Piety/Godliness in Early Christianity and the Roman World

By the beginning of the 1st century ce, piety/godliness (Greek: εὐσέβεια; Latin: pietas) came to entail the dutiful fulfilment of one’s obligations to one’s household, homeland, and gods. It could also describe one’s respectful attitude toward and treatment of the dead, guests, hosts, and supplicants as well as describe keeping an oath. Numerous studies on the use of piety in the New Testament have been concerned about identifying the cultural backgrounds that influenced the biblical authors’ deployment of the term and whether such use retains its Greek and Roman meanings, derives from Hellenistic Judaism, or reflects a “Christianization” of the term to encapsulate the complete Christian life, including both proper belief and practice. Outside of the field of biblical studies, philologists in classics have studied the evolution and use of the term εὐσέβεια and its cognates in ancient Greek literature, where the term had significant purchase in philosophical literature. The Latin virtue of pietas gains significant prominence in political discourse near the dusk of the Roman Republic and at the dawn of the Roman Empire with the publication of Virgil’s Aeneid and Augustus’s restoration of priesthoods and temples. Although the term εὐσέβεια and its cognates occur in Acts and 2 Peter, the majority of attention to the significance of this term in early Christian literature has centered around its meaning and function in the canonical Letters to Timothy and Titus, also known as the Pastoral Epistles. In particular, scholars have been concerned about whether the use of the term in the Pastorals reflects the respective author’s accommodation to Greek society (and thus a further development away from the earliest/more authentic/Pauline articulations of the Christian faith) or rather reflects enculturation within Hellenistic Jewish thought. Neither the historical Jesus nor Paul in his undisputed letters describe the ideal Christian life in terms of piety—thus it remains a fascinating topic to consider the social and political implications of early Christians utilizing this terminology which held significant cultural capital and prestige in its Greek and Roman cultural contexts.

Old Tales for a New Gens. Alberic of Trois-Fontaines’ Grafting of History

Throughout the Middle Ages, waves of people came to the lands once been a part of the Roman Empire. At the same time, lands yet unknown encountered the successors of the Empire. These gentes sometimes preserved a long history of their paths to their new homelands. The Longobards, the Saxons, and many others had an origo gentis, where gods played an important role. These narrations were incorporated into a historiography that was almost entirely Christian. This article is concerned with the methods used to find harmony between the past and present by Alberic of Trois-Fontaines when writing about the Semigallians. The narrative of their origins used established motifs and themes that made it possible to include the invented history of the gens into the then-established universal history. This was done through the etymology of names or the erudite use of the writings of other authors. These new gentes were grafted onto the trees of old tales.

Reclaiming the Classics for a Diverse and Global World Through OER

In the 2019–20 academic year, I redesigned a course on the classics to make both the texts and the context in which they were taught more accessible for and relevant to the predominantly female students of Saint Mary’s College, Notre Dame. The course was re-centered on the dialogue between the ever-evolving and diverse cultures within Greece and the Roman empire and surrounding regions such as Egypt, Ethiopia, and Persia; issues caused by slavery and economic inequality; conceptions of gender roles and sexuality, race and ethnicity, and migration and citizenship; the troubling appropriation of classical motifs and texts by fascist groups in the twentieth century and some alt-right groups and sexual predators in the twenty-first century; and on recent initiatives meant to demonstrate the diversity of both Greek and Roman cultures through documentary, artistic, and archaeological evidence (particularly in the digital humanities and in museums and libraries). I also wanted to make the course close to zero cost for students and to shift to digital texts which lent themselves to interactivity and social scholarship. Our librarian, Catherine Pellegrino, obtained multi-user e-books for modern reinterpretations of classical works still in copyright. A LibreTexts grant enabled the co-authors of this article—the course instructor (and lead author) and two paid student researchers—and a team of summer-employed student collaborators to edit, footnote, and create critical introductions and student activities for various key texts for the course. Many of these texts are now hosted on the LibreTexts OER platform. Beta versions of enriched OER texts and activities were user tested in a synchronous hybrid virtual/physical classroom of twenty-five students, who were taking the course (HUST 292) in the fall semester of 2020.

Heracles and the Monkey

In the pamphlet On Salaried Posts in Great Houses Lucian of Samosata analyzes the problem of the impossible relationship between misthos, ‘money’, and paideia, ‘culture’ and ‘teaching’. Money is an indispensable asset for the necessities of life. But starting with Socrates and the Sophists it becomes problematic. In Lucian’s satire the attack is directed at philosophers and the marketing of culture in the Roman Empire at the time of the Second Sophistic.

Greek Migrant Literature in the Early Roman Empire

This article argues that the concept of migrant literature, developed in postcolonial studies, is a useful tool for analysing Greek literature of the Early Roman Empire (27 BC-AD 68). The city of Rome attracted huge numbers of migrants from across the Mediterranean. Among them were many writers from Hellenized provinces like Egypt, Syria and Asia, who wrote in Greek. Leaving their native regions and travelling to Rome, they moved between cultures, responding in Greek to the new world order. Early imperial Greek writers include Strabo of Amasia, Dionysius of Halicarnassus, Nicolaus of Damascus, Timagenes of Alexandria, Crinagoras of Mytilene, Philo of Alexandria and Paul of Tarsus. What connects these authors of very different origins, styles, beliefs, and literary genres is migrancy. They are migrant writers whose works are characterized by in-betweenness, ambivalence and polyphony.

Shedding Light on Roman Glass Consumption on the Western Coast of the Black Sea

The chemical composition of 48 glass finds from Histria and Tomis, Romania, chiefly dated to the 1st–4th c. AD, was determined using prompt gamma activation analysis (PGAA) at the Budapest Neutron Centre (BNC). Most fragments have composition typical for the Roman naturally colored blue-green-yellow (RNCBGY) glass; Mn-colorless, Sb-colorless, and Sb–Mn colorless glass finds were evidenced, too. Several Foy Série 2.1 and Foy Série 3.2 glass fragments, as well as an HIMT and a plant ash glass sample, were identified in the studied assemblage. The archaeological evidence, the glass working waste items, and the samples with compositional patterns suggestive of recycling are proofs of the secondary glass working activities at Tomis during the Early Roman Empire period.

Once Again on Claudian's Egyptian Origin

The life of Claudius Claudian (c. 370 – c. 404 AD), the great Latin poet active during the reign of Honorius, is unknown, especially the years before his great debut in 395 AD. Communis opinio holds that he was a pagan Egyptian Greek born in Alexandria c. 370 AD, who having come to Italy in 394 AD started a career of a political poet in the service of the elites of the Western Roman Empire. This view codified by Alan Cameron (1970) was challenged by Peder G. Christiansen (1997), who asserted that Claudian was actually a Westerner. The thesis of the poet’s Egyptian origin was defended by Bret Mulligan (2007) and then again attacked by Christiansen and Christiansen (2009). This article aims to reconsider the scarce textual evidence and to put an emphasis on some points that have been underestimated so far: the possibility of Claudian’s early connections with Constantinople and the ruling circles of the eastern capital.