front cover of Christian and Pagan in the Roman Empire
Christian and Pagan in the Roman Empire
Robert Sider
Catholic University of America Press, 2001
In this volume, Robert D. Sider undertakes a judicious pruning of the original texts and brings a fresh accessibility to the important writings of Tertullian.
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A Chronicle of the Last Pagans
Pierre Chuvin
Harvard University Press, 1990

A Chronicle of the Last Pagans is a history of the triumph of Christianity in the Roman Empire as told from the perspective of the defeated: the adherents of the mysteries, cults, and philosophies that dominated Greco–Roman culture.

With a sovereign command of the diverse evidence, Pierre Chuvin portrays the complex spiritual, intellectual, and political lives of professing pagans after Christianity became the state religion. While recreating the unfolding drama of their fate—their gradual loss of power, exclusion from political, military, and civic positions, their assimilation, and finally their persecution—he records a remarkable persistence of pagan religiosity and illustrates the fruitful interaction between Christianity and paganism. The author points to the implications of this late paganism for subsequent developments in the Byzantine Empire and the West. Chuvin's compelling account of an often forgotten world of pagan culture rescues an important aspect of our spiritual heritage and provides new understanding of Late Antiquity.

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Cosa
The Roman and Greek Amphoras
Elizabeth Lyding Will and Kathleen Warner Slane
University of Michigan Press, 2019
This long-awaited volume presents the work of Elizabeth Lyding Will on the important group of transport amphoras found at Cosa. This town has been widely recognized as a prototypical colony of the later Roman Republic and a source for trade with Gaul and Spain, so this publication of its finds has important implications for archaeologists and historians of the ancient world. Will’s initial work was on Latin amphora-stamps in the eastern Mediterranean, and through the 1960s and 1970s she developed an amphora typology based on materials found in the region and at Cosa. What has not been appreciated is that this typology was not limited to stamped Republican amphoras but also included unstamped vessels, such as imperial Spanish, African, and eastern amphoras dating as late as the fifth century CE. This book shows that Will was far ahead of her time in documenting the Mediterranean trade in commodities carried in amphoras: her work not only provides a record of the amphoras found on the town-site of Cosa, but also includes a comparison between the finds from the port and the town.   

At the time of Will’s death, her manuscript consisted of a typed catalogue of the amphora stamps from Cosa and an equal number of unstamped vessels, but was missing important elements. On the basis of extensive notes and photographs, Kathleen Warner Slane has reviewed and updated the manuscript, adding type descriptions and footnotes to materials that have appeared since Will’s death as well as a framing introduction and conclusions. Appendices highlight an Augustan amphora dump on the Arx and add a catalogue of the Greek amphora stamps found at Cosa.

Cosa: The Roman and Greek Amphoras will be of interest to scholars and students of Rome and its system of colonies, and also to those interested in Greek and Roman archaeology and trade in the ancient world.
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Dionysus, Christ, and the Death of God, Volume 1
The Great Mediations of the Classical World
Giuseppe Fornari
Michigan State University Press, 2020
This magisterial reflection on the history and destiny of the West compares Greco-Roman civilization and the Judeo-Christian tradition in order to understand what both unites and divides them. Mediation, understood as a collective, symbolic experience, gives society unity and meaning, putting human beings in contact with a universal object known as the world or reality. But unity has a price: the very force that enables peaceful coexistence also makes us prone to conflict. As a result, in order to find a common point of convergence—of at-one-ment—someone must be sacrificed. Sacrifice, then, is the historical pillar of mediation. It was endorsed in a cosmic-religious sense in antiquity and rejected for ethical reasons in modernity, where the Judeo-Christian tradition plays an intermediate role in condemning sacrificial violence as such, while accepting sacrifice as a voluntary act offered to save other human beings. Today, as we face the collapse of all shared mediations, this intermediating solution offers a way out of our moral and cultural plight.
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front cover of Dionysus, Christ, and the Death of God, Volume 2
Dionysus, Christ, and the Death of God, Volume 2
Christianity and Modernity
Giuseppe Fornari
Michigan State University Press, 2020
This magisterial reflection on the history and destiny of the West compares Greco-Roman civilization and the Judeo-Christian tradition in order to understand what both unites and divides them. Mediation, understood as a collective, symbolic experience, gives society unity and meaning, putting human beings in contact with a universal object known as the world or reality. But unity has a price: the very force that enables peaceful coexistence also makes us prone to conflict. As a result, in order to find a common point of convergence—of at-one-ment—someone must be sacrificed. Sacrifice, then, is the historical pillar of mediation. It was endorsed in a cosmic-religious sense in antiquity and rejected for ethical reasons in modernity, where the Judeo-Christian tradition plays an intermediate role in condemning sacrificial violence as such, while accepting sacrifice as a voluntary act offered to save other human beings. Today, as we face the collapse of all shared mediations, this intermediating solution offers a way out of our moral and cultural plight.
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Drudgery Divine
On the Comparison of Early Christianities and the Religions of Late Antiquity
Jonathan Z. Smith
University of Chicago Press, 1990
In this major theoretical and methodological statement on the history of religions, Jonathan Z. Smith shows how convert apologetic agendas can dictate the course of comparative religious studies. As his example, Smith reviews four centuries of scholarship comparing early Christianities with religions of late Antiquity (especially the so-called mystery cults) and shows how this scholarship has been based upon an underlying Protestant-Catholic polemic. The result is a devastating critique of traditional New Testament scholarship, a redescription of early Christianities as religious traditions amenable to comparison, and a milestone in Smith's controversial approach to comparative religious studies.

"An important book, and certainly one of the most significant in the career of Jonathan Z. Smith, whom one may venture to call the greatest pathologist in the history of religions. As in many precedent cases, Smith follows a standard procedure: he carefully selects his victim, and then dissects with artistic finesse and unequaled acumen. The operation is always necessary, and a deconstructor of Smith's caliber is hard to find."—Ioan P. Coulianu, Journal of Religion
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front cover of From Roman to Early Christian Thessalonikē
From Roman to Early Christian Thessalonikē
Studies in Religion and Archaeology
Laura Nasrallah
Harvard University Press, 2010
This volume brings together international scholars of religion, archaeologists, and scholars of art and architectural history to investigate social, political, and religious life in Roman and early Christian Thessalonikē, an important metropolis in the Hellenistic, Roman, and early Christian periods and beyond. This volume is the first broadly interdisciplinary investigation of Roman and early Christian Thessalonikē in English and offers new data and new interpretations by scholars of ancient religion and archaeology. The book covers materials usually treated by a broad range of disciplines: New Testament and early Christian literature, art historical materials, urban planning in antiquity, material culture and daily life, and archaeological artifacts from the Roman to the late antique period.
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Gerulata
The Lamps: A Survey of Roman Lamps in Pannonia
Robert Frecer
Karolinum Press, 2015
For the ancient Romans, lamps were more than just a way to be able to see in the dark—they were mythical muses, witnesses to secrets, and instruments of the supernatural. Far more familiar to the average Roman than the high art of mosaics, statues, or frescos, lamps created the atmosphere of day-to-day life in the homes, workshops, and public houses of Roman provincial towns.
            This catalog brings together for the first time the 210 ancient lamps excavated since 1949 in Bratislava-Rusovce, a suburb of the capital of Slovakia and the site of the ancient Roman settlement of Gerulata. What may appear at first glance as a standard panoply of Roman lamps is comprehensively examined to uncover signs of wear and use, unique personal inscriptions, and exceptional forms. This book reveals the stunning wealth of knowledge that can be gained from the study of lighting devices in this liminal settlement on the tough northern frontier of the Roman Empire.
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Greek, Roman and Islamic Coins from Sardis
T. V. Buttrey
Harvard University Press, 1981

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The Hellenistic, Roman, and Medieval Glass from Cosa
David Frederick Grose (R. T. Scott, editor)
University of Michigan Press, 2017
The Hellenistic, Roman, and Medieval Glass from Cosa continues the exemplary record of publication by the American Academy in Rome on important classes of materials recovered in excavation from one of the principal archaeological sites of Roman Italy. Over 15,000 fragments of glass tableware, ranging in date from the mid-second century BCE to the early fifth century CE, were found at Cosa, a small town in Etruria (modern Tuscany). Cosa’s products were chiefly exported to North Africa and Europe, but its influence was felt throughout the Mediterranean world.

The research and analysis presented here are the work of the late David Frederick Grose, who began this project when no other city site excavations in Italy focused on ancient glass. He confirmed that the Roman glass industry began to emerge in the Julio-Claudian era, beginning in the principate of Augustus. His study traces the evolution of manufacturing techniques from core-formed vessels to free blown glass, and it documents changes in taste and style that were characteristic of the western glass industry throughout its long history.

At the time of Grose’s unexpected passing, his study was complete but not yet published. Nevertheless, the reputation of his work in this area has done much to establish the value and importance of excavating and researching Cosa’s glass. This volume, arranged and edited by R. T. Scott, makes Grose’s essential scholarship on the subject available for the first time.


 
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front cover of The Power of Sacrifice
The Power of Sacrifice
Roman and Christian Discourses in Conflict
George Heyman
Catholic University of America Press, 2007
In this work, George Heyman offers a fresh perspective on the similarities between pagan Roman and Christian thinking about the public role of sacrifice in the first two and a half centuries of the Christian era.
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front cover of Public Spectacles in Roman and Late Antique Palestine
Public Spectacles in Roman and Late Antique Palestine
Zeev Weiss
Harvard University Press, 2014

Public Spectacles in Roman and Late Antique Palestine introduces readers to the panoply of public entertainment that flourished in Palestine from the first century BCE to the sixth century CE. Drawing on a trove of original archaeological and textual evidence, Zeev Weiss reconstructs an ancient world where Romans, Jews, and Christians intermixed amid a heady brew of shouts, roars, and applause to watch a variety of typically pagan spectacles.

Ancient Roman society reveled in many such spectacles—dramatic performances, chariot races, athletic competitions, and gladiatorial combats—that required elaborate public venues, often maintained at great expense. Wishing to ingratiate himself with Rome, Herod the Great built theaters, amphitheaters, and hippodromes to bring these forms of entertainment to Palestine. Weiss explores how the indigenous Jewish and Christian populations responded, as both spectators and performers, to these cultural imports. Perhaps predictably, the reactions of rabbinic and clerical elites did not differ greatly. But their dire warnings to shun pagan entertainment did little to dampen the popularity of these events.

Herod’s ambitious building projects left a lasting imprint on the region. His dream of transforming Palestine into a Roman enclave succeeded far beyond his rule, with games and spectacles continuing into the fifth century CE. By then, however, public entertainment in Palestine had become a cultural institution in decline, ultimately disappearing during Justinian’s reign in the sixth century.

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Religious Competition in the Greco-Roman World
Nathaniel P. DesRosiers
SBL Press, 2016

Essays that broaden the historical scope and sharpen the parameters of competitive discourses

Scholars in the fields of late antique Christianity, neoplatonism, New Testament, art history, and rabbinics examine issues related to authority, identity, and change in religious and philosophical traditions of late antiquity. The specific focus of the volume is the examination of cultural producers and their particular viewpoints and agendas in an attempt to shed new light on the religious thinkers, texts, and material remains of late antiquity. The essays explore the major creative movements of the era, examining the strategies used to develop and designate orthodoxies and orthopraxies. This collection of essays reinterprets dialogues between individuals and groups, illuminating the mutual competition and influence among these ancient thinkers and communities.

Features:

  • Essays feature competitive discourse as the central organizing theme
  • Articles present unique theoretical models that are adaptable to different contexts and highly applicable to religious discourses before and after the Late Antique Period
  • Scholars cover a much wider range of traditions including Judaism, Christianity, paganism, and philosophy in order to provide the most complete portrait of the religious landscape
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Roman and European Mythologies
Edited by Yves Bonnefoy
University of Chicago Press, 1992
This volume begins with Roman myths and traces their influence in
early Christian and later European literature. Ninety-five entries
by leading scholars cover subjects such as sacrificial cults and rites
in pre-Roman Italy, Roman religion and its origins, the mythologies of
paganism, the survival of the ancient gods in the Middle Ages and the
Renaissance, gypsy myths and rituals, romanticism and myth in Blake,
Nerval, and Balzac, and myth in twentieth-century English literature.

Mythologies offers illuminating examples of the workings of
myth in the structure of societies past and present—how we create,
use, and are guided by systems of myth to answer fundamental questions
about ourselves and our world.

Many of the sections in Mythologies, originally published as a
two-volume cloth set, will soon be available in four paperback volumes
(two are announced here; two more are scheduled for 1993). These
volumes will reproduce the articles, introductory essays, and
illustrations as they appeared in the full Mythologies set.
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Treason in Roman and Germanic Law
Collected Papers
By Floyd Seyward Lear
University of Texas Press, 1965

"Treason" is a word with many connotations, a word applied to a host of varied offenses throughout the history of humanity. These essays by Floyd Seyward Lear analyze the development of the political theory of treason from its beginning in Roman Law to its transformation in the Germanic custom of the early Middle Ages.

The author has presented treason as a political idea, possessing historical continuity, though varying from age to age as it follows the evolution of political authority itself. These studies trace the shifting emphasis in crimes against the state from acts directed against a central absolutist authority to acts involving the personal relationship of a pledged troth and individual fealty. This is a shift from the concept of majesty in Roman law to the concept of fidelity in Germanic law with the corollary shift from allegiance as an act of deference to allegiance as a token of mutual fidelity.

These ideas are examined chronologically across an interval extending from archaic Roman law to incipiently feudal forms, from which modern theories of treason, allegiance, and sovereignty derive. Contemporary concepts in these political areas can hardly be understood apart from their historical origins. Broadly considered, this work is intended as a contribution to intellectual history.

Further, this collection represents the synthesis of material widely scattered in the primary sources and relevant secondary works. The two concluding bibliographical essays are intended as a general survey of the literature relevant to these studies in Roman and Germanic public law. Descriptive and interpretive works which deal with treason and its allied aspects of political and legal theory are not numerous in the English language.

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