleness and duplicity, contradiction and paradox” (Hyde 1998, 7) and second as the god of thwarted speech (cf. Bettini 2000, 17-19). At the same time, through a discussion of certain passages of Vergil’s Aeneid, I show how by the very use of this expression different “meanings” of Mercury’s divine personality are introduced into the text.

Roman Religious Officials - (J.) Rüpke Fasti Sacerdotum. A Prosopography of Pagan, Jewish, and Christian Religious Officials in the City of Rome, 300 BC to AD 499. Biographies of Christian Officials by Anne Glock. Translated by David M.B. Richardson. Pp. x + 1107. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008 (first published 2005). Cased, £325. ISBN: 978-0-19-929113-7.

Roman Religious Officials - (J.) Rüpke Fasti Sacerdotum. A Prosopography of Pagan, Jewish, and Christian Religious Officials in the City of Rome, 300 BC to AD 499. Biographies of Christian Officials by Anne Glock. Translated by David M.B. Richardson. Pp. x + 1107. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008 (first published 2005). Cased, £325. ISBN: 978-0-19-929113-7. - Volume 59 Issue 2

The Organization of Roman Religious Beliefs

Abstract: This study will focus on the differences in the way that Roman Paganism and Christianity organize systems of beliefs. It rejects the theory that “beliefs” have no place in the Roman religion, but stresses the differences between Christian orthodoxy, in which mandatory dogmas define group identity, and the essentially polythetic nature of Roman religious organization, in which incompatible beliefs could exist simultaneously in the community without conflict. In explaining how such beliefs could coexist in Rome, the study emphasizes three main conceptual mechanisms: (1) polymorphism, the idea that gods could have multiple identities with incompatible attributes, (2) orthopraxy, the focus upon standardized ritual rather than standardized belief, and (3) pietas, the Roman ideal of reciprocal obligation, which was flexible enough to allow Romans to maintain relationships simultaneously with multiple gods at varying levels of personal commitment.

The Building Stone at the Roman Religious Complex, Lydney Park, Gloucestershire: Character and Fate

The lower walls of the temple and bath house survive above ground at the Roman religious complex in the high ground of Lydney Park. They are composed almost exclusively of roughly dressed, coursed blocks of the red-stained, petrographically distinct Drybrook Sandstone (Lower Carboniferous), which outcrops within a few hundred metres nearby. Blocks of conglomerate from the Quartz Conglomerate (Upper Old Red Sandstone) and limestones from the Carboniferous Limestone Series are also present but very rare. The Norman Great Tower of Chepstow Castle, claimed to have been built largely of material robbed from Lydney Park, presents a markedly different suite of building materials in terms of rock-type, relative abundance and block shape, and was sourced from elsewhere.

Reports from Colloquia at Tübingen

Roman Religious History. Assembly of Sources and Possibilities of their Exploration

An Assemblage of Palaeolithic Hand-Axes from the Roman Religious Complex at Ivy Chimneys, Witham, Essex

This paper describes the context and nature of an assemblage of forty-four Palaeolithic hand-axes from a Roman religious site at Witham, Essex. The hand-axes are considered to have been derived from several sources, and it is suggested that the Romano-British occupants of the site deliberately selected them for their shape and placed them in the bottom of two large man-made depressions. In the light of stone axe finds on continental temple sites, and of classical Roman texts and traditions, the possibility arises that the Witham finds may have represented ‘thunderbolts’ in the worship of Jupiter or a local Celtic equivalent.

Signs and Wonders in the Imperial Cult: A New Look at a Roman Religious Institution in the Light of Rev 13:13-15

Signs and Wonders in the Imperial Cult: A New Look at a Roman Religious Institution in the Light of Rev 13:13-15

The Roman Military Feriale

In a major study, “The Roman Army and the Roman Religious Year,” recently published in this journal (XLV [1952] 187–252), Professor Nock has presented a new interpretation of the character and purpose of the Feriale Duranum. It is hardly necessary at this short interval to repeat his conclusions, which seem to me quite convincing, but as a postscript to Nock's study, I should like to do three things. The first is to discuss the purpose of the military Feriale when it was established, as it probably was, by Augustus. The second is to consider the distribution of the occasions in the Feriale and hence to some extent their value as breaks in the soldier's routine. Finally, I shall examine three sections of the text which for one reason or another deserve close study.

The Roman Army and the Roman Religious Year

Dura-Europos on the Euphrates has given us many surprises, and not the least of them was that from this outpost we should acquire a Feriale, or list of days with prescribed offerings, and that these holy days should be exclusively Roman, Imperial, or military. After preliminary publications by Rostovtzeff, under whose guidance the whole work has proceeded, the text was edited by Robert O. Fink, Allan S. Hoey and Walter F. Snyder with a commentary indispensable to students of Roman religion and Imperial history.