James B. Rives

Religion and authority in Roman Carthage from Augustus to Constantine

This book examines the organization of religion in the Roman empire from Augustus to Constantine. Although there have been illuminating particular studies of the relationship between religious activity and socio-political authority in the empire, there has been no large-scale attempt to assess it as a whole. Taking as his focus the situation in Carthage, the greatest city of the western provinces, J.B. Rives argues that the traditional religion, predicated on the structure of a city-state, could not serve to integrate individuals into an empire. In upholding traditional religion, the government abandoned the sort of political control of religious behaviour characteristic of the Roman Republic, and allowed poeple to determine their own religious identities. The importance of Christianity was thus suited to the needs of the increasingly homogeneous Roman empire.

The decree of Decius and the religion of Empire

In A.D. 249 the emperor Trajan Decius issued an edict requiring the inhabitants of the Roman Empire to sacrifice to the gods. With this decree, he also inaugurated the first empire-wide persecution of Christians. Previously, persecutions of Christians had always been local affairs determined by local conditions. Thereafter, persecutions were largely instigated by emperors and took place on an imperial scale. It has consequently become common to distinguish pre-Decian persecution, characterized by its local and ad hoc nature, from the centrally organized persecutions of Decius in A.D. 249–50, Valerian in A.D. 257–60, and Diocletian, Galerius, and Maximinus in A.D. 303–13. The importance of the decree as a turning point in the history of Christian persecution is thus widely recognized. Beyond this, discussions of the decree have usually focused on its precise nature and the motivations behind it; given the limited evidence, however, these discussions have tended to be inconclusive. In this paper I will return to a consideration of the decrees effects, but in the context of traditional religion rather than that of Christianity. I will argue that, seen from this perspective, the decree was a highly innovative and important step towards a radical restructuring of religious organization in the Roman world.

Graeco-Roman Religion in the Roman Empire: Old Assumptions and New Approaches

This article surveys recent trends in research on Graeco-Roman religion, focusing on the first and second centuries CE. In the first half, I assess current views on what I call the old ‘master narrative’ of Graeco-Roman religious history in this period, that is, the assumption that the decline of traditional Graeco-Roman religion left a void filled on the one hand by the purely political phenomenon of imperial cult and on the other by mystery/oriental religions, which met the emotional needs of the populace. In the second half I discuss two areas of interest that have come to the fore in the wake of the old master narrative’s collapse: an approach to interpreting traditional Graeco-Roman religion that some scholars have termed the ‘polis -religion model’, and a focus on religious life in the provinces of the Roman empire. As an appendix I include a brief survey of available scholarly resources in this field.

Women and Animal Sacrifice in Public Life

In evaluating the scarcity of evidence for the participation of women in animal sacrifice, we need to take into account our more general lack of information about the details of sacrificial practice in the western Roman empire. This chapter first reviews the evidence for three categories of people who are likely to have presided over animal sacrifices: magistrates, priests, and benefactors. It then discusses the likelihood of women serving in these various roles. Having done this, the chapter helps the reader to gauge the extent to which women were likely to have presided over animal sacrifices by considering how frequently and in what contexts they filled those social roles. Keywords:animal sacrifice; magistrates; priests; public benefactors; public life; western Romanempire; women

A Prefect's Edict Mentioning Sacrifice

The papyrus published and discussed in this article consists of two very scrappy fragments and does not even come close to offering a single complete sentence. Its contents seem nonetheless of sufficient interest to warrant detailed consideration, because the handful of preserved words point to an important and otherwise lost edict mentioning sacrifice published under the Tetrarchy. In 1911 A. S. Hunt published the first volume of papyri in the John Rylands Library of Manchester. Pride of place in this entirely literary volume was given to two fragments of a codex containing the Septuagint text of Deuteronomy. Hunt recognized that the leaves had been rnanufactured by pasting together two pieces of papyrus, and he noted that a bit of text on the otherwise hidden side of one of these was visible, giving a date to 293/4. No Information was available about the provenance of the papyrus codex. Over the years, more papyrus Codices, and two papyrus rolls, manufactured in the same way have come to light, and in 1989 Jean Gascou showed that in all cases where the provenance could be established it was Panopolis. He mentions P. RyL l, noting that the method of manufacture suggested (but could not prove) a Panopolite provenance; in the absence of access to the hidden text, one could hardly go further. Since tlien the conservator of the John Rylands University Library has separated two leaves; the remainder is considered too fragile to take apart. In March, 1998,1 was able to study the Originals in Manchester and make a preliminary text, subsequently checked against photographs. It became quickly apparent that we were dealing with fragments of official correspondence, a genre of which Panopolis has famously provided the most extensive specimen in the rolls from which a codex in

The Cults of the Roman Empire

Introduction. Externa Superstitio. 1. The Great Mother and Her Eunuchs. 2. Isis of the Many Names or Our Lady of the Waves. 3. The Orontes Pouring into the Tiber. 4. Beneath the Rocks of the Persian Cavern. 5. Horsemen, Mothers and Serpents. 6. Occultism and Theosophy. 7. Dionysus and Sabazius. Epilogue. Abbreviations. List of Plates. Figures. Historical and Mythographical Index. Index of Religious Particulars.

S. A. Takács, Isis and Sarapis in the Roman World (Religions in the Graeco-Roman world CXXIV). Leiden: Brill, 1995. Pp. xiv + 235. ISBN 90-04-10121-7. Fl. 110/US

Through the implementation of the complex historical method, this study provides a more precise picture of the integration of the cult of Isis and of the function of Isis and Sarapis in the Rhine and Danubian provinces.