Drawing Down the Moon: Defining Magic in the Ancient Greco­Roman World

2019 ◽  
pp. 1-34
Author(s):  
Radcliffe G. Edmonds III
Keyword(s):  
Cultural Tradition ◽  
The Moon ◽  
Social Construct ◽  
Perceived Efficacy ◽  
Roman World ◽  
Greco Roman ◽  
The Social ◽  
Definition Of ◽  
Over Time

This introductory chapter provides a definition of magic. One of the most useful adjustments in the recent scholarship on magic has been the turn to considering magic as a dynamic social construct, instead of some particular reality. Magic is not a thing, but a way of talking. Thus, magic is a discourse pertaining to non-normative ritualized activity, in which the deviation from the norm is most often marked in terms of the perceived efficacy of the act, the familiarity of the performance within the cultural tradition, the ends for which the act is performed, or the social location of the performer. Such a discourse always has a history, since such a way of talking about things shifts over time as different people do the talking. When one speaks of “magic,” therefore, one should always explain: “magic for whom?” Any specific piece of evidence from the ancient Greco-Roman world provides an example of magic for that particular person, from one particular perspective. To speak of “magic in the ancient Greco-Roman world” is thus to refer to the whole range of things that various people in those cultures during those times could label as “magic.” The chapter then considers the act of drawing down the moon.

The Roman Retail Revolution

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Steven J. R. Ellis
Keyword(s):  
Interdisciplinary Approach ◽  
Vital Role ◽  
Archaeological Material ◽  
Roman World ◽  
The Social ◽  
History Of ◽  
Food And Drink ◽  
Bodies Of Evidence ◽  
Definition Of ◽  
The University

Tabernae were ubiquitous among all Roman cities, lining the busiest streets and dominating their most crowded intersections, and in numbers not known by any other form of building. That they played a vital role in the operation of the city—indeed in the very definition of urbanization—is a point too often under-appreciated in Roman studies, or at best assumed. The Roman Retail Revolution is a thorough investigation into the social and economic worlds of the Roman shop. With a focus on food and drink outlets, and with a critical analysis of both archaeological material and textual sources, Ellis challenges many of the conventional ideas about the place of retailing in the Roman city. A new framework is forwarded, for example, to understand the motivations behind urban investment in tabernae. Their historical development is also unraveled to identify three major waves—or, revolutions—in the shaping of retail landscapes. Two new bodies of evidence underpin the volume. The first is generated from the University of Cincinnati’s recent archaeological excavations into a Pompeian neighborhood of close to twenty shop-fronts. The second comes from a field survey of the retail landscapes of more than a hundred cities from across the Roman world. The richness of this information, combined with an interdisciplinary approach to the lives of the Roman sub-elite, results in a refreshingly original look at the history of retailing and urbanism in the Roman world.

Through a Glass Darkly: Divination and Magic

2019 ◽  
pp. 188-235
Author(s):  
Radcliffe G. Edmonds III
Keyword(s):  
Interpersonal Communication ◽  
Normal Order ◽  
Roman World ◽  
Greco Roman ◽  
Extraordinary Form ◽  
Definition Of

This chapter assesses divination. Divination consists of soliciting and receiving messages from the gods; it is in some sense the reverse of prayer, since it is communication from gods to mortals. As with prayer, divination is an area in which the definition of magic as an extraordinary form of ritualized action becomes particularly useful. Like prayer and sacrifice, divination forms a large part of the order of normal religion in the Greco-Roman world, so divination is only labeled “magic” when it makes claims to authority far outside this normal order, either as a superlatively efficacious procedure that depends on specialized arcane knowledge or, conversely, as a bit of traditional superstition that seems ineffective in comparison with the normally accepted procedures. Technical, indirect, or artificial divination consists in the observation of significant phenomena and the puzzling out of the significance, whereas natural or inspired divination does not rely on such interpretive techniques but rather on interpersonal communication with the divine.

Introduction

2010 ◽  
pp. 1-8 ◽  
Author(s):  
Angela T. Ragusa
Keyword(s):  
Social Order ◽  
Social Systems ◽  
Social Institutions ◽  
Ways Of Knowing ◽  
Change Over Time ◽  
Sandra Harding ◽  
The Social ◽  
The 19Th Century ◽  
Over Time

Epistemology is the concept used to describe ways of knowing. In other words, how you know what you know. Sociologists have been interested in how knowledge is produced since the discipline was founded in the 19th Century. How we come to know our world and make sense of it are influenced by social institutions, individual attitudes and behaviors, and our demographic position within the social order. The social order is an historical product which continues to change over time. To facilitate our learning from our socio-historical experiences, sociologists frequently turn to ideas expressed by social theorists. Social theory, whether classical or contemporary, may thus be employed to help us make sense of changes in our social and material world. Although technology is arguably as ancient as our first ancestors, as the chapters in this book reveal, the characteristics of and communications within our postindustrial society vary greatly from those which occurred in the age of modernity. This introductory chapter identifies a few well-known social theorists who have historically attempted to explain how and why social systems, at macro and micro levels, change over time. Next, it contextualizes communication as a cultural product, arguing the best way to examine the topic is from multiple, local perspectives. In the feminist tradition of postmodernist Sandra Harding, it implores us to consider the premise and source of the knowledge sources we use and espouse while communicating and interacting in specific ways and environments. Finally, grounded in the systemic backdrop of social inequality, this chapter encourages readers to begin the task of critical thinking and reflecting about how each of us, as individuals and members of local communities, nations and the world, assuage or reproduces the structurally-derived inequalities which the globalization of communication and technical systems and interacting in a global environment manifests.

General

2014 ◽  
Vol 61 (2) ◽  
pp. 311-314
Author(s):  
Vedia Izzet ◽  
Robert Shorrock
Keyword(s):  
Social Life ◽  
Human Life ◽  
Tenth Century ◽  
Human Beings ◽  
Social Fabric ◽  
Roman World ◽  
Greco Roman ◽  
Imperial Period ◽  
Historical Outline

Originally published in Dutch in 1995, Antiquity. Greeks and Romans in Context by Frederick Naerebout and Henk Singor aims to provide (in its own modest words) a ‘reasonably comprehensive one-volume’ overview of the Greco-Roman world for undergraduates and a wider interested audience (xiii). The main focus of the work is the Greco-Roman world from 1000 bc to 500 bc (divided into the Archaic, Classical, Hellenistic, and Roman Imperial periods). Each period is covered under the same three headings (in the interests of comparability): ‘Historical Outline’, ‘Social Fabric’, ‘Social Life and Mentality’. The wider context is, however, by no means ignored. The authors provide a valuable overview of the Palaeolithic and Neolithic periods (27–35) and of the early civilizations of Eurasia up to 900 bc (36–58). At the other end of the timeline, the book does not simply conclude with the Roman Imperial period but carries on the story up to the tenth century ad and beyond (369–94). A particular emphasis is placed in the introductory chapter on ‘The Ecology of History’ (11–23): [M]aterial factors can be called the ‘basics’ of history: they determine what, under given circumstances, is possible and what is not; they create preconditions for, and restraints on human life. Thus, every culture has been in many respects the expression of the ways in which some group of human beings managed to adapt to the ecosystem in which they happened to be living, which might also be described as ecological anthropology. (11)

The idea of becoming an individual in the context of early Christianity

1997 ◽  
pp. 43-51
Author(s):  
Pavlo Pavlenko
Keyword(s):  
Civil Wars ◽  
Social Life ◽  
Early Christianity ◽  
Roman World ◽  
Greco Roman ◽  
The Social ◽  
The World ◽  
History Of ◽  
Different Parts

The last centuries before the beginning of the Christian era, the first centuries after that, were enveloped in the history of mankind as a period of the total crisis and the decline of the Greco-Roman civilization, a crisis that covered virtually all spheres of the social life of the Roman world and which, as ever before, experienced almost every one, whether he is a slave or a free citizen, a small merchant or a big slave or an aristocrat. As a reaction to the crisis, in various parts of the empire the civil wars and the slavery uprising erupt in different parts of the empire. Under such conditions of life, the world around itself no longer seemed to man to be self-sufficient, harmonious, stable, "good" and warded by a cohort of traditional deities. Yes, and the gods themselves were now turned out to be incapable, unable to change the unceasing flow of fatal doom.

‘It all comes out in the wash’: Looking harder at the Roman fullonica

2002 ◽  
Vol 15 ◽  
pp. 20-44 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mark Bradley
Keyword(s):  
Urban Space ◽  
Final Section ◽  
Literary Discourse ◽  
Cultural Stereotypes ◽  
The Public ◽  
Roman World ◽  
Woollen Cloth ◽  
Lead Pipe ◽  
The Social ◽  
Definition Of

In the Baths of Mithras at Ostia, a lead pipe from the public urinal carried fluids directly into a basement corridor which led to two small underground fullonicae (figs. 1-4). As must have happened in towns and cities all over the Roman world, this product of human excretion was flushed down the urinal to re-emerge as the quintessential industrial cleansing agent. The Roman fuller has achieved notoriety for his exploitation of urine for washing woollen cloth. In this paper, I intend first to attempt a definition of fulling, and to show that the process of identifying and reconstructing a fullonica requires us to think harder about Roman cleansing processes. I will argue that the topic of cleanliness is so culturally loaded that it is very difficult to reach a neutral account of fulling. Literary discourse on these processes and their agents offers us a set of contrasting responses, most notably in interpretations of urine. I will examine the ways in which the Romans played with some of these paradoxes in a world of limited chemistry. From this, I will suggest a topographical model of water and waste in which the fullonica was a significant unit, and examine how the proverbial smells it generated raise interesting archaeological questions about location and urban space. A final section addresses the social profile of fullers and the cultural stereotypes attached to this profession.

scholarly journals Sexuality and shifting paradigms – setting the scene

2005 ◽  
Vol 61 (3) ◽  
Author(s):  
Yolanda Dreyer
Keyword(s):  
Social Environment ◽  
Old Testament ◽  
Social Dynamics ◽  
Eastern Mediterranean ◽  
Western Mediterranean ◽  
Greco Roman ◽  
The Social ◽  
Mediterranean World ◽  
The New Testament ◽  
Over Time

The social environment of the Biblical world can be distinguished in the Eastern Mediterranean (Semitic) and the Western Mediterranean (Greco-Roman) contexts. From a historical chronological perspective these contexts first functioned separately and then later merged because of Hellenisation. In both these Mediterranean contexts sexuality, religion and marriage were intertwined, but the values attributed to them, were different. The Old Testament mostly mirrors the Eastern Mediterranean world, whereas the New Testament represents a syncretism of the values of the Eastern and Western Mediterranean worlds. In order to understand the changes in the values attributed to sexuality, religion and marriage over time – from premodern, to modern, to postmodern times – it is necessary to investigate the social dynamics in the different eras. The aim of the article is to explore the nature of the interconnections and the values attributed to sexuality, religion and marriage in Biblical times.

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