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The Organization of Roman Religious Beliefs
Abstract
This study will focus on the differences in the way that Roman Paganism and Christianity organize systems of beliefs. It rejects the theory that "beliefs" have no place in the Roman religion, but stresses the differences between Christian orthodoxy, in which mandatory dogmas define group identity, and the essentially polythetic nature of Roman religious organization, in which incompatible beliefs could exist simultaneously in the community without conflict. In explaining how such beliefs could coexist in Rome, the study emphasizes three main conceptual mechanisms: (1) polymorphism, the idea that gods could have multiple identities with incompatible attributes, (2) orthopraxy, the focus upon standardized ritual rather than standardized belief, and (3) pietas, the Roman ideal of reciprocal obligation, which was flexible enough to allow Romans to maintain relationships simultaneously with multiple gods at varying levels of personal commitment. © 2003 by The Regents of the University of California. All rights reserved.
... The ancient Romans held the belief that each parcel of land and every tree possessed its own protective spirit or genius, which needed to be satisfied before any activities could commence in that particular location. It was deemed inappropriate to remove trees (lucum conlocare) without first presenting an offering to the deities believed to inhabit those sacred spaces (King, 2003). Originally, the term lucus referred to trees or a small area of woodland, but its meaning quickly transformed to describe an open space encircled by woodland, resembling a landscaped park. ...
The immense stature and enduring lifespan of trees and forests have undeniably left a profound impact on the creative minds of preliterate societies. It is evident that these natural wonders have captivated the imagination of early civilizations, influencing their beliefs, traditions, and cultural expressions. Throughout the globe, various religious groups have preserved sacred forests and groves, which are ancient wooded areas believed to be the dwelling places of the spiritual or divine entities, for many generations. Numerous sacred forests have endured throughout various regions of the world. These include the church forests found in the highlands of Ethiopia, the hillside groves that hold great significance for Catholics in Italy, the woodlands that are deeply revered by Shinto practitioners in Japan, as well as the forests that hold sacred value for Indigenous communities in Siberia, Australia, the Americas, and India. Protected woodlands serve as valuable repositories of biodiversity, acting as crucial sanctuaries for various plant and animal species that are scarce or have disappeared in other parts of the region. The preservation of these sacred spaces is being challenged by climate change, pollution, and urbanization. Throughout the years, devoted caretakers, environmentalists, and governments have taken on the responsibility of safeguarding these areas, but now there is a growing effort to enhance their protection.
... This Greek "postmodernism" is very different from the Roman religious worldview already because the latter spread from one center, and at the level of the base code it had a much greater de-gree of integration (another thing is that having already become a world empire, Rome experienced the actions of deities, not all of whom were supportive of it, and some were clearly hostile). Charles King identifies three basic conceptual mechanisms of the Roman religion: polymorphism, meaning that gods can have multiple identities with incompatible attributes, orthopraxy, focusing on standardized ritual rather than standardized faith, and piety (pietas), the Roman ideal of mutual commitment, which was flexible enough to allow the Romans to maintain relations simultaneously with several gods at different levels of personal commitment (King, 2003). In my article I will also focus on other features of the Roman religion, as well as on its differences from the Greek one. ...
Purpose of the article is the reconstruction of ancient Greek and ancient Roman models of religiosity as anthropological invariants that determine the patterns of thinking and being of subsequent eras. Theoretical basis. The author applied the statement of Protagoras that "Man is the measure of all things" to the reconstruction of the religious sphere of culture. I proceed from the fact that each historical community has a set of inherent ideas about the principles of reality, which found unique "universes of meanings". The historical space acquires anthropological properties that determine the specific mythology of the respective societies, as well as their spiritual successors. In particular, the religious models of ancient Greece and ancient Rome had a huge influence on formation of the worldview of the Christian civilization of the West. Originality. Multiplicity of the Olympic mythology contributed to the diversity of the expression forms of the Greek genius, which manifested itself in different fields of cultural activity, not reducible to political, philosophical or religious unity. The poverty of Roman mythology was compensated by a clear awareness of the unity of the community, which for all historical vicissitudes had always remained an unchanging ideal, and which was conceived as a reflection of the unity of the heavens. These two approaches to the divine predetermined the formation of two interacting, but conceptually different anthropological paradigms of Antiquity. Conclusions. Western concepts of divinity are invariants of two basic theological concepts – "Greek" (naturalism and paganism) and "Roman" (transcendentalism and henotheism). These are ideal types, so these two tendencies can co-exist in one society. The Roman trend continued to be realized by the anti-Roman religion, which took Roman forms and Roman name. Iconoclasm was a Byzantine version of the Reformation, promoted by the Isaurian emperors and failed due to the strong Hellenistic naturalistic lobby. Modern "Romans" are trying to get rid of the last elements of religious naturalism, and modern "Greeks" are trying to preserve the Hellenic elements in Christianity. Patterns can be transformed, but the observational view will still be able to identify their lineage. The developed model allows a deeper understanding of the culture of both ancient societies, as well as the outlook of Western man.
... Texts in fact played an immensely important role in the Graeco-Roman world in delineating the nature of the gods and in 9 A number of scholars have in various ways emphasized the importance of belief in Roman religion (e.g., Feeney 1998, pp. 12-46;King 2003;Mackey 2009). Harvey Whitehouse offers a sophisticated cognitive model (Whitehouse 2004); what I refer to here as 'practice' corresponds roughly to Whitehouse's 'cognitively optimal 'mode. ...
In this paper I present a model for describing the change in religion that took place during the Roman imperial period, a model that is built around a contrast between orthopraxy and orthodoxy. I begin with a brief survey of the most important earlier models of religious change in the Roman empire, followed by an initial sketch of my own proposed model. In the third and fourth sections I elaborate on this model in more detail by developing it through two brief case studies: the Graeco-Roman practice of animal sacrifice and the nascent Christian discourse around that practice. In analyzing animal sacrifice, I focus on its role in constructing the socio-political and cultural structures of the Roman empire. For the Christian discourse of sacrifice, I limit myself to one particular text, Paul’s first letter to the Corinthians, which provides some of the earliest surviving reflections on sacrifice by a Christ-follower. I close with a few comments on some of the limitations as well as the potential of my proposed model.
... Bendlin (2000) argues against the civic model of religion that serves as the basis for the works of Scheid and North, and argues instead for a market model of Roman religion during the late Republic that emphasizes that a number of religious choices were available. King (2003) challenges S.R.F. Price's conclusion that discussions of belief presuppose a Christian bias. ...
... However, as various more recent scholars have argued, the wiping out of mentality went too far: for while "belief " was not the primary criterion by which the Romans assessed the correctness or otherwise of religious behavior, Roman writings on religion, as on other topics, constantly present, explicitly or implicitly, accounts of the conceptual assumptions underlying religious practices and religious narratives, and indeed it is often hard to make sense of those practices and narratives without taking into account the underlying assumptions. See, e.g., Linder and Scheid 1993;Feeney 1998: 12-46;Bendlin 2000;King 2003. 2 Gradel 2002, esp. 25-32, 71-72, 101-3, 321-36, 349-56. ...
Recent analysis of the imperial cult has argued that it can be best understood in terms of the lack of a fundamental division between gods and humans at Rome worshiping a human as a god was accordingly not a transgressive act. This paper challenges this interpretation, demonstrating that gods and humans were indeed usually conceived as separate species of being. The imperial cult was thus transgressive in theory; however, it primarily operated in contexts where that could be overlooked and the worship of humans as gods accordingly appeared unproblematic.
In Isis in a Global Empire, Lindsey Mazurek explores the growing popularity of Egyptian gods and its impact on Greek identity in the Roman Empire. Bringing together archaeological, art historical, and textual evidence, she demonstrates how the diverse devotees of gods such as Isis and Sarapis considered Greek ethnicity in ways that differed significantly from those of the Greek male elites whose opinions have long shaped our understanding of Roman Greece. These ideas were expressed in various ways - sculptures of Egyptian deities rendered in a Greek style, hymns to Isis that grounded her in Greek geography and mythology, funerary portraits that depicted devotees dressed as Isis, and sanctuaries that used natural and artistic features to evoke stereotypes of the Nile. Mazurek's volume offers a fresh, material history of ancient globalization, one that highlights the role that religion played in the self-identification of provincial Romans and their place in the Mediterranean world.
The provincial religions of the Roman Empire exhibited considerable diversity, reflecting the adoption and adaptation of Roman and non-Roman beliefs, traditions and deities. Divine marriage, as viewed through the postcolonial lens, was argued to provide a unique insight into these complex religious interactions, reflecting multiple, nuanced approaches to the divine. The intention of this paper is to expand upon these perspectives by engaging with new theoretical approaches developed in the analysis of religious change in modern colonial contexts. The juxtaposition of indigenous and non-indigenous deities in provincial divine marriage is mirrored in the Creole religions of the Americas, and the significance of these pairings as a means to negotiate the colonial encounter has been the subject of recent anthropological research. This paper will consider the extent to which the insights derived from these studies may inform new interpretations of divine marriage and the processes of religious negotiation in the provinces.
Cambridge Core - Ancient History - Roman Tombs and the Art of Commemoration - by Barbara E. Borg
Re-use of ancient Egyptian architectural styles outside Egypt began in the time of the pharaohs and continues to the present day. The style draws on the structures, elements and motifs of ancient Egypt using both ancient and replica/pastiche pieces. I will argue that appropriation of the style should be seen as an active process designed to create a cultural object with specific meaning within the coeval social world. Drawing on the tenets of reception theory, I aim to explore the appropriation of Egyptian obelisks to early imperial Rome by considering the social circumstances, possible producer motivation and potential audience responses to the monuments. I will propose that the appropriation of Egyptian obelisks to Rome is a creative negotiation that prioritises particular aspects of the monument to address specific economic, political and religious circumstances within the appropriating society. At the same time it is important to consider the coeval perceptions of Egypt circulating in Rome and how these perceptions impact on the selection and reception of obelisks in the city. Central to my research is the presentation of a data set relating to fourteen obelisks appropriated to Rome, a detailed discussion of the ‘transfer vehicles’ which carried crucial information about ancient Egypt and obelisks from Egypt into the Roman world, and the identification of clusters of appropriation points within the imperial period; all of which help to create a more nuanced picture of why at least fifty obelisks were raised in Rome and how we might start to understand these acts of appropriation two thousand years later.
This chapter's story unfolds on many levels: most profoundly, in the individual conscience. Far from existing alone, however, personal feelings about the afterlife fit in a web of societal relationships. Heaven, hell and purgatory certainly involve the dead, but dead souls were not completely absent from earth and continued to haunt their families. As in Roman times, the family included its departed parents and ancestors. Medieval Europeans expressed clan loyalty through ‘suffrages’, actions dedicated to the dead. Charters recording gifts to churches show donors acted to benefit their own souls and those of their predecessors. Tales relate the visits from purgatory or hell requesting that heirs pay debts or resolve other unfinished business. Revenants also appear from heaven to encourage the pusillanimous. Thus, however pious the language, many charitable actions also comprised a personal interest: a cleansing of conscience, earning of merit, removal of guilt. Gifts to churches were also gifts to ecclesiastics; pious donations created alliances with people influential in the world. Religious authorities, who were often political powers too, functioned at all levels, from the papacy to the parish, and also shaped personal attitudes towards heaven and hell. Popes and councils intervened with dogmatic definitions and the prosecution of heretics. Theologians articulated reasons for individual doctrinal provisions and offered their conclusions to confessors and preachers in manuals that began to circulate in Latin around 1200, in the vernacular around 1300, and in print around 1450.
This book examines the fragmentary and contradictory evidence for Orpheus as the author of rites and poems to redefine Orphism as a label applied polemically to extra-ordinary religious phenomena. Replacing older models of an Orphic religion, this richer and more complex model provides insight into the boundaries of normal and abnormal Greek religion. The study traces the construction of the category of 'Orphic' from its first appearances in the Classical period, through the centuries of philosophical and religious polemics, especially in the formation of early Christianity and again in the debates over the origins of Christianity in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. A paradigm shift in the study of Greek religion, this study provides scholars of classics, early Christianity, ancient religion and philosophy with a new model for understanding the nature of ancient Orphism, including ideas of afterlife, cosmogony, sacred scriptures, rituals of purification and initiation, and exotic mythology.
Rome, Season One: History Makes Television examines the first season of the HBO-BBC collaboration, Rome, in a collection of thought-provoking essays by some of the world's most influential scholars in the fields of classical antiquity and popular culture. • Examines the first season of the HBO-BBC collaboration, Rome, in a collection of 17 thought-provoking essays by some of the world's most influential scholars in the fields of classical antiquity and popular culture • Focuses on the award-winning first season's historical framework, visual and narrative style, contemporary thematic overtones, and influence on popular culture • Addresses the artistic values, and roles of the script, sets, and actors • Reveals how the series Rome 'makes history' in terms of representing the past on screen and producing innovative and influential television.
The question is whether the inscriptions (above discussed) are Christian or not. Two of them can be read on gold glass disks, and the third on a glass cup. Inscriptions like these occurred fairly often, and are generally interpreted as Christian'ones because of the phrase in nomine Dei or in Deo. But this interpretation does not seem to be quite clear. The so called pagan people are used to tell each other good wishes drinking wine or offering Dis Manibus. Then we can experience these phrases are connected with both the drink and the life. On the other hand, also the pagan Romans confessed the oneness of the God (Unum Deum). The life meant for Romans partly the felicitas temporum on the earth, partly the immortality on the afterlife. The Greek and Latin sources have given evidences for reconstruction the rites connected with the death. One moment of the series of the rites is the circumpotatio, which was continued even in the Christian era. Relatives, friends said to the deceased good wishes with wine, and the wine refreshed him/her or them. The wine meant the life as the blood did. This point is the connection between the wine and blood. The most important act is the refresh (refrigerium), and the grave goods (first of all the glass vessels) provide evidences for this interpretation. The inscriptions in question correlate the life and drinking; that is why it can be supposed the glass vessels without inscription concern for also the life and drinking as the representation of jug and cup does. But the practice to refresh the deceased, i. e. the circumpotatio was pagan custom even in the Christian era. The reason of the burial ad sanctos should be based on the custom circumpotatio through which the deceased could get physically strength. The wine gives life, and the blood does the same. The blood of the martyrs can give life, so it was worth lying by them. Martyrs were martyred for Christ whose blood grants really life, eternal life. That is why also the mensa (the communion table) was used for circumpotatio even in the saint Peter basilica. This, however, was not an agape. The agapé always followed the fractio panis, the circumpotatio, on the other hand, always belonged to the burial celebration and commemorating.
The study of ancient religion, partly in response to anthropology, moved in recent decades away from thinking in terms of 'belief' to studying 'ritual': this has a fundamental effect on how we treat the evidence (or decide what evidence is, and what it is evidence of). This chapter argues that the transition is incomplete and explores some of the deeper implications of thinking in terms of 'belief'. It argues that these continue to hamper our perspective on ancient religion. The 'otherness' of ancient religion does not reside in the 'rationality' of their thinking, rather, it is axiomatic (their crediting ritual with power to effect changes in the wider world).
Graeco-Roman religion in its classic form was polytheistic; on the other hand, monotheistic ideas enjoyed wide currency in ancient philosophy. This contradiction provides a challenge for our understanding of ancient pagan religion. Certain forms of cult activity, including acclamations of ‘one god’ and the worship of theos hypsistos, the highest god, have sometimes been interpreted as evidence for pagan monotheism. This book discusses pagan monotheism in its philosophical and intellectual context, traces the evolution of new religious ideas in the time of the Roman empire, and evaluates the usefulness of the term ‘monotheism’ as a way of understanding these developments in later antiquity outside the context of Judaism and Christianity. In doing so, it establishes a new framework for understanding the relationship between polytheistic and monotheistic religious cultures between the first and fourth centuries AD.
This book tells a part of the back-story to major religious transformations emerging from the tumult of the late Republic. it considers the dynamic interplay of Cicero's approximations of mortals and immortals with a range of artifacts and activities that were collectively closing the divide between humans and gods. A guiding principle is that a major cultural player like Cicero had a normative function in religious dialogues that could legitimize incipient ideas like deification. Applying contemporary metaphor theory, it analyzes the strategies and priorities configuring Cicero's divinizing encomia of Roman dynasts like Pompey, Caesar and Octavian. it also examines Cicero's explorations of apotheosis and immortality in the De re publica and Tusculan Disputations as well as his attempts to deify his daughter Tullia. in this book, Professor Cole transforms our understanding not only of the backgrounds to ruler worship but also of changing conceptions of death and the afterlife.
This book offers a comprehensive assessment of the intersection between Roman politics, culture and divination in the late Republic. it discusses how the practice of divination changed at a time of great political and social change and explores the evidence for a critical reflection and debate on the limits of divination and prediction in the second and first centuries BC. Divination was a central feature in the workings of the Roman government and this book explores the ways in which it changed under the pressure of factors of socio-political complexity and disruption. it discusses the ways in which the problem of the prediction of the future is constructed in the literature of the period. Finally, it explores the impact that the emergence of the Augustan regime had on the place of divination in Rome and the role that divinatory themes had in shaping the ideology of the new regime.
This article reviews a range of important recent work on Greek religion. It looks first at the critique (common to a number of the books under review) of the
polis
-religion model associated with Christiane Sourvinou-Inwood and then attempts to draw out a number of emerging themes: a comparative approach, a focus on the gods or on individual worshippers and a cognitive perspective. It then examines in more detail the application of the terms ‘belief’ or ‘theology’ to the field of Greek religion and the extent to which any picture of Greek religious experience may be said to be logically coherent, before looking forward to possible future directions of study.
As expressed through a variety of rituals, Roman funerary cult was the active worship of the manes (or di manes), Rome's deified dead.Keywords:classical civilization;Roman history
The term “pagan monotheism” was coined to describe monotheistic tendencies in Greco-Roman religion. Its usefulness has been strongly disputed on various grounds: for introducing a cognitive perspective on ancient religion, which was basically ritualistic; for implicitly taking Christianity as the norm by which to measure classical religion; and for confusing scholarly categories by classifying phenomena as monotheistic that are much better described as henotheistic. This article suggests that these arguments have been attempts to create a supposedly objective and universal scholarly vocabulary, while that new vocabulary would serve to obscure the history and ideological origin of the concepts it promoted. Arguing for a reflective, hermeneutical approach that incorporates an awareness of the origin and charged meanings of our concepts into scholarship, the author proposes methodological pluralism as a way out of these unfruitful terminological debates. Each concept sheds light on some aspects of reality while obscuring others. In particular, the often-criticized ambiguity and fuzziness of the term “pagan monotheism” may help us to formulate questions that otherwise would remain marginal in studies of ancient religion.
Recent analysis of the imperial cult has argued that it can be best understood in terms of the lack of a fundamental division between gods and humans at Rome: worshiping a human as a god was accordingly not a transgressive act. This paper challenges this interpretation, demonstrating that gods and humans were indeed usually conceived as separate species of being. The imperial cult was thus transgressive in theory; however, it primarily operated in contexts where that could be overlooked and the worship of humans as gods accordingly appeared unproblematic.
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.
As a methodological experiment, this article privileges a female voice belonging to an inferior class that survives in a well-known inscription (CIL 6.18817 = ILS 8006) as its primary testimony regarding the manes, and it deploys parallels from Latin literature (Cicero, Propertius, Vergil, Ovid, Juvenal, and Apuleius) as subsidiary aids to the interpretation of what she had to say. Results suggest that we might use female-authored inscriptions as a means to assess the authenticity of male-authored representations of female experience, thus allowing us to recoup from both types of sources more evidence than we might have expected from either in isolation.
This paper reopens the discussion of key terms of the Socratic indictment, such as "worship" or "belief," from the point of view of Athenian religiosity. It addresses the content of the accusation itself: the main contention is that the accusations of "atheism" and "disbelief " are indeed opaque when understood against the background of the sources and in the context of Greek religiosity. The investigation includes a detailed inquiry into the categories of faith and belief and into the cultural reasons underlying the choice of these terms in Socratic scholarship.
A Companion to Ovid is a comprehensive overview of one of the most influential poets of classical antiquity. Features more than 30 newly commissioned chapters by noted scholars writing in their areas of specialization Illuminates various aspects of Ovid's work, such as production, genre, and style Presents interpretive essays on key poems and collections of poems Includes detailed discussions of Ovid's primary literary influences and his reception in English literature Provides a chronology of key literary and historical events during Ovid's lifetime.
This article is concerned in general with the relevance of cognitive psychological models to interpretation and analysis of symbolism. The discussion focuses on a cognitive model for the production and comprehension of symbolism proposed by Sperber (1979). It demonstrates that his models is untenable and suggests one more suitable. Discussion of Sperber's cognitive model is made a vehicle for the argument that any real understanding of symbolism and the symbolic process demands an investigation that takes in the development of cognitive processes at the same time as it examines representation in whatever social group is the object of study.
Like the late Justice Stewart on obscenity, most classicists confidently point to what they consider magic, on a modem viewpoint, in Greco-Roman literary texts, curse tablets, papyri, and astrology. Many are wont to identify what they deem magical elements in the “developed” forms of Greco-Roman religion, albeit often lamenting the persistence of such allegedly primitive relics of irrationality. Again, scattered ancient evidence for the repression of certain religious activities, some of which the ancients actually called magic, has encouraged a tacit working assumption that the ancients were as anxious to penalize such activities as, say, the witch-hunters of early modem Europe: according to Ammianus Marcellinus (359 A.D.), “Anyone who wore round his neck a charm against the quartan ague or some other complaint, or was accused by his ill-wishers of visiting a grave in the evening, was found guilty and executed as a sorcerer or as an inquirer into the horrors of men’s tombs and the empty phantoms of the spirits which haunt them” (19.12.14).
Beware of meaning! Meaning is not an entity. It does not refer to anything. This essay is an attempt to describe Donald Davidson's theory of semantics. It took Davidson some time to realize that his truth conditional theory of meaning entailed a radical repudiation of traditional correspondence and coherence theories of meaning. We now have a third theoretical alternative in semantics. In this theory “truth” is left undefined. It is essential that you grasp firmly the fact that truth does not refer, or, “connect-up” anything that makes a sentence true. That is the work of epistemology, or perhaps psycho-neurology. The first theoretical task, therefore, is to describe truth, or meaning, as “convention-T”. The second principle, the principle of charity, provides an explanation for testing the theory. The third principle, the principle of holism, provides the theoretical framework for truth-conditions and charity. The theory provides new and powerful refutations of relativism and the notion that semantics must be reduced to the function of the brain, sensations, specific stimuli, and the like. It also provides warrants for denying that religion is “symbolic” of experience of the numinous, the sacred, or other “given” foundations of what might be described as “religious experience”. Davidson's theory has important, if not radical, consequences for the study of religion. The essay briefly describes a few of these.
The first such dictionary since that of Platner and Ashby in 1929, A New Topographical Dictionary of Ancient Rome defines and describes the known buildings and monuments, as well as the geographical and topographical features, of ancient Rome. It provides a concise history of each, with measurements, dates, and citations of significant ancient and modern sources.
1. Varro: Aug. C.D. 4.31. W.W. Warde Fowler, The Religious Experience of the Roman People (London 1911) 353; cf. G. Wissowa, Religion und Kultus der Römer, 2nd ed. (Munich 1912) 70ff. K. Latte, Römische Religionsgeschichte (Munich 1960) 264ff. Parallel sentiments could easily be multiplied.
2. E.g., Horace, Carmina 3.6, a typical specimen. The ancient theories of Rome's moral decline, not all of which stress decline in the state religion, are discussed by D.C. Earl, The Moral and Political Tradition of Rome (London 1967) 17ff.
3. Rituals and Power. The Roman Imperial Cult in Asia Minor (Cambridge 1984) 7-15.
4. E.g., M.E. Spiro, "Religion: Problems of Definition and Explanation," in M. Banton (ed.), Anthropological Approaches to the Study of Religion (London 1966) 85-126.
5. A list even of recent good scholarship on Roman religion would be long. Outstanding items include: H.D. Jocelyn, "The Roman Nobility and the Religion of the Republican State," Journal of Religious History 4 (1966) 89-104; E. Rawson, "Religion and Politics in the Late Second Century," Phoenix 28 (1974) 193-212 = Roman Culture and Society (Oxford 1991) 149-68; J.A. North, "Conservatism and Change in Roman Religion," Papers of the British School at Rome 44 (1976) 1-12; id., "Religion and Politics, From Republic to Principate," Journal of Roman Studies 76 (1986) 251-58; J.H.W.G. Liebeschutz, Continuity and Change in Roman Religion (Oxford 1979); A. Wardman, Religion and Statecraft among the Romans (London 1982); J. Linderski, "Cicero and Roman Divination," Parola del Passato 36 (1982) 12-38; id., "The Augural Law," Aufstieg und Niedergang der Römischen Welt II.16.3 (1986) 2146-2312; A. Momigliano, "The Theological Efforts of the Roman Upper Classes in the First Century B.C.," Classical Philology 79 (1984) 199-211; and M. Beard, "Cicero and Divination: The Formation of a Latin Discourse," Journal of Roman Studies 86 (1986) 33-46.
6. Above, note 3, 11.
7. Liebeschutz (above, note 5) 55-100.
8. Cicero De Natura Deorum 3.87.
9. Jocelyn (above, note 5) 92.
10. Polybius 6.56.6-12.
11. See the discussion by F.W. Walbank, A Historical Commentary on Polybius, vol. 1 (Oxford 1957) 741ff. and the literature cited there. Roman appropriation of this conceit: inter alios Q. Mucius Scaevola apud Augustine C.D. 4.27; Cicero de Divinatione 2.148; Varro apud Augustine C.D. 4.31.
12. M.G. Morgan, "Politics, Religion and the Games in Rome, 200-150 B.C.," Philologus 134 (1990) 15.
13. Liebeschutz (above, note 5) 53 note 4: "In De Domo Cicero argued against the validity of the consecration of the site of his house by Clodius on the ground (among others) of Clodius' immorality (esp. 139)."
14. Doubters include M. Beard and M. Crawford, Rome in the Late Republic (Ithaca 1985) 31 note 13; Morgan (above, note 12) 16 note 8.
15. T.N. Mitchell, Cicero, the Senior Statesman (New Haven 1991) 158-60.
16. Consecration of shrines: T. Mommsen, Römisches Staatsrecht, vol. 2., 3rd ed. (Leipzig 1887) 618-24; Nisbet (below, note 23) 209-14; W. Kierdorf, "«Funus» und «Consecratio». Zu Terminologie und Ablauf der römischen Kaiserapotheose," Chiron 16 (1986) 43-70. The distinction between an aedes (shrine) and a templum, which required inauguration: Linderski, Aufstieg und Niedergang der Römischen Welt II.16.3 (1986) 2249 note 407 and 2272ff. That this (religious) issue was referred to the appropriate religious authority for advice was normal practice: O'Brien Moore, RE Suppl. 6 (Stuttgart 1935) 714. The ultimate (political) decision resided with the senate, cf. J. Linderski, "The Libri Reconditi," Harvard Studies in Classical Philology 89 (1985) 216-17; M. Beard, "Priesthood in the Roman Republic," in M. Beard and J. North (eds.), Pagan Priests. Religion and Power in the Ancient World (London 1990) 30-34. The pronouncements of the sacred colleges were not invariably followed by the senate, cf. M.G. Morgan, "The Introduction of the Aqua Marcia into Rome, 144-140 B.C." Philologus 122 (1978) 48ff.
17. The hearing was public but the audience seems predominantly to have consisted of members of the elite...
Winner of the 1993 Distinguished Book Award, Pacific Sociological Association "A major work in three different areas of sociology, [A Theory of Religion] is a model of how to build a systematic theory, a leading accomplishment of the rational choice school, and a comprehensive theory of religion...It is a sobering as well as penetrating vision. [This] book deserves a great deal of attention, both in the sociology of religion and in wider realms of social theory."--Randall Collins, Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion "The value of [this book] lies in the distance it carries sociology toward a scientific theory of religion and in the sustained rigor of its deductive application. It is a 'must read' for anyone interested in the scientific study of religion or the formal axiomatization of sociology."--Thomas Ryba, Zygon "Stark and Bainbridge have made pioneering and enduring efforts in writing this book, and to a large extent they have been successful in their attempt to explain deductively why and how the phenomena of religion occur."--K. Peter Takayama, Journal of Church and State In this unique text, Stark and Bainbridge begin with basic statements about human nature and, employing the principles of logic and philosophy, build toward increasingly complex propositions about societies and their religious institutions. They provide a rigorous yet flexible sociological theory or religion as well as a general sociological model for deriving macrolevel theory from microlevel evidence. Rodney Stark is a professor of sociology and of comparative religion at the University of Washington and co-author of The Churching of America, 1776-2005: Winners and Losers in Our Religious Economy (Rutgers University Press). William Sims Bainbridge is director of the sociology program at the National Science Foundation and author of Goals in Space: American Values and the Future of Technology.
Part I. The Framework of Belief: 1. The intellectualist programme 2. The Durkheimian thesis 3. Variations on the symbolist theme 4. Symbol and theory Part II. Ritual Action: 5. 'Ritual' 6. Ceremony and interaction 7. Operative ceremonies 8. Symbols and symbolic action 9. Theories of magic Part III. The Framework of Belief: Intellectualism: 10. 'Ritual' reconsidered 11. Intellectualism, 'Frazerian' and 'Dorkheimian' 123. 'Traditional' and 'Modern' 13. Paradox and explanation Appendix.
The conventional definition of a conceptual class is that its members must possess certain properties in common. Vygotsky and Wittgenstein have shown that this definition is unrealistic and logically unneccessary. The resultant recognition of classificatory concepts formed by family resemblances has recently led to a revision of anthropological analyses of kinship and of belief statements. The present article reports the discovery that, by a remarkable convergence of ideas in the past decade, family resemblance predicates had already been adduced in certain natural sciences under the term 'polythetic classification'. The methodological and experimental results of this approach are set out, and a variety of consequences for social anthropology are drawn from them. A main conclusion is that comparative studies carried out in the stock classificatory terms of anthropology are subverted by the realisation that they refer not to common features but to polythetic classes of social facts. It is suggested that effective comparison may nevertheles be practicable by reliance on a purely formal terminology of analytical concepts, and it is envisaged that these may permit the determination of basic predicates in the study of human affairs.
The tremendous advances in electronic data processing are likely to result in revolutionary changes in the theories and practices of taxonomy. The process of classification is being removed from speculations regarding the origin of the taxa being classified. A natural classification is one whose taxa share the largest number of properties and which is most useful for a wide range of purposes. The principles of numerical taxonomy are stated briefly and illustrated by means of diagrammatic examples. The relative roles of the taxonomist and computer are discussed and estimates given of computer time and costs involved in numerical taxonomic work. The numerical taxonomic work done in botany so far is discussed and the paper concludes with a brief mention of several problems of numerical taxonomy with regard to botanical work. These are: scarcity of characters, correlations between cytogenetic work and phenetic similarities, and problems raised by hybridization.