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Icon, cult, and context : sacred spaces and objects in the classical world : an edited volume featuring papers written by former students and colleagues of Susan B. Downey on the occasion of her retirement
\"This festschrift honors UCLA professor emerita Susan Downey and her meticulous scholarship on religious architecture and imagery in the Roman/Hellenistic world. The iconography of gods and goddesses, the analysis of sacred imagery in the context of ancient cult practices, and the design and decoration of sacred spaces are the main themes of the book. Authors examine such subjects as painting from Dura-Europos, Hellenistic sculpture at Saqqara in Egypt, Roman cameo glass, Pompeian fresco, and aspects of Venus in portrait sculpture. The essays on Dura-Europos are especially valuable in light of the present turmoil in the region.Professor Downey's influence shines through in these discussions, which echo her mentorship of several generations of art history and archaeology students and recognize her scholarly achievements. The broad temporal and geographic parameters of the volume are expansive, and the juxtaposition of images and analyses leads to surprising new conclusions\"-- Provided by publisher.
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The reuse of ancient tuff blocks in early medieval construction in Rome
This paper analyzes the reuse of ancient tuff blocks in early medieval architecture in Rome, in both papal and private structures. The blocks are a well-known phenomenon, but they have not yet received any focused study. Short discussions in earlier scholarship have typically described them in utilitarian terms. I first identify a pattern of targeted reuse in papal building projects. I then argue that they would also have had symbolic value for an independent papacy wanting to display power. For later private builders, I propose that the blocks became prestige materials displayed on the houses of an ever-tightening aristocracy eager to be seen within some of the city's most important monumental spaces. I consider how the city's ancient monuments and their pieces were viewed in the early medieval period and how the blocks’ ancient contexts contributed to the symbolic value that I identify in them.
Journal Article
Did the Rabbis Believe in Agreus Pan? Rabbinic Relationships with Roman Power, Culture, and Religion in Genesis Rabbah 63
This article presents a reading of the story of the Patriarch's meeting with the Emperor Diocletian as it appears in the late antique midrashic compilation, Genesis Rabbah. The story encapsulates the complexity of the relationship between the rabbis and Roman political, cultural and religious hegemony, showing the rabbis as both in eternal conflict with the Roman Empire and its culture and, yet, in many ways, very Roman themselves. In the second half of the article, I argue that this story presents a unique perspective on rabbinic views of both “demons” and the Olympian gods themselves. I conclude by comparing and contrasting these views with the approaches of early Christian thinkers.
Journal Article
When the Rabbi’s Soul Entered a Pig
This essay analyzes an unpublished manuscript of a giudiata, a poem mocking Jewish funerals that was written and performed in Rome in the mid-seventeenth century. Melchiorre Palontrotti, the author of the composition, was a Roman polemist and author of other published works against Italian Jews, including, among others, the Venetian rabbi Simone Luzzatto, between 1640 and 1649. After furnishing information on the author and the historical background in which the song was written, and following an analysis of the origins of giudiate and their diffusion in early modern Rome, this paper explores the content, language, and style of the giudiata text. The appendix includes a bibliography of Palontrotti’s writings and a transcription of the manuscript.
Journal Article
Keeping Kosher
The Jewish religion, especially its dietary laws, has been seen as an obstacle to Jewish military service in the armies of the Roman Empire and, thus, is used as a main argument by scholars who deny that Jews served in the Roman army in any considerable numbers. The current essay is the first to examine this claim. Its first part shows that Jews would not have been unique among ethnic army recruits in having dietary restrictions, while the second part presents the diet of the Roman soldier. The third part uses the Jewish soldier as a case study of the capability of any serviceman, no matter his faith or ethnicity, to serve in the army while keeping his customs and traditions with regard to food. Lastly, the article raises the possibility that the Roman logistical system was purposefully structured to ease the service of soldiers from different cultures and ethnicities.
Journal Article
Roman Sacrifice, Inside and Out
The ‘insider-outsider problem’ has had little impact on the study of religion in pre-Christian Rome. Classicists generally assume that the modern idea of sacrifice as the ritual killing of an animal applies to the Roman context. This study argues, however, that the apparent continuity is illusory in some important ways and that we have lost sight of some fine distinctions that the Romans made among the rituals they performed. Sacrificium included vegetal and inedible offerings, and it was not the only Roman ritual that had living victims. Roman sacrificium is both less and more than the typical etic notion of sacrifice.
Journal Article
The Cult Statues of the Pantheon
This article reconsiders the possible statuary of the Pantheon in Rome, both in its original Augustan form and in its later phases. It argues that the so-called ‘Algiers Relief’ has wrongly been connected with the Temple of Mars Ultor and is in fact evidence of the association of the Divus Julius with Mars and Venus in the Pantheon of Agrippa, a juxtaposition which reflects the direction of Augustan ideology in the 20s b.c. and the building's celestial purpose. This triple statue group became the focus of the later Pantheon, and its importance is highlighted by the hierarchized system of architectural ornament of the present building.
Journal Article
Neronianis Temporibus: The So-Called Arae Incendii Neroniani and the Fire of A.D. 64 in Rome's Monumental Landscape
This essay examines the evidence for the Domitianic ‘Arae Incendii Neroniani’, a presumed set of monumental altars dedicated to Vulcan in fulfilment of a vow dating back to the Neronian Fire of a.d. 64. A close reading of the text of the dedicatory inscription creates a framework for exploring the larger historical and cultural context of these monuments, which offer a significant illustration of Flavian rhetoric concerning Rome's post-Neronian transformation. Reaffirming Julio-Claudian notions of civic identity, collective memory, and the ruler's privileged relationship with the gods, the Arae also constitute a conspicuous form of posthumous reproach to Nero.
Journal Article
Leo's Liturgical Topography: Contestations for Space in Fifth-Century Rome
This paper examines the Sermons of Leo the Great (a.d. 440–461) for their liturgical topography. Leo developed an annual cycle of set places on set days — the very definition of stational liturgy — in Rome as one means to assert papal authority over the city's Christian communities and especially over the resident Roman senatorial aristocracy. Leo's Sermons indicate that the bishop found new ways to centralize the liturgy at St Peter's in the Vatican, making St Peter's — not St John the Lateran — the religious centre and the symbol of the papacy.
Journal Article
Orality and Textuality: The Alexius Legend and the Brothers Grimm
Da Silva and Tehrani’s (Roy Soc 2016, https://doi.org/10.1098/rsos.150645) article using statistical phylogenetic analyses to trace the ancient roots of Indo-European folktales was widely reported in the popular press as proof that the Brothers Grimm were “right after all.” Its conclusion that some folktales had been passed down orally for 6000 years within individual Indo-European language families and had not spread geographically through trade or migration seemed to reassure readers that the beloved Grimms’ Fairytales were “authentic.” Findings of scholars who had argued for later origins and text-based transmission seemed to have shaken the foundations of beliefs held since childhood in a secure cultural patrimony. Other arguments that tales passed back and forth between oral and written forms, being told and retold in various versions were not comforting and tended to pit folklorists and philologists against one another. The present study seeks an alternative approach by conducting a case study of an actual Brothers Grimm tale that dates back 1500 years and can be traced in various media back to a fifth-century Semitic text. The investigation traces how the tale of The Holy Man of Edessa migrated from the Near East throughout Western Europe, being retold and rewritten in multiple languages as it was reshaped to appeal to different audiences. Examples reveal the role played by redactors who reshaped the story to address their own concerns along with those of audiences. It concludes that examining examples in specific historical and social contexts clarifies the process of how and why folktales developed as they did.
Journal Article