An Exploration of Secrecy and Sociogenesis from the Palatine Hill
By Vivian Laughlin, Wake Forest University
Augustus used his living quarters that stood on top of Palatine Hill as a statement of his political vision. As Cassius Dio indicates, Augustus chose the Palatine Hill because of its association with Romulus (53.16.5). The historical location coupled with Augustus’ position as Rome’s first princeps emphasized his role as a founder.
How to suppress a secret cult: invective and perverted rites in Cicero’s Catilinarians
By Isobel K. Köster, University of Colorado
In this talk, I use Cicero’s Catilinarians as a case study for the applicability of recent scholarship on conspiracies and religion to ancient rhetoric. Cicero repeatedly accuses the conspirators of engaging in secret religious rites (see especially Cat. 1.16; 1.24; 2.13). At Catiline’s domestic shrine, they dedicate a dagger for murder and keep a perverted legionary standard. Their rites do not recognize traditional gods, and any blood spilled is that of humans.
On the secrecy of Maenadic rites
By Bartek Bednarek, University of Warsaw/ Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität, Munich
This paper discusses the secrecy that surrounded some of the allegedly exclusively feminine forms of Dionysus’ cult. According to an inveterate scholarly tradition, which dates back to Rapp (1872) and became somewhat dogmatic from Dodds (1940, 1960) onwards, women who were in a state of maenadic frenzy performed their rituals a total absence of males (perhaps with the exception of a so-called “single male participant”, which, as Henrichs (1984) has shown, was a product of a scholarly misunderstanding).
Secrecy and the Oracle Lore: On Knowledge Restriction in Ancient Babylonia
By Netanel Anor, The Hebrew University of Jerusalem
In ancient Babylonia, political decisions were usually taken by support of an oracle procedure. When a king needed to decide whether to go to war, appoint an official or to give one his offspring to marriage, he would normally turn to an oracle expert, or a seer, who knew how to consult the decision of the gods on this matter.