The imperial cult and the individual : the negotiation of Augustus' private worship during his lifetime at Rome

This dissertation argues for a reevaluation of the imperial cult in Rome. It demonstrates that worship of the living Augustus began in private acts which progressed into public rituals after his senate-decreed divinity in 14 CE. Scenes of private worship, preserved in architecture, poetry, and the city's topography, as well as private images of the emperor anticipate Augustus' public cult as a divus (deified emperor). The chapters show how the climate in Rome allowed for the private articulation of Augustus' living cult, and then address specific aspects of his worship: sacrifice, cult places, and cultic statues. This argument expands our understanding of Augustus' divinity in Rome to include worship of the vivus (living emperor), and demonstrates how this worship transitioned into public cult. No less importantly, it challenges lingering modern assumptions about the boundaries between divinity and humanity as these played out around the figure of the emperor in early imperial Rome.

Worship on Screen

Chapter 5 examines digital audiovisual worship media as nodes that serve both as extensions of congregations into the virtual realm and as sites for the creation of new networked congregations. Drawing from ethnographic field research both on and offline, this chapter argues that new digital audiovisual technologies and the avenues of online communication along which they travel not only give evangelical worshipers new ways to transmit, share, and discover worship songs; rather, they also strongly condition the practices evangelicals consider to be necessary parts of worship. Through audiovisual worship media experienced on small personal screens and large projection screens in church, conference, and concert settings, once-separate aural and visual strands of evangelical devotion are drawn together into a powerful experiential whole. The networked mode of congregating centered around these audiovisual worship experiences challenges the boundaries between public and private worship and has brought about new negotiations between individual, institutional, and industry authority.

Offering hospitality to strangers: Hugo Grotius’s draft regulations for the Jews

In 1615, the States of Holland and West-Vriesland commissioned Hugo Grotius to draft a set of legal regulations for the Jews in their province. This article analyzes Grotius’s draft, entitled Remonstrance. It examines how Grotius understood and justified the rights of Jews and to what extent his approach was novel. More particularly, it shows how Grotius developed the concept of a natural duty to offer hospitality to strangers to advocate admission and toleration of Jews. He borrowed this concept from the sixteenth-century jurist and theologian Francisco de Vitoria, who had used it to justify the Spanish colonization of the Americas. While Vitoria had suggested that the Indians had violated their natural duty to offer hospitality to strangers by refusing to admit the Spanish merchants to their lands, Grotius argued that the provinces of Holland and West-Vriesland had a natural duty to offer hospitality to the Jews who had been expelled from their communities for religious reasons. Unlike Vitoria, Grotius recognized the natural duty to offer hospitality to strangers as the natural foundation of the right to asylum, which applied irrespective of religion. This enabled him to argue that these Jews, as religious exiles, had to be admitted to the provinces of Holland and West-Vriesland, and granted particular rights, including the freedom of (private) worship.

FOUR INSCRIPTIONS FROM GREATER KNOSSOS AND THE ROAD TO ITS PORT AT HERAKLION (CRETE)

Four inscriptions of Hellenistic to Early Roman date were found in rescue excavations undertaken during the construction of public housing at the location Bedevi, east of Leophoros Knossou in the suburbs of modern Aghios Ioannis (Heraklion). These four inscriptions constitute an intriguing group as they provide evidence of a rural installation where a vessel with an inscribed lid was stored, a sepulchral site and private worship of Artemis, as well as a point between ancient Heraklion and Knossos where a Roman road crossed the Chrysopigis stream. In antiquity this area was part of the greater Knossos area, albeit closer to Heraklion than to Knossos. These four inscriptions provide new evidence for the nature of this area and for the northern road connections of Roman Knossos, particularly the road that linked Knossos with its harbour at Heraklion.