“To the ravens”: Curses from the Oracle of Abonouteichos

2021 ◽  
Vol 60 (3-4) ◽  
pp. 417-427
Keyword(s):  
Financial Support ◽  
Second Century ◽  
Religious Conflict ◽  
Lucian Of Samosata ◽  
Market Theory ◽  
Roman World ◽  
Theory Of Religion ◽  
Roman Antiquity ◽  
False Prophet

Abstract This discussion examines the religious conflict between the cult and oracle of Glykon and its Epicurean opponents recorded in the second century CE satire, Alexander the False Prophet, by Lucian of Samosata. Following the market theory of religion approach, these groups can be understood to have been engaged in an intense and escalating struggle over followers, financial support, status, and, ultimately, for survival. For the oracle and Glykon's prophet, Alexander of Abonouteichos, this effort included the use of magical curses, which were deployed against their adversaries. As such, these circumstances represent an as-yet unrecognized agonistic context for cursing to take place in the Graeco-Roman world. Alexander's use of cursing also highlights previously overlooked aspects of his own connections to the practice of magic in Graeco-Roman antiquity.

scholarly journals cult of Glykon as a 'New Religious Movement'

2020 ◽  
Vol 54 ◽  
Author(s):  
Daniel Sarefield
Keyword(s):  
Second Century ◽  
Religious Movement ◽  
Religious Movements ◽  
New Religious Movements ◽  
Religious Groups ◽  
Lucian Of Samosata ◽  
Social Scientists ◽  
Roman World ◽  
Starting Point ◽  
False Prophet

This essay explores the integration of eastern religions into the Roman world during the early Empire by examining one particularly successful example, the Cult of Glykon, which became popular during the later second century and following. Drawing on the characteristics that social scientists have identified as most significant in contributing to the success of New Religious Movements (NRMs) in the recent past, the presence of these features in the Cult of Glykon is considered from the surviving evidence, including the satire Alexander or the False Prophet, which was written by Lucian of Samosata. As this discussion makes clear, the Cult of Glykon appears to have achieved some measure of success as a New Religious Movement in the Roman world because it possessed many of the same characteristics. They are, therefore, a useful starting point for exploring the integration of other religious groups in the Roman world.

Hegel's Antiquity

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Will D. Desmond
Keyword(s):  
World History ◽  
Historical Thinking ◽  
Aesthetic Theory ◽  
Roman World ◽  
Classical World ◽  
Roman Antiquity ◽  
Greek World

Hegel’s Antiquity aims to summarize, contextualize, and criticize Hegel’s understanding and treatment of major aspects of the classical world, approaching each of the major areas of his historical thinking in turn: politics, art, religion, philosophy, and history itself. The discussion excerpts relevant details from a range of Hegel’s works, with an eye both to the ancient sources with which he worked, and the contemporary theories (German aesthetic theory, Romanticism, Kantianism, Idealism (including Hegel’s own), and emerging historicism) which coloured his readings. What emerges is that Hegel’s interest in both Greek and Roman antiquity was profound and is essential for his philosophy, arguably providing the most important components of his vision of world history: Hegel is generally understood as a thinker of modernity (in various senses), but his modernity can only be understood in essential relation to its predecessor and ‘others’, notably the Greek world and Roman world whose essential ‘spirit’ he assimilates to his own notion of Geist.

An Ancient Dream Manual

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Peter Thonemann
Keyword(s):  
Social Order ◽  
Natural World ◽  
Dream Interpretation ◽  
Greek Literature ◽  
Roman World ◽  
Road Map ◽  
The Social ◽  
Roman Antiquity ◽  
Analytical Tools ◽  
Life Career

Artemidorus’ Oneirocritica (‘The Interpretation of Dreams’) is the only dream-book which has been preserved from Graeco-Roman antiquity. Composed around AD 200, it is a treatise and manual on dreams, their classification, and the various analytical tools which should be applied to their interpretation. Artemidorus travelled widely through Greece, Asia, and Italy to collect people’s dreams and record their outcomes, in the process casting a vivid light on social mores and religious beliefs in the Severan age. This book aims to provide the non-specialist reader with a readable and engaging road-map to this vast and complex text. It offers a detailed analysis of Artemidorus’ theory of dreams and the social function of ancient dream-interpretation; it also aims to help the reader to understand the ways in which Artemidorus might be of interest to the cultural or social historian of the Graeco-Roman world. The book includes chapters on Artemidorus’ life, career, and worldview; his conceptions of the human body, sexuality, the natural world, and the gods; his attitudes towards Rome, the contemporary Greek polis, and the social order; and his knowledge of Greek literature, myth and history. The book is intended to serve as a companion to the new translation of The Interpretation of Dreams by Martin Hammond, published simultaneously with this volume in the Oxford World’s Classics series.

Animal Supply

2021 ◽  
pp. 544-556
Author(s):  
Michael MacKinnon
Keyword(s):  
Professional Organizations ◽  
Final Destination ◽  
Roman World ◽  
Large Numbers ◽  
Animal Bones ◽  
In Captivity ◽  
Exotic Animal ◽  
Roman Antiquity ◽  
In Transit

Animals of all types, be these domestic or wild, native or exotic, were routinely required for spectacles and events in the Graeco-Roman world, most notably, perhaps, in the context of the amphitheatre games of Roman antiquity. Behind such events, however, lay networks involved in the capture, transport, and supply of these animals. The integration of ancient textual, iconographical, and archaeological (including zooarchaeological) evidence provides the requisite data to investigate these aspects. Available ancient textual and artistic evidence suggest that soldiers and professional hunters, assisted by civilians and natives as required or demanded, undertook many of these tasks. Guilds or professional organizations of wild beast hunters and merchants provided further administrative, technical, financial, and transport assistance. Equipment involved in capturing the animals varied depending upon factors such as the size, age, or ferocity of the animal, but included a range of nets, cages, and traps, among other methods. Extrapolation from more modern practices, however, suggests that baiting and ambushing, arguably somewhat less noble or brave tactics, likely characterized much of exotic animal capture in antiquity. Treatment for many of these animals, in transit to their final destination, was probably poor; large numbers certainly perished during transport or while in captivity. Available zooarchaeological evidence helps locate exotic animal bones across different contexts in the ancient Graeco-Roman world, including beasts presumably involved in amphitheatre games, but also provides tempering evidence to downplay the magnitude of numbers actually supplied to such events, as is attested in ancient textual and iconographical data.

Charisma, Magic, and Spirituality as Socially Engaged Processes: Lucian’s (circa 120-200) “Alexander the False Prophet” and People’s Accounts of the Supernatural

2017 ◽  
Vol 13 (4) ◽  
pp. 6-46
Author(s):  
Robert Prus
Keyword(s):  
Developmental Process ◽  
Reference Points ◽  
Religion And Spirituality ◽  
Sociological Study ◽  
Lucian Of Samosata ◽  
Religious Cult ◽  
False Prophet

Focusing on Alexander the False Prophet and The Lover of Lies, two texts from the Greek poet-philosopher Lucian of Samosata (circa 120-200) of the Classical Roman era, this paper considers (a) charisma, magic, and spirituality as aspects of an interconnected, collectively achieved, developmental process associated with the emergence of a religious cult. Somewhat relatedly, this paper also acknowledges (b) people’s broader, longstanding fascinations with matters that seem incredulous.  Depicting a more sustained realm of prophetic activity and an account of people’s intrigues with the supernatural, Lucian’s texts offer some especially valuable transhistorical and transcultural reference points for the broader sociological study of human knowing and acting. The paper concludes with a consideration of the implications of these matters for the study of people’s involvements in religion and spirituality as humanly-engaged realms of endeavor and interchange.

Post Mortem Makes a Difference: On a Redescription of Euhemerism and Its Place in the Study of Graeco-Roman Divine Kingship

2012 ◽  
Vol 19 (3-4) ◽  
pp. 319-339 ◽  
Author(s):  
Nickolas P. Roubekas
Keyword(s):  
The Other ◽  
Post Mortem ◽  
Natural Phenomena ◽  
Early Christian ◽  
Roman World ◽  
Theory Of Religion ◽  
Lost Work ◽  
Other Hand ◽  
New Interpretation ◽  
Divine Kingship

Abstract Euhemerus of Messene is one of the most popular ancient theorists of religion. In his now lost work Sacred Inscription he formulated a theory of religion by arguing that the Olympian gods were nothing more than prominent kings that were deified due to their benefactions to mankind. On the other hand, true divinity was to be found in the natural phenomena. However, this theory – known as euhemerism – has been (ab)used in many ways due to the different interpretative agendas of various authors and critics. In this paper I argue that euhemerism needs a new interpretation, a redescription, based primarily on a rereading of the text. In addition, by showing the different usages of the text by Euhemerus’s contemporaries and the early Christian writers, I argue that the connection of his theory with the practice of deification of kings in the Graeco-Roman world should be dismissed and reexamined by taking into account contemporary responses to his work that show that his theory was not meant as a justification for the deification of the Graeco-Roman kings.

The Ravenous Wolf: The Apostle Paul and Genesis 49.27 in the Early Church

2016 ◽  
Vol 62 (4) ◽  
pp. 610-627 ◽  
Author(s):  
Darrell D. Hannah
Keyword(s):  
Second Century ◽  
First Century ◽  
Early Church ◽  
Apostle Paul ◽  
Roman World

Jacob's blessing of his youngest son Benjamin (Gen 49.27) was widely understood in the early Church as a prophecy of that most (in)famous Benjaminite, the apostle Paul. This exegesis enjoyed enduring popularity and can be traced to every corner of the Roman world. It is also early: it was already well established by the time of its earliest surviving witnesses at the end of the second century. But if it predates the late second century, when did it originate? While we can only speculate, this paper offers reasons for supposing that this exegesis may reach back into the first century.

scholarly journals Luciano e a experimentação biográfica: filosofia e religião

2013 ◽  
pp. 161-182
Author(s):  
Pedro Ipiranga Júnior
Keyword(s):  
Religious Belief ◽  
Religious Discourse ◽  
Moral Action ◽  
Lucian Of Samosata ◽  
Biographical Account ◽  
Epistolary Form ◽  
False Prophet ◽  
Philosophical Questions ◽  
A Current ◽  
Religious Aspect

The purpose of this work is based on the following issues: how the religious aspect is focused on biographical works and what constitutes its function; how religious discourse interferes with conception of the genre of biographical and literary prose from the perspective of Lucian of Samosata. For that we will use as a benchmark for our analysis some conceptions about the religious phenomenon in works with biographical tone of Isocrates, Plato and Xenophon, in order to check how Lucian resumes and refigure issues there proposed. In a kind of biographical account and in epistolary form, Lucian somehow promotes a mimesis (here in the sense of a critical refiguring) of reports of Bios, in which he enacts a moral action figure, syncretizes or juxtaposes philosophical adhesion and religious belief. In the biographical works of Lucian: The passing of Peregrinus, Alexander the false prophet, Demonax and somehow Nigrinus, ‘conversion to a current philosophical’ concerns a pathos in the discourse, which is staged so explicitly dramatized and therefore undergo a treatment critical. Thus, we treat this work in order to delineate the constitution of pathos of biographical discourse and status of a distinctive literary biographical prose linked to religious and philosophical questions.

“One Has To Be So Terribly Religious To Be An Artist”: Divine Inspiration and theophilia in Aelius Aristides’ Hieroi Logoi

2018 ◽  
Vol 20 (1) ◽  
pp. 257-271
Author(s):  
Georgia Petridou
Keyword(s):  
The State ◽  
Second Century ◽  
Close Link ◽  
Intellectual Elite ◽  
Roman World ◽  
Divine Inspiration ◽  
Hieroi Logoi

Abstract:This paper deals with the close link between divine epiphany and artistic inspiration in the life and work of one of the most renowned rhetoricians of the second century AD, Aelius Aristides. The argument in a nutshell is that when Aristides lays emphasis on the divinely ordained character of the Hieroi Logoi, in particular, and his literary and rhetorical composition, in general, he taps into a rich battery of traditional theophilic ideas and narratives (oral and written alike). These narratives accounted for the interaction of divine literary patrons and matrons with privileged members of the intellectual elite to provide thematic or stylistic guidance to their artistic enterprises. Thus, Aristides makes wider claims about his own status of theophilia (lit. ‘the state of being dear to the gods’), a status that was much-praised and much-prized in the Graeco-Roman world, and one that functioned as a status-elevating mechanism in the eyes of both his contemporaries and posterity. Furthermore and on a different level, he also utilizes his theophilic aspirations to elevate his prose-hymns (a genre he invented) to the higher and already established level of encomiastic poetry, which Greeks regarded for centuries as fit for the ears of the gods.

Introduction

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Philippa Adrych ◽  
Robert Bracey ◽  
Dominic Dalglish ◽  
Stefanie Lenk ◽  
Rachel Wood
Keyword(s):  
Roman Empire ◽  
Second Century ◽  
Roman World ◽  
Ancient Religion ◽  
The Many ◽  
Material Record

This chapter focuses on two marble tauroctony statue groups that are now in the British Museum’s collection. Both are thought to be originally from Rome and date roughly to between the end of the first and the second century AD. In this opening chapter, we look at several of the many interpretations that have been offered for the tauroctony and discuss the image’s development in the Roman world. At the heart of all such interpretations lies the problem of how to reconstruct an ancient reality based on scant remains. These carefully constructed compositions, painstakingly restored in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, simultaneously present us with the characteristic representation of Mithras in the Roman Empire, yet also show the difficulties in reconstructing ancient religion from a fragmented material record.

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