Focusing on the power of language in the ancient world, this collection of essays offers original insights and innovative perspectives. The work explores how social imaginaries shaped Roman culture and communication, providing a fresh understanding of historical contexts and linguistic influences. Through lucid and thoughtful analysis, it contributes significantly to contemporary discussions in the field.
What did the Romans know about their gods? Why did they perform the rituals of their religion, and what motivated them to change those rituals? This book proposes simple answers: in contrast to ancient Christians, who had faith, Romans had knowledge, and their knowledge was empirical in orientation.
The Roman empire during the period framed by the accession of Septimus Severus in 193 and the rise of Diocletian in 284 has conventionally been regarded as one of crisis. This book describes and integrates the contrasting histories of different parts of the empire and assesses the impacts of administrative, political and religious change.
In 212 CE, the emperor Caracalla extended citizenship to nearly all free-born residents of the Roman Empire. In doing so, he transformed not only his own, but the very ideal of empire and statehood in Europe. This volume first inquires into the contexts of Caracalla's act in his own day. Rome was an ancient empire: it had traditionally ruled over populations that were conceived and governed as distinct units, a practice that was both strategic and ideological. What were the practical and political effects of a universalizing ideology in this context? Was there a reorientation of private social and legal practice in response? And what politics of exclusion came to apply, now that citizenship no longer served to distinguish persons of higher and lower status? The volume subsequently traces the history of citizenship in universalizing ideologies and legal practice from late antiquity to the codification of law in Europe in the nineteenth century. Caracalla's act was then repeatedly cited as the ideal toward which sovereign polities should strive, be they states or empires. Citizenship and law were thereby made preeminent among the universalisms of European statecraft.
The public/private distinction is fundamental to modern theories of the family, religion and religious freedom, and state power, yet it has had different salience, and been understood differently, from place to place and time to time. The volume brings together essays from an international array of experts in law and religion, in order to examine the public/private distinction in comparative perspective. The essays focus on the cultures and religions of the ancient Mediterranean, in the formative periods of Greece and Rome and the religions of Judaism, Christianity and Islam. Particular attention is given to the private exercise of religion, the relation between public norms and private life, and the division between public and private space and the place of religion therein.
Law is a particularly fruitful means by which to investigate the relationship between religion and state. It is the mechanism by which the Roman state and its European successors have regulated religion, in the twin actions of constraining religious institutions to particular social spaces and of releasing control over such spaces to those orders. This volume analyses the relationship from the late Republic to the final codification of Roman law in Justinian's Constantinople.