Literature and Religion at Rome: Cultures, Contexts, and Beliefs (Roman Literature and its Contexts)
Language: English
Pages: 176
ISBN: 0521559219
Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub
This book exploits recent reevaluations of Roman religion in order to argue in favor of taking the religious dimensions of Roman literature seriously, as important cultural work in their own right. Instead of seeing Roman religious and literary activity as derivative and parasitic upon Greek originals, the book questions the romanticizing biases of classical studies, and argues for the power and creativity of the Romans in their engagements with Greek culture.
this conventional way of framing the issue may not do justice to the aleatory nature of much of this process. It has been argued that such apparently fundamental myths as the Trojan Horse, or the Judgement of Paris, or Heracles and the Hydra arose as late as the eighth century, as the result of attempts to explain Greek artists' representations of a Near Eastern 37
corresponding hole at the centre of Roman religion. There are, as we have seen, serious problems involved in the assumption that the gods of Greek cult and piety were experienced through the medium of the mighty personalities with which they were invested in drama and epic; as Vernant puts it, 'the Greek gods are powers, not persons'.5 Nonetheless, we may certainly observe
differences in emphasis in the two intellectual cultures' treatment of the gods in their investigations into religion. The Romans' Greek predecessors and contemporaries were the heirs of a centurieslong philosophical and scholarly engagement with poetic representations of the divine, and this engagement was one in which the Romans participated only obliquely, for their culture did not share the compulsion to make sense of epic poetry which ultimately conditioned all this Greek activity. The
opposite: that the cult was a vigorous and muscular institution which could provoke and sustain interrogation and debate. The entitlement of a deceased emperor to apotheosis was never automatic, but had to be debated.119 Just as 'le critique appartenait . . . á la technique mythographique',120 so criticism and testing was part of the apotheosis technique.
and throughout the Empire, and an initiate into the mysteries of Eleusis since the age of thirtytwo. He was acclaimed in marble, bronze, papyrus and song as the descendant of Venus and the son of Divus Julius. He was the viceregent of Jupiter, founder of a new temple of Jupiter the Thunderer, and always carried a sealskin with him as protection against thunderstorms. In which of these contexts is the 'core' of belief to be found?