Mysteries of the Heavenly Spheres: Astrology and Magic

2019 ◽  
pp. 236-268
Author(s):  
Radcliffe G. Edmonds III
Keyword(s):  
Roman Empire ◽  
Hellenistic Period ◽  
Vast Array ◽  
Roman World ◽  
Greco Roman ◽  
Almost Everywhere ◽  
Time Period ◽  
The World ◽  
The Moment ◽  
Fixed Matrix

This chapter studies astrology. The astronomical model of the cosmos described in astrology, with the divinities of the heavens proceeding in systematic and observable paths as they preside over the world of mortals, becomes one of the most important and widespread models for understanding the cosmos in the Greco-Roman world, starting with the Hellenistic period and increasingly so during the Roman Empire. Indeed, some form of this cosmological model appears almost everywhere in the Greco-Roman world in this time period, ranging from the most basic identification of traditional Greek and Roman gods with the visible planets to the most sophisticated and complicated systems detailed in the astrological manuals or Gnostic theologies. The most outstanding features of astrology that distinguish it from other forms of divination are its extreme complexity and systematicity. All forms of divination operate with a fixed matrix of signs and a random element of chance, but astrology works with a vast array of celestial signs, and the element of chance is limited to the moment of birth. While some of the multitude of uses of astrological ideas and images do not appear to be marked as abnormal or extraordinary, others bear the familiar stamp of strangeness that marks the practice as extraordinary, beyond the bounds of normal—magical.

Lead pollution and the Roman economy

2020 ◽  
Vol 33 ◽  
pp. 354-364
Author(s):  
Damian Pavlyshyn ◽  
Iain Johnstone ◽  
Richard Saller
Keyword(s):  
Roman Empire ◽  
Economic History ◽  
Roman Economy ◽  
Roman World ◽  
Greco Roman ◽  
Institutional Frameworks ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Impact ◽  
Industrial Societies ◽  
Somatic Energy

More than a decade ago, the Oxford Roman Economy Project (OXREP)1 and the Cambridge economic history of the Greco-Roman world put the question of the performance of the Roman economy at the center of historical debate, prompting a flood of books and articles attempting to assess the degree of growth in the economy.2 The issue is of sufficient importance that it has figured in the narratives of economists analyzing the impact of institutional frameworks on the potential for growth.3 As the debate has continued, there has been some convergence: most historians would agree that there was some Smithian growth as evidenced by urbanization and trade, while acknowledging that production remained predominantly agricultural and based primarily on somatic energy (i.e., human and animal).4 This is, of course, a very broad framework that does not differentiate the Roman empire from other complex pre-industrial societies. The challenge is to refine the analysis in order to put content into the broad description of “modest though significant growth”5 and to offer a deeper understanding of the dynamics of the economy.

No Patriotic Fervor for Pella: Aelius Aristides and the Presentation of the Macedonians in the Second Sophistic

Mnemosyne ◽  
2008 ◽  
Vol 61 (2) ◽  
pp. 207-227 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sulochana Ruth Asirvatham
Keyword(s):  
Roman Empire ◽  
The Other ◽  
Second Sophistic ◽  
Philip Ii ◽  
Greco Roman ◽  
Other Hand ◽  
The World

AbstractThis paper examines four speeches by Aelius Aristides that contrast the image of Macedonian history negatively with Greek past and Roman present. Aristides' literary milieu of the 'Second Sophistic' is characterized by Greek self-consciousness and nostalgia in the Roman Empire. While writers like Plutarch and Arrian mythologize the figure of Alexander as a second Achilles and a philosopher-of-war as a means of offering subtle proof of 'Hellenic' primacy over the Romans, Aristides chooses to focus on the more negative aspects of the Macedonian legacy. To the Thebans I and II elaborately update the 'barbaric' image of Philip II found in Demosthenes, making him parallel not only, perhaps, to the Persian enemy of old but also to Rome's contemporary Parthian enemy. The Panathenaic Oration and To Rome, on the other hand, idealize the world of the present, where Athens reigns supreme in culture, Rome in conquest. Aristides' stance suggests that, despite the attractions of the 'Hellenic' Alexander, pride in Greece does not necessarily have to include Macedonian history. What is more important is that writers have some means of Hellenizing Rome, whether by idealizing a 'Greco-Roman' Alexander, or by seeing Rome as the ultimate polis.

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.

Magic and maleficia in the Ancient World: The case of Roman Sardinia

2021 ◽  
Vol 60 (3-4) ◽  
pp. 293-302
Keyword(s):  
Roman Empire ◽  
Specific Area ◽  
Ancient World ◽  
Roman World ◽  
The World ◽  
Different Cultures

Abstract This paper will focus on magic rituals aimed at causing maleficia in a specific area: Sardinia. Although difficult to retrace, there is some evidence, on the island, of the existence of forms of both necromancy and oracular divination that refer, with their own forms, to the culture spread in the Roman empire. Among the most significant documents, there are the tabellae defixionum, some epigraphic texts widely documented in the Roman world, and even earlier in the Punic world. The evidence, in this case, is quite interesting, also, because it reflects the combination of different cultures in Sardinia, whose results are “original”, also in the world of magic.

“Who is his mother so I can curse him?”: The role of the mother as a passive (dangerous) medium on curse tablets

2021 ◽  
Vol 60 (3-4) ◽  
pp. 353-362
Keyword(s):  
Roman Empire ◽  
Specific Context ◽  
Interesting Phenomenon ◽  
Roman World ◽  
Greco Roman ◽  
Care Giving ◽  
Private Action ◽  
The Family ◽  
The One

Abstract Curse tablets are artefacts of a very specific nature. They are generally interpreted as material expression of a particular magic action, usually performed by an individual. Such finds are especially interesting for the study because they represent an epigraphic monument, on the one hand, as well as a standard archaeological find with its specific context on the other hand. A particularly interesting phenomenon is visible on curse tablets throughout the Mediterranean – the presence of mother's name to identify the victim of the curse. The “boom” of this phenomenon occurs in the 2nd century AD, but there also are much older examples, particularly from the 4th and 3rd century BC. In the 2nd century AD, the identification of the mother spread to Italy and the African provinces, where this kind of targeting became dominant. In my paper, I will focus on the later, Latin and Greek curse tablets in the Roman Empire. Mothers' names were assigned to identify a particular person: This is interesting because patronyms were usually used in the Greco-Roman world as the identifier. The purposes of the curse tablets bearing the mother's name were thus different: the tablets were used in cases of private action in competition, love or trials linked to family affairs – all within a ritual framework. For this reason, this paper aims to observe the curse tablets as an important medium of the ritual practice which should enable us to answer the questions: Why should the name of the father, which is usually used, be replaced by the name of the mother? Could the reason for such replacement be the recognition of the mother as a mediator for targeting her child? Is this the most precise identification, as the mother is more accurately identifiable than the father? What does it tell us about the care-giving function of the mother within the family and about the authors of the curse tablets?

Slavery

2010 ◽  
Author(s):  
John Byron
Keyword(s):  
Near East ◽  
Vital Part ◽  
Roman World ◽  
Greco Roman ◽  
The Bible ◽  
Religious Text ◽  
The World ◽  
The New Testament ◽  
Accepted Part ◽  
Insight Into

Slavery was an accepted part of the world in which the biblical authors lived and wrote. It was a vital part of the empires in the ancient Near East and the Greco-Roman West. The Hebrew Bible condones slavery, contains laws regulating it, and even uses it as a metaphor to describe God’s relationship with Israel. The New Testament, entrenched in the Greco-Roman world, accepts the fact of slavery, commands slaves to obey their masters, and even recounts the return of a slave to his master. But as attitudes began to change and abolitionism became a motivating force, biblicists were challenged to reexamine the Bible in light of the new worldview. The Bible was used both to support and to condemn slavery. More recently, the descendants of former slaves have asked how the Bible, used to subjugate their ancestors, can still be a valuable religious text. These shifts in attitude have led to a reevaluation of how slavery is studied. Scholars have moved away from legal definitions of slavery, which view the institution from the owner’s perspective, to sociological definitions that provide insight into how the institution was experienced by the enslaved.

The Symbolic Power of Food in the Greco-Roman World

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
John David Penniman
Keyword(s):  
Roman Empire ◽  
Human Person ◽  
Cultural Value ◽  
Child Rearing ◽  
Symbolic Power ◽  
Roman World ◽  
Greco Roman ◽  
Human Formation ◽  
Body And Soul ◽  
The One

This chapter highlights some of the foundational philosophical, medical, and moral texts that account for the power of nourishment within the formation of the human person in the Greco-Roman world. Focusing primarily on Hippocratic treatises, Plato, and Aristotle, it first considers how classical anthropological theories about the relationship between body and soul broadly emphasize the importance of food in shaping human nature (both bodily and intellectually). The chapter then turns to the social and political context of the Roman Empire and its explicit program of family values within which breast-feeding and child-rearing were highly politicized—and thus highly theorized—activities. These disparate texts contribute to the discourse of human formation in antiquity. In each attempt to describe or theorize the power of food, such writings are located within a larger ideological constellation about eating and feeding, the result of which is what the book broadly identifies as the symbolic power of nourishment. This symbolic power produces a tension, or at least an ambiguity, between statements about actual nourishment and what it was specifically believed to do, on the one hand, and the symbol of nourishment as a nebulous cultural value, on the other.

The Theoretical Possibility of Extensive Infanticide in the Graeco-Roman World

1982 ◽  
Vol 32 (1) ◽  
pp. 114-116 ◽  
Author(s):  
William V. Harris
Keyword(s):  
Roman Empire ◽  
Psychological Effects ◽  
Theoretical Possibility ◽  
Female Infanticide ◽  
Roman World ◽  
Greco Roman ◽  
Roman Antiquity ◽  
Different Parts

We have extremely strong reasons for supposing that the exposure of infants, very often resulting in death, was common in many different parts of the Roman Empire, and that it had considerable demographic, economic and psychological effects. The evidence for the first of these propositions has been reviewed or alluded to in several recent publications.1 However, a thorough new study, covering the whole of Greek and Roman antiquity, would be worth while. In the meantime Donald Engels has declared that in the Greek and Roman worlds the exposure of children was ‘of negligible importance’ (‘The problem of female infanticide in the Greco-Roman World’, CPh 75 (1980), 112–20).

scholarly journals The Book of Revelation: Hope in Dark Times

Religions ◽  
2019 ◽  
Vol 10 (4) ◽  
pp. 239
Author(s):  
Francis J. Moloney
Keyword(s):  
Jesus Christ ◽  
First Century ◽  
Word Of God ◽  
Christian Church ◽  
Book Of Revelation ◽  
New Jerusalem ◽  
Roman World ◽  
Greco Roman ◽  
The World ◽  
Book Of Daniel

Contemporary analysis of the world that produced the Book of Revelation suggests that Patmos was not a penal settlement, and there is little evidence that Domitian systematically persecuted Christians. The Emperor Cult was widely practiced, but Christians were not being persecuted for lack of participation. The document makes much of God’s victory in the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ, the slain and standing Lamb (Rev 5:6). The “saints” were not persecuted Asian Christians but, under the influence of the Book of Daniel, John’s presentation of those from Israel’s sacred history who lived by the Word of God and accepted the messianic witness of the prophets (8:3–4; 11:18; 13:7, 10; 14:12; 16:6; 17:6; 18:20, 24; 19:8; 20:6, 9). They already have life, the application of the saving effects of the slain and risen lamb “from the foundation of the world” (13:8). John addresses late first-century Asian Christians, presenting the model of these “saints,” offering them hope as they are tempted by the allure of the Greco-Roman world and its mores. He invites them into the life and light of the New Jerusalem, the Christian church (22:1–5).

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