Philology's Shadow: Theology and the Classics

Perhaps when reading Macrobius we should ask ourselves questions about our own reading and writing practices. Perhaps when piously praising the Victorian greats of philology we fail to appreciate their own deep theological concerns. And what will they say of us in two hundred years? Who were our gods, and what did we mean by to theion? Perhaps our own tenebrous commitments make it hard to appreciate with much clarity the shadowy contours of others’ lives. Any suggestion that we might be strangers to ourselves will naturally be a painful one.

The study of the study of Classics in the 19th century has become a staple of the burgeoning field of reception studies for obvious reasons. Classics provided the mainstay of elite education [Stray (1998); Goldhill (2002)] and had considerable reach throughout society, not just in the literature and art of both the grander and lower sorts, but also in circuses, music halls, and theatres (Richardson (2013); Hall (forthcoming); Bryant Davis (forthcoming); Flashar (1991) (2001); Prins (1999)]. Classics, in short, provided the furniture of the mind [Goldhill (2011)].

This paper addresses what is arguably the single most important question for contemporary studies of ancient religion: can we imagine a critical language for analysing ancient polytheisms without retrojecting onto them modern theological categories?

This paper will argue that the sublimated pressure of theological concerns is present as early as the fifth century, and even in a writer long considered the poster child of late paganism, Macrobius.