scholarly journals Il ‘sacro’ tra antico e contemporaneo

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Marta Miatto
Keyword(s):  
Human Sacrifice ◽  
Ancient Rome

We owe to Grottanelli several seminal works on the role of ideological perspectives in approaching the topic of sacrifice in antiquity. Starting from ancient Rome and Greece, the concept and practice of human sacrifice are investigated throughout their historical transformations. Grottanelli pays particular attention to the reception of the notion of sacrifice by modern ideologies. Such readings can be linked to different aims and can lead to a denial, an exaltation, or a re-evaluation of sacrifice, as experiences like the Kosmiker of Munich and Acéphale show.

Idleness and Freedom in Michel de Montaigne’s “Essays”

2019 ◽  
Vol 29 (1) ◽  
pp. 189-202
Keyword(s):  
Intellectual History ◽  
Ancient Rome ◽  
Spiritual Quest ◽  
Guiding Principle ◽  
Sextus Empiricus ◽  
History Of ◽  
Self Knowledge ◽  
The Aesthetic ◽  
The Relationship

The article advances a hypothesis about the composition of Michel de Montaigne’s Essays. Specialists in the intellectual history of the Renaissance have long considered the relationship among Montaigne’s thematically heterogeneous thoughts, which unfold unpredictably and often seen to contradict each other. The waywardness of those reflections over the years was a way for Montaigne to construct a self-portrait. Spontaneity of thought is the essence of the person depicted and an experimental literary technique that was unprecedented in its time and has still not been surpassed. Montaigne often writes about freedom of reflection and regards it as an extremely important topic. There have been many attempts to interpret the haphazardness of the Essays as the guiding principle in their composition. According to one such interpretation, the spontaneous digressions and readiness to take up very different philosophical notions is a form of of varietas and distinguo, which Montaigne understood in the context of Renaissance philosophy. Another interpretation argues that the Essays employ the rhetorical techniques of Renaissance legal commentary. A third opinion regards the Essays as an example of sprezzatura, a calculated negligence that calls attention to the aesthetic character of Montaigne’s writing. The author of the article argues for a different interpretation that is based on the concept of idleness to which Montaigne assigned great significance. He had a keen appreciation of the role of otium in the culture of ancient Rome and regarded leisure as an inner spiritual quest for self-knowledge. According to Montaigne, idleness permits self-directedness, and it is an ideal form in which to practice the freedom of thought that brings about consistency in writing, living and reality, in all of which Montaigne finds one general property - complete inconstancy. Socratic self-knowledge, a skepticism derived from Pyrrho of Elis and Sextus Empiricus, and a rejection of the conventions of traditional rhetoric that was similar to Seneca’s critique of it were all brought to bear on the concept of idleness and made Montaigne’s intellectual and literary experimentation in the Essays possible.

Fray Juan De Zumárraga–His Social Contributions

1949 ◽  
Vol 5 (3) ◽  
pp. 264-274
Author(s):  
James A. Magner
Keyword(s):  
Human Factors ◽  
Human Sacrifice ◽  
Forward Movement ◽  
Charles V ◽  
Social Contributions ◽  
Aztec Empire ◽  
Conquest Of Mexico

To Understand the conquest of Mexico, one must recognize the various human factors and the variety of motives that entered into the titanic struggle for mastery of the land. In the letters of Cortés to the Emperor Charles V, the whole gamut of ambitions—personal, national, grossly material and highly spiritual—are revealed. There can be no doubt that Cortés and the Spaniards with him were moved in the first place by a spirit of personal adventure and a desire to better their fortunes. As the panorama of the Aztec Empire opened itself before his eyes, the dream of expanding the Spanish domains came to Cortés as a justifying cause for his forward movement, so that escape or retreat appeared as treachery to his King. At the same time, as a product of the Spanish crusading era, he beheld himself in the rôle of a spiritual hero bringing the doctrine of Christian Redemption to heathen tribes sunk in idolatry and human sacrifice.

Russian proper nouns derived from a Roman praenomen

Proglas ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 29 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Gergana Petkova ◽  
◽  
Vanya Ivanova ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Proper Names ◽  
Ancient Rome ◽  
Proper Noun ◽  
Feminine Gender ◽  
Proper Nouns ◽  
Catholic Tradition

The present paper examines Russian proper nouns of both masculine and feminine gender, which are derived from a Roman praenomen. Our main goal has been to present these proper names in their entirety, together with their etymology. The excerpted onyms are grouped according to the appellative or the anthroponym from which they are derived. Another classification, based on extralinguistic information about the canonization of proper names, is also included: it takes into account its origin, i.e. when a Russian anthroponym is derived from a saint’s name in the Orthodox or the Catholic tradition, or when it is recognized by and exists in the canons of both churches. A brief review of the proper-noun system in Ancient Rome – and the role of Roman praenomens in it – is also provided. Special attention has been paid to the etymology of the praenomens.

scholarly journals The Return of the Sacral King

2020 ◽  
Vol 25 ◽  
pp. 51-65
Author(s):  
Paul R. DeHart ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Roman Empire ◽  
Political Order ◽  
The Political ◽  
Modern State ◽  
Ancient Rome ◽  
The World ◽  
Ancient Christianity ◽  
The City

In Pagans & Christians in the City, Steven D. Smith argues that in contrast to ancient Rome, ancient Christianity, following Judaism, located the sacred outside the world, desacralizing the cosmos and everything in it—including the political order. It thereby introduced a political dualism and potentially contending allegiances. Although Smith’s argument is right so far as it goes, it underplays the role of Christianity’s immanent dimension in subverting the Roman empire and the sacral pattern of antiquity. This division of authority not only undermined the Roman empire and antique sacral political order more generally—it also subverts the modern state, which, in the work of Hobbes and Rousseau, sought to remarry what Western Christianity divorced.

Edward Gibbon (1737–1794) and Early Christianity

1994 ◽  
Vol 45 (4) ◽  
pp. 661-672 ◽  
Author(s):  
W. H. C. Frend
Keyword(s):  
Roman Empire ◽  
Ancient Rome ◽  
Christian Church ◽  
The Public ◽  
History Of ◽  
Secular Society ◽  
Role Of Religion ◽  
The Church

Thus Gibbon opened the thirty-seventh chapter of the History of the decline and fall of the Roman Empire, a lengthy chapter devoted to the twin topics of ‘the institution of monastic life’ and ‘the conversion of the northern barbarians’. The connection between the history of the Roman Empire and the Christian Church was indeed indissoluble. The Church was destined to follow the pattern of the empire by gradually degenerating as it grew in strength from original purity in the life of Christ and the Apostles to become a corrupt and baleful influence on the fortunes of secular society. Looking back over twenty years of research and writing (1767–87) he wrote near the beginning of his final chapter, ‘In the preceding volumes of this History, I have described the triumph of barbarism and religion and I can only resume in a few words, their real or imaginary connection with the ruin of ancient Rome.’ He goes on to list ‘potent and forcible causes of destruction’ by barbarians and Christians respectively. As he finally laid down his pen on 27 June 1787 at Lausanne, he concluded with a sentence whose strict accuracy has sometimes been doubted: ‘It was among the ruins of the Capitol that I first conceived the idea of a work which has amused and exercised twenty years of my life, and which, however inadequate to my wishes, I finally deliver to the curiosity and candour of the public.’ The date of this decision was 15 October 1764. Here we survey briefly the role of ‘religion’, i.e. Christianity in the ruin of the Roman Empire.

scholarly journals The Comparison between Human Sacrifice in Egypt and that in China

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Bohai Xu
Keyword(s):  
Human Sacrifice ◽  
Ancient Rome ◽  
Ancient Egyptian ◽  
Egyptian Culture

From the paper, we can think why human sacrifice does not appear prior to Aha, nor after the 1st Dynasty of Egypt, and human sacrifice was found a little in Greece and ancient Rome, but it existed massively in China. So I get a conclusion that some Egyptian people came to China and brought the ancient Egyptian culture, and Chinese inherited the Egyptian culture.

Rhetoric and Epic

2014 ◽  
pp. 224-236
Author(s):  
Jon Hall
Keyword(s):  
Civil War ◽  
Epic Poetry ◽  
Rhetorical Education ◽  
Ancient Rome ◽  
Stylistic Development

This chapter examines the influence of rhetorical education on the stylistic development of epic poetry in ancient Rome, focusing in particular on the works of Ovid (Metamorphoses) and Lucan (Civil War) (although the role of rhetoric in Virgil’s Aeneid is also briefly discussed). As both ancient and modern commentators have noted, training in rhetorical declamation at school seems to have fostered in Roman students the use of stylistic tropes, figures, and mannerisms that can also be discerned in the verse of Ovid and Lucan. These figures include hyperbole, paradox, and the formulation of clever sententiae, elements frequently designed to engage the intellect as much as the emotions. Although such devices often complement the artistic aims of these poets, their prevalence points to a complex and fascinating interaction between rhetoric and epic composition, producing a subgenre sometimes labeled rhetorical epic.

A Place at the Altar

2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
Meghan J. DiLuzio
Keyword(s):  
Well Being ◽  
Central Place ◽  
Ancient Rome ◽  
Men And Women ◽  
Leading Role ◽  
Roman People ◽  
Slave Women ◽  
Vestal Virgins

This book illuminates a previously underappreciated dimension of religion in ancient Rome: the role of priestesses in civic cult. Demonstrating that priestesses had a central place in public rituals and institutions, the book emphasizes the complex, gender-inclusive nature of Roman priesthood. In ancient Rome, priestly service was a cooperative endeavor, requiring men and women, husbands and wives, and elite Romans and slaves to work together to manage the community's relationship with its gods. Like their male colleagues, priestesses offered sacrifices on behalf of the Roman people, and prayed for the community's well-being. As they carried out their ritual obligations, they were assisted by female cult personnel, many of them slave women. The book explores the central role of the Vestal Virgins and shows that they occupied just one type of priestly office open to women. Some priestesses, including the flaminica Dialis, the regina sacrorum, and the wives of the curial priests, served as part of priestly couples. Others, such as the priestesses of Ceres and Fortuna Muliebris, were largely autonomous. The book offers a fresh understanding of how the women of ancient Rome played a leading role in public cult.

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