Religion

Since Guignebert 1923, much effort has gone into studying Christians deviant from episcopal norms (e.g., Frankfurter, MacMullen). The existence of non-Christian counterparts of Guignebert’s “semi-Christians” has been recognized (e.g., by Cameron), but their beliefs have received much less attention. This article studies two late Roman people who had articulately non-Christian ways of seeing god, humanity, and the cosmos, but nonetheless adopted a few distinctively Christian beliefs or philosophical ideas.

Sacred Bandages: The Fillet as Instrument of Epiphany in the Epidaurian Miracle Inscriptions

Rend, Repurpose, Recycle: Religious Materialities of the Liber Linteus Zagrabiensis

Some columns of Philodemus’ book IV of On Music develop a critique against the Stoics Cleanthes and Diogenes of Babylonia, who claimed that musical performances are means to pray and to pay homage to the gods. The Epicurean philosopher rejects their doctrine by arguing that music is not only useless for this purpose, but even damaging for the following reasons: 1) it neither pleases nor gives pleasure to gods, 2) it creates unnecessary delights in the worshippers, 3) it “distracts” the human mind from the “vision” of the divine.

The paper builds on the argument of Schultz 2016 that the modern understanding of the Roman ritual of devotio as a form of self-sacrifice (e.g., Yerkes 1952, Versnel 1976, Gustafsson 2015, van Henten 2018) clashes with actual Roman ritual taxonomy.  That article made the case that devotio and sacrificium (the particularly Roman instantiation of sacrifice) were two very distinct entities in the Roman ritual repertoire on the basis of the starkly different Roman attitudes toward each ritual and the fact that no ancient source claims any relationship between the

The Strength of Ambiguity: Constructing Belief in the Apotheosis of Julia, daughter of Nikias (IG Bulg. I2 345)