Giulia Pedrucci offers a working paper on 'Who protects children in the Roman religion? From whom? Some reflections concerning Carna, Ino, and Thesan, in connection with Mater Matuta'

Speaking of children protection in the Roman religion, the first goddess that comes to mind is Mater Matuta. This paper, however, does not focus directly on Mater Matuta, but on other divine figures to some extent related to her. 

The first one is Crana-Cranaë-Cardea, the nymph of the thresholds. Ovid (Fasti, 6, 101-182) recalls a myth in which Janus, in exchange for a sexual intercourse with her, gave Crana a branch of hawthorn, that had the power to ward off the bad influences from the thresholds. Crana used the plant for this purpose to protect the young Proca. She was called by his nurse, once she realized that the child was victim of striges, nocturnal winged creatures (noctis aves), which can come into the house during the night to suck infants’ blood. According to Ovid, the myth would therefore explain both the traditional use of hawthorn branches to hunt striges and the fact that Crana was considered a protective deity for children. Mc Donough 1997 links her cult to the Matralia, by emphasizing its contiguity in the Roman religious calendar: Crana was celebrated at the calends of June, just ten days after the ceremony in the temple of Mater Matuta. Moreover, Crana protected from the possible negative influences outside the threshold, that is to say outside the family unit.
Then, I will analyse Ino. The myth of Ino is a particularly intricate and disorienting one. Indeed, she is alternatively mother, step-mother, nurse, maternal aunt; in these roles, she can be good and evil, towards her own children and towards other’s people children. She exposes her offspring to danger, even though not intentionally. In general, it’s a narrative full of women who can either protect or threaten infants. There are also the Maenads, who notoriously were reputed to tear their own children limb from limb in their madness. In some versions of her narrative, we find Ino herself among the Maenads. The cult of Ino and her son Melicertes arose in Italy and they were called by the Greeks Leukothea and Palaemon, and by the Romans Matuta and Portunus. The story narrated by Ovid in the Fasti (6, 501-547) – it is said – originated the Matralia festival.
The other deity is Thesan, the Etruscan goddess connected with the Dawn, like Mater Matuta. The iconographical theme of the kidnap of the young Chefalus was particularly widespread. She seems to be an anti-curotrophic figure, in contrast with Mater Matuta, but this is not completely true. In fact, the abduction by the Dawn expresses the ancestral awareness of its danger: the sick child will escape the danger only if he manages to survive the night, and therefore the Dawn. If she returns the infant to its mother - as the maternal aunts will symbolically do after the Matralia - the baby will be safe. Indeed, Ino in the narratives concerning the foundation of Matralia bears some kind of ambiguity, as well.
My main aim is to suggest how ambivalently the ensemble of women gravitating towards an infant --- including mothers, grandmothers, maternal aunts, (wet)nurses, and divine interlocutors --- was perceived. The narratives seem to suggest that, at least theoretically, all these female figures --- even
the mother --- could be either benevolent or malevolent towards the baby. Incidentally, I will try to suggest that the Roman religious calendar from the 1st of June to the 11th of June was full of details which might allude to each other, with the aim of underlining the importance of human and divine
kourotrophia, by using the concept of intertext in literary criticism.

Janico Albrecht presents a working paper on 'The transvectio equitum of Pompey the Great in 70 BC'

In my project on Roman religion my interest lies in the interface setting between the civil and the military context (domi – militiae). It is easily observable that occasions of transition (e.g. departure and return of the army) were always religiously framed. I am taking into account both the structural composition of such events and the options for individual orchestrations – which is also reflected in the two main parts of this colloquium paper which first treats the ritual of the transvectio and then the singular performance of Pompey in 70 BC.

The aim is to sharpen our awareness of contextual and situational factors that influenced religion in an area of society which was not pervaded by ‘sacred law’ but rather relied on a variety of other determinants: logics of interdependence between military success and divine support, relation to precedents (imitation, innovation), appealing presentations of religious claims to different audiences (soldiers, citizens, senators) and so on.

Here, the figure of the imperator (the general) emerges as a religious entrepreneur who, other than most priests in the city, was barely restricted in his choice of religious measures once he had left Rome. Of course, there were requirements and expectations – from a usually highly aroused soldierly audience and also from the senatorial peers at home. But in the first place, there was a war to win and here the end (or rather the result) justified the means. It comes a no surprise that there is an abundance of stories about famous Roman victories including extraordinary religious behavior by the imperator and curious narratives about divine interventions.

The appearances of the Dioscuri treated in this paper are the perfect example for this ‘field-born’ kind of religion and they serve well to demonstrate the interconnectedness with the civil (urban) context which was significantly shaped by the actions of the imperatores: Temple constructions, yearly games or religious festivals resulted from their battlefield vows and were financed by the loot. Sometimes even the gods themselves who received the cultic attention were ‘spoils of war’ acquired from the enemy.

Unsurprisingly, moments of return of victorious generals and armies had a great impact on the elite stratification since they also marked the moments of reintegration: of the soldiers into civil society and of the general into the senatorial environment. Ideally, a triumph would commemorate this occasion as well as offering the imperator the opportunity to present himself with his army in the city – something that was otherwise unthinkable except for violent transgressions during civil wars.

When writing about religion in a military context there is a ‘natural’ focus on the most famous figures of Roman history who were usually generals. Not only do they have a disproportionally high presence in the sources from a quantitative view but they are also the ones around who the most interesting narratives of religious behaviour revolve. Since I don’t intend to write a history about the ‘big men’ and how they appropriated religion, it therefore sometimes becomes a bit of a balance act to squeeze from their personal stories information that can be generalized to a certain extend.

The present colloquium text is an attempt to do exactly that. Still, for the bigger frame in my dissertation it is necessary to cover the historical background of Pompey – something which I have largely excluded from this paper. In my PhD a deeper analysis of Pompey, his predecessors and the prevailing circumstances antecede the discussion of the transvectio. One of the resulting questions aims at understanding the (historical) reasons for Pompey extraordinary deed. This, in turn, is something I entirely excluded from this paper in the hope of being able to extract something worthwhile by confining my view to the curious ritual of the transvectio and Plutarch’s dense account of how Pompey used the occasion to stage his role as imperator.

Elisabeth Begemann is going to present a working paper on '“They demand a spectacle!” – The Roman triumph in American movies'

In the context of the Cold War, the depiction of the Roman triumph in Hollywood history films was an ambivalent affair. It worked both within the movie and towards the watching audience as actual parades and processions do, sending multiple messages that need decoding by the target audiences. In the context of the US/USSR antagonism, which was framed also in religious terms as a struggle not only between political systems, but between different faiths, and with the film industry in both nations being employed (with their consent) as active players in this struggle to promote certain values deemed intrinsic to their nations, the depiction of Roman religion in history films set in the ancient world had to be muted against the backdrop of America’s long identification with the Roman republic and the Roman empire, so as not to contradict its self-understanding as a Christian nation. Considering the Roman triumph as a test case, the paper examines the ways in which Roman religion was adapted and reinterpreted to fit American needs.

Valentino Gasparini presented a working paper on ''

The paper is part of the larger project on 'Isiacus. Embodiment, experience and communication in everyday Isiac cultic practice'

Because of a sort of unconscious cultural debt for dogmatic Protestant models, scholarship has often fallen in the trap of arbitrarily applying to ancient societies some modern interpretative categories which were later proven to be inadequate or even mystifying. Thus recent research (led by John Scheid) has finally rejected concepts like “belief” and “orthodoxy”, moving to the much more fruitful ones of “practice” and “orthopraxy” and showing that Graeco-Roman religion was not based on what it is now conceptualised as faith or creed, but rather on the scrupolous (sometimes nitpicking) compliance with regulations for the correct carrying out of rituals, which entailed the strict observance of interdictions and, in case of infraction, the payment of sanctions. Because of a parallel distorted historiographic paradigm (again built on Jewish/Christian bookrevealed religious traditions and canonical Catholic law), the idea of a Greek and (in particular) a Roman religion strongly focussed on a meticulous respect of ritual prescriptions generated the search for an original Sakralrecht and a related Ritualtext, that is a juridical corpus of laws based on some ancient libri sacerdotum and regulating, item by item, the constellation of different aspects linked to the religious praxis. But, as underlined by Laura Gawlinski, “leges sacrae was a category created in the nineteenth century as part of an effort to organize and make accessible the inscribed documents deemed most useful to scholars of the history of religion”. We cannot deny that religious specialists were regularly involved in political affairs (advicing magistrates in the case of ritual concerns) and that their consultations might be actually registered both in the priestly commentarii (e.g. of the Fratres Arvales) and in the official magistratual reports stored in the public archives. But the transmission of the ritual knowledge was basically operated orally, from one individual to the other, from one generation to the following, and there is no actual evidence supporting the idea of the existence of such unified written collections of laws. In Greece, the huge number of decrees dealing with ritual norms led to the construction of the histographical category ambiguously called “sacred laws” (hieroi nomoi), which has been strongly questioned during the last dozen years. In fact, the Greeks never distinguished it “as a category of rules separate from other laws, nor did they ever gather sacred laws together in any recognizable collection. Leges Sacrae is a modern category with no exact equivalent in ancient Greece”. Despite oracles and myths might be collected into books, and Orphic texts on papyrus rolls could be recited during the Dionysiac initiations, these texts can not be considered tout court “sacred books”. Nor the Romans did possess similar texts describing in detail origin and features of religious regulations or even a systematised corpus of religious jurisprudence (ius sacrum or divinum). This is why, as underlined by Scheid, Augustus himself had to ask lawyers and antiquarians to write down treatises on cultic institutions in order to bring to completion his religious restoration. In spite of the ancient presence of books of Sibylline Oracles, Etruscan libri fatales and libri pontificales, there was no Latin liber sacer or sanctus, and the very sporadic hints at “sacred books” in archaic or early Republican Rome are just mentioned by Greek authors, namely Dionysius of Halicarnassus and Plutarch. The latter significantly recalls that the corpse of Numa was buried in a sarcophagus on the Ianiculum, as well as the sacred books which he had written out with his own hand and taught orally to the priests. In plain words, an institutionalised religious norm fixed on written texts simply did not exist in the Graeco-Roman world.

Maik Patzelt gave a working paper on 'The Significance of Religious Experience in Seneca’s Works: The Case of the Silent Prayer'

This contribution aims to argue that Seneca attempts to promote a religious experience as well as the essential technique to that end. Whereas his philosophical views elaborate a concept of divine proximity, the religious experience of divine presence is realized through ritualized practices of ecstasy. Seneca elaborates a ritualized technique of silent prayer that fulfills, cognitive psychologically speaking, all conditions of a so-called ‘mystical’ prayer. The prayer style as well as its experience is quite hidden behind a special narratological structure, which the following approach has to reveal. This structure is characterized by the opposition of the silent prayers with those prayers of the ‘wrongdoers’. Seneca strategically opposes two sorts of experiences this way.

Rubina Raja and Joerg Ruepke publish 'A Companion to the Archaeology of Religion in the Ancient World'

                                                Rubina Raja (Editor), Joerg Reupke (Editor)

ISBN: 978-1-4443-5000-5

520 pages, 2015, Wiley-Blackwell

The publication of A Companion to the Archaeology of Religion in the Ancient World presents a comprehensive overview of a wide range of topics relating to the practices, expressions, and interactions of religion in antiquity, primarily in the Greco-Roman world. As the below features will underline, it is a product of the close cooperation between the editors at the Max Weber Center, University of Erfurt, one of the leading research institutes in Lived Ancient Religion, together with colleagues from around the world, covering a broad range of disciplines.
The Companion covers
• Features readings that focus on religious experience and expression in the ancient world rather than solely on religious belief
• Places a strong emphasis on domestic and individual religious practice
• Represents the first time that the concept of “lived religion” is applied to the ancient history of religion and archaeology of religion
• Includes cutting-edge data taken from top contemporary researchers and theorists in the field
• Examines a large variety of themes and religious traditions across a wide geographical area and chronological span
• Written to appeal equally to archaeologists and historians of religion

The editors:
Rubina Raja is Professor of Classical Archaeology at Aarhus University, Denmark. She has published widely on religious identities in the eastern Roman provinces, and is editor of the series Contextualising the Sacred, Lived Ancient Religion, and Palmyrenske Studier. She is the author of the monograph Urban Development and Regional Identity in the Eastern Roman Provinces, 50 BC – AD 250: Aphrodisias, Ephesos, Athens, Gerasa. She is currently working on a monograph on the religious life of the Tetrapolis region.
Jörg Rüpke is Professor of History of Religion at the University of Erfurt, Germany and director of the ERC Research Group “Lived Ancient Religion.” His books include Domi militiae (1990); Rituals in Ink (2004); Religion and Law in Classical and Christian Rome (2006); (ed.) A Companion to Roman Religion (Wiley-Blackwell, 2007); Religion of the 

'Religion in the Roman Empire' - New journal in the History of Religion

 

 

The first issue of a new journal dedicated to “Religion in the Roman Empire” (RRE) is out. “Individual appropriation in lived ancient religion” is the title of the first issue of 130 pages. The articles focus on methodologies to reconstruct individual appropriations of traditions, religious experiences and communication on religion in different social spaces. Such perspectives, standard in approaches on recent and contemporary religion, are facing serious challenges when addressing the material available for ancient Mediterranean religion. New methods are developed in case studies on Mithraic representations, practices of sacralizing space at Italian Ostia, consumption of religion in Egyptian Karanis or rituals and their literary reflections at Rome. 

The new journal, published by Mohr Siebeck, intends to further and document new and integrative perspectives on religion in the Ancient World combining multidisciplinary methodologies. Starting from the notion of “lived religion” it will offer a space to take up recent, but still incipient, research to modify and cross the disciplinary boundaries of “History of Religion”, “Archaeology”, “Anthropology”, “Classics”, “Ancient History”, “Jewish History”, “Rabbinics”,  “New Testament”, “Early Christianity”, “Patristics”, “Coptic Studies”, “Gnostic and Manichean Studies”, “Late Antiquity” and “Oriental Languages”. The editors, based at European and American universities hope to stimulate the development of new approaches that can encompass the local and global trajectories of the multi-dimensional pluralistic religions of antiquity. The editorial office is based at the Max Weber Center of the University of Erfurt and can be reached via rre@uni-erfurt.de. See also www.mohr.de/rre

Roman religion – religions of Rome - an Interview with Professor Jörg Rüpke

Roman religion – religions of Rome

-interview with professor Jörg Rüpke -

Szabó Csaba

University of Pécs, HU

szabo.csaba.pte@gmail.com

Jörg Rüpke (1962) is one of the leading scholars of Roman religious studies. Chair of the Comparative Religion at the University of Erfurt since 1999 and fellow of the Max Weber Center for Advanced Cultural and Social Studies, since 2000 he chaired numerous international projects and grants, many of them dealing with various aspects of the Roman religion. With more than 20 individual monographs and 38 edited volumes, his work became unavoidable in the field of religious studies. Taking an overview or an account of his work and activity, we can have a broader view on the actual state of the Roman religious studies – a discipline in continuous formation and transformation.

You have learned Latin and theology in various universities in Germany and abroad, but formed as a scholar in Tübingen, one of the most important center for religious studies with a rigorous tradition in theological studies.  Why you choose the study of Roman religion and who influenced you in the beginning of your carrier?

In the very beginning of my studies I was interested in religions of Asia and classical antiquity too. I learned also Hebrew and Sanskrit, but after a short time I have realized that I’m much more interested on religious studies. In Bonn I had as a mentor, prof. Karl Hoheisel (1937-2011) editor and one of the authors of the Reallexikons für Antike und Christentum, the only person at the faculty who had special interests in Roman religion. Than in Tübingen I met Hubert Cancik and Burkhard Gladigow, who had an important role in my formation as a scholar.

Your Ph.D. thesis dealt with the religious aspects of the wars in Roman times[1]. In the 1990’s your interests will focus especially on the historiography of the Roman religion and the Roman calendar[2] followed after 2005 by your studies on religious rituals of the individuum and the communities[3]. How you choose a topic for a research program?

I don’t really choose a topic or research program, as a predefined plan. Usually they are born from my earlier works. For instance, my Ph.D. topic was chosen by professor Gladigow. I planned a detailed chapter on Roman festivals in military context, which wasn’t published finally in the Domi militiae. I spent all my summer of 1992 writing this chapter, on which I was very fascinated at that time. Actually, in 2-3 months, I wrote the basics of my habilitation work on Roman calendars. In the 1990’s working on so called “imperial religion” my interest turned increasingly on regionalism and local aspects of the Roman religion, which influenced my project on regionalism, provincialism and individualization too.

During this 25 year while you became a leading scholar in the study of Roman religion, the methodology of the religious studies generally – but especially in the Römische Religionsgeschichte – changed radically. Some of the scholars - like C. Robert Phillips or Carl Orson – talked even about a crisis in the methodology[4]. Is it true?

I would not affirm that we are facing now a real “crisis of the discipline”, because there is in fact, no united discipline of Roman religious studies. We are facing the flourishing of Isiac studies or Mithraic studies but having many neglected aspects too. Historicizing Roman religion is still lacking: a unified view on Roman religion or even, about ancient religion generally. Christianity and Judaism is still not integrated in the study of the ancient religions. Theology deals separately with them, as “church religion” and the religious studies too. Similarly to this, Judaism are often missing from such project, which deals with ancient Magic and religion. Important synthetizes are missing from the current research. We tried to reduce this gap in the research with the Companion to the Roman Religion[5]  and now we are working on the Companion to the archaeology of religion in the ancient world, which hopefully will also contribute for shaping the discipline[6].

One of your major works deal with the priests of the city of Rome, collecting all the sacerdotal personae from Republican time to Late Antiquity[7]. We see there hundreds of names – many of them remarkable persons of the Roman history – with different roles from the typology of Joachim Wach: founders of religions, diviners, magicians, priests…What was the impact of these people in Rome and in a smaller area, like a provincial city?

They were not so important as it seems to be. It was not like in the case of ancient Egypt or the Mesopotamian city – states, where priests had much more power and influence.  They are part of the everyday life, but the official religion is transmitted mainly by the magistrates. Priesthood had a second meaning in this social structure. Religion is set free for individual engagement and self representation in an imperial structure, which had large free spaces – in ideological and religious terms – for these functions and the dynamics between different social and religious levels and manifestations. We must analyze the priesthood of the Roman Empire strictly in connection with the imperial ideology and the concept of the empire.

Another book of you – translated in many languages, even in Korean – deals with the Roman calendar[8]. The number of the sources and the variety of the different urban Fasti are stunning, but can we reconstruct by these analogies the religious calendar of a Roman individual too? Or the religious Fasti of a provincial city?

Some of the intellectuals and the literates surely had personalized calendars. We know this from ancient sources, like Ovid or Petronius that some of the Romans had scrolled calendars or marked the black and white days with nails on a wall. It was a symbol for personal beliefs. In the case of cities, we must highlight the difference about East and West. In the Near East, the Julian calendar was introduces lately, because most of the urban centers had their own specific fasti.  However, even in the West, the local calendars and religious holydays – known mainly from the Hispanic municipal laws and some fragmentary preserved urban fasti[9] – were very diversified, with few common festivals, like the Saturnalia or the imperial holydays.  It is important to mention, that the monumental marble calendars are disappear even from Rome after the time of Tiberius, which suggest that the new Julian calendar – and the fasti itself – became an integrated part of the Roman society.

Dealing with the faith of the ancient man is a risky job. We know some puzzles from different periods, times and places about the faith and individual acts, feelings, cloths, places and instruments of religious manifestation. It is like reconstructing the life of a star by astronomers: you need analogies. What do we know about Roman religion in fact?

About the feelings and direct, religious experiences of the Roman people we have very few information. But we can ask also, what do we know the religious experience of our generation? We had almost the same lack of information about the religiosity of the people from the beginning of the XX^th century. With the exception of some personal journals, short remarks, poems and interviews we don’t know how they interacted and lived their religion. It is the same with the Romans: we have mainly the official façade of the religiosity, the self expression and representation of the people, with some laconic sources of personal religiosity, mainly from literary and epigraphic texts.

You are a member and coordinator of many international projects. Some of them, like the “Religiöse Individualisierung in historischer Perspektive” (second project: 2012 – 2017) has already a great echo in the international literature[10]. What are the perspectives and main ideas of this project?

In this project we are working together with theologians, historians, archaeologists and historians of religions mainly from Europe, but having also collaborators from India, China and New Zeeland.  Our main aim is to bringing together discernable patterns, mainly focusing not only one society, but the transfer of different agents of religion in and outside of a group. We also want to analyze some historiographical aspects, redefining also the term of “religion” in the frame of this new perspective of the individual.  As a perspective for this project, we will organize small workshops and conferences on the topic.

Another project is entitled “Lived Ancient Religion (2012-2017)”[11]. In this work we can find many young scholars also, dealing with some particular aspects of ancient religion like the small sanctuaries, the religious life of Ostia or Karanis. Why this project was founded and what are the main tasks of it?

The project is aiming to present the “lived religion” not as a supplementum or alternative for “cults” and “polis religion”, but as a perspective of it. Using the methodology of Meredith McGuire on embodied practices of the contemporary religion only as a starting point, the project’s aim is not to recreate a methodology of this kind for ancient societies and individuals, but more to use as a starting point for new perspectives. Having already organized important workshops and conferences, the research group will meet next time at Copenhagen in May, 2014[12].

Beside publishing books and articles on Roman religion, religious studies and historiography, you are also a very dynamic culture diplomat, elected in 2012 as a member in the German Council of Science and Humanities. How do you see the future of classical studies in Germany and generally, in Europe? What are the main problems or tendencies and how could we change it?

Classical studies as a privilege of the intellectual bourgeois is in disappearance even in Italy, Germany or Switzerland.   However, it is still easier to find financial support for project in the Western countries. Many of the studies are focusing on “globalization” in Roman world or on the relation of Rome and China – as a postmodern, actual topic. But this is only what the professionals see. For the rest of the world it is very important to present to Roman Empire and it’s heritage in Europe, the Near East and North Africa as an opportunity to share, making international projects and collaborations.

Bibliography

Phillips, R. 2007. Approaching Roman religion: the case for Wissenschaftgeschichte. In: Rüpke J. 2007. 12-25.	Rüpke, J. 2011. Time and festival. A Cultural history of the Calendar. Seoul.
Rives, D. 2010. Graeco – Roman Religion in the Roman Empire: Old Assumptions and New Approaches. In: Currents in Biblical Research 8, 240-299.	Rüpke, J. 2012. Lived ancient religion: questioning „cults” and „polis religion”. In: Mythos 5, 191-204.
Rüpke, J. 1990. Domi militiae. Die religiöse Konstruktion des Krieges in Rom. Stuttgart.	Rüpke, J. 2013. (Ed.) The individual in the religions of the Ancient Mediterranean. Oxford.
Rüpke, J. 1993. Religion bei Eduard Norden: die ’Altrömischen Priesterbücher’ im wissenschaftlischen Kotext der dreissiger Jahre. Magdeburg.	Rüpke, J. 2014. (Ed.) A Companion to the archaeology of the ancient world. New York (forthcoming)
Rüpke, J. 1995. Kalender und Öffentlichkeit: die Geschichte des geschichtlichen Bewusteins und seiner Verschiftlichungsformen in der Antike. Potsdam.
Rüpke, J. 2001. Religion der Römer: eine Einführung. München.
Rüpke, J. 2005. Fasti sacerdotum. Prosopographie der stadtrömischen Priesterschaften römischer, griechischer, orientalischer und jüdisch – christlicher Kulte bis 499 n. Chr. Stuttgart.
Rüpke, J. 2007. (Ed.) A Companion to Roman Religion. New York.

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[1] Rüpke 1990.

[2] Rüpke 1993, Rüpke 1995.

[3] Rüpke 2001.

[4] Phillips 2007, Rives 2010.

[5] Rüpke 2007.

[6] Rüpke 2014.

[7] Rüpke 2005.

[8] Rüpke 2011.

[9] About the urban calendars see: Rüpke 1995, 95-165, Reeves 2004.

[10] Rüpke 2013.

[11] Rüpke 2012.

[12] Workshops of the project: Presence of death in lived religion. 11^th EASR Annual Conference 2012 „Ends and beginnings”, Södertörn University, Stockholm, 23-26 August, 2012;  Archaeology of Lived Religion in Antiquity, Rome, 5-7^th November, 2012; “Sharpening the knife”: making religion effective in everyday life. Erfurt, 11-14 June, 2013; The role of objects-creating meaning in situations. Eisenach, 9-11 October,2013; Stories told and memories uttered – Ettersburg/Weimar, 29-31 January, 2014,