Ritual and Religious Belief

In his Legatio ad Gaium, Philo claims that the Augusteum in Alexandria served as a “hope and sign of deliverance to those setting sail, and those coming in to land - ἐλπὶς καὶ ἀναγομένοις καὶ καταπλέουσι σωτήριος” (151). A similar sentiment is echoed by Josephus in his Antiquitates Judaicae when he states that Herod constructed a temple to Roma and Augustus in the harbor city of Caesarea that could be seen far out to sea and offered hope to sailors and travelers of a safe end to their journey (15.339).

This paper traces a history of Greek interaction with foreign scripts in the 7th/6th centuries. In

recent years, the adaption of the Greek alphabet from north Semitic script has become clearer as

more ostraca are known from various parts of the Late Geometric Euboean world, such as

Pithekoussai, Eretria, and Methone (West 2015, Papadopoulos 2016). In the late archaic period,

the alphabet is known to have been called in inscriptions the made-up ethonym poinikeia,

‘Phoenician letters’ (Kritzas 2010) (cf. Herodotus’ appellation as παρὰ τῶν Φοινίκων τὰ

The opening columns of the Derveni papyrus, an extraordinarily weird literary text of the late 5th century bce that was copied in the 4th century and rediscovered in 1962, present an extraordinary challenge to scholarship. The main body of the papyrus contains a commentary on an early Orphic theogony, wherein generations of gods succeed one another by means of violence and rape.

From Tertullian to Augustine, Latin Christian writers treated traditional Roman religion on a scale and frequency unmatched since the late Republic and early Empire. Modern scholars, however, have often criticized Christian works on Roman religion for their reliance on Classical texts, accusing them of being disconnected from contemporary pagan religiosity (Cameron: 621, Turcan: 35–6, Chadwick: 22).

The Athenian Skira festival has long been an enigma to scholars of Classical religion (eg. Brumfield 1981, Foxhall 1995, Sourvinou-Inwood 2009). Particularly problematic is its combination of seemingly disparate elements: private, distributed women’s rituals run alongside a centralized masculine state festival, ancient fertility rituals celebrated together with more contemporary Olympian sacrifices and processions, and the combined worship of Demeter, Persephone, Helios, Poseidon, and Athena.

„The Origins of Christian Monasticism are embedded in Christian Asceticism“. With this statement Karl Suso Frank opened up his study of the history of Christian monasticism (6^th edition, 2010). According to his view monasticism developed gradually out of a movement of hermits or anchorites into coenobitic communities. This progression was enhanced through a strong religious motivation of self-fulfillment, which was often accompanied by a form of escapism.