scholarly journals ‘Deo Magno Mercurio Adoravit…’ – The Latin Language and Its Use in Sacred Spaces and Contexts in Roman Egypt

2021 ◽  
Vol 42 (2) ◽  
pp. 15-30
Author(s):  
Jiří Honzl
Keyword(s):  
Roman Empire ◽  
Social Background ◽  
Sacred Spaces ◽  
Latin Language ◽  
Privileged Status ◽  
Roman Egypt ◽  
Roman Culture ◽  
Funerary Inscriptions ◽  
Actual Relation

The use of Latin in the multilingual society of Roman Egypt was never more than marginal. Yet, as a language of the ruling power, the Roman Empire, Latin enjoyed to some extent a privileged status. It was generally more widely applied in the army, as well as on some official occasions, and in the field of law. Less expectably, various Latin inscriptions on stone had religious contents or were found in sacred spaces and contexts. Such texts included honorary and votive inscriptions, visitors’ graffiti, and funerary inscriptions. All three groups are surveyed and evaluated focusing especially on their actual relation to the religious sphere and social background, noting both continuity and changes of existing practices and traditions. Such analysis of the inscriptions allows to draw conclusions not only regarding the use of Latin in religious matters in Egypt but also reveal some aspects of the use of Latin in Egypt in general and the role of Roman culture in the Egyptian society.

Recent Johannine Studies: Part Two: Monographs

2012 ◽  
Vol 123 (9) ◽  
pp. 417-428 ◽  
Author(s):  
Francis J. Moloney
Keyword(s):  
Roman Empire ◽  
Gospel Of John ◽  
Social Background ◽  
Early Church ◽  
Fourth Gospel ◽  
Ongoing Debate ◽  
Roman Religion ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
Standing Question

This survey presents recent studies of the Gospel of John that have attended to the long-standing question of the relationship that may or may not exist between the Johannine story of Jesus and words and events from his life. A renewed interest in a closer link between John and history is taking place. Recent work on the role of “witness” in the early Church and in the transmission of traditions is also related to this search for the relationship between John and history, as is the ongoing debate over the relationship between the Fourth Gospel and the Synoptic Tradition. The debate over the religious and social background to John has been enriched by recent studies that attempt to locate the Gospel in the Roman Empire, and trace the influence of Roman religion and Imperial practices in the Johannine text. Rich studies of Johannine Theology continue to appear, and the recent turn to a more literary evaluation of the Gospel has led to a strong growth in interest in the role of Johannine characters within the story. Some claim that they are entirely subject to the Johannine rhetoric, while others prefer to single them out as distinct and identifiable “personalities.”

Rhetorical Battles: Jesus as Speaker in the Gospel of Mark

2020 ◽  
Vol 22 (1) ◽  
pp. 31-50
Author(s):  
Tor Ivar Østmoe
Keyword(s):  
Roman Empire ◽  
New Testament ◽  
Gospel Of Mark ◽  
Literary Culture ◽  
Social Background ◽  
Social Spaces ◽  
Cultural Elite ◽  
The Social ◽  
The New Testament ◽  
Roman Culture

Building on research relating the New Testament to Greek and Roman literary culture, the article explores the Gospel of Mark's representation of Jesus as speaker. In focus are dialogues in the Gospel's seventh chapter which take place between Jesus and characters with different social background and in different social spaces. The article argues that, in these dialogues, Jesus speaks as a member of the social and cultural elite, as he has access to social spaces and has the necessary skills in rhetoric to adapt his speech to varying circumstances. This representation of Jesus as speaker can have several functions. One is to familiarise readers of the Gospel across the Roman Empire with a distant province, Judaea, as Jesus conforms to expectations for an elite male in Greek and Roman culture. A second is to contribute to Jesus' literary characterisation as subversive or comic, as he engages in ‘rhetorical battles’ with different people and with varying success.

The Dance of Priests, Matronae, and Philosophers: Aspects of Dance Culture in Rome and the Roman Empire

2020 ◽  
Vol 8 (1) ◽  
pp. 190-199 ◽  
Author(s):  
Karin Schlapbach
Keyword(s):  
Roman Empire ◽  
The Political ◽  
Dance Culture ◽  
Political Role ◽  
Italian Peninsula ◽  
Roman Culture ◽  
Cultural Interactions

Abstract The fourteen papers delivered at a conference on Roman dance in June 2019 set about correcting the widespread idea that dance was marginal and held in low esteem in Rome. They elucidated different contexts in which dance was central, especially religion, the theatre, and private entertainments, and further topics included cultural interactions on the Italian peninsula, the diversity of practitioners, the political role of dance, and dance images in poetry. The conference showed not only that further study of Roman dance is necessary, but also that dance is a valuable tool that allows us to think about what we mean when we talk about ‘Roman’ culture.

Victorian Culture and Classical Antiquity

2011 ◽  
Author(s):  
Simon Goldhill
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Roman Empire ◽  
Classical Antiquity ◽  
Victorian Culture ◽  
Wide Range ◽  
Victorian Art ◽  
Victorian Science ◽  
Role Of Religion ◽  
Nineteenth Century Novels

How did the Victorians engage with the ancient world? This book is an exploration of how ancient Greece and Rome influenced Victorian culture. Through Victorian art, opera, and novels, the book examines how sexuality and desire, the politics of culture, and the role of religion in society were considered and debated through the Victorian obsession with antiquity. Looking at Victorian art, it demonstrates how desire and sexuality, particularly anxieties about male desire, were represented and communicated through classical imagery. Probing into operas of the period, the book addresses ideas of citizenship, nationalism, and cultural politics. And through fiction—specifically nineteenth-century novels about the Roman Empire—it discusses religion and the fierce battles over the church as Christianity began to lose dominance over the progressive stance of Victorian science and investigation. Rediscovering some great forgotten works and reframing some more familiar ones, the book offers extraordinary insights into how the Victorian sense of antiquity and our sense of the Victorians came into being. With a wide range of examples and stories, it demonstrates how interest in the classical past shaped nineteenth-century self-expression, giving antiquity a unique place in Victorian culture.

THE ROLE OF ACCOUNTING IN PUBLIC EXPENDITURE AND MONETARY POLICY IN THE FIRST CENTURY AD ROMAN EMPIRE

1995 ◽  
Vol 22 (2) ◽  
pp. 117-129 ◽  
Author(s):  
David Oldroyd
Keyword(s):  
Monetary Policy ◽  
Roman Empire ◽  
Financial Planning ◽  
Public Expenditure ◽  
First Century ◽  
Financial Control ◽  
The Public ◽  
Monetary System ◽  
Epigraphic Evidence

Previous authors have argued that Roman coinage was used as an instrument of financial control rather than simply as a means for the state to make payments, without assessing the accounting implications. The article reviews the literary and epigraphic evidence of the public expenditure accounts surrounding the Roman monetary system in the first century AD. This area has been neglected by accounting historians. Although the scope of the accounts supports the proposition that they were used for financial control, the impetus for keeping those accounts originally came from the emperor's public expenditure commitments. This suggests that financial control may have been encouraged by the financial planning that arose out of the exigencies of funding public expenditure. In this way these two aspects of monetary policy can be reconciled.

Coinage and the Tributary Mode of Production

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Eduardo Manzano Moreno
Keyword(s):  
Roman Empire ◽  
Middle Ages ◽  
Social Role ◽  
State Of The Art ◽  
Early Middle Ages ◽  
The Social ◽  
Simple Question ◽  
Mode Of Production

This chapter addresses a very simple question: is it possible to frame coinage in the Early Middle Ages? The answer will be certainly yes, but will also acknowledge that we lack considerable amounts of relevant data potentially available through state-of-the-art methodologies. One problem is, though, that many times we do not really know the relevant questions we can pose on coins; another is that we still have not figured out the social role of coinage in the aftermath of the Roman Empire. This chapter shows a number of things that could only be known thanks to the analysis of coins. And as its title suggests it will also include some reflections on greed and generosity.

Trade, Commerce, and the State in the Roman World

2017 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Roman Empire ◽  
The State ◽  
Market Regulation ◽  
External Trade ◽  
Long Distance ◽  
Legal Structures ◽  
The City ◽  
Political Character ◽  
Different Sources

This interdisciplinary volume presents nineteen chapters by Roman historians and archaeologists, discussing trade in the Roman Empire in the period c.100 BC to AD 350, and in particular the role of the Roman state, in shaping the institutional framework for trade within and outside the Empire, in taxing that trade, and in intervening in the markets to ensure the supply of particular commodities, especially for the city of Rome and for the army. The chapters in this volume address facets of the subject on the basis of widely different sources of evidence—historical, papyrological, and archaeological—and are grouped in three sections: institutional factors (taxation, legal structures, market regulation, financial institutions); evidence for long-distance trade within the Empire, in wood, stone, glass, and pottery; and trade beyond the frontiers, with the East (as far as China), India, Arabia, and the Red Sea, and the Sahara. Rome’s external trade with realms to the east emerges as being of particular significance to the fisc. But in the eastern part of the Empire at least, the state appears, in collaboration with the elite holders of wealth, to have adapted the mechanisms of taxation, both direct and indirect, to support its need for revenue. On the other hand, the price of that collaboration, which was in effect a fiscal partnership, in slightly different forms in East and West, in the longer term fundamentally changed the political character of the Empire.

The Role of the City in Merovingian Francia

2020 ◽  
pp. 581-610
Author(s):  
S. T. Loseby
Keyword(s):  
Roman Empire ◽  
Urban Communities ◽  
Late Antiquity ◽  
Building Blocks ◽  
Urban Network ◽  
City Councils ◽  
Royal Courts ◽  
Range Of Functions ◽  
Fierce Competition

The Merovingians inherited an urban network from the Roman Empire that remained substantially intact. Although Gallic cities had long been declining in extent and sophistication, during late antiquity their landscapes were adapted to contemporary priorities through the provision of walls and churches, and their politics was transformed by the emergence of bishops as leaders of urban communities. When the upper tiers of imperial administration disappeared, this equipped the vast majority of cities to survive as the basic building blocks of Merovingian kingdoms that were initially conceived as aggregations of city–territories. In ruling through their cities, the Merovingians expanded upon existing mechanisms for the extraction of taxes and services, while relying on centrally appointed bishops and counts rather than city councils for the projection of their authority. This generated fierce competition between kings for control of cities and among local elites for positions of power within them. In the later Merovingian period, however, the significance of cities diminished as stable territorial kingdoms emerged, political practice was centralized around the royal courts, and the Roman administrative legacy finally disintegrated. But the cities remained preeminent religious centers, and, with the beginnings of economic revival, continued to perform a range of functions unmatched by other categories of settlement.

scholarly journals Hermēneis in the Documentary Record from Hellenistic and Roman Egypt: interpreters, translators and mediators in a bilingual society

2020 ◽  
Vol 8 (1) ◽  
pp. 50-102
Author(s):  
Rachel Mairs
Keyword(s):  
Late Antiquity ◽  
Ancient World ◽  
Legal Cases ◽  
Roman Egypt ◽  
Monastic Communities

AbstractEgypt of the Hellenistic and Roman periods remains the most thoroughly documented multilingual society in the ancient world, because of the wealth of texts preserved on papyrus in Egyptian, Greek, Latin and other languages. This makes the scarcity of interpreters in the papyrological record all the more curious. This study reviews all instances in the papyri of individuals referred to as hermēneus in Greek, or references to the process of translation/interpreting. It discusses the terminological ambiguity of hermēneus, which can also mean a commercial mediator; the position of language mediators in legal cases in Egyptian, Greek and Latin; the role of gender in language mediation; and concludes with a survey of interpreting in Egyptian monastic communities in Late Antiquity.

THE RHETORIC OF RELIGIOUS CONFLICT IN ARNOBIUS’ADVERSVS NATIONES

2019 ◽  
Vol 69 (1) ◽  
pp. 402-416
Author(s):  
Konstantine Panegyres
Keyword(s):  
Roman Empire ◽  
Religious Identity ◽  
Religious Conflict ◽  
Religious Practices ◽  
Historical Evidence ◽  
Historical Source ◽  
Local Religion ◽  
Early Christian ◽  
Christian Writer

In this paper I discuss the ways in which the early Christian writer Arnobius of Sicca used rhetoric to shape religious identity inAduersus nationes. I raise questions about the reliability of his rhetorical work as a historical source for understanding conflict between Christians and pagans. The paper is intended as an addition to the growing literature in the following current areas of study: (i) the role of local religion and identity in the Roman Empire; (ii) the presence of pagan elements in Christian religious practices; (iii) the question of how to approach rhetorical works as historical evidence.

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