Individual in the Religions of the Ancient Mediterranean 0199674507, 9780199674503

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THE INDIVIDUAL IN THE RELIGIONS OF THE ANCIENT MEDITERRANEAN

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The Individual in the Religions of the Ancient Mediterranean Edited by

JÖRG RÜPKE

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Great Clarendon Street, Oxford, OX2 6DP, United Kingdom Oxford University Press is a department of the University of Oxford. It furthers the University’s objective of excellence in research, scholarship, and education by publishing worldwide. Oxford is a registered trade mark of Oxford University press in the UK and in certain other countries # Oxford University Press 2013 The moral rights of the authors have been asserted First Edition published in 2013 Impression: 1 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior permission in writing of Oxford University Press, or as expressly permitted by law, by licence or under terms agreed with the appropriate reprographics rights organization. Enquiries concerning reproduction outside the scope of the above should be sent to the Rights Department, Oxford University Press, at the address above You must not circulate this work in any other form and you must impose this same condition on any acquirer Published in the United States of America by Oxford University Press 198 Madison Avenue, New York, NY 10016, United States of America British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data Data available Library of Congress Control Number: 2013943776 ISBN 978–0–19–967450–3 Printed and bound by CPI Group (UK) Ltd, Croydon, CR0 4YY Links to third party websites are provided by Oxford in good faith and for information only. Oxford disclaims any responsibility for the materials contained in any third party website referenced in this work.

Acknowledgments Many people and a few institutions helped to bring this volume into being. A generous grant from the German Science Foundation (DFG, FOR 1013) made it possible to set up a research group on ‘Religious individualization in historical perspective’ at the Max Weber Centre of the University of Erfurt in 2008 and to hold a series of conferences at Erfurt, finally leading to many chapters of this volume. Thanks to the organizational efforts of Diana Püschel we gratefully remember the atmosphere of the discussions as well as the gathering at the ‘Coelicum’ of the Cathedral and the Augustinerkloster. Elisabeth Begemann in an early phase and Christopher Degelmann in the final phase took care of the manuscripts. Hilary O’Shea took an early interest in the project and found readers, who were helpful, yet critical where necessary, in their comments. I should like to thank Howard Emmens for his careful copy-editing. Finally, thanks are addressed to all the contributors, Fellows of the Max Weber Centre (indicated by their affiliation) and other participants in the conference, for their participation in the discussions, their willingness to test terms and approaches, and their patience until publication. Mihaela Holban has compiled the indices with her usual care and consideration in order to open many different pathes into the argument of this book. Erfurt, April 2013, Jörg Rüpke

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Contents List of Contributors

x Introduction

1. Individualization and Individuation as Concepts for Historical Research Jörg Rüpke

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Historical Change 2. The Religious Life in Hellenistic Phoenicia: ‘Middle Ground’ and New Agencies Corinne Bonnet 3. Disguising Change in the First Century John A. North 4. Subjects, Gods, and Empire, or Monarchism as a Theological Problem Clifford Ando

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Individual and Society 5. Individual and Common Cult: Epigraphic Reflections Fritz Graf 6. Ritual and the Individual in Roman Religion Greg Woolf

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Experiences and Choices 7. The Religious Anthropology of Late-Antique ‘High’ Magical Practice Richard Gordon 8. Individualization and the Cult of the Martyrs: Examples from Asia Minor in the Fourth Century Johan Leemans

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Contents Conceptualizing Religious Experience

9. Dimensions of Individuality in Ancient Mystery Cults: Religious Practice and Philosophical Discourse Katharina Waldner 10. Individualization and Religious Rhetoric in Imperial Anatolia Nicole Belayche

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Agency 11. Mark’s Gospel and the Pre-History of Individuation Ian H. Henderson 12. The Individual and the Word in Hellenistic Judaism: Cases in Philo and Josephus Tessa Rajak 13. Fighting for Differences: Forms and Limits of Religious Individuality in the ‘Shepherd of Hermas’ Jörg Rüpke 14. Willing to Die for God: Individualization and Instrumental Agency in Ancient Christian Martyr Literature Karen L. King

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Master and Disciple 15. Religio mentis: The Hermetic Process of Individualization Giulia Sfameni Gasparro 16. The Discourse of Revelation as Source for the Gnostic Process of Individuation Giovanni Filoramo

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Beyond the Empirical Individual 17. Cicero and Seneca on the Fate of the Soul: Private Feelings and Philosophical Doctrines Aldo Setaioli

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Contents 18. ‘Humanity was Created as an Individual’: Synechdocal Individuality in the Mishnah as a Jewish Response to Romanization Charlotte Elisheva Fonrobert

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Index of Sources

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General Index

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Introduction

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1 Individualization and Individuation as Concepts for Historical Research Jörg Rüpke

A NEW APPROACH TO ANCIENT RELIGION Why bother with individuation?1 Ancient Mediterranean religion is traditionally viewed through the lens of public religion, that is, it is seen as consisting of the religions of political units (usually citystates) that are part and parcel of civic identity. Such analyses of ancient polytheistic religions, whether they refer to ‘embedded’, ‘civic’ or ‘polis’ religion,2 work on the assumption that all members of ancient societies were in principle equally religious. From this point of view, religion (and this also applies to Judaism) is a taken-forgranted part of every biography: rites de passage structure the life of each individual, while ritual acts within the domestic cult, family cult, or burial, and death rites facilitate change of status within the primary social units. This basic assumption of a homo religiosus is bound up with the political interpretation of ancient religion: since religion is an unquestioned given, religion is thought to be particularly well-suited to cultivate ‘collective identities’ and to act as instrument for the justification of power. Paradigmatic of this approach is the claim,

1 Working on this paper has been much facilitated by a reduction in teaching assignments enabled by a grant of the German Science Foundation (DFG) related to the work of the Research group ‘Religious individualisation in historical perspective’ (KFG 1013). 2 See, e.g. de Polignac 1995a, 1995b; critically Bendlin 2000; again Dondin-Payre, Raepsaet-Charlier 2006 with the critique of Häussler 2008 and Ando 2009.

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now historically disproved,3 that only citizens were entitled to take part in the rituals of the polis. Here the religious actions of individuals take place solely in those niches and predefined spaces permitted by the civic religion, which is in turn created and financed by the dominant social groups.4 The public religion perspective forms the vast majority of accounts of ancient Mediterranean religion during the last decades. This holds true for handbooks and monographs on Greek religion,5 which show a remarkable tendency to concentrate on single cities instead of the transregional world of shared mythologies, common festivals (Olympia, Corinth), and diffused philosophical reflection. The same holds true for Italic religion as well as for the description of Roman religion in general6 and, more recently, in that of Ostia or Pompeii in particular.7 The role of women is analysed against this backdrop, too.8 The description of less urbanized polities and whole provinces follows the same pattern, even if, owing to the overwhelming presence of epigraphical evidence, more space is given to the cultic practices of different groups, professional as well as ethnic.9 Civic religion is also understood as supplemented by or—in the end—even in competition with ‘cults’. Being elective in nature, these cults offered options for more intensive social interaction and in particular soteriological perspectives, starting with Orphism in classical Greece.10 Interest is focused on the so-called ’oriental’ cults or religions such as those of Isis, Mithras, or the Syrian deities. Frequently, a history of religion, in particular for late antiquity, is told as the struggle between different cults or religions—Iuppiter or Isis, Mithras or Christ.11 This is not only problematical as far as the status of these units of the narrative is concerned. Conceptualizing all instances of the veneration of Isis as a coherent religion or ‘cult’

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Krauter 2004, 142 for Rome. See Rüpke 2007b, 21–9 for the role of the elite. Bruit Zaidman and Schmitt Pantel 1992; Mikalson 1998; very differentiated: Parker 1996. 6 Beard, North, and Price 1998 for the republic; Scheid 1998; Warrior 2006. 7 Van Andringa 2009, adding substantial considerations on domestic cult. 8 Schultz 2006; Bremen 1996. 9 Mitchell 1993; Derks 1998; cf. the reflections on the problem in Woolf 1997; Woolf 1998; Spickermann 1997, 2003, 2008. 10 Burkert 2011, 415–16. For Rome see North 1994. 11 For critique see now Rüpke 2011. 4 5

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is as problematical as postulating the coherence of an actor ‘Christianity’.12 Accepting the framework of civic religion, much of twentieth century scholarship on ancient religion has been directed towards locating, identifying, and classifying the evidence into ‘cults’ or—if the documents seemed hostile to plurality or explicitly favoured monolatry—‘religions’.13 The topic of the diffusion of such ‘cults’ dominates research on the religion of the provinces of the Roman empire as well as the influx of cults to the large urban centres. Cultcentred corpora of evidence laid the groundwork for enterprises, supplemented by prosopographical14 or historical studies15 or studies addressing the iconographic or narrative construction of divine figures.16 Topically, research has focused on key factors determining membership in these supposedly small, soteriologically oriented groups (‘sects’, to use the terminology of the sociology of religion), which are regarded as forerunners and ultimately competitors of Christianity.17 The starting point for such an approach is the assumption that public cults failed to address the individual and its existence within social orders, which were in some cases gripped by change to the point of crisis. Public cults would not have offered any emotionally and intellectually satisfying perspective to a consciousness of individuality that had started to take shape. This analysis could apply both to Hellenistic cities and the metropolises of the imperial era.18 Recently, however, the category has encountered severe criticism, since it does not provide a stable criterion either as regards content (mysteries) or geography.19 Furthermore, among such cults, so it was claimed, only religious options like Christianity offered a fundamental alternative to polis religion. On this understanding, Christianity (even more than Judaism) marked a rupture with the truly ancient, the polis religions, as a result of its emphasis on individual promises of salvation and

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See the contributions in Cancik and Rüpke 2009. e.g. dozens of volumes in the Études preliminaires aux religions orientales dans l’Empire romain; cf. now, with elaborate methodology, Bricault 2005; Bricault 2008. 14 Mora 1981, 1990a, 1990b. 15 Sfameni Gasparro 1985, 2007. 16 Versnel 1990; Versnel 2011. 17 Starting with Cumont 2006. 18 Schwertheim 1974; Turcan 1996; Casadio and Johnston 2009. 19 Bonnet 2008; Bonnet and Huet 2008; Bonnet and Rüpke 2009; Bonnet, Rüpke, and Scarpi 2006. 13

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faith rather than ritual practices. As with oriental cults, so with Christianity, a principal revision has been its recent reinterpretation as ‘ancient religion’.20 The same holds true of Judaism as well as Manichaeism. The manifold links and large overlaps of these ‘isms’ with the background and ongoing development of ancient (and late antique) religion is only insufficiently reflected. ‘Cults’ and ‘polis religion’, however, leave a major gap. Religious phenomena of the ancient Mediterranean societies have been analysed far beyond what has been described so far. Tens of thousands of votives in sanctuaries have been collected, documented, and studied. They point to a ‘votive religion’ that copes well with individual crises.21 ‘Magic’, ranging from amulets and curse tablets to elaborate rituals and discursive methods manipulated by ancient specialists,22 has been analysed as a cultural resource that might even be opposed to religion. Divination makes up another field of ‘instrumental religion’, provided not only by and for state officials (and hence described as part of public religion), but also by a broad range of male and female practitioners.23 Finally, funerary rites and the cult of the dead are a further area that abounds with evidence, yet occupies a marginal position (if any) in the polis religion paradigm. To sum up, vast areas of evidence and excellent research done on these phenomena have not managed to open up a new, broader framework within the study of ancient religion. As a consequence, with a few exceptions, the field has assumed a marginal position in global religious studies and comparative religion—that is, for today’s understanding of contemporary and historical religion—and has not adequately contributed to our understanding of ancient Mediterranean cultures in general. In order to supplement the cults-and-polis religion perspective, it is not sufficient to merely point to these fields, but to firmly establish a perspective that has been used as an argument for explaining religious change in the imperial period but was never systematically explored, that is, the individual, who has been much underrated as a religious agent. It is a fact that non-Christian antiquity also knew individual

20 See Markus 1990 and J. Z. Smith’s stress on the ‘locative’ character of most strands of early Christianity (1990) and Rüpke 2009. 21 van Straten 1981; Bouma 1996; Parker et al. 2004; Bodel and Kajava 2009. 22 Faraone 1999; Faraone and Obbink 1991; Graf 1996; Gordon 1987; Bohak 2008. 23 Belayche et al. 2005.

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religious practices. Ancient conceptualizations gave such sacra privata precedence even over the state, with respect to military conscription for example.24 Cicero’s ‘religious legislation’ explicitly excluded the sacra privata from any kind of interference. In contrast to this ancient perception the realm of individual religious practice emerges as a marginal phenomenon in scholarship. Attention is drawn to rituals of birth and mourning and the notions of the soul and the hereafter.25 In the case of domestic cult, an antiquarian perspective predominates, which at best includes economic history26 and seeks no further historical contextualization.27 ‘Domestic cult’ has not been properly integrated into the complex topography of individual religious action that involves various sites—house, garden, family tombs, neighbourhoods, and selected shrines and healing sanctuaries as much as centralized public festivals—and diverse social contexts. The present volume intends to take up these lines of research and bring them together by focusing on the individual and individuality in religion. The use of this term has been hindered by an assumption, shared by many Western intellectuals, that individuality is the result of a long process called ‘individualization’ which in itself is a process peculiar to Modernity. What does individualization mean?28 First and foremost it includes the notion of de-traditionalization. Individual action is less and less determined by traditional norms handed down by family and the larger social context. Options open up, choices are made. On the part of the individual, this development is reflected in changes in ‘individuation’, the parallel process of a gradual full integration into society and the development of self-reflection and of a notion of individual identity. Socialization, the biographical process of being integrated into ever larger social contexts (not necessarily in any formal manner) by the individual’s appropriation of social roles and traditions—and more specifically religious roles and traditions—and the development of individual identity go hand in hand. I know how to act in society and I act strategically, being selfaware, not necessarily selfish. Religious individuation for instance does not imply the individual’s wish to be different. Quite the contrary, it is safe to say for the period under consideration that being different was not a value-informing individuation. Dignity and 24 26 28

25 Gell. 16.4.3–5. Bremmer 1983; Vernant 1996. 27 Bakker 1994. Bassani 2008. Cf. for classical sociological approaches Kippele 1998.

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honour, notions of competition, being better than others in certain respects, or even being perfect, were such values. Religious practices might be among fields of competition, in euergetic activities, in displays of a cultured taste, in intensive relationships with a deity. Such changes entail institutional developments. Options are declared legitimate, voluntary associations help to realize certain options, writing helps to develop notions of individuality, inscriptions might help to express it. The rights of the individual are legally protected against society’s demands. This process culminates in the formulation of individual human rights. Finally, individuality takes on a normative character: you have to be an individual. Should anything less be called individualization? The usual self-understanding of Western modernity tends to answer in a negative manner. But rather than accepting this simple answer, the authors of this volume take up the notions of individuation and individualization in a heuristic and descriptive manner,29 in order to explore the individual factor in the history of religion in the Hellenistic and Roman periods, the dynamics of religious change (including revitalization and invented traditions30), the spaces of experience, the limits of individual agency, and the mechanisms and forms of religious individuation. Within the societies of the ancient Mediterranean, individuation is full of variables. Already primary socialization in the elementary social group of the family is subject to many complications.31 Basically, one has to learn the biographically changing roles of, for example, son or older sister, wife or pater familias. But families were not stable, mortality in birth and childbed was high, and military conflict endemic in the Mediterranean basin, resulting in the death or slavery of the individual.32 Processes of urbanization increased social and local mobility, migration was frequent. Secondary socialization in a system of general education, by specialized agents and institutions was probably restricted to a minority of affluent people, and nearly exclusively to male members of such groups. Here, a literacy that went beyond the ability to write one’s name or to read a short 29 The underlying concept of the individual and individuality, too, is inter-culturally and intra-culturally widely varying, but again, neither coextensive nor restricted to the ‘Western’ world: see Spiro 1993. 30 Hobsbawm 1983. 31 There are few studies on childhood in antiquity with a view on religion: Leeuw 1939; Brelich 1969; Wiedemann 1989; Eyben 1993; Martin and Nitschke 1986. 32 See now Eckstein 2008 for the latter; ancient demographics: Scheidel 2001.

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inscription33 was taught. For members of local elites who were not Greek or Latin by origin, bilingualism might have been widely present. In sum, a large potential for de-traditionalization was given.

ANCIENT CONCEPTS: INDIVIDUA, SELF, AND PERSONHOOD In throwing one’s net into a pool of so many phenomena, it is reasonable to ask whether concepts in ancient thinking and texts offer guidance. It was M. Tullius Cicero, in his accounts and discussions of Greek philosophical positions, who coined the term individua as a translation of the Greek átoma.34 In his paraphrase of the Platonic Timaios, Cicero employed the term to distinguish between the indivisible and divisible matter used by the creator god to form the human soul (animus).35 Seneca could use the term for indivisible material connections as well as indivisible goods like peace and liberty.36 By the end of the first century ad the term could be used for very strong bonds of friendship or love.37 Within the philosophical discussion the ontological debate about the priority of the individuals as first substances (Aristotle) or a priority of the generalities (Plotinos) remained dominant, leading to an understanding of individuals as clearly and demonstrably separate beings, easily illustrated by human individuals, but never restricted to human and superhuman rational beings.38 As far as I can see, neither the problems of the growth of individuality by developments in time and space (individuation) nor the problem of the communication between separated individuals39—and hence the social dimension of individualism— became a matter of debate in ancient texts. Unlike the discussions of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, difference did not form a central implication and hence problem of individuality in antiquity. 33

2009. 34 35 36 37 38 39

See Harris 1989, with Bowman 1996, Woolf 1998; Hezser 2001; W. A. Johnson Kobusch 1976, 300; e.g. Cic. fin. 1.17; ND 1.71. Cic. Tim. 21. Sen. dial. 1.5.9; epist. 73.8. Tac. ann. 6.10; Apul. Apol. 53; CIL 8.22672. Kobusch 1993, 301–3. See Borsche 1994, 310–22 for the modern development of the term.

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For that period a Begriffsgeschichte will not lead to substantial results. Being different was not a value that informed individuation, but dignity and honour were. They were attributed to individual persons, even if related to and determined within family and social backgrounds. They were acclaimed for legitimizing purposes, but easily contested and without guarantee of success during your lifetime.40 Memoria dignus, worthy of memory, would prolong this beyond the space of one’s own lifetime, but to achieve such a memory, a much higher degree of being remarkable, excellent, and different had to be attained. Difference existed within acceptable degrees and upon agreed fields of competition: euergetic engagement (that is, generosity), display of a cultured taste (referring to an always changing mix of both Greek and local standards), literary and art production. Not all fields were shared by a majority. Individual rationality, as developed in Greek techniques of argumentation, by philosophy and rhetoric, was of growing importance and a source of success during the late Roman republic, but it was always contested.41 Huge differences between modern and ancient terminological use can be stated for another term, namely ‘person’. Important for ancient grammar as well as Christology, the term, even if primarily denoting a role (in theatre, court, administration), was neither used for an elaborate role theory nor discussions about the attribution of responsibility or holders of right. Without any special emphasis it is used for persons acting and subject to the law. Only in very late (Western) antiquity did Boethius coin his famous definition persona est naturae rationabilis individua substantia (‘person is the individual substance of a rational nature’) that connected ‘person’ to the notion of ‘individual’.42 Hence, I suggest using that term instead of a casual ‘individual’ in order to denote human beings. So far, I have concentrated on the relationship of individuals and society. What about the relationship of the individual to her or himself—to keep the gender factor in mind? Terminologically the object of this relationship is best phrased as ‘self ’. The notions of autós and ipse were present in ancient philosophical discourse, starting with Platonic dialogues. They have given rise to many historical studies. Should not such a term be preferred to a modern concept 40 41 42

Rilinger 1991; Forbis 1996; Lendon 1997; Cancik 2002. Rüpke 2012; see Dumont 1986, 28. Boeth. c. Eutych. 1–3; see Fuhrmann 1989.

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like individuality? Michael Trapp has recently presented a detailed analysis of the Hellenistic and imperial thinking about self, person, and individual, some results of which should be briefly summarized43 in order to answer this question. At first sight, the evidence is quite differentiated. Contributions to a theory of the self stem from physical thinking about the soul which clearly is identified as the more important part, governing the body and connecting the human with the divine, in particular in the best (and hence leading) part of the soul.44 The real self tends to be identified with the divine intellect, ultimately separated from the bodily and emotional parts.45 The second line of reflection is even more central to the essentially ethical concern of all philosophical schools of the time, the question of how to live a good life. Selfanalysis, basically driven by a sense of self-preservation, is necessitated by the Stoic concept of oikeiôsis. Everyone has to find out and adapt to their own physical and social nature, consciously striving to understand their state step by step from the basic physical facts to their position within the divinely ordered cosmos. The same selfanalysis is necessitated by the ‘duties’ (officia) one has to fulfil for oneself and for society.46 In all these instances, however, it is not individuality in the sense of individual differences that is sought after. The way of living and one’s duties vary according to the classes of sex, age, and juridical and social status to which one belongs.47 As part of the divine intellect—of course we have to except the Epicureans here—the highest aim and capacity of the human soul and (or) mind is participating in rational thinking and its impersonal standards.48 It is deficits and illnesses of the human body and mind that constitute individual variants. In long therapeutic practices they have to be carefully identified and cared for, whether in healing cults or philosophical activity, and—ultimately—removed.49 It should be pointed out that a theory of roles (personae) is not brought to bear on these discussions.50 In a parallel manner, the argument from the life and character of a person (de vita) is not much articulated in

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Trapp 2007, 98–133. See briefly Setaioli 2007, 350. For the problems of Jewish thinkers to adapt the concept and Philo’s creative solutions see Dillon 2009 and van Kooten 2009. 45 46 47 Trapp 2007, 99–109. Trapp 2007, 109–14. Trapp 2007, 115 f. 48 49 50 Trapp 2007, 109. Trapp 2007, 116–22. Trapp 2007, 120. 44

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the rhetorical system (as part of the invention) and training for advocacy.51 These findings are important for the terminological clarification of the inquiry. Positively, they invite the usage of the term ‘self ’ in matters ancient in a psychologically descriptive way as the empirical view of a person of itself,52 typically including the notion of moral responsibility. Negatively, it must be stressed that the term ‘self ’ cannot include the notion of individuation,53 as developed so far, but can only be an aspect of it. For a history of individuation and individualization, the textual presence of the notion of the self is not sufficient. Whenever selves are constructed and treated in texts in a high frequency (as could be shown for the second century ce), this is, however, important data for such a history.

TYPES OF INDIVIDUALITY Against the backdrop of the complex notion of individualization used in sociological discourse,54 it is necessary to develop sharper instruments for historical inquiries. Instead of asking which degree of individuality had been achieved in individuation it is more useful to inquire into the forms of individuality supported by concepts, practices, or institutions that are important for processes of individuation. I propose to differentiate five types of individuality that would ultimately shape the detailed description of individuation as well as of any long-term processes that might be addressed as individualization (or its opposite, de-individualization): – – – – –

51

practical individuality moral individuality competitive individuality representative individuality reflexive individuality.

See Rhetorica ad Herennium 2.5. Thus Schönpflug’s definition of the modern psychological usage of the term (1995, 305). 53 As in Martin and Miller 2005. 54 See above and Kippele 1998. 52

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These types are not necessarily correlated. Practical individuality, the fact that people have to act on their own instead of simply following tradition, points to situations of dis-embeddedness, due to temporary rupture of social bonds (as in the case of migrants, travellers, survivors) or to a sharp division of labour. This would frequently not be reflected, but could be prepared for by written or learnt instructions, for instance for post-mortal travelling. Moral individuality involves the ascription of responsibility to persons for their own behaviour, concepts of sin and punishment as well as law. Usually, for antiquity, the standards would be those of others and would include judgements about social obligations, often to the point of negating individuality. Specific duties rather than universal rights are stressed. Any juridical individuality in the sense of a declaration of human rights is far from being sought after. Thus, we have to look for details. An obligation of participation in rituals might already be indicative of such a moral individuality that transcends mere bans. Competitive individuality refers to the widespread aristocratic struggle for distinctiveness, which typically established aims towards which other social groups would orient themselves. Individual differences would be sharply noticed by contemporary observers, but evaluated against a discursively constructed common ethos that would stress the commonwealth. The concrete norms would be very much shaped and modified by actual competitive behaviour. Conflict is inherent. Representative individuality is clearly related to the two preceding types. Individuals may strive to become exemplary and those who succeed would be cited as examples. The aim is not individual difference, but perfection in fulfilling a social or religious role, whether as Roman general, Christian martyr, or male Jew, yet fulfilment is a personal feat. Finally, reflexive individuality would demand the formation of an individualistic discourse—an individualist ideology, so to speak. Again, such reflections on the self or the individual human nature, for example in the Stoic figure of oikeiosis, would be frequently informed by normative concepts of social roles, thus pointing to the type of representative individuality. All these types vary according to gender and to a person’s position in society. They will be found in the elite or on the margins in different forms and degrees. They interact. Rules on representative individuality,

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for example, could easily outlaw a more general understanding of what behaviour is acceptable and preferable in competitive individuality. Finally, the phenomena that give rise to processes of institutionalization are transitory. Here, religion is of special interest. The largest part of ancient evidence on religious action—that is, dedicatory inscriptions and votives—mostly comes from religious actions of single persons. At certain times certain temples were open for individual cultic and other use, and some groups recognized individual membership, thus enabling and stabilizing choices. How do these practices and institutions relate to individuation?

A HEURISTIC OF RELIGIOUS INDIVIDUATION In order to deal with the complexity of our problem, I propose to start from the process of individuation and the opportunities offered by religions for increasing individual difference and the space of action not defined by traditions, always keeping in mind that the individual acquisition of religion and the reproduction and reproductive changes of religion are mutually interdependent. This has to be set in the context of a society with a view to the changes within and beyond this society. The model to describe and analyse the processes I am proposing here is rather simple in its implicit equation of tradition and the status quo of that society. This is admittedly a defective but perhaps acceptable account of the basic stability of ancient societies. My model is presented in graphic form (Figure 1). I start at the centre, the individual member of an ancient society of the Hellenistic or Roman period. Above all I thought about the late Roman republic and the empire, but tried to keep the model generalizable. The person’s individuation is informed by different factors, gender above all, then economic and social factors, like legal status (freeborn or slave, freedman origin), wealth, space (town or countryside—most of our textual evidence comes from urban zones) and mobility, social status (like being a member of the local elite), and finally cultural factors like the name system, education or current practices of selfrepresentation. Of course, the (probably very variable) exposure to the phenomena of all the following areas is of importance for any specific religious individuation.

↔

reflection

action

EXTERNAL FACTORS - Hellenization/intellectualization - diffusion of symbol systems

healing images temple ↑

BEYOND SOCIETY

magic

↑

pilgrimage ← religious experience (auto) biography ↑ postmortal ← caring for existence the self ↓ self-concepts

divination (astrology) ↑ domestic religious ↑ communication with ritual space the divine ↑ ↑ privatization ↑

INSTITUTIONALISATION - writing - texts/canonization

←

IN SOCIETY

representational ↑ creating norms ↓ professional

person → individuation informed by gender, social and cultural factors creating choices

universalization

- empire - migration - welfare - juridical system - conscription, profession

employing rationality ↓ criticizing traditions

using choices ↓ gods

change/ resistance to change

→ gods → cults

fighting/ outlawing deviance

↓ groups

- schools - group formation

Diagram 1. Facets of religious individuation and potentials of individualization in ancient Mediterranean societies

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I have tried to divide the spectrum of religion-related activities into eight segments, sometimes easier, sometimes more difficult to separate. Roughly, the spectrum refers to social action on the right side and to reflection on the left side. This corresponds to more intense interaction in society and the problem of conflicts and even legal persecution by the society on the one hand, and a potentially universal space of communication on the other. Evidently, Greek, and to a lesser degree Latin, texts could be read throughout the Mediterranean basin by the literate echelons of Hellenistic and even more imperial society. It was a particular attraction of the type of rationality offered by Greek philosophy and rhetoric that it claimed universal validity beyond traditional hierarchies and social status.55 ‘Beyond society’, however, transcends the human realm as is indicated by direct communication with the divine outside of public rituals and the services of public priests.

I Using choices The rise of religious options in the form of gods, temples, and groups56 has been described as one of the major characteristics of the Hellenistic and imperial period, even to the extent of comparison with modern religious pluralism.57 This was primarily due to the mobility of merchants, administrators, soldiers, and slaves58—and of literature.59 For an urban centre like Rome the significant permanent immigration might imply the continuation of older traditions rather than the invention of new choices.60 Ramsay McMullen has pointed to the phenomenon of diaspora as an indicator of the traditional character of religious adherence. People stabilize their identity in a foreign social context by clinging to their old religions. At the same time, however, fast processes of acculturation are visible. 55

See Rüpke, Cultural change and rationality, forthcoming. The term ‘elective cults’, although attractive, has been introduced by Beard, North, and Price 1998 as complementary to the traditional patterns of civic religion, an association that I try to avoid. 57 An excellent summary: North 1994. For the notion of pluralism critically Rüpke 2010. 58 Briefly Rüpke 2007a. 59 Rüpke and Spickermann 2009; Spickermann 2009; Sterbenc-Erker 2009; Waldner 2009. 60 For immigration to Rome even in late antiquity see Purcell 1999; Noy 2000; for the religion of immigrants to Hellenistic Athens: Mikalson 1998; to Rome: Noy 2000. 56

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Immigrants find themselves attracted to the religious options of the new locality. Locals test the exotic offer of immigrated religions and both groups involved change their religious roles and practices within the second or third generations.61 A competence to select deities according to situational specifics is fundamental for the Mediterranean type of polytheism. How to address the proper deity is a frequent concern in questions posed to oracles. This does not entail lasting differences between people who venerated different deities in different situations. Only the proliferation of cults that generate religious groups popularized concepts of exclusivity. This ability of cults to create social bonds is a proliferating feature of imperial developments,62 but it has important Greek antecedents, if we think of Orphic or Bacchic groups. These groups have been neglected in the research informed by the concept of polis religion.63 This said, it must be stressed that the intense internal interaction of the communities thus created, the degree and range of exclusivity have been grossly overvalued. Here is much work to be done.

II Creating choices Within the framework of an additive polytheistic system that is open to extension64 the introduction of new gods and options of venerations into local temples (by setting up votives to gods not previously venerated) or ‘panthea’ (by introducing new cults into a locality) was frequent. It was frequently subject to individual whims meriting further research for Greek sanctuaries as well as republican Roman temples.65 Hence, there is no underlying logic to the growing number of gods present in a city. The most important set of religious symbols, the pantheon of gods, was a fortuitous result of different people’s individual decisions. Here again future research should pay more

61 See e.g. Steuernagel 2001, 2004; Rüpke 2006a; Ertel, Freyberger, and von Hesberg 2008. 62 North 2003; Kippenberg 2005; Bendlin 2005. 63 See e.g. Bremmer 2002; Graf and Johnston 2007; Bernabé 2008. 64 See Bendlin 1997. 65 See, for Rome, briefly Rüpke 1990, 260–2; Orlin 1997. It might be interesting to compare the extreme productivity of Christological metaphors to this process (see Wallraff 2003).

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attention to historical contingency than to the systematic or structuralist interpretation in particular implied in the notion of ‘polis religion’.

III Creating norms Donating a new sanctuary was a complex matter, not restricted to the establishment of a new god. Selection of place, choice of architectural detail, regulation of ritual (often hardly visible for us): all of this involved many decisions that would relate to existing traditions, interpret and—as benchmarks in a competitive society—create new norms. Henner von Hesberg has demonstrated such visible individual selections and consequences for the accessibility and usability for republican temple architecture.66 Normative statements in this sense could be made in the form of tomb monuments, too. The tomb of Eurysaces, the Roman baker and contractor, offers an example. Being situated close to an aqueduct, which was later transformed into a city gate, the site is even more exceptional today than in Augustan time. Striving for originality, the tomb is representative rather than exceptional in giving expression to a world view dominated by Eurysaces’ own professional experiences and horizon. The machinery and the working of his enterprise are prominent; the urn of his wife might have taken the form of a bread basket.67 In a number of such monuments and in a religious text like the ‘Shepherd of Hermas’ from the second century ce, which deals with problems of daily behaviour, economic activities, and familial responsibilities,68 it is everyday life that is given ultimate value. On a societal level, that did not successfully question the dominance of a rather aristocratic system of values, but it indicates an individual re-evaluation of everyday life that reminds us of the importance given by Charles Taylor to the valuing of everyday life in modern, in particular North American, civilization.69

66 67 68 69

von Hesberg 2005. Cf. von Hesberg 2002 for the basilica. Petersen 2003. Thus Rüpke 1999 and ch. 13, below. Taylor 1994, 14. I am grateful to Mathias Huff for the qualification.

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IV Privatization Privatization of religion is one of the central diagnoses of modernity,70 but there are striking findings for much earlier periods. For Hellenistic and Roman antiquity a view on domestic cult, which has seen in it a residual of traditional behaviour, has overlooked serious indicators of innovative de-traditionalization and privatized appropriation of traditions. Some domestic rituals seemed to be mimetic representations of public cult. For Christianity, Kim Bowes has shown the extent of such ritual practices in late antiquity and the conflicts with ecclesiastical institutions caused by them.71 Here, late antiquity is a good case for the complexity of developments. Indicators of growing individuality are contemporaneous with growing centralization and standardization. This discrepancy was producing clashes as the Priscillianist controversy or the ban on a wide range of private ritual practices in the Codex Theodosianus72 show. The establishment of private ritual space is part of that conflict, too.73 But we need not wait for late antiquity to observe this phenomenon. Spectacular sanctuaries could be part of the entrance area of an urban house or part of the large gardens of a suburban villa as has been shown for the Casa dei Vettii at Pompeii.74 The same holds true for the idyllic landscape on the banks of the Tiber that included a circular sanctuary for Hercules, right in the centre of Rome.75 But creation of private ritual space could be observed on a smaller scale even more frequently. The creation of a tomb established a sanctuary for the defunct’s relatives—and had to be defended against the use by others.

V Communication with the divine Personal communication with the gods was never restricted to public rituals or temples. Votives probably resulting from personal concerns are extant from the archaic period onwards.76 Forms and intensity, however, are changing and might be related to a growing concern about one’s family and oneself. The rise of the cult of Asclepios could

70 72 74 76

71 Luckmann 1967. Bowes 2005, 198; Bowes 2008. 73 Collected in CTh 9 and 16. Bowes 2005, 199. 75 Kastenmeier 2001. von Hesberg 2005. e.g. Bouma 1996.

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be such an indicator,77 as healing and the social topography of healing imply statements about the relationship between a person and society: ex-centric sanctuaries attract individuals who leave their social context to care for themselves.78 Aelius Aristides’ Hieroi Logoi are one of the most important testimonies of religious individuality from antiquity.79 Two other relevant forms of communication with the divine must be mentioned. Divination is the first. The imperial reinvigoration and proliferation of oracles80 is an interesting area of research for the individualization of institutions that address the needs of individuals rather than offering advice to polities. Astrology as a mass phenomenon of the personalization of temporal orders would offer further opportunities for knowing about oneself and legitimizing individual decisions.81 Astrology refers an individual to a universal natural order surpassing his or usual social and political boundaries. For late antiquity, theurgy offered another way of efficacious personal contact.82 The vast array of practices called ‘magic’ is the second area. Again individual concerns about health are important. The privatization is more visible in magic related to legal procedures. Here, employing magic was an attempt to counter results of law suits that were to be expected on the basis of social status. In the highly risky area of relationships of and with prostitutes the lack of traditional regulations is replaced by magic.83

VI Religious experience Despite the centrality of experience in the thinking about religion since the end of the eighteenth century, ‘experience’ has not been brought to bear on ancient religion outside Judaism and Christianity despite some recent book titles.84 The very subjectivity of ‘experience’

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Graf 1997, 96; more general: Gordon 1995. See McGuire 1988, 240–57; Rüpke 1995. 79 Behr 1968; Harris and Holmes 2008; Petsalis-Diomidis 2009. 80 Bendlin 2006; Belayche and Rüpke 2007; cf. Rosenberger 2001, Bowden 2005 for the classical period of Greece. 81 Rüpke 1995, 587–92; Rüpke 2006b, 182–7. 82 Janowitz 2002; Athanassiadi 1993. 83 Gordon 1987; Gordon 1999; Gordon 2009. 84 Bispham and Smith 2000; Cole 2004. “Emotionality” has gained more attention, but needs not be related to individuality: Linke 2003, 84. 78

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(pathos,85 unlike the ancient notion of experientia, that is, learning from practising) seems to conflict with the dearth of ancient sources. However, recent analyses of the phenomena have produced a concept of experience that takes into account the connection between personal experience and communicated meaning and opens a perspective for a historical use of the concept: ‘Personal, lived experience in its qualitative-emotional dimension remains dumb and has no power to transform behaviour as long as it is not articulated symbolically and . . . any system of convictions and practices, that from the first-person-point of view is no longer seen as expressive for qualitative experience, becomes increasingly obsolete.’86 Experience, thus, could stress the observer and user of images, sacred space, and movement towards and in sacred space, that is, pilgrimage.87 The latter established a tradition to temporarily drop out of society, of privatization.88 For the use of images I would like to point to the presentation of cult images in temples. Certain arrangements point to a stress on a lively and overwhelming appearance in a rather intimate space89 in Hellenistic Italy. For the imperial period and perhaps already in Augustan times Heron of Alexandria describes a wide range of instruments and mechanisms to create emotionally intensive and surprising confrontation with the image. A bend in the access route, mirrors, or the opening of doors offers sudden visibility of the statue.90 Architectural arrangements could serve the same purpose. Spectacular encounters seem to be intended in the arrangements exemplified by the ground plan and furnishing of the so-called sanctuary of Syrian deities on the slopes of the Janiculum at Rome,91 but they are not restricted to ‘exotic’ deities. Regular temples, too, might secure overwhelming encounters, for instance, on confronting an oversized image in a rather small temple. The Roman temple of Fortuna Huiusce Diei must have produced such

85

Troles Engberg-Pedersen presented on the Boston SBL conference in 2008 an attempt to define and identify religious experiences in ancient texts by this term. 86 Jung 2006, 21; see also Jung 2004 and Schlette, Jung 2005, in particular Jung 2005. 87 For the latter see, e.g. Petsalis-Diomidis 2006. 88 See Hunt 1984; Büttner et al. 1985; Dunand 1997. 89 von Hesberg 2007, 454–6. 90 I am grateful to Mihaela Holban, Erfurt, for the reference. 91 Goodhue 1975; see also Scheid 1995.

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an experience. In their treatises on ‘superstition’, Seneca and Plutarch found some of their most striking examples for religious folly, as they classify it, in central city temples.

VII Caring for the self Caring for the self, le souci de soi, is of course a classical topos of individuation and individuality. Religion is central, but is subject to historical developments. I agree with Guy Stroumsa that ‘identity, which in the Hellenistic world had been defined . . . in cultural and linguistic terms, became essentially religious in the Roman empire.’92 Where are concepts of the self developed? Autobiography and—as far as it is displaying interest in other persons as potential role models or references for self-reflection93—biography might entirely replace the need for explicit concepts of the self by simply offering a coherent narrative.94 Conversion narratives and accounts of sin and purification are narrative or interpretive contexts that produce explicit reflections.95 Interest in oneself could take the form of interest in one’s postmortal fate. That might take the form of speculations on a post-mortal continuation of the soul and its divinization.96 However, neither do concepts of the self in the form of one (or occasionally two97) soul(s) need the notion of a continuing existence,98 nor is care for the postmortal phase bound to the notion of the soul. In many cases, stress is laid on the continuing social presence, on memoria, ensured, however, by one’s family (in the larger sense of household rather than kinship) or professional colleagues. Here, again, developments and regional differences might be interesting. The specific Roman emphasis on a familial context, visible in so many inscriptions, is not matched everywhere.99 92

93 Stroumsa 2005, 184. See ch. 12. e.g. McGing and Mossman 2006; see Momigliano 1987 pleading for biographical approaches to ancient religion. 95 See Assmann and Stroumsa 1999. 96 e.g. Brenk 1998, 180–1. For Greece, see Vernant 1996. 97 Stroumsa 1999, 282–91 on Manichean soul concepts influenced by Iranian traditions. 98 See above, p. 5 and 8. 99 von Hesberg 2005a. The temporary domestic presence of mummies in Roman Egypt would be an interesting case for comparison (see Wortley 2006). I am grateful to Françoise Dunand for further information. 94

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VIII Employing rationality The spread of rational argumentation that I have tried to map in detail for the late Roman republic100 could be used as a resource of de-traditionalization by anybody. Rhetoric was a learnable technique (and as such opposed by the Roman elite even at the beginning of the first century bc) and (differing from philosophy) intended for performance.101 It was useful for universalizing one’s argumentation beyond the traditional problems of a local society. At the same time it continued to clash with established hierarchies and authorities and found its place in the law courts rather than in the bodies of political decision-making. Like many other phenomena, such a development is not irreversible. Undeniably, there is an anti-intellectual current in fourth-century Christian thinkers.102 The clash of rationality and spirituality is not an invention of postmodernity.

OVERVIEW OF THIS VOLUME The terminology and model presented do not offer a theory of individualization or a chart-flow diagram for historical phases of individualization. Rather, I have tried to identify important areas of intensification of individual differences and individuality as being developed within the necessary process of individuation of every person. It is a map of areas of research and the parallel use of different diverse parameters which could help to historicize the notion of individuality.103 Research that follows processes and institutions of individuation will help to better understand the complexity and dynamics of the ancient history of religion in the Hellenistic and Roman period. The authors of this volume address the problem of religious individuation from very different methodological angles and in different ways. They critically discuss the terms presented so far, but they share the basic definitions, thus enabling comparison and mutual exchange

100

101 102 Rüpke 2012. Trapp 2007, 235. Stroumsa 2005, 191. I am grateful for the discussion with Paul Lichterman (Los Angeles), fellow of the research group in 2009, and his insistence on separating the conglomeration of notions tied to religious individualization and religion in modernity. 103

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of evidence. The first group of chapters address historical developments. They point to complex developments and are reluctant to claim to identify stable processes of ‘individualization’. In chapter 2 Corinne Bonnet does not put individualization at the centre. Her focus is on intercultural exchange as a further dimension of cultural practices. Fluidity and individual agency are added as important concepts. The chapter sharply criticizes any arguments on the basis of individual ‘needs’. The case study of Sidon, hence, is embedded in general considerations. Sceptical as to the claims about long-term changes in individualization, Bonnet in her conclusion stresses that religious acting in the complex ‘middle ground’ of bicultural social networks is neither to be confused with individuality nor disproves it. In chapter 3 John North explores the mechanism of open, publicly induced religious change in the Roman republic and the evidence for individually instigated religious change during the empire. Evidence for the latter is rather anecdotal. Apparent changes over time—clearly visible by the fourth century—are often due to the change of types of evidence of the religious practices thus attested. Methodologically the chapter claims the priority of social identity over self-awareness within any notion of religious individuality. Unlike John North, Clifford Ando in chapter 4 explicitly discusses models of religious change during the empire. He interprets the change of evidence, namely the disappearance of honorific and votive inscriptions addressing a local reality, as a consequence of structural changes. The chapter adds a new dimension to the historical notion of individualization. The superposition of empire questions the ability of local power, communication, and cults to religiously ‘emplace’ the world. Politically and legally atomized individuals are the driving force for massive religious change. The following sequence of chapters inquires into the problems of methodologically distinguishing between individual and society in discussing agency. In chapter 5 Fritz Graf presents the cases of Xenophon and Archedamos of Thera around the turn of the fifth to the fourth century bc in order to investigate the limits imposed by shared traditions, laws, and media on individual choices in establishing cults. Greg Woolf takes up the notions of religious individuation as a biographical process of acquiring religious roles and experiences in chapter 6. Roman religion was no abstract system, but action carefully drafted on tradition in an always changing present, and on the action

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of competent actors. Inscriptional protocols of rituals and highly individualized historiographical narratives offer ample evidence. The growth in complexity of Mediterranean societies from the third century bc to the second century ad furthers individualization in so far as individualization aimed at relational, sociocentric persons rather than autonomous selves. Evidence about ritual performance hardly ever allows an insight into the actors’ competences and reflexions. In chapter 7 Richard Gordon tries to come closer to this by meticulously analysing the multiplicity of illocutions and authorial voices in the late Egyptian texts called magical papyri. The implied reader is left with decisions, reflections, dealing with failures to a degree that suggests one speaks of religious individualization at the time of composition, and reedition and use in the third to fourth centuries ad. Yet the implied reader died with the dumping of the library. Individual experience and space for individual behaviour admitted or taken in rituals lie at the heart of chapter 8 by Johan Leemans. His examples from the fourth century Cappadocian cult of the martyrs do not offer a basis to hypothesize on long-term developments, but they attest to circumstances and a period that could be described as of ‘modest individualization’. The two following chapters directly address individual religious experience. In chapter 9 Katharina Waldner surveys mystery cults and ancient descriptions of mystery cults from the hymn to Demeter down to Middle and Neo-Platonism. She points out how philosophers employ mysteries to talk about individual experience. Mysteries are a regular feature of ancient religions; they furthered, one might say, a sustainable individuation even beyond death. Within a city they offered space for competitive individuality. In chapter 10, written by Nicole Belayche, the focus remains on Asia Minor and on the interaction between individual and collective religious experiences and expressions of such experiences. In the analysis of a corpus of Greek votive inscriptions with a wealth of combinations of divine concepts and names, the perspective of individual experience and agency offers new insights and adduces further evidence for a ‘dossier’ of individualized religious practice. ‘Agency’ might serve as a headline for the following couple of chapters. They all deal with texts which reflect on the possibilities of the authorial figure or the reader to act. The application of the terminology of individual allows for the description of the often

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paradoxical determination of such agency: individuality finds its apex in the voluntary loss of individuality, in social self-debasement, in giving in to the ‘god’s’ will. In chapter 11 Ian Henderson analyses the gospel of Mark which deliberately subdues banal individuality by attributing ‘flat personalities’ to the people narrated. Henderson employs the polar notion of self and social persona to analyse such phenomena. His special emphasis, however, is on individuation. Mark is talking about such a process when Jesus is dealing with his identification as ‘the Son of Man’: Jesus’ reflections lead to an exemplary individuality which could be emulated by his readers, leaders-to-be. Henderson does not deny the ‘modernity’ and even novelty of some of Mark’s notions and literary devices, but is insistent on not incorporating this into some ‘long narrative’ as the history of receptions demonstrates the dominance of alternative readings of the text. Tessa Rajak deals with the first-century Jewish authors Philo and Josephus in chapter 12. Her focus is on the development of a selfreflective individuality in interpreting and writing about Scripture, thus adding the notion of an authorial individuality to the typology proposed above. Of course, this type remains an elite type of individuality and presupposes institutional components of any individuation into a religious book culture. Chapter 13 by Jörg Rüpke follows the same line of investigation, focusing on a slightly later author, the author of the ‘Shepherd of Hermas’. Fighting with the blurring (more precise: making) of boundaries, ‘Hermas’ offers a specific religious individuation, an individuation in the confrontation with God, as a strategy to establish differences with regard to other persons or activities. The insertion of autobiographical elements into the text might serve this strategy. Karen King’s chapter 14 reviews the terminology in the light of claims made regarding the position of Christianity within a history of individualization. Analytically she concentrates on the concept of agency for the analysis of ancient martyrological texts. These texts served to provide examples and training to remain faithful in the decisive moment of death. Two premises are particularly important. Agency is first of all a characteristic of situation: the possibilities to act are defined by, for example, legal institutions. Nevertheless, these settings leave room or, better, entail the necessity of individual appropriation. Second, for the Christians, this agency is instrumental;

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the ultimate agent is God. As King points out, such a double concept of agency entails important consequences for the larger historical developments, as a divide between a separate religious order and the hegemonic order in society opens. The following two chapters focus on religious traditions characterized by the importance of a master–disciple relationship. In chapter 15 Giulia Sfameni Gasparro enlarges the field of inquiry by addressing another corpus of texts, Hermetic literature. The dialogical nature of the texts could be read as individually addressing a reader and thus offering her or him a model for religious individuation. In the detailed analysis of the text, however, Sfameni Gasparro is able to distinguish three very different dialogical practices. These are monological teaching in disguise, a didactic interaction, and finally an initiatory process that may spiritually advance in detail. Historically, as the chapter concludes, the evidence remains inconclusive as to whether there were organized groups institutionalizing such individual practices. In chapter 16 Giovanni Filoramo traces comparable phenomena in Gnostic literature. Given the negative view of the present world and corporality, individuation is negatively defined in a twofold manner, namely, it neither aims at socialization with present society nor at any substance of the self. Instead, literary guidance is offered to attain the divine beyond. In its literary form, an institutionalized practice— Filoramo speaks of habitus—is visible, whereas the underlying religious experiences remain beyond our reach. The two final chapters transgress the empirical person in two important directions. In chapter 17 Aldo Setaioli offers clarification on a topos of reflexive individuality, longing for immortality, and a stark contrast to the Gnostic position. The analysis of philosophical as well as consolatory texts by Cicero and Seneca reaches similar conclusions for both authors: nice to have for the wise, but unprovable and hence ethically irrelevant. In the final chapter 18 Charlotte Fonrobert turns to a process that offers clear evidence for de-individualization. In analysing second and third century Mishna, Fonrobert demonstrates these texts to be instruments in constructing a sort of collective individual that is able to replace the loss of a locative identity after the destruction of the temple of Jerusalem in 70 ce. And yet, precise reading of the texts offers evidence for the intensive drawing on concepts of individuality and the individual body. *

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Setaioli’s final result for Seneca, the recommendation to contemplate this universe’s order, makes an important point regarding the relationship of individuation and socialization as developed before. In hegemonic discourse, individuality is understood not as deviance from but conformity with, and perfection of, an order that is both societal and natural. It is, as Karen King points out, the discordance of the divine as fundamental order and the (merely) mundane order that entails the largest potential for conflict. And yet, as the following chapters show, historical dynamic is not confined to open conflict. Even if ideals agree, these very ideals open up large spaces of individual agency and appropriation. Here, the volume provides a starting point for mapping more precise areas of investigation into and refinement of the notion of individualization.

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Bouma, Jelle W. 1996. Religio Votiva: The Archaeology of Latial Votive Religion; the 5th—3rd c. bc votive deposit south west of the main temple at ‘Satricum’ Borgo Le Ferriere. Drachten: Donkel & Donkel. Bowden, Hugh 2005. Classical Athens and the Delphic Oracle: Divination and Democracy. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Bowes, Kim 2005. ‘Personal Devotions and Private Chapels’, in Burrus, Virginia (ed.), A People’s History of Christianity, vol. 2: Late Ancient Christianity. Minneapolis, MN: Fortress, 188–210. —— 2008. Private Worship, Public Values, and Religious Change in Late Antiquity. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Bowman, Alan K. (ed.) 1996. Literacy and Power in the Ancient World. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Brelich, Angelo 1969. Paides e parthenoi. Rome: Ed. dell’Ateneo. Bremen, Riet van 1996. The Limits of Participation: Women and Civic Life in the Greek East in the Hellenistic and Roman Periods. Dutch monographs on ancient history and archaeology 15. Amsterdam: Gieben. Bremmer, Jan 1983. The Early Greek Concept of the Soul. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. —— 2002. The Rise and Fall of the Afterlife: the 1995 Read-Tuckwell lectures at the University of Bristol. London: Routledge. Brenk, Frederick E. 1998. Relighting the Souls: Studies in Plutarch, in Greek Literature, Religion, and Philosophy, and in the New Testament Background. Stuttgart: Steiner. Bricault, Laurent 2005. Recueil des inscriptions concernant les cultes isiaques (RICIS). Mémoires de l’Académie des Inscriptions et Belles-Lettres 31. Paris: de Boccard. —— 2008. Sylloge Nummorum Religionis Isiacae et Sarapiacae (SNRIS). Paris: Boccard. Bruit Zaidman, Louise, and Schmitt Pantel, Pauline 1992. Religion in the Ancient Greek City (trans. Cartledge, Paul). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Burkert, Walter 2011. Griechische Religion der archaischen und klassischen Epoche. Die Religionen der Menschheit 15. Stuttgart: Kohlhammer. Büttner, M. et al. (eds) 1985. Grundfragen der Religionsgeographie: Mit Fallstudien zum Pilgertourismus. Berlin: Reimer. Cancik, Hubert 2002. ‘ “Dignity of Man” and “Persona” in Stoic Anthropology: Some Remarks on Cicero, De Officiis I 105–107’, in Kretzmer, David, and Klein, Eckart (eds), The Concept of Human Dignity in Human Rights Discourse. The Hague: Kluwer Law International. Cancik, Hubert, and Rüpke, Jörg (eds) 2009. Die Religion des Imperium Romanum: Koine und Konfrontationen. Unter Mitarbeit von Franca Fabricius und Diana Püschel. Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck.

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Casadio, Giovanni, and Johnston, Patricia A. (eds) 2009. Mystic Cults in Magna Graecia. Austin: University of Texas Press. Cole, Susan Guettel 2004. Landscapes, Gender, and Ritual Space: the Ancient Greek Experience. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Cumont, Franz Valery Marie 2006. Les religions orientales dans le paganisme romain, ed. Bonnet, Corinne. Bibliotheca Cumontiana: Scripta maiora 1. Turin: Aragno. Derks, Ton 1998. Gods, Temples and Ritual Practices: The Transformation of Religious Ideas and Values in Roman Gaul. Amsterdam: Archaeological Studies. Dillon, John M. 2009. ‘Philo of Alexandria and Platonist Psychology’, in Elkaisy-Friemuth, Martha, and Dillon, John M. (eds), The Afterlife of the Platonic Soul: Reflections of Platonic Psychology in the Monotheistic Religions. Studies in Platonism, Neoplatonism, and the Platonic Tradition 9. Leiden: Brill, 17–24. Dondin-Payre, Monique, and Raepsaet-Charlier, Marie-Thérèse (eds) 2006. Sanctuaires, Pratiques Cultuelles et Territoires Civiques dans l’Occident Romain. Bruxelles: Timperman. Dumont, Louis 1986. Essays on Individualism: Modern Ideology in Anthropological Perspective. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Dunand, Francoise 1997. ‘Lieu sacré païen et lieu sacré chrétien: autour des pèlerinages’, in Boespflug, F. and Dunand, F. (eds), Le comparatisme en histoire des religions: Actes du Colloque international de Strasbourg (18–20 septembre 1996). Paris: Cerf, 239–58. Eckstein, Arthur M. 2008. Rome enters the Greek East: from Anarchy to Hierarchy in the Hellenistic Mediterranean, 230–170 bc. Malden, MA: Blackwell. Ertel, Christine, Freyberger, Klaus Stefan and Hesberg, Henner von 2008. ‘Das Theater und die Kultbezirke des römischen Byblos’, ZOrA 1, 5–8, 90–153. Eyben, Emiel 1993. Restless Youth in Ancient Rome. London: Routledge. Faraone, Christopher A. 1999. Ancient Greek Love Magic. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. —— and Obbink, Dirk (eds) 1991. Magika Hiera: Ancient Greek Magic and Religion. New York: Oxford University Press. Forbis, Elizabeth 1996. Municipal Virtues in the Roman Empire: The Evidence of Italian Honorary Inscriptions. Stuttgart: Teubner. Fuhrmann, Manfred 1989. ‘Person I. Von der Antike bis zum Mittelalter’, in Ritter, Joachim, and Gründer, Karlfried, Historisches Wörterbuch der Philosophie, vol. 7. Basel: Schwabe, 269–83. Goodhue, Nicholas 1975. The Lucus Furrinae and the Syrian Sanctuary on the Janiculum. Amsterdam: Hakkert. Gordon, Richard 1987, ‘Aelian’s Peony: The Location of Magic in GraecoRoman Tradition’, Comparative Criticism, 59–95.

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Gordon, Richard 1995. ‘The healing event in Graeco-Roman folk-medicine’, in Eijk, Philip J. van der (ed.), Ancient Medicine in its Socio-Cultural Context: Papers read at the Congress held at Leiden University, 13–15 April 1992. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 363–76. —— 1999. ‘Imagining Greek and Roman Magic’, in Ankarloo, Bengt, and Clark, Stuart (eds), Witchcraft and Magic in Europe, vol. 2: Ancient Greece and Rome. London: Athlone Press, 159–275. —— 2009. ‘Magic as a topos in Augustan Poetry: Discourse, Reality and Distance’, Archiv für Religionsgeschichte 11, 209–28. Graf, Fritz 1996. Gottesnähe und Schadenzauber: Die Magie in der griechischrömischen Antike. Munich: Beck. —— 1997. ‘Asklepios I. Religion’, Neuer Pauly 2, 94–9. —— and Johnston, Sarah Iles 2007. Ritual Texts for the Afterlife: Orpheus and the Bacchic Gold Tablets. London: Routledge. Harris, William V. 1989. Ancient Literacy. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. —— and Holmes, Brooke (eds) 2008. Aelius Aristides between Greece, Rome, and the Gods. Columbia Studies in the Classical Tradition 33. Leiden: Brill. Häussler, Ralph 2008. Review of Dondin-Payre, Monique and RaepsaetCharlier, Marie-Thérèse (eds), Sanctuaires, Pratiques Cultuelles et Territoires Civiques dans l’Occident Romain (2006), Bonner Jahrbücher 206, 381–4. Hesberg, Henner von 2002. ‘Die Basilika von Ephesos: Die kulturelle Kompetenz der neuen Stifter’, in Berns, Christof (ed.), Patris und Imperium: kulturelle und politische Identität in den Städten in der römischen Provinzen Kleinasiens in der frühen Kaiserzeit: Kolloquium Köln, November 1998. Leuven: Peeters, 149–58. —— 2005. Römische Baukunst. Munich: Beck. —— 2007. ‘Die Statuengruppe im Tempel der Dioskuren von Cori: Bemerkungen zum Aufstellungskontext von Kultbildern in spätrepublikanischer Zeit’, Mitteilungen des Deutschen Archäologischen Instituts, Römische Abteilung 113, 443–61. Hezser, Catherine 2001. Jewish Literacy in Roman Palestine. Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck. Hobsbawm, Eric J. 1983. The Invention of Tradition. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Hunt, E. D. 1984. ‘Travel, Tourism and Piety in the Roman Empire: A Context for the Beginning of Christian Pilgrimage’, Echos du Monde Classique 28, 391–417. Janowitz, Naomi 2002. Icons of Power: Ritual Practices in Late Antiquity. University Park, PA: Penn State University Press. Johnson, William Allen (ed.) 2009. Ancient Literacies: The Culture of Reading in Greece and Rome. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

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Jung, Matthias 2004. ‘Qualitative Erfahrung in Alltag, Kunst und Religion’, in Mattenklott, Gert (ed.), Ästhetische Erfahrung im Zeichen der Entgrenzung der Künste. Epistemische, ästhetische und religiöse Erfahrungsformen im Vergleich. Hamburg: Meiner, 31–53. —— 2005. ‘Making us Explicit’—Artikulation als Organisationsprinzip von Erfahrung’, in Schlette, Magnus, and Jung, Matthias (eds), Anthropologie der Artikulation. Würzburg: Königshausen & Neumann, 103–42. —— 2006. ‘Making life explicit—The Symbolic Pregnance of Religious Experience’, Svensk Teologisk Kvartalskrift 82, 16–23. Kastenmeier, Pia 2001. ‘Priap zum Gruße: Der Hauseingang der Casa dei Vettii in Pompeji’, Mitteilungen des Deutschen Archäologischen Instituts, Römische Abteilung 108, 301–11. Kippele, Flavia 1998. Was heißt Individualisierung?: Die Antworten soziologischer Klassiker. Opladen: Westdeutscher Verlag. Kippenberg, Hans G. 2005. ‘Nach dem Vorbild eines öffentlichen Gemeinwesens: Diskurse römischer Juristen über private religiöse Vereinigungen’, in Kippenberg, Hans, and Schuppert, Gunnar (eds), Die verrechtlichte Religion: der Öffentlichkeitsstatus von Religionsgemeinschaften. Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 37–63. Krauter, Stefan 2004. Bürgerrecht und Kultteilnahme: politische und kultische Rechte und Pflichten in griechischen Poleis, Rom und antikem Judentum. Berlin: de Gruyter. Kobusch, Theo 1976. Studien zur Philosophie des Hierokles von Alexandrien: Untersuchungen zum christlichen Neuplatonismus. Munich: Berchmans. —— 1993. Die Entdeckung der Person: Metaphysik der Freiheit und modernes Menschenbild. Freiburg i. B.: Herder. Leeuw, Gerardus van der 1939. Virginibus puerisque: A Study on the Service of Children in Worship. Amsterdam: Noord-Hollandsche uitgevers maatschappij. Lendon, Jon E. 1997. Empire of Honour: The Art of Government in the Roman World. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Linke, Detlef B. 2003. Religion als Risiko: Geist, Glaube und Gehirn. Reinbek bei Hamburg: Rowohlt-Taschenbuch-Verlag. Luckmann, Thomas 1967. The Invisible Religion. New York: Macmillan. Markus, R. A. 1990. The End of Ancient Christianity. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Martin, Dale B. and Miller, Patricia Cox 2005. The Cultural Turn in Late Ancient Studies: Gender, Asceticism, and Historiography. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Martin, Jochen and Nitzschke, August 1986. Zur Sozialgeschichte der Kindheit. Freiburg i. B.: Alber.

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McGing, Brian C. and Mossman, Judith 2006. The Limits of Ancient Biography. Swansea: Classical Press of Wales. McGuire, M. B. with the assistance of Debra Kantor. 1988. Ritual Healing in Suburban America. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press. Mikalson, Jon D. 1998. Religion in Hellenistic Athens. Berkeley: University of California Press. Mitchell, Stephen 1993. Anatolia: Land, Men, and Gods in Asia Minor, vol. I: The Celts and the Impact of Roman Rule; vol. II: The Rise of the Church. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Momigliano, Arnaldo 1987. Ancient Biography and the Study of Religion in the Roman Empire. Paris: EHESS. Mora, Fabio 1981. ‘I ‘silenzi erodotei’’, Studi storico religiosi 5, 209–22. —— 1990a. Prosopografia Isiaca 1: Corpus prosopographicum religionis Isiacae. EPRO 113. Leiden: Brill. —— 1990b. Prosopografia Isiaca 2: Prosopografia storica e statistica del culto Isiaco. EPRO 113. Leiden: Brill. North, John 1994. ‘The Development of Religious Pluralism’, in Lieu, Judith, North, John, and Rajak, Tessa (eds), The Jews among Pagans and Christians in the Roman Empire. London: Routledge, 174–93. —— 2003. ‘Réflexions autour des communautés religieuses du monde gréco-romain’, in Belayche, Nicole, and Mimouni, Simon C. (eds), Les communautés religieuses dans le monde gréco-romain: Essais de définition. Turnhout: Brepols, 337–47. Noy, David 2000. Foreigners at Rome: citizens and strangers. London: Duckworth. Orlin, E. M. 1997. Temples, Religion and Politics in the Roman Republic. Leiden: Brill. Parker, Robert 1996. Athenian Religion: A History. Oxford: Clarendon Press. —— et al. 2004. ‘Dedications’, in Boardman, John (ed.), Thesaurus Cultus et Rituum Antiquorum, vol. I: Processions, Sacrifices, Libation, Fumigations, Dedications. Los Angeles: Getty Museum, 269–450. Petersen, Lauren Hackworth 2003. ‘The Baker, His Tomb, His Wife, and Her Breadbasket: The Monument of Eurysaces in Rome’, Art Bulletin 85.2, 230–57. Petsalis-Diomidis, Alexia 2006. ‘Sacred Writing, Sacred Reading: The Function of Aelius Aristides’ Self-Presentation as Author in the Sacred Tales’, in McGing, B., and Mossman, J. (eds), The Limits of Ancient Biography. Swansea: Classical Press of Wales, 193–211. —— 2009. Truly Beyond Wonders: Aelius Aristides and the Cult of Asklepios, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Polignac, François de 1995a. Cults, Territory, and the Origins of the Greek City-State. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

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—— 1995b. ‘Repenser la “cité”? Rituels et société en Grèce archaïque’, in Hansen, Mogens Hermann, and Raaflaub, Kurt (eds), Studies in the Ancient Greek Polis. Stuttgart: Steiner: 7–19. Purcell, Nicholas 1999. ‘The Populace of Rome in Late Antiquity: Problems of Classification and Historical Description’, in Harris, W. V. (ed.), The Transformations Of Urbs Roma In Late Antiquity. Journal of Roman Archaeology supplement 33, 135–61. Rilinger, Rolf 1991. ‘Ordo und dignitas als soziale Kategorien der römischen Republik’, in Hettling, Manfred (ed.), Was ist Gesellschaftsgeschichte? Positionen, Themen, Analysen. Munich: Beck, 81–90. Rosenberger, Veit 2001. Griechische Orakel: eine Kulturgeschichte. Stuttgart: Theiss. Rüpke, Jörg 1990. Domi militiae: Die religiöse Konstruktion des Krieges in Rom. Stuttgart: Steiner. —— 1995. Kalender und Öffentlichkeit: Die Geschichte der Repräsentation und religiösen Qualifikation von Zeit in Rom. Berlin: de Gruyter. —— 1999. ‘Apokalyptische Salzberge: Zum sozialen Ort und zur literarischen Strategie des “Hirten des Hermas” ’, Archiv für Religionsgeschichte 1, 148–60. —— 2006a. ‘Integrationsgeschichten: Gruppenreligionen in Rom’, in Rüpke, Jörg (ed.), Gruppenreligionen im römischen Reich: Sozialformen, Grenzziehungen und Leistungen. Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 113–26. —— 2006b. Zeit und Fest: Eine Kulturgeschichte des Kalenders. Munich: Beck. —— 2007a. ‘Medien und Verbreitungswege von Religion im römischen Reich: Thematische Einführung’, Mediterranea 4 (2008), 27–32. —— 2007b. Religion of the Romans, ed. and trans. Richard Gordon. Cambridge: Polity Press. —— 2009. ‘Early Christianity out of, and in, Context’: review of Mitchell, M. M. and Young, F. M. (eds), The Cambridge History of Christianity, vol. 1: Origins to Constantine (2006) and Casiday, A. and Norris, F. W., The Cambridge History of Christianity, vol. 2: Constantine to c.600 (2007), Journal of Roman Studies 99, 182–93. —— 2010. ‘Religious Pluralism and the Roman Empire’, in Barchiesi, Alessandro, and Scheidel, Walter (eds), The Oxford Handbook of Roman Studies. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 748–66. —— 2011. ‘Reichsreligion? Überlegungen zur Religionsgeschichte des antiken Mittelmeerraums in römischer Zeit’, Historische Zeitschrift 292, 297–322. —— 2012. Rationalization and Religious Change in Republican Rome. Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press. Rüpke, Jörg, and Spickermann, Wolfgang 2009.‘Religion and Literature’, Archiv für Religionsgeschichte 11, 121–2.

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Scheid, John 1995. ‘Le  de Gaionas: Observations sur une plaque inscrite du sanctuaire des dieux syriens à Rome’, Mefra 107, 301–14. Scheidel, Walter 2001. Debating Roman Demography. Leiden: Brill. Schultz, Celia E. 2006. Women’s Religious Activity in the Roman Republic. Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press. Schlette, Magnus, and Jung, Matthias (eds) 2005. Anthropologie der Artikulation : begriffliche Grundlagen und transdisziplinäre Perspektiven. Würzburg: Königshausen & Neumann. Schwertheim, Elmar 1974. Die Denkmäler orientalischer Gottheiten im römischen Deutschland: Mit Ausnahme der ägyptischen Gottheiten. EPRO 40. Leiden: Brill. Setaioli, Aldo 2007. ‘Seneca and the Divine: Stoic Tradition and Personal Developments’, International Journal of the Classical Tradition 13.3, 333–68. Sfameni Gasparro, Giulia 1985. Soteriology and Mystic Aspects in the Cult of Cybele and Attis. Leiden: Brill. —— 2007. ‘¨¯¨  ˙: Aspetti del culto di Asclepio dell’eta ellenistica alla tarda antichita’, in Brandenburg, Hugo, Heid, Stefan, and Markschies, Christoph (eds), Salute e guarigione nella tarda antichità: atti della giornata tematica dei Seminari di Archeologia Cristiana, Roma, 20 maggio 2004. Sussidi allo studio delle antichità cristiane 19. Vatian City: Pontificio Istituto di Archeologia Cristiana, 245–71. Smith, Jonathan Z. 1990. Drudgery Divine: On the Comparison of Early Christianities and the Religions of Late Antiquity. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Spickermann, Wolfgang 1997. ‘Aspekte einer “neuen” regionalen Religion und der Prozeß der “interpretatio” im römischen Germanien, Rätien und Noricum’, in Cancik, Hubert and Rüpke, Jörg (eds), Römische Reichsreligion und Provinzialreligion. Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 145–67. ——2003. Germania Superior: Religionsgeschichte des römischen Germanien 1. Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck. —— 2008. Germania Inferior: Religionsgeschichte des römischen Germanien 2. Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck. —— 2009. ‘Lukian von Samosata und die fremden Götter’, Archiv für Religionsgeschichte 11, 229–61. Spiro, Melford E. 1993. ‘Is the Western Conception of the Self “Peculiar” within the Context of the World Cultures?’, Ethos 21, 107–53. Steuernagel, Dirk 2001. ‘Kult und Community: Über Sacella in den Insulae von Ostia’, JdI 108, 41–56. ——2004. Kult und Alltag in römischen Hafenstädten: soziale Prozesse in archäologischer Perspektive. PAwB 11. Stuttgart: Steiner. Sterbenc-Erker, Darja 2009. ‘Das Lupercalia-Fest im augusteischen Rom: Performativität, Raum und Zeit’, Archiv für Religionsgeschichte 11, 145–78.

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Stroumsa, Guy G. 1999. Barbarian Philosophy: The Religious Revolution of Early Christianity. Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck. —— 2005. ‘From Master of Wisdom to Spiritual Master in Late Antiquity’, in Brakke, David, Satlow, Michael L., and Weitzman, Steven (eds) 2005. Religion and the Self in Antiquity. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 183–96. —— 2008. ‘The End of Sacrifice: Religious Mutations of Late Antiquity’, in Weg, M. Misset-van de (ed.), Empsuchoi Logoi: Festschrift Pieter van der Horst. Leiden: Brill, 29–46. Stuckrad, Kocku von 2000. Das Ringen um die Astrologie: Jüdische und christliche Beiträge zum antiken Zeitverständnis. Religionsgeschichtliche Versuche und Vorarbeiten 49. Berlin: de Gruyter. Taylor, Charles 1994. Quellen des Selbst: Die Entstehung der neuzeitlichen Individualität, trans. Schulte, Joachim. Frankfurt/M.: Suhrkamp. Trapp, Michael 2007. Philosophy in the Roman Empire: Ethics, Politics and Society. London: Ashgate. Turcan, Robert 1996. The Cults of the Roman Empire, trans. Nevill, Antonia. Oxford: Blackwell. Van Andringa, William 2009. Quotidien des dieux et des hommes: la vie religieuse dans les cités du Vésuve à l’époque romaine. BEFRAR 337. Rome: Ecole française. van Kooten, George H. 2009. ‘St Paul on Soul, Spirit and the Inner Man’, in Elkaisy-Friemuth, Martha and Dillon, John M. (eds), The Afterlife of the Platonic Soul: Reflections of Platonic Psychology in the Monotheistic Religions. Studies in Platonism, Neoplatonism, and the Platonic Tradition 9. Leiden: Brill, 25–44. van Straten, F. T. 1981. ‘Gifts for the Gods’, in Versnel, Hendrik S. (ed.), Faith, Hope and Worship: Aspects of Religious Mentality in the Ancient World. Leiden: Brill, 65–151. Vernant, Jean-Pierre 1996. L’ individu, la mort, l’amour: soi-même et l’autre en Grèce ancienne. Paris: Gallimard. Versnel, Hendrik S. 1990. Inconsistencies in Greek and Roman Religion, vol. 1: Ter Unus. Isis, Dionysos, Hermes: Three Studies in Henotheism. Studies in Greek and Roman Religion 6. Leiden: Brill. —— 2011. Coping with the Gods: Wayward Readings in Greek Theology. Religions in the Graeco-Roman World 173. Leiden: Brill. Wallraff, Martin 2003. ‘Viele Metaphern—viele Götter? Beobachtungen zum Monotheismus in der Spätantike’, in Frey, Jörg (ed.), Metaphorik und Christologie. Berlin: de Gruyter, 151–66. —— 2007. Religionsgeschichte der Spätantike. Verkündigung und Forschung 52, 2. Gütersloh: Kaiser. —— 2009.‘Religion im Roman des Longos: Die Erfindung des ‚Hirteneros‘ auf Lesbos’, Archiv für Religionsgeschichte 11, 263–83.

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Historical Change

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2 The Religious Life in Hellenistic Phoenicia: ‘Middle Ground’ and New Agencies Corinne Bonnet

HELLENISTIC PHOENICIA: GENERAL CONSIDERATIONS Since Jörg Rüpke has initiated a reflection on ‘Religious individualization in historical perspective’, I have selected the case study of Phoenician cults in the Hellenistic period, already pointed out by Fergus Millar as a singular example of ‘hellenization’.1 Our concern, regarding this process, will be the creation of cross-cultural compromises and the emergence of new paradigms in religious agency characterized, or not, by an increasing role of the individual. Thus, any quick equation of ‘hellenization’ and ‘individualization’, as proffered by Louis Dumont2, for example, is replaced by a more complex analysis of this process—as a more precise treatment of the notion of individualization. Let us first present the main elements of the historical context. From 332 bc the small Phoenician kingdoms were part of the new empire conquered by Alexander and his army, with important changes on different levels. On the political level the local dynasties disappeared3 within two or three generations and the Phoenician cities were fully integrated in the Ptolemaic or Seleucid empires. On 1 Millar 1983. See also Millar 1987; Grainger 1992 (reviewed by MacAdam 1993); Sartre 2001. 2 Dumont 1983. 3 Eddy 1961; Verkinderen 1987.

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the linguistic and cultural levels, the Greek koinè generally spread and the Phoenician people often adopted Greek names, although Phoenician inscriptions and names are still present until at least the first century bc.4 In the material culture, Greek models of, for example, pottery, dresses, and coinage are very successful. Finally in the cultic life, whereas Greek influences become more and more visible, the Phoenician traditions remain vivacious. We can assume that religious practices particularly fit to strategies of cross-cultural negotiations. The religious life in the Phoenician kingdoms before Alexander— although they are usually called ‘city states’—illustrates a rather different political and social shape from the Greek poleis. In Tyre, Sidon, or Byblos, the social structure is pyramid-shaped, or vertical, with the king at the top. In the royal inscriptions, the king is presented as chosen by the gods for his personal qualities; he is the mediator between the divine world and the people. ‘Beloved by the gods’, he is responsible for food, peace, health, welfare, power, and he performs some public rituals. For example, the king of Sidon mentions in his inscriptions first his priesthood of Astarte title and secondly his title of ‘king of the Sidonians’.5 The articulation between individual and collective levels of religious practices is thus differently conceptualized and operated in Greek and in Phoenician societies and polytheisms. In Greek contexts, especially in democratic cities, the notion of isonomia influences the ritual organization.

‘HELLENIZATION’: A DEBATED ISSUE The complex phenomenon of ‘hellenization’ is the very core of my investigation.6 For sure, the introduction of a set of Greek cultural features (personal names, toponyms, images, cults, social behaviours or attitudes, literature . . .) must have transformed the ‘indigenous’ traditions. But the problem is when and where exactly, who, why, and to what extent, and last but not least, how can we describe and explain 4

Briquel-Chatonnet 1991. Elayi 1986. 6 The bibliography on this topic is almost endless: Bichler 1983; Orrieux, Will 1986; Bowersock 1990; Momigliano 1990; Canfora 1987; Gehrke 1990; Cartledge et al. 1996; Funck 1996; Payen 2005; Couvenhes and Legras 2006, especially Couvenhes and Heller 2006, 15–49. 5

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this process without using the old models of a colonial ‘acculturation’ or the confused notion of ‘syncretism’? The first concept implies that Greek ‘modernity’ was inoculated in the ‘primitive’ Phoenician traditions. An aspect of this process could deal with the promotion of a (more?) individual approach to the divine. However, we must admit that the strong persistence of native languages in ritual contexts (for example, in funerary or dedicatory inscriptions) does not necessarily reveal a lack of ‘hellenization’ and consequently a ‘primitive’ or ‘conservative’ behaviour. The second concept (‘syncretism’) is nowadays unanimously considered as unable to grasp the complex reality and the fluid process of translatability of religious names, practices, images, and beliefs.7 Moreover, we must keep in mind that Phoenician people began to adopt Greek cultural standards long before Alexander’s conquest. From archaic times at least (and even since the Late Bronze Age), Greeks and Phoenicians were continuously connected in the Mediterranean networks.8 In this framework, the Greeks learned the alphabet from the Phoenicians at the beginning of the first millennium bc, having with them intense and reciprocal exchanges. The late Persian period (fifth and fourth centuries bc) shows an unequivocal penetration of the Greek ‘taste’ in Phoenicia, especially at Sidon, the major town.9 When Alexander and his army invaded Phoenicia, they discovered a world already deeply ‘hellenized’. The conquest only intensified and extended a previous trend. Hence, it is certainly wrong to define sharp cultural and chronological boundaries between two different moments and two different habitus in Phoenicia, before and after the Macedonian hegemony. ‘Hellenization’ or ‘Hellenism’, far from exemplifying a clash between two worlds or collapse of the traditional framework, has to do with strategy and negotiation, social fluidity and cultural creativity. Glen Bowersock appropriately suggests that Hellenism is ‘a language and culture in which peoples of the most diverse kind could participate. . . . It was a medium not necessarily antithetical to local or indigenous traditions. On the contrary, it provides a new and more eloquent way of giving voice to them.’ Consequently, the range of effects, in terms of practices, behaviours, mental habits, and images, is 7 8 9

Smith 2008; Ando 2008, p. 43–58, on the interpretatio romana. Malkin 2005. Elayi 1998; 1989.

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extremely vast and goes far beyond the colonial model of an imposed acculturation or the ideal picture of a meeting between East and West, according to Droysen’s concept of Verschmelzung (‘fusion’). For the Hellenistic period and even before, we must refrain from using clearcut labels such as ‘Phoenician’ or ‘Greek’ cultures, which rely on an essentialist mapping of the Mediterranean world, made of single units. On the contrary, connectivity and cross-cultural processes are constantly on stage, producing hybrid realities which elude any rigid ideological approach.10 Turning to our main concern, we must be very cautious in establishing far-fetched ‘markers’ of Greek culture or Greek identity in Hellenistic times, such as an increasing attention paid to individual religious needs. The opinio comunis on Mediterranean post-classical religions has presumably to be challenged on several grounds, in particular because the distinction between collective and individual necessities and actions, in religious contexts, is extremely difficult to operate. Moreover, it wrongly suggests that the emergence of individual religious agencies is part of an evolutionist trend of ‘progress’.

A BRIEF SKETCH OF PHOENICIAN CULTS BEFORE ALEXANDER The pantheons of the Phoenician cities are constructed on a common framework:11 at the top, we find a divine couple made of a local Baal (Baal of Tyre, of Sidon, of Byblos, and so on) associated with a goddess (generally called Astarte). Together they symbolize the local identity, whereas several other gods and goddesses are worshipped with specific competences (such as sea, mountain, war, snake bites, birth and childhood, or death). The main goddess, the Baalat of every kingdom, is mentioned in the royal inscriptions as the divine queen who ‘makes’ the king and gives him the skills and powers he needs to be recognized as legitimate and right and to have a long and prosperous reign. The charis and sense of justice of every mortal king is at the same time inspired by the divine model of the local Baal. The 10

Jong 2007. Bonnet, Lipinski, and Marchetti 1986; Bonnet and Xella 1985; Lipinski 1995; Bonnet and Niehr 2010. 11

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contractual religious exchange, according to which gods receive offerings from humans and give them what they are asking for (in other words the collective destiny), is closely bound to the personal ability of the king to capture the gods’ benevolence. However the ‘religious contract’ also directly binds any single citizen to the gods: the Phoenician inscriptions reveal that anybody could offer gifts to the gods, asking them to be heard and blessed, to receive health, prosperity, longevity . . . The worshippers always introduce themselves as part of a kinship or lineage: ‘X son of Y, grandson of Z, . . . ’. The longer the genealogy, the more prestigious is the individual. Mentions of qualifications, ranks, or titles play the same role of social distinction. The epigraphic medium, displayed in public spaces, like sanctuaries, offers local elites an opportunity to emphasize their high status in the society. The economic activities of the Phoenician kingdoms, involved in the Mediterranean networks, helped the emergence of entrepreneurial elites eager for social promotion. We can hardly doubt that for them the ‘hellenization’ process was basically a positive challenge.

THE CONQUEST: A UNIVOCAL NARRATIVE Even if Alexander was welcomed as a liberator by the Phoenician authorities and the people almost everywhere, except in Tyre,12 the Macedonian conquest partly broke up the existing political, social, and cultural framework. The Phoenician kings, chosen by the gods, became Alexander’s subjects. The new authorities theoretically respected local aristocracies and royal families, but they transformed them into political tools or puppets. Royal charisma was seriously questioned, while Alexander presented himself as a divine ‘international’ figure, Heracles’ and Dionysos’ heir in the East. The cultic mediation of native kings became gradually meaningless. The local gods were maintained and adopted by the new inhabitants, but ‘translated’ into or identified with Greek gods. Does this mean that their religious identity and authority were at risk? When the Spanish and Portuguese conquistadores invaded Mexico or Peru, 12

2008.

For the Tyrian siege and the extreme violence on both sides, see recently Amitay

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they declared that local gods were dead. Interpretatio—on which Cliff Ando and Mark Smith have recently thrown important light—is always a strategy of hierarchizing the divine world. Melqart in Tyre, for example, who was identified with Heracles centuries before,13 is not ‘dead’, but he is almost completely swallowed up by Heracles and put under Greek control. The bow and the lion skin, typical heraclean attributes, become part of his official image, even on civic coinage or weights. We can however confidently assume that it was not, or not only, a Greek decision, but also a Tyrian strategy. The local Baals are ‘used’ by the Greeks to mark their territory but, on the other hand, the Phoenicians take advantage of the Greek ‘equipment’ to give their own culture a new dimension and resonance. The result is that both parts work more or less consciously for a cultural compromise, a sort of ‘middle ground’. In such an interactive context, new spaces and new figures of religious mediation can emerge. The Hellenistic (more) hybrid society needs individuals able to play with both tradition and innovation, and to display original strategies ‘in between’. Looking at Hellenistic Sidon, I shall focus on the invention of original forms of religious agency linked with social strategies of political and cultural mediation in which individuals operate at the same time for their own interest and for the group’s integrity and promotion.

WHEN ESHMUN MEETS ASCLEPIOS IN SIDON The city of Sidon, between Beirut and Tyre, on the Phoenician coast, had been the capital of a rich kingdom since the beginning of the first millennium bc. Homer calls all the Phoenicians Sidonians, using an interesting pars pro toto figure. During the Persian empire, Sidon was the major Phoenician city, with its royal dwelling and huge paradeisos. Sidon is a very cosmopolite city, open to many influences, including Persian, Anatolian, Egyptian, and Mesopotamian, but mainly Greek. Eshmun had been the Baal of Sidon since the second millennium bc.14 His name is connected with oil, an important element of 13 14

Bonnet 1988; see in particular Hdt. 2.44. Brown 1998; Lipinski 1995; Xella 1993, 2001.

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everyday life for health and medicine, but also for royal investiture and ritual ceremonies. Eshmun’s divine spouse is Astarte, called ‘Name of Baal’ because, thanks to her close relationship to the god, she is the only one who knows his name.15 Both gods were venerated in an important urban sanctuary, in ‘Sidon on the sea’, as well as in another prestigious cult-place outside Sidon, on the first slopes of Mount Lebanon, at Bostan esh-Sheik.16 This extra-urban sanctuary, irrigated by the Ydal holy spring, was constructed by the local kings during the seventh or sixth century bc, under Babylonian hegemony. Step by step, the sanctuary became more famous: the royal family, the local elite, and all the Sidonians honoured Eshmun of the holy spring with different types of offerings. Among them, particularly striking are the numerous statues of small children, the so called temple boys (and, more rarely, temple girls), including children of the royal family. Originating from Cyprus, they refer to rituals dealing with birth, childhood, and family and consequently the destiny of the whole city. A set of Phoenician inscriptions reveals that Eshmun was invoked to protect the young Sidonian population. More than twenty royal inscriptions, over a long span of time, give further confirmation of the king’s central position in this process: as a single and special individual, he works for the common interest of the population. Because Eshmun had been identified with Asclepios since the fifth to fourth century bc, several scholars look at him as a ‘healing god’ and consider Bostan esh-Sheik as a ‘healing sanctuary’, similar, for example, to Epidauros. Its increasing size and prosperity during Hellenistic times is thus considered as a tangible sign of major attention paid to individual needs—body, health, sexuality, afterlife—associated with a more personal and direct experience of the divine (something like ‘mysteries’). Such a view has to be challenged, because the translation of Eshmun into Asclepios also relies on cultural strategies aiming at a new compromise from which both would benefit. What about ‘individualization’ in this context? Are the Hellenistic religious behaviours attested in Bostan differently orientated from before? How can we understand the new orientations of Eshmun-Asclepios’ cult?

15 16

Bonnet 2009. Stucky 1984, 1993, 2005. See also Stucky 2001.

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Looking carefully at the evidence from pre-Hellenistic times, we observe that Eshmun’s cult deals both with children, their development and integration, and with the future of the Sidonian society. The introduction of Asclepios in the sanctuary, from the fourth century bc, does not fundamentally change the ritual shape: the god receives the same images of temple boys, of children playing or involved in the activities of everyday life; they receive offerings like games or glass beads. Obviously the Greek taste is more perceptible in the style, but the Greek inscriptions to Asclepios still emphasize the collective dimension of the offerings tied with the family’s concerns. Nothing expressly points to more individual rituals or to major interests in the body, in ‘self-care’ or individual destiny. The personal concerns are always encompassed in a collective frame. Besides, the worshippers in the Bostan sanctuary frequently go on using their own language.17

THE TRENDY CLUB OF ASCLEPIOS’ INTERNATIONAL SANCTUARIES From a strategic point of view, using both languages and divine names, and displaying a hellenized appearance, with Greek inscriptions, Greek iconography, and Greek architecture, the Sidonians favoured a cultural compromise. It allowed not only the Phoenicians, but also the Greek or hellenized people to visit the sanctuary, and recognize their own god, making offerings to an ‘international’ shared god. Taking advantage of the new political and cultural environment, the Sidonians endeavoured to participate in the prestigious and international religious network of the Asclepieia and in the big business of Mediterranean pilgrimage.18 Indeed, several pieces of evidence show that the Sidonians intentionally emphasized the compatibility between Eshmun and Asclepios. A bilingual Greek and Phoenician inscription from Cos,19 dating from the end of the fourth century bc, deals with a maritime construction offered by the son of Abdalonymos, king of Sidon, to Astarte as goddess of the sea and the seafarers. As far as this building 17 18 19

For the inscriptions from Bostan, see Stucky 2005. Elsner and Rutherford 2005. Kantzia 1980; Sznycer 1980, 1999. See also Habicht 2007.

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seems to be paid by Eshmun’s sacred funds, we can imagine that the Sidonian authorities paid attention to the Coan harbour because the local famous Asklepieion began to be visited by Sidonian pilgrims and, conversely, because Coan or Greek pilgrims could easily join Sidon and honour its Phoenician Asclepios. The Sidonian cult of Eshmun-Asclepios, far from revealing an individualization process and an emerging concern for personal religious experiences and individual needs, is rather a tangible hint of a new religious koine, which includes the Phoenician ‘hellenized’ kingdoms. Another clue comes from the famous ‘Tribune of Eshmun’ (dating from the end of the Persian period) and the so called ‘Bâtiment aux frises d’enfants’ (dating from the fourth to the third century bc).20 Both iconographic designs express the Sidonian claim and desire to be integrated, even before Alexander’s conquest, in a broader, international context in which their local traditions could be consolidated and disseminated. In fact, these monuments display images of circular groups dancing together, hand in hand, playing music and producing harmony: it is a kind of ‘ring composition’. Barbara Kowalzig’s recent analysis of similar material21 points to a persistent symbolic and iconographic frame which symbolizes the concept of integration in Greek communities through political and religious actions. Concluding on that point, we must admit that the concepts of ‘hellenization’, ‘individualization’, ‘modernity’ or ‘healing cults’ do not do justice to the diversity and complexity of behaviours, beliefs, and practices to which the Sidonian sanctuaries testify. The Greek claim for cultural supremacy, even if based on a sophisticated process of translatability between gods, is balanced by the Phoenician strategy which aimed to preserve or even promote the traditional heritage taking advantage of the new international connectivity and using Greek tools to favour the integration process. Now, the search for a cultural compromise requires mediators able to work in the new ‘middle ground’, lobbying, networking, spinning. These persons try to build bridges between two cultural shores, working at the same time for their own personal prestige and for the benefit of the whole society.

20

Stucky 1984; Apicella 2006.

21

Kowalzig 2005.

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Corinne Bonnet DIOTIMOS’ INSCRIPTION: A SIDONIAN COGNATE TO THE GREEKS

Diotimos is known through a Greek inscription from Sidon, discovered in 1862 by Ernest Renan and studied in 1939 by Elias Bickerman.22 The inscription contains an honorific epigram for the winner at the Nemean Games in Greece. The mention of the Cretan sculptor Timocharis allows us to date the monument to c.200 bc. The elegant and sophisticated epigram was probably composed by a deeply hellenized local poet. In fact, we are aware of the existence of Greek literary circles in Phoenician cities. Meleager of Gadara, who spent many years in Tyre when he was a young poet, is the best example of this milieu.23 The City of the Sidonians honour Diotimos, son of Dionysios, a judge (dikastès), who won the chariot race at the Nemean Games. Timocharis from Eleutherna made the statue. The day, on which, in the Argolic valley, from their starting posts, all the competitors launched their quick horses for the race, the people of Phoronis gave you a splendid honour and you received the ever memorable crown. For the first among the citizens, you brought from Hellas in the noble house of the Agenorids the glory won in an equestrian victory. The holy city of Cadmos, Thebes, also exults, seeing its metropolis distinguished by victories. The prayer of your father, Dionysios, made in occasion of the contest was fulfilled when Greece made this proclamation: ‘Oh proud Sidon, you excel not only with your ships but also with your yoked chariots which are victorious.’

The athletic agones were a typical feature of Greek culture. They made it possible for individual citizens to be distinguished by the kleos within a context which reinforced the social bounds. The introduction of agones in the Near East was a major aspect of ‘hellenization’, together with the gymnasion and the theatre.24 They promoted Greek models of sociability and identity, offering spaces of cultural mediation under Greek control. In Tyre, for example, where the resistance to the Macedonian army was strongest, Alexander immediately after his 22 Bikerman 1939; Ebert 1972; Merkelbach and Stauber 2002. See also Couvenhes and Heller 2006. 23 Cf. Gutzwiller forthcoming. 24 Le Guen 2005.

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victory imposed the celebration of athletic games in honour of Heracles in order to appropriate Melqart’s cult, the Baal of Tyre.25 The Phoenicians, used to working in a Mediterranean context, quickly understood how prestigious, from a social and cultural point of view, a victory was in a Greek (especially Panhellenic) festival. Hence they participated not only in the Greek agones celebrated in Phoenicia (mainly in Tyre and Sidon), but also in those in Greece itself. From the third century bc, Phoenician competitors definitely considered as ‘Greek’ won important games in Delos, Athens, Cos, and Corinth. Participation in such competitions appears as a relevant strategy of integration for the Phoenician elites and the Phoenician kingdoms without provoking a loss of identity. Diotimos, for example, who is most probably a descendant of the Sidonian royal family and won the prestigious chariot race at the Nemean Games, celebrated in Zeus’ honour, must be a rich man, aware of Greek habits, but still deeply bound to Sidon. He and his father are mentioned in the inscription with Greek names; they are celebrated according to the Greek traditions, by an elegant Greek epigram and a statue made by a Cretan artist. All these elements could lead us to the conclusion that Diotimos is totally hellenized and that such a celebration of a single citizen is a feature of ‘individualization’ tied with a new cultural trend, typical of the Hellenistic koinè. We must, however, refrain from such a simplistic analysis. In fact, the mythological elements contained in the text deserve more attention. Even if they are included in a Greek framework, they recall a sophisticated strategy of communication and a complex cultural landscape. First of all, it is worth noticing that Diotimos is at the same time proud of his victory in a Greek competition, but also of his title and duty of ‘judge’, dikastès in Greek, which clearly translates a Semitic word, shufat, meaning something like ‘governor’. The cultural mixture is evident and not conflicting at all. At that time (c.200 bc) the Sidonian kingship had been abolished and a new political and social deal was emerging. Diotimos, who belongs to the higher aristocracy, skilfully uses a typically Greek strategy to get prestige, glory, and immortality, being also involved in the local institutional organization as a ‘governor’. He appears as a typical Phoenician Hellenistic mediator. Diotimos alludes in his inscription to the memory of Agenor, the first king of Sidon, and to his glorious family. Now, Agenor is an

25

Adams 2006.

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extraordinary case of Greek–Phoenician interaction. In fact he is said, at least since the fifth century bc,26 to have been the son of Phoronis, king of Argos, and to have given birth to Phoinix, the Phoenicians’ eponymous hero, and to Europa, Cadmos, Phineux, and Kilix. Cadmos is well known in Greece as mythical oikistès of the city of Thebes and the one who introduced the Phoenician alphabet to Greece. Through this ‘comforting (mythological) fiction’,27 Diotimos finds a way to underline the crucial Phoenician contribution to Greek culture and to advertise a hybrid sense of belonging without resisting Hellenism. As Agenor has definitely a Greek origin, the Phoenicians are most certainly Greek. Moreover, Agenor, through his sons, fecundated Greece and ‘civilized’ it.28 It is a tricky and paradoxical message in a context of ‘hellenization’! The mythological traditions, in these circumstances, provide a common language necessary for any ‘middle ground’. The concept of mythological kinship, syngeneia, helps to reveal very ancient bonds between the Greek and the non-Greek people. The idea of a common family rests on the model of Greek supremacy over barbarian enemies. Turning to our main issue, Diotimos’ inscription shows how a single citizen can be honoured with an elegant inscription and a public monument, using his personal glory, his ‘sich selbst feiern’ for the prestige of his family, of the whole city, and finally of the ‘Phoenician culture’ challenged by Greek models. The Phoenician elite borrowed the Greek aristocratic and even tyrannical model of the kleos won in the agones to recover part of their political and social prestige lost after the Macedonian conquest.29 Through this strategy, they also inscribe the Phoenician identity in the symbolic and imaginary network of Greek mythology, promoting integration and mutual comprehension.

CONCLUSION Reflecting on Hellenistic times, John Ma recently proposed renouncing ‘paradigms’ (for example the paradigm of fusion or separation) 26

27 Hellanic. 4 F 36 J (ap. Schol. Eust. Hom. Il. G 75). Gruen 2005. Later on, Ach. Tat. 1.1.1, speaking of Sidon, calls it ‘mother of the Phoenicians, father of the Thebans’. 29 Bremen 2007. See also Chaniotis 1995. 28

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and to work instead with ‘paradoxes’.30 According to him the admission of contradictory situations and parameters coexisting in historical contexts is a fascinating clue to these ‘times of troubles’. Following his suggestion, we should conclude that the category of ‘hellenization’ includes a wide spectrum of responses and levels of interaction, a huge range of attitudes and behaviours: violent opposition and peaceful communication, ideological pressure, or resistance and rebellion. Far from any ‘obviousness’, such an approach emphasizes the importance of creativity and opportunism in cultural interaction, according to space, time, purpose, and social context. As regards the cultic life, we must pay attention to the ‘religious work’, tackled by J. Z. Smith in his Imagining Religion.31 The homo religiosus is more properly a homo faber, always busy, constructing social equipments with a large set of tools. ‘Hellenization’, like ‘occidentalization’ in Canada or Mexico in modern times, stimulated creativity as an answer to a certain disruption of techniques, memories, and the native realm of imaginations. After Alexander’s conquest in the East, the cultural instability and change turned out to promote the construction of new cultural layouts and forms in which some individuals found space for their political, social, or religious agency. They tried to maximize the benefits derived from an environment oriented towards the Greek world and a new conception of ‘otherness’. New identities lead to new agencies in a context where the old boundaries are replaced by transactions and networks of relations. The Phoenician case illustrates the fact, emphasized in the introduction, that individualization is neither coextensive to ‘modernity’, nor to the concept of ‘progress’. It should not be regarded as opposed to society, but as an option in the numerous aspects of interaction inside the social network. Any claim to identify individuality must take account of the latter.

R E F E R E NC E S Adams, W. Lindsay 2006. ‘The Games of Alexander the Great’, in Heckel, Waldemar, Tritle, Laurence, and Wheatley, Pat (eds), Alexander’s Empire. Formulation to Decay. Claremont: Regina, 125–38.

30

Ma 2008.

31

Smith 1988.

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Amitay, Ory 2008. ‘Why did Alexander the Great besiege Tyre?’, Athenaeum 96, 91–102. Ando, Clifford 2008. The Matter of the Gods. Religion and the Roman Empire. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Apicella, Catherine 2006. ‘Asklépios, Dionysos et Eshmun de Sidon: la création d’une identité religieuse originale’, in Couvenhes, Jean-Christophe and Legras, Bernard (eds), Transferts culturels dans le monde hellénistique: Actes de la table ronde sur les identités collectives. Paris: Publications de la Sorbonne, 141–9. Bichler, Reinhold 1983. Hellenismus: Geschichte und Problematik eines Epochenbegriffs. Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft. Bikerman, E. 1939. ‘Sur une inscription agonistique de Sidon’, in Mélanges syriens offerts à Monsieur René Dussaud, I. Paris: Geuthner, 91–9. Bonnet, Corinne 1988. Melqart: Cultes et mythes de l’Héraclès tyrien en Méditerranée. Namur: Presses Universitaires / Leuven: Peeters. —— 2009. ‘Le visage et le nom. Réflexions sur les interfaces divines à la lumière de la documentation proche-orientale’, in Bodiou, Lydie, Mehl, Véronique, Oulhen, Jacques, Prost, Francis, and Wilgaux, Jérôme (eds), Chemin faisant: mythes, cultes et société en Grèce ancienne. Mélanges en l’honneur de Pierre Brulé. Rennes: Presses universitaires de Rennes, 205–14. —— Lipinski, Edward, and Marchetti, Patrick (eds) 1986. Religio Phoenicia. Namur: Société d’Études Classique. —— and Niehr, Herbert 2010. Religionen in der Umwelt des Alten Testaments II : Phönizier, Punier, Aramäer. Kohlhammer Studienbücher Theologie, Bd. 4, 2. Stuttgart: Kohlhammer. —— and Xella, Paolo 1985. ‘La religion’, in Krings, Véronique (ed.), La civilisation phénicienne et punique: Manuel de recherche. Leiden: Brill, 316–33. Bowersock, Glenn 1990. Hellenism in Late Antiquity. Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press. Bremen, Riet van 2007. ‘The Entire House is Full of Crowns: Hellenistic Agōnes and the Commemoration of Victory’, in Hornblower, Simon and Morgan, Catherine (eds), Pindar’s Poetry, Patrons, and Festivals: From Archaic Greece to the Roman Empire. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 345–75. Briquel-Chatonnet, Françoise 1991. ‘Les derniers témoignages sur la langue phénicienne en Orient’, Rivista di studi fenici 19, 3–21. Brown, Michael L. 1998. ‘Was there a West Semitic Asklepios?’, UgaritForschungen 30, 133–54. Canfora, Luciano 1987. Ellenismo. Bari: Laterza. Cartledge, Paul et al. (ed.) 1996. Hellenistic Constructs: Essays in Culture, History and Historiography. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press.

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Chaniotis, Angelos 1995. ‘Sich selbst feiern? Städtische Feste des Hellenismus im Spannungsfeld von Religion und Politik’, in Wörrle, Michael, and Zanker, Paul (eds), Stadtbild und Bürgerbild im Hellenismus. Munich: Beck, 147–69. Couvenhes, Jean-Christophe and Legras, Bernard (eds) 2006. Transferts culturels et politique dans le monde hellénistique. Paris: Publications de la Sorbonne. —— and Heller, Anna 2006. ‘Les transferts culturels dans le monde institutionnel des cités et des royaumes à l’époque hellénistique’, in Couvenhes, Jean-Christophe and Legras, Bernard (eds), Transferts culturels et politique dans le monde hellénistique. Paris: Publications de la Sorbonne, 15–49. Dumont, Louis 1983. Essais sur l’individualisme: Une perspective anthropologique sur l’idéologie moderne. Paris: Le Seuil. Ebert, Joachim 1972. Griechische Epigramme auf Sieger in gymnischen und hippischen Agonen. Berlin: Akademie. Eddy, Samuel K. 1961. The King is dead: Studies in the Near Eastern Resistance to Hellenism, 334–31 b.c. Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press. Elayi, Josette 1986. ‘Le roi et la religion dans les cités phéniciennes à l’époque perse’, in Bonnet, Corinne, Lipinski, Edward, and Marchetti, Patrick (eds), Religio Phoenicia. Namur: Société d’Études Classique, 249–61. —— 1989. Sidon, cité autonome de l’Empire perse. Paris: Idéaphane. —— 1998. Pénétration grecque en Phénicie sous l’empire perse. Nancy: Presses Universitaires de Nancy. Elsner, Jas and Rutherford, Ian (eds) 2005. Pilgrimage in Graeco-Roman and Early Christian Antiquity: Seeing the Gods. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Funck, Bernd (ed.) 1996. Hellenismus: Beiträge zur Erforschung von Akkulturation und politischer Ordnung in den Staaten des hellenistischen Zeitalters. Tübingen: Mohr. Gehrke, Hans-Joachim 1990. Geschichte des Hellenismus. Munich: Beck. Grainger, John D. 1992. Hellenistic Phoenicia, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Gruen, Erich 2005. Cultural Borrowings and Ethnic Appropriations in Antiquity. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Gutzwiller, Kathryn forthcoming. Genre and Ethnicity in the Epigrams of Meleager. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Habicht, Christian 2007. ‘Neues zur hellenistischen Geschichte von Kos’, Chiron 37, 123–52. Jong, Lidewijde de 2007f. ‘Narratives of Roman Syria: a historiography of Syria as a province of Rome’, Princeton/Stanford Working Papers in Classics .

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Kantzia, Charis, 1980. ‘ . . . Ø  ƺø ıH  Æغø. A bilingual Graeco-Phoenician inscription from Kos’, Archaiologikon Deltion 35, 1–16. Kowalzig, Barbara 2005. ‘Mapping out Communitas: Performances of Theōria in their Sacred and Political Context’, in Elsner, Jas and Rutherford, Ian (eds), Pilgrimage in Graeco-Roman and Early Christian Antiquity: Seeing the Gods. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 41–72. Le Guen, Brigitte 2005. ‘Théâtre, cités et royaumes en Anatolie et au ProcheOrient ancien de la mort d’Alexandre le Grand aux conquêtes de Pompée’, in Prost, Francis (ed.), L’Orient méditerranéen de la mort d’Alexandre aux campagnes de Pompée: Cités et royaumes à l’époque hellénistique. RennesToulouse: Presses Universitaires de Rennes, 329–55. Lipinski, Edward 1995. Dieux et déesses de l’univers phénicien et punique. Leuven: Peeters. Ma, John 2008. ‘Paradigms and Paradoxes in the Hellenistic World’, Studi ellenistici 20, 371–85. MacAdam, Henri I. 1993. ‘Phoenicians at home, Phoenicians abroad’, Topoi 3, 321–44. Malkin, Irad (ed.) 2005. Mediterranean Paradigms and Classical Antiquity. London: Routledge. Merkelbach, Reinhold and Stauber, Josef 2002. Steinepigramme aus dem griechischen Osten, IV. Munich: Saur, 274–5. Millar, Fergus 1987. ‘The Problem of Hellenistic Syria’, in Kuhrt, Améli and Sherwin-White, Susan M. (eds), Hellenism in the East, London: Duckworth, 110–33, reprinted in Millar, Fergus 2006. The Greek World, the Jews, and the East. Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 3–31. —— 1983. ‘The Phoenician Cities: A Case Study of Hellenisation’, Proceedings of the Cambridge Philological Society 209, 54–71, reprinted in Millar, Fergus 2006. The Greek World, the Jews, and the East. Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 32–50. Momigliano, Arnaldo 1990. Alien Wisdom. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Orrieux, Claude and Will, Édouard 1986. Ioudaïsmos-Hellénismos: Essai sur le judaïsme judéen à l’époque hellénistique. Nancy: Presses Universitaires de Nancy. Payen, Pascal 2005. ‘Introduction’, in: Droysen, Johann G. (ed.), Histoire de l’hellénisme. Grenoble: Millon, 5–82. Sartre, Maurice 2001, D’Alexandre à Zénobie. Histoire du Levant antique, IVe siècle av.—IIIe siècle ap. J.-C., 2nd edn, Paris: Fayard. Smith, Jonathan Z. 1988. Imagining Religion: From Babylon to Jonestown. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

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—— 2008. God in Translation: Deities in Cross-Cultural Discourse in the Biblical World. Forschungen zum Alten Testament 57. Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck. Sznycer, Maurice 1980. ‘La partie phénicienne de l’inscription bilingue gréco-phénicienne de Cos’, Archaiologikon Deltion 35, 17–30. —— 1999. ‘Retour à Cos’, Semitica 49, 103–16. Stucky, Rolf A. 1984. Tribune d’Echmoun: Ein griechischer Reliefzyklus des 4. Jahrhunderts v. Chr. in Sidon. Basel: Vereinigung der Freunde Antiker Kunst. —— 1993. Die Skulpturen aus dem Echmun-Heiligtum bei Sidon. Basel: Vereinigung der Freunde Antiker Kunst. —— 2001. ‘Acculturation et retour aux sources: Sidon aux époques perse et hellénistique’, in Frei-Stolba, Regula and Gex, Kristine (eds), Recherches récentes sur le monde hellénistique. Berne: Lang, 247–58. —— 2005. Das Eschmun-Heiligtum von Sidon: Architektur und Inschriften. Basel: Vereinigung der Freunde Antiker Kunst. Verkinderen, Frank 1987. ‘Les cités phéniciennes dans l’empire d’Alexandre le Grand’, in Lipinski, Edward (ed.), Studia Phoenicia V: Phoenicia and the East Mediterranean in the First Millennium b.c. Leuven: Peeters, 287–308. Xella, Paolo 1993. ‘Eshmun von Sidon. Der phönizische Asklepios’, in Dietrich, Manfred and Loretz, Oswald (eds), Mesopotamia—Ugaritica— Biblica. Festschrift für Kurt Bergerhof. Neukirchen-Vluyn: Neukirchner, 481–98. —— 2001. ‘Les plus anciens témoignages sur le dieu phénicien Eshmoun: Une mise au point’, in Daviau, Michèle, Wevers, John W., and Weigl, Michael (eds), The World of the Aramaeans, II. Studies in History and Archaeology in Honour of Paul-Eugène Dion. Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press, 230–42.

3 Disguising Change in the First Century John A. North

INTRODUCTION The purpose of this chapter is to look at some different types of disguise that might conceal (or half-conceal) the initiation of religious changes in Roman society and hence might have enabled reform and innovation to take place in a pagan world where open reform as such would not have been tolerable or tolerated.1 If individualization is to be understood as a gradual process of emancipation from traditional norms of behaviour, as reinforced by tradition, family, social group, state, and culture, then we certainly need to identify changes in behaviour by individuals, but also to establish that such changes pre-suppose an overall pattern or direction of change, and cannot be written off as no more than individual aberrations. But the identification of ‘significant’ change, in this sense, has to start from an analysis of the set of attitudes and ideas from which the whole development began. The idea of this chapter therefore is to start from the communal area where we have the best chance of identifying the principles that govern this initial state; but then to move on to the area of individual religious experience and individual decision-making. There could be different ways of conceiving the direction of travel in this quest. It could be that we are looking for a movement from constraint to freedom, from a top-down authoritarian civic religious order to one where the individual can find new means of religious 1 I am very grateful to colleagues for much illuminating and helpful discussion of the original draft of this chapter during the conference in Erfurt.

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self-expression. Or it might be conceived rather as the progressive subordination of the individual actor to norms laid down by groups of innovators imposing new rules of behaviour, especially in the notoriously controversial area of ‘belief ’, in which pagan authorities had taken relatively little interest. On this view, it could be argued that the progress is not towards freedom at all, but towards a new and more effective form of authoritarianism. From another point of view, the development could also be conceived as an evolution within the pagan order; or as the result of co-existence and competition with new forms of religious organization outside the control of civic authorities and priests. One position that it would be difficult to sustain would be that the phenomenon of change as such in religious life would have been unfamiliar to pagans; examples of innovation openly accepted in the public sphere of Roman life are easy enough to find. From such examples, we can hope to infer public attitudes in the late republic; the next question to be asked is how much freedom of action was there in the individual sphere and what the limits were on that freedom of action. There must, of course, always have been tension between the fact of change in its various forms and the apparent ideology of antipathy to change, in other words the assumption that value lay in the perfect preservation of the religious order as handed down from and by the maiores.2 Perhaps as a result, the major driver of change in the ritual sphere may well have been simply the forgetting of the details of past practice, with differential impact depending on whether the ritual in question was to be performed frequently, annually, occasionally, or (as in the famous case of the Secular Games) centennially.3 Forgetting should be seen for this purpose as a form of disguise. With a religion that depended on the retention of large numbers of rituals repeated from the past and at least notionally descending unchanged from remote forebears,4 it must be quite inevitable that both practice and ideas actually changed unnoticed, or were only detected retrospectively by those who investigated these matters, such as Varro and his second-century bce predecessors. It is surely significant that Varro and his contemporaries were the first generation to be able to look back to an earlier one of antiquarian writers, who had recorded some 2 3 4

For discussion see North 1976; Rüpke 1996; Ando 2008. For the Secular Games, see below 65–7. For a definition and analysis of these phenomena, Rappaport 1999, 23–50.

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facts about religious practices from the second half of the second century bce. But we can also see a good deal about how more sudden and radical changes can be presented as having some form of traditional authentication, either at the time or later; the mythical formations that result from the introduction of the Magna Mater cult are a familiar enough case in point.5 There are, also, boundaries to be explored between what could happen and what apparently could not.

COMMUNAL CHANGE

I By legislation It cannot be doubted, if we look at the evidence about the public sphere, that change at least sometimes took place openly and was openly documented as such, without any apparent prevarication or misgiving. The lex Ogulnia of 300 bce, the lex Domitia of 104 bce, and the various consequential laws of Sulla, Labienus, and Caesar all made highly significant changes in the position of the priestly colleges.6 In 196 bce, no doubt on priestly advice, but by a law passed in the comitia and therefore evidently on an issue over which the comitia had the legal capacity to act, a new priestly college was created, with its own sphere of sacred jurisdiction (Livy 33.41.1).7 These are major religious decisions and dramatic changes of practice made quite openly by the passing of law. However, in the case of decision-making by senate or populus or plebs, there seems to have been a definite limit to what they enacted, if not in theory, at least in practice. The distinction seems to be made in practice between matters of organization, where quite radical changes were made by law; and matters of ritual, where it seems virtually axiomatic that the priests and the past practice they represented held the final authority and where it would have been a very sensitive matter for change of any kind to be deliberately introduced by senate 5

For a full discussion of the whole story, Berneder 2004. For these laws, Beard et al. 1998, vol. 1, 135–7: Rüpke 2005, 1635–50. For a recent very thorough discussion of problems over the lex Domitia and the lex Labiena, see Drummond 2008; North 2011. 7 For the epulones see Wissowa 1912, 518–19; Latte 1960, 398–9; on the epulones and the epulum of Iuppiter: Bernstein 1998, 282–91. 6

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or by the comitia. Exactly where this line was drawn may be hard to grasp in particular circumstances; but where there are apparent exceptions, these should be regarded in my view with great suspicion, even if they cannot be proved to be mistaken. To take an specific test case, it is sometimes claimed that the senatus consultum of 97 bce reported by Pliny (NH 30.1.12) had the effect of making illegal from that date onwards the practice used in 216, but also as recently as 114 bce of the burial alive of pairs of foreign people (Greeks and Gauls).8 Extant certe et apud Italas gentes vestigia eius in XII tabulis nostris aliisque argumentis quae priore volumine exposui. DCLVII demum anno urbis Cn. Cornelio Lentulo P. Licinio Crasso cos. senatusconsultum factum est ne homo immolaretur; palamque fit in tempus illut sacra prodigiosa celebrata. Pliny NH 30. 1. 12

There are traces of this even amongst the peoples of Italy, as in our Twelve Tables and (as shown) by the other arguments that I used in an earlier book. Finally in 657 a.u.c., in the consulship of Cn. Cornelius Lentulus and P. Licinius Crassus (= 97 bce), a senatusconsultum was passed that no person should be ritually sacrificed; so evidently, before that time, such monstrous rituals had been performed. The implications of this claim, if it were substantiated, would be: first, that it was recognised that these burials were to be classified as human sacrifices (immolationes), not just, as might otherwise be supposed, ritual killings, as were the disposal of monstra perceived as prodigies; secondly, that the senate after the event ruled these rituals were unlawful and not to be practised in future. In effect, the senate decided to renounce, presumably on humanitarian grounds, rituals that the priests had on earlier occasions approved. In my view, this alleged ritual ruling is highly improbable and needs to be looked at very critically. There are good reasons for questioning the interpretation of Pliny’s text and its relevance to the question being asked: 1. The context in which it arises in Pliny is a discussion of magical practice in Italy; Pliny himself clearly thought that the senate intended to make illegal the sacrifice of human victims in the course 8

For these rituals: Fraschetti 1981; Beard et al. 1998, vol. 2. 6.6b.

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of magical procedures, not state rituals. Indeed, he only quotes the senatusconsultum at all in this place because it provided him with evidence that magic was present in Italy as well as the East at the relevant date. The existence of the senatusconsultum, of course, raises the question, as he says himself, whether human sacrifice had previously been legal? If so, where and for whom? 2. Burial alive is nowhere classified as sacrifice, in the sense of immolatio, and cannot reasonably be the ritual to be forbidden by Pliny’s senatusconsultum. The ruling, whatever its impact may have been, cannot have affected such events as the punishment of the Vestals, the disposal of hermaphrodites, which had been happening at the time and continued afterwards,9 or even the killing of a homo sacer, if that ever really took place.10 Romans certainly did occasionally kill people in a religious context, but not by using the ritual of immolatio. The only occasion on which any public Roman activity can be identified that the senatusconsultum would definitely have had the effect of banning, if it had been applied, is the ritual described in the notorious (and much discussed) passage of Livy 22.57, where the Greeks and Gauls are said to have been buried in a spot in the Forum in 216 bce: iam ante hostiis humanis . . . imbutum (already stained with the blood of humanae hostiae). Livy’s remark (minime Romano sacro) makes it clear that he thought this phrase meant what it did in his own day, that is, the ritual sacrifice of human victims.11 But actually, Livy was probably wrong about this, because we know from Festus 91.24 L that: Humanum sacrificium dicebant, quod mortui causa fiebat. Humanum was the name for a sacrifice performed for the sake of a dead person.

This is sacrifice for a person, not the sacrifice of a person. As is in fact well known, Aulus Gellius also implies clearly that what was

9 Hermaphrodites: survey of the evidence in MacBain 1982, 127–35. Vestals: Plut. Num. 10; see Guizzi 1968, 142–58; Beard et al. 1998, vol. 2. 8.4a; Wildfang 2006, 51–63. 10 For a comprehensive discussion, Fiori 1996, see especially, 7–22. 11 For thoughtful discussion of this passage, Davies 2004, 68–9, though he accepts the story of ‘human’ sacrifice.

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indicated by the term must have been the sacrifice of an animal;12 not a human victim. There are many problems in relation to both these passages, but on any view they do suggest that when Livy read in his sources that the burial of the Greeks and Gauls was accompanied by humana sacrificia, that had originally meant animal sacrifices, no doubt intended to appease the dangerous powers released by the deaths about to take place in the middle of the city. If that is right, then the Romans in 97 bce would have been able to say that the senatusconsultum had no implications at all for their own cult-practice in the past. It was a matter of banning a disgusting practice from the private sphere, in which, it should be noticed, they felt no apparent reluctance to intervene. What I am not inclined to accept is that we should erect the distinction I have just used into a structured barrier of some kind between the religious and the administrative. It must have been the established view that the number and form of choice of priests was a human matter, though even here the boundary is difficult to define and a special form had to be found in order to respect the gods’ rights in the procedure.13 But there is no such boundary between, for example, the conduct of ritual and its financing; that division does not necessarily correspond to magisterial authority as distinct from priestly, as is clearly shown by a ruling of 200 bce when the pontifex maximus ruled that votive games must be financed from a fixed fund; the senate referred the matter to the college of the pontifices who overruled the pontifex maximus.14 His point was that it had always been done in one way, with a fund fixed in advance, and that way could not be changed. It emerges sharply from this incident both that a perfectly open change in procedure could be justified and that the decision (though ultimately taken by the Senate, as it would have needed to be) fell squarely within the remit of the pontifices.

12 Gell. 5.12.12 (. . . immolaturque ritu humano capra), on which see, e.g. Wissowa 1912, 420 n. 4. 13 Cic. leg. agr. 2.18–19: Ne hoc quidem uidit, maiores nostros tam fuisse popularis ut, quem per populum creari fas non erat propter religionem sacrorum, in eo tamen propter amplitudinem sacerdoti uoluerint populo supplicari. (He has even missed the point that our ancestors were so far populares that, in the case of a priest who, as a result of a religious objection, it was not fas should be appointed by the people, they nevertheless wished, because of the importance of the priesthood in question, should be submitted to the people.) 14 Liv. 31.9.6–10, and Briscoe 1973.

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They were the arbiters of the sacred law and their ruling was decisive. How the games were to be financed was evidently part of that responsibility. With that incident in mind, we might look also at the opening of the Augustan secular games records: The XVviri s.f. decreed: uti, quoniam ant[i]queis libreis non invenitur qua summa soliti [sint locare ludos] saeculares XV vir(i) sacr. faciund., in summa constitu [a]tur quae sacerdotum conlegis et quae nuper . . . pro ludis quos pro salute Caesaris fecerunt lucaris nomine, constituta est uti etc. (see Schnegg-Köhler 2002, 24 and 74–6) that since it was not discovered in the ancient books at what sum of money the quindecimviri s.f. were accustomed to contract to hold the Secular Games, let the sum be at that level which was fixed, in the form of a lucar, for the colleges of priests and for the Games which they recently held for the benefit of Caesar’s health.

In terms of a mixture of conservatism and change, this is a very illuminating text. The underlying assumption is that there must have been a fixed unchanging level of the lucar for the secular games, ever since the remote past. The use of the word soliti is a particularly rich expression in the context of games that occurred only every century or so—if that. The records they searched cannot surely have been state records but their own priestly books,15 just as the matter in hand is being decided by the quindecimviri of their own day. It cannot be accepted that finance was a separate area in the Roman conception from religion—whatever we think that term might have meant to them. The relation with the gods depended on the proper conduct of the ritual and the lucar was part of that. It was therefore a priestly matter. There is an interesting question about the relationship between the decision of 200 bce and the question being asked in 17 bce. One could think that the rules had changed since 200 bce; or that the pontifical decision did not apply here; or (most plausibly, perhaps) that the pontifices were deciding about votive games, not about other kinds of games. Or perhaps there had been some forgetting.

15

If so, John Scheid (1998b, 18–19) was wrong on this particular point.

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II The Sibylline Books On any view, the classic source of authentication for innovation in the sphere of cults and rituals is provided by the Sibylline Books. Whatever we may think about their origin, these Greek oracles acted repeatedly throughout the republican period in recommending cults that had not previously been established in Rome.16 The date of the myth of their origins and the connection with the Sibyl must be uncertain; but there can be no question that they had the effect of guaranteeing that what might be seen as new was in fact already part of their own religious tradition before the republican era began. What the Sibyl had foretold was bound to come to pass in the end. The one surviving text of a republican oracle17 also gives us clues, through its incorporation of the weaving metaphor, into the way the priests and the Sibyl collaborated in the construction of the text: Scheid and Svenbro argue convincingly that the text would have been composed by selecting lines from a collection so as to interweave with a predetermined acrostych.18 So the gods might be perceived as participating in the weaving of the text. The supreme case of the Sibylline Books as the disguise of changes must be the ritual of the Augustan Secular Games19 where it is above all clear that there is a high degree of correspondence between the ritual as recorded in the inscriptions20 and the recommendations of the Sibylline oracle.21 The obvious interpretation is that the republican character of the games has been utterly transformed by omitting the rituals for the benefit of Dis and Proserpina, apparently the original recipients of the games, and replacing them wholesale with Augustus’s favourite powers: Iuppiter, Iuno and, above all, Apollo and Diana.22 There are, however, problems with this view: first, the fact is that we have no direct records of the republican games and do 16 For the Sibylline Books: Latte 1960, 160–1; Radke 1963; Parke 1988; Scheid 1998b; North 2000. 17 For the (seriously corrupt) text and commentary, Diels 1890, 111–24; the text is from Phlegon of Tralles, Mirabilia 10; translation in part in Beard et al. 1998, vol. 2. 7.5. 18 Scheid and Svenbro 1996, 148–50. 19 For the history of the Secular Games in general the sources are collected in Pighi 1965; see also Weinstock 1971, 192–7; Bernstein 1998, 129–42; Scheid 2005, 97–10. 20 Text and translation in Schnegg-Köhler 2002, 24–45. 21 In Pighi 1965, 56–58 = Phlegon, 37.5.2–4; see Schnegg-Köhler 2002, 221–8. 22 For analysis of ths ritual programme: Schnegg-Köhler 2002, 46–8.

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not know what if anything corresponded to the daytime sections of the Augustan rituals. We do not even know whether the priests themselves did this in Augustus’ times. In one respect at least, however, the change seems to have been too dramatic to be readily comprehensible to us. The foundation myth of the games and the basic ritual as reported in the sources, concern Dis Pater and Proserpina, in other words the underworld gods. This mythical background is not forgotten or obliterated from the record: our sources for the story are imperial and above all the tale is reported in the Lexicon of Festus,23 who must certainly have derived it from the Augustan antiquarian Verrius. No very full version of this entry from Verrius’ Lexicon survives, but the story certainly occurs more than once in damaged versions, which refer to the deities concerned, to the foundation myth, and to the location of the ritual—the socalled Tarentum by the Tiber.24 But when we read the part of the Augustan records that concerns the night-time programme the whole of this side of the rituals has disappeared. The worshippers go at night to the banks of the Tiber; they presumably go to the site of the Tarentum—even if not actually named—and they conduct sacrifices to other deities, but not to Dis Pater and Proserpina.25 If we were to follow the arguments of Robert Palmer,26 the situation becomes even more complex. He argues that the Moerae, who were the first group of goddesses to be honoured in the night-time ritual, are in fact to be understood as the Italian Fatae, who were on his view nine goddesses, in groups of three, who are attested as prophetic deities from the archaic period, in particular by a dedication to the Ninth Fata (Neuna Fata etc.).27 In that case there would be a strange combination of continuity with the remote past and rupture with the specific tradition of the Republican Secular Games. We might say that the retention of very ancient elements in the ritual as well as the Sibylline

23 On Festus and Verrius, see Glinister and Woods 2007, esp. 1–32; on the games, Festus s.v. saeculares 440.13 L = Pighi 1965, 59; s.v. [Tarentum] 478.15 L = Pighi 1965, 61. 24 For the Tarentum (or perhaps Terentum) see Coarelli 1999; Schnegg-Köhler 2002, 186–200. 25 They are mentioned specifically in both the Festus entries, above n. 21; it was argued by Weiss 1973 that the ill-attested republican series of Games might be no more than an annalistic fiction; but this suggestion has not been followed. 26 Palmer 1974, 89–114. 27 On whom see, Guarducci 1946/48; Weinstock 1960; Palmer 1974, 108–14.

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prophecy are to be seen as elements of disguise; but the problem remains why this change of deity was felt necessary. The conclusion seems unavoidable that radical changes were made in full public view and in full awareness both organizationally (by law) and ritually (by recommendation or re-interpretation on the part of the priests).

THE INDIVIDUAL So far, this chapter has been seeking to establish (or re-establish) the character of religious change in public life against the background of an ideology of changelessness, the conditions under which it occurs, and the limits of toleration of it. When we turn to the evidence about individuals, the problems are different but there are some elements that can be transferred: the Sibylline Books apply only to the most public of affairs, but this role might be played by the appeal to other forms of divine advice—oracles, visions, other sources of direct authentication.28 At least, the same problems must have arisen, of the forgetting of obligations and of the need to achieve consensus, though in narrower social circles, and often without the direct help of priests. The next step is to look at the evidence we have about attitudes toward individual religious activities.

I Cicero’s ideas Cicero provides at least a place to start. He was not reluctant in his philosophical writings to make suggestions for radical changes in the nature at least of the official area of Roman religious life. In the de Divinatione the central point made by the character ‘Marcus’ and perhaps also by the narrator figure who speaks at the beginning of Book 2 (neither of whom should be confused with the man Cicero himself) is that religio needs to be purified by the excision of

28 See, for example, the dedication to the Fortuna of Praeneste of Nothus the slave, directed by the lot oracle to make a dedication: Fortunae Iovis puero Primigeniae d(ono) d(dedit) ex sorte compos factus Nothus Ruficanae L. f(iliae) Plotillae. (To Fortuna Primigenia, daughter of Iuppiter, Nothus, the slave of Ruficana Plotilla, daughter of Lucius, gave as a gift having been obliged (compos) through a response of the lot oracle.’ ILS 3685 = CIL XIV. 2862: (Date unknown; now lost).

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superstitio.29 And by that he does not mean new invasions of superstitio, polluting the ancient traditions of religio, but rather the remnants of ancient practices, in which no belief should any longer be placed. While the final message of de Divinatione is left open, and I believe seriously so,30 the unmistakeable implication seems to be that the defence of religio involves accepting change brought about by the increase of sophistication over time. Meanwhile, the de legibus, while the main lines of its recommendations may be a characterization of the existing system in Rome, clearly smuggles in a good deal of change in the general direction of central control; it should, of course, never be trusted as an accurate source of information about the late republican situation, but it can be a source for what Cicero assumed to be the case in his own day, as well as the changes he would want to see.31 When it comes to the freedom of individuals, however, there seems to be little sign that Cicero wanted to take a relaxed line towards innovation. In many ways, the contemporary republican order seems to have left individuals with a great deal of room for manoeuvre,32 though, of course, it is far from easy to know how much pressure might have been put on individuals by their family or their locality or simply the traditions of their place in the social order. But we know of nothing that prevents people from choosing which deity they turn to for help in different situations, or which associations they joined. What needs to be remembered is that religious freedom in this sense would have required a good deal of knowledge as to the character of different deities and the rules that applied to different cults. We do not know how such knowledge could be accessed or how it was handed on from generation to generation, though it must be certain that it was. The question must arise, for instance, how much knowledge slaves could access and what use they were able to make of their knowledge.33 But at least it seems that Cicero has only limited interest in controlling ritual activities as opposed to the choice of deities.

29

Cic. div. 2.1–7. Cic. div. 2. 50. 31 Discussion of the issues: in Rawson 1973, 342–9; Dyke 2004, 242–5; cf. also Schmidt 1969, 25–8; Powell 2001, 32–9. 32 On this specific point, I fully agree with the arguments of Bendlin 2000. 33 For the extent of slave activity in this sphere see the mass of material collected by Bömer 1981. 30

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There is not much in the de legibus that deals with such matters and what is there is not at all immediately clear: Separatim nemo habessit deos, neve novos neve advenas, nisi publice adscitos; privatim colunto quos rite a patribus . Cicero, de legibus 2.19 cultos acceperint: added by Madvig. Separately from the community, let no-one worship new gods, nor foreign ones unless they have been officially adopted. Privately, let them worship those (gods) that duly by their forefathers.

Cicero’s comment on this clause is at 2.25: Suosque deos aut novos aut alienigenas coli confusionem habet religionum et ignotas caerimonias nostris sacerdotibus. Nam patribus acceptos deos ita placet coli, si huic legi paruerint ipsi patres. That there should be worship of peoples’ own gods or of new ones or of foreign ones, introduces both confusion in modes of worship and also rituals unknown to our priests. For it is appropriate that the gods accepted by the forefathers be worshipped, so long as the forefathers themselves had obeyed this law.

What is apparently being forbidden by this rule is the worship by individual citizens separatim of gods and, presumably, goddesses, unless they had been publicly adopted. That means, I assume, that it is acceptable to worship separatim either traditional Roman deities or those that have been accorded temples, altars, cult or the like and have been in that sense accepted by the priests, the senate, and people, as was true, for example, of the Magna Mater. New or private gods are thus totally excluded; foreign gods, if un-adopted; but apart from these two categories, separate worship is implied to be acceptable and there is no mention of any limitation on the type of worship that might be practised. However, the implication is that the Roman priests must be able to understand and assess the ritual practices involved. Cicero is presumably thinking of vows, dedications, prayers, and gifts, the kinds of individual religious activities massively documented by epigraphy in the imperial period. It is difficult to think that he is being in any way innovative here. Dyke in his commentary 34 argues that the word privatim in the second sentence implies that the first sentence applied to public cult, 34

Dyke 2004, ad loc.

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the second to private cult; but the notion that a public cult could be celebrated separatim is surely quite meaningless. Privatim in any case must surely refer to the sacra privata, that is to the officially recognized sacra undertaken by private individuals on behalf of the community, not what we might mean by a ‘private religion’.35 Publica sacra quae publico sumptu pro populo fiunt, quaeque pro montibus, pagis, curis, sacellis; a priuata quae pro singulis hominibus, familiis, gentibus fiunt. Festus s.v. Publica = 284.18–21 L ‘Public’ sacrifices, those which are made at public expense on behalf of the people, and those on behalf of the mountains, pagi, curiae, and shrines: but ‘private’, those which are made on behalf of single men, families, and gentes.

The issue here is not a matter of status, but of who is to be the beneficiary—cui bono. And none of the activities mentioned are other than part of the communal life of Rome and its family elements. Separatim surely contemplates quite different and independent religious activities by an individual apart from any particular community or group, precisely the kind of activity of which we have a massive record in imperial period inscriptions. What Cicero seems, therefore, to be doing in this passage of the de legibus is recognising implicitly three areas of legitimate religious activity: 1. the public sphere; 2. the private sphere; 3. the separate sphere of an individual worshipping recognised deities; all these are to be subject to some degree of control by the authorities, though in practice, of course, there was little or no mechanism of authority to check up on what individuals did, whether or not the pontifices were notionally responsible. What are we to make of this? What are the implications of publice adscitos? Should we think of this regulation as a statement of the current position in the late republic or was he proposing to introduce new limitations on religious freedom? It seems safe to assume that it would not have occurred to Cicero that acceptable innovation in religious life could arise from activities outside the elite sphere. We know he saw superstition as a danger, that is, not in the terms for which Richard Gordon has recently argued for it as a weapon of the imperializing ruling class.36 But did Cicero think of it as a serious 35

For the sacra privata: Wissowa 1912, 398–402; Scheid 2005, 129–60. Gordon 2008; cf. for a view Gordon rejects, Martin 2004; still fundamental to the analysis of superstitio: Grodzynski 1974. 36

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danger of importing change or rather as a hangover from the illinformed past?

II Private sacra Sacra privata are not private religious activities in our sense, but officially accepted cultic activities that are undertaken not by the public authorities or by the priestly colleges but by specific individuals or families. Festus preserves from the writer on legal distinctions Aelius Gallus, who seems to be knowledgeable about such questions, a set of rulings quoted in the article sacer: Gallus Aelius ait sacrum esse quocumque mo atque instituto ciuitatis consecratum sit, siue aedis siue ara siue signum siue locu siue pecunia siue quid aliud quod dis dedicatum atque consecratum sit: quod autem priuati suae religionis causa aliquid earum rerum deo dedicent, id pontifices Romanos non existimare sacrum. At si qua sacra privata suscepta sunt, quae ex instituto stato die, aut certo loco facienda sint, ea sacra appellari, tamquam sacrificium; ille locus ubi ea sacra priuata facienda sint, uix uidetur sacer esse. quocumque modo F; quodcumque more: Lachmann. Aelius Gallus says that sacrum is whatever is consecrated according to the tradition and institutions of a city, whether a temple or an altar or a statue or a place or money or anything else that has been dedicated and consecrated to the gods; but of those things listed above, he says, that private citizens dedicate to a god out of respect for their own religious obligations, the pontifices at Rome do not accept as sacra; if, however, private sacra are undertaken that must by regulation be performed on a fixed day or at a specific place, these are called sacra, in so far as they constitute a ritual; the place where such private sacra are to be performed does not appear to be sacer. Festus s.v. sacer = 422.26 L

I take it that there are two separate claims implicit here: what needs to be remembered is that Aelius Gallus’ work ‘de significatione verborum quae ad ius civile pertinent’ was naturally preoccupied with the definitions of terms to do with law.37 So what runs through this passage particularly is the question of property and its legal status. The word sacer can, of course, be used both for rituals 37 For the fragments of this work, Bremer 1896, 245–52; Funaioli 1907, 545–54; for discussion of the character of the work: Bona 1990.

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performed for the gods and for property handed over to the gods. In the case of the creation of a temple we know that a magistrate or a specially appointed official formally on behalf of the state gave the property to the gods. In the view I have argued elsewhere, the pontifex who had to be present was there to accept the gift on the god’s behalf.38 It follows that basically the doctrine expounded here is reassuring to the interests of the individual worshipper. He can apparently make dedications of his own and he can, within limits, carry out rituals on his own property; but the effect of this is to create a ritual which is recognized within the system as a sacrum; but his actions do not have the effect of making the place where he carries out the ritual, the property of the god. His own ownership of the property is not threatened and it only the ritual that is sacrum, not the property. The only serious problem here is the meaning of suscepta sunt: there seem to be two possibilities: first, that it simply means undertaken by the person who will perform the sacra in future; secondly, that the word is being used rather in the same sense as Cicero’s adscitos above—that its reference is to the official adoption of a ritual by the pontifices. It is to be remembered in the context that the inherited family sacra, for which an heir was primarily responsible, were well known to have been the responsibility of the pontifices; and these traditional family rituals, which Cicero (de legibus 2.22) rules are to be preserved for ever, are commonly called sacra.39 This would suggest that there was quite a considerable degree of control by the priests over these private cults, but also apparently considerable freedom for the individual as long as he stayed within very broad guidelines. The overall effect of the pontifical ruling, therefore, is to enable individuals to conduct a wide range of religious transactions without threatening the legal status of their property.

SUPERSTITION AS DISGUISE So far I have been trying to define and locate the space that an individual, citizen or not, might have had for the expression of his/her own 38

North 2008, 27–30. For Cicero’s critique of the pontifices in relation to these rules (de legibus 2. 46–53), see Fontanella 1996, 254–60; Dyke 2004. 39

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religious preferences or ideas and hence of his/her capacity to innovate without attracting undue hostility. There is at least one text, preserved only by a hostile Christian source, which gives us a picture of religious activity of a kind not at all familiar from other surviving sources: Huic tamen – inquit – furori certum tempus est; tolerabile est semel anno insanire. In Capitolium perveni: pudebit publicatae dementiae, quod sibi vanus furor adtribuit officii. Alius nomina deo subicit, alius horas Iovi nuntiat, alius lictor est, alius unctor, qui vano motu bracchiorum imitator unguentem. Sunt quae Iunoni et Minervae capillos disponant (longe a templo, non tantum a simulacro, stantes digitos movent ornantium modo) sunt quae speculum teneant. sunt qui ad vadimonia sua deos advocent, sunt qui libellos offerant et illos causam suam doceant. Doctus archimimus, senex iam decrepitus, cotidie in Capitolio mimum agebat, quasi dii libenter spectarent quem homines desierant. Omne illic artificum genus operatum diis immortalibus desidet. Seneca, de supertstitionibus Fgt.69 Vottero = 35–6 Haase Hi tamen – inquit – etiam si supervacuum usum, non turpem nec infamem deo promittunt. Sedent quaedam in Capitolio quae se a Iove amari putant: ne Iunonis quidem , si credere poetis velis, iracundissimae respectu terrentur. Seneca, de supertstitionibus Fgt. 70 Vottero = 37 Haase At least (says Seneca) there is a fixed term to this madness; it is reasonable to go demented once a year. You go up on the Capitol and you will feel ashamed at the lunacies put on for the public, perceived as obligations by vacuous lunacy. One person announces peoples’ names to Iuppiter; another tells him the time; one acts as his lictor; another as his masseur, who mimes the movements of oiling with his hands and arms. There are women to fix Iuno and Minerva’s hairdos (they stand far away from the temple, not just from the statues, and move their fingers in the style of hairdressers); others hold up the mirror. There are some who call on the gods for their bail-money; some show their writs and explain the defence they’re using. There used to be a very old decrepit but experienced pantomime artist who performed his act on the Capitol every day as though the gods would be happy to watch him when his human audiences had stopped coming. This whole tribe of workers are sitting there in utter devotion to the immortal gods. But these (he goes on), are offering services to the god which, however useless, are at least not indecent or dishonourable. Some of the women who sit on the Capitol are those who think that they are beloved of Iuppiter, totally undeterred by fear of Iuno’s (if you trust the poets) violent fury.

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Two immediate points can be made about this text. First, the notion of superstitio may here be itself acting as a disguise for religious change; at least, if we can show that what is described was behaviour becoming widespread in the Roman world in the imperial period, then it will be clear that the notion of superstition is being used both as an explanation and, because of the implication of triviality, also as a concealment of significant developments. Secondly, if this is evidence of change, the change in question cannot possibly be interpreted either as a move against the worship of images or against polytheism: in a sense this is a vigorous popular re-assertion of traditional pagan values. Notice also here that the activities in question would fit perfectly well with Cicero’s classification of what was acceptable—that it is all directed to the most Roman of Roman deities.40 Both Seneca—in so far as we can reconstruct him from the use Augustine is obviously making of him—and Augustine himself treat the activities of these working persons with the contempt one might expect of them. Of course, they are making different points: Seneca is criticising an excess of enthusiasm, but also implying the irrationality of the basic religious activity; he is against both what Cicero would have called superstitio and what he would have called religio. The boundaries between the two are, as always, shifting and contested. Augustine on the other hand is looking to Seneca for material he can use against pagan practices as such, not quite what Seneca meant to offer. As usual, as long as he can find criticism, it does not matter whether this was originally aimed at specific practices or at all pagan religion. Either will do for his purposes, but his purposes are not ours. There is another way to look at these texts: the essence of the activity Seneca is describing consists in going to a sacred site adjacent to, but not inside, a temple; carrying out ritual activities by mime at a distance from the actual images on which the activity is focused; and expressing devotion and hope in a far more direct and emotional way than seems to have been traditional at least in official contexts previously. It is precisely the emotional commitment to the power of the gods (today, you might call it simple faith) that arouses the contempt of the philosophical commentator. Particularly striking in

40

See above 67–71.

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this regard is the story of the elderly mime artist, hoping that the gods will value his efforts when nobody else will.41 But this passage only becomes significant for the argument of this chapter if it can be shown that the practices described by Seneca are (a) widespread and (b) different from anything that had gone before. This is more or less the thesis that Paul Veyne has been arguing for some years.42 His view, influenced by those of Boissier, is that various changes in pagan practice, particularly sitting in temples and regularly saluting the gods, imply a new attitude towards the relations of humans and gods, marked by a greater degree of reflection and personal involvement than previously accepted. Particularly important in making the connection between the fragment of Seneca and the other evidence collected by Veyne is the wording of the last phrase: the despised tribe of workers sit on the Capitol devoting themselves to work (operatum) on behalf of the immortal gods: Omne illic artificum genus operatum diis immortalibus desidet. In support of Veyne’s thesis, it seems clear that the evidence of inscriptions can also be deployed to show individuals who give expression to their own ideas about the gods. One clear example (to be cited by Nicholas Purcell in a forthcoming paper) would be the dedication to Venus Proba from Cumae (ILS 3170). Whatever the precise words mean, this inscription must imply thoughtfulness and originality: he ascribes to Venus illustricenare opus, which must imply that he saw her as having the power to illuminate the animae of her worshippers. But many more inscriptions refer, in a coded way, to the personal religious experience of the dedicant.43 Recent studies have also shown how particular areas can yield striking evidence of new religious modes of behaviour; as in the case of the inscriptions from Anatolia in which the power of the gods is advertised through a narrative of the dedicant’s own misdeeds and redemption.44 Or again the group of second and 41 On the passage in general Estienne 2001; Estienne 2006. For Greek parallels to the worship by artists, see Robert 1938, 21, 37–8, 41, 42. 42 Veyne 1985; Veyne 1986; Veyne 1989; cf. Veyne 2005, esp. 517–27; also see Boissier 1909, 335–403. 43 The formulae used vary a good deal, but the claim to having divine authority is quite common; so, to take examples from ILS: ex visu 3005, 3006, 3007, 3168, 3274, 3392, 3503, 3542; somno monitus 3019; ex praecepto 3051; ex iussu 3160; 3263; imperio 3534, 3659; monitu 3229, 3339. For compos sortis see above note on the slave Nothus; for Jupiter Dolichenus below n. 45. See further Veyne 1986. 44 Publication by Petzl 1994; for the interpretation followed here: Belayche 2006 (with further bibliography); Belayche 2008.

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third-century ce inscriptions connected with an Aventine cult-centre of the Syrian-derived cult of Iuppiter Dolichenus seems to imply a changing relationship between deity and worshippers. Dedications, including those to other gods and goddesses, are almost all made at the behest of Iuppiter Dolichenus himself and the ritual is conducted through the mediation of a priest (per sacerdotem); furthermore, religious roles within the community are allocated by the deity himself (quos elexit sibi servire).45 A rather charming, and illuminating, example of what must reflect the same tendency is provided by a dedicatory inscription by the owner of a vineyard on the Adriatic island of Issa (or Lissa): I O M Aug. sacrum C. Valius Festus conditor vineae huius loci, qui nunc Valianus Festo dicitur, aeternumque tenet per saecula nomen. Voto succepto, aram adampliavit et tauro immolando dedicavit. CIL 3.6423 C. Valius Festus the founder of the vineyard of this place, which is now called Valianus after Festus, and will keep the name forever through the centuries. In discharging a vow, he increased the size of the altar and dedicated it with the sacrifice of a bull.

So here we have the owner of a vineyard who terms himself a ‘founder’ and declares the locality named after him in perpetuity, as he spends money on the adorning and re-dedication of Iuppiter’s altar. To cap it all, he inserts his own name in place of the hero Misenus and incorporates himself into Virgil’s lines: qui nunc Misenus ab illo dicitur, aeternumque tenet per saecula nomen Aen. 6.234–5

This Festus clearly had some resources at his disposal, and can hardly have been a member of the lower order of society; on the other hand his main achievement was evidently the creation of a vineyard, which he celebrates by associating it with his restoration of the Iuppiter cult. This is an interesting instance of an individual, who must have been of non-elite status, using a religious dedication as a 45 For the documents of the cult, see Hörig and Schwertheim 1987; for a heroic attempt to disentangle the cult’s hierarchy, see Rüpke 2005, 1537–46 = Rüpke 2008, 51–6. For the cults of Eastern origin in general Bonnet et al. 2006.

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vehicle for the expression of his own feelings, in this case pride in his achievements. The next step towards the testing of this idea ought to be a thorough and methodical investigation of the very large numbers of inscriptions of the imperial period that prima facie record individual religious vows, gifts and dedications often with some indication of the circumstances in which the decision was taken. This would constitute a search for individuality of religious expression and creativity in the religious sphere in the records of all classes, including the slaves. Of course, there would be much need for care in so far as the man or woman whose name appears on the record can never be assumed to be acting entirely alone and may have had the full support of family, locality, an association, or the local priests. But in a sense that point does no more than re-ask the familiar question about whether human agents can ever be thought to act alone. The results of the search would still have their validity. As a very provisional conclusion, we might suggest that this period saw a rise in religious self-expression at the individual level within pagan communities, without attracting resistance, so far as we can tell.

REFLECTIONS ON METHOD Before this line of argument, attractive though it is, can be accepted as altogether soundly based, there are difficulties that need to be measured and reckoned with. First, there are problems about the specific practices that have been thought to suggest an increasing degree of enthusiasm or reflectiveness compared to the republican past. The trouble here is that we have so little specific information about personal activity in the earlier periods of Roman religious experience. So the case may rest on the claim of finding change, when there is in fact only a change in the type of evidence that has reached us. John Scheid has given a rather convincing warning about this kind of delusory diagnosis of change.46 It may be, in a sense, the unintended consequence of the assertion that Roman religion was essentially based on ritual, not belief.47 That claim was never in my view

46

Scheid 1998a.

47

See e.g. Scheid 2005.

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intended to imply that there was a shortage of other forms of mental activity around the gods and the means of communication with them— feeling, speculation, imagination, argument, and so on.48 The contention was only that beliefs as such were not made explicit, professed or made into the object of coercion by others. But this position has all too often been misinterpreted to mean that religion was all action and no thought. Hence any sign of mental activity or originality by individuals has been interpreted as if it were evidence of change from this inert past state.49 Let us, however, at least for the sake of argument, assume that any such difficulties can be resolved and that there can be secure proof of individual innovations and initiative in the religious sphere. The question then arises of whether we can move from having proof of change, generated within the pagan tradition in the way that has been suggested, to interpreting these changes as constituting an increase of ‘religious individuality’ in the course of the Roman empire. The problem here seems to me to be that individuality must be understood as a derivative conception, ultimately dependent on the notion of ‘identity’ and therefore must share in the well-discussed ambiguity of that term.50 Religious identity as an element of social identity (i.e. essentially connected with the membership of strongly differentiated religious groups) we might call ‘identity type 1’; the development of a sense of self and oneself as a religious agent as ‘identity type 2’.51 There must presumably be links between the two types of identity, but it is not at all clear what such links would be; in the meantime it seems an essential precaution to maintain the differentiation. One might presumably argue that pagan life was evolving in the direction of independent religious action and the development of a new awareness of religious experience (linked with identity 2), in a period before the development of the kind of competition between

48 Though see now Versnel 2011, 539–59, who so interprets and attacks the original position of Simon Price; I do not recognize the position so attacked, but certainly agree with Versnel that it would be indefensible. 49 For the so-called civic model of religion and its implications, see Woolf 1997; Bendlin 2000; Ando 2008. 50 e.g. Gleason 1983, with a useful history of the conception; Brubaker and Cooper 2000; Stachel 2005. 51 The two types correspond to, but are not identical with, Dumont’s distinction between the individual within society and the individual outside society. Dumont 1983; cf. Vernant 1987.

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religious groups that we can see developing by the fourth century ce, which must surely be linked to ‘identity 1’. Or one might argue the reverse—that an independently religious sense of self could only have developed after the phenomenon of group membership and change of membership had become socially understood. There can be no reasonable doubt, in my view, that religious identity, if it could be said to have existed at all in the pagan world as it was in the centuries bce, was entirely embedded in other forms of political, social, and ethnic identity. By the fourth century, this was no longer true: you could describe yourself as (for example) a Roman citizen, a parent, a reader of poetry, and also a Christian or a pagan, all relating to groups of different kinds of which you were a member.52 But this development must primarily be cast in terms of identity type 1. We may take the view that such a development could not have happened at all unless radical changes were already taking place in the quality of the individual’s religious experience; or we might argue that the coming into existence of a set of rival religious groups was a necessary precondition for changing the individual’s religious experience. Either way it is crucially important to consider the whole religious situation together, not the different groups separately, and to keep the two types of identity conceptually distinct, while recognising that they must inter-connect in some way. But the concept of individuality must not be allowed to beg the question of how the two types of identity should be understood and distinguished. If there was any relationship between the new interest in the self in the later Roman empire53 and the kind of slow, individual changes in pagan practice that I have been trying to explore in this paper, then the connection is not yet at all evident. They may very well both be parts of a single historical development, but it does not seem to me that we are yet in a position to assert that with any confidence. To sum up, the general line I have been trying to explore in this paper seems to me a hopeful and potentially very important line of research. I quite see that it can reasonably form part of the very interesting project that is under discussion in this volume. I also see that the range of issues evoked by the idea of individualization needs to be used effectively so as to guide and enlighten the study of the different issues that arise. The conception may well turn out to 52 53

Cf. in general, North 1992; Belayche and Mimouni 2003. See, e.g. Stroumsa 2005a; Stroumsa 2005b.

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provide us with a means of understanding the religious transformations of this period far superior to anything we have at the moment. But it will surely only do so if historians can make use of the conception of the ‘history of the individual’ without being trapped in the toils of its multiple complexities.

R E F E R E NC E S Ando, Clifford 2008. The Matter of the Gods: Religion and the Roman Empire. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Beard, Mary, North, John, and Price, Simon 1998. Religions of Rome. 2 vols. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Belayche, Nicole and Mimouni, Simon (eds) 2003. Les communautés religieuses dan le monde gréco-romain: essai de définition. Bibliotèque de l’Ê´cole des Hautes Ê´tudes: Sciences Religieuses 117. Turnhout: Brepols. —— 2006. ‘Les stèles dites de confession: une religiosité originale dans l’Anatolie imperial’, in Blois, Lukas de, Funke, Peter, and Hahn, Johannes (eds), The Impact of Imperial Rome on Religions, Ritual and Religious Life in the Roman Empire. Leiden: Brill, 66–81. —— 2008. ‘Du texte à l’image: les reliefs sur les stèles de confession de l’Anatolie’, in Estienne, Sylvia et al. Image at religion dans l’Antiquité Greco-romaine. Collection du Centre Jean Bérard, 28. Naples: École française d’Athènes, 181–93. Bendlin, Andreas 2000. ‘Looking Beyond the Civic Compromise: Religious Pluralism in Late Republican Rome’, in Bispham, Edward, and Smith, Christopher (eds), Religion in Archaic and Republican Rome and Italy. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 115–35. Berneder, Helmut 2004. Magna Mater-Kult und Sibyllinen: Kulttransfer und annalistische Geschichtsfiktion. Innsbruck: Universität Innsbruck Institut für Sprachen und Literaturen. Bernstein, Frank 1998. Ludi Publici: Untersuchungen zur Entstehung und Entwicklung der öffentlichen Spiele in republikanischen Rom. Historia Einzelschriften 119. Stuttgart: Steiner. Bömer, Franz 1981. Untersuchungen über die Religion der Sklaven in Griechenland und Rom. Teil 1 (Die wichtigsten Kulte und Religionen in Rom und in lateinischen Westen). Forschungen zur Antiken Sklaverei 14.1. (First edn Wiesbaden: Steiner, 1957). Second expanded edn with Peter Herz. Wiesbaden: Steiner. Boissier, Gaston 1909. Religion romaine d’Auguste aux Antonins. 7th edn. Paris: Hachette. (1st edn, 1874).

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Bona, Ferdinando 1990. ‘Alla ricerca del “De verborum, quae ad ius civile pertinent, significatione’ ” di C. Elio Gallo’, Bullettino dell’Istituto di diritto romano 90, 119–68. Bonnet, Corinne, Rüpke, Jörg, and Scarpi, Paolo 2006. Religions orientales— culti misterici: neue Perspectiven—nouvelles perspectives—prospettive nuove. PAwB 16. Stuttgart: Steiner. Bremer, Franz 1896. Iurisprudentiae antehadraianae quae supersunt, vol. 1. Leipzig: Teubner. Briscoe, John 1973. Commentary on Livy Books XXXI-XXXIII. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Brubaker, Rogers and Cooper, Frederick 2000. ‘Beyond ‘Identity’, Theory and Society 29.1, 1–47. Coarelli, Filippo 1999. ‘Tarentum’, in Steinby, Eva Margareta (ed.), Lexicon Topographicum Urbis Romae. 5 vols, Rome: Edizioni Quasar (1993–9), 20–2. Davies, Jason 2004. Rome’s Religious History: Livy, Tacitus and Ammianus on their Gods. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Diels, Hermann 1890. Sibyllinische Blätter. Berlin: Reimer. Drummond, Andrew 2008. ‘The Ban on Gentiles Holding the Same Priesthood and Sulla’s Augurate”, Historia 57, 367–405. Dumont, Louis 1983. Essais sur l’individualisme: une perspective antropologique sur l’idéologie modern, Paris: Editions du Seuil (English trans. as Essays on Individualism. Chicago, 1986). Dyke, Andrew 2004. A Commentary on Cicero, De Legibus. Ann Arbor. MI: University of Michigan Press. Estienne, Sylvia 2001. ‘Les ‘dévots’ du Capitole. Le “culte des images” dans la Rome impériale, entre rites et superstition’, MEFR 113.1, 189–210. —— 2006. ‘Images et culte: pratiques “romaines”, influences “orientales”, in Bonnet, Corinne et al. (eds), Religions orientales—culti misterici: neue Perspectiven—nouvelles perspectives—prospettive nuove. PAwB 16. Stuttgart: Steiner. Fiori, Roberto 1996. Homo Sacer: dinamica politico-constituzionale di una sanzione giuridico-religiosa. Pubblicazioni dell’Istituto di diritto Romano e dei diritti dell’ Oriente Mediterrane, 72. Naples: Jovene. Fontanella, Francisca 1996. ‘Ius pontificium, ius civile e ius naturae in de legibus II, 45–53’, Athenaeum 84, 254–60. Fraschetti, Augusto 1981. ‘Le sepolture rituali del Foro Boario’, in Le délit religieux dans la cite antique. Collection de l’École française de Rome 48. Rome: École française de Rome. Funaioli, Gino 1907. Grammaticae Romanae Fragmenta. Leipzig: Teubner. Gleason, Philip 1983. ‘Identifying Identity: A Semantic History’, Journal of American History 69, 910–31, reprinted in Sollors, Werner (ed.), Theories of Ethnicity, a Classical Reader, New York 1996, 460–87.

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Glinister, Fay and Woods, Clare (eds) 2007. Verrius, Festus and Paul. BICS, Supp. 93. London: Institute of Classical Studies. Gordon, Richard 2008. ‘Superstitio, Superstition and Religious Repression in the late Roman Republic and Principate’, in Smith, Stephen A. and Knight, Alan (eds), The Religion of Fools? Superstition Past and Present. P & P Supplement 3. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 72–94. Grodzynski, Denise 1974. ‘Superstitio’, REA 76, 36–60. Guarducci, Margherita 1946/48. ‘Tre cippi Latini arcaici con iscrizioni votive’, Bulletino Comunale 72, 3–10. Guizzi, Francesco 1968. Aspetti giurinici del sacerdozio Romano. Naples: Jovene. Hörig, Monika and Schwertheim, Elmar 1987. Corpus cultus Iovis Dolicheni. EPRO 106. Leiden: Brill. Latte, Kurt 1960. Römische Religionsgeschichte. Müller’s Handbuch der Altertumswissenschaft. 5.4. Munich: Beck. MacBain, Bruce 1982. Prodigy and Expiation: a Study in Religion and Politics in Republican Rome. Collection Latomus 177. Brussels: Latomus. Martin, Dale 2004. Inventing Superstition: from the Hippocratics to the Christians. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. North, John 1976. ‘Conservatism and Change in Roman Religion’, PBSR 44, 1–12. —— 1992. ‘The Development of Religious Pluralism’, in Lieu, Judith, North, John, and Rajak, Tessa (eds), The Jews among Pagans and Christians. London: Routledge, 174–93. —— 2000. ‘Prophet and Text in the third century bc’, in Bispham, Edward, and Smith, Christopher (eds), Religion in Archaic and Republican Rome and Italy. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 92–107. —— 2008. ‘Action and Ritual in Roman Historians: or how Horatius held the Doorpost’, in Rasmussen, Anders and Rasmussen, Susanne (eds), Religion and Society: Rituals, Resources and Identity in the Ancient Graeco-Roman World. Rome: Quasar, 23–36. ——2011. ‘Lex Domitia revisited’, in Richardson, James and Santangelo, Federico (eds), Priests and State in the Roman World. PAwB 33. Stuttgart: Steiner, 39–61. Palmer, Robert 1974. ‘The Gods of the Grove Albunea’, in Roman Religion and Roman Empire. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 79–171. Parke, Herbert 1988. Sibyls and Sibylline Prophecy in Classical Antiquity. London: Routledge. Petzl, Georg 1994. Die Beichtinschriften Westkleinasiens. Epigraphica Anatolica 22. Opladen: Westdeutscher Verlag. Pighi, Giovanni 1965. De Ludis Saecularibus populi Romani Quiritium, 2nd edn, Amsterdam: Schippers.

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Powell, Jonathan 2001. ‘Were Cicero’s Laws the Laws of Cicero’s Republic?’, in Powell, Jonathan, and North, John (eds), Cicero’s Republic. BICS Supplement 76. London: Institute of Classical Studies, 17–39. Radke, Gerhard 1963. s.v. ‘Quindecimviri’, RE XXIV, cols. 1114–48. Rappaport, Roy 1999. Ritual and Religion in the Making of Humanity. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Rawson, Elizabeth 1973. ‘The interpretation of Cicero’s de legibus’, in Temporini, Hildegard (ed.), Aufstieg und Niedergang der Römischen Welt, 1.4. Berlin: de Gruyter, 334–56, reprinted in Temporini, Hildegard, Roman Culture and Society. Oxford: Oxford University Press 1991, 125–48. Robert, Louis 1938. ‘Fêtes, musiciens et athletes’, in Études épigraphiqies et philologiques. Paris: Champion, 7–112. Rüpke, Jörg 1996. ‘Innovationsmechanismen kultischer Religion: Sakralrecht im Rom der Republik’, in Cancik, Hubert, Lichtenberger, Hermann, and Schäfer, Peter (eds), Geschichte—Tradition—Reflexion: Festschrift für M. Hengel, vol. 2. Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 265–85. —— 2005. Fasti Sacerdotum: die Mitglieder der Priesterschaften und das sakrale Funktionspersonal römischer, griechischer und jüdisch-christlicher Kulte in der Stadt Rom von 300 v. Chr. Bis 499 n. Chr. Teil 3 Quellenkunde und Organisationsgeschichte. PAwB 12.3. Stuttgart: Steiner. —— 2008. Fasti Sacerdotum: a Prosopography of Pagan, Jewish and Christian Religious Officials in the City of Rome, 300 bc to ad 499. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Scheid, John 1998a. ‘Nouveau rite et nouvelle piété: réflexions sur le ritus Graecus’, in Graf, Fritz (ed.), Ansichten griechischer Ritual, für Walter Burkert. Stuttgart: Teubner, 168–82. —— 1998b. ‘Les livres Sibyllins et les archives des Quindécemvirs’, in La mémoire perdue: recherches sur l’administration romaine. CEFR 243. Rome: École française de Rome, 11–26. —— 2005. Quand faire, c’est croire: les rites sacrificiels des Romains, Paris: Flammarion. —— and Svenbro, Jesper 1996. The Craft of Zeus: Myths of Weaving and Fabric. (Eng. tr. of Le métier de Zeus (1994)) Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Schmidt, Peter 1969. Die Abfassungszeit von Cicero’s Schrift über die Gesetze. Collana di Studi Ciceroniani 4. Rome: Centro di Studi Ciceroniani. Schnegg-Köhler, Bärbel 2002. Die augusteischen Sakularspiele. Archiv für Religionsgeschichte 4. Munich: Saur. Stachel, Peter 2005. ‘Identität: Genese, Inflation und Probleme eines für die zeitgenössischen Sozial- und Kulturwissenschaften zentralen Begriffs’, Archiv für Kulturgeschichte 87.2, 395–425. Stroumsa, Guy 2005a. ‘From Master of Wisdom to Spiritual Master in Late Antiquity’, in Brakke, David, Satlow, Michael, and Weitzman, Steven

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(eds), Religion and the Self in Antiquity. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press. Stroumsa, Guy 2005b. La fin du sacrifice: les mutations religieuses de l’Antiquité tardive. Paris: Odile Jacob. Vernant, Jean-Pierre 1987. ‘L’individu dans la cite’, in Veyne, Paul (ed.), Sur l’individu. Paris: Ê´ditions du Seuil, 20–37. Versnel, Hendrik S. 2011. Coping with the Gods: Wayward Readings in Greek Theology. RGRW 173. Leiden: Brill. Veyne, Paul 1986. ‘Une évolution du paganisme gréco-romain: injustice et piété des dieux, leurs ordres ou “oracles” ’, Latomus 45, 259–83, reprinted as, La Société romaine (tr. of Societa Romana (1990)). Paris: Éditions du Seuil 1991, 281–310. —— 1985. ‘Les saluts aux dieux, le voyage de cette vie et la “reception” en iconographie’, Revue Archéologique, 47–61. —— 1989. ‘S’asseoir auprès des dieux, fréquenter les temples’, Revue de philologie 63, 75–94. —— 2005. L’Empire gréco-romain. Paris: Éditions du Seuil. Vottero, Dionigi (ed.) 1998. Seneca, Frammenti. Bologna: Patron Editore. Weinstock, Stefan 1960. ‘Two Archaic Inscriptions from Latium’, JRS 50, 112–18. —— 1971. Divus Julius. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Weiss, Peter 1973. ‘Die “Säkularspiele” der Republik—eine Annalistische Fiktion? Ein Beitrag zum Verstandnis des kaiserzeitlichen Ludi Saeclares’, MDAI (R) 80, 205–17. Wildfang, Robin 2006. Rome’s Vestal Virgins: A Study of Rome’s Vestal Priestesses in the Late Republic and Early Empire. London: Routledge. Wissowa, Georg 1912. Religion und Kultus der Römer. Müller’s Handbuch der Altertumswissenschaft. 5.4. 2nd edn, Munich: Beck. Woolf, Greg 1997. ‘Polis-Religion and its Alternatives in the Roman Provinces’, in: Cancik, Hubert and Rüpke, Jörg (eds), Römische Reichsreligion und Provinzialreligion. Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 71–84, reprinted in Ando, Clifford (ed.), Roman Religion. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2003, 39–54.

4 Subjects, Gods, and Empire, or Monarchism as a Theological Problem Clifford Ando

Let me start by outlining what seem to me two problems of theory in much contemporary scholarship on religion of the high Roman empire. The first is perhaps best described as normative, the second conceptual. To begin, an almost universal ambition, indeed, often an explicit one, of most recent grand theories of religion in the Roman empire has been to correct or at the very least to set aside such frameworks as once produced triumphalist narratives of the rise and inevitable victory of Christianity. (A more appropriate goal might have been to shift the units of analysis altogether—to ask, in other words, what entitles us to speak of plural ‘religions’ and to understand them as historically autonomous and thus in competition in the first place.)1 But the fact remains that the Mediterranean world did convert, which is to say that inter alia it converted to a vision of religion in which conversion was meaningful, and this fact remains a great explanandum in the field. I designate this problem normative because it seems to me often to arise from a concern to avoid teleology not simply on intellectual grounds—in order not to presume that which must in fact be explained—but also, or even exclusively, from anxieties that might best be described as post-colonial: accepting the dubious contention that Christianity and contemporary paganisms were autonomous

1

For a related argument see Rüpke 2010.

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cultural formations martially opposed to one another (not least in their pantheons), we have decided to reject not only Christian historiography’s diagnosis of its own success but likewise its judgement in respect to paganism’s failings. But this collusion to regard Greek and Roman paganism (that’s a disjunctive ‘and’, by the way) as neither bankrupt nor dying has, for reasons hard to discern, been extended, such that scholars frequently insist ‘paganism’ or polytheism or the civic cults or the oracles or what have you were not simply flourishing, but flourishing even as before: indeed, we are often told that they simply persisted.2 In the new dispensation, paganism—meaning especially but not exclusively the locative civic and regional cults of the Roman empire—has become a religion without history. (I will take up below the utility of the terms ‘locative’ and ‘utopian,’ as well as the cogency of the distinction they map.) The second problem of theory affecting much contemporary scholarship arises from the very success of the dominant models of Greek and Roman civic religion of the last few decades. The two most prominent—that of ‘polis religion’ on the Greek side, and ‘the civic compromise’ on the Roman—share with their various revisions and rivals a tendency implicitly or explicitly to understand religious life as embedded within larger political or cultural formations.3 On this view, the traditional cults of Greek and Roman cities were ordered by principles homologous to those that organized their dominant political and cultural institutions and indeed were not conceptualized as distinct from them. The adherence of individuals to such cults was then assumed to follow upon local structures of political belonging: as cities each had their own gods, so citizens worshipped the gods of their cities. As scholars have begun over the last decade or so to argue, however useful these models have been, their explanatory power is limited in a number of respects. Two concerns of this critical literature are relevant to my argument today. First, models of religion as embedded assume a quite distinctive and potentially misleading form of subjectivity, which assigns to individuals imaginative and psychological horizons coterminous with those imputed to them by the politicaleconomic regime rendered visible in textual and epigraphic evidence. 2

See e.g. Rousselle 1997, 11–19. Nongbri 2008. See also Bendlin 1997; Bendlin 2000; Bendlin 2001; and Ando 2013a. 3

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As a result, they generally fail to account for any religious activity not consequent upon membership in a polity: they have therefore been indicted for failing to explain magic or incubation or private votives, or for that matter the differential contents of household shrines.4 The second difficulty with contemporary models of civic religion has been most cogently articulated by Jonathan Z. Smith. As he demonstrated now two decades ago, no simple developmental argument can account for the existence of cults with complex institutional structures unrelated to those of the polis, nor, it would seem, for the adherence of individuals to such cults.5 It furthermore bears stressing in this context that Smith explicitly maintained on both theoretical and empirical grounds that his taxonomy was not a mask or cipher for some earlier distinction between Greco-Roman and oriental/mystery cults. On the contrary, he argued that many so-called mystery cults should in their late Hellenistic forms be understood as locative in orientation; and that several, including those of Attis and Christ, show signs in the Roman period of a gradual reinterpretation from a locative to a utopian view.6 Although susceptible to independent articulation, these two difficulties—the one anti-teleological but issuing in anti-historical thinking; the other arising from models whose fit to the data gradually diminishes, which fact the models themselves naturally cannot explain—operate together to handicap much research. For where the one encourages us to see the religions of the high empire in timeless persistence, the other is capable of seeing only them. The results are historical perspectives of an astonishing and insistent stasis: this is so, it seems to me, despite quite extraordinary advances in various forms of particularist and empirical inquiry. But whatever the fluctuations in the technologies of cult or ebb and flow in the popularity of particular gods these researches reveal, what our fear of teleology will apparently not permit us to say is that religion in the Roman empire has a history; that one religion, armed not least with a polemical understanding of what religion is, sought successfully to eradicate its peers; but that its victory must have had deep historical roots existing in intricate connection to precisely the disembedding of 4 Woolf 1997, ‘Polis-religion and its alternatives in the Roman provinces’, reprinted in Ando 2003; Bendlin 1997; Ando 2009b. 5 Smith 1990. 6 Smith 1990. 85–143.

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religion to which Smith drew our attention; and that among those roots, the failure of the civic compromise looms large. For though the Romans discovered that they, too, had a religion, it was for complex reasons not easily exported. On the contrary, rather startlingly a Reichsreligion did not form part of that national culture that the project of empire sought to universalize among first the residents and later the citizens of the pre-Decianic empire.7 What we find instead is, for a time, a landscape of increasing complexity, in which an evolving political economic reality and vastly heightened human mobility brought previously isolated cultural systems into ever more contact with each other. One result was the spread of cults, at first located within immigrant populations; and secondarily the articulation of new forms of religious identity, as religion became one among several cultural forms that united the members of those communities in contradistinction to the populations among whom they resided.8 That is to say, if the religions of Greek poleis and Roman civitates were of and for their citizen bodies, the period of the empire witnessed staggering growth in the number and assertiveness of communities of resident aliens, and religion played a prominent role in their constitution.9 Not surprisingly, the earliest, largely abortive attempts by imperial Greek and Latin writers to describe communities embedded within civitates, but having independent cultic associations, find articulation when those writers confront the radically deracinated slave population of Rome: the language of Cassius Longinus in Tacitus, Ann. 14, to the effect that Roman households contained nationes in families . . . in quibus diuersi ritus, externa sacra aut nulla sunt, ‘entire nations of slaves, 7 On the ‘discovery of Roman religion’, see Ando 2000, 206–9, 385–98; see also Ando 2008a, 1–3, 105–8, 95–148, and Ando 2012. I have recently devoted several chapters and essays to problems attendant upon Roman efforts to accommodate their civic cult to the context of empire, as well as to modern ways of theorizing their failure: see esp. Ando 2007; Ando 2008a; Ando 2008b; and Ando 2009a. For related studies of the disembedding of religious identity see Schwartz 2001 and Boyarin 2004. Miller 2007 offers a helpful review of their work and the response it has provoked. Regarding the transfer or reduplication of cults on a more general level, see the case studies and cautionary remarks in Chaniotis 2005. 8 Such a view of the religious history of the ancient Mediterranean in the early imperial period is perhaps still most cogently articulated in John North’s (justly famous) essay, ‘The development of religious pluralism’, (North 1992); see also Bendlin 2000. 9 On this topic see for now Belayche, Mimouni 2003, see also Cracco Ruggini 1980; MacMullen 1993; Belayche 2007; and Compatangelo-Soussignan and Schwentzel 2007.

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practising diverse cults and foreign rites, or none at all’, is perhaps the most famous of these (Tacitus Ann. 14.44.3). Such slaves existed as persons and property before the law, and were known to adhere to cults as individuals and within communities, but neither the slaves themselves nor their communities were understood as political. Their religious identity—their religion—had therefore of necessity to be disarticulated from any recognizable form of poliadic or republican jural-political identity and might have been theorized as such, if only they had been worth thinking about. What is more, it is likely that it was precisely the dislocation of cults that had been in their original context locative that permitted, or at least promoted, their reinterpretation in terms Smith calls ‘utopian’ in the high empire. Mutatis mutandis, even Roman cults in new contexts, divorced from sites to which purely Roman myths attached them, must have taken on new meanings now lost to us. But this aspect of the religious history of the empire will elude us, so long as it is mere plurality, whether of gods or religions, by which we index the state of affairs.10 Paradoxically, the adoption of such indices is perhaps the most significant practice religious studies owes to Christian late antiquity; and yet it is precisely Christian late antiquity that this tradition cannot explain.11

EFFECTS OF EMPIRE The cul-de-sac in which we now find ourselves is not, however, a necessary endpoint to contemporary narrative. On the contrary, it is, I argue, precisely modern understandings of Graeco-Roman religion as embedded and locative, as both homologous to, and consonant

10 On the history of plurality as an index, and the question how and when gods became the foci of separate ‘religions,’ see Ando 2012. 11 In other words, it was Christians (and Jews) in late antiquity who polemically assigned the multiplicity of gods and cults in their world to a collective paganism, and our tendency to write histories of religion by counting gods or enumerating cults, or itemizing cult practices, is in part a legacy of this tradition. But Christian polemicists developed this way of talking about religion precisely to assert the radical otherness of Christianity to its context. It is therefore no wonder, quite apart from our fear of teleology, that the heuristic tools traditional in the history of Mediterranean religion fail to bridge the gap between (say) the late second and late fourth centuries.

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with, the ordering principles and institutional arrangements of the societies that animated them, which can open the door to a more robust analysis of change, to ways of understanding the history of religion under the empire as, at least in part, an effect of empire. Simply put, integration into the Roman empire placed enormous stress on the particularized conceptions of order and of the self that governed material social relations in the communities it absorbed, and indeed in Rome itself. One side of the homology changed. Did religion not respond? On this view, Smith’s insight regarding the locative origins of utopian cults does not so much provide an answer as provoke a question. In what follows, I wish to sketch what seem to me salient effects of imperial rule on the structures of communal life, which will have challenged the capacity of traditional civic and regional cults, in respect of their verbal, gestural, material, and cognitive components, to emplace the world. In particular, I want to suggest that the workings of imperial government, in promoting greater mobility and riving communities and individuals, one from another, by means of administrative law, effectively atomized individuals in respect to their immediate political and social contexts. In so doing, the empire abetted the creation of new and distinctive forms of subjectivity, east and west. Up to a point, these tectonic changes provoked homeomorphic responses in the domain of religion, not least in theological discourse. But only to a point, for even as those processes unfolded, I argue, the ability of cult and the theologies it reified to give cogent, substantial, and enduring articulation to the horizons of daily life gradually collapsed. Here at last, the correlates between the radical alienism of the slave and the deracinated cosmopolitanism of the imperial citizen are made visible. Roman practice in provincial governance in the conquest and immediate post-conquest period is well-described in light of two modern theories of empire: on the one hand, being an empire (and not a state), Rome governed through the cultivation and management of difference. A very great deal of Roman administrative law was thus directed toward controlling geographic aspects of social and economic conduct, most notably in forbidding forms of sociality (especially marriage) and rights of contract between individuals and groups across boundaries established by Roman agents. At a minimal level, Rome’s aim was no doubt to prevent the realization of solidarity among conquered populations.

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At the same time, Rome of this period might be understood as a particularly complex form of aristocratic empire: it worked through the co-optation of local elites; it shaped local institutions of government so as to conduce their formation and stability across time; and it left the conduct of local politics, of jurisdiction, and indeed of tax collection in their hands. One might illustrate the spirit of the administrative actions taken by Rome in the period of consolidation with an example from the sphere of religion, namely, the definition offered by Festus of socalled municipal rites: Municipalia sacra vocantur, quae ab initio habuerunt ante civitatem Romanam acceptam; quae observare eos voluerunt pontifices, et eo more facere, quo adsuessent antiquitus. Festus 146L s.v. municipalia sacra Those rites are called municipal that a people had from its origin, before receiving Roman citizenship, and which the pontifices wanted them to continue to observe and perform in the way in which they had been accustomed to perform them from antiquity.

The facticity of Festus’s historical claim notwithstanding, the definition distils an early imperial, metropolitan view of the religious landscape of the empire: on the one hand, the empire is tesselated into as many communities as once were conquered; while on the other, the nominal persistence of pre-existing institutions in those myriad localities, under purely local leadership, is taken to conduce both a particular local and a singular imperial order. It is, of course, one of the functions of locative traditions to reinscribe and so, often enough, perchance to redescribe order in the face of change, and had Rome wholly and truly governed through local elites, with time, who knows what the fundamentalist work of the empire’s local, locative cults might have achieved. But as it happens, the world given normative description by Festus never came fully into being. For even as it took form, another was being created, wrought also by the actions of government, structured on very different principles from the other. This came about from two causes: first, for various reasons and by varied means, Roman government so worked as to alienate individuals in respect to their social and political contexts—to bracket them in respect to the structures of value that made poliadic localism meaningful; second, it simultaneously undermined or effectively sidelined local institutions of governance and in

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particular of dispute resolution. In consequence, local modes of political belonging were ultimately evacuated of meaning, and the cultural forms through which belonging and its entailments were expressed seem to have lost their relevance. I take these problems in turn.12 As regards atomization, allow me to commence with the simplest instrument by which such was achieved, namely, the grant of citizenship. I quote one of the most famous documents attesting such, namely, the Tabula Banasitana, the inscribed copy of a text produced from the imperial archives on 6 July 177: . . . At the request of Aurelius Iulianus, princeps of the Zagrenses, by petition, with the support of Vallius Maximianus by letter, we grant Roman citizenship to them, salvo iure gentis, with local law preserved, without harm to the taxes and duties of the People or the Imperial Purse. IAM 94

On one level, the quoted clause attests no more than a grant of citizenship. Such grants were wholly commonplace. Indeed, if one feature of Roman history stands out in the history of empires and likewise persists in common memory, it is the tendency of Rome to give away its citizenship, even unto that still remarkable moment when it did so universally. That said, its wording hints at a more complex problem, less often remarked. The spread of a Roman law of persons—even the mere classification of the conquered as alien—imposed upon local systems of identity formation a superordinate one, common to the empire. More particularly, both ad hoc and systematic grants of citizenship per magistratuum interpellated individuals in ways that atomized them in respect to just those structures that made purely local identities meaningful and materially sustainable. It is recognition of that fact, and its consequences for local economic and social orders, that provoked the stipulation salvo iure gentis, whose import seems clear enough even if its practical consequences remain obscure. Similar effects were no doubt worked by all manner of administrative procedures that operated to create or even merely to classify, the identities of individuals in respect to Rome, not least the census. 12 The arguments outlined here condense ones I have laid out rather more exhaustively elsewhere, including Ando 2000; but especially Ando 2010b; Ando 2011a; Ando 2013a; and Ando 2013b.

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We know this not simply from a large sociological literature on the operation of the census in modern democracies. It is clear, rather, from the enormous body of evidence suggesting that individuals retained and deployed both unofficial and notarized administrative records attesting their status before the Roman state: from the citation of earlier epikriseis in administrative hearings; to the submission of census returns, tax receipts, and death certificates in court; as well as the mere preservation of such documents in family archives, for years and sometimes decades after their initial production. Where local institutions are concerned, what patterns in the use of law courts suggest—naturally, insofar as these are visible to us—is a gradual delegitimization of purely local sources of social authority, a perception, at least, that effective social power derived from Rome and was most efficiently accessed through individuals and institutions holding (or perceived to be holding) authority delegated directly from the metropolis. These processes could be jural or political or administrative, but they were all communicative. Indeed, they are virtually all known to us by virtue of written testimonials to bilateral exchanges, in which individuals addressed, and were themselves in turned addressed by, Roman authorities. The co-optation of local elites, and their assimilation to Roman cultural norms—visible to local subalterns not least in changes in elite nomenclature, but also changed patterns of sociality and perhaps of dress and, who knows?, of sacrificial practice—thus went hand in hand with a transformation worked by what we now call municipalization, in which local offices that had existed in a merely hierarchical relationship to Roman institutions were gradually reoriented in fractal subordination to them. This is easiest to document in respect to rules of jurisdiction but operated in respect to virtually all forms of public authority, On my reconstruction, it was, therefore, above all, the communicative actions of Roman government, along with administrative practices designed to produce from persons objects of knowledge and of governance, that constituted formerly conquered provincials as subjects. What is more, in so individually interpellating them and in so communicating, Roman government ultimately undermined its own various attempts to rule through local aristocracies or, for that matter, to rule through the cultivation of difference. One might even say that it ceased in any meaningful sense to be an empire. It became, rather, something like a state—perhaps, to adopt the framework of Geoffrey

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Hosking, a state that was, rather than a state that had, an empire— with a uniform law of persons and legal culture, both penetrating (at least notionally) universally and uniformly throughout its territory. These processes did not unfold overnight, nor did the second rapidly undermine the first. On the contrary, the initial (re)constitution of local communities along Roman lines went hand in hand with the diffusion among local elites of various cultural and political forms by which individual ambition was channelled, and individual achievement was expressed, through participation in communal authority structures, and through these same the authority, and indeed the existence, of local elites as a whole coalesced and consolidated. I refer here to the content of elite self-fashioning—the holding of magistracies, priesthoods, and the like; as well as to the formal means through which claims to honour were publicly advanced and recognized: the career inscription above all, but also honorific decrees, public portraiture, reliefs, and so forth; and finally also to the patterned distribution of such commemorations within monumentalized urban landscapes in which all forms of public display—of the self, notably, but also of monuments—were regulated in a patently selflegitimating manner by those self-same elites.13 At nearly the same time, however, the empire witnessed an astonishing efflorescence of public-mindedness—of attention to the place of the self and of private corporate bodies in the public sphere—on the part of non-elite actors, what amounted to an astonishing politicization of the previously silent: I refer in particular to the enormous contribution made by freedmen and even slaves, for example, to the epigraphic habit, or the vast role played by freedmen in public priesthoods, or the rush of women, freedmen, and sometimes slaves and children to Roman courts.14 The Principate is, on these terms, an explosion of voices. Up to a point, one might argue that this development reflects the success achieved by economic elites at the local level

13

On this theme see e.g. Alföldy 1979; Alföldy 1984; Sehlmeyer 1999; Sehlmeyer 2000; and Purcell 2007. 14 On the epigraphic habit see MacMullen 1982. Among the vast literature MacMullen inspired see esp. Greg Woolf ’s wonderful essay, ‘Monumental writing and the expansion of Roman society in the early Empire’ (Woolf 1996), in particular pp. 34–8, where an argument very similar to the one I have advanced is developed. On freedman in imperial cult see Nock 1933. On women, children, and slaves before the law see Huchthausen 1974a; Huchthausen 1974b; Huchthausen 1975; and Huchthausen 1976.

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in inducing the worse off into playing the game by their rules, as it were: by accepting as honours derivative versions of status markers among the elite, those excluded from power colluded with the powerful in naturalizing a political and cultural economy that worked to their disadvantage. That said, this explosion seems to me only partially explicable through models of cultural mimesis. In my view, it must also derive in very large measure from the self-understanding achieved by such individuals through their constitution as imperial subjects: their interpellation by agents and processes of imperial government thus endowed them with a place and an agency that existed and operated geographically alongside, but metaphysically transcended, the concrete and depersonalized political structures that nominally mediated Roman power in the provincial landscape.15 Ultimately, however, these very processes by which individual provincials found their place within the empire—which is to say, were classified and so achieved subjecthood—operated hand-inhand with others, better known, which in the abstract amounted to a gradual and finally an extreme intensification of the penetration by imperial government into the structures of regional and local life. This, combined with the universal extension of citizenship, operated so as to evacuate of meaning those varied forms of deportment and self-fashioning that had made localism meaningful: euergetism, office, priesthood, and local citizenship not least among them. On this reading, the death of the career inscription amounts to an index, gesturing both to the more general phenomenon, namely, the collapse of precisely that publicness of which the epigraphic habit remains our best evidence, as well as to its cause: the disintegration of the local through its subordination to the imperial.16 15

The phrasing is indebted to Shaw 1986 at 74–5; see also Shaw 2000 at 362–4. On the end of the career inscription, see Eck 1999. Charting changes in selfrepresentation by the elite, in respect to both medium and message, Eck concludes with a reading of a mid-fourth century ‘career inscription’. Eck notes that the inscription does mention the honorand’s offices, but continues: ‘Doch all dies geht fast unter in den Lobpreisungen seiner persönlichen Eigenschaften, dem splendor seiner auctoritas, der admirabilis eloquentia und benevolentia, der moderatio und iustitia. Dies wird von ihm verkündet, nicht mehr vornehmlich der ordnungsgemäße Vollzug einer vollständigen Laufbahn im Dienst der res publica. Früher war dies die sehr einheitliche Botschaft solcher Monumente gewesen. Jetzt aber tritt an die Stelle dieser relativen Einheit der senatorischen Elite weit stärker das Individuelle. Die normierende und prägende Kraft des res publica als alleiniger Bezugspunkt eines Mitglieds der 16

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Roman intervention and Roman government thus disturbed more than boundaries or the place of things. Rather, what the empire presented was a set of structures superordinate to the polis, outside it and foreign to it, and acting both upon and within it. The purely local and contingent nature of the structures of life were thereby revealed as never before. By virtue of the processes I have outlined, the stability of the empire overall, in both its imperial and its local dimensions, will thus have come to rest upon a more homogenized cluster of principles of legitimation. For what it’s worth, in my view, the local cultures of the empire remained even then too variegated— and the technology of its communicative apparatus too primitive—to sustain such a monody. What one might call an important moment in the history of governmentality thus faded away, and from its passage the Roman empire emerged a less cohesive, less vibrant state. What of religion? Local cultural norms might be adapted to emplace local life; but how could they be made to account for structures apart, beyond, and above them? As in politics, so in religion, I focus on two patterns, the one more strictly developmental, the other adapting an old apparatus to more revolutionary (or at least potentially revolutionary) ends. It was, of course, very often possible to accommodate new gods and new powers within cult, through logic internal to the operation of ritual; or, one might say, it lay within the efficacy and regular competence of many cults to account for even fairly radical developments in the system of things. Perhaps the most helpfully explicated such cultic system is that of Dea Dia, where, as John Scheid has demonstrated, the rites themselves vary enormously in the range of gods worshipped, but the embrasure of those gods, including members of the imperial house, takes place according to a strict logic.17 The same might be said for the religious-theological import of the ritual housing of imperial portraits in the temples of other gods, and likewise of the extension of the apparatus of cult to emperor worship.18

Elite hatte ihre Selbstverständlichkeit verloren’ (55). See also Eck 2005, as well as Millar 2007. For a very different interpretation of the end of the epigraphic habit in respect (inter alia) to enthusiasm among local elites for office-holding (but in respect also to changing aesthetics in self-presentation) see Witschel 1999. 17 Scheid 1999 [= Scheid 2005]; see also Ando 2013b, chapter 4. 18 Nock 1930; Nock 1947; MacCormack 1975; Pekáry 1985, 55–7. On imperial cult see Habicht 1970 and Price 1984.

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I should perhaps stress now that I am not denying any significance to these developments. Rather, I am seeking to isolate changes that I would describe as incapable of articulation in the grammar or traditional signification of Greek or Roman ritual, or, when so articulated, the effect was to bring a new language into being: shifts in the ontological status accorded to deity, the development of new epistemological apparatus within (or without) religious discourse or of new conceptualizations of personhood in relation to the world and the like, particularly such as I would understand to be covariant with the emergent structures of (super-poliadic) political subjectivity in the high empire. One such, visible in religious art as well as theological discourse, amounts to a shift in perception regarding the locus, both geographic and metaphysical, of effective power. By this, in religious art I intend the representation of deity in the trappings of imperial officialdom: most notably, holding standards or wearing a Roman uniform, such as appear in Syria, Dura, Palmyra, and Egypt in the third century, and were treated in magnificent articles by Mikhail Rostovtzeff and Ernst Kantorowicz a half-century ago, or in the Danubian provinces, again in the third century.19 In one perspective, these representations may be aligned with the attribution of superlative divine qualities to emperors (in contradistinction to gods?)—they are most immanent20—and hence understood in some loose relation to the cognitive work performed by cult in accommodating imperial power within enduring conceptualizations of the world. But in another, to my mind far more revealing perspective, they might be understood as kindred to the valuation of gods by worshippers according their esteem and support of those same emperors— they are philokaisaros, and so forth.21 On this understanding, the representation of a god amounts to a theological statement of a sort, in which, on my reading, the source domain in a stunning variety of cognitive systems around the empire coalesces across the second and third centuries around some crude picture of the power within the empire. The simplest instantiation of this phenomenon is perhaps the rewriting of cultural metaphor and its analogical elaboration in 19 Rostovtzeff 1942; Kantorowicz 1961 = idem, 1965, 7–24, a lovely volume with fresh plates; Alföldy 1989, 81 and 92. 20 On epiphanestatos see for now Mitthof 1993. 21 On philokaisaros see Buckler 1935; Reynolds 1986, 110.

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the Latin translation of Pseudo-Aristotle’s De mundo transmitted under the name of Apuleius. Here, the modelling of heaven on analogy with the Great King’s rulership through satraps, widely attested in Hellenistic literature, is very substantially expanded and its underlying apparatus rewritten in strictly Roman terms (see Appendices 1 and 2). Not surprisingly, we find much the same language in Tertullian: all agree, he writes, that there is one God—the chief god, the princeps, of perfectae maiestatis—but the pagans hold that the procurantes et praefectos et praesides through whom god exercises his imperium should be worshipped alongside of him.22 But similar formulations begin very rapidly to appear in Greek theological literature, too, and perhaps most spectacularly in Christian texts, where its adoption substantially precedes the conversion of Constantine. One might classify these instantiations under three rubrics: descriptions of the governance of heaven on analogy with the governance of earth (commencing perhaps with the curious hybrid in Celsus, taken up by Origen, at a moment before the place of the Great King in this tradition was finally abandoned);23 construals of representation in religious contexts on analogy with imperial portraiture (the earliest known to me is Methodius)24; and the likening of religious ceremonial, either as described in Scripture or reenacted in liturgy, to imperial ceremonials.25 There is, of course, a not inconsiderable historical irony in the fact that the Roman emperor supplants the Great King as the dominant cultural paradigm for world-encompassing power at nearly the same moment when, in critical literature, the imperial court is described by 22 Tert. apol. 24.4 (trans. after T. R. Glover): Nunc ut constaret illos deos esse, nonne concederetis de aestimatione communi aliquem esse sublimiorem et potentiorem, velut principem mundi perfectae maiestatis? Nam et sic plerique disponunt divinitatem, ut imperium summae dominationis esse penes unum, officia vera eius penes multos velint. . . . itaque oportere et procurantes et praefectos et praesides pariter suspici. ‘Now, suppose [the demons whom pagans regard as gods] to be gods; but you concede, do you not, on the basis of common consent, that there is a god, more sublime and more potent, princeps, as it were, of the universe, of absolute maiestas? For that is how most men apportion divinity; they hold that the imperium of mastery rests with one, the various functions of divinity among many . . . So they hold that his procurators and prefects and governors should be respected equally with him.’ 23 Appendix 3. 24 On the loaded nature of the terminology employed by Methodius, not least the closing phrase, ÆغÆ ŒÆd ŒæØ , see Beskow 1962, passim but esp. 39–47 and 83–9. See Appendix 4. 25 A much-treated topic, of course, on which see Grabar 1968, 44–5.

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contemporaries as adopting Persian ceremonial.26 But as perhaps Gibbon knew better than any writer since and perhaps before, the cognitive gaps we denominate ironic are often tragic and always revealing. For what these kindred phenomena of imperial theological discourse reveal is a stunning inversion of the political and theological ideology once named monarchism—the belief in a single and singular rulership of heaven—which has oft been depicted as a theological doctrine invented, or at least deployed, in support of a particular distribution of power on earth. So described, this scholarship once had an immense and distinguished life in our field.27 But the ancient evidence that I have presented is notable against this backdrop for two reasons: first, if we follow Momigliano’s characterization of theology in the early Principate—in it, according to him, ‘the gods provide models to the emperors, they do not explain the Empire’— this literature on governance is, to a point, novel.28 Second, and more importantly, they are precisely inversions: it is the governance of earth, not heaven, that is the source domain in these analogical mappings. At a purely cognitive level, this constitutes notable evidence for the direction of historical influence within this discursive regime; and at an intellectual-historical one, we find here a stunning absence of that self-consciousness in respect to epistemology that in high imperial scholarship comes to infect both Christian and neoPlatonic philosophies of religious metaphor. On this reading, the phenomena that I have discussed—these disparate traditions of representation, epithesis, and metaphor— might be usefully understood as effecting precisely the sort of reversal in ontological priority (my term, not his) that Arthur Darby Nock sought to identify, isolate, and describe in his study of ‘the emperor’s 26 The criticism leveled at Diocletian by both Aurel. Vict. Caes. 39 and Amm. 15.5.18 suggests an origin in the Kaisergeschichte. For the historical and historiographic problems involved in the study of ceremonial see Ando 2010a and Whitby 2008. 27 As an aside, I observe that this literature varies a great deal not least in the political commitments it reveals. Highlights include Batiffol 1913; Dölger 1932; Enßlin 1943; Beskow 1962; Kantorowicz 1963; and Momigliano 1986; Peterson 1935. 28 I note that I have attempted elsewhere to provide my own, very different answer to what Momigliano calls his ‘two questions’ (never mind that three follow!): ‘first, whether and how plurality of gods was related to pluri-national character of the Empire; and second, how was the plurality of gods thought to help the emperors? If the Empire was justified by victory, how was victory related to polytheism?’ (Momigliano 1986, 286). See Ando 2008a, chapter 6; and cf. Ando 2000, 409 n. 13.

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divine comes’.29 My contribution to his effort could then be described as expanding the range of phenomena understood to instantiate such a reversal, and assigning it a cause. I have urged, furthermore, that the shift in fundamental understanding of the structure of divine power of which these phenomena represent inevitably partial articulations must have had recursive effects on the vitality and viability of what might now be described as purely local cult. The decline throughout much of the empire of both private dedications and privately-funded building projects should then be understood as kindred in cause to the decline of the career-inscription. In both cases, a cultural form turns out to have possessed highly particularized legitimacy in giving public expression to a contingent form of public persona, which became in the new post-Antonine state unviable.30 The relevance of local cults was thus declining, and local gods were dying, even before they were killed off.

RELIGION AND EMPIRE Religious-historical scholarship of the last twenty years has identified two grand transitions under the empire: the first, toward heightened individuation, sees individuals in the grand metropolitan centres of the late Hellenistic and late republican eras as confronted with a marketplace of religious choices, all more or less regarded as legitimate in the wider culture, from which any given person constructed an ad hoc and self-satisfying bricolage.31 The second, toward religious individualization, portrays individuals in the late third century and beyond making religious commitments that potentially and betimes effectively emancipated them from the interconnected and overlapping structures that had once knit together social structures like family and state, henceforth contingently deemed extra-religious. To put the matter starkly, the religious bricoleur merely individuates because his act is one of self-fashioning entirely susceptible to 29

Nock 1947. On the nature of the post-Antonine state see Ando 2010b; and esp. Ando 2011c, chapter 2. 31 The marketplace model of religious life in the late republic has received stunningly little criticism: it seems to me a deeply inappropriate metaphor. On this topic see Beck 2006. 30

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contemporary norms of recognition. By contrast, echoing the selfinterested claims of contemporaries, scholars understand late-antique Jews and Christians as individualizing because their ideologies of exclusion are taken as deontological and existential. Bracketing any further reflection on the cogency of these analyses, I have here attempted to contextualize the historical patterns at issue within broader currents of historical, social, and demographic change, and hence to integrate the history of religion with that of politics, that of the religious individual with that of the subject of government and object of knowledge. The argument advanced here has further implications for the cogency of Smith’s distinction between locative and utopian cults. Many of the features of utopian cult that mark them as utopian emerge on my reading not as rejections of this world but as provisional attempts to map—to emplace—a world in which extra-civic, supra-poliadic sources of norms had diminished, even unintentionally, the cogency of local articulations of power and belonging. To describe such cultural systems as other than locative and, by implication, as promoting a counter-cultural or oppositional metaphysics, is, I would argue, a mistake consequent upon a misrecognition of the world for which they sought to provide a normative articulation. Indeed, I would go further: as even the voicing of an alternate opposition between the locative and the imperial suggests, the notion of any so radical a polarity ill suits the context and the data. In 1776, in the first volume of The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, Edward Gibbon argued that Christianity as a force in Roman history served as handmaid to historical changes that were already operative in the empire prior to Constantine—changes that were also unfolding within the Christian community itself. It became the religion of the empire at that moment when the character of those holding citizenship in the Christian community had assimilated to the virtues required of subjects of despotic rule. In other words, it became the religion of the empire precisely at the moment when a homology was achieved between its social-theoretical postulates and the wider political culture of the day.32 This, it seems to me, is a model worth rereading. Gibbon’s claims, as well my own, amount

32

Regarding Gibbon see Ando 2008c.

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to an indictment of any locative-utopian distinction in the very case it was devised to explain.

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République aux peuples fédérés du Bas-Empire. Rennes: Presses Universitaires de Rennes. Cracco Ruggini, Lellia 1980. ‘Nuclei immigrati e forze indigene in tre grandi centri commerciali dell’impero’, in D’Arms, J. H. and Kopf, E. C. (eds), The Seaborne Commerce of Ancient Rome. Memoirs of the American Academy in Rome, 36. Rome: American Academy at Rome, 55–76. Dölger, F. J. 1932. ‘Zur antiken und frühchristlichen Auffassung der Herrschergewalt von Gottes Gnaden’, Antike und Christentum 3, 117–27. Eck, Werner 1999. ‘Elite und Leitbilder in der römischen Kaiserzeit’, in Dummer, Jürgen and Vielberg, Martin (eds), Leitbilder der Spätantike— Eliten und Leitbilder. Stuttgart: Franz Steiner, 31–55. ——2005. ‘Der Senator und die Öffentlichkeit—oder: Wie beeindruckt man das Publikum?’, in Eck, Werner and Heil, Matthäus (eds), Senatores populi Romani. Realität und mediale Präsentation einer Führungsschicht, HABES 40. Stuttgart: Franz Steiner, 1–18. Enßlin, Wilhelm 1943. ‘Gottkaiser und Kaiser von Gottes Gnaden’, SitzBay 6, 53–83. Grabar, André 1968. Christian Iconography: A Study of its Origins. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 44–5. Habicht, Christian 1970. Gottmenschentum und griechische Städte, 2nd edn, Zetemata 14. Munich: C. H. Beck. Huchthausen, Liselot 1974a. ‘Herkunft and ökonomische Stellung weiblicher Adressaten von Reskripten des Codex Iustinianus (2. und 3. Jh. u. Z.)’, Klio 56, 199–228. ——1974b. ‘Kaiserliche Rechtsauskünfte an Sklaven und in ihrer Freiheit angefochtene Personen aus dem Codex Iustinianus’ WZRostock 23, 251–7. ——1975. ‘Kaiserliche Reskripte an Frauen aus den Jahren 117 bis 217 u. Z.’, in Actes de la XIIe conférence internationale d’études classiques ‘Eirene’. Bucharest: Editura Academiei Republicii Socialiste România, 479–488. ——1976. ‘Zu kaiserlichen Reskripten an weibliche Adressaten aus der Zeit Diokletians (284–305 u. Z.)’, Klio 58, 55–85. Kantorowicz, Ernst 1961. ‘Gods in uniform’, Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society 105, 368–93, reprinted in Selected studies. Locust Valley, NY: Augustin, 1965, 7–24. ——1963. ‘Oriens Augusti—Lever du Roi’, DOP 17, 119–77. MacCormack, Sabine 1975. ‘Roma, Constantinopolis, the Emperor, and his Genius’, Classical Quarterly 25, 131–50. MacMullen, Ramsay 1982. ‘The epigraphic habit in the Roman Empire’, AJPh 103, 233–46. ——1993. ‘The Unromanized in Rome’, in Cohen, Shaye J. D. and Frerichs, Ernest S. (eds), Diasporas in Antiquity, Brown Judaic Studies 288. Atlanta, GA: Scholars Press, 47–64.

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Millar, Fergus 2007. ‘Die Bedeutung der Cursusinschriften für das Studium der römischen Administration im Lichte des griechisch-römischen Reiches von Theodosius II’, in Haensch, Rudolf and Heinrichs, Johannes (eds), Herrschen und Verwalten: Der Alltag der römischen Administration in der Hohen Kaiserzeit. Cologne: Böhlau, 438–46. Miller, Stuart 2007. ‘Roman Imperialism, Jewish Self-Definition and Rabbinic Society’, Association for Jewish Studies Review 31, 329–62. Mitthof, Fritz 1993. ‘Vom æ Æ  ˚ÆÆæ zum ØçÆ Æ  ˚ÆÆæ: die Ehrenprädikate in der Titulatur der Thronfolger des 3. Jh. n. Chr. nach den Papyri’, ZPE 99, 97–111. Momigliano, Arnaldo 1986. ‘The disadvantages of monotheism for a universal state’, Classical Philology 81, 285–97, reprinted in On pagans, Jews, and Christians. Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 1987, 142–58. Nock, Arthur Darby 1930. ‘Æ & ¨&’, HSCP 41, 1–62, reprinted in Essays on Religion and the Ancient World, vol. 1, ed. Stewart, Zeph. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1972, 202–51. ——1933. ‘Seviri and Augustales’, in Mélanges Bidez, Annuaire de l’institut de philologie et d’histoire orientales 2, Brussels: Secrétariat de l’Institut, 627–38, reprinted in Essays on Religion and the Ancient World, vol. 1, ed. Stewart, Zeph. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1972, 348–56. ——1947. ‘The Emperor’s Divine Comes’, Journal of Roman Studies 37, 102–16, reprinted in Essays on Religion and the Ancient World, vol. 1, ed. Stewart, Zeph. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1972, 653–75. Nongbri, Brent 2008. ‘Dislodging “Embedded” Religion: A Brief Note on a Scholarly Trope’, Numen 55, 440–60. North, John 1992. ‘The Development of Religious Pluralism’, in Lieu, Judith, North, John, and Rajak, Tessa (eds), The Jews among Pagans and Christians in the Roman Empire. London: Routledge, 174–93. Pekáry, Thomas 1985. Das römische Kaiserbildnis in Staat, Kult und Gesellschaft dargestellt Anhand der Schriftquellen, Das römische Heerscherbild, 3 Abt., Bd. 5. Berlin: Mann, 55–7. Peterson, Erik 1935. Der Monotheismus als politisches Problem. Leipzig: Hegner. Price, Simon 1984. Rituals and power: the Roman Imperial Cult in Asia Minor. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Purcell, Nicholas 2007. ‘Urban Spaces and Central Places: The Roman World’, in Alcock, Susan E. and Osborne, Robin (eds), Classical Archaeology. Oxford: Blackwell, 182–202. Reynolds, Joyce 1986. ‘Further Information on the Imperial Cult at Aphrodisias’, StCl 24, 109–17. Rostovtzeff, Mikhail 1942. ‘Vexillum and Victory’, Journal of Roman Studies 32, 92–106.

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APPENDIX 1

[Aristotle] Peri kosmou 397b9–398b28 (translation after E. S. Forster) (398a18–23)  · ø b  ø ¼æ ƒ æH Ø ŒÆd ØŒØ Æ Ø ØŒŒÅ , ƒ b Iç ÆP e ÆغÆ,  æıçæ Ø  ŒÆd T ÆŒ ıÆd ºª Ø, ‰ ¼ › Æغf ÆP e  Å ŒÆd Łe O ÆÇ   Æ b º Ø,  Æ  IŒ  Ø. Outside these the chief and most distinguished men had their appointed place, some around the king himself, the spear-carriers and the so-called ‘listeners,’ that the king himself, who was called their master and deity, might see and hear all things. (398a26–35) c b ÆÆ Iæåc B Æ, æÆ ıÅ  EººÅ ø fi b KŒ H æe æÆ æH,  fiH b KŒ H æe ø, ØغçÆ ŒÆ a ŁÅ  æƪ Ū d ŒÆd Æ æÆØ ŒÆd ÆغE  Fº Ø F ªº ı BÆغø, æ æ Ø  ŒÆd Œ  d ŒÆd IªªºØÆçæ Ø çæıŒ øæØH  K  Bæ.  F  b q › Œ , ŒÆd ºØ Æ H çæıŒ øæØH, ŒÆ a ØÆ åa ıæı ıH IºººÆØ KŒ æ ø B IæåB åæØ  ø ŒÆd ¯ŒÆ ø, u e ÆغÆ ªØŒØ ÆPŁÅæe  Æ a K B fi Æ fi ŒÆØ ıæª Æ. All the empire of Asia, bounded by the Hellespont in the regions toward the west and by the Indus in the regions toward the east, was apportioned by race among generals and satraps and slave-kings of the Great King; and there were couriers and watchmen and message-bearers and superintendants of the watch-fires. So effective was this cosmos, this arrangement, and especially that of the watch-fires, reaching in succession to one another from the edges of the empire to Susa and Ecbatana, that the king knows everything that happens in Asia the very same day. (398b1–7)  Ø   c c F ªº ı Æغø !æ åc æe c F e Œ  Kå   Ł F  F  ŒÆ Æ æÆ ‹  B KŒ ı c F çÆıº  ı  ŒÆd IŁ  ı Çfi ı, u , Yæ ¼  q ÆP e Æ! fiH  ŒE ˛æÅ ÆP ıæªE –Æ Æ ŒÆd KØ ºE L  º Ø ŒÆd KçØ   Ø ØŒE,  ºf Aºº  Iæb i YÅ ŁfiH. Now we must suppose that the majesty of the Great King falls short of the majesty of the god who rules the cosmos by as much as the difference between the King and the poorest and weakest creature in the world, so that if it was beneath the dignity of Xerxes to appear himself to be the actual executor of all things, to carry out his wishes himself and to administer [the empire] by personal supervision, it would be still more unbecoming for God.

APPENDIX 2

Apuleius, de mundo 25–6 (25) Qua[m] re[m] rectius est atque honestius sic arbitrari: summam illam potestatem, sacratam caeli penetralibus, et illis qui longissime separentur, et proximis, una et eadem ratione et per se et per alios opem salutis adferre, nec penetrantem atque adeuntem specialiter singula nec indecore adtrectantem comminus cuncta. Talis quippe humilitas deiecti et minus sublimis officii, ne cum homine quidem convenit, qui sit vel paululum conscientiae celsioris. Militiae principes et curiae proceres et urbium ac domorum rectores dico numquam commissuros esse, ut id suis manibus factum velint, quod sit curae levioris fuscioris quodque possint nihilo sequius facere dominorum imperia, ministeria servulorum. Exemplo quale sit istud intellege. For which reason it is better and more honourable to think thus: that highest power, consecrated in the recesses of heaven, brings aid to those who are furthest separated from it and to those who are closest in one and the same way, both through itself and through others, neither penetrating nor approaching individual things on a particularist basis nor indecorously contacting everything hand-to-hand. Indeed, such lowness in respect to an abject and less sublime duty does not even suit a human being of the sort who possesses even some small degree of a loftier self-image. Leaders of soldiery and heads of senates and administrators of cities and estates would never so engage, I affirm, such that they would want something done by their own hands which is of insignificant and obscure worth and which the commands of a master and attention of slaves could accomplish just as well. Learn how this is from an example: (26) Cambyses et Xerxes, et Darius potentissimi reges fuerunt. . . . Ante fores viri fortes stipatoresque regalium laterum tutela pervigili custodiam per vices sortium sustinebant. Erant inter eos et divisa officia; in comitatu regio armigeri quidam, at extrinsecus singuli custodes locorum erant et ianitores et atrienses. Sed inter eos aures regiae et imperatoris oculi quidam homines vocabantur. Per quae officiorum genera rex ille deus esse ab omnibus credebatur, cum omnia quae ubique gererentur [quae] ille otacustarum relatione discebat. Dispensatores pecuniae, quaestores vectigalium, tribunos aerarios habebat; alios et alios praefecerat ceteris muneribus: alii venatibus agendis provinciam nacti, pars domibus et urbibus praefecti putabantur et ceteri, perpetuis magnisque curis, observationi singularum rerum adpositi erant.

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Cambyses and Xerxes and Darius were the most powerful kings . . . Before the doors strong men and attendants undertook the protection of the royal walls in turns in sleepless vigil. Duties were divided among them; among the royal company were certain armed guards, while outside there were individual guards for particular locations, as well as doormen and guards of atria. What is more, among them were some men who were called the ears and eyes of the imperator. By distributing such tasks as these, the king himself was thought by all to be a god, since he learned of everything that was done everywhere through reports from these otacoustae. He had dispensatores pecuniae, quaestores vectigalium and tribuni aerarii. He put still others in charge of further tasks: some obtained the provincia, the bailiwick of conducting the hunt; others were regarded as praefecti of estates and cities; and still others were assigned the oversight of individual things, a perpetual and weighty concern.

APPENDIX 3

Origen, Contra Celsum 8.35–6 (translation after H. Chadwick) ŒÆ Æ ø  ŒÆd ¼ººÅ ºØ F ˚º ı, G ø å ıÆ· # ˙ › b F —æH j   øÆø Æغø Æ æÅ X oÆæå  j  æÆ Åªe X KØ æ  ,  Ø c ŒÆd ƒ a ØŒæ æÆ Iæåa j KØºÆ j !ÅæÆ å   ªÆ ÆØ  i º Ø Iº  Ø, ƒ  IÆæØ   ŒÆd KªØ Ø Æ æÆØ ŒÆd ØŒ  Ø ØŒæa º Ø i !æØÇ Ø;

$ OæÆ c H IŁæøØŒ f Æ æÆ F Kd AØ Ł F ŒÆd !aæå ı ŒÆd  æÆ Åª f ŒÆd KØ æ ı ŒÆd f ØŒæ æÆ Iæåa ŒÆd KØºÆ ŒÆd !ÅæÆ å  Æ NªØ ªºÆ º  Æ f !æÇ  Æ . . . (35) Let us consider another passage of Celsus which runs as follows: The satrap or legate or governor or procurator of the Persian or Roman emperor, and furthermore even those who hold lesser positions or responsibilities or offices, could do much harm if they were slighted. Would the satraps and ministers both in the air and on earth do but little harm if they were insulted?

Notice how he introduces anthropomorphic satraps of the supreme god, and legates and governor and procurators, and those who hold lesser positions and responsibilities and offices, as if they did much harm to people who insult them. ºº På, ‰ Y ÆØ ˚º , º ıØ ƒ IºÅŁH Æ æÆØ ŒÆd oÆæå Ø ŒÆd  æÆ Åª d ŒÆd K æ  Ø F Ł F ¼ªªº Ø f !æÇ  Æ· (36) The angels, the true satraps, legates, governors and procurators of god, do no harm to those who slight them, as Celsus thinks.

APPENDIX 4

Methodius de resurrectione 2.24.1 Bonwetsch `P ŒÆ ª F H B fi  Æغø ÆN NŒ, Œi  Ie ∞  ºf ØØø æÆ oºÅ, åæı F, Iæªæ ı, MºŒ æ ı j KºçÆ , tØ ŒÆ ŒıÆÆØ, Øc å ıØ æe ± ø· P ªaæ a b Ie ∞  ºf ØØø æÆ oºÅ åÅÆ ŁæÆ   K ºØªøæ FØ H ¼ººø ƒ IŁæø Ø, Iººa Æ KÅ ØHØ, N ŒÆd Ie ªł ı j åƺå F !æå ıØ, ŒÆd › ıçÅÆ d › æÆ h  ‰ źe Æ ØÆ Iç ÆØ, h  ‰ åæıe Kı ºÆ åæ ÆØ, Iºº ‰ N ÆP e IÆ e ÆغÆ ŒÆd ŒæØ . Straightaway images of emperors, even if they are not made of more valuable material—gold, silver, electrum or ivory—nevertheless have honour before all. For men attending to images not fashioned from more valuable material do not think less of them than of others, but they honour them all equally, whether they are made from gypsum or bronze. Furthermore, the one who blasphemes against either is not released because he dishonoured clay nor convicted because he disparaged gold, but is convicted because he displayed impiety toward the emperor and lord himself.

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Individual and Society

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5 Individual and Common Cult: Epigraphic Reflections Fritz Graf

What is individual religion? Its opposite term is collective religion: this makes individual religion the beliefs and/or the ritual actions of a single person differentiated from and sometimes in opposition to the beliefs and actions of an entire group; it derives its individuality from choices the individual has made. These choices might be solely in the realm of belief, without affecting the religious action (a Greek atheist might participate in polis sacrifices, out of conventionality or in order to save himself some trouble), or they might spill over into action (another Greek atheist might openly proclaim his belief and refuse participation in sacrifice). How is individual religion different from private religion? The opposite of private is public, in ancient terms e YØ  versus e ÅØ , privatim versus publice. With regard to religion, ‘private and public’ refer to spatial and social frameworks for religious action, the spatial being the indicator of the social. Seen in this way, we immediately spot differences and overlaps: an atheist might well refuse to perform any rituals in his own house, even if he participated in the public rituals. Defined in this way, individual religion becomes almost irrelevant for ancient religions, as we perceive them. As long as the atheist participates in the public sacrifices, he can think whatever he prefers: what counts is orthopraxy. This becomes visible whenever we look at ancient legislation on proper religious behaviour—not at the leges sacrae, this almost random collection of casualistic rules that mostly

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concern only the exceptional, not the basic, but at the philosophical legislation brought forward by Plato and, in his wake, Cicero. In his long disquisition on how to punish IØÆ in book 10 of his Laws, Plato offers a sixfold definition of the offence, but then focuses only on the two most egregious of these forms, the two ways of atheism that I just used as my examples; both deserve punishment because they are wrong forms of thinking that can lead to wrong forms of behaviour (so much for our predilection of orthopraxy: Plato was fully capable of thinking in terms of orthodoxy and deviant beliefs, as did those Athenians who condemned Socrates to death).1 He then considers preventive measures: he forbids shrines in private houses and prescribes that any religious action has to take place at the public shrines: ƒæa Åb x  K NÆØ NŒÆØ KŒ Łø· ŁØ ’ ‹ Æ Kd  F YÅØ Ø, æe 0 a ÅØÆ Y ø Łø.2 In the end, orthopraxy carries the day: if nobody has a private space for his rituals, then group censure prevails and the gods cannot be offended. True to Roman tradition and unlike the radical Plato,3 Cicero has no intention of forbidding private cults as long as they are a family tradition (privatim colunto quos rite a patribus ), and he is similarly open (or restrictive) as to the gods that individuals might have: this is allowed only if these gods correspond to those whose cult the state has established (separatim nemo habessit deos neve novos neve advenas nisi publice adscitos); his separatim deos habere comes closest to what we could call individual belief, but it is concerned only with divinities whose place of cult might be in a private house, separated from the public space. Individual religion and private religion again collapse. In both cases, individual religion thus is centred on a private place of worship. In his comments on this law, Plato makes the connection perfectly clear: although many individuals, especially women, are in 1

Plat. leg. 10.907Bff. Leg. 909DE; the full passage:  Iæa Åb x  K NÆØ NŒÆØ KŒ Łø· ŁØ ’ ‹ Æ Kd  F Yfi Å Ø, æe a ÅØÆ Y ø Łø, ŒÆd E ƒæF  ŒÆd ƒæÆØ KªåØæØÇ ø a ŁÆ Æ, x  ±ªEÆØ  ø KغE. ııŁø b ÆP   ŒÆd n i KŁºfiÅ  ’ ÆP F ıåŁÆØ. ‘No one shall possess a shrine in his own house: when any one is moved in spirit to do sacrifice, he shall go to the public places to sacrifice, and he shall hand over his oblations to the priests and priestesses to whom belongs the consecration thereof; and he himself, together with any associates he may choose, shall join in the prayers.’ 3 It is one of these cases that confirm Macrobius’ observation, ille [Plato] rem publicam ordinavit, hic [Cicero] rettulit, Macr. Comm. In Somn. 1. 2

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the habit of promising sacrifices and cult foundations for the god who would eventually save them, not the least because a dream ordered them to do so, ‘it is not easy to found sanctuaries and gods (ƒæa ŒÆd Ł f P Þfi Ø  ƒæŁÆØ)’, and should be left to the public specialists.4 But exactly how difficult is it, and how did these foundations express an individual religiosity and the private performance of rituals that would conflict with the public rites? In what follows, I will take a closer look at four such foundations or re-foundations, try to understand the mechanisms involved and the relationship that these cults had with a ÅØÆ, and use them to explore the limits of individual religion. I understand this also as a contribution to the discussion about the nature of polis religion that has recently become much more interesting than it used to be.5

FROM XENOPHON TO THE YOUNGER PLINY When he returned from his expedition with a Greek mercenary army into the interior of the Persian empire, Xenophon was a rich man, rich enough to fulfil the vow that all the leaders of the Greeks had made, to give a tenth of the booty to Apollo in Delphi and to Artemis of Ephesos. Apollo’s gift was deposited in the Athenian treasury in Delphi; the gift to Artemis had to wait until Xenophon was home and settled by the Spartans on an estate in Skillous near Olympia. This is how Xenophon describes what he then did:6

4

Plat. leg. 909D. See Sourvinou-Inwood 1990, Kindt 2009. On two of my case studies, see also the discussions in Purvis 2003: Archedamus of Thera 31–60, Xenophon 61–114. 6 Xen. Anab. 5.3.9–13, after Trumbull, McNamara 2005: ˛ çH b ºÆg åøæ  TE ÆØ B fi ŁfiH ‹ ı IEº › Ł. 8 ıå b ØÆææø Øa F åøæ ı  Æe ºØ F. ŒÆd K ’¯çø fi b Ææa e B æ Ø  g ºØ F  Æe ÆæÆææE. ŒÆd NåŁ  K Iç æ Ø ØØ ŒÆd ŒªåÆØ· K b fiH K ŒØºº F Ø åøæø fi ŒÆd ŁBæÆØ  ø ›Æ K d IªæıÆ ŁÅæÆ. 9K Å b ŒÆd øe ŒÆd Æe Ie F ƒæ F Iæªıæ ı, ŒÆd e º Øe b Id ŒÆ ø a KŒ F Iªæ F ‰æÆEÆ ŁıÆ K Ø B fi ŁfiH, ŒÆd   ƒ  ºE ÆØ ŒÆd ƒ æåøæ Ø ¼æ ŒÆd ªıÆEŒ  Eå  B  æ B. ÆæEå b Łe E ŒÅ FØ ¼ºçØ Æ, ¼æ ı, r  , æƪÆ Æ, ŒÆd H Łı ø Ie B ƒæA  B ºå , ŒÆd H ŁÅæı ø . 10ŒÆd ªaæ ŁæÆ K Ø F N c  æ c ¥  ˛ çH  ÆE ŒÆd ƒ H ¼ººø  ºØ H, ƒ b  ıº Ø ŒÆd ¼æ ıŁæø· ŒÆd ºŒ a b K ÆP F F ƒæ F åæ ı, a b ŒÆd KŒ B % ºÅ, 5

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Xenophon took the money and bought for the goddess a plot of ground at a point indicated to him by the oracle. The plot, it so happened, had its own Selinus river flowing through it, just as at Ephesus the river Selinus flows past the temple of Artemis, and in both streams fish and mussels are to be found. On the estate at Scillus there is hunting and shooting of all the beasts of the chase that are. Here with the sacred money he built an altar and a temple, and ever after, year by year, tithed the fruits of the land in their season and did sacrifice to the goddess, while all the citizens and neighbours, men and women, shared in the festival. The goddess herself provided for the banqueters meat and loaves and wine and sweetmeats, with portions of the victims sacrificed from the sacred pasture, as also of those which were slain in the chase; for Xenophon’s own sons, with the sons of the other citizens, always made a hunting excursion against the festival day, in which any grown men who liked might join. The game was captured partly from the sacred district itself, partly from Pholoe, pigs and gazelles and stags. The place lies on the direct road from Lacedaemon to Olympia, about twenty furlongs from the temple of Zeus in Olympia, and within the sacred enclosure there is meadow-land and wood-covered hills, suited to the breeding of pigs and goats and cattle and horses, so that even the sumpter animals of the pilgrims passing to the feast fare sumptuously. The shrine is girdled by a grove of cultivated trees, yielding dessert fruits in their season. The temple itself is a facsimile on a small scale of the great temple at Ephesus, and the image of the goddess is like the golden statue at Ephesus, save only that it is made, not of gold, but of cypress wood. Beside the temple stands a stele bearing this inscription: THE PLACE IS SACRED TO ARTEMIS. HE WHO HOLDS IT AND ENJOYS THE FRUITS OF IT IS BOUND TO SACRIFICE YEARLY A TITHE OF THE PRODUCE. AND FROM THE RESIDUE THEREOF TO KEEP IN REPAIR THE SHRINE. IF ANY MAN FAIL IN AUGHT OF THIS THE GODDESS HERSELF WILL LOOK TO IT THAT THE MATTER SHALL NOT SLEEP.

 ŒÆd  æŒ ŒÆd ºÆç Ø. 11 Ø b åæÆ fi w KŒ ¸ÆŒÆ   N  OºıÆ  æ  ÆØ ‰ YŒ Ø  Ø Ø Ie F K  OºıÆ fi ˜Øe ƒæ F. Ø ’ K fiH ƒæfiH åæø fi ŒÆd ºØg ŒÆd ZæÅ æø  , ƒŒÆa F ŒÆd Ær ªÆ ŒÆd  F æçØ ŒÆd ¥  ı, u  ŒÆd a H N c  æ c N ø ! ǪØÆ PøåEŁÆØ. 12æd b ÆP e e Æe ¼º  æø æø Kçı ŁÅ ‹Æ K d æøŒ a ‰æÆEÆ. › b Æe ‰ ØŒæe ªºø fi fiH K ’¯çø fi YŒÆ ÆØ, ŒÆd e Æ   ØŒ ‰ ŒıÆæ Ø  åæıfiH Z Ø fiH K ’¯çø fi . ŒÆd  ºÅ  ÅŒ Ææa e Æe ªæÆ Æ å ıÆ· ¯ˇ ˇ ( ˇ ˙ ` ¯)˜ˇ. ˇ˝ ¯(ˇ˝ ` ˚` ˚`—ˇ+)¯˝ˇ˝ ˙˝ )¯˝ ˜¯˚` ˙˝ ˚` `¨+¯˝ ¯˚` ˇ+ ¯ ˇ+. ¯˚ ˜¯ ˇ+ —¯

ˇ+

ˇ˝ ˝`ˇ˝ ¯—˚¯+`Z¯˝. `˝ ˜¯  )˙ —ˇ˙ `+ ` ˙ ¨¯  )¯¸˙¯.

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Xenophon’s sanctuary, a private dedication built on his own estate, bears witness to the fame that the Ephesian temple and its statue had acquired in the early fourth century (a forerunner to the many dedications to Artemis Ephesia in the Greek world during Hellenistic times),7 but also to Xenophon’s generous way of fulfilling a promise towards the goddess: the shrine was embedded in a sacred grove with a river; the grove shades without any clear border into the surrounding hills and shelters wild animals that are hunted in preparation of the goddess’s annual festival together with larger animals living in the hills: as befits the hunter’s goddess, the meat eaten does not just come from the sacrifices but also from the hunt. Unlike in the case of Apollo whom Xenophon consulted both before he went to Persia and again before he built his sanctuary, we do not know why Xenophon was personally engaged with Ephesian Artemis. He tells us that he had deposited the part of the tithe destined to the Ephesian Artemis with Megabyxos,8 the Ephesian neokoros who brought it to him once he was settled in Skillous, so he might have felt some obligations towards the Ephesian goddess himself, beyond what loyalty with his fellow strategoi obliged him to do. But the question is rather irrelevant; what matters is what he did with the part of the tithe destined for Ephesian Artemis. He could have done what he did with the money for Apollo, perform a sacrifice and dedicate a votive image in Ephesos and thus connect himself with two of the most visible sanctuaries of the ancient world.9 Instead, he built his own temple, a miniature version of the Ephesian one, and founded an annual sacrifice in which the inhabitants of Skillous all participated; Xenophon must have been the person to speak the prayer and lead the annual sacrifice. Still advertising his relationship to the Ephesian goddess, this foundation perpetuated Xenophon’s gratefulness to the divinity by permanent honours for her from an entire community; it also gave Xenophon himself a prominent and

7

See LSAM 31 (ca. 160 bce), a text that takes about the many foundations of temples for Artemis Ephesia in the entire oikoumene. 8 Anab. 5.3.6. This, and not Megabyzos, is the form of the name warranted by epigraphy, the Persian form of the name, and presumably palaeography (although, as far as I can see, not attested by Xenophon’s manuscripts), as Bremmer 2008 after Wackernagel forcefully advocates. 9 Anab. 5.3.5. The fact that he consulted Delphian Apollo before he set out (Anab. 3.1.6), seems irrelevant for this dedication that he made in his own name and in the name of ‘Proxenos who died together with Klearchos’.

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likewise permanent place in which he could express his gratitude. Even if one remains sceptical towards the modern idea that Xenophon’s foundation replicated a Persian paradeisos, a royal hunting park, which would model Xenophon’s social role on that of the Persian king, we cannot doubt his central role as the owner of the estate and founder of a sanctuary and an annual festival.10 Xenophon’s inscription—not a dedication but a ‘sacred law’ that prescribes the use of the income for sacrifice and maintenance of the shrine— makes it clear that he envisioned the cult to outlast him. The sanctuary seems to have disappeared at the time of Strabo, although the geographer still remembers the story.11 A copy of this same inscription, dated to about 200 ce, has been found on the island of Ithaca: it is either a pierre errante from Skillous and thus would attest to a renewal of the cult some six centuries after its foundation, or, perhaps more plausibly, belongs to the island and attests how another landowner replicated his classical model in his own sanctuary, at a time when the Greek elites were looking at their great past for models.12 Less than a century before this second attestation of Xenophon’s foundation, another landed gentleman on the other side of the Adriatic Sea involved himself with a sanctuary on his estate—this time not to found it, but to restore and enhance its splendour. In a short letter to one of his associates, the Younger Pliny tells him (and us, his readers): Pliny to his Mustius: The haruspices admonished me to restore the shrine of Ceres on my estates, a really old and narrow one, into a better and larger form, since

10 Unlike the paradeisos, Xenophon’s grove contains no closed-off area to house the animals for the hunt; even less is there a need to connect Xenophon’s Artemis with the Persian Anahita, said by some to preside over the king’s hunting park. But see L’Allier 1998 (with earlier bibliography). 11 Strab. 8.7.5 p. 387. 12 IG IX: 12, no. 1700 (= IX: 1,654). The text has been found in the 18th century and lacks any context; because of its small dimensions, 0.19m :: 0.16 m :: 0.035 m (that is: a thin and relatively small marble plaque, presumably built into a wall), it is unlikely to have served as a ballast stone on a boat, which would be the most obvious way of explaining how it came from the region of Olympia to Ithaca. We know of other 2nd cent. ce copies of earlier inscriptions, such as the text of the foundation story of menadism in Magnesia on the Maeander, I. Magnesia 215a (the original is dated to the late 3rd cent. bce), or the sacred law of a Persian cult in Sardis, SEG 29.1205 (the law is dated in the 39th year of Artaxerxes II, the stone was inscribed c.150 ce); the topic is not covered in Cooley 2000, an otherwise very stimulating conference volume.

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it is very well frequented on its festival day. On the Ides of September, many people from all over the region come together there; much is performed and negotiated, many vows are taken, many are fulfilled; but there is no near shelter against rain or sun. It thus seems that I will be acting in a generous and a god-fearing way, if I rebuild the shrine as beautifully as possible and add a portico to the shrine, the former to the benefit of the goddess, the latter of the people.13

In what follows, he instructs Mustius to buy four columns and marble for the floor and the walls of the small temple, a templum in antis with four columns in front, and to have a marble statue made since the old wooden image has been damaged over the years. Thus, he does not shun expense for the temple; the portico, however, should be built from less costly local materials. The two cases mirror each other closely, despite the temporal and spatial distance. Like Xenophon, Pliny constructs a shrine on his estate that serves as a focus of communal religion: the entire region comes together at the local Cerealia (whose date is set locally and does not find any echo in the urban calendar). In both cases, the impulse came from outside, and the gods were involved in it: together with his fellow generals, Xenophon had made a vow to dedicate a tithe to Artemis when successfully returning home, but the form was left to his own initiative, subsequently confirmed and validated by Apollo in Delphi.14 In Pliny’s case, it is the haruspices, the official body of Etruscan seers, who tell Pliny what to do; he does not tell us why they gave him this information, but it is likely that Pliny himself took the initiative to consult them once he realized the state in which his

13 Plin. Ep. 9.39 C. Plinius Mustio suo s. 1Haruspicum monitu reficienda est mihi aedes Cereris in praediis in melius et in maius, vetus sane et angusta, cum sit alioqui stato die frequentissima. 2Nam Idibus Septembribus magnus e regione tota coit populus, multae res aguntur, multa vota suscipiuntur, multa redduntur; sed nullum in proximo suffugium aut imbris aut solis. 3Videor ergo munifice simul religioseque facturus, si aedem quam pulcherrimam exstruero, addidero porticus aedi, illam ad usum deae has ad hominum. (Translation from the Loeb Classical Library edn with modifications.) On this and similar rural shrines in Pliny see Scheid 1996; for a possible archaeological identification of this small shrine, see Braconi, Saéz 2001. 14 Neither the vow nor the question Xerxes put to Apollo are known; but in the latter case, I assume he did what he had done when he asked the god about his participation in the expedition against Artaxerxes, Anab. 3.1.6: he had a clear idea of what he wanted, and the god had simply to agree; this explains the “coincidence” that the river in Skillous sanctuary has the same as the one in Ephesos; pace Fontenrose 1978, 43.

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shrine was. Unlike his Greek peer, Pliny talks about his motives: he wants to appear generous (munificus) and god-fearing (religiosus). But I have little doubt that Xenophon would have argued in exactly the same way. In both cases, we deal with members of the elite and their individual engagement in cult; in both cases, this engagement expressed itself in a public form. The view from the other side, the community that reacted to such a decision by an elite member, is expressed in many honorary decrees from Hellenistic and imperial cities, such as in a decree from late Hellenistic Istros.15 The lengthy text honours a member of a prominent family who three times accepted to act as the eponymous priest of Apollo Ietros, the main city god, with its considerable expenses. His fellow citizens underline his religiosity ( e Ł E, 1.18):16 by doing what he did, he honoured the gods and the city ( f Ł f ŒÆd c ºØ K Å, 1.23f.), and he did so ‘in order to show that those who serve their city in the most pious and beautiful way receive favours from the gods and from those to whom they have done well’ ( F  ıº  KçÆØ ‹ Ø E P Æ Æ ŒÆd ŒººØ Æ  ºØ ı  Ø ŒÆd Ææa ŁH åæØ ŒÆd Ææa H Pæª ÅŁ ø KÆŒ º ıŁE, 1.24f.). This is individual religion insofar as it is based on the decisions and choices of individuals; the means to express these decisions and choices, however, were offered by a community to whose values and standards it had to conform. Seen in the framework of the individual case, this did not exclude innovation, even if we reduce innovation to the modernization which Pliny had the shrine and the image of Ceres undergo. Perhaps more telling is Xenophon’s innovation, the miniaturization of the temple and presumably the image of Ephesian Artemis: by copying an existing temple and image, Xenophon inserted his foundation into a powerful tradition, connecting it with the world famous Ephesian cult. At the same time, by making it into a miniature replica of the Ephesian sanctuary,17 he domesticated the Ephesian shrine and reduced it to a size that allowed him to make it a part of his private estate, instead of having it stand alone as 15 Pippidi 1983, no. 54 (mid-1st cent. bce); the relevant part is discussed in Chiekova 2008, 16–19. 16 Many years ago, Jeanne and Louis Robert 1968, 538 remarked that “la piété n’est pas une vertu des rois; tout magistrat ou tout citoyen peut en être loué; les examples en sont innombrables”. 17  ˇ b Æe ‰ ØŒæe ªºøØ HØ K  ¯ çøØ YŒÆ ÆØ, ŒÆd e Æ   ØŒ ‰ ŒıÆæ Ø  åæıHØ Z Ø HØ K  ¯ çøØ Anab. 5.3.12.

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the city shrine of Ephesos and one of the World Wonders. Although this is not the radical miniaturization that Jonathan Z. Smith found in the Greek Magical Papyri, it still has the comparable function of domestication, not for individual use in the framework of a private house however, but for the use of Xenophon’s neighbourhood.18 In the self-perception of the founders of such sanctuaries, it was the traditional model that counted and that they followed. They thus enhanced their status in two ways—through their role as owners of a shrine that formed the centre of a neighbourhood group, and through the resonance with a powerful model (in Xenophon’s case) or with longstanding religious traditions (in the case of Pliny whose modifications evidently did nothing to detract from the power of this tradition).

ARCHEDAMOS OF THERA About a generation before Xenophon’s foundation, another ‘gentleman’, albeit neither landed nor Athenian (nor, presumably, a gentleman at all), founded a very different cult in the countryside of Attica, again with a shrine and a garden around it. Unlike Xenophon’s shrine, this one is still preserved, and it has made a deep impression on modern visitors since the days of Richard Chandler.19 Halfway up a hillside near the village of Vari in south-western Attica, visited mostly by sheep that feed on the scarce vegetation, there is the entrance to an ancient cave. From the outside, it is today not much more than a gap in the soil, marked by a fig-tree and secured by a mighty iron grid from which one lowers oneself onto a subterranean ridge with steps that lead into the dark. In the late fifth century, the entire space around this entrance was planted with a garden that must have been watered from the rich spring in the cave. We still have the dedicatory inscription of this garden, written on two sides of a stone slab.20 On one side, one reads 18

Smith 2004, 224–6. See the suggestive remark by Ross 1848, II, 76. The main archaeological accounts are Weller 1903, 263–6 and Schörner and Goette 2004; see also Connor 1988, 155–89. 20 IG I3 977, dated to c.425 bce. 19

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æåÆ  h ¨æÆE  ŒA  ˝çÆØ Kç ı. Archedamos the Theraean planted the garden for the Nymphs,

on the other: æå  ¨æÆE  ŒÆd å e Oå b[] ˝çÆØ Kå ØŒ . Archedamos the Theraean built also a dancefloor, being a dancer,21 for the Nymphs.

Visitors to the cave who master the steep way down arrive in a subterranean space that is separated into two chambers by the ridge through which they have entered; this natural wall that helps to support the roof of the cave does not run the full length of the cave but leaves a wide opening between the landing and the larger and deeper southern chamber, so that this chamber receives some natural light through this ‘window’, whereas the smaller northern chamber is left in the dark. From the landing the floor slopes downwards to the deepest point at the far end of the larger chamber. There are two ways to go down, either following the natural slope in an anticlockwise spiral movement through a short hallway into the smaller chamber and from there over a threshold into the larger chamber, or down a flight of steps that are cut into the wall below the entrance point and lead down from what we can describe as a ‘windowsill’. The hallway leading to the antechamber is adorned with two relief niches dedicated to Pan and to Charis (the reliefs are missing), and with two inscriptions, one of which is the verse dedication of this cave complex, carved into the wall in letters of the final years of the fifth century and thus perhaps written by someone else in his memory:22 æåÅ  › ¨|ÅæÆE  › ıç|ºÅ  çæÆ4|ÆEØ ˝ıç * |¼ æ  KÅæªÆ .

21 The text is difficult to read at this point, and none of the modern attempts is fully convincing. 22 IG I3 980.

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Archedemos the Theraean the one seized by the Nymphs brought, through the instructions of the Nymphs, the cave to completion.

This formal dedicatory inscription of the cave corresponds to the two texts that record the construction of garden and dance-floor (whose lettering is somewhat earlier). The smaller chamber, basically the extension of the landing or entrance hallway that rapidly slopes downward, becomes dark very fast. Its only mark of distinction is a spring at its deepest end; it is the larger chamber that, together with the landing area, contains the sculptures and inscriptions, but it is only the larger southern chamber where we find a sequence of shrines cut out from the rock that is at the bottom of the dividing ridge, visible because they receive light through the entrance hole. Starting at the threshold that marks the entrance from the smaller into the larger chamber and moving east along this wall, one counts five important sculptures and shrines. First is an almost life-size relief of a man with a hammer and a chisel, twice inscribed with the name of Archedamos: this obviously is a portrait of the man who built all this, the pictorial equivalent of the dedicatory inscription—it must mark the beginning of the sequence of shrines along the ridge wall. Next comes a complex of traces inscribed with the names of Apollo and Hersos (or Apollo Hersos, as a divine name and an otherwise unknown epithet).23 It is followed by a series of niches for reliefs, now lost, then, after the steps that lead down from the entrance, by a complex of niches with reliefs of Pan. Then follows the headless and almost life-size sculpture of a matronly woman on a throne, whose identity is not clarified by an inscription and is thus unclear; rather than a nymph, it seems to be an image of the Mountain Mother.24 Finally, there is a rock outcropping shaped in the form of an omphalos or rough human body. Inside the rapidly sloping large room, opposite the sitting goddess, is another small stone shelf whose statues are lost but that had a conduct of water; a nicely worked pathway led to it over the rapidly descending floor from the region of the threshold. It might well have been the shrine of the Nymphs whose importance is attested by the garden, and whose connection with flowing water is obvious. 23 IG I3 981, c.400 bce: ººø  :  ‚æ . The interpretation of the text is unclear, neither a heros Hersos nor an epiclesis Hersos are attested elsewhere. 24 Thus already Milchhoefer 1880, 217.

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The main evidence for cultic activity, besides the many horns of sacrificial goats, is another inscription, a sacred law inscribed on the wall that leads from the hallway into the smaller chamber (again written in letters of the later fifth century):25 ¼ æ’ å ŒºÇ [] ŒÆd e ZŁ  Ç . __ Wash the entrails outside and wash off the dung.

Whereas the slaughtering and preparation of the sacrificial animals had to take place outside the cave, the meat must have been burnt on the altars or placed before the images inside the cave. All this, then, evokes a complex sanctuary of the Nymphs, Pan, Charis, Apollo the shepherd’s god, and perhaps the Mountain Mother. Archaeological remains show that the cave must have received some cult already in the later sixth century bce; in the mid-fifth century, a goat herd inscribed a dedication to the Nymphs.26 It remained in full and continuous use until the second century bce: a number of votive reliefs with their inscriptions date from the fourth and third centuries bce.27 But the one man most firmly associated with the cave, its elaboration into a complex shrine (KÅæªÆ ), and the addition of a garden and dance floor in the later part of the fifth century is Archedamos of Thera. He must have been a metic with some skills as a mason, but by no means a professional sculptor; guesses as to his profession range from quarry worker to merchant. More importantly is the characterization as ıçºÅ , ‘seized by the Nymph’: not necessarily a raving ecstatic but perhaps simply having a mild case of epilepsy that he himself and his surroundings explained as possession, and that led him to a very personal and intensive devotion to the Nymphs and to the transformation of a pre-existing cult cave into an impressively complex shrine. His reconstruction, too, had received divine sanction—this time through the direct inspiration of the Nymphs that possessed Archedamos (çæÆÆEØ ˝ıç *). Like Xenophon, Archedamos moved inside a well-established religious tradition: the combination of Pan, the Nymphs, Charis, and Apollo 25 26 27

Sokolowski 1969. IG I3 974, ca. 450 bce? See Weller 1903, 283–4.; Baumer 2004, 17, and catalogue ATT 42.

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is no spectacular innovation; the only unusual element, the possible presence of Cybele, the Mountain Mother, might find an explanation not just in her intimate connection with mountains but also as a healer of possession that is in Archedamos’ individual history.28 The conformity to tradition should not surprise. The shrine had already a tradition when Archedamos took it over, and more importantly, unlike Xenophon or Pliny, Archedamos was no independent land-owner: as a metic in Athens, he could not own land. He thus had to rely on the friendship or indulgence of an Athenian citizen who would let him work on his land or buy land for the use of the metic: this is true even in the case, attested for the successors of Epicurus’ Garden, that this Athenian citizen and landowner was not much more than a middleman acting on behalf of a metic—no middleman would have offered his services to something that would have drawn attention to his business.29 It does not come as a surprise, then, that the sanctuary went on to flourish well after Archedamos’ intervention: his work resonated with the worshippers for three more centuries.

ARTEMIDOROS OF PERGE Up to now, the case studies—Xenophon, Pliny, Archedamos—have all concerned shrines on private property outside the city in the countryside. One might suspect that these shrines, riding on the border between publice and privatim, were more open to such initiatives—although in all three cases these shrines were visited by members of a community and served as the focal point of an annual local festival. It might well be that they were visited also by inhabitants of the nearby cities: in Menander’s Dyscolos, the rural shrine of Pan near the house of Knemon invites city folks to rural sacrificial parties, and votive material from rural shrines bears this out.30 It 28 She healed Dionysos from madness sent by Hera: Eumelos F 11 Bernabé (Schol. A to Il.6.131, compare Schol. D to Il. 6.130); Apollod. 3.5.1 (5.55); Schol. Lycophr. 273. 29 The opinio recepta that metics could not own land goes back to Moses Finley who stressed the economic hindrances created by this ‘gap between land and money’; for the more flexible way of understanding the question see Millett 1991, 225; for the concrete case of Epicurus’ successor: Leiwo and Remes 1999, 161–66. 30 Baumer 2004.

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might thus be hasty to think of rural shrines as offering greater privacy than could city shrines.31 There is at least one case from the interior of a city that deserves attention. In the city of Thera, on the street to the agora, one still sees the remains of a strange and complex shrine with several altars, statue bases, and inscriptions; they are dated to the middle of the third century bce and are the work of another determined individual, one Artemidoros of Perge.32 Other inscriptions attest to his activities as founder of a cult of his native Artemis Pergaia, and of a temple for the first three Ptolemies.33 Unlike the Theraean Archedamos in Athens, the Pergaean Artemidoros was very visible in the island community of Thera, and presumably much wealthier: after his dedications, and perhaps as a result of them, the Theraeans made him their citizen, and instituted a hero cult after his death.34 Although presumably assembled over a period of time and not necessarily with a blueprint to start with, the long and narrow temenos has ended up with a programme that shows a tripartite structure. At its centre is an altar of Homonoia:35  ˇ  Æ æ øæ   ººø ı —æªÆE  ŒÆ ’ KØ . IŁÆ  øe ºØ ¥ Æ BØ’  ˇ  Æ Æ æ  J —æªÅ ŒÆ ’ KØ  æ øæ . Of Concord: Artemidoros, son of Apollonios, of Perge, after a dream. After a dream, Artemidoros has built the immortal altar of Concord for this town here, although having Perge as his home-town,

Both the position in the centre of the monument and the reference to the dream that ordered him to dedicate this altar point to its key role in the entire monument. It is framed by two subordinate altars of helpers in a crisis, to the left (seen from the street) the Samothracian gods, to the right, after an almost empty panel, the Diskouroi.36 Both 31 Matthew Dillon’s description of Archedamos living near his cave in the countryside is pure fantasy, albeit not impossible: Dillon 1997, 113–27. 32 See esp. Palagia 1992, 171–78 and Graf 1995, 107–12, with the older bibliography. 33 Artemis: IG XII: 3.1350; Ptolemies: IG XII: 3.464. 34 Citizenship: IG XII: 3.1344; hero cult: IG XII: 3.863=1349. 35 IG XII: 3.1336. 36 Dioskouroi IG XII: 3.422=1333; Samothracian gods 1337.

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epigrams that go with them refer to their helping function: the epigram with the Samothracian gods calls the altar ‘listening to prayers’ (KŒ

 På  ØØ, with an adjective usually confined to helpful deities, dei praesentes); the one with the Dioskouroi puts emphasis on their function as saviours and that of the two flanking altars as helpful (ø BæØ Ł EØ . . . Kıå  ØØ  ÅŁ ). The right wing of this triptych, so to speak, features two altars, the one at the margin belonging to Hekate, the one towards the center to Priapos.37 Hekate is addressed as Phosphoros, ‘Light-bringer’, an epiclesis that is more often given to an almost identical Artemis;38 it is iconographically expressed in two torches carried by the goddess and concerns the rescue from, and help in, some peril, in a common use of light imagery in Greece; the epigram defines her as ‘whom those worship who inhabit the countryside’ (m ØHØ ‹ Ø åæÆ ŒÆ å ıØ).39 Priapos, the immigrant god from Lampsakos and another god of the country-side, promises wealth (º F  ¼çŁØ  çæø) and is characterized as helper for citizens and foreigners alike (AØ  º ÆØ E ’ K ØŒ FØ  Ø). The left wing focuses on three Theraean city gods, Zeus Polieus, Apollo Stephanephoros, and Poseidon Pelagios, represented by their altars and, in a reading that goes back to Hiller von Gaertringen, their sacred animals, eagle, lion, and dolphin respectively.40 The same Hiller observed that in all the epigrams in this section the ethnic —æªÆE  was absent; he read this as an indication of its relative date: Artemidoros added the three altars after he was given the Theraean citizenship that is mentioned at the very beginning of the section, together with his portrait. Each dedication is accompanied by two hexameters; the first to Zeus adds two lines that regard them all: ¼çŁØ Ø, IŁÆ Ø ŒÆd IªæÆ Ø IÆ   ø , ‹ Ø ƒæf   Œ  æ øæ .

37

The inscriptions IG XII: 3,421=1335. A Theraean inscription from the 2nd cent. ce invokes Einodia Soteira Phosphoros Artemis, IG XII: 3.1328. 39 See the material in Graf 1985, 228–36. 40 IG XII: 3.1345–1347. Palagia 1992 understood the animals as symbols of towns that represented Artemidoros’ earlier career; if so, he did not make this clear to anybody, since the accompanying epigrams describe the animal images as gifts to the gods. 38

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Indestructible, immortal, ageless, and eternal are the altars, with which the priest Artemidoros built the temenos.

Four more altars stood in front of the middle part; two only are preserved, one to Tyche, and the other to the Heroissai ‘who bring a new harvest every year’ (ŒÆæe   []N KØÆı e ¼ª ıØ) and are invoked to come to ‘this city’.41 Although the work of an individual that reflects his own religious choices and, by the choice of Priapos, his own socio-political status as a foreigner, the combination of gods does not mirror Artemidoros’ private life. The emphasis is on the community, its problems, and the help the divinities (and their propagator, Artemidoros) can bring. Natural resources—or their lack—seem to be one problem (an epigram without an altar talks about earth who brings forth everything and takes it away again),42 but political tension seems to be the major one: this has put the cult of Homonoia, Concord, into the centre of the entire shrine. Homonoia is worshipped either to preserve or restore unity inside a community or to guarantee concord between two cities.43 Since no such external partner is mentioned here, we have to think of internal tensions, and it is tempting to connect this with the heavy presence of the Ptolemaic fleet and its commander around 261 bce. In other words, it appears that the foreigner and alien resident Artemidoros, at a critical time, offered his personal help to his host city by founding a very visible but also rather idiosyncratic shrine and acting as priest of the gods worshipped in it. As a final group of inscriptions from the temenos indicates, it must have had the intended results: grouped around the portrait of Artemidoros, they tell of the rewards the Theraeans gave their benefactor—first an honorific wreath ( ’  ˇ ØÆ Ła ø F åæØ I ÆøŒ e  çÆ  Ææa B ºø ªÆ æ ØæøØ, ‘goddess Concord returned, as a thanksgiving for the altar, the great wreath from the city for Artemidoros’),44 then a second one;45 finally they voted the citizenship and yet another wreath to this ‘blameless citizen’.46 41

42 IG XII: 3.1338. 1340. IG XII: 3.1334. See Thériault 1996. There is some more material now, but it doesn’t contradict Thériault’s conclusions. 44 45 IG XII: 3.1342. IG XII: 3.1343. 46 IG XII: 3.1344 B  KåØæ Å [›] ¨ÅæÆE  æ øæ , ŒÆd  çøØ Å ¼  K Æ  º Å. 43

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CONCLUSION: THE LIMITS OF INDIVIDUALIZATION Archedamos of Thera and Artemidoros of Perge, both foreign residents, each built a complex shrine that combined different divinities of their own personal choice; but they did so with very different motivations. Archedamos obeyed the nymph that spoke in him and dedicated a temenos in her honour and in the honour of divinities associated with her, with the somewhat unusual addition of the Meter Oreia. Although we might feel tempted to understand nympholepsy as a mental problem and the construction of the shrine with its worship as a private way of coping with it, this cannot be what motivated Archedamos: possession is healed by rites of purification, not by worshipping the very spirit that possesses. Rather, possession legitimated Archedamos’ unusual project to take over and radically reshape an existing place of worship on an estate that according to Athenian law could not have been his own. Artemidoros, on the other hand, wanted his cult to address political problems of the community of which he was, in a legal sense, only a marginal member, and he did so on a highly visible spot inside the city of Thera; if he too could not own the ground on which he built (which might well be), he needed the help and tacit approval from a citizen to do so, even if he claimed divine legitimization by the dream that ordered him to construct the shrine (or at least the altar of Concord), as Archedamos might have found an obliging citizen on the strength of his possession. Beyond these obvious differences—and beyond the similarity of their marginal position in their community, with the necessity for any undertaking of this sort to be legitimized by the gods whose voices spoke to the founder in a dream or in possession, if only to gain a de facto right of ownership of the real estate on which the shrine was built—there is much common ground between the two founders. Both took pains to mark their efforts as their personal undertaking, not just by the repeated inscription of their names but also by adding their self-portrait: it was not just Artemidoros who thus expected that others would visit and worship in their shrine, Archedamos must have done the same, and the one cultic ordinance—to wash the entrails outside the cave—is written in the same hand as most of the other inscriptions and must go back to his initiative: he foresaw or experienced the necessity of directing a larger crowd of worshippers. Already the experience of the divine that gave legitimization to their

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respective endeavours was personal and self-centred, being either a dream or a moment of possession in which the divinity spontaneously took over the self. I read this insistence on, and advertising of, the personal initiative as a function of their social status. As resident aliens, both men were marginal in their communities (and Archedamos’ possession must have set him apart as well); but both used their individual religious choices to insert themselves into a central position in a wider community. This is more obvious in Artemidoros’ undertaking that showed him as a benefactor to the city of Thera and resulted in his full acceptance into it as an honoured citizen (and, after his death, as a hero who received cultic worship), but it must also have worked with Archedamos: his shrine served as the religious focus of local worshippers who regularly met for a sacrifice and common meal, no doubt praising the man who had beautified the shrine. The final result, then, is close to what Xenophon or Pliny, the landed members of the local elite, achieved: their shrines too were the cultic centre of a local festival that united all the neighbours, in Pliny’s case an already pre-existent festival on an old family estate,47 in Xenophon’s a new one on an estate donated to him by Sparta (in this respect, Xenophon might well have needed to gain prestige with his new neighbours as well). The different locations—countryside versus interior of the city—is a function of the different aims of the founders of these shrines, without influence on the degree and form of individualization. This also points to the limits of individualization: whether conscious or not, the choices had to resonate with the wider group at whose centre, or in whose margins, these men were, if they wanted to succeed. The divine legitimization they all sought has to do with this limit: it legitimizes the choice not to the person who had been choosing but to a wider audience, and it is significant that the two elite members, Xenophon and Pliny, relied on public means of communication with the divine—Delphi and the haruspices— whereas the two metics acted out of purely individual experience of the divine, possession and dreams. This is not to say that these cases mark the outer edge of individualization of religion of their times: the philosophers, starting with the Milesians, went much further, 47 Plin. Ep. 4.1.4 mentions that the near-by city, Tifernum Tiburinum, made him their patronus adhuc puerum; he undertook other public construction there as well (3.4.2).

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although, as the case of Socrates shows, not without considerable risk. And more importantly (but in conformity with what I observed in my introduction), the philosophers went further only in their Ł º ªÆ, in the way they talked about the divine, not necessarily in the way they behaved as religious actors—or, if they went further, like the Pythagoreans who refused animal sacrifice, they ended up by founding their own communities that might in their turn provoke the anger or the mockery of others. Others, such as Plato’s Academy, behaved like ordinary thiasoi, groups organized around a common cult, whatever their discourse on the gods was.48 And as to the itinerant specialists, Plato’s Iªæ ÆØ ŒÆd  Ø who made religion their craft ( åÅ  Ø  Ø a ƒæ), in the words of the Derveni author, and whom Plato sharply attacks as disguised atheists in the Laws, must have been the last who could afford unlimited individualization;49 their livelihood depended on the expectations of their clients. Although these customers had individual needs that could not be fulfilled by the activities of the polis cult, the rites they sold were rooted in the common mould of accepted ritual behaviour— only the explanation, the Ł º ªÆ, was not. But the angry mockery of the Derveni author shows that the ordinary customer did not care for Ł º ªÆ, and the ordinary professional did not provide it. To a certain extent, one could argue that the limits of individualization are given by the medium I analysed, the epigraphic texts; such texts, at least when inscribed on stone, are almost all public and thus open to the judgement and criticism of the group, and one would presumably not advertise offending content. But this is only partly true. On the one hand, grave inscriptions show a wide span between firm eschatological hopes and the denial of any survival after death; nobody seemed to be offended by any of these statements, since there was no orthodoxy as a gauge that could trigger dissent and offence. On the other hand, the foregoing reflections demonstrate how individual choices remained in the realm of discourse or, if translated into practice, found their own group where they became the new orthopraxy: the limit is thus set by the religious system, not just by the medium in which it expresses itself.

48

Still valid: Boyancé 1936. Plat. rep. 364BC; leg. 10.909D (K z  Ø  ŒÆ ÆŒıÇ  ÆØ  ºº d ŒÆd æd AÆ c ƪªÆÆ ŒŒØÅ Ø); Pap.Derveni col. xx 3. 49

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Baumer, Lorenz E. 2004. Kult im Kleinen. Ländliche Heiligtümer Spätarchaischer Bis Hellenistischer Zeit. Attika—Arkadien—Argolis—Kynouria. Internationale Archäologie 81. Rahden: Verlag Marie Leidorf. Boyancé, Pierre 1936. Le culte des Muses chez les philosophes grecs: Études d’histoire et de psychologie religieuses. BEFAR 141. Paris: E. de Boccard. Braconi, Paolo, and Sáez, José Uroz 2001. ‘Il Tempio della Tenuta di Plinio il Giovane “in Tuscis” ’, Eutopia 1, 203–17. Bremmer, Jan 2008. ‘The Spelling and Meaning of the Name Megabyxos’, in Greek Religion and Culture, the Bible and the Ancient Near East. Jerusalem Studies in Religion and Culture 8. Leiden: Brill, 353–6. Chiekova, Dobrinka 2008. Cultes et Vie Religieuse des Cités Grecques du Pont Gauche (VIIe–Ier siècles avant J.-C.). European University Studies Series 28: 76. Bern: Peter Lang. Connor, William Robert 1988. ‘Seized by the Nymphs: Nympholepsy and Symbolic Expression in Classical Greece’, Classical Antiquity 7, 155–89. Cooley, Alison 2000. The Afterlife of Inscriptions: Reusing, Rediscovering, Reinventing and Revitalizing Ancient Inscriptions. Bulletin of the Institute of Classical Studies, Suppl. 75. London: Institute of Classical Studies. Dillon, Matthew 1997. ‘The Ecology of Greek Ritual’, ZPE 118, 113–27. Fontenrose, Joseph 1978. The Delphic Oracle. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Graf, Fritz 1985. Nordionische Kulte: Religionsgeschichtliche und Epigraphische Untersuchungen zu den Kulten von Chios, Erythrai, Klazomenai und Phokaia. Bibliotheca Helvetica Romana 21. Rome: Institute Suisse. ——1995. ‘Bemerkungen zur bürgerlichen Religiosität im Zeitalter des Hellenismus’, in Wörrle, Michael and Zanker, Paul (eds), Stadtbild und Bürgerbild im Hellenismus. Munich: Beck, 103–14. Kindt, Julia 2009. ‘Polis Religion—A Critical Appreciation’, Kernos 22, 9–34. L’Allier, Louis 1998. ‘Le Domaine de Scillonte: Xénophon et l’Exemple Perse’, Phoenix 52, 1–14. Leiwo, Martii and Remes, Paulina 1999. ‘Partnership of Citizens and Metics: The Will of Epicurus’, CQ 49, 161–6. Milchhoefer, Arthur 1880. ‘Nymphenrelief aus Athen’, AM 5, 206–23. Millett, Paul 1991. Lending and Borrowing in Ancient Society. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Palagia, Olga 1992. ‘Cult and Allegory: The Life Story of Artemidoros of Perge’, in Sanders, Jan M. (ed.): FLˇL`˚ˇ˝; Laconian Studies in Honour of George Catling. London: British School at Athens, 171–8. Pippidi, Dionise M. (ed.) 1983. Inscriptiones Scythiae Minoris Graecae et Latinae I. Bucharest: Editura Academiei Republicii Socialiste România.

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Purvis, Andrea 2009. Singular Dedications: Founders and Innovators of Private Cults in Classical Greece. London: Routledge. Robert, Jeanne, and Robert, Louis 1968. ‘Bulletin Épigraphique’, REG 81, 420–549. Ross, Ludwig 1848. Reisen des Königs Otto und der Königin Amalia in Griechenland. Halle: Schwetschke & Sohn. Scheid, John 1996. ‘Pline le Jeune et les Sanctuaires d’Italie: Obeservations sur les Lettres IV, 1 VIII, 8 et IX, 39’, in Chastagnol, André, Demougin, Ségolène, and Lepelley, Claude (eds), Splendidissima Civitas: Études d’Histoire Romaine en Hommage à Francois Jacques. Paris: Publications de la Sorbonne, 241–58. Schörner, Günther and Goette, Hans Rupprecht 2004. Die Pan-Grotte von Vari. Mainz: Zabern. Smith, Jonathan Z. 2004. Relating Religion. Essays in the Study of Religion. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Sokolowski, F. 1969. Lois sacrées des cites grecques, no. 9. Paris: Boccard. Sourvinou-Inwood, Christiane 1990. ‘What is Polis Religion?’, in Murray, Oswin and Price, Simon (eds): The Greek City from Homer to Alexander. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 295–322, reprinted in Buxton, Richard (ed.) 2000. Oxford Readings in Greek Religion. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 13–37. Thériault, Gaétan 1996. Le culte d’Homonoia dans les cités grecques. Lyons: Maison de l’Orient méditerranéen. Weller, Charles H. 1903. ‘The Cave at Vari: I. Description, Account of Excavation, and History’, AJA 7, 263–88.

6 Ritual and the Individual in Roman Religion* Greg Woolf

RELIGION AND THE INDIVIDUAL Ritual action has always been about individuals: there are, after all, no other conceivable social actors. Primatologists observing social groups among the great apes differentiate group members by their role and character. Those identities go beyond what is determined by age and gender. Our individuality is arguably inextricably bound up with our sociality and our mortality. The mortality of each member of a social group imposes a biography on the survivors, and a narrative direction on their life-courses. Social replacement entails the development and differentiation of the social roles of its members in ways that might reasonably be described as individuation. If we have been individuals since before we were human, it is not surprising that the first traces of ritual activity (in the Upper Palaeolithic) include handprints made by individual artists on the walls of caves, and burial rituals which operated in part to differentiate the deceased and recognize their individuated identities.1 Much ethnographically observed ritual mediates between individual and group. Indeed some generalizing theories of ritual are precisely focused on the means by which collectivities reproduce themselves through the * I am grateful to all who commented on the paper pre-circulated for the Erfurt conference of September 2009 and especially to Clifford Ando who read and greatly improved a subsequent version. I alone am responsible for the views expressed. 1 Gamble 2007; Gamble and Poor 2005. On individual roles in the upper palaeolithic see also Mithen 1998.

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recruitment, socialization, and enculturation of new members.2 It follows that religious individuation must coincide with the first appearance of human beings, whether that means homo sapiens or even, conceivably, other late hominid lineages such as the Neanderthals. What of individualization? To be useful for the study of ancient religions, the term should entail more than the religious dimensions of this mundane individuation that is entailed in all human sociality. The most obvious additional specificity would be the emergence of some level of personal choice between alternative world-views and competing religious engagements. Choice in this sense should mean the capacity of one member of a group to follow a religious path other than those entailed by his or her (necessarily individuated) social identity. That path might be in addition to, or in place of, those expected by virtue of that person’s ascribed social identity. Individualization may be thought of as a measure of the extent to which this choice is exercised. ‘Emancipation’, ‘disembedding’, and ‘structural differentiation’ offer variant ways of talking about these changes as they have unfolded in historical time at the level of entire societies. The variety of these formulations mainly reflects differences in where analytical attention is focused, rather than major differences of conceptualization or explanation. Our shared narrative of religious history in the very long term envisages a series of moments of individualization, points at which society and the sacred became more and more estranged from one other. Yet the capacity for choice is a more difficult criterion to apply than it seems at first sight. It is widely accepted that a measure of individual choice already existed in classical antiquity, even if there is less agreement about how this should be conceptualized. Some scholars see polytheism itself as inevitably entailing some measure of choice: individuals might form attachments to particular deities, or at least choose to attend or give to one temple rather than another.3 The ubiquitous votive dedications tend to specify the precise identity of the particular worshippers and gods involved. Those ritual moves had a counterpart in myth. Personal connections between human 2 For example, Connerton 1989. A similar stress on socialization is a theme of Bell 1992. A compatible account of the origins of ritual is offered by Liénard, Boyer 2006. 3 For some scholars such attachments are integral to classical polytheism, others classify them as henotheism, on which Versnel 1990.

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protagonists and particular gods are central to the plots of the earliest literary works, including the Epic of Gilgamesh and the Odyssey. The fact that those connections take the form of love, hate, jealousy, respect, disdain, and even kinship suggests that patterns of human sociality were extended to involve divine persons created by the dynamics of a polytheistic world view, rather as sacrifice invited the gods to share in commensuality as ritualized within human communities.4 Myth and ritual created gods as well as men who were endowed with some freedom of action, freedom that entailed choice as well as agency. Against this stands an influential narrative of religious change which claims that during the Hellenistic and Roman periods new religious forms emerged that offered heightened levels of individual religious experience.5 A key feature of these new religious forms (or religions) was said to be the requirement they imposed on individuals to make a positive choice to participate, or join, or to become an initiate.6 Christianity was, of course, the paradigmatic case of a new religion conceptualized in these terms. As a result, current studies of the emergence of religious pluralism are inevitably bound up with the debates on Christian origins.7 That narrative is itself linked to the emergence of the category of ‘religion’, itself increasingly seen to be a product of Christian thought and discourse.8 The chronology of these changes is contentious. The origins of Dionysiac cult associations lie before the Hellenistic period, while key developments in the definition of religion as a category have been located between the second and fourth centuries ad.9 The problem is not so much an empirical one as a sign of lack of consensus about what should be considered the central components of this phenomenon, or narrative. Where should individualization and personal choice be placed in these accounts of religious history? One (traditional) option would be

For the view that Greeks viewed their gods as ‘larger Greeks’ see Nock 1942. The classic statement is Cumont 1906. A set of responses and reassessments is gathered in Bonnet, Rüpke and Scarpi 2006. 6 The most elegant formulation remains that of Nock 1933. 7 The exercise of choice between competing options is central to the formulations of North 1992, Stark 1996. But note the powerful critique of the ‘religious market place’ model in Beck 2006. 8 On which Asad 1993. 9 On the emergence of the category of religion in Roman antiquity see now Boyarin 2004a; Boyarin 2001; Boyarin 2004b. 4 5

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to say that persons might be individuated in traditional religion but only individualized in new religions: individualization would then be placed back into the conventional story of rupture between polytheisms and monotheisms, open religious systems versus exclusive ones, between religion in society and religion and society. Less comfortably it would become part of the story of the rise and distinctiveness of Christianity, a narrative that borrows a good deal from the interested accounts framed by the triumphant monotheists themselves.10 The objections to this analytical move are clear. At best we would simply gain a new vocabulary in which to tell an old story: at worst it would lend spurious sociological legitimacy to a set of distinctions and periodizations that are now widely seen as problematic. My own starting point is the observation that individuals are assigned quite a prominent place in Roman religion in such accounts as we possess of actual ritual performances. The second part of this chapter asks what functions the naming of individual participants in historical and other records of rituals served. The third part asks, on the basis of such records, how rituals participated in the creation of individuals. My examples deliberately straddle the line conventionally drawn between ‘civic cults’ and ‘new religions’.

PERFORMANCE AND HISTORY I shall begin with the participation of individuals in the collective public cults of the classical city, those sacra publica that are often today placed in one way or another at the heart of Roman religion.11 One of the striking features of Roman historical accounts of particular ritual performances is the prominence given in those accounts to named individual participants. Consider the restoration in 70 ce of one of the central cult places of Rome, the temple of Jupiter on the Capitol, following its destruction during the Flavian civil war. Tacitus narrates it as follows:

10 Ando, see ch. 4. On the influence of Christian polemics of different kinds on the historiography of ancient religions see also Smith 1990. 11 e.g. Beard, North and Price 1998; Scheid 1985). For discussion of this convention see Bendlin 2000; Gordon 1990a; Woolf 1997.

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The work of restoring the Capitol was assigned by him [Vespasian] to Lucius Vestinius, a man of the Equestrian order, who, however, for high character and reputation ranked among the nobles. The haruspices whom he assembled directed that the remains of the old shrine should be removed to the marshes, and the new temple raised on the original site. The Gods, they said, forbade the old form to be changed. On the 21st of June, beneath a cloudless sky, the entire space devoted to the sacred enclosure was encompassed with chaplets and garlands. Soldiers who bore auspicious names entered the precincts with sacred boughs. Then the Vestals, with a troop of boys and girls whose fathers and mothers were still living, sprinkled the whole space with water drawn from the fountains and rivers. After this, Helvidius Priscus, the praetor, as directed by Publius Aelianus the pontiff, first purified the spot with a suovetaurilia, and duly placed the entrails on turf; then, besought Jupiter, Juno, Minerva, and the tutelary deities of empire, to prosper the undertaking, and to lend their divine help to raise the abodes which the piety of men had founded for them. He then touched the wreaths, which were wound round the foundation stone and entwined with the ropes, while at the same moment the other Magistrates and Priests, the Senators, the Knights, and a great part of the People, with zeal and joy uniting their efforts, dragged the huge stone along. Contributions of gold and silver and virgin ores, never smelted in the furnace but still in their natural state, were showered on the foundations. The haruspices had previously directed that no stone or gold which had been intended for any other purpose should profane the work. Additional height was given to the structure; this was the only variation which religion would permit, and the one feature which had been thought wanting in the splendour of the old temple.12

No textualization of any ancient ritual is innocent. Nor can it be entirely extracted from the larger text of which it forms a part. The restoration of the Capitol is a focal point in Tacitus’ narrative of recovery. Its destruction had been narrated as the nadir of Rome’s fortune in a chapter (Histories 3.72) that resumed the history of the temple from its foundation, and alluded to its previous destruction in the worst of the civil wars of the republic. Its restoration follows a series of debates in the senate, also narrated in the Histories, debates in which the roles of Vespasian and Helvidius are highlighted. Restoration was certainly an intended meaning of the original ceremony, one motivation for the considerable cost of the project to Vespasian. 12

Tac. Hist. 4.53.

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The project was undertaken at a moment when he still had other serious concerns, presumably because, like the Templum Pacis, it might evoke Augustus’ restorative actions in respect of temples and cults at the end of ‘his’ civil war.13 The Vespasianic rebuilding and its very public performance was an attempt to cement and sacralize his own victory.14 Tacitus’ telling of the story raises doubts about the stability of that order. The rebuilding of the temple represents a brief collusion of interests between these two protagonists—Vespasian and Priscus—but the conflict between them will return. The following book will represent the Flavians as temple sackers rather than restorers when the narrative moves to Jerusalem. The temple of Jupiter on the Capitol was in any case already a focal point in Roman historiography. Livy (1.55–6) presents its original construction as the last and greatest act of Tarquin the Proud: his treatment makes clear that the subject had been prominently treated in the histories of Fabius Pictor and of Piso. Livy emphasises both its magnificence and the suffering of the people compelled to labour on it by the tyrant. Tacitus’ account of the ritual is carefully selective but new questions will have been evoked by his allusion to the tradition.15 What sort of emperor will Vespasian turn out to be? A new Augustus? Or a new Tarquin? Or a new Sulla? The Histories are heading towards Domitian whose Capitoline Agon will be a symbol for subsequent reigns of his own corruption, rather than restoration, of the res publica.16 For present purposes, however, I want to put aside the topicality of the action and the character of Tacitus’ account, and instead draw attention to the record of the ritual on which we must presume Tacitus relied. The exact nature of these records is unclear. The acta senatus may have included an account of whatever was agreed in the preliminary debates. The college of pontiffs generated and kept its

13

For full documentation see Gros 1976. For other attempts to provide religious legitimacy for Vespasian’s victory in terms of portents, astrology, and the patronage of Sarapis see Henrichs 1968; Lattimore 1934. 15 Suet. Vesp. 8 and Dio 65.10.2 in contrast stresses the personal engagement of the new emperor, actually participating in the manual work of clearing the rubble from the wreckage of the earlier temple. 16 See for instance the comments of Tacitus’ contemporary, Plin. epi. 4.22 on which Woolf 2006. Also Caldelli 1993; Hardie 2003. 14

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own records.17 Quite possibly there were epigraphic monumenta of the ceremony as well. Monumental writing was as important a source of legitimacy to Vespasian as it had been to earlier emperors. Suetonius describes Vespasian’s concern to find copies of three thousand odd documents originally recorded on bronze tablets around the Capitol, and to reinscribe them as part of his restoration, and the Flavian period in general is marked by a resurgence of epigraphic texts.18 Whatever the medium originally employed it is clear that an important part of the records comprised the names of those involved. The initiative for restoration is attributed to the new emperor (in what capacity Tacitus does not specify although the original records may have done so). Three further individuals are named: the equestrian charged with the construction, Helvidius Priscus as praetor, and Publius Aelianus the pontiff. It was evidently important for those who recorded the ritual in the first place to note the names of those involved, as well as precisely which priests and magistrates were to play a part. As in other imperial rituals—the better documented consecrationes, for example, or the various ceremonies described and prescribed in the new Tiberian epigraphic documents—we are offered the spectacle of the state performed as a pageant.19 Each of the ordines is given its place, and their membership is left anonymous. Yet the identity of the key players was also evidently deemed important. It is not certain exactly how such rituals were devised. Some components might have been suggested by the ways in which other temples had been dedicated, or even by the rites used in the Sullan restoration. Temple dedications were so common as to be virtually routine: the Temple of Jupiter itself had been rededicated on a

17

For the documents generated by priestly colleges see the essays gathered in Moatti, ed.1998. 18 Suet. Vesp. 8 listing senatus consulta and plebiscita recording alliances, treaties and privileges granted to various parties. Note also the bronze fragments of the lex de imperio Vespasiani (CIL VI.930) which show Vespasian as concerned as had been Tiberius at the start of his reign to make the maximum possible use of epigraphic monumenta. The various copies of the Flavian municipal decree, the reinscription of the colonial law of Urso, the production of the Orange cadasters are among provincial exemplars of the Flavian vogue for epigraphic monuments. The existence of a Flavian predecessor of the Forma Urbis Romae that hung in the Severan reconstruction of the Templum Pacis has also been suspected. 19 Price 1987; Rowe 2002. Cf. Hopkins 1991.

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number of occasions. Elements of repetition and a punctilious concern with precedent would seem appropriate. But it is clear from the involvement of the haruspices that planning the ritual was also treated as the design of something new and unique, its detail the solution to a complex ritual problem. And at some point, discussion of the rites must have given way to decisions about the identity of individual participants. Why Helvidius of all the senior magistrates? Was it because of his leading role in the debates about restoration? Other participants were also selected on the basis of characteristics that were essentially personal. No prior register can have existed of boys and girls whose parents were still alive. How were they selected? And what about all those soldiers named Felix, Fortunatus, and so on, plucked from the ranks to make a lucky day? Their names too are part of the preparation of the ceremony and of its record. The same emphases on the planning of a unique ceremony and on recording the names of the personnel involved occur in Livy’s account of the bringing of the Great Mother of the Gods to Rome in 204 bc. On that occasion a lengthy discussion was held about precisely who should welcome her on her arrival. Interpretation of the Sybilline books had earlier led to the decision to seek the help of King Attalus of Pergamum, a key Roman ally, in acquiring her from her sanctuary at Pessinus. En route to Pergamum the delegation had stopped to consult the oracle at Delphi and had received instructions about the rituals appropriate to her reception at Rome.20 The debate which resulted is described by Livy, our main source for these events. There was also a discussion (consultatio) on how the Idaean Mother should be welcomed. Marcus Valerius, a member of the delegation, had travelled ahead to announce that she would soon be in Italy, and a recent report stated she was already at Terracina. No trivial matter demanded the senate’s decision, viz. who was the best man (optimus vir) in the state. To be sure anyone would prefer victory in this competition to any number of commands or magistracies, whether awarded by the votes of the senate or the people. The judgement was made that Publius Scipio, son of the Gaius who had died in Spain, a young man not yet old enough to hold a quaestorship, was the best of all the good men in the state. I would gladly relate the specific qualities of this man that led the senate to this decision, had earlier writers who had access to the memory of contemporaries passed this on. But I shall not add my 20

Liv. 29.10–11 for initial discussion and consultation of oracles.

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own guesses given the long lapse in time since then. Publius Cornelius was commanded to go with all the matronae to meet the goddess at Ostia. He himself was to go aboard the ship to receive her and would bring her ashore and hand her over to the matronae who would carry her on. After the ship arrived at the mouth of the river Tiber, he did as he was ordered, sailed out to the ship and received the goddess from her priests and brought her to land. She was welcomed by the foremost women of the city, the most prominent of whom was one Claudia Quinta. The story goes that some had doubts about her reputation before these events, but her purity (pudicitia) was all the more famous in later years on account of her performance of this ritual. The matrons then passed the goddesses from hand to hand in succession while all the city came out to meet her. Censers had been placed in front of the doors along the route she took and as she passed incense was burned and prayers offered up that she might enter the city of Rome willingly and might bring good fortune. They carried her to the temple of Victory on the Palatine on the Ides of April. That day became a sacred day. Crowds of people brought gifts to the goddess on the Palatine, a feast of the gods (a lectisternium) took place and games were held, called the Megalensian Games.21

These events have been most often discussed for their political context and for the significance of the mixture of traditional and exotic elements that came to characterize the cult of the Great Mother.22 But for present purposes, I want to underline the fact that the rituals themselves are composed of fairly conventional elements, and yet great care seems to have been taken in the choreographing of the ritual performance. Why did it need such careful planning? Here too there were many possible models that ought to have made planning the events a simple matter. The evocatio of Juno Regina from Veii is just one of a number of precedents. Livy’s account of that event is shorter, but begins with the selection of a group of young men picked from the entire army.23 After washing themselves and putting on white robes they solemnly entered the temple and reached out their hands to touch the cult statue, and one asked the goddess if she was willing to move. Livy tells

21

Liv. 29.14.5–13. The other main account is Ovid. fast. 4.179–372. See most recently Burton 1996; Gruen 1990, ch. 1. For attention to the process of designing the new rituals see Beard 1994. On the identification of goddess and cult image Ando 2008, 22–6. 23 Liv. 5.22.5–8 22

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us the others declared they had seen her nod, then reports an alternative tradition that the goddess actually agreed verbally. Either way she was apparently moved, as if almost weightless, to her new temple on the Aventine, this too being taken as a sign of her consent. Each of these three ritual performances is presented as an exceptional and unique event, even though precedents were available for consultation in all cases. Part of the explanation must be the difference between our perspective and theirs: a ritual performance that may seem to us to be routine expressions of a norm—like the weekly attendance of mass for many Catholics—must have felt less ordinary, and more laden with immanent significance to those involved.24 That difference becomes more acute with the perceived importance of the performance. Each of these cases underwent a lengthy planning process, and in each case detailed records were clearly made of what actually occurred. It looks very much as if both preparation and memorialization served primarily to assert the special significance of the events in question, to extend their duration backwards and forwards in time. The prominence of the selection and recording of names flags the participation of key individuals as something other that the routine discharge of their duties. For in all cases it was apparently not decided simply that such and such a ritual was the prerogative of a particular priest or subdivision of the community of the Romans. Nor was random sortition or representative selection employed. A deliberate public selection was clearly felt important, and the names selected were remembered even, as Livy complains, when the reasons for the choice were not. Can we go beyond noting the emphasis given to the participation of particular individuals to the religious experience of those individuals themselves? This is not so easy. Nevertheless, Livy’s account does suggest both that the selection of Publius Cornelius Scipio was something that might be expected to bring lasting honour, and also that the participation of Claudia Quinta changed her reputation, her fama. No personal record survives. But it does not seem too speculative to suppose that at least some individuals selected for a starring role in a great ceremony of this kind—the children on the Capitol, the auspiciously named soldiers, the youths selected to touch the cult 24 On the importance of this difference for the study of cultural action see Bourdieu 1977, 3–9. I am grateful to Clifford Ando for drawing my attention to this passage.

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statue in Veii that until then only members of one Etruscan priestly family had been allowed to touch—might carry that experience with them throughout their lives. That might seem to qualify for an individuated religious experience. How much more striking must have been the experience of being selected for a priesthood, especially if it were one like the priestesses of Vesta or the flamen Dialis, which surrounded the body of the chosen ones with elaborate prescriptions and proscriptions?25 Very occasionally the priestly role seems to have become central to the perception of a given individual. How much of this was meant when a Quintus Mucius Scaevola was nicknamed ‘augur’ or ‘pontifex’? Perhaps the best evidence for the notion of a sacerdotal identity (as opposed to role) is provided by the priestly persona Augustus tried to cultivate through iconography and titulature.26 The experience of such distinction is, however, beyond reconstruction. Let us return to the written account of the performance. One effect of this prominent insertion of the names of individuals into accounts of ritual performances is to enhance, for the reader, a sense of the historicity of the events described, of the once-and-for-all occasion on which each ritual was performed. It is no surprise that historians like Tacitus and Livy deliberately historicize these events. The rituals they describe are episodes in narratives that are not primarily religious. I provided some context for the Vespasianic restoration of the temple of Jupiter on the Capitol. It would have been equally easy to show how the story of the Idaean Mother’s journey to Rome forms an integral part of the account of how Rome survives Hannibal’s penetration of Italy and their initial crippling defeat at his hands, to recuperate their position and win the second Punic War, or how the bringing of Juno Regina to Rome has a key place in the story of the rise of Rome and in the life of Camillus. Yet it is not only in literary and historical narrations of ritual acts that the names of individuals are prominent. One of the most striking features of the epigraphic Acta of the Arval Brothers is the minute attention with which they record each ritual performance, and with it the names of the officiating priests or magistri and of other members of the college present at the time. These texts may be distinguished 25

On the distinctiveness of this category of priests Rüpke 1996; Scheid 1986. On this Gordon 1990b. For alternative Roman notions of priesthood that had perhaps a greater charismatic component, see Beard 1989. 26

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from familiar epigraphic forms like the alba and fasti that publicized and memorialized comprehensive and ordered records of the membership of collegia or civic bodies, true for a given period but not focused on a single ritual performance. A record of those who happened to be present on one given occasion emphasises contingency over comprehensiveness, and serves to individualize and historicize each act of cult performed in the sacred grove.27 It has often been pointed out that each performance differed slightly, and that even if reading a series of records might convey a sense of normative practices—practices of prior debate, of performance, and of recording—they were in no sense scripts for future performances. There is also a growing consensus that no such scripts existed, and that the creation of such comprehensive accounts and normative texts as were composed occurred only late in the republican period in the context of challenges to priestly authority.28 Both the acta Arvalium and the letters of Symmachus make clear that priests of the imperial period did not behave as if constrained by such manuals, and continued to plot individual performances in minute detail. My point here is not to claim that Roman rituals were not repetitive or conservative. They clearly were, as any perusal of a series of entries such as the Arval Acta makes clear. Generation upon generation of priests agonized over the design of individual performances without apparently introducing either radical innovations or procedures for their mechanical replication. That is to say ritual action remained both conservative and creative, and what looks to us like repetition was never simple routinization. Each performance, it seemed, should conform (in some sense) to precedent. Yet it could never conform so closely that control of ritual might slip from the hands of aristocratic priests nor that their expertise would become redundant.29 These considerations suggest another reason for the presence of named individuals in the written accounts of these performances. Ritualization more or less demands agreement on a series of signs that flag a given action as belonging to a ritual tradition: such signs generate a sense of familiarity as well as recognition.30 That applies to 27

For this point see Rüpke 2004, 35–6. On this process see Wallace-Hadrill 1997. 29 For Roman religion, this dynamic is most clearly exemplified in struggles over the publicising of the ritual calendar on which Rüpke 1995. Key moments are illuminated by Purcell 2001; Wallace-Hadrill 1987. 30 Bell 1992. 28

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the actual words, costume, props, and gestures employed as well as to the physical layout of texts and the formulae spoken and inscribed. Romans understood perfectly well the sense that certain rituals, especially those which acquired a fixed place in the calendar, stabilized the earthly order by emphasizing the cyclical nature of time. Ancient commentators on festivals like the Parilia and the Lupercalia repeatedly stress their antiquity, while Horace famously used the regular procession of pontiff and vestal Virgin up the slopes of the Capitol as a figure for remote posterity.31 The eternity of Rome was, in some senses, bound up with the myth that its ritual tradition stood outside history. How then to relate this to the highly historicized accounts of particular performances that we have in literary texts and on epigraphic monuments? I suggest that what we have to deal with is a tension between the timelessness of ritualized action and the implicit claims to the uniqueness and immediacy of each performance. That tension was part of what gave each performance its charge. The punctilious itemization of the names of individuals helped to anchor any given performance in the here and now. Individuals (or their names) were employed (or deployed) routinely so as to historicize the transcendent. The place they were allocated was, however, closely circumscribed so as not to disturb the sense in which ritual ensured the extension of the present state into the future in a direction that marked a continuity with the past. Individuals, that is, had their place but it was carefully regulated, at least in these narrations of performance. If this is correct, then the prominence of individuals in these recorded performances was not a product of an increased value placed on personal religious participation or experience, nor a sign of a movement towards emancipation and greater autonomy, both often taken as markers of individualization. Instead, their names anchored ritual performance in the here and now, just as the intense plotting of more or less identical performances marks each one as unique. Both modes of action contributed to protecting the prerogatives of the priests and the aristocracy from which they were drawn. 31 e.g. Plut. Rom. 21 on the ancient origins of the Matronalia, Carmentalia, and Lupercalia, Cic. Cael. 26 on the Lupercalia ‘coitio [sc. Lupercorum] illa silvestris ante est instituta quam humanitas atque leges’. On the pontiff and virgin, Hor. car. III.30.6–9. Many other such passages could be gathered.

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Religious writing operated in precisely the opposite manner to a vernacular book of common prayer: it constrained rather than emancipated, and it consolidated existing power structures rather than providing the resources with which to challenge them.

RITUALS AND EXCHANGE The preceding argument depended heavily on Tacitus’ and Livy’s appropriations of records deriving from actual performances. When we turn to the primary records—virtually all epigraphic in nature—it is possible to ask other questions about the participation of named individuals. I have already suggested that performing a particular ritual role might be experienced as a form of individuation, a contribution to the ongoing transformation of a participant’s personal biography. Corresponding transformations today have a twofold nature. First they may alter our interiorized sense of self, by laying down powerful memories which we may revisit repeatedly as a means of self-fashioning: wedding days and funerals are obvious examples, but participation in some more public rituals such as coronations can also provide resources of this kind. Second, rituals transform our social identity, affecting the way others treat us: weddings again (and indeed all rites of passage) have this effect. Naturally the two dimensions of identity—the sense of self and social identity—are not wholly independent of one another, although it is common enough for them to be in tension. Was this what it was like for the Romans too? That rites of passage affect social identity is clear enough in all human societies, but what of the interior self ? This is the terrain on which oriental religions and the like were once believed to do the most work. Let me begin with this inscription from an altar found at the colony of Lyon. In the taurobolium of the Great Idaean Mother of the Gods, which was performed on the instruction of the Mother of the Gods, for the wellbeing of the emperor Caesar Titus Aelius Hadrianus Antoninus Pius, father of his country and of his children and of the condition of the colonia of Lugdunum, Lucius Aemilius Carpus, sevir Augustalis and at the same time dendrophorus received the ‘powers’ (the vires) and transferred them from the Vaticanum, and consecrated an altar adorned with an ox-head at his own expense. The officiating priest,

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Quintus Sammius Secundus, was honoured with an armlet and garland by the quindecimviri, and the most holy town-council of Lugdunum decreed him a lifelong priesthood. In the consulship of Appius Annius Atilius Bradua and Titus Clodius Vibius Varus. Ground was given for this monument by decree of the town council.32

This example takes us into territory claimed by both the sacra publica and the new ‘oriental’ cults. The cult of Cybele originated with that of an Anatolian mother-goddess, worshipped as an aniconic stone betyl through rites that included ecstatic frenzy and self-mutilation. I have already discussed Livy’s account of how she was brought to Rome during the Hannibalic War. Thereafter her public cult contained elements of what Romans considered exotic rituals, alongside annual games, civic drama, and a temple on the Palatine. Taurobolium in this period meant both a public sacrifice of a bull and also an initiatory ritual conducted for the benefit of individual worshippers of the Great Mother. This well-known, if in some respects enigmatic, text records the installation of her cult among the sacra publica of another city, the Roman colonia of Lyon.33 The inscription is a monument to a series of rituals that created a web of relationships between a number of participating parties. The parties concerned included two individuals, Carpus, who was both augustalis and dendrophorus, and Secundus, the sacerdos; two civic bodies, (the decuriones of Lyon and the priestly college of the quindecimviri); two cities (Rome and Lyon); a god, Magna Mater Deorum; and the emperor Antoninus Pius. The rituals transformed the relationships between the participants. That was presumably one reason why the monument was set up by the central figure, Carpus. Another was to commemorate and publicize the various acts of permission and sponsorship that had made these transformations possible and authorized them. The most obvious change of status is that undergone by Secundus to whom the ordo of the colonia decreed a perpetual priesthood.34 But the inscription takes care to name all the other participants involved, and to document the distribution of gifts through which these changed relationships were marked. Carpus paid for an altar and 32

CIL XIII 1751 translation adapted from Beard, North, and Price 1998, 162. See Audin 1985; Beard, North, and Price 1998, 383–8; Turcan 1972, 80–98. 34 CIL 13.1751 : . . . . cui sanctissimus ordo lugdunens(ium) perpetuatem sacerdoti(i) decrevit. 33

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brought the bull’s vires from the Vatican; the quindecimviri granted ornamenta to Secundus; the ordo confirmed the perpetuity of his priesthood and gave a place for the monument; the goddess commanded the ritual take place; the chief beneficiaries of the taurobolium were the emperor, his family and the colonia, the strong connections between which were thereby asserted. When these gift exchanges—concluding with the setting up of our inscription—were completed, the social world had been slightly changed. What the rituals had transformed were the social identities of those concerned, and specifically the relational dimensions of those identities. How far can we generalize from this example? The cases which I have so far discussed were not part of the common experience of all Romans. Nor were all rituals so obviously transformative. What of the carnival atmosphere of the Saturnalia or the Parilia? What about festivals focused on the dead like the Lemuria and Parentalia? The rituals associated with those four festivals were repeated each year, at different scales of association. On the face of it they seem likely to have promoted social solidarity and a sense of continuity with the past and future. Joining or leaving a group that customarily celebrated one of these together conceivably marked some change of social identity. Yet collective ritual experience is often said to generate a sense of common, rather than individual, identity. Roman rites of passage formed a slightly different case. Putting on the toga virilis for boys or young men and the dedication of dolls by girls or young women was not a collective experience, like the initiations which entire age-sets undergo together in some societies. There is no sign in Roman culture of a special bond between those who attained adulthood at roughly the same time. Besides, rituals like these were perhaps pretty much the same for all children of equivalent social status. Socialization seems more evident than any differentiated individuation. In many cases, participation in ritual had no real individuating dimension for most Romans. The exceptional cases remain. Carpus as a dendrophorus and Secundus as a perpetual priest at Lyon had presumably both taken conscious decisions to devote themselves to the worship of the Great Mother. Not all exceptional cases exhibited this degree of choice: the age at which a tiny number of aristocratic girls became Vestals (rather than brides) was so young as to suggest that they may have had little realistic say about it. Religious differentiation did, however, became a little more significant in the Roman world than beforehand. The argument is an a

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priori one.35 Opportunities for social differentiation depend to a large degree on the complexity of any given society. Modern societies have the highest rates because of the extent of the division of labour, the high level of economic polarization, and the possibilities for social mobility opened up by both. Ancient societies were much less complex; nevertheless that complexity increased between say 300 bc and ad 200. Relative increases in levels of urbanization, of economic activity, of the reach of government, and of education must to some extent have released many from their social cages.36 Limited social mobility can be detected.37 Analogies have often been drawn with modernizing processes of various kinds.38 Diasporic movements and cosmopolitanism of various kinds were concomitants of these changes; so too was religious differentation, and that meant higher levels of religious individuation, some voluntary, some not. There is another reason to link these processes with the transformative potential of some Roman rituals. One phenomenon characteristic of those social milieux most affected by these processes was the appearance of epigraphic memorialization.39 Most inscriptions are in fact records (or monuments) of ritual performances. The vast majority are funerary, the second largest category being dedications to the gods. Both categories of ritual mark the modification of social relationships, and both were also marked by gift exchange. Epitaphs offer a final reckoning of relations between the deceased and the commemorators, marking the moment at which social roles changed, through testation and inheritance and the redistribution of authority and roles within the family.40 Payment for the funeral and the monument was often an important officium expected of the heres who in any case had a vested interest in public recognition of those social transformations. Votive altars commemorated significant transactions between the human and the divine, exchanges of gifts that modified social relationships between dedicator and deity.41 The

35

What follows owes a good deal to the parallel argument of Runciman 1984. For the effects of government see Ando (this volume). For social caging see Mann 1986. 37 Hopkins 1965; Purcell 1983. Downward mobility is, naturally, less well attested. 38 For application of Wallerstein’s notion of world systems see Hopkins 1980; Woolf 1990. For globalization see Hingley 2005; Hitchner 2008; Sweetman 2007. 39 For an explanation of this in relation to Latin inscriptions see Woolf 1996. 40 For similar ideas applied to testaments, see Champlin 1991. 41 Derks 1995. 36

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general importance of epigraphy in making a claim to new social relationships is supported by the sense of public evoked by the locations in which they were placed.42 It has long been known that the upwardly mobile—such as former slaves, or auxiliary soldiers who have won citizenship—are disproportionately represented in the epigraphic record.43 Some sanctuaries at least were filled with texts recording the names of worshippers: this too may be seen as a means of asserting a relationship between dedicator and deity.44 The Capitol, with those thousands of bronze tablets recording treaties and decrees, alliances and grants, was just a very special case of this phenomenon. Restoring that monumental assemblage was one means by which Vespasian proclaimed the endurance of the relationally defined identities within the community of the Romans and between that community and its neighbours. What about that other, internalized dimension of identity that we term the self? Perhaps there were in antiquity private moments of revelation, transactions between gods and men that remained forever internalized. If so we have no access to them. Even the shortest epitaph takes its anticipated readership into its confidence. The scarcity of pre-Christian texts expressing such a sensibility is notorious.45 There are, I suggest, good reasons to doubt the significance of individualism of that sort. Religious individualization in antiquity, I have suggested, needs to entail a level of choice if it is to be meaningfully distinguished from socialization or the human experience in general. Religious choice, as it emerges in the material I have considered, takes the form of participating in kinds of gift exchange and ritual action through which a person acquires a modified social identity relationally. By ‘relationally’ I mean this new identity is not a unique and personal self, fashioned by whatever means, but rather membership of one or more groups. Put otherwise, individual identity was established by a process of triangulation on the identities of others. Assertions of identity made epigraphically took the form of claims about where one was located in the social nexus. Non-epigraphic sources often described a change of identity as the assumption of a new persona. The most recent discussions of the concept are quite sceptical about the emergence in the Roman period 42 44

Carroll 2006; Corbier 1987; Hesberg and Zanker 1987. 45 Beard 1991; Scheid 1996; Veyne 1983. Nock 1933.

43

Hope 2001.

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of quasi-modern subjectivities centred on a self-conscious and internalised individuality.46 Persona was, it seems, an important, but not a permanent, aspect of the self, and one clearly anchored to externally defined roles, such as ‘senator’, ‘father’, or ‘judge’: who one was depended to a great extent on one’s (current) statio in life. There is no real sign of an ethic of individualism, certainly not in a positive sense. Nor is there a sense that one’s internal self is in some sense the real, essential, and defining core of one’s being. Seneca, Pliny the Younger, and Epictetus all devote a good deal of attention to the production of the self, but always viewed as a being in action, a person defined relationally. It is no surprise then that identities asserted epigraphically, that is as products of ritualized exchanges, conform to this model. They are typically highly formal and fairly regular in type. The relationship between the dedicator and the commemorated on funerary inscriptions does sometimes include affective elements, but the deceased is rarely described wholly or even mostly in terms of personal qualities. Names, filiation, tribe, origo, citizenship, ranks, honores, even approximate age, all combined to create an identity with reference to the broader social groups at the intersection of which he or she was located. What this means for religious individualization is that when individuals made choices about religious roles they chose from ready-made models. This is certainly not the same as unreflective participation in ancestral rites. But it is quite different from what we understand today by the development of a personalized religiosity, let alone engagement in personal cosmological and ethical reflection that has been both valorised and condemned since the Reformation.47 A great gulf separates ancient forms of individualization from those of the early modern and modern worlds. From a wider cross-cultural perspective this is not at all surprising. The variability of notions of the self is well known to those anthropologists for whom personhood has been a major subject of debate.48 As individualization is classically related to modernity, so interiorized and autonomous selves have come to be seen as a relatively recent

46 I have found particularly helpful Frede 2007; Gill 2006, especially pp. 328–44. More widely see the fundamental collection Carrithers, Collins, and Lukes 1985. 47 Ginzburg 1980. 48 Carrithers, Collins, and Lukes 1985. The collection departs from a lecture given by Marcel Mauss in 1938.

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invention and one by no means universally subscribed to even today. With all the usual caveats about generalizing theories, something like an ideal type of a socio-centric or holistic person has been developed to describe pre-modern and non-western notions of selfhood.49 Traditional societies such as the Melanesian ones on which much recent work has focused often treat personhood entirely relationally and contextually. What we would regard as individualistic behaviour is liable to be categorized as sorcery or madness. When Melanesians speak of themselves they portray each individual as a node in a web of relations, exchanges, and mutual obligations, that same web articulated and explored in terms of gift exchange. The term ‘dividual’ has been coined to describe this lay concept.50 Romans were not, of course, just like Melanesians . . . any more than they are just like us. But the space between these ideal types seems the best place to look for the kinds of self we find elaborated in philosophical texts or produced by epigraphic records of rituals. The main implication for the study of religious individualization in historical perspective is that we are not dealing with a simple movement along a developmental continuum. For the religious history of the period, the implications are even more serious. The most influential accounts of religious change posit a world full of gods in which individuals, conceived of in modern terms, selected among competing religions. If, as now seems most likely, there were (properly speaking) neither individuals nor religions in Roman antiquity, our explanations will need to be recast.

REFERENCES Ando, Clifford 2008. The Matter of the Gods: Religion and the Roman Empire. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Asad, Talad 1993. Genealogies of Religion: Discipline and Reasons of Power in Christianity and Islam. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press.

49 Where earlier studies elaborate contrasting ideal types, more recent ones tend to explore the interplay of different models of selfhood, especially in relation to modernizing societies. An excellent introduction is offered by LiPuma 1998. See also Englund, Leach 2000; Sökefeld 1999. 50 Strathern 1988.

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Audin, Amable 1985. ‘Dossier des fouilles du sanctuaire lyonnais de Cybèle et de ses abords’, Gallia 43.1, 81–126. Beard, Mary 1989. ‘Acca Laurentia gains a son. Myths and priesthood at Rome’, in MacKenzie, M. M. and Rouéche, Charlotte (eds), Images of Authority: Papers presented to Joyce Reynolds on the occasion of her seventieth birthday. Cambridge: Cambridge Philological Society, 41–61. ——1991. ‘Ancient Literacy and the function of the written word in Roman religion’, in Humphrey, J. H. (ed.), Literacy in the Roman World. Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 35–58. ——1994. ‘The Roman and the Foreign: The cult of the “Great Mother” in Imperial Rome’, in Thomas, Nicholas and Humphrey, Caroline (eds), Shamanism, History and the State. Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 164–90. ——North, John and Price, Simon 1998. Religions of Rome, 2 vols Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ——1998. Religions of Rome, vol. 1: A History. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ——1998. Religions of Rome, vol. 2: A Sourcebook. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Beck, Roger 2006. ‘The Religious Market of the Roman Empire: Rodney Stark and Christianity’s Pagan Competition’, in Vaage, Leif E. (ed.), Religious Rivalries in the Early Roman Empire and the Rise of Christianity. Waterloo, ON: Wilfred Laurier University Press, 233–52. Bell, Catherine 1992. Ritual Theory, Ritual Practice. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Bendlin, Andreas 2000. ‘Looking Beyond the Civic Compromise. Religious Pluralism in Late Republican Rome’, in Bispham, Edward and Smith, Christopher (eds), Religion in Archaic and Republican Rome: Evidence and Experience. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 115–35. Bonnet Corinne, Rüpke, Jörg, and Scarpi, Paolo (eds) 2006. Religions orientales—culti misterici. Neue Perspektiven—nouvelles perspectives— prospettive nuove. PAwB. Stuttgart: Franz Steiner Verlag. Bourdieu, Pierre 1977. Outline of a Theory of Practice. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Boyarin, Daniel 2001. ‘Justin Martyr invents Judaism’, Church History 70.3, 427–61. —— 2004a. Border Lines: The partition of Judaeo-Christianity. Philadelphia. PA: University of Pennsylvania Press. ——2004b. ‘The Christian Invention of Judaism: The Theodosian Empire and the Rabbinic Refusal of Religion’, Representations 85, 21–57. Burton, Paul J. 1996. ‘The summoning of the Magna Mater to Rome (205 b.c.)’, Historia. Zeitschrift für Alte Geschichte 45.1, 36–63.

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Caldelli, Maria L. 1993. L’agon Capitolinus: Storia et protagonistici dall’istituzione domiziana al IV secolo, Studi pubblicati dall’Istituto italiano per la storia antica. Rome: Istituto italiano per la storia antica. Carrithers, Michael, Collins, Steven, and Lukes, Steven (eds) 1985. The Category of the Person: Anthropology, Philosophy, History. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Carroll, Maureen 2006. Spirits of the Dead: Roman Funerary Commemoration in Western Europe. Oxford Studies in Ancient Documents. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Champlin, Edward 1991. Final Judgments: Duty and Emotion in Roman Wills, 200 bc–ad 250, Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Connerton, Paul 1989. How Societies Remember. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Corbier, Mireille 1987. ‘L’écriture dans l’espace public romain’, in L’Urbs. Espace urbain et histoire 1er siècle av. J.C.—III siècle ap.J.C. Actes du colloque international organisé par le CNRS et l’Ecole française à Rome 8–12 mai 1985. Rome: L’Ecole française à Rome, 27–60. Cumont, Franz 1906. Les religions orientales dans le paganisme romain. Annales du Musée Guimet. Paris: E. Leroux. Derks, Ton 1995. ‘The ritual of the vow in Gallo-Roman religion’, in Metzler, J. Millett, M.; Roymans, N. and Slofstra, J. (eds), Integration in the Early Roman West: The Role of Culture and Ideology. Luxembourg: Musée d’Histoire et d’Art, 111–27. Englund, Harri and Leach, James 2000. ‘Ethnography and the MetaNarratives of Modernity’, Current Anthropology 41.2, 225–48. Frede, Michael 2007. ‘A Notion of a Person in Epictetus’, in: Scaltsas, Theodore, and Mason, Andrew S. (eds), The Philosophy of Epictetus. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 153–68. Gamble, Clive 2007. Origins and Revolutions: Human Identity in Earliest Prehistory. New York: Cambridge University Press. —— and Poor, M. (eds) 2005. The Individual Hominid in Prehistory. Investigations of Lower and Middle Paleolithic Landscapes, Locales and Artefacts. London: Routledge. Gill, Christopher 2006. The Structured Self in Hellenistic and Roman Thought. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Ginzburg, Carlo 1980. The Cheese and the Worms: The Cosmos of a Sixteenth Century Miller. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. Gordon, Richard 1990a. ‘Religion in the Roman Empire: The Civic Compromise and its Limits’, in Beard, Mary and North, John (eds), Pagan Priests. London: Duckworth, 233–55. ——1990b. ‘The Veil of Power. Emperors, sacrificers and benefactors’, in Beard, Mary and North, John (eds), Pagan Priests. London: Duckworth, 199–232.

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Gros, Pierre 1976. Aurea Templa: Recherches sur l’architecture religieuse de Rome à l’époque d’Auguste, Bibliothèque des écoles françaises d’Athènes et de Rome. Rome: École française de Rome. Gruen, Erich 1990. Studies in Greek Culture and Roman Policy. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Hardie, Alex 2003. ‘Poetry and politics at the games of Domitian’, in Boyle, A. J. and Dominik, W. J. (eds), Flavian Rome: Culture, Image, Text. Leiden: Brill, 125–49. Henrichs, Albert 1968. ‘Vespasian’s visit to Alexandria’, ZPE 3, 51–80. von Hesberg, Henner and Zanker, Paul (eds) 1987. Römische Gräberstraßen. Selbstdarstellung—Status—Standard. Munich: Verlag der Bayerischen Akademie der Wissenschaften. Hingley, Richard 2005. Globalizing Roman Culture: Unity, Diversity and Empire. London: Routledge. Hitchner, R. Bruce 2008. ‘Globalization avant la lettre: Globalization and the History of the Roman Empire’, New Global Studies 2.2, 1–12. Hope, Valerie M. 2001. Constructing identity: The Roman Funerary Monuments of Aquileia, Mainz, and Nimes. British Archaeological Reports International Series. Oxford: Archaeopress. Hopkins, Keith 1965. ‘Elite Mobility in the Roman Empire’, Past and Present 32, 12–26 ——1980. ‘Taxes and Trade in the Roman Empire, 200 bc—ad 200’, Journal of Roman Studies 70, 101–25. ——1991. ‘From violence to blessing: symbols and rituals in ancient Rome’, in Mohlo, Anthony, Raaflaub, Kurt, and Emlen, Julia (eds), City States in Classical Antiquity and Mediaeval Italy: Athens and Rome, Florence and Venice. Stuttgart: Franz Steiner Verlag, 479–98. Lattimore, Richard 1934. ‘Portents and Prophecies in Connection with the Emperor Vespasian’, Classical Journal 29.6, 441–9. Liénard, Pierre and Boyer, Pascal 2006. ‘Whence Collective Rituals? A Cultural Selection Model of Rritualized Behavior’, American Anthropologist 108.4, 814–27. LiPuma, Edward 1998. ‘Modernity and Forms of Personhood in Melanesia’, in Lambek, Michael and Strathern, Andrew (eds), Bodies and Persons: Comparative Perspectives from Africa and Melanesia. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 53–79. Mann, Michael 1986. The Sources of Social Power, vol. 1. A History of Power from the Beginning to a.d. 1760. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Mithen, Steven 1998. ‘The Supernatural Beings of Prehistory and the External Storage of Religious Ideas’, in Renfrew, Colin and Scarre, Chris (eds), Cognition and Material Culture: The Archaeology of Symbolic Storage. Cambridge: McDonald Institute for Archaeological Research, 97–106.

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Moatti, Claudia (ed.) 1998. La mémoire perdue: recherches sur l’administration romaine. Collection de l’École Française de Rome 243. Rome: École française de Rome. Nock, Arthur Darby 1933. Conversion: The Old and the New in Religion from Alexander the Great to Augustine of Hippo. Oxford: Clarendon Press. ——1942. ‘Religious Attitudes of the Ancient Greeks’, Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society 85.5, 472–82. North, John 1992. ‘The development of religious pluralism’, in Lieu, Judith, North, John, and Rajak, Tessa (eds), The Jews among Pagans and Christians in the Roman Empire. London: Routledge, 174–93. Price, Simon 1987. ‘From Noble Funerals to Divine Cult: The Consecration of Roman Emperors’, in Cannadine, David and Price, Simon (eds), Rituals of Royalty. Power and Ceremonial in Traditional Societies. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 56–105. Purcell, Nicholas 1983. ‘The Apparitores: A Study in Social Mobility’, Papers of the British School at Rome 51, 125–73. ——2001. ‘The Ordo Scribarum: A study in the Loss of Memory’, Melanges de l’École française à Rome 113.2, 633–74. Rowe, Greg 2002. Princes and Political Cultures: The New Tiberian Senatorial Decrees. Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press. Runciman, W.G. 1984. ‘Accelerating Social Mobility: The Case of AngloSaxon England’, Past and Present 104, 3–30. Rüpke, Jörg 2004. ‘Acta aut agenda: Relations of Script and Performance’, in Barchiesi, Alessandro, Rüpke, Jörg, and Stephens, Susan (eds), Rituals in Ink: A Conference on Religion and Literary Production in Ancient Rome held at Stanford University in February 2002. Stuttgart: Franz Steiner Verlag, 23–43. ——1996. ‘Controllers and Professionals: Analyzing Religious Specialists’, Numen 43.3, 241–62. ——1995. Kalendar und Öffentlichkeit: Die Geschichte der Repräsentation und religiösen Qualifikationen von Zeit im Rom. Religionsgeschichtliche Versuche und Vorarbeiten. Berlin: de Gruyter. Scheid, John 1985. Religion et piété à Rome. Paris: Découverte. ——1986. ‘Le flamine de Jupiter, les Vestales et le général triomphant. Variations romains sur le thème de la figuration des dieux’, Le Temps de le Réflexion 7, 213–30. ——1996. ‘Pline le jeune et les sanctuaires d’Italie’, in Chastagnol, André, Demougin, Ségolène, and Lepelley, Claude (eds), Splendidissima Civitas: Études d’histoire romaine en hommage à François Jacques. Paris: Publications de la Sorbonne, 241–58. ——1985. Religion et piété à Rome. Paris: Découverte.

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Smith, Jonathon Z. 1990. Drudgery Divine: On the Comparison of Early Christianities and the Religions of Late Antiquity. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Sökefeld, Martin 1999. ‘Debating Self, Identity and Culture in Anthropology’, Current Anthropology 40.4, 417–47. Stark, Rodney 1996. The Rise of Christianity: A Sociologist Reconsiders History. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Strathern, Marilyn 1988. The Gender of the Gift: Problems with Women and Problems with Society in Melanesia. Berkeley: University of California Press. Sweetman, Rebecca J. 2007. ‘Roman Knossos: The Nature of a Globalized City’, American Journal of Archaeology 111.1, 61–81. Turcan, Robert 1972. Les religions de l’Asie dans la vallée du Rhône. Études préliminaires aux religions orientales dans l’empire romain 30. Leiden: Brill. Versnel, Hendrik S. 1990. Inconsistencies in Greek and Roman Religion, vol. 1: Ter Unus: Isis, Dionysos, Hermes; Three Studies in Henotheism. Studies in Greek and Roman Religion 6. Leiden: Brill. Veyne, Paul 1983. ‘Titulus Praelatus’: offrande, solemnisation et publicité dans les ex-voto greco-romains’, Revue Archéologique, 281–300. Wallace-Hadrill, Andrew 1997. ‘Mutatio Morum: The Idea of a Cultural Revolution’, in Habinek, Thomas and Schiesaro, Alessandro (eds), The Roman Cultural Revolution. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 3–22. ——1987. ‘Time for Augustus. Ovid, Augustus and the Fasti’, in Whitby, Michael, Hardie, Philip, and Whitby, Mary (eds), Homo Viator: Classical Essays for John Bramble. Bristol: Bristol Classical Press, 221–30. Woolf, Greg 1996. ‘Monumental Writing and the Expansion of Roman Society’, Journal of Roman Studies 86, 22–39. ——1997. ‘Polis-Religion and its Alternatives in the Roman Provinces’, in Cancik, Hubert and Rüpke, Jörg (eds), Römische Reichsreligion und Provinzialreligion. Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 71–84. ——1990. ‘World Systems Analysis and the Roman Empire’, Journal of Roman Archaeology 3, 44–58. ——2006. ‘Playing Games with Greeks: One Roman on Greekness’, in Konstan, David and Said, Suzanne (eds), Greeks on Greekness: Viewing the Greek Past Under the Roman Empire. Cambridge: Cambridge Philological Society, 162–78.

Experiences and Choices

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7 The Religious Anthropology of Late-Antique ‘High’ Magical Practice Richard Gordon

In undertaking to historicize the notion of individuality as presented by scholars such as Albert Musschenga,1 the Erfurt project has deliberately tried to refract or decline the notion through as many case studies as possible. We have asked questions about modes of de-traditionalizing religious experience; about the ways in which individual stances or interpretations have shaped religious behaviour, and about institutions that may have encouraged or favoured individuality. It seemed worth adding to these case-studies the ritual texts from Roman Egypt nowadays known, rather misleadingly, as the Greek Magical Papyri. These texts deploy theological knowledge as a means of achieving privileged access to the Other World. If there is any mileage for us as historians of Greek and Roman religion in the notion of pre-modern ‘religious individualization’, whether in respect of reported religious experience, religious expressivity, or intellectualization, we might reasonably expect to find traces of it in such a corpus of ritual prescriptions.2

THE MAGICAL PAPYRI ‘Magische Papyri’ (‘Magical Papyri’) is a traditional term going back to Gustav Parthey’s edition of the two Berlin papyri in 1865, when 1

Musschenga 2000; van Harskamp and Musschenga 2001. ‘ . . . the corpus, even as it now stands, represents something quite precious: one of the largest collections of functioning ritual texts, largely in Greek, produced by ritual specialists that has survived from late antiquity’: J. Z. Smith 2004, 222 (stress in original). 2

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little was known of what we may call the ‘high ritual realism’ of Egyptian (and Graeco-Egyptian) temple-practice.3 A better term would be ‘Late-Egyptian Ritual Texts mainly in Greek’.4 Most of them derive, proximately or in part, from the immense written tradition created within the context of Late-Egyptian temple-service, combined with eclectic but limited borrowings, mainly from Greek sources, together with some Jewish incantatory material, chiefly names and epithets of Yahweh, such as Iaô, Sabaôth, Adônaï, archangelic and ‘angelic’ names in -êl, -el, -ôth, -ot, and ôt, and names of patriarchs such as Abraham, Isaac, and Moses, but including a few genuine invocatory schemes.5 These syncretic texts, whose tradition extends from the late first to the sixth century ce or even later, are of two main kinds. Group 1 consists of formularies—collections of ritual prescriptions that, like the individual entries in cookerybooks, address an implied reader who is assumed to be capable of performing the ritual. A few formularies, Group 1a, which I describe in greater detail below, are compendious editions (the longest in Greek contains 53 recipes) of prescriptions from different, unspecified sources, most probably earlier formularies. Most, however, are brief, and contain only one or two; I term these Group 1b. Like the mass of ordinary papyri, Group 1b come from the rubbish dumps of Lower Egypt and the Fayûm, and their very existence points to a relatively casual exchange of recipes between practitioners. Individual Parthey 1865; Wessely 1888. ‘Realism’ in this sense means the claim that correct religious knowledge-practices can fulfil pragmatic human wishes by providing direct access to the divine world, which will necessarily respond. This sense roughly corresponds to the Egyptian concept/deity Heka/heka(u). 4 ‘Magic and heka are fundamentally incompatible notions’: Ritner 1995a, 59; cf. Frankfurter 1997. Although I generally prefer the neutral word ‘practice’ (the regular word employed in the Magical Papyri for the instrumental rituals they prescribe is praxis). For the sake of convenience, however, I sometimes retain the conventional term ‘magic’, without feeling the need to subscribe to its supposedly exclusionary connotations. For practitioners, both in the Graeco-Roman world and in Egypt, ‘magic’ is a knowledge-practice forming one aspect of instrumental religion. 5 For brief accounts, see Preisendanz 1926; Preisendanz 1964; Brashear 1995 at 3398–422; Gordon 2012, 147–51. The standard edition is Preisendanz 1973–4 (= PGrMag here), which consists of minor alterations to the original 2 vols of 1928–31 plus the new texts that were to have been included in vol. 3 (1941), the blocks of which were destroyed in the war. The most valuable part of this volume, the Indices, has never been published, though samizdat photocopies exist of the proofs. Texts published since Preisendanz are collected in Daniel and Maltomini 1990–2. 3

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prescriptions may even occur in codices of miscellaneous content.6 Group 2 includes the individual ‘activated’ texts, which can themselves be divided into various sub-groups: those written on papyrus (binding and erotic curses but also many phylacteries and amulets), on lead (binding and erotic curses), on precious metals such as gold or silver (phylacteries and amulets), or on some other base, such as linen or wood. Provenances vary: the examples of binding-curses on papyrus were all found in Egypt, but virtually nothing is known about their provenience—almost all those in Western European collections stem from uncontrolled excavations before the Great War, and dealers in antiquities, whose asseverations are generally worthless. A few of the activated curse-tablets on lead were likewise found in Egypt, but most of the published examples in the Graeco-Egyptian tradition were found elsewhere, for example, in Carthage and Hadrumetum in Africa Proconsularis, in the Athenian Agora, at Amathous on Cyprus, and at Rome.7 With one notable and one or two minor exceptions,8 none of the activated spells bears a close relation to the surviving formulary recipes in Groups 1a and b. This in turn suggests a) that the production of materials in both Groups 1 and 2 was very large,9 but enjoyed only local or regional circulation,10 and b) that there was very 6 e.g. the magical texts copied into BGU IV 1024–27, which otherwise contains trial proceedings, official documents, receipts, etc. One set was published as PGrMag XXIIa (from pp.22f. of the codex), the other by Brashear 1992a. The hand of these latter closely resembles that of P.Oslo 1 = PGrMag XXXVI. 7 The older examples are collected in Audollent 1904 (cited as DTAud hereafter); more recent ones are listed by Jordan 1985a and 2000. Athenian agora: Jordan 1985b; Jaime Curbera and Sergio Benedetto are working on the edition of many others from the same provenance. The absolute majority of ancient binding-curses on lead however are not in the Graeco-Egyptian tradition, which required special training and expertise. 8 The main exception relates to the philtrokatadesmos (PGrMag IV 296–466), which has been found in several versions in Egypt, some close to that version, some divergent, cf. Daniel and Maltomini 1990–92 nos. 46–51 (hereafter SupplMag). The fullest account is Martinez 1991, 8–20. 9 Of which only a tiny fraction survives: William Brashear counted 147 texts in PGrMag and 100 in SupplMag: 1992b, 84 n.12. Since then, a small number of new texts has accrued. 10 There are one or two cases, e.g. DTAud no. 188  PGrMag LVIII, cf. Jordan 1976, 129, in which a prescription known from an Egyptian papyrus text has been found far afield (in this case, Rome). The caches of texts in the Graeco-Egyptian tradition found in the Athenian Agora or the Porta S. Sebastiano group at Rome are probably the work of itinerant practitioners. I place no reliance on the literary sources (e.g. Acts 19.19, Lucian. Philops. 31) often quoted to support the idea that such formularies circulated widely.

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considerable innovation and adaptation by individual practitioners in consideration of the requirements of individual clients and the payment involved. Being small and easily transportable, phylacteries and amulets on precious metals circulated widely and have been found in small numbers all over the Graeco-Roman world, though mainly in the eastern Mediterranean.11 Allied to the phylacteries is the genre of the magical amulets, intaglios in semi-precious stone bearing a range of specifically Graeco-Egyptian iconography.12 These likewise circulated mainly in the eastern Mediterranean but their iconography has only an indirect relation to that known from the formularies, though the latter do on occasion envisage the preparation of intaglios for ritual purposes.13 In this chapter I am concerned only with the formularies of Group 1a.14 For the most part, this consists of a group of the papyrus formularies once owned by Giovanni Anastasi (1780–1857), an Armenian who participated in the semi-legal looting of Egyptian antiquities after the failure of the French expedition to Egypt in 1798–9.15 The Greek hands of all these Anastasi texts are generally dated to the late third or early fourth century ce.16 The physical contents of the ‘Library’ itself, whatever they were exactly, seem to have been concealed or buried around 350 ce. However, two of the long Demotic texts (London-Leyden and P.Leid J 384 verso), written by the same man, are now dated roughly to the late second or early third century ce, so that the tomb, if that is where the ‘Library’ was found, included Demotic manuscripts at least 150 years old when they were buried.17 As with all these long formularies, they are individual or personal compilations of recipes from a variety of earlier sources, including some in Greek (there are a few short sequences in Greek, and some Greek loan-words in the prescriptions).18 In the case 11

The only collection is Kotansky 1994 (sadly never completed). See esp. Sfameni Gasparro 2009; catalogues: Michel 2004. In brief: ZwierleinDiehl 2007, 210–31; also the six relevant papers in Entwistle and Adams 2011, 39–87. 13 Schwartz 1981. 14 Further details concerning Anastasi’s collection are given in Gordon 2012, 147–51. 15 Vercoutter 1986. 16 Coptic script only acquired a relatively fixed alphabet in the first half of the fourth century ce. 17 Johnson 1975, 29–31 and 1977, 55 and 94f.; Ritner 1995b. As far as I know, no magical texts have been found among the relatively extensive Demotic finds in areas adjacent to temples in Soknopaiou Nesus and Tebtunis. 18 The Greek words are listed by Griffth and Thompson 1904–9, 3: [102–4]. 12

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of these Demotic manuscripts, it is conjectured that the individual recipes were composed over the previous century or so.19 The period from the early second to the third century ce is likely also to be the date of many of the original recipes collected in the Greek texts, although, as living texts, they were subject to continual alteration, elaboration, and ‘improvement’. What is odd about the Demotic texts, as F. Llewellyn Griffith and Herbert Thompson suspected more than a century ago, is that to some extent at least they are most probably not originals but translations or imitations of recipes that the scribe had encountered in Greek.20 In other words they are, at least in part, pseudo-originals deliberately rendered back into the sacred language, Egyptian (not the current spoken language at that time, but still a somewhat decadent form of the truly sacred languages and scripts, hieroglyphic and Hieratic).21 By that date, the only persons capable of reading and writing Demotic were temple-priests. The Greek ‘originals’ however were themselves composed on the basis of still earlier texts emanating from Egyptian temple-practice in the wide sense.

FITTING INTO A TRADITION The texts of Group 1a provide instructions for rituals which, if correctly performed, will enable the practitioner to obtain, say a revelation from a god, a daemonic factotum,22 a prophetic dream, protection from fever,23 attraction of a sexual partner, grace and favour from the mighty, success in a law-suit, the death of an 19

Dieleman 2005, 291–4. Griffith and Thompson 1904–9, 1: 11–12. 21 Prior to the print-on-demand version of Griffith and Thompson 1904–9 vol. 1 (now available on Kindle), it was the decision to include the Demotic formularies (translated by Janet Johnson, here denoted PDMag) in the English translation organized by Betz 1986 (= GMPT here) and the commentaries on them by R. K. Ritner, that contributed most to the appreciation of the Egyptian background of these texts among non-Egyptologists. On the shifting status of Demotic, whose development was more or less complete by the fourth or third century bce, see Quack 2009a, 1–6. 22 Cf. Ciraolo 1995; Scibilia 2002. 23 The frontier between temple magic and temple medico-magical practice was illdefined, cf. Westendorf 1999. On the medical contents of the magical papyri, see recently Scibilia 2000. 20

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enemy, sometimes several such ends ad libitum. It hardly needs saying that the broader meaningfulness of such claims is underwritten by numerous assumptions about the nature of the divine world and its manifestations in the world.24 More specifically, it assumes the efficacy of a large body of theological knowledge reserved to a literate priestly group to cause specific changes in the world,25 the power of secret, unintelligible words and names (OÆ Æ æÆæÆ, voces magicae) to communicate directly with the divine world,26 knowledge of a range of divine iconographic forms, and mastery of numerous ritual practices. Earlier versions of some of these knowledge-practices were an aspect of traditional temple-service in Dynastic times. The relevant ritual practices were set down in the temple-ordinances, which continued to be copied throughout the Ptolemaic and early Roman periods.27 However, although as a class the Magical Papyri do have a background in traditional temple magical practice, that is not their immediate Sitz im Leben. They emanate from a context in which the traditional genres of ‘everyday’ temple-magic, particularly protective magic against demons, crocodiles, snakes, and scorpions, are much less attested,28 and new, or hitherto much less common, genres become dominant, for private malign and aggressive (mainly erotic) magic; for personal success and attractiveness; different, often ambitious, forms of divination, written phylacteries. Techniques of miniaturization (of rituals, of ritual paraphernalia), of do-it-yourself, individual action by the practitioner, are typical of this new mode.29 Some familiarity with (Greek) astrological lore is also pervasive.30 Two things seem to have changed. First, the demands of the clients, 24 The nature and power of Egyptian Heka/heka(u) is briefly described by Borghouts 2002, 19–27. 25 On the implicit, referential character of traditional mythic knowledge, see e.g. Assmann 1977; on the art of the historiola, Podemann Srensen 1984; Frankfurter 1995; images: Ciampini 2002. 26 ‘ . . . the corpus of such names floating around in this period must have been very large’: Johnson 1977, 95. Poccetti 2002 makes valuable points on this difficult topic. 27 On the Book of the Temple, see Quack 2000 and 2002. 28 Koenig 1994 is a useful illustrated introduction. A small selection from hundreds of texts in Lange 1927; Sauneron 1970; Borghouts 1978; a representative collection of artefacts in Raven 2010. 29 Moyer and Dielemann 2003; some critical observations on their thesis will be found in Quack 2009b. 30 See Gundel 1968.

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whom I take to have been mainly the relatively prosperous and enterprising Greek-speaking inhabitants of Alexandria and the metropoleis of Lower and Middle Egypt. Secondly, although a training in temple-magic is taken for granted (the practitioner is assumed to be technically competent, to know how to apply ‘eye-paint’, conduct a bowl-divination with or without medium,31 recite a fixed prayer, intone shifting vowel-sequences,32 reproduce long sequences of onoma barbara/voces magicae, pose as a god, compose a letter to the dead, be able to obtain ‘hieratic papyrus’, natron, and other ingredients), the relative decline of the temples in these areas evidently forced priests to become more like the part-time, often itinerant, practitioners outside the temple, who lived from the lower-grade magical and healing services they could sell to clients.33 The immediate need to generate authority in the Anastasi formularies thus derives from the desire to continue a glorious ancient tradition within a changed world.34 Some continue a practice found in Dynastic-period spells by claiming to be able to deliver an astonishing range of results. One asserts that it works

31 On the increased range of divination-techniques, also including low-level, routine forms such as dreams, see Frankfurter 2005. 32 ‘It was through “Egyptianism”, the Graeco-Roman idealization of and projection onto Egypt, that vowels earned a unique status in Egyptian ritual texts’: Frankfurter 1994, 203. 33 The decline of the temple in the Roman period is charted in Kákosy 1995, somewhat relativized for rural temples by Frankfurter 1998. The shift to ‘private’ practice was emphasized by J. Z. Smith 1993, 181–5 and 2004, 223–7, although, as Ritner 1995a, 58–9 rightly pointed out, at least in the 1993 [1976] article he misrepresented the alleged events reported by ‘Thessalos’ (cf. Festugière 1939), by claiming that the Egyptian priests had lost faith in high-class autoptic divination. In this connection, a great deal hangs on the reference of the word oikos in the ritual prescriptions, e.g. PGrMag I 84–85: ŒÆd e Łe N  e   KªŒ, ‹ ı ŒÆ ØŒE, ŒÆŁ Å. æH  b e r Œ   æÆ, ŒÆŁg æØ, ‘take (the god) into (the) small room, where you live, and sit him down. But first clean the room, as is fitting . . . ’ (cited again below); III 193; 302; IV 1859–61  2187–9; VII 540–1;727; 875 XII 164; XIII 5–7; 1034 XXXVIII 5–6. Smith took oikos to mean a room in a house, but, as Ritner also pointed out (1995a, 58 n. 65) the word may also denote a room in a temple-compound (cf. LSJ9 s.v.). On the other hand, it certainly sometimes denotes a workshop or place of business outside a temple, e.g. XII 104: K fit YŒø fi æƪ ı ÆØ Kªg ‹. However that may be, it is indisputable that the notional authority for magical practice derived, and continued to derive, from the historical prestige of the temple as an institution. 34 Betz 1982; Ritner 1995a, 56–8; Gordon 1997, 68–81; Dieleman 2005, 254–80.

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for every thing and every rite . . . It attracts in the same hour, it sends dreams, it causes sickness, produces dream visions, removes enemies when you reverse the spell, however you wish. PGrMag. IV 2622–26, tr. E. N. O’Neil

Another presents itself as a spell of attraction . . . It inflicts sickness excellently and destroys powerfully, sends dreams beautifully, accomplishes dream revelations marvellously and in its many demonstrations has been marvelled at for having no failure in these matters. PGrMag IV 2441–46, tr. E. N. O’Neil

The majority, however, deliberately evoke Egypt and aspects of Egyptian temple-practice. Sacred Egyptian sites such as Heliopolis, Memphis, or the grave of Osiris at Abydos are invoked. A repeated claim is that the text ( ºÅ) presented had originally been inscribed in a temple or came from a temple-library: Copy of incantations from the < . . . . > found in Heliopolis, in the holy book entitled ‘Of Hermes’ (kept) in the inner shrine (K fiH I ø fi ), (written) in Egyptian letters (i.e. hieroglyphs) and translated into Greek.35 SupplMag no. 72 ll.1–5 This papyrus itself, the personal property of the Twelve Gods, was found in Aphroditopolis [beside] the greatest goddess Aphrodite Ourania, who embraces this universe.36 PGrMag VII 863–4

Such texts are often called ƒæÆ, in order to emphasize their special status, equivalent to coming from the temple. Another method is for the practitioner himself to claim to be a senior priest:

35 The grammar of the preamble is doubtful in several places; in l.1f. the writer seems to have intended to write ‘(extracted) from the book found in Heliopolis’ (KŒ B K  ˙º ı ºØ !æŁÅ ), but then changed his mind in order to increase the prestige of the book and specify its authorship by Thoth (K  ˙º ı ºØ K B fi ƒæfi A ºøØ B fi ŒÆº ıfiÅ  Eæ F K fiH I ø fi . . . .). This text, PBerol. inv. 21243 from Abusir el Melek, is in fact one of the very earliest surviving magical papyri (assigned to the first century bce or first century ce by W. Brashear, to the Augustan period by Daniel and Maltomini), and contains numerous deviations from later examples, cf. Faraone 2000, 202–9. 36 Numerous other examples are listed by Daniel and Maltomini 1990–2, 2: 111–12; origin in a temple (adyton or library), ibid. 113.

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For I am a prophêtês, and since I am about to call a terrible, fearful name . . . open [the holy temple], the world [built on the earth] and welcome Osiris, because I am . . . PGrMag VII 323–27

The spell of attraction already cited is ascribed to Pachrates, the prophêtês (h. m-ntr priest) of Heliopolis (PGrMag IV 2446–7). Another technique invoking the past is the claim to be able to know a name of power as written in hieroglyphics, at a time when, with the increasing acceptance of Demotic for sacred texts, fluency in this script had largely disappeared even among temple-priests:37 I speak your names which the thrice-greatest Hermes wrote in Heliopolis with hieroglyphic letters . . . PGrMag IV 886

Other techniques are the invention of pseudo-hieroglyphs, the charaktêres, which were designed to stand out from the text just as hieroglyphs did from a hieratic text, and are treated as themselves divine and compelling; and the inclusion in the text of divine images, themselves deemed to instantiate the immediate presence of the deity.38 The two most compelling forms of authority, however, are knowledge of ‘true’ divine names, perhaps mostly words or phrases in Egyptian so deformed that the original cannot be restored, and the deployment of an extraordinary range of arcane theological reference (though individual recipes vary greatly in this respect). We thus encounter a general context, a decline in the fortunes of the temple in the Roman period and official moves against at least some aspects of temple magical-practice, such as autoptic divination, which might be expected to evoke new forms of religious expressivity, a new emphasis on moral purity, a tendency to ascesis, and a search for enlightenment: in a word the sort of development that Jan

37 On the marked reduction of texts written in hieroglyphs in the second half of the second century ce, see e.g. Kákosy 1995, 2927. At the same time, the cryptographic value of hieroglyphs, which is a marked feature of the writing-systems of the Ptolemaic and Roman period, encouraged a purely symbolic reading of signs, as reported by Plot. enn. 5.8.6 and Amm. 17.4.10. Conversely, the number of signs and their values could be indefinitely extended in the interests of obscurity. In the late temple of Esna, for example, there are 143 different ways of representing the divine name Chnum in hieroglyphs: Hornung 1999, 20. 38 Charaktêres: Frankfurter 1994, 205–11; Gordon 2011; images: Gordon 2002, 97–107; on the legitimating function of such designs, cf. Ciampini 2002, 39.

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Assmann and Robert Meyer have suggested did take place in the Late Period, especially under the impact of the Persian and Macedonian conquests—the re-adaptation of the wisdom literature of the Middle Kingdom, the emphasis on the heart as the seat of piety, the interpretation of conquest by foreigners as divine repayment for past immorality.39 At first sight, however, these shifts seem to have had no impact upon the commitment in these texts to ritual realism. Their overt rhetoric insists on the continuing ability of the priestly ritual tradition to deliver marvellous results of the highest order. To a great extent, of course, this is a matter of genre: the effort to adapt temple-practice to the requirements of a different type of client legitimated the idea that an ancient tradition was simply being renewed. It is, for example, quite striking that the purity envisaged in these texts is wholly ritual, a matter of washing oneself, abstaining from certain foods, and cleansing the room with natron, almost as in the Old Kingdom rules, and has no internal moral correlate; just as there is no perceptible hesitation about including recipes intended to kill targets— indifferent to anything except her own power activated by ritual means, Heka traditionally knows no morality.40

READING AGAINST THE GRAIN This generic position however is not the end of the matter. There are a number of features of these texts that do not fit with the dominant confidence in the efficacy of ritual prowess. Some of these are the result of the editorial process. For example, we sometimes find parentheses which record that another manuscript or version of the recipe has a different formula [K IººfiH (I تæ,ø fi )],41 but the matter is left at that—the implied reader is given no advice as to which version is preferable; yet confidence in the efficacy of pure ritualism is founded on the authority of the fixed text. The existence of multiple versions evidently prompted some collator-practitioners to try their hand at creating syntheses, which in turn often led to confusion and unclarity, so that the version we possess cannot possibly have been 39 41

40 Assmann 1993, 96–113; R. Meyer 1999. Cf. Ritner 1995a, 52–6. e.g. PGrMag II 50, IV 500, VII 204, XII 201, XIII 731; in plur., V 51.

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carried out without makeshift decisions and changes. A prominent example here is the ‘cat-ritual’ of P. Mimaut (PGrMag III).42 Another interesting case occurs in PGrMag XIII, one of the Greek papyri in the Rijksmuseum van Oudheden in Leyden, which calls itself the º  ƒæa K،ƺ ıÅ ) , alternatively the Eighth Book of Moses. It consists of a codex containing two variant versions of the same elaborate ritual, constructed around a cosmogony (ll.1–233, 343–734), each followed by a variety of particular applications. The text does not comment on the fact that they are basically the same: the title of the second version actually begins on the last line of the first (XIII 3f. = 343f.).43 In this case simple parataxis avoids the need to come to a decision about which text is more authoritative. The realist claim is implicitly undermined by such indeterminacies: which, if any, of these procedures could actually have been tried out in practice? Another feature of the magical papyri relevant here is the frequency of references to failure of the ritual. In lecanomancy or lychnomancy with medium, for example, the latter is frequently imagined to present difficulties, failing to see the light of divinity or the apparitions which have been invoked. In these cases the practitioner must resort to a different formula until the medium does ‘see’, or must allow him to do the work himself until the vision appears. In direct visions of a god (Æh  Ø), the god may refuse to come and require compulsion; or refuse to answer, sometimes called ‘stubbornness’ or ‘slowness’. The practitioner may have to wake up from sleep in order to persuade a dream vision to come. One recipe allows for three consecutive days of failure of a divination ceremony; another seven. In PGrMag II 50–9, an alternative recipe allows an initial delay of five days, and prescribes the usual compulsion formula; but, surprisingly, imagines the possibility of yet further delay, ‘If he does not obey even then . . . ’ (55). The daemones may simply be contrary: ‘If delay occurs in order not to tell you an answer . . . ’ (PDMag xiv 1168 = GMPT 249); or there may be something more fundamentally wrong with the purification procedures of the practitioner: ‘If you do not purify it, it does not come about. Purity is its chief factor.’44 42

Harrauer 1987, 12–53. Cf. M. Smith 1984 and 1986. Photographs of the entire codex of 16 leaves = 32 pages can be found in Daniel 1991, 32–81. 44 PDMag xiv 515f. = GMPT 224. Note also ‘Its chief factor is purity. It is more profitable than the youth; it is profitable for you yourself as a person [acting] alone’ (ibid. 885f. = GMPT 240). 43

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Although a form of the rhetorical figure of auxesis may be at work here, the initial admission of defeat serving to emphasize the constraining power of the compulsion formulae, there is here at least an awareness of the difficulties of the enterprise, strikingly at odds with the dominant rhetoric of automatic efficacy and amazement. Between the lines, the implied reader gathers that success may be a great deal less common than the vulgar suppose. The possibility of failure returns irrepressibly in another guise, the issue of the credibility of what is revealed. We repeatedly find in the invocations to the divinities or daemones references to this anxiety: do not deceive me, speak the truth, let truth happen to me, speak accurately, do not be ambiguous, do not be treacherous, speak surely from your memory, he speaks with you truthfully with his mouth opposite your mouth—there are dozens of formulae of this kind. A related fear also surfaces, that the apparition may not be what it purports to be, but something else: ‘send me the true Asclepius and not some deceptive daemon in the guise of the god’;45 ‘do not substitute a face for a face, a name for a true name, truly [without] falsehood in it!’46 If it is truly uncertain whether an apparition is authentic, then ritual magic has no special advantage over any other kind of divination, which can also only be proved in the event.47 We also sometimes encounter frankly fictional devices designed to provide convincing local colour when imagining encounters with divine beings but whose mode is quite incompatible with the genre of the ritual prescription. We may call this phenomenon the urge towards supplementation. In one case, when Helios-Apollo appears, he will be holding a libation-bowl; if you ask, he will come and give you a drink.48 Recipes for acquiring a divine assistant (ææ ) are the passages in the formularies that come closest to the image of the Pharaonic magician in late Egyptian texts.49 In one such recipe, the practitioner is to greet the oracular paredros in the usual manner of greeting friends, with a handshake and a kiss, and force him to swear an oath of fidelity. Whereupon,

45

e.g. PGrMag I 319–21; II 7; 10; III 194; 288; VII 634f. PDMag xiv 266f. = GMPT 211. This question, among others, was discussed at length by Pythagoras of Rhodes in his Psychomanteia (Aeneas of Gaza, Theophrastus p. 54.4–10 Colonna), cf. Ziegler, s.v. Pythagoras 11, RE 24 (1963) 304f. 47 The possibility of deception is however never generalized in this way. 48 49 PGrMag VII 737f. Cf. Gordon 1997, 70–7. 46

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clasping him by the hand, jump down [from the roof ], and, leading him into the narrow room where you live, [sit] him down. PGrMag I 82–4

Here the practitioner will have prepared a feast, and wine from Mendes in the Nile Delta, to be dished up by a ritually-pure servant who must not speak. The practitioner takes the opportunity to ask the paredros for advice and instruction. After three hours, the god will suddenly jump up. Tell the servant to run to the door. Say: ‘Depart, lord, blessed god, to your permanent home, as it pleases you’. And the god disappears.50 PGrMag 92–4

In this sequence, the underlying aim of ritual realism, the temporary fusion of the divine world with the humdrum world, is fully realized in narrative form. The impulse to lay bare has found its logical fulfilment. But the sheer banality of the supper with a god proves the wisdom of the tacit rule enjoining evasion in such contexts. And in giving way to the temptation of such micro-narratives, the authorial voice has broken the illusion that these are purely ritual prescriptions. Another case illustrates the dangers inherent in meddling with the Other World: in PGrMag IV 52–85, a rite for summoning a daemon to make a revelation, the practitioner is to throw some bits of food out at a certain spot, and fix up a lamp to singe a scarab suspended from a reed; and must then hurry back home and lock himself in ‘in case he [the daemon] arrives before you: for if you are caught out of doors, you will be locked out by him’ (60–2). Having got indoors, the practitioner is recommended to stay calm, ‘for he will come up all of a sudden and prevail upon you with threats (he will be armed) to set the beetle free’ (69–71). Once again the impulse towards supplementation undercuts the claim to pure ritual efficacy—in a micronarrative like this (and they are very common), a secondary, or even tertiary, authorial voice makes itself heard. Yet another unresolved tension arises between the claim to be reproducing rituals that derive their authority from their specifically Egyptian character and the constant invocation of alternative magical 50 Cf. another similar rite: ‘[A star] will come down and stand right over your room (or house-top), and when the star has dispersed (?) in your sight, you will behold the angel whom you evoked sent to you . . . ’ (I 74–6).

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traditions, the appeal to famous Persian, Median, Jewish, Greek, or other ‘masters’ such as Apusoras, Damigeron, Carmendas, Moses, Ostanes, ‘Jannes’, Apollobex, Orpheus, or Pythagoras.51 Some recipes are given individual titles which enshrine the authority of such mythic non-Egyptian figures, for example ˛,  ˜Ææ ı, Sword of Dardanus, or ˜Å Œæ ı ,ÆEæÆ, Sphere of Democritus. This habit is linked to the process of borrowing texts or models from non-Egyptian sources, most obviously the numerous Greek versehymns (which may, however, actually be compositions by the practitioners) and the heavy Jewish texture of some recipes.52 This appeal implies the relativization of the Egyptian tradition, which now appears as simply one among several authoritative magical traditions.

CONSTRUCTING AUTHORIAL VOICES Beneath the confident simplicity of the ‘instructional imperative’ there are thus a number of intriguing hesitations, supplements, and relativisms. They are not allowed to contradict the claim regarding the efficacy of ritual transactions, but they allow us to invoke the idea of discrepant authorial voices. It is in this connection that the broad distinction between the formularies of Group 1a and b becomes important. Most obviously, as relatively ambitious personal collections from a variety of sources, the texts of Group 1a (Anastasi) reveal a clear preference for certain types of praxis. About 35 per cent of all the recipes in this group (excluding PGrMag VI) are for various kinds of divination, a type of recipe which is hardly found in the short formularies.53 Of these, 29 are instructions for obtaining dreamvisions, 23 for obtaining responses via a child-medium, and 33 for the most highly-prized form, the Æh  , the personal vision of a god while one is awake. Divination is the most self-referential aspect of the practitioner’s activity. The most obvious reason for this is that both the experience and the results are highly subjective. Less 51 Plin. nat 30.5; Apul. apol. 90, also 27 with Abt 1908, 244–54; Dieleman 2005, 263–75. 52 The verse form of the 26 Greek hymns, as edited by E. Heitsch, are printed on pp. 237–64 of PGrMag vol. 2. On the Jewish recipes, see e.g. Fernández Marcos 1985. 53 The only true example of a divinatory recipe (actually an activated example) in SupplMag. is no. 66 = SEG 41: 1619.

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obviously, although they sometimes have a service-function for third parties, their primary role is to supply the practitioner himself with esoteric information, such as voces magicae, and verify or correct existing practice. In a note appended to the ‘Mithras liturgy’, the god’s revelation is said to have prompted the author to alter his practice: ‘Do not use the ointment [the recipe for which has just been given] any longer, but throw it into the river: you [are to] seek revelation by wearing the great mystery of the scarab brought back to life by the twenty-five birds; and to seek revelation once each month rather than three times a year, at the full moon’.54 Similarly, it is Amenhotep–Asclepius himself who provides Thessalus with the key information whose absence from Nechepso’s book had led to his initial failures as an iatromathematician.55 Divination was therefore directly related to the creation of a ‘personal signature’ in ritual magic, the legitimation of individual choices, innovations, and editorial decisions. A second consideration is the degree to which divinatory texts employ what we might call ‘practical theory’ about how the revelation is mediated. In some cases, named gods are invoked to appear to provide information on their own authority; in others, there occurs the notion of the ‘god on duty’, who is to be told by a higher divinity to fulfill his revelatory function.56 In a request for a dream-revelation, the god is represented as entering into the practitioner directly.57 These illocutionary and narrative options represent concrete instances of theory at work. Such concern with how foreknowledge is mediated contrasts sharply with the total absence of theoretical reflection about how the magical compulsion itself works, which is the premise of the entire enterprise. The contrast is surely significant. For it suggests that the introduction of theory is tactical, not simply ‘learning’, but a function of the circumstances in which such divination was undertaken and of the underlying claim to authority over

54

PGrMag IV 792–5, cf. H.-D. Betz 2003, 219–21. Praef. }24–26, pp. 53/55 Friedrich. 56 e.g. PGrMag IV 930–1114; IV 3086–124; Va; VII. 550f.; 628–42; 727–39; PDMag xiv 232–8 = GMPT 209; 239–95 = GMPT 209–13; 695–700, 701–5 = GMPT 232f. It is also common for gods to be instructed to send named angels, daemones or shades, e.g. PGrMag IV 1–25; 52–85; VIII 80f.; PDMag xiv 93–114 = GMPT 200f. The influence of the forms of trials, where witnesses are summoned to give evidence, and of army duties, seems to be traceable in these representations. 57 PGrMag IV 3206f. 55

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the system. Formally, the incantations are addressed to the gods or daemones; but inasmuch as these utterances contain theory—that is, contain facts and possibilities produced by theoretical notions—they have also other addressees: that is, the practitioner who may utter them; and the implied reader of the formulary collection itself. Practical theory of this kind is a form of intellectualization, a sign of an ability to distance oneself in some degree from the ritual praxis itself. There is a further point. The emphasis on divination in the Group 1a texts suggests that those who made these selections viewed themselves to a significant degree, indeed overridingly, as a channel of communication between two worlds. Subjectively, I suggest, dealing with divinatory texts, the experience of inducing indicative dreams, the practice of lecanomancy with medium, and the induction of an authentic divine presence all became a guarantee of sincerity and merit, and, indirectly, a reassurance of the objective validity of the claims of high ritual realism.58 The moral superiority of direct revelation from the gods over ‘magical’ practices is central to Philostratus’ claim that Apollonius of Tyana was no mere wizard (ªÅ) as Moiragenes claimed.59 This reminds us of the distinction Heliodorus puts into the mouth of Kalasiris, the Egyptian priest (æ , Å) in the Ethiopian Story, a novel now generally dated to the first half of the third century, if not a little earlier: One kind (of Egyptian wisdom) is popular, we might say creeping along the ground, ministrant to images and wallowing among corpses, addicted to simples, and relying on incantations. It neither attains any good end itself, not brings any good to those who use it; most often it finds itself at fault, such successes as it achieves being painful and meagre . . . But the other knowledge . . . the true wisdom, of which this other has spuriously assumed the name, and in which we priests of prophetic line are trained from our youth, looks upwards to the heavenly region: companion of the gods, partaker of the nature of the higher

58 One might even suggest that such revelations were the correlate within ritual magic of the ‘theological oracles’ used by contemporary philosophers to protect claims and insights. 59 5.12, 7.20, pp. 173, 274 Kayser, cf. Sfameni Gasparro 2005, 250–1, 267–9. It evidently also underlies the marvel vouchsafed to Plotinus in his séance in the Iseum at Rome (Porphyry, Vit. Plotini 10.15–25 = 1, 17 Henry–Schwyzer).

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powers, it traces the motions of the stars and gleans foreknowledge of the future. Aithiop. 3.16.3–4 tr. J.R. Morgan (adapted)60

Kalasiris’ distinction here is much too sharp, for the Group 1a formularies do actually contain a good deal of ‘creeping magic’ (especially erotic magic) as well as divinatory rituals (astrology is mainly implicit rather than foregrounded). Nevertheless the hierarchy of aims and skills that he invokes seem to correspond roughly to the horizon of expectations implict in the Anastasi group. The grand effort by Iamblichus in De mysteriis aegyptiacis to defend theurgy against the accusation of magic is a further step in the same direction.61 The impulse to distinguish between low and high magic must owe something to the Roman view of the matter,62 but was surely also driven by internal differences of self-representation within the group of practitioners, differences that seem to have inspired the preferences visible in the Anastasi formularies. Variety of authorial voices, supplementation, practical theory, and implicit ethical hierarchization in the Group 1a formularies suggest the possibility that the composition of such books, performed by unusually skilled and dedicated scribe-editors, contributed to the construction of an implied reader with a variety of capacities and expectations. Such variety made possible a ‘modularity’, a flexibility of role-conceptions, belied by the dominant tone of ritual efficacy. Such modularity is an aspect of what we might mean by religious individualization. The emphasis in the ‘superior’ Magical Papyri upon the range of choice open to the practitioner in establishing communication with the divine world, the stress on personal dream-experience and the interpretation of medium-experiences, the expectation of veridical encounters with divinity, and the hints or traces of such experiences, all these are so many institutionalized strategies for articulating personal, necessarily individual, experience of the divine over the long term. Individualization may not have been the aim, but it was surely an unintended consequence of fulfilling the role of the practitioner in this Graeco-Egyptian tradition.

60 61 62

A passage rightly stressed by Dowden 1996; cf. Gordon 2012, 159–60. See van Liefferinge 1999, 23–126. Ritner 1995a, 57–8 (stressing P. Yale inv. 299); cf. Rea 1977.

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Frankfurter, David 2005. ‘Voices, Books, Dreams: The Diversification of Divination Media in Late Antique Egypt’, in Johnston, Sarah Iles and Struck, Peter T. (eds), Mantikê: Studies in Ancient Divination. Religions in the Graeco-Roman World 155. Leiden: Brill, 167–232. Gordon, Richard L. 1997. ‘Reporting the Marvellous : Private Divination in the Greek Magical Papyri’, in Schäfer, Peter and Kippenberg, Hans G. (eds), Envisioning Magic: A Princeton Seminar and Symposium. Studies in the History of Religions 75. Leiden: Brill, 65–92. ——2002. ‘Shaping the Text: Theory and Practice in Graeco-Egyptian Malign Magic’, in Horstmannshoff, H. E. J., Singor, H. W., van Straten, F. T., and Strubbe, J. H. M. (eds), Kykeon: Studies in honour of H. S. Versnel. Religions in the Graeco-Roman World 142. Leiden: Brill, 69–111. ——2011. ‘Signa nova et inaudita: The Theory and Practice of Invented Signs in Graeco-Egyptian Magical Texts’, in Pérez Jiménez, Aurelio (ed.), Studia Mystica, Magica et Mathematica ab Amicis, Sodalibus et Discipulis Iosepho Ludovico Calvo Oblata (Festschrift F. Calvo Martínez) = MHNH 11, 15–45. ——2012. ‘Memory and Authority in the Magical Papyri’, in Dignas, Beate and Smith, Bert (eds), Historical and Religious Memory in the Ancient World: Essays for Simon Price. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 145–80. Griffith, F. Llewellyn and Thompson, Herbert (eds, comm.) 1904–9. The Demotic Magical Papyrus of London and Leiden. 3 vols. London: H. Grevel; repr. of vol. 1 only, i.e. without the Demotic fair-copy and the indices. New York: Dover, 1974. Gundel, Hans-Georg. 1968. Weltbild und Astrologie in den griechischen Zauberpapyri. Munich: Beck. Harrauer, Christine. 1987. Meliouchos: Studien zur Entwicklung religiöser Vorstellungen in griechischen synkretistischen Zaubertexten. Wiener Studien, Beiheft 11: Arbeiten zur antiken Religionsgeschichte 1. Vienna: Verlag der Österreichischen Akademie der Wissenschaften. Harskamp, Anton van and Musschenga, Albert W. (eds) 2001. The Many Faces of Individualism. Expert-Seminar on Individualism, Civil Society and Civil Religion, Feb. 1998. Leuven: Peeters. Hornung, Erik 1999. Das esoterische Ägypten. Das geheime Wissen der Ägypter und sein Einfluß auf das Abendland. Munich: Beck. Johnson, Janet 1975. ‘The Demotic Magical Spells of Leiden I 384’, Oudheidkundige Mededelingen uit het Rijksmuseum van Oudheden te Leiden 56, 29–64. ——1977. ‘Louvre E3229: A Demotic Magical Text’, Enchoria 7, 55–102. Jordan, David R. 1976. ‘CIL VIII 19525 B2, QPVULVA = q(uem) p(eperit) vulva’, Philologus 120, 127–32.

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——1985a. ‘A Survey of Greek Defixiones not included in the Special Corpora’, Greek, Roman and Byzantine Studies 26, 151–97. ——1985b. ‘Defixiones from a Well near the South-West Corner of the Athenian Agora’, Hesperia 54, 205–55. ——2000. ‘New Greek Curse Tablets (1985–2000)’, Greek, Roman and Byzantine Studies 41, 5–46. Kákosy, László 1995. ‘Probleme der Religion im römerzeitlichen Ägypten’, ANRW II.18.5. Berlin: de Gruyter, 2894–3049. Koenig, Yvan 1994. Magie et magiciens dans l’Égypte ancienne. Paris: Éditions Pygmalion/Gérard Watelet. ——(ed.) 2002. La magie en Égypte: À la recherche d’une définition. Paris: Musée du Louvre. Kotansky, Roy (ed.) 1994. Greek Magical Amulets: The Inscribed Gold, Silver, Copper and Bronze Lamellae, 1: Published Texts of Known Provenance. Text and Commentary. Papyrologica Coloniensia 22.1. Opladen: Westdeutscher Verlag. Lange, H. O. (ed., comm.) 1927. ‘Der magische Papyrus Harris’, in Det Kgl. Danske Videnskabernes Selskab, Historisk-filologiske Meddelelser XIV.2. Copenhagen: Royal Danish Academy of Science. Martinez, David G. (ed.) 1991. Michigan Papyri XVI: A Greek Love-Charm from Egypt (PMich. 757). American Studies in Papyrology 30. Atlanta, GA: Scholars Press. Meyer, Marvin and Mirecki, Paul (eds) 1995. Ancient Magic and Ritual Power. Religions in the Graeco-Roman World 129. Leiden: Brill. Meyer, Robert 1999. ‘Magical Ascesis and Moral Purity in Ancient Egypt’, in Assmann, Jan and Stroumsa, Guy (eds), Transformations of the Inner Self in Ancient Religions. Studies in the History of Religion 83. Leiden: Brill, 45–64. Michel, Simone 2004. Die magischen Gemmen: Zu Bildern und Zauberformeln auf geschnittenen Steinen der Antike und Neuzeit. Studien aus dem Warburg-Haus 7. Berlin: Akademie Verlag. Moyer, Ian and Dieleman, Jacco 2003. ‘Miniaturization and the Opening of the Mouth in a Greek Magical Text (PGM XII 270–350)’, Journal of Ancient Near Eastern Religions 3, 47–71. Musschenga, Albert W. 2000. ‘Persönliche Individualität in einer individualisierten Gesellschaft’, Concilium 36, 144–51. Parthey, Gustav 1865. ‘Zwei griechische Zauberpapyri des Berliner Museums’, Abhandlungen Kgl. Akademie der Wissenschaften zu Berlin 1865, 109–80. Pocetti, Paolo 2002. ‘Manipolazione della realtà e manipolazione della lingua: alcuni aspetti dei testi magici dell’antichità’, in Morresi, Ruggero (ed.), Linguagio—Linguaggi. Invenzione—Scoperta, Atti del Convegno.

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Macerata-Fermo, 22–23 ottobre 1999. Collana Lingue, Linguaggi, Metalinguaggio 7. Rome: “il Calamo”, 11–59. Podemann Srensen, Jrgen 1984. ‘The argument in ancient Egyptian magical formulae’, Acta Orientalia 45, 5–19. Preisendanz, Karl 1926. ‘Die griechischen Zauberpapyri’, Archiv für Papyrusforschung 8, 104–67. ——1964. ‘Zur Überlieferung der griechischen Zauberpapyri’, in Miscellanea critica: Festschrift zum 150-jährigen Bestehen des Verlages B.G. Teubner, 1. Leipzig: Teubner, 203–17. ——(ed.) Papyri Graecae Magicae. Die griechischen Zauberpapyri, 2 vols. Leipzig: Teubner, 1928–31 [vol. 3, 1941]; rev. edn ed. Heinrichs, Albert. Stuttgart: Teubner, 1973–4. Cited as PGrMag. Quack, Joachim-Friedrich 2000. ‘Das Buch vom Tempel und verwandte Texte: ein Vorbericht’, Archiv für Religionsgeschichte 2.1, 1–20. ——2002. ‘La magie au temple’, in Koenig, Yvan (ed.), La magie en Égypte: À la recherche d’une définition. Paris: Musée du Louvre, 41–68. ——2009a. Einführung in die Altägyptische Literatur III: Die demotische und gräko-ägyptische Literatur, 2nd edn, Berlin: Lit Verlag. ——2009b. ‘Miniaturisierung als Schlüssel zum Verständnis römerzeitlicher ägyptischer Rituale?’, in Hekster, Oliver, Schmidt-Hofner, Sebastian, and Witschel, Christian (eds), Ritual Dynamics and Religious Change in the Roman Empire: Proceedings of the Eighth Workshop of the International Network ‘Impact of Empire’ (Heidelberg, July 5–7, 2007). Impact of Empire 9. Leiden: Brill, 349–65. Raven, Maarten J. 2010. Egyptische Magie: op zoek naar het toverboek van Thot. Zutphen: Walburg Pers. Rea, John 1977. ‘A New Version of P. Yale inv. 299’, ZPE 27, 151–6. Ritner, Robert K. 1995a. ‘The Religious, Social and Legal Parameters of Traditional Egyptian Magic’, in Meyer, Marvin and Mirecki, Paul (eds), Ancient Magic and Ritual Power. Religions in the Graeco-Roman World 129. Leiden: Brill, 43–60. ——1995b. ‘Egyptian Magical Practice under the Roman Empire: the Demotic Spells and their Religious Context’, ANRW II.18.5. Berlin: de Gruyter, 3333–79. Sauneron, Serge 1970. Le papyrus magique illustré de Brooklyn (Brooklyn Museum 47.218.156). New York: Brooklyn Museum. Schäfer, Peter and Kippenberg, Hans G. (eds) 1997. Envisioning Magic: A Princeton Seminar and Symposium. Studies in the History of Religions 75. Leiden: Brill. Schwartz, Jacques 1981. ‘Papyri magicae graecae und magische Gemmen’, in Vermaseren, Maarten J. (ed.), Die orientalischen Religionen im Römerreich. Études préliminaires aux religions orientales de l’Empire romain 93. Leiden: Brill, 485–509.

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Scibilia, Anna 2000. ‘Le componenti medicali della prassi magica: esempi dai Papiri Magici Greci’, in Dal Covolo, Enrico and Giannetto, Isidoro (eds), Cultura e promozione umana. La cura del corpo e dallo spirito dai primi secoli cristiani al Medioevo: contributi e attualizzazione ulteriori. Convegno internazionale di studi, Oasi “Maria Santissima” di Troina, 29 ott.-1 nov. 1999. Collana di cultura e lingue classiche 6. Troina [Enna]: Oasi, 209–25. ——2002. ‘Supernatural Assistance in the Greek Magical Papyri: The Figure of the Parhedros’, in Bremmer, Jan N. and Veenstra, Jan R. (eds), The Metamorphosis of Magic from Late Antiquity to the Early Modern Period. Groningen Studies in Cultural Change 1. Leuven: Peeters, 71–86. Sfameni Gasparro, Giulia 2005. ‘Il sofista e l’ “uomo divino”: Filostrato e la costruzione della “vera storia” di Apollonio di Tiana’, in Sfameni Gasparro, Giulia (ed.), Modi di communicazione tra il divino e l’umano: Tradizioni profetiche, divinazione, astrologia e magia nel mondo mediterraneo antico. Collana Hierá 7. Cosenza: Lionello Giordano, 247–83. ——2009. ‘Religione e magia nel mondo tardo-antico: il caso delle gemme magiche’, in Sfameni Gasparro, Giulia, Problemi di religione greca ed ellenistica. Dèi, dèmoni, uomini: tra antiche e nuove identità. Collana Hierá 12. Cosenza: Lionello Giordano, 315–89. Smith, Jonathan Z. 1993. ‘The Temple and the Magician’, in Map is not Territory. Studies in the History of Religion. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 172–207 (this volume was originally published by E. J. Brill, Leiden, in 1978). The article was first published under the same title in Jervell, Jacob, and Meeks, Wayne A. (eds), God’s Christ and his People: Essays honoring Nils Alstrup Dahl on the occasion of his Sixty-fifth Birthday. Oslo: Universitetsforlaget, 1976, 333–47. ——2004. ‘Trading Places’, in Relating Religion: Essays in the Study of Religion. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 215–29. First published in Meyer, Marvin and Mirecki, Paul (eds) 1995, Ancient Magic and Ritual Power. Religions in the Graeco-Roman World 129. Leiden: Brill, 13–27. Smith, Morton 1984. ‘The Eighth Book of Moses and how it grew (PLeid J 395)’, in Gigante, Marcello (ed.), Atti del XVIIo Congresso internazionale di Papirologia (Napoli 19–26 maggio 1983). Naples: Centro internaz. per lo Studio dei Papiri Ercolanesi, 2, 683–93. ——1986. ‘PLeid J 395 (PGM XIII) and its Creation Legend’, in Caquot, André et al. (eds), Hellenica et Judaica: Hommages à Valentin Nikiprowetzky. Leuven: Peeters, 491–8. Van Liefferinge, Carine. 1999. La théurgie: Des Oracles Chaldaïques à Proclus. Kernos Supplément 9. Liège: Centre International d’Étude de la Religion Grecque Antique. Vercoutter, Jean 1986. À la recherche de l’Égypte oublié. Paris: Gallimard.

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Wessely, Karl 1888. ‘Griechische Zauberpapyrus von Paris und London’, Denkschriften der Akademie der Wissenschaften in Wien 36, 44–126. Westendorf, Wolfhart 1999. Handbuch der altägyptischen Medizin. 2 vols. Handbuch der Orientalistik1.36.1–2. Leiden: Brill. Ziegler, Konrad 1963, s.v. ‘Pythagoras [11]’, RE 24, cols. 304f. Zwierlein-Diehl, E. 2007. Antike Gemmen und ihr Nachleben. Berlin: de Gruyter.

8 Individualization and the Cult of the Martyrs: Examples from Asia Minor in the Fourth Century Johan Leemans

INTRODUCTION In her book Private Worship, Public Values and Religious Change in Late Antiquity, Kim Bowes analyses the contribution of private initiative in the religious sphere to the Christianization of the Roman empire. Her study shows how dynamic and enriching a factor the private initiative—be it private devotion, erecting church buildings, beginning new cults—has been within Christianity, and how its dynamic led to clashes and tensions with the institutional structures of the rising episcopacy. Bowes also demonstrates how throughout Late Antiquity, especially in the West, bishops became more prominent and ultimately largely resolved these tensions in their favour. In her book, Bowes draws quite substantially on material related to the cult of the saints. In this contribution I would like to follow up on this aspect of Bowes’s research agenda and study the martyr cult as an area in which on the one hand individual initiative was possible, while on the other hand, customs and the structures and interests of the institutionalized Church were also playing their role. Moreover, whereas ‘private’ stands in opposition to ‘public’, ‘individual’ stands in opposition to‘collective’. The individual is the person who distinguishes him- or herself from the rituals, the habits of the group,

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the collective. As geographical and chronological limits I will zoom in on the martyr cult in the provinces of Cappadocia, Armenia, and Pontus1 in the second half of the fourth century ad.2 This is a good focus through which to study in some detail the questions at hand: (1) it is a geographically and chronologically limited period about which we are well-informed, mainly through the writings of the Cappadocian Fathers (the ‘big three’—Gregory of Nyssa, Gregory of Nazianzus, and Basil of Caesarea—and also Asterius of Amaseia and Amphilochius of Iconium); (2) the Cappadocian Fathers as representatives of the institutionalized Church have always held the martyr cult in high esteem and actively supported it; (3) the period under consideration marks the rapid development of the martyr cult when it is really in full swing. As ‘standard-bearers of Christianity into the countryside’, the martyr cult was not only present in, or at the outskirts of, all the major cities, but in Anatolia it had by the later fourth century also conquered often surprisingly remote parts of the countryside.3 Our working hypothesis will be that in the martyr cult we witness tensions: tensions between the individual initiative versus that of the church leaders; tensions between individual ritual and devotional practices and more communal ones; tensions between the habits of the collective and the individual appropriating of these habits in a personalized way. Operating within this field of tensions the late antique Christian could, often building on non-Christian habits and rituals with a venerable pedigree, carve out a space for the individual.

1 With these rather unprecise but (given the many changes in the organization of Asia Minor) not completely infelicitous terms I refer to central Anatolia, the region in which the Cappadocian Fathers were active; an activity which was not confined to one provincial administrative unity but comprised Armenia I and II (after the reorganization of 386), Cappadocia I and II (after the separation in 371/2) and what were traditionally the provinces Helenopontus (earlier Diospontus) and Pontus Polemonianus (under Diocletian together also the diocese Pontus). 2 See, for a brief survey, Limberis 2006. 3 Mitchell 1993, 68–9. A beautiful illustration of how remote areas had already been touched by the martyr cult can be found in Gregory of Nyssa’s ep. 1. Here he describes how he was on his way to Andaemonè, a small villages in a mountainous area which he only reached after having been under way an entire night in his carriage, followed by 15 miles on horseback and partly even walking.

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TESTAMENT OF THE FORTY MARTYRS OF SEBASTE The so-called Testament of the Forty Martyrs of Sebaste is in many ways an extraordinary document. Allegedly an encyclical letter written by Meletius, Aetius, and Eutychius, three of their group, this document presents itself as the last words of this famous and hugely popular group of martyrs. In their letter they express their will as to what should happen with their remains. These should be buried ‘in the town of Sarim, below the city of Zelon’; they should be buried there all together in one place. Furthermore they ask their readers that nobody should take a particle of the remains for himself. As to the young man Eunoicus, it is stipulated that he should be buried together with them but, if he should survive the trial and persecutions, he is urged to devote himself in all freedom to the tomb of the Forty. After a more general parenetic part to live a Christ-centred life, the letter closes with a long list of greetings.4 This document stands out in several ways: as to literary genre it is unique among the late antique martyrial literature, and while there are some other documents written by the martyrs themselves, such as (part of) the Passio Perpetuae and, possibly, the Martyrium Pionii,5 such texts remain exceptions. Doubts regarding the text’s authenticity and historicity have been brought forward without decisive argument pro or contra emerging.6 While the possibility of the text’s authenticity cannot be entirely excluded, it can certainly also easily be made sense of as having originated later than the early fourth century, at a time that the cult of the Forty, and the creation of a literary tradition around them, was in full swing. The theme of the unity of the Forty and the idea that the powerfulness of each particle of their remains equals that of those of the entire group is a stock theme also present in other late fourth century texts about the Forty.7 And besides, for its edifying value in the parenetic part the Testament may have been written to bolster the claim of the town of Sarim as an early (though probably

4 Text in Musurillo 1972, 354–9 [this text is a reprint of that in the 1892 Bonwetsch edition]. 5 See on this issue the recent contribution by Hilhorst 2010. 6 The most complete defence of the text’s authenticity (against Buckle 1921) was by Franchi di Cavalieri 1928, 173–9 (‘merita ogni fede’). 7 Cf. Vinel 1997.

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not the original) burial place of the Forty, maybe even in competition with bigger centres of the veneration of the Forty that had established themselves.8 The most startling aspect of this text with regard to the purpose of this contribution, however, is that this is the only relatively early martyr text I know in which the heroes of the story themselves dictate what should happen with their own bones. Generally, this is the duty of the community or its leaders. In this text, though, the roles are reversed: the martyrs themselves are indicating who of the community members are to be responsible for the care for their remains and they say what should happen with them. In that it gives precedence to the group of individual martyrs over against the ‘normal’ course of events in which community members or leaders after the martyr’s death take the initiative to start a cult, the Testament can be considered as the expression of an exceptional form of individualization in the late antique cult of the martyrs. Unusual as it may be, the Testament has introduced us to the main (f)actors in the martyr cult: the centrality of the martyr’s relics, the role of the community, and of the leaders of the community.

THE PROVENANCE OF RELICS At the heart of the martyr cult were the martyr’s relics—the bones and other remains. These were its tangible centre. They guaranteed the real presence of the martyr and through that the ground for miracles, healings, and whatever other benefits one might hope for. Where did these relics come from? In the case of a local martyr there was often continuity between the historical event of his martyrdom, the preservation of the relics, the normal burial ritual, and commemoration by the community, resulting in a clearly identifiable tomb as a place for veneration and commemoration on the yearly feastday of the martyr. This was a duty of the community, as is clear from the earliest description of this process in the Martyrdom of Polycarp. The author of the text, writing on behalf of the Smyrnaean Christian community, describes how ‘at last, collecting the remains [Polycarp’s

8

Maraval 1999; van Dam 2003, 136.

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ashes] that were dearer to us than precious stones and finer than gold, we buried them in a fitting spot. Gathering here, so far as we can, in joy and gladness, we will be allowed by the Lord to celebrate the anniversary day of his martyrdom.’9 It is the community (‘we’) who collect Polycarp’s relics and make them into an object of veneration and yearly celebration and commemoration. The Christian community of bigger cities composed its own calendar of martyrs and saints and was responsible for all other organizational aspects related to the cult (for example, somebody to look after the cult place, such as young Eunoicus in the Testament of the Forty). Within the framework of this community-organized cult there was room for the individual to participate, though concrete details about this emerge more fully from the second half of the fourth century onwards. Encouraged by the end of the persecutions and the example of Constantine, the cult of the martyrs is celebrated throughout the empire with increasing gusto and splendour: many more cults are established, the edifices became bigger and more richly adorned, and on a local level the cult of martyrs (and very quickly also other saints) becomes an important part of the life of any local Christian community.10 Certainly from the second half of the fourth century onwards, this success and spread of the martyr cult was to no small extent helped by the mechanisms of inventions and translations. The earliest documented translation is that of the remains of the martyr Babylas who was brought from within the city of Antiochia to a new sanctuary in Daphne, at the outskirts of the city, in order to compete with an Apollo-sanctuary.11 For Cappadocia and surroundings several translations are known. Often we only know of them indirectly: if a cult is attested for several localities, we may assume that somehow relics of that particular martyr have been distributed, probably through a translation. In a few instances, however, we know more details about the translation itself. Thus, through his relative Junius Soranus and the local bishop Vetranio of Tomi, Basil of Caesarea was able to obtain the relics of the martyr Sabas who had died during persecutions in Scythia.12 Possibly there is a connection with Basil’s promise to his colleague Arcadius to provide him with some relics for his 9 10 11 12

Martyrium Polycarpi, 18 (tr. H. Musurillo 1972, 17). Baumeister 2009. Baumeister 2009, 132. Basil. Ep. 155; 164 and 165. Cf. Pouchet 1991.

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new-built church.13 In another letter, written to Ambrosius of Milan, Basil goes out of his way to assure his Milanese colleague that the relics he was to send with the priests that had come for them were truly those of Dionysius of Milan, Ambrosius’ illustrious predecessor.14 The latter also documents Ambrosius’ promotion of the martyr cult.15 The relics of the Forty of Sebaste were dispersed over the entire eastern empire,16 but, through Gaudentius of Brescia, also reached the West. Gaudentius describes how he visited Caesarea while on pilgrimage to the Holy Land. There he met some nieces of Basil the Great, who were at the head of a monastery that kept relics of the Forty. The virgins happily gave (part of ) them to Gaudentius.17 These instances show how individuals and networks were of crucial importance for the spread of relics and cults. Besides the translatio, the phenomenon of the inventio also contributed to the spread and proliferation of cults. The inventio of the relics of the Milanese martyrs Gervasius and Protasius under Ambrosius is an early, well-known example.18 For Asia Minor there are two examples worth discussing in some detail. The first comes from Gregory of Nazianzus panegyric on Cyprian, a sermon delivered while he was at Constantinople. It is narrated how a pious lady had relics of saint Cyprian in her possession. Through a miraculous 13

Basil. Ep. 49. The letter was probably written in 370: the prologue indicates that Basil had not long been bishop of Caesarea. Arcadius is not otherwise known, but can perhaps be identified with the bishop of Tremithus (Cyprus) (cf. Hauschild 1973, 195, note 246). 14 Pouchet 1992, on good grounds denies Basil the authorship of Ep. 197.2. The most important argument is that the letter is only extant in one single manuscript, the Parisinus Suppl. gr. 1020. This manuscript is also the only witness of the Greek text of ‘Basil’s’ Ep. 8, which is in fact a letter of Evagrius of Pontus to Peter of Sebaste. Because of this connection, Pouchet thinks Peter of Sebaste might actually be the author: besides a few in themselves insufficient parallels as to content, Pouchet also points to parallels in word-use between this document and another letter of Peter to his brother Gregory of Nyssa (Ep. 30 in SC 363, 314–19). 15 HV, 133; Dassmann 2004. 16 About their wish to be buried together, see Testamentum 1 Musurillo. Overviews of the spread of their relics, see Amore 1968, col. 770; Maraval 1985, 372, 374, 377, 378; Maraval 1999. 17 Gaudentius of Brescia, Tractatus XVII: In . . . Caesarea . . . . repperimus quasdam Dei famulas, monasterii sanctarum virginum dignissimas matres, . . . quibus (sc. famulas) ab avunculo suo summo sacerdote ac beato confessore Basilio olim traditae fuerunt horum martyrum venerandae reliquiae, quas desiderio nostro incunctanter ac fideliter tribuerunt . . . 18 Ambr. Ep. 77 Zelzer [= Ep. 22 in the traditional numbering]. For this famous inventio, e.g. Amat 1985, 214–16 and Den Boeft 1988.

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revelation it became known that Cyprian’s relics were preserved by this pious lady who then, in turn, put them at the disposal of the entire community.19 Gregory says that through this revelation God’s will had both respected the piety of this pious woman and the benefit of the community. Yet, one may sense behind this narrative the tendency of the institution to react against a too explicit privatization of the holy. This is somewhat different in the miraculous story of the inventio of the relics of the Forty of Sebaste as told in their Passion (BHG 1201). Here it is the institutionalized church community in the person of the bishop who firmly has the initiative. The author describes what happens after the martyrs’ bodies had been burned. In order to prevent the Christians taking and filling the entire earth with them—an ironic allusion to their spread afterwards!—the ‘tyrants’ decided to throw the ashes in the river. Yet the ashes stayed together and gathered in the neighbourhood of a rock in the river. After three days this is revealed (IŒÆºçŁÅ) to Peter, the bishop of Sebaste. In a dream the martyrs urge him to go at night to the river and take them out. The bishop does as he is told: together with some of his clerics he goes to the river where he sees immediately the relics glowing so that they can be easily collected in small caskets.20 Through the mechanisms of invention and translation the martyr cult became a crucial element in the life of any local Christian community and therewith it constituted a privileged locus for the individual Christian to perform his or her ritual practices. The presentation of the evidence from Asia Minor in the next sections gives a representative overview of these practices.21

INDIVIDUAL PRACTICES The relics were the centre of the martyr cult and the focal point of attention for all visitors to the sanctuary. This is made very clear by Gregory of Nyssa in his Homily in Praise of Theodore the Recruit. This

19

Greg. Naz. In Cyprianum, 17. Cf. Mossay 1966 239–40. Passio XL Martyrum, 13. 21 Besides the martyr cult, pilgrimages and visits to important centres of pilgrimage also provided such privilegied loci (cf. e.g. the still good surveys of Kötting 1980 and Maraval 1985). 20

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sermon contains an extensive ecphrasis of the martyr’s sanctuary in Pontic Euchaïta, the very place where the homily was delivered.22 Gregory first describes the outer appearance of the building, then moves to the wall-paintings and finally zooms in on the tomb itself: Taking delight in the seeing of such works of art that can be observed, one is longing for the rest, in particular to approach the tomb, trusting that touching it results in sanctification and blessing. And if somebody gives permission to take away the dust that lies upon the surface of the resting place, then the soil is taken away as a gift and the earth is preserved as a treasure. But to touch the relics themselves, as chance on occasion provides the opportunity, that is much-desired and the gift for prayers to the Most High, as is known to those who have had this experience and have fulfilled this kind of longing. For as if it is the same body, still alive and flourishing, those beholding it embrace it with the eyes, the mouth, the ears. And when they have approached it with all the senses, they pour tears out over it from piety and emotion. And as if he was intact and appearing, they address to the martyr a plea that he would intercede on their behalf, in a way as if they were asking God’s bodyguard for a favour and he, called upon, receives presents and provides them whenever he likes.23

In a powerful way this text bears testimony to the centrality of the relics and the power that was ascribed to them. Hence the central place they had in the sanctuary and in the martyr cult as a whole. Acquiring some of the dust on the coffin, touching the relics themselves, all the senses and emotions coming into play, asking the martyrs for favours, all of these were common individual practices which will be discussed more fully below. Most striking is the personal and emotional (‘longing’, ‘much-desired’) element in this description. Gregory presents it as individual actions his hearers have been doing or will do in the sanctuary. Apparently there was also some choice: some may have preferred to take the dust of the coffin, others to touch the relics. It was precisely in the context of these devotional practices—small and great—that there was room for the individual to give expression to his or her devotion to the martyr. The individual character of these ritual or devotional practices should not be overstated,

22 On the rhetorical aspects and the function of this passage in the entire sermon, see Leemans 2005a. 23 Greg. Nyss. Theod., trans. Leemans, Mayer, Allen, and Dehandschutter 2003, 85.

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though: it is clear that many ‘individuals’ were doing exactly the same and that in these devotional practices well-worn patterns are present with roots not seldom reaching back to non-Christian religious practices with a venerable pedigree. This is certainly the case with the invocation to the martyrs, testimony to the widespread belief that it was profitable to ask favours of them.24 Such invocations can be done by a homilist on behalf of the community. Often these invocations are found at the end of the panegyric on the martyr who is addressed.25 More interesting for our topic are the descriptive passages in panegyrical sermons which inform us about the practice of invocations to the martyrs in their shrines. Even taking into account that the purpose of these panegyrics was to increase the fame of the martyrs, Basil of Caesarea’s Homily on the Forty of Sebaste is a very informative text in this regard: The one who is in trouble takes refuge in the Forty, the one who rejoices runs off to them—the former to find release from difficulties, the latter to protect his prosperity. Here a pious woman is found praying for her children, begging for the return of her husband who is away, for his safety because he is sick. Let your petitions be with the martyrs.26

An equally moving testimony about people in need visiting the martyr’s shrine for assistance is given by Asterius of Amaseia. In his sermon On the Holy Martyrs a lively portrait is painted of how the martyrs are ‘safe harbours’ for those who suffer from the storms of life: sick people, people who are in debt, a mother who goes with her sick child to the martyr rather than to the doctor, engaged couples who go on the eve of their wedding to the martyr’s shrine to invoke the martyr’s blessing over their marriage, the seaman who asks the martyr for protection when he is about to leave the harbour.27 All of them go to the martyrs to invoke their support, protection, or 24

Cf. Michel and Klauser 1976, cols. 19–21. Some examples: Basil. On the Forty Martyrs of Sebaste 8; Greg. Nazi. On Cyprian 19; Greg. Nyss. Theod.; Greg. Nyss. On Stephen II. 26 Basil. Homilia in XL Martyres, 8 (ed. PG 31, col. 524 A3–13:  EŁºØ  Kd f ÆæŒ  Æ ŒÆ ÆçªØ- › PçæÆØ  K- ÆP f I æåØ˙ › b- ¥Æ ºØ oæfi Å H ıåæH˙ › b- ¥ Æ çıºÆåŁfi B ÆP fiH a åæÅ  æÆ. ’¯  ÆFŁÆ ªıc Pc !bæ Œø På Å ŒÆ ƺÆ ÆØ- I Å F Ø Iæd c K   ÆN ıÅIWÞø F Ø c ø ÅæÆ. ) a Ææ æø ªŁø a ÆN Æ Æ !H. trans. Leemans, Mayer, Allen, and Dehandschutter, 2003, 75. 27 Asterius of Amaseia In Sanctos Martyres 4.4. Book VIII of Theodoret’s Graecarum affectionum curatio contains a similar passage (cf. Canivet, 1958, 333). 25

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assistance. These are only examples, but, precisely as such, they indicate that Christians of the fourth century reacted to their individual sorrows, emotions, wishes, problems, and hopes by stepping into the collective pattern of offering invocations, a collective pattern and an age-old and widespread habit. Yet the belief in the power of the martyrs went further than merely the invocation. It was believed that touching the relics or even only being in their neighbourhood had a supernatural and salutary effect. ‘He who touches the bones of a martyr’, says Basil, ‘partakes in the sanctity and grace that reside in them.’28 About the relics of the female martyr Julitta, he says that ‘they sanctify both the place where they rest and the people who assemble there’.29 According to Gregory of Nazianzus, ‘the bodies of the martyrs have the same power as their holy souls, whether one touches them or just venerates them. Just a few drops of their blood, the signs of their suffering, can effect the same as their bodies.’ As effects caused by the veneration or touching of the martyr’s relics, Gregory mentions the chasing away of demons, the curing of the sick, the causing of visions, and predictions of the future.30 According to Basil, Christians often visited the tomb of the Caesarean martyr Mamas to ask his assistance and protection during travels or in periods of sickness. Mamas would even have resuscitated children from death and prolonged the life of others.31 Many who had obtained a favour through the martyr’s intercession (be it a cure, a safe home-journey, or something else) brought a present, an anathema to the martyrium.32 In book VIII of his Graecarum affectionum curatio Theodoretus of Cyrrhus argues that the old, pagan cult of the heroes had been superseded by the Christian martyr cult.33 His apologetical demonstration underlines how the martyrs’ sanctuaries easily surpass the pagan heroa, inter alia because of the presence and beauty of the anathemata on display in the 28

Basil. hom. in Ps. 115. Basil. On Julitta. Greg. Naz. Against Julian 1.69. 31 Basil. In Mamantem 1 PG 31, col. 589 C7–14: ‘)ŁÅ   Ø F æ ıæ - ‹ Ø Ø- Oæø ÆP F IźÆÆ ˙ ‹ Ø- æØ ıå  fiH ø fi  ø fi - KåŒÆ ÆP e ıæªe N æ ıå˙ ‹ Ø- OÆ Ø ŒºÅŁd- Kd H æªø Ææ Å˙ ‹ ı › Øæ ı Kƪƪ˙ ‹ ı K IWÞø Æ I Å˙ ‹ Ø ÆEÆ IøŒ XÅ  ºı ÅŒ Æ˙ ‹ Ø æ ŁÆ  ı ÆŒæ æÆ K Å.’ 32 About anathemata (with reference to Asterius On Phocas), see Deichmann 1975. 33 Dihle 1998. 29 30

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martyrium. He mentions small sculptures of hands, feet, or eyes in gold or wood, depending on the financial possibilities of the giver.34 In all likelihood these were images of the body parts that had been healed thanks to the martyr’s intervention. These were on display as a testimonial to the efficacy of the martyr’s intervention and his power. No doubt they also functioned as a convincing argument to others to put their trust in the martyr. Another extensive description of votive offerings for Cappadocia and surroundings comes from Asterius’ Homily on Phocas. Contrary to the previous text, which clearly documented that anathemata were brought to the martyr by poor and rich alike, this text only has an eye for the upper layer of society. The homilist mentions that the martyr’s shrine where he is delivering his sermon contained many precious presents and ornaments that had been gifts from several Christian emperors. Most noteworthy to Asterius, however, was the presence of the anathema of a Scythian king. He had sent a diadem and a cuirass, the first, Asterius comments, as thanks for his kingship, the second for his military successes.35 Yet, we know from the same homily that Phocas was also considered the protector-saint of the fisherman and that in his martyrium care was also taken of the needy. Therefore, it is possibly best to ascribe the exclusive focus on the anathemata of emperors and kings to Asterius’ desire to give his rhetorical talent free rein by concentrating on the most splendid of presents. It is highly likely that Theodoretus’ description reflects also the situation in Phocas’ shrine in Amaseia and in most other martyr shrines. A further interesting individual practice associated with the martyr cult is that of the incubation. The ‘temple-sleep’ is well-known in Egyptian, Old-Israelite, and Greco-Roman religions but it also played an important role in Christianity and most particularly in the cult of the saints and at pilgrimage shrines. Besides healing, the person practising incubation could also receive visions of the future.36 For

34

Theod. Gr. aff. cur. 8.63. Asterius of Amaseia On Phocas 12: ¯x  ª- s ¼æåø KŒEŁ ŒÆd Æغf e  çÆ  B ŒçƺB I Ł - åæıfiH ŒÆd ¼ŁØ ºŁø æغÆ - ŒÆd e ŁæÆŒÆ e  ºØŒe I - oºÆ å  Æ º  ı-IºÆÇ ØŒc ªaæ ŒÆd Łæı Å H Æææø M Æ ºÆ-ł Iç æÆ IÆŁÆ< Æ> Øa F æ ıæ  ø fi fiH ¨ø fi fiH ŒÆd ıø ŒÆd IØÆ  ŒÆŁØæÆ a Iç æ. 36 On incubation in early Christian literature, see Parmentier 1989 and Wacht 1997. 35

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Cappadocia and Pontus the testimonies are rather scarce.37 At the end of his Second Homily on the Forty of Sebaste Gregory of Nyssa adduces two examples to demonstrate the Forty’s miraculous power. Firstly, he narrates at length the story of a limping soldier who received a vision while sleeping in the sanctuary of the Forty in Pontic Ibora, and was cured.38 Secondly, he narrates his own incubation-experience, a precious ego-document. Gregory’s family always had had a penchant for the cult of the martyrs in general and the Forty in particular. Gregory’s mother had established a sanctuary on the family estates in Pontus and insisted that Gregory, though not in the neighbourhood, should attend the festive inaugural gathering around the martyrs’ relics. Gregory grudgingly accepted the invitation. He arrived at the moment the vigil service was going on and he took the opportunity to have a nap. While he was sleeping the Forty appeared in a vision to him, very threatening, and he barely escaped a beating-up. Back in reality he understood the message of the Forty, regretted his stubbornness and wept for his stupidity, dropping some tears on the relics so that the Forty would forgive his initial lack of enthusiasm.39 A final usage related to the deeply-rooted belief in the power of relics is the inhumatio ad sanctos: burial in the immediate vicinity of the martyrs’ relics.40 This burial ad sanctos was by the fourth century ad a widespread and well-documented practice in both east and west. Quite a few beliefs were attached to these practices. Thus, the vicinity of the relics would protect the deceased and his grave against demons and grave-robbers. Moreover, on the occasion of the judgement before God, the martyrs would act as the advocates of the deceased. Further, the unity between deceased and martyrs in the inhumatio ad sanctos was considered to be a prefiguration of their heavenly being together. Finally, it was believed that at the end of times martyr and deceased would resurrect together.41 This practice of the burial ad sanctos had a quasi-magical character. Yet, a corrective was built in, in the sense 37 Besides the two texts from Gregory’s sermon, the following texts also may hint at the practice of incubation: Greg. Naz. On Cyprian 18; Asterius of Amaseia On Phocas 13; Basil. In Mamantem 1. 38 Greg. Nyss. On the Forty Martyrs of Sebaste 2. 39 Greg. van Nyss. In XL Martyres 2. 40 The standard work on the topic is still Duval 1988. Cf. Greg. Nyss. On the Forty Martyrs of Sebaste 2; Greg. Naz. carm. 2.20 and 2.76. 41 Duval 1988, 171–201.

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that it was also believed that if somebody had not led a truly Christian life, his burial ad sanctos would not function as a ‘shortcut to heaven’ but would, on the contrary, be considered as a last, grave sin.42 The burial ad sanctos could constitute for the individual Christian a fitting end to his or her life. As the following examples will demonstrate, it seems that in the fourth century generally the burial ad sanctos in the immediate vicinity of the relics was some sort of privilege that, also on financial grounds, certainly was not accessible for everybody. At the same time, however, several texts underline that being buried in the vicinity of a martyr’s tomb was believed to have the same salutary effects, even though it wasn’t the immediate vicinity. The testimonies for burials ad sanctos in Cappadocia are all related to the families of either Gregory of Nazianzus or Gregory of Nyssa. The parents of the latter, as well as his oldest sister Macrina, were buried in the vicinity of relics of the Forty of Sebaste.43 According to Gregory, this was done in order that on the moment of the resurrection they would be resuscitated together with their advocates.44 As for Gregory of Nazianze: his parents, his brother Caesarius, and Gregory himself found their last resting place in the vicinity of relics of (otherwise not identified) martyrs.45 Gregory of Nazianzus’s Epigram 165 mentions a young deceased who was buried ad sanctos, without giving further details.46 An extensive description of a burial ad sanctos is offered in Gregory’s Epigram 118 (c.370). It concerns the burial monument of Gregory’s uncle Amphilochos, his wife Livia, and their son Euphemius. The monument consisted of two storeys: below the grave of the family, on top of that the sanctuary of the relics, which could also be venerated. The epigram underlines the unity of the building: it is called ‘one house’ (x   ) and the martyrs who are at the upper floor are asked to keep a benevolent and watchful eye on those below, both the ones who have already been deposed there and the ones who will eventually find their resting place.47

42

Duval 1988, 154–68. Several texts corroborate this: Greg. Nyss. In XL Martyres II; Greg. Nyss. Vita Macrinae 13.1.19; 34 (250–3). Cf. Duval 1988. 44 ‘¥ Æ K ø fi fiH ŒÆØæø fi fiH B IÆ ø  a H PÆWÞÅØÆ H  ÅŁH KªæŁHØ.’ (Mart II). 45 Cf. Greg. Naz. Epigr. 31; 39; 76 and 77. See Duval 1988, 69–70. 46 Greg. Naz. Epigr. 165.1, 2 (ed. P. Waltz, Anthologie grecquele). 47 Greg. Naz. Epigr. 165.2. 43

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So far we have seen that within the context of the martyr cult a number of individual ritual and devotional practices blossomed. Not infrequently these practices exhibited parallels with the non-Christian past and context (for example, ex-votos to pagan deities or to the martyrs). Often they were supra-individual, collective habits that were performed by the individual in the context of his or her own needs or situation. Within these limitations it is beyond doubt that in the martyr cult the individual—he or she or they—may have found room for an individualized approach to the holy. In that sense the described practices within the framework of the martyr cult offered a welcome addition to the traditional liturgical services which were much more community-directed. In passing we have also seen that with these devotional practices the room for the more privileged individual was not entirely exhausted. Through the building of large funerary monuments and the acquisition of relics they could have a burial ad sanctos or start a new local cult, as Gregory of Nyssa’s mother did at the family estate for the Forty. If rich enough, one had the possibility of building a martyr’s shrine: Gregory himself did so (see the description in his Letter 25) but also Paulinus of Nola—to mention just this famous example—invested large sums in buildings and churches in honour of the martyrs.48 Finally, we have also heard about pious ladies having relics in private possession. For all of these mentioned instances, too, parallels for other geographical areas and chronological periods can easily be found. These instances all bear testimony to the initiative of the (rich) individual as well as to a form of privatization of, or at least privileged access to, the holy. The martyr’s shrine, in which the relics were present, was central to any local martyr cult as well as to the liturgical and spiritual life of local Christian communities. Throughout the year it was an important holy place, a place where heaven and earth met and where local Christians could go to join in that dynamic. The culmination point of a martyr cult, however, was the yearly festival or panèguris. On that occasion all the rituals and devotional practices that have been described above could also take place. But there was also room for many other things, related to the special character of the feast-day 48 The only source for the martyrium in Nazianzus is Greg. Naz. Laudatio funebris in patrem; the sources about Paulinus’ activity are studied in de la Portbarré-Viard 2006.

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and the large crowd of visitors a martyr’s shrine attracted on that occasion. It is to the room for forms of individualization within the context of the panèguris that I will turn now.

AT THE MARTYR FESTIVAL While it was possible to visit the sanctuary of the martyrs during the entire year, the cult of each individual martyr reached its yearly peak during the martyr festival (panèguris) on the anniversary of the martyr’s death or funeral. This yearly event was attended in great numbers by the local Christian community in all its diversity: men, women, and children, well-to-do and less privileged, bishops and lower clergy, hard-core Christians, and many more wavering of heart made their way to the martyrium, which was often at the outskirts of the city.49 Basil compares the mass of believers to a swarm of bees, Gregory of Nyssa to a colony of ants. Gregory of Nazianzus affirms that the celebration of the panèguris for Mamas in Nazianzus, celebrated in the open air, attracted a few thousands of people.50 Many other texts convey this sense of massive attendance, of hustle and bustle.51 At the martyrium, the Christian community came together for a complex event which featured not only explicitly religious but also social and economic aspects. Exactly this complexity offered the individual free space to choose and ‘make’ his or her own panèguris-experience. This free space is most obvious with regard to the social aspect of the festival: it was an opportunity to meet people, presumably including those one did not meet on ordinary occasions such as other liturgical services or markets. It is self-evident that this social aspect made a panèguris a very attractive occasion. This was also true for the ecclesiastical authorities. For them, panègureis offered opportunities to organize provincial synods, to invite colleagues and discuss 49 e.g. Basil. On Gordius 1; Greg. Nyss. Theod.; Asterius Homily on the Holy Martyrs 1.1. Cf. Delehaye 1933, 36–8. 50 Gregor. Naz. In novam domenicam 11: æ  ÆE  ººÆE åغØØ H Æ ÆåŁ Kت ø. 51 Bees: Basil. On Gordius 1; ants: Greg. Nyss. Theod. Some other examples chosen at random: Basil. On Mamas 2; ep. 95; Greg. Nyss. On the Forty Martyrs of Sebaste Ia; Asterius On Phocas 9.2; On the Holy Martyrs 1.1.

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ecclesiastical business, or to tighten their relations with dignitaries from the secular realm.52 This gathering of large crowds also generated commercial activity, in itself a logical consequence of the large masses attending. The panègureis of martyrs and other saints were in that respect no different from their non-Christian predecessors.53 Especially when it was a panèguris in a big city, the market attached to it was economically very important as the one place to buy the things that, following the law of supply and demand, could not be bought normally. Gradually such markets established themselves as fixed, periodic markets.54 No wonder that these markets and the social benefits of meeting others, indulging in making pleasure together, having a few drinks (and possibly a few too many), playing dice, watching the animals at the beast-market, were all part and parcel of the panèguris-experience. This socio-economic side of the panègureis gave the individual, it would seem, considerable freedom to indulge in the activities on offer. According to the bishop-homilists, however, the attention the visitors to the festival paid to these peripheral things took such excessive forms that it distracted attention from the religious aspects.55 In response to this, the Cappadocian Fathers developed a homiletical discourse that pleaded for celebration of the panègureis ‘in spirit and truth’, to consider it as a moment for spiritual growth. This discourse— which also developed a polemical twist towards other religions and their festivals56—didn’t exclude participation in extra-religious interests but these should be of secondary importance and by applying the

52 See, e.g. Basil. ep. 142 (a letter to the numerarius, expressing his disappointment because the latter didn’t attend the great panèguris for Eupsychius which had made it impossible to introduce to him some of his country bishops) or ep. 278: Basil hoping to use the occasion of a panèguris to play an intermediary role in a conflict between a number of people from Caesarea and Valerianus, a young acquaintance of his. 53 De Ligt and De Neeve 1988, 397 write (with regard to non-Christian panègureis): ‘Nevertheless even the smallest panègyreis were occasions where more people than usual assembled; and this concentration of people made these festivals most suited for communication, contact and trade. Although our focus is on the economic aspects of the panègyreis we should not completely ignore the social aspects. Both are inextricably intertwined. Festivals were places where one met people from other towns, where one made friends and where news was exchanged.’ 54 De Ligt 1993. 55 Cf. e.g. Basil. Homily on Riches; ‘Long Rules’; Asterius of Amaseia Against Avarice 1.3. 56 Harl 1981.

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virtue of sophrosunè all excesses in this regard must be avoided.57 Here one senses a tension between the interests of the church leaders and those of (at least some of) the members of the Christian community as well as an attempt of the former to ascertain the prevalence of the panèguris as a religious event over against all the rest of the hustle and bustle that was going on. The heart and soul of the panèguris-visitor should be on the martyrs and their uplifting example for the spiritual life. The martyr as an example of Christian faith and virtue worthy of imitation is the red thread that runs throughout the panegyrical sermons on martyrs by the Cappadocian Fathers.58 Here the homilists pursue a huge pastoral challenge: using the rhetoric of the Second Sophistic and biblical borrowings59 the homiletical presentation of the martyr is detached from the historical person in order to be able to function as a spiritual model long after the persecutions, in radically changing times.60 To the extent that these sermons tried to nurture some spiritual progress in their hearers, they might be considered as discourses aimed at the edification of the individual hearers. The extent to which the homilists were successful in that regard remains outside our purview. Besides offering room for individual ritual practices such as the ones described in the section above, the panèguris also featured communal liturgical celebrations. Thanks to the abundant source material, it has been possible to obtain a relatively detailed picture. During the night before the festival there was an all-night vigil service and on the day itself a eucharist service. Often there also was a procession and there is some evidence that at least part of the liturgical celebrations could be outdoors.61 One can surmise that, while all these liturgical celebrations were communal, there still was room for individual choices and preferences, if only in the liberty to participate or not. There also is some indication that during the vigil service people could leave the church for a moment if they felt like it. Moreover, one shouldn’t picture these liturgical celebrations as too 57 Exemplary passages in this regard are Greg. Naz. In Gregorium Nyssenum, 5, pp. 340–1 and Greg. Naz. On Cyprian 3–4. 58 See Leemans 2000. 59 Cf. Girardi 1990; Van Dam 2003, 132–57. 60 I have tried to analyse this process in some detail; see Leemans 2004; Leemans 2005b or Leemans 2007. 61 Leemans 2001.

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static. Firstly, the audience was not a meek, quiet, more or less attentive group of people; on the contrary, they were not afraid to interrupt the sermon and voice approval or disapproval through applause or other noise.62 Secondly, there was also room for improvisation on the part of the person who was presiding.63 This is most visible in the sermons, if only in the fact that far from all sermons held during a martyr festival were eulogies on the martyr of the day: if the homilist felt like it or deemed it necessary, he could broach any other topic. Probably the most spectacular example of the extent to which improvisation was possible can be found in Basil of Caesarea’s Homily in Praise of Mamas. About this martyr nothing specific was known except that during his life he was a shepherd. Moreover, it was one of the first times Basil had to preach on Mamas.64 Thus he had no earlier exempla to hark back to. Basil solves the problem by keeping his homily rather short and expounding largely and in general on the gathering of the panèguris. Next he treats some biblical shepherds, discussing their merits and shortcomings, and ends with the topics of Christ as the Good Shepherd and the heretics as bad and untrustworthy shepherds.65 All in all a not very original, even a predictable, approach. But there is more. To nurture his audience’s ardent veneration of Mamas, Basil solves the problem of his lack of knowledge on Mamas by creating for the congregation the possibility of informing each other. In the beginning of his homily he asks that everybody should try to remember all they know about the martyr and to join all these pieces of information to a kind of common oration in praise of Mamas.66 He encouraged them to try to remember how often Mamas appeared to them in a dream, how much support they received from him, how many sick people he cured, travellers he protected, dead children he resurrected from death. ‘Share with each other: anybody who knows [should share] with somebody who doesn’t and he who does not know must receive from he who does. In this way you must by putting together [your knowledge] feed each other and thus meet our weakness.’67 The series of imperatives and exhortative formulas 62

63 Best survey in Olivar 1991. See e.g. Budde 2001. On the date of this homily (between 371 and 373), see Troiano 1987. 65 Cf. the edition of this homily in PG 31, cols 589–600. 66 Basil. On Mamas 1. 67 Basil. On Mamas, 1: ººº Ø Ø - L r  ŒÆ - ø fi fiH c N Ø˙L c r ºÆÆ ø Ææa F N - ŒÆd o ø KŒ ıØç æA Iººº ı ı ØÆ MH fi B IŁÆ fi ªªø . 64

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employed by the homilist in this section may suggest that this was not mere rhetoric but that he indeed wanted to give his audience this opportunity. However exceptional such a text may seem, we should realize that, though probably not in common usage, improvisations such as this may have occurred more frequently than can be gleaned from our sources which, in their final redaction, are not always faithful reproductions of the sermon as it was delivered.68 Moreover, even in the texts as they are transmitted, now and then surprising examples of improvisation have been preserved.69 Obvious examples are Gregory of Nyssa’s First Homily on the Forty of Sebaste (after several warnings the homilist simply stops his sermon because his audience was making too much noise), Basil’s On Detachment (the second half consists entirely of answers to questions and criticisms from the audience)70 or his Homily on Psalm 114 (arriving much too late in the martyrium for the liturgy of the panèguris he delivers not a sermon on the martyr of that day but instead an inpromptu sermon on the psalm the congregation had been singing while waiting).71 These examples of improvisation and the late ancient preachers’ willingness, during their sermons, to leave the well-trodden paths lend credibility to the possibility that Basil indeed did invite his audience to share their knowledge about Mamas with one another. It is an example of how a church leader and representative of the institution steps backward to make room—however temporarily and for whatever reason—for the contribution of the individual Christian. Whether they stepped into the room that was created, we do not know.

CONCLUSION: INDIVIDUALIZATION AND THE MARTYR CULT As is clear from this contribution, sermons are our most important sources about the martyr cult in Cappadocia, Pontus, and Armenia. These sources are not ‘ready-made’ to address the issue of the role of the individual, let alone that of individualization. Instead, as the main 68 69 70 71

Merkt 1997. Hammerstaedt and Terbuycken 1996, esp. cols 1257–84. Basil. Quod rebus mundanis adhaerendum non sit. Basili. hom. in Ps. 114, 1.

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forum for bishops to address their flock and assert their authority, they document the position and viewpoint of the leaders of the Christian communities. Information about the individual largely comes through the preachers’ eyes as an unintended side-effect. With the exception of furthering the spiritual and moral progress of the members of their audience, the individual as such was not a major concern of these bishops. Reading between the lines and adding information from other sources to the picture, however, resulted in a more detailed overall picture of what went on in these martyrial shrines. What does this reveal about ‘the individual’ and to what extent is it plausible to speak about ‘individualization’ in the sense of a continuing process? In its most general sense, ‘individualization’ denotes the process of distinguishing somebody from a more generic group, class, or species. What we have been describing, however, are predominantly ritual practices and activities by individuals or participation by individuals in practices. The individual practices are not a sign of individualization in the sense that they would be unique for this or that particular individual vis-à-vis the collective he or she belonged to. Nor should they be considered as the outcome of a highly creative original choice that was diverging from everything that had been done before. On the contrary, we have seen that these were practices along sometimes age-old lines, filled at best with some new content and that many were sharing in these practices. In this sense there was very little individualization in the martyr cult and we cannot but conclude that we do not get further than the level of the individual. At the same time, however, the sources—however fragmentary an impression they may give us—do allow us to conclude that the role of the individual was not entirely non-existent. There was some room for freedom in how one chose to participate in the martyr cult and this gave this participation a degree of individuality. While not consciously aiming at individualizing, I think it is a fair assessment that not everybody’s participation and purpose (conscious or unconscious) attached to this participation were the same. Bound to habits and structures as it may have been, there also was clearly room for individuality. One can think here of Basil of Caesarea’s invitation to his audience to tell one another what the martyr Mamas had done for them or had meant to them. This indicates that behind the ‘formal aspect’ of the ritual practices involved there also was a truly individual experience. In this way, and within the limitations as to the precise

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nature of the process involved, there indeed was a modest process of individualization taking place in the cult of the martyrs. This individualization, though, does not have as its referent a gradual development of the collective habits and traditions towards more individuality over a longer stretch of time in Late Antiquity. The cases are rather limited and occasional in which the individual had or took the chance to overcome the gravitational power of the habits and structures of the collective he belonged to.

SOURCES Ambrosius, Epistulae, ed. Zelzer, Michaela. Sancti Ambrosi Opera. X. Epistula et acta. III. Epistularum liber decimus. Vienna: HoelderPichler-Tempsky, 1982. Asterius of Amaseia, In Avaritiam, ed. Datema, Cornelis. Homilies I–XIV. Text, Introduction and Notes. Leiden: Brill, 1970. ——In Phocam, ed. Datema, Cornelis. Homilies I–XIV. Text, Introduction and Notes. Leiden: Brill, 1970. ——In Sanctos Martyres, ed. Datema, Cornelis. Homilies I–XIV. Text, Introduction and Notes. Leiden: Brill, 1970. Basil of Caesarea, Epistulae, ed. Deferrari, Roy Joseph: St. Basil: The Letters. Loeb Classical Library. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1938. ——Epistulae, ed. Courtonne, Yves: Saint Basile, Lettres. Texte Établi et Traduit (Collection Budd.), 2 vols. Paris: Les Belles Lettres, 1957–61. ——Homilia in Divites, ed. Migne, Jacques Paul: Tou en hagiois patros hemon Basilieiou archepiskopou Kaisareias Kappadokias ta heurismena panta = Sancti Patris Nostri Basilii Caesareae Cappadociae archiepiscopi opera omnia quae extant, vel quae sub ejus nomine circumferuntur. Patrologiae Cursus Completus, Series Graeca XXIX–XXXII. Turnhout: Brepols, 1961. ——Homilia in martyrem Iulittam, ed. Migne, Jacques Paul: Tou en hagiois patros hemon Basilieiou archepiskopou Kaisareias Kappadokias ta heurismena panta = Sancti Patris Nostri Basilii Caesareae Cappadociae archiepiscopi opera omnia quae extant, vel quae sub ejus nomine circumferuntur. Patrologiae Cursus Completus, Series Graeca XXIX–XXXII. Turnhout: Brepols, 1961. ——Homilia in Psalmum 114, ed. Migne, Jacques Paul: Tou en hagiois patros hemon Basilieiou archepiskopou Kaisareias Kappadokias ta heurismena panta = Sancti Patris Nostri Basilii Caesareae Cappadociae archiepiscopi opera omnia quae extant, vel quae sub ejus nomine circumferuntur.

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Patrologiae Cursus Completus, Series Graeca XXIX–XXXII. Turnhout: Brepols, 1961. Basil of Caesarea, Homilia in Psalmum 115, ed. Migne, Jacques Paul: Tou en hagiois patros hemon Basilieiou archepiskopou Kaisareias Kappadokias ta heurismena panta = Sancti Patris Nostri Basilii Caesareae Cappadociae archiepiscopi opera omnia quae extant, vel quae sub ejus nomine circumferuntur. Patrologiae Cursus Completus, Series Graeca XXIX–XXXII. Turnhout: Brepols, 1961. ——Homilia in XL Martyres, ed. Migne, Jacques Paul: Tou en hagiois patros hemon Basilieiou archepiskopou Kaisareias Kappadokias ta heurismena panta = Sancti Patris Nostri Basilii Caesareae Cappadociae archiepiscopi opera omnia quae extant, vel quae sub ejus nomine circumferuntur. Patrologiae Cursus Completus, Series Graeca XXIX–XXXII. Turnhout: Brepols, 1961. ——In Gordium Martyrem, ed. Migne, Jacques Paul: Tou en hagiois patros hemon Basilieiou archepiskopou Kaisareias Kappadokias ta heurismena panta = Sancti Patris Nostri Basilii Caesareae Cappadociae archiepiscopi opera omnia quae extant, vel quae sub ejus nomine circumferuntur. Patrologiae Cursus Completus, Series Graeca XXIX–XXXII. Turnhout: Brepols, 1961. ——In Mamantem, ed. Migne, Jacques Paul: Tou en hagiois patros hemon Basilieiou archepiskopou Kaisareias Kappadokias ta heurismena panta = Sancti Patris Nostri Basilii Caesareae Cappadociae archiepiscopi opera omnia quae extant, vel quae sub ejus nomine circumferuntur. Patrologiae Cursus Completus, Series Graeca XXIX–XXXII. Turnhout: Brepols, 1961. ——Quod Rebus Mundanis Adhaerendum Non Sit, ed. Migne, Jacques Paul: Tou en hagiois patros hemon Basilieiou archepiskopou Kaisareias Kappadokias ta heurismena panta = Sancti Patris Nostri Basilii Caesareae Cappadociae archiepiscopi opera omnia quae extant, vel quae sub ejus nomine circumferuntur. Patrologiae Cursus Completus, Series Graeca XXIX–XXXII. Turnhout: Brepols, 1961. ——Quod Rebus Mundanis Adhaerendum Non Sit, ed. Migne, Jacques Paul: Tou en hagiois patros hemon Basilieiou archepiskopou Kaisareias Kappadokias ta heurismena panta = Sancti Patris Nostri Basilii Caesareae Cappadociae archiepiscopi opera omnia quae extant, vel quae sub ejus nomine circumferuntur. Patrologiae Cursus Completus, Series Graeca XXIX– XXXII. Turnhout: Brepols, 1961. ——Regulae fusius tractatae, ed. Migne, Jacques Paul: Tou en hagiois patros hemon Basilieiou archepiskopou Kaisareias Kappadokias ta heurismena panta = Sancti Patris Nostri Basilii Caesareae Cappadociae archiepiscopi opera omnia quae extant, vel quae sub ejus nomine circumferuntur. Patrologiae Cursus Completus, Series Graeca XXIX–XXXII. Turnhout: Brepols, 1961.

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Gaudentius of Brescia, Tractatus, ed. Glück, Ambrosius: Gaudentii episcope Brixiensis tractatus. CSEL 68. Vienna: Akademische Verlagsgesellschaft, 1936. Gregory of Nazianzus, Carmina II, ed. Migne, Jacques Paul: Opera quae exstant omnia accedunt variorum commentarii et scholia in omnia opera Sancti Gregorii. Patrologiae Cursus Completus, Series Graeca XXXV– XXXVIII. Paris, 1857–8. ——Epigramma, ed. Waltz, Pierre: Anthologie Grecque. 1, Première Partie, Anthologie Pataline. 6, Livre 8. Collection des Universités de France. Paris: Belles Lettres, 1944. ——In Cyprianum, ed. Mossay, Justin and Lafontaine, Guy: Gregoire de Nazianze. Discours 20–23. Sources Chrétiennes 270. Paris: Cerf, 1980. ——In Gregorium Nyssenum, ed. Calvet-Sébasti, Marie-Ange: Gregoire de Nazianze. Discours 6–12. Sources Chrétiennes 405. Paris: Cerf, 1995. ——In Iulianum, ed. Bernardi, Jean: St. Gregoire de Nazianze. Discours 4–5 contre Julien. Sources Chrétiennes 309. Paris: Cerf, 1983. ——In Novam Domenicam, ed. Migne, Jacques Paul: Opera quae exstant omnia accedunt variorum commentarii et scholia in omnia opera Sancti Gregorii. Patrologiae Cursus Completus, Series Graeca XXXV– XXXVIII. Paris, 1857–8. Gregory of Nyssa, De Sancto Theodoro, ed. Heil, Günter, Calvanos, Johannes P., and Lendle, Otto: Sermones: De vita Gregorii Thaumaturgi; De sancto Theodoro; In sanctum Stephanum I et II; In Basilium fratrum; In XL Martyres Ia, Ib et II. Gregorii Nysseni Opera X, 1. Leiden: Brill, 1990. ——Epistulae, ed. Maraval, Pierre: St. Grégoire de Nysse, Lettres. Sources Chrétiennes 363. Paris: Cerf, 1990. ——In XL Martyres, ed. Heil, Günter, Calvanos, Johannes P., and Lendle, Otto: Sermones: De vita Gregorii Thaumaturgi; De sancto Theodoro; In sanctum Stephanum I et II; In Basilium fratrum; In XL Martyres Ia, Ib et II. Gregorii Nysseni Opera X. 1. Leiden: Brill, 1990. ——Vita Macrinae, ed. Maraval, Pierre: St. Gregoire de Nysse, Vie de Sainte Macrine. Sources Chrétiennes 178. Paris: Cerf, 1971. Martyrium Polycarpi, ed. Musurillo, Herbert: The Acts of the Christian Martyrs. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1972. Passio XL Martyrum, ed. Gebhardt, Oscar von: Acta Martyrum selecta. Ausgewahlte Märtyreracten und andere Urkunden aus der Verfolgungszeit der christlichen Kirche. Berlin: Duncker, 1902. Testamentum 1, ed. Musurillo, Herbert: The Acts of the Christian Martyrs. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1972. Theodoret, Graecorum Affectionum Curatio, ed. Canivet, Pierre: Théodoret de Cyr. Thérapeutique des maladies helléniques 2. Livres VII–XII. Sources Chrétiennes 57,2. Paris: Belles Lettres, 1958.

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Amat, Jacqueline 1985. Songes et visions: l’au-delà dans la littérature latine tardive. Études augustiniennes. Série Antiquité 109. Paris: Études augustiniennes. Amore, Agostino 1968. s.v. ‘Sebastia, XL martiri di’, Bibliotheca Sanctorum, vol. XI, cols. 768–71. Baumeister, Theofried 2009. Martyrium. Hagiographie und Heiligenverehrung im christlichen Altertum. Römische Quartalschrift für christliche Altertumskunde und Kirchengeschichte 61. Rome: Herder. Boeft, Jan den 1988. ‘Milaan 386: Protasius en Gervasius’, in Hilhorst, Anton (ed.), De Heiligenverering in de Eerste Eeuwen van het Christendom. Nijmegen: Dekker & van de Vegt, 168–78. Buckle, D. P. 1921. ‘The Forty Martyrs of Sebaste: A Study in Hagiographical Development’, BJR 6, 352–60. Budde, Achim 2001. ‘Improvisation im Eucharistiegebet: zur Technik freien Betens in der Alten Kirche’, JAC 44, 127–41. Dam, Raymond van 2003. Becoming Christian: the Conversion of Roman Cappadocia. Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press. Dassmann, Ernst 2004. Ambrosius von Mailand: Leben und Werk. Stuttgart: Kohlhammer. Deichmann, Friedrich Wilhelm 1975. Die Spolien in der spätantiken Architektur. Sitzungsberichte der Bayerischen Akademie der Wissenschaften 6. Philosophisch-historische Klasse. Munich: Bayerrische Akademie der Wissenschaft. Delehaye, Hippolyte 1933. Les Origines du Culte des Martyrs. Subsisida Hagiographica 20. Bruxelles: Société des Bollandistes. Dihle, Albrecht 1998. ‘Theodorets Verteidigung des Kults der Märtyrer’, in Dassmann, Ernst and Thraede, Klaus (eds), Chartulae: Festschrift für Wolfgang Speyer. JAC Ergänzungsbände 28. Münster: Aschendorff, 104–8. Duval, Yvette 1988. Auprès des saints, corps et âme: L’inhumation ‘ad sanctos’ dans la chrétienté d’Orient et d’Occident du IIIe au VIIe siècle. Paris: Etudes Augustiniennes. Franchi de Cavalieri, Pio 1928. ‘Note Agiografiche VII’, Studi e Testi 49, 155–85. Girardi, Mario 1990. Basilio di Cesarea e il culto dei martiri nel IV secolo: scrittura e tradizione. Quaderni di Vetera Christianorum 21. Bari: Istituto di studi classici e cristiani, Università di Bari. Hammerstaedt, Jürgen and Terbuyken, Peri 1996. s.v. ‘Improvisation’, RAC 17, cols. 1212–84. Harl, Marguerite 1981. ‘La dénonciation des festivités profanes dans le discours episcopal et monastique, en orient chrétien, à la fin du IVe siècle’, in La Fête: pratique et discours: d’Alexandrie hellénistique à la mission de

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Besançon. Centre de Recherches d’Histoire Ancienne 42. Paris: Annales littéraires de l’Université de Besançon, 123–47, reprinted in Harl, Marguerite. Le déchiffrement du sens: études sur l’herméneutique chrétienne d’Origène à Grégoire de Nysse, Collection des études Augustiniennes, Série Antiquité 135, 1993, 433–55. Hauschild, Wolf-Dieter (ed.) 1973. Basilius von Caesarea. Briefe. Bibliothek der griechischen Literatur 3. Stuttgart: Hiersemann. Hilhorst, Anton 2010. ‘ “He Left us This Writing.” Did He? Revisiting the Statement in Martyrdom of Pionius 1.2’, in Leemans, Johan (ed.), Martyrdom and Persecution in the Early Church: Festschrift Boudewijn Dehandschutter. Bibliotheca Ephemeridum Theologicarum Lovaniensium 205. Leuven: Peeters, 103–21. Kötting, Bernhard 1980. Peregrinatio religiosa: Wallfahrten in der Antike und das Pilgerwesen in der alten Kirche, 2nd edn, Forschungen zur Volkskunde 33/35. Münster: Stenderhoff. Leemans, Johan 2000. ‘Schoolrooms for Our Souls: Homilies and Visual Representations: the Cult of the Martyrs as a Locus for Religious Education in Late Antiquity’, in Depaepe, Marc and Henkens, Bregt (eds), The Challenge of the Visual in the History of Education. Paedagogica Historica. Supplementary Series 6. Ghent: CSHP, 113–31 ——2001. ‘Celebrating the Martyrs: Early Christian Liturgy and the Martyr Cult in Fourth Century Cappadocia and Pontus’, Questions Liturgiques/ Studies in Liturgy 82, 247–67. ——2004. ‘Preaching Christian Virtue: Basil of Caesarea’s Panegyrical Sermon on Julitta’, in Partoens, Gert, Roskam, Geert, and Houdt, Toon van (eds), Virtutis imago: Studies on the Conceptualization and Transformation of an Ancient Ideal. Collection d’Etudes Classiques. Leuven: Peeters, 259–85. ——2005a. ‘Style and Meaning in Gregory of Nyssa’s Panegyrics on Martyrs’, ETL 81, 109–29. ——2005b. ‘Martyr, Monk and Victor of Paganism: an Analysis of Basil of Caesarea’s Panegyrical Sermon on Gordius’, in Leemans, Johan (ed.), More than a Memory: The Discourse of Martyrdom and the Construction of Christian Identity in the History of Christianity. Annua Nuntia Lovaniensia. Leuven: Peeters, 45–81. ——2007. ‘Grégoire de Nysse et Julien l’Apostat: Polémique antipaïenne et identité chrétienne dans le Panégyrique de Théodore’, Revue des Etudes Augustiniennes et Patristiques 53, 15–33. —— Mayer, Wendy, Allen, Pauline, and Dehandschutter, Boudewijn 2003. ‘Let Us Die That We May Live’: Greek Homilies on Christian Martyrs. London: Routledge. Ligt, Luuk de 1993. Fairs and Markets in the Roman Empire: Economic and Social Aspects of Periodic Trade in a Pre-Industrial Society. Dutch Monographs on Ancient History and Archaeology 11. Leiden: Brill.

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Ligt, Luuk de, and Neeve, Pieter Wim de 1998. ‘Ancient Periodic Markets: Festivals and Fairs’, Athenaeum 67, 391–416. Limberis, Vasiliki 2006. ‘The Cult of the Martyrs and the Cappadocian Fathers’, in Krueger, Derek (ed.), Byzantine Christianity. A People’s History of Christianity 3. Minneapolis, MN: Fortress Press, 33–53. Maraval, Pierre 1985. Lieux saints et pélérinages d’Orient: Histoire et géographie des origines à la conquête arabe. Paris: Cerf. ——1999. ‘Les premiers développements du culte des XL Martyrs de Sébastée dans l’Orient byzantin et en occident’, Vetera Christianorum 36, 193–211. Merkt, Andreas 1997. ‘Mündlichkeit: Ein Problem der Hermeneutik patristischer Predigten’, Studia Patristica 31, 76–86. Michel, Otto and Klauser, Theodor 1976. s.v. ‘Gebet II’, RAC 9, cols 1–36. Mitchell, Stephen 1993. Anatolia: Land, Men and Gods in Asia Minor. vol. II. The Rise of the Church. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Mossay, Justin 1966. La mort et l’au-delà dans Saint Grégoire de Nazianze. Recueil de travaux d’histoire et de philologie 34, Louvain: Publications Universitaires. Musurillo, Herbert 1972. The Acts of the Christian Martyrs. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Olivar, Alexandre M. 1991. La Predicacion Cristiana Antigua. Biblioteca Herder. Seccion de teologia y filosofia 189. Barcelona: Herder. Parmentier, Martien 1989. ‘Non-Medical Ways of Healing in Eastern Christendom: the Case of St. Dometius’, in Bastiaensen, Antoon, Hilhorst, Antonius, and Kneepkens, Corneille (eds), Fructus Centesimus. Mélanges offerts à Gérard J.M. Bartelink à l’occasion de son soixante-cinquième anniversaire. Instrumenta Patristica 19. Dordrecht: Springer, 279–97. Portbarré-Viard, G. Herbert de la 2006. Descriptions monumentales et discours sur l’édification chez Paulin de Nole: le regard et la lumière (epist. 32 et carm. 27 et 28), Supplements to Vigiliae Christianae, 79. Leiden: Brill. Pouchet, Robert 1992. Basile le Grand et son univers d’amis d’après sa correspondence. Studia Ephemeridis Augustinianum. Rome: Institutum Patristicum Augustinianum. Troiano, Marina Silvia 1987. ‘L’omelia XXIII In Mamantem martyrem di Basilio di Cesarea’, Vetera Christianorum 24, 147–57. Vinel, Francoise 1997. ‘Sainteté anonyme, sainteté collective? Les quarante martyrs de Sébastée dans quelques textes du IVe siècle’, in Freyburger, Gérard and Pernot, Laurent (eds), Du héros païen au saint chrétien. Actes du colloque organisé par le Centre d’Analyse des Rhétoriques Religieuses de l’Antiquité (C.A.R.R.A.), Strasbourg, 1er—2 décembre 1995. Études Augustiniennes. Série Antiquité 154. Paris: Institut d’Études Augustiniennes, 125–32. Wacht, Manfred 1997. s.v. ‘Inkubation’, RAC, cols 179–265.

Conceptualizing Religious Experience

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9 Dimensions of Individuality in Ancient Mystery Cults: Religious Practice and Philosophical Discourse Katharina Waldner

INTRODUCTION Ancient mystery cults came to be viewed as a relatively uniform phenomenon in both modern scholarship and ancient sources.1 In antiquity, a variety of terms was used to describe these cults: mystēria, which was derived from the Attic festival of the Mysteria in Eleusis, is attested since the seventh century bce;2 but we find also teletaí (sg. teletē) and órgia, although both of them had a much broader definition, which it is possible to render as mere ‘ritual’ or feast.3 Since they were much used to denote mystery cults, however, both came to be used as synonyms for mystēria in later Greek usage.4 As far as Latin is 1 For terminology (ancient and modern), see e.g. Berner 1998 and Cancik 1998; in ancient philosophy: Riedweg 1987; in antiquity in general: Burkert 1987, 8–10. 2 Homeric Hymn to Demeter (650–550 bce); for the history of Eleusis, see Clinton 1974; Mylonas 1961; archaeological evidence (continuity from Mycenaean times onward?): Cosmopoulos 2003a. 3 Cf. the discussion by Calame 1991, esp. p. 202, who lays stress on the fact that there were almost no exact Greek terms for our modern notion of ‘myth’ and ‘ritual’. Instead the Greeks used a rich vocabulary to designate a religious festival as a whole (e.g. heortē, panēgyrís) or to designate singular types of common rituals (e.g. thysía, pompē, agōn). 4 LSJ s.v.; Calame 1991, 202 with reference to Pind. Ol. 3.41 (teletē as ‘ceremonies for gods’) compared to Athenaios 2, 40d, who writes that teletaí means ‘feasts (heortaí) in the tradition of the mysteries’. But we can find the usage described by Athenaios from Herodotus (e.g. 2.171.2; 4.79.1) onward.

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concerned we find the loan words mysteria and teleta and initia (‘beginnings’), which was incorporated into the language in Hellenistic times.5 The uniqueness of this category of cult, which has been noted by both ancient and modern observers, has been most effectively described by Walter Burkert6 who stresses a distinct feature of the ancient term in its usage. The verb myéō which is often employed within this context, as well as the synonymous, though less specific, teléō were used in connection with a personal object and the name of a deity (mostly in the dative form).7 (The Latin equivalent is the verb initiare.) We thus find expressions like Dionýsōi telesthēnai (Hdt. 4.79.1), telein tōi Dionysōi (LSAM 48,18), tá mystēria mýesthai and so forth, which are normally translated as ‘to be initiated to Dionysos’, ‘to initiate to Dionysos’, ‘to become initiated into a mystery cult’, using the Latin initiare as a modern technical term.8 Anyone initiated into a mystery cult was required to keep secret whatever they experienced during their initiation.9 The possibility of being initiated into the mystēria of a specific deity or a number of deities was given from the seventh century bce onward until Theodosius prohibited pagan cults at the end of the fourth century ce. There are essentially three organizational forms of mystery cults to be found:10 larger sanctuaries, whose organization was at least in part guaranteed by the public (the polis); itinerant religious specialists and private personae offering their ‘initiations’ both in private and in public; and cult associations (thíasoi), which expanded rapidly during Hellenistic and imperial times. As a consequence, mystery initiations are to be viewed as fundamental a phenomenon of the religious history of the Mediterranean as are sacrificial rituals or temple building. The notorious tradition of scholarship which uses the term ‘mystery religions’ to isolate mystery cults from the contexts of daily polis religion is therefore rightly criticized.11 With a view to ancient terminology and marked off 5

6 SEG 29, 799. Burkert 1987, 8. 8 Burkert 1987, 8–9. cf. also e.g. Hdt. 8.65. Cf. Burkert 1987, 9. 9 Nondisclosure is attested already in the Homeric Hymn to Demeter. 10 Burkert 1987, 31. 11 The most influential use of the term ‘Mysterienreligionen’ goes back to Reitzenstein 1927 (1st edn, 1910); Burkert 1987, 2–3 states that in this tradition there are three stereotypes concerning ancient mystery cults: mystery religions are ‘late’ (1), ‘Oriental’ (2), and they are ‘spiritual’ (transcending the practical outlook of daily pagan religion) and often considered as ‘Erlösungsreligionen’ which made them the forerunner of Christianity. 7

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against an understanding which has long since become obsolete in viewing mystery cults as ‘late’ and ‘Oriental’, Walter Burkert defines these cults finally as follows: ‘mystery cults are initiation ceremonies, cults in which admission and participation depend upon some personal ritual to be performed on the initiand. Secrecy and in most cases a nocturnal setting are concomitants of this exclusiveness.’12 Ancient mystery initiations were, says Burkert, the exception to the modern sociological term of initiation. While van Gennep, Eliade, and others defined initiation as ‘status dramatization’ or ‘ritual change of status’, no ‘visible change of social status’ can be made out for ancient mysteries. Any change was defined not in social, but in personal terms: ‘From the perspective of the participant, the change of status affects his relation to a god or a goddess; the agnostic, in his view from outside, has to acknowledge not so much a social as a personal change, a new state of mind through experience of the sacred.’13 Burkert also notes that initiations into ancient mystery cults could always be repeated: Theophrastus pokes fun at this phenomenon in his Characters (16.12) when he represents the superstitious man as being initiated every single month, which clearly contradicts the modern concept of initiation as a unique change of status.14 It is actually possible to show that the ‘classic’ modern term ‘initiation’, which scholars of religious studies are slowly beginning to discard,15 is, in fact, a Christian one. If one asks how concepts and experiences of individuality and individuation16 might have been interrelated with the field of religious knowledge and practice in antiquity, the notion of ‘mystery cults’ might come to one’s mind immediately. In the above quoted introduction by Walter Burkert we can read: ‘Mysteries were initiation rituals of a voluntary, personal, and secret character that aimed at a change of mind through experience of the sacred.’17 According to Burkert, it is no accident that mystery cults started developing during the sixth century bce, since this was an era of ‘the discovery of the individual’.18 Private mystery cults were always under scrutiny by the ‘advocates of a rigorous state or tribal control’ 12

13 14 Burkert 1987, 7–8. Burkert 1987, 8. Burkert 1987, 8. 16 Cf. e.g. Lincoln 2003; Graf 2003. On terminology see below note 21. 17 Burkert 1987, 11. 18 Burkert 1987, with reference to B. Snell, Die Entdeckung des Geistes. Zur Entstehung des europäischen Denkens bei den Griechen. Göttingen 1946 (revised editions: 1975 and 1980; latest unchanged edition: Göttingen 2009; English trans.: New York 1960). 15

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and were repeatedly persecuted as suspect. For all those, however, ‘who knew how to employ the risks and chances of individual freedom’, mysteries were a ‘decisive invention’.19 At the same time, Burkert argues for the normalcy of the phenomenon within polisreligion in contrast to those who opt for a kind of personal or individual spirituality propagated in mystery cults, provided that the latter qualify as a special kind of religion in the way designated above. But initiations were no more than one option among many practices offered by ancient polytheism. Since all mystery cults promised— though in different ways—to improve the living conditions of the initiated, mystery cults are to be compared to the extremely common practice of votive offerings.20 This chapter sets out to argue that we can indeed reconstruct lines of contact between the development of mystery cults, ancient practices of (particularly competitive) individuality, and ancient ideas about individuation (in the sense of construction and achievement of certain types of self-identity)21 which are, however, too complex to be explained by the ‘discovery of the individual’. In doing so I will focus on two different fields: first, I will concentrate on the early development of Greek mystery cults from the sixth to the fourth century bce. Starting from early Greek ideas about punishment after death and the possibilities of achieving a better place in the afterlife by participation in mystery cults, I will argue that this religious field offered possibilities for expressing individuality, probably of the ‘competitive’ type.22 This holds true not only for those participating in mystery cults (esp. of the ‘private’ Bacchic type) but also for 19

Burkert 1987, 11. Burkert 1987, 12–29; on mystery cults and polis religion, see also Bremmer 2010. 21 I use the terms ‘individuality’ and ‘individuation’ in the sense proposed by Jörg Rüpke in the introductory chapter of this volume: individuality thus hints in its most basic sense at ‘differences between and distinctiveness among persons’. Starting from Kippele (1997) Rüpke proposes to differentiate five types of individuality: practical, moral, competitive, representative, and reflexive individuality. In the case of early Greek mystery cults I am especially interested in the type of competitive individuality. As far as individuality is concerned, Rüpke stresses its nearness to the process of socialization, ‘the development of a social persona with individuality’. Dealing mainly with the philosophical discourse in the second part of this chapter, I would argue that ancient philosophers were highly interested in the process of individuation (esp. in imperial times where they called it ‘paídeusis’) and that it is important to ask if religion (i.e. mystery cults in our case) had an impact on this specific discourse and (elite) practice of individuation. 22 See Rüpke, ch. 1 this volume. 20

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religious practitioners and experts offering ‘new’ initiations (teletaí). These experts were in competition not only with each other but also with the philosophical discourse and the newly developing philosophical schools, which also offered individuals a chance for a happy and successful life and an undaunted view of death.23 In addition, both philosophers and religious experts contended for defining new ideas about the self and about self-identity. This is most evident in the Platonic discourse, which uses the description of mystery cult experience as a metaphor for philosophical insight and discusses in several myths different views on the existence of the soul after death. Particularly the image of Socrates facing death in the Phaedo succinctly shows how the new (Platonic) philosophical ideas and the promises of mystery cult initiations are in competition with each other. The second part offers a reconstruction of the (Platonic) philosophical discourse about the ritual experience of mystery cults in Hellenistic and imperial times. While the relation between philosophy and ritual practice was marked by a distinct element of competition during the Archaic and Classical periods, this element was no longer prominent in Hellenistic and imperial times when the bonds between philosophy and religion were reinvigorated and put in a rather different cultural context. The discourse concerning mystery rituals, which centred on individual religious experiences, confirms this point. A heightened interest of souci de soi in Hellenistic and imperial times—including the question of how the philosopher should deal with his emotions (páthē)24—changed the way not only mystery

23 For the practical aspects of ancient philosophy, see Hadot 2002; cf. Nussbaum 1996; Nussbaum 2009. 24 Sorabji 2000; cf. also Konstan 2006. It is very difficult to describe the exact meanings of the term páthos. According to Harris 2001, 84 the meaning ‘emotion’ is a relatively late development (around 420 bce). Konstan 2006, 4 states that in classical Greek páthos refers in a very general sense ‘to what befalls a person, often in the negative sense of an accident or misfortune, although it may also bear the neutral significance of a condition or state of affairs’. In Greek terms like ‘fear’, ‘anger’, ‘love’, ‘pity’ are called páthē, but according to the results of Konstan’s analysis we should not take this as an argument to translate páthos straightforwardly by ‘emotion’. According, Aristotle’s most extensive treating of páthē in his Rhetoric, every páthos is accompanied by pain and pleasure; in his view what is concerned with the art of persuasion páthē are those things, ‘on account of which people change and differ in regard to their judgments’ (Konstan 2006, 27). Cf. also Fortenbaugh 2002.

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rituals but religious rituals in general were viewed. These changes can be set in a wider context so aptly described by Guy Stroumsa, who maintains that during the imperial period the role of religion as an indicator of individual and collective identity come to be redefined.25 This holds true not only on the level of discourse but also in the field of religious practices since priestly offices in this period were open to, and often held by, philosophers and other intellectuals.26 This was, on the one hand, of course, connected to considerable political prestige, but it also offered the opportunity to link religious practices with philosophical discourse. This probably has its clearest expression in the oracular texts compiled, perhaps even written, by intellectual priests.27 The emotional and personal experiences arising out of participation in mystery rituals should be regarded as part of this development. Is it then to be assumed that Hellenistic and especially imperial philosophers understood ritual experiences—like those of mystery cults—to be a natural part of their idealized cultured personality (the pepaideuménos)? If so, one might not be wrong in saying that ritual religious experiences (especially those made in mystery, oracular, and healing cults)28 were an important part of the individuation of members of the imperial elite. In sum, this chapter does not present any new facts or evidence about the well known and, especially in the last years, well studied realm of ancient mystery cults.29 Its agenda is different and more humble—to attempt to (re)read certain parts of the evidence on ancient mystery cults, and especially the philosophical discourse about the experience of becoming initiated in a mystery cult, in the light of the question about the religious dimensions of individuality and individuation in ancient societies.

25

Stroumsa 2005. The most prominent example is, of course, Plutarch; for more evidence cf. Bendlin 2006, 190. 27 Bendlin 2006, 190–2. 28 It is worth mentioning that an observer in antiquity, Marcus Aurelius, counts mysteries together with dream visions and miraculous healing among those religious practices by which human beings could be most certain of attaining the care of the gods (in Front. 3.10, p. 43, 15 van den Hout). 29 The basic study remains Burkert 1987; but see e.g. also the contributions in Cosmopoulos 2003; Graf and Johnston 2007 on Bacchic mysteries; on Eleusis: Parker 2005, 343–68 and Bremmer 2012. 26

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ANCIENT MYSTERY CULTS: A WAY OF EXPRESSING (RELIGIOUS) INDIVIDUALITY? Renate Schlesier rightly describes the meaning of the oldest Greek mystery cults in the form of a ‘message’, this message being: ‘There is ritual access to a privileged relationship with the gods that anyone is free to choose, granting a better lot in the afterlife to you than to other mortals.’30 The earliest references are passages from the Homeric Hymn to Demeter (written between 650 and 550 bce) relating the founding of the Mysteries at Eleusis.31 After Demeter has been appeased for the rape of her daughter, she once again brings forth fruit from the earth and bestows the ritual of the mysteries as a gift to the people of Eleusis (Homeric Hymn to Demeter, 471–85):32 Straightaway she sent up the harvest from the land with its rich clods of earth. And all the wide earth with leaves and blossoms was laden. Then she went to the kings, administrators of themistes, and she showed them—to Triptolemos, to Diokles, driver of horses, to powerful Eumolpos and to Keleos, leader of the [475] people [lâoi]— she revealed to them the way to perform the sacred rites, and she pointed out the ritual to all of them —the holy ritual, which it is not at all possible to ignore, to find out about, or to speak out. The great awe of the gods holds back any speaking out. Olbios among earth-bound mortals is he who has seen [480] these things. But whoever is uninitiated in the rites, whoever takes no part in them, will never get a share [aisa] of those sorts of things [that the initiated get], once they die, down below in the dank realms of mist. But when the resplendent goddess finished all her instructions, they [Demeter and Persephone] went to Olympus, to join the company of the other gods.

30

31 Schlesier 2001, 160. Cf. Richardson 1974. Translation by Gregory Nagy (accessed 17 August 2009). 32

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This ritual was taught to the kings of Eleusis. In historical times two priestly families, the Eumolpids and the Kerykes, were responsible for the rites and held the privilege of initiation. The administration of the sanctuary, however, was in the hands of the polis of Athens, probably even from the very beginning.33 The valuable religious gift presented to the people by Demeter—and this is most interesting—is rendered in the Hymn to Demeter by means of negation: it is impossible to speak of it. The participant will see something, and whoever has seen it, is called blissful (ólbios); this bliss is to be contrasted with the lot of all those who have no part in it. This is an extreme form for expressing individuality (in the sense of demarcating oneself from others), incorporating at the same time a kind of socialization within the group of initiates. The hymn, a splendid piece of ritual poetics, says nothing, about how this special bliss should be envisaged, thus offering the opportunity for initiates to apply their special knowledge of the cult while reading or hearing the poem. More explicit mention is made in contexts that are not as strongly connected to religion as the Homeric hymn, for example, in a fragment of Sophocles ( fr. 837): Since thrice fortunate are those among mortals who have seen these rites before going to Hades; for they alone have life there, while others have every kind of misery.34

We know that the rituals at Eleusis were open to all, free men and slaves, men and women; all that was required was to raise the sum to buy a piglet which was sacrificed at the start of the ritual.35 In choosing to be initiated into the mysteries of Eleusis you also chose a certain way of looking at death, as we find it described, for example, in the Panegyricus of Isocrates (or. 4.28): When Demeter came to our land on her wanderings after the rape of Kore she became well-disposed towards our ancestors through their services, which only the initiated may hear about; and she gave them two gifts, the greatest there are—the fruits of the earth, which are the reason why we do not live like beasts, and the mystic rite (teletē), which

33 Parker 2005, 334; Clinton 1974; Burkert 1987, 37. The annually elected basileús exercised general supervision over the mysteries, while a board of epistátai was charged with finances. 34 Translation by Lloyd-Jones 1996. 35 Parker 2005, 324 with detailed discussion of the evidence.

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leads its participants to have more agreeable expectations about the ending of their lives and all eternity.36

Such ‘more agreeable expectations’ are by no means natural if we take into account the beliefs presented in archaic poetry and philosophy, thoroughly discussed by Sarah Iles Johnston with a view to mysteries.37 Pindar and Plato put forth concepts of the afterlife that propound a judgement in the afterlife for crimes committed in this life.38 To this may possibly, though not necessarily, be connected the concept of the transmigration of souls (metempsychosis) which has also been known at least since the early fifth century.39 In addition, in Solon we find the earliest certain evidence of the notion of inherited guilt.40 Reward is just as possible: by leading ethically pure lives (in one or many reincarnations) or by cleansing punishments (which include the possibility of multiple reincarnations), anyone may live happily in the afterlife, just as heroes did. Johnston suggests a reading of these notions as reactions to the epics—while admitting that this has to remain an ‘informed guess’, given the fragmentary state of the sources.41 Accordingly in the epics the majority of people live on in Hades after death without a particular share of pain or joy. Reward or punishment affects only certain people, mostly exalted personae (heroes), who are in some way connected to the gods (mostly by birth) and reach the Isles of the Blessed after their deaths. And only hardened criminals like Tantalus endure eternal punishments. The new notions differ considerably, as Johnston points out: they allow anyone to hope for a post-mortem existence in the realm of gods and heroes. The price was, however, a stiff one: novel notions like this, which Johnston regards as ‘an increasing awareness of the individual and an increasing concern with questions of personal responsibility’,42 also lead to increasing fear and anxieties. A ritual like the one at Eleusis can offer remedy. But in what way exactly? The following part of the Hymn to Demeter is interpreted by Johnston as saying that certain rituals at Eleusis are enough to escape punishment in the

36

Translation by Usher 1990. Johnston in Graf and Johnston 2007, 94–136. Cf. also in general Bremmer 2002; Habermehl 1996 (collected evidence). 38 e.g. Pind. Ol. 2; Plat. Rep. 614b–615d; for judgement in afterlife in general cf. Burkert 2009. 39 40 Cf. Burkert 1962, 98–142; Graf and Johnston 117–20. Frg. 13.26–8. 41 42 Graf and Johnston 2007, 106. Graf and Johnston 2007, 106. 37

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afterlife.43 Hades tries to pitch the idea of marital bliss with him in the underworld to kidnapped Persephone by pointing out the honours (that is, sacrifices) that await her here (363–9): I will not be an unseemly husband to you, in the company of the immortals. I am the brother of Zeus the Father. If you are here, you will be queen of everything that lives and moves about, and you will have the greatest tímai in the company of the immortals. Those who violate díkê—will get punishment for all days to come —those who do not supplicate your menos with sacrifice, performing the rituals in a reverent way, executing perfectly the offerings that are due.44

It is possible, though, that díkê here implies a moral conduct beyond the fulfilment of religious duties toward Persephone. But we also have evidence for the view that one might gain a better place in the other world by the mere performance of ritual practices. A passage in Plato’s Republic thus shows that people did discuss the worth of rituals eliminating individual misconduct. Plato’s critical remarks about the mysteries (teletaí ) of itinerant specialists also stress the desire for rituals similar in form and function to those at Eleusis. Begging priests and seers go to rich men’s doors and make them believe that they, by means of sacrifices and incantations, have accumulated a treasure of power from the gods that can expiate and cure with pleasurable festivals any misdeed of a man or his ancestors, and that if a man wishes to harm an enemy, at little cost he will be enabled to injure just and unjust alike, since they are masters of spells and enchantments that constrain the gods to serve their ends . . . And they produce a hubbub of books of Musaeus and Orpheus, the offspring of the Moon and the Muses, as they affirm, and these books they use in their rites, and make not only ordinary men but states believe that there really are remissions of sins and purifications for unjust deeds, by means of sacrifice and pleasant entertainment for the living, and there are also special rites for the defunct (teteleutesasi), which they call functions (teletaí), that deliver us from evils in that other world, while terrible things await those who have neglected to sacrifice. Republic 364b–365a45

43

Graf and Johnston 2007, 106. Translation by Gregory Nagy [http://www.uh.edu/~cldue/texts/demeter.html (17.08.2009)]. 45 Translation adapted from W. C. Greene by Graf and Johnston 2007, 144. 44

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Such itinerant specialists were no doubt responsible for the emergence and diffusion of the so-called Bacchic mysteries that spread throughout the ancient world from the fifth century bce. These had the advantage of not being tied to a certain location and being able to adapt to the special needs of small groups and individuals by virtue of their less formal organization. Graf and Johnston as well as Burkert assume that competing ‘craftsmen of the sacred’ had their individual brands of teletaí most probably modelled on the example of Eleusis.46 This holds true not only for rituals but just as much for the related myths, especially the tale of Dionysus’ laceration and his restitution.47 The so-called Orphic (or Bacchic) Gold Leaves found in graves dating from the fifth century onward belong in this context.48 They contain instructions for the proper conduct of the souls in Hades. They were supposed to identify themselves by certain passwords and not drink from the Fount of Oblivion, but of Mnemosyne (memory).49 Apparently, their goal was to attain a blissful existence after death as the following example of a tumulus grave in Thurii dating from the fourth century bce attests. But as soon the soul has left the light of the sun, Go to the right . . . being careful of all things. ‘Greetings, you who have suffered the painful thing (pathōn to páthēma); you have endured this before. You have become a god instead of a mortal. A kid you fell into milk. Rejoice, rejoice.’ Journey on the right-hand road To holy meadows and groves of Persephone.50

46 Burkert 1987, 33–4. Johnston 2007, 66–92 calls the itinerant specialist a ‘bricoleur’ of myths and rituals. Burkert 1987, 24 calls it a ‘striking fact’ that after the persecution of the Roman Bacchanalia in 186 bce ‘the itinerant initiation priest seems to have totally disappeared from Bacchic mysteries’. (This kind of itinerant practitioners was also characteristic of the teletaí of Meter.) 47 For the evidence and reconstruction of the myth, see Johnston in Graf and Johnston 2007, 66–80. 48 Texts and translation now easy available in Graf and Johnston 2007, who call them ‘Bacchic gold tablets’ which seems more appropriate. As Plato says in Republic 364b–365a itinerant practitioners often relied on ‘books of Orpheus’ and certainly there might have been groups of adherents of the ‘Orphic way of life’. But there is no evidence for a regular connection of teletaí, the gold leaves, and Orphism; see Graf 1974; Schlesier 2001; Graf and Johnston 2007, 165–84. 49 For the tradition of the fount of oblivion, see Graf and Johnston 2007, 117–20. 50 Translation by Graf and Johnston 2007.

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Renate Schlesier points out that a higher claim to exclusiveness is made here, despite the affinity to Eleusis.51 The dead who have been buried in this way not only have secret knowledge, they aim to be gods themselves, as the example shows. Other texts exhort the dead to reveal themselves with the words ‘I am a child of Earth and starry Sky . . . but my race is heavenly’.52 Divine origin is propounded, perhaps alluding to the idea that the souls of the dead rise up to dwell among the stars, as in the well-known epitaph for the fallen of Potidaia: ‘Ether took their souls, earth their bodies’ (432 bce).53 But the Orphic (or Bacchic) tablets do not put forth common notions. ‘Tell Persephone the Bacchic One released you’, says one of them.54 What marks out the people buried in this way is not first and foremost the hope of a continued existence after death but a certain closeness to the divine, promising ‘salvation’ or ‘deliverance’. This closeness is established by a unique or repeated act of initiation with the aid of religious specialists. This holds true not only for the Eleusinian and Bacchic mysteries, but just as much for those of Mater Magna, Isis, and Mithras, to name only the best-known. In this way, expressing individuality by demarcating oneself from individuals within the same culture becomes possible. But any kind of initiation also meant a socialization into the group of all those who were initiated into the same cult. The inner connection within this group varied in terms of degree and locale (that is, distribution).55 However, it could be perceived as an alternative form of community from that of the polis or the family. This alternative form could (but did not need to) be viewed in terms of competition with other groups, by polis or family as well as by philosophical schools.56 One of the Orphic (or Bacchic) tablets may thus speak of a ‘sacred road’ on which the most glorious mýstai and bácchoi travel, but all directions 51

Schlesier 2001. Graf and Johnston 2007, no. 2 (lines 6–7); cf. no. 10 (line 3), no. 5 (line 4); no. 6 (line 3) etc. 53 Habermehl 1996. 54 Graf and Johnston 2007, no. 26 a, b (line 2). 55 Cf. Burkert 1987, 43–4 clearly rejecting the often used term ‘Mysteriengemeinde’ as implying a far closer solidarity then was common in groups of mýstai of pagan cults. 56 It is interesting that our most ancient and clear evidence for the notion of initiates as a group is found in Plato’s seventh epistle where he compares it with the group of philosopher friends (ep. 7.334b7). It is no surprise that the philosopher friends were seen as the more reliable form of social group. 52

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and acclamation refer to only one person, in the singular. The few texts and images portraying initiation rituals confirm this. The possibility of excelling in terms of initiation or even religious specialization may well have been attractive and useful during the sixth and fifth centuries bce when tyrannis and democracy shifted socially and politically unwanted or obsolete forms of oligarchic competition in part into the area of religion. As a result, religion became intensely politicized.57 Particularly, the trial of Socrates as well as the trials of the priestesses of foreign or private teletaí in Athens58 prompt the assumption that a political interpretation might be a much better explanation for the evolution of religious individualization than the rather overplayed ‘discovery of the individual’ in archaic Greece.59 In these trials the Athenian demos insisted on its right to control people who made use of religious practice to reach a marked degree of individuality. It is not by accident that we find the philosopher Socrates among the accused, although we know quite well that Plato represents him as a person who needs anything but mystery cults to liberate himself from the fear of death. Keeping this contradiction in mind it is time to turn to the philosophical discourse, which is at the same time our only source for reconstructing a sort of ‘personal’ or ‘individual’ experience which we suppose to have been placed at the centre of mystery initiations.

THE PATHOS OF MYSTERY INITIATION: A MEANS OF RELIGIOUS INDIVIDUATION? Since ancient authors were for the most part committed to the command of silence when it came to describing the actual rituals of the different teletaí, our knowledge on the matter is necessarily restricted. Common to these reports, however, were the strong sensory impressions made on the initiand by displaying various theatrical means to

On fifth-century Athens, cf. e.g. Furley 1996; Garland 1992. Versnel 1990, 127–30; Trampedach 2001. 59 In addition we might also think of the development of new forms of jurisdiction during the archaic epoch which may have influenced ideas about punishment and rewards in the afterlife. 57 58

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raise emotional tension, fear, release, and joy.60 There also seem to have been instances of ecstasy in which the initiand and other cult members attained a state of consciousness quite unlike to everyday consciousness by means of music and dance.61 One example may be found in the cult of Dionysos Sabazios, which Demosthenes involves (albeit in a very disrespectful way) in his Speech on the Crown (259–60): On reaching manhood, you [sc. Aeschines], attended your mother’s initiation sessions and read the texts for her, and helped to conduct the rest of the ceremony: wrapping the initiates in fawn-skins and mixing wine, purifying them, plastering them with clay and bran and scraping it off, raising them up from their lustration and bidding them say ‘I have escaped evil, I have found the better’. You boasted that no one ever howled as loudly. . . . In the daytime you led your noble bands through the streets, garlanded with fennel and poplar, squeezing the largecheeked snakes and waving them above your head, and shouting ‘Euoi Saboi’ and dancing to the words ‘Hyes Attes Attes Hyes’ saluted as chorus-master, leader, ivy-bearer, and fan-bearer.62

Even though harsh criticism was a constant factor in the discussion of these rituals—exempting only Eleusis and other ‘official’ mysteries such as Samothrace—their impact is just as undisputed. For this, Plato is once again our most ancient, and best, witness. It seems almost natural for him to employ the events surrounding mystery initiations at Eleusis as a metaphor in central sections of his work concerned with matters of epistemology and anthropology. Prominent among them is a passage from his Phaedrus that compares the initiation into the mysteries with the capacity of the souls to see beauty itself while dimly recalling the sight of ideas: But before it was possible to see beauty blazing out, when with a happy company they saw a blessed sight before them—ourselves following with Zeus, others with different gods—and were initiated into what it is right to call most blessed of mysteries, which we celebrated, whole

60

Burkert 1987, 89–114. As Burkert 1987, 112 states, the alteration of consciousness in ecstasy was typical of Dionysos and Meter both of them often associated to mystical teletaí. But one could ask if the phenomenon as such was bound to ‘initiation’ in such a cult. Burkert also reminds us that in the cases of Eleusis, Isis, and Mithras we have no evidence of ecstasy (ibid. 113). 62 Translation by Usher 1993. 61

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ourselves, and untouched by the evils which awaited us in a later time, with our gaze turned in our revelations, in a pure light, pure ourselves and not entombed in this thing which we now carry round with us and call body, imprisoned like oysters (250b–c).63

Shortly after this, Plato harks back at the mysteries to mention that the sudden revelation of beauty was preceded by chills and the recollection of former fears (deímata, 251a). Plato’s Symposium includes the speech of Diotima (Symp. 201d–212c) where the philosophical ascent to true knowledge is even more straightforwardly compared with mystery rituals: the élenchos recalls the preparatory purification rituals, followed by the instruction through myth (i.e. the hieroí lógoi of the mysteries), and finally the epopteía,64 probably the terminus technicus for the last stage of initiation at Eleusis.65 The dramatic changes which the initiand experienced were taken by Plato for granted. In the Republic he refers to them in metaphorical fashion to illustrate the changes the ‘oligarchic’ personality undergoes on the verge of becoming ‘democratic’ (Rep. 560de): in a teletē, the soul is ‘emptied’ and ‘cleansed’ of all established notions and convictions, whereas crown and exultation after this ‘initiation’ mark the new (false) convictions. In view of the long tradition of interpretation of these passages (esp. Phaedrus and Symposium), the question of why Plato chose the experiences of mystery rituals in order to illustrate the process of philosophical understanding has hardly been discussed. Did he employ religious terminology to legitimize his own, novel claim for a philosophy that aimed at theoretical knowledge? This is precisely what Andrea W. Nightingale assumes with a view to the Platonic use of the term theoría, which is obviously taken from the religious discourse.66 Or did Plato indeed seek to ‘sacralize’ his philosophy, as Eveline Krummen suggests he does in her own reading of the Phaedo?67 This dialogue in fact shows, as I will argue, that the answer is to be sought in yet another direction. In his Phaedo Plato describes—albeit often with ironical distance—the brave death of Socrates, who faces the end of his life quite calm and collected after exhaustive conversations with his 63

Translation by Rowe 1986. This systematic comparison is not made explicit in the speech of Diotima but the parallels are obvious as Riedweg 1987, 2–21 shows. 65 For the different stages at Eleusis cf. Clinton 2003. 66 67 Nightingale 2004. Krummen 2007. 64

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philosopher friends about the possibility of an afterlife. What Socrates does not need is the reassurance mystery cults offer, although the teletaí are quite often alluded to in this text.68 Philosophical life itself, characterized in part as the division of body and soul, offers enough in the direction of liberation from fear of death. Socrates’ friends, however, find themselves to be in quite an emotional state, a mixture of joy and sorrow, recalling the ritual experiences of the mystēria: ‘I experienced something strange’ (thaumásia épathon) is how Echekrates begins his tale (58e). His students, in a rather jesting mood, call Socrates goētés and epodós (i.e. a ‘craftsman of the sacred’), thus calming their childlike anxieties (‘to exorcize the anxious child in us’), while wondering where they would find another religious teacher like him after Socrates had gone (77e–78a). Socrates answers the question and says that such a religious specialist would be indeed of great value. But he also exhorts his friends to help one another by keeping up the philosophical discourse (78a). Just like mystery rituals, philosophy enables the human being to free himself from fear of death and experience closeness to the divine. Philosophical friends form a community within the polis—as do mýstai.69 The task of taking care of the soul is continually stressed, especially with regard to young people. We might interpret this as a call for ‘individuation’ as well as ‘individuality’, because the soul (psychē) is understood in this context as the seat of indestructible identity, though I would rather avoid the term ‘personality’ or ‘self ’.70 For Plato, the religious practices of the mysteries entail both inspiration and competition; he treats private teletaí as endangering his idealized political community. Nevertheless, Plato regards these teletaí to be considerably efficient. Yet the philosophía that he seeks, strongly impressed by the eccentric figure of Socrates, is not based on (mystery) ritual, but on ‘knowledge’, although the kind of life the Platonic philosopher would seek may well be termed ‘individualized’, and also seems to rely on a relationship with the divine as it can be seen in the description of Socrates in the Apology. 68 Cf. the compilation of all passages refering to teletaí in this dialogue by Krummen 2007. 69 Cf. above note 56. 70 For ideas of the ‘self ’ in ancient and modern cultures, cf. Baumgarten et al. 1998; Assmann and Stroumsa 1999. On the famous essay by Marcel Mauss (‘Une catégorie de l’esprit humain: La notion de personne, celle du “moi” ’, Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 68, 1938) see Carrithers, Collins, and Lukes 1985; Köpping, Welker, and Wiehl 2002 and esp. Köpping 2002.

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In order to understand the further development of the philosophical discourse on mystery rituals in Hellenistic and imperial times, it is important first to take a famous dictum into consideration. The transmission of Aristotle’s position that to undergo initiation rituals in the so-called mystēria meant for the initiates to ‘experience’ or to ‘suffer’, but not to ‘possess’ or to ‘gain’ knowledge testifies to the extent of the changes that took place in Late Antiquity. It surprises us also in showing that there is still competition between religious ritual and philosophy, but focus and content have shifted. Synesius of Cyrene, adherent of Plato and a Christian bishop, complains about certain monks who claim that access to the divine is possible via mere ritual (that is, asceticism), but not via careful study and philosophical training: But their procedure is like Bacchic frenzy—like the leap of a man mad, or possessed—the attainment of a goal without running the race, a passing beyond reason without the previous exercise of reasoning. For the sacred matter [contemplation] is not like attention belonging to knowledge, or an outlet of mind, nor is it like one thing in one place and another in another. On the contrary—to compare small and greater—it is like Aristotle’s view that men being initiated have not a lesson to learn, but an experience to undergo and a condition into which they must be brought, while they are becoming fit (for revelation). Aristot. frg. 15 Ross = Synes. Dion viii 48a71

Synesius understands Aristotle’s sentence as postulating a preparatory state before being initiated into the mystēria.72 Synesius believes, following Plato, that this kind of preparation can and must be achieved by philosophical paideía, though he also labels the state to be reached as ‘irrational’. As Christoph Riedweg shows in his attempt to better comprehend Synesius’ understanding of Aristotle it is helpful to look at Clement of Alexandria first.73 Clement also speaks of different levels employing a terminology which recalls the multilevelled mysteries of Eleusis. ‘Learning’ belongs to the beginner level, the ‘lesser mysteries’; immediate insight, epopteúein, follows.74 Aristotle seems then, not to oppose, a philosophical matheín to an irrational and religious patheín. It is rather to be reasoned that he was the first to systematically compare the road of philosophical 71 73 74

72 Translation by Fitzgerald 1930. Riedweg 1987, 9. Riedweg 1987, 123–30. Clem. Strom. V.70.7–71.2; cf. Theon p. 14,18ff. Hiller (Riedweg 1987, 125).

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understanding, or training, to the tripartite process of mystery initiation (preparation, lesser mysteries, epopteía).75 Most likely he was prompted to do so by the subtle beginnings of this kind of description of mystery cults in philosophical texts such as Plato’s Symposium, which we have already discussed. But the way in which Aristotle conceives the ritual experience of mystery initiation is worth examining more closely. It is remarkable that Aristotle uses the verb páthos to describe the unique character of the most important part of initiation into the mysteries, which— according to Plato and others—consists of blessed sight and the sudden reversal of fear into joy. Discussing and describing religious practices against an independent and institutionalized philosophical background, Aristotle does not follow the Platonic inclination to treat philosophy and mystery cults as antagonistic fields, and gains a new perspective by describing religious experience as such. In my view, he does not focus on the connection between páthē of gods as found in mythological narration and mystery rituals historically attested since Herodotus.76 Rather, Aristotle seems to understand páthos as a lasting experience. It is quite possible that he wanted to stress the passivity of ritual participants—not active ‘learning’, but passive ‘suffering’ or ‘enduring’. Since Aristotle is one of the first to employ the word páthos systematically in the sense of ‘emotion’ or ‘feeling’,77 there is an implication of strong emotional experience. The combination with diatethénai (to be brought into a certain condition) reinforces this idea. Aristotle displays the same amount of scientific detachment and curiosity when dealing with the phenomenon of religious ecstasy (enthousiasmós).78 We may even infer that a 75

Riedweg 1987, 129. Hdt. 2.171.2; cf. Burkert 1987, 74–6 who states that despite the obvious importance of myths about suffering gods in Bacchic and Isis mysteries we should not follow Frazer in speaking of a ‘dying and rising’ god or ‘rebirth’ (of gods and initiands). 77 See above note 24. 78 In discussing the educational functions of musical instruments, he says about the flute: ‘Flutes must not be introduced into education . . . moreover the flute is not a moralizing but rather an exciting influence (orgiastikón), so that it ought to be used for occasions of the kind which attendance has the effect of purification (kátharsis) rather than instruction (máthēsis) (Arist. pol. 1341a 21–4). In pol. 1341b 32 he states again that the purpose of music can be education, purgation (kátharsis), or amusement. Some people are very liable to emotions like pity, fear, and ‘religious excitement’ (enthousiasmós); when they hear sacred music, ‘we see these people, when they use tunes that violently arouse the soul, being thrown into a state as if they had received medicinal treatment and taken a purge (kátharsis)’ (Pol. 1342a5). 76

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religious cleansing employing music and dance, as practised in the mysteries, provided the starting point for his theory of tragedy.79 Once again, the term páthos (now definitely used as a term for emotion) plays an important part: Tragedy, then, is mimesis of an action which is elevated, complete, and of magnitude; in language embellished by distinct forms in its sections; employing the mode of enactment, not narrative; and through pity and fear accomplishing the catharsis of such emotions (páthē). Aristot. poet. 1449b80

Compared to Plato, Aristotle seems to develop an obviously novel, rather detached and quasi-scientific way of describing religious experiences. Aristotle’s stance is worth studying for its own sake. In my argument it represents the link between the philosophical discourse on mystery cults in classical times and its reformulation in Middle Platonism and Neoplatonism. This new perspective on religious experience is an important precondition for understanding how the experience of mystery cults is conceived anew in imperial times and how it converged into something we might call ‘individual religious experience’.

RELIGIOUS EXPERIENCE IN MIDDLE PLATONISM AND NEOPLATONISM The relationship between philosophical discourse and religious practice changed fundamentally with Plutarch, who adds another famous description of ritual experiences in mystery cults. Plutarch is not only a philosopher; he was also a priest at Delphi. For him, ritual practices are no longer mere metaphors or objects for analysis, but they also provide a valid affirmation of philosophical considerations.81 This changes the discourse on rituals, which was at the same time intensified by a return to the classical Greek traditions of paideía in the Second Sophistic.82 Plutarch thus answers the question of what 79 80 81 82

Hoessly 2001, who considers also the medical traditions of kátharsis. Translation: Halliwell 1995. Burkert 1987, 84f.; on philosophers as priests see above note 26. On religion and the Second Sophistic cf. e.g. Bendlin 2006; Goldhill 2006.

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happens to the soul after death by pointing to the experiences of initiands at the mysteries: but when that time [the time of dying] comes, it has an experience like that of men who are undergoing initiation into great mysteries; and so the verbs teleutān (die) and teleísthai (be initiated), and the actions they denote, have a similarity. In the beginning there is straying and wandering, the weariness of running this way and that, and nervous journeys through darkness that reach no goal, and then immediately before the consummation every possible terror, shivering and trembling and sweating and amazement. But after this a marvellous light meets the wanderer, and open country and meadow lands welcome him; and in that place here are voices and dancing and the solemn majesty of sacred music and holy visions. And amidst these, he walks at large in new freedom, now perfect and fully initiated, celebrating the sacred rites, a garland upon his head, and converses with pure and holy men; he surveys the uninitiated, unpurified mob here on earth. frg. 178 Sandbach83

Plutarch does not say that mystery cults anticipate or ritually stage death experiences, but that the soul in death would experience something that is similar to what it experienced during the mysteries. In other words, the traditional form of ritual for Plutarch is a source of information of a higher order. This new perspective demands a more precise description of rituals, including ‘secret’ mysteries. Burkert points out that Numenius complains that he, as a philosopher, had given away the secret of Eleusis.84 At the same time when Platonic philosophers begin to include precise instructions on how to perform certain rituals in their teachings (theurgy), there unfolds a new interest in the way in which actual and traditional rituals function in general. As a first example I would like to turn to Iamblichus. He raises the question of the role obscenities play in religious rituals.85 Iamblichus draws on Aristotle’s theory of tragedy. He claims that it is not useful to suppress pathēmata completely: they must, however, be tempered. This may be achieved by cleansing (apokathaíresthai): Again the question admits another rationale too. When the power of human emotions (pathēmata) in us is everywhere confined, it becomes stronger. But when it is brought to exercise (enérgeia) briefly and to a 83 84 85

Translation by Sandbach 1969. Burkert 1987, 85 (Numenios fr. 55 Des Places). Sorabji 2000, 273–87.

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moderate extent, it rejoices moderately and is satisfied. By that means it is purged and ceases by persuasion, and not in response to force. It is by this means that, when we see the emotions (páthē) of others in comedy and tragedy, we still our own emotions and make them more moderate and purge them, and in sacred rites, through the sight and sound of obscenities, we are freed from the harm that comes from actual indulgence (érga) in them. (Iamb. De myst. 1.11, pp. 39,14–40,8.)86

Keeping up with Iamblichus’ religio-psychological approach, the theatrical dimension (sight and sound) of rituals allows for the kátharsis of emotions just as much as theatre plays, according to the theory of Aristotle. Is this transferable to the invocation of fear and joy in mystery cults? Unfortunately, we cannot know what Iamblichus may have thought about this. Another Neo-Platonist, however, Proclus, describes the mysteries of Eleusis—already dead in his days—as follows: They [the teletaí] cause sympathy of the souls with the ritual (drómena) in a way that is unintelligible to us, and divine, so that some of the initiands are stricken with panic, being filled with driven awe; others assimilate them to the holy symbols, leave their own identity, become at home with gods, and experience divine possession. In Remp. 2.108.17–30 Kroll87

Proclus’ line of thinking seems to be quite similar to Iamblichus’. He also recalls Aristotle’s theory of tragedy when he terms the rituals drómena.88 What does come as a surprise is his remark that each participant in the cult reacts differently to the ritual in an individual way. By pursuing this line of thinking, which appears quite familiar to modern-day observers, he adds a new element to all the sources we have looked at so far. Is such an individualist view of ritual only possible at the moment in which mystery rituals become a thing of the past? Or does it derive from the understanding that ritual experience is a given for a philosopher such as Proclus? It seems plausible to take as a starting point for Iamblichus and Proclus the notion that a philosophical education quite matter-of-factly included ritual which in turn made it necessary 86

87 Translation by Sorabji 2000, 286. Translation by Burkert 197, 114. In the sentence immediately before our passage Proclus says that the teletaí are using mýthoi to make obvious divine truth. So maybe drómena could also mean the ‘plot’ of the myths. 88

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to reflect in a new way on the consequences of rituals for the soul of the individual. This leads us back to the question posed at the very beginning: Was initiation into mystery cults in imperial times part of the development of the individual in the sense of an ‘individuation’ that a member of the well-educated elite (a pepaideuménos) had to go through and how does this phenomenon relate to the philosophical discourse in a stricter sense? The writings of Apuleius, chronologically to be placed between Plutarch on the one side and Iamblichus and Proclus on the other, may provide an answer to this question. Being accused of practising magic, Apuleius in his speech of defence represents himself as the ideal Greek (Platonic) philosopher, notably stressing his piety. This explicitly includes his initiations into a number of distinctly Greek mystery cults. The following passage allows Apuleius to explain why he kept a number of unspecified objects wrapped up in a strip of linen by his household altar of the Lares, the more so since his opponents took this as a token of Apuleius0 preoccupation with magic: I have been initiated into many mystery cults in Greece. Priests have given me some symbols and souvenirs, which I carefully preserve. I am not saying anything unusual, anything new. You, for example, the initiates of Liber present here, you know what you keep stored at home and silently venerate, out of reach of all who have not been initiated. But as I say, I have learned numerous cults, manifold rites, and various ceremonies in my ardour for truth and my sense of duty towards the gods. Apul. apol. 55.8–989

The ease with which the Platonic philosopher and sophist speaks about his initiations into the mysteries, appealing to the mystae of Dionysus (Liber) he assumed to be in the audience, shows how much the initia and teletaí belonged to the religious world of the imperial Age. In this context, it may be noted that the alleged contrast between ‘Greek mysteries’ and a cult of Liber is quite remarkable. What 89 Sacrorum pleraque initia in Graecia participaui. eorum quaedam signa et monumenta tradita mihi a sacerdotibus sedulo conseruo. Nihil insolitum, nihil incognitum dico. Uel unius Liberi patris mystae qui adestis scitis, quid domi conditum celetis et absque omnibus profanes tacite ueneremini. at ego, ut dixi, multiiuga sacra et plurimos ritus et uarias cerimonias studio ueri et officio erga deos didici. English translation by Harrison, Hilton, and Hunink 2001.

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Apuleius does not mention is that participation in these initia supplied him with a special sort of personal experience or insight. This he does seem to imply (at least at a first glance) in the eleventh book of his Metamorphoses. I cannot deal here with this masterpiece of narration at any length.90 Without going into detail, however, I would like to propose a reading that takes the ironic, reflective, even satirical character of the treatise into account.91 From such a viewpoint, it becomes at once noticeable that Lucius does not experience that typical reversal from despair to overwhelming joy and a total change of character during the ritual of initiation into the mysteries of Isis, but before, that is, after he chances upon the goddess Isis herself and transforms back into a human being during a procession in her honour. In his account of the ritual of initiation into the Isis cult he does not refer to either transformations or emotions. Instead, this topic is entirely covered by the speech of one of the priests.92 The only sentiments the narrator mentions are his yearning for Isis after the initiation and his love for the goddess to whose service he now feels himself to be committed. The dramatic statement of a rhetor concerning his own initiation into Eleusis—‘I came out of the mystery hall feeling like a stranger to myself ’93—does not apply to Lucius. At the end of his initiation process he has the certainty that from now on, the benevolence of the gods will guarantee him a regular income as a forensic orator.94 In fact, the only thing changed is that from now on he keeps his head shaved as an outward sign that he belongs to the college of the pastophori.95 The narrative mode allows Apuleius to question the certainty with which Plutarch, for example, believed in the divine and the effectiveness of traditional ritual. The goddess Isis appears in a ‘ritual’ which the exhausted ass spontaneously invents out of sheer necessity on the beach of Corinth.96 This, and not a complex and complicated ritual of initiation, is what brings about the change.

90

Cf. Winkler 1985 and Egelhaaf-Gaiser 2000, to mention only two basic studies. Following Winkler 1985. 92 Apul. met. 11.21.5–9. Cf. 11.15.1–5. 93 Sopatros Rhet. Gr. 8.114 f. 94 Apul. met. 11.30.2. 95 In the end of the text the narrator emphasizes that he did not hide his shaved head: rursus denique qua raso capillo collegii vetustissimi et sub illis Syllae temporibus conditi munia non obumbrato vel obtecto calvitio, se quoqueversus obvio gaudens obibam. (met. 11.30.5). 96 Apul. met. 11.1.4–2.4. 91

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In either case, both the playfully ironic depiction of Apuleius’ Metamorphoses and the important part mystery initiation plays in his Apologia show how important initia and teletaí were in the public eye of the major urban centres of the imperial age and how deeply they were rooted in everyday life. Unlike Stoicism, the philosophical writers of Middle and Neo-Platonism incorporated this discourse into their systems, thus producing a singular, quasi religio-psychological interpretation of initiation into mystery cults. A further study of the coincidental development of the discourse of Christian ritual— especially baptism—would show that this phenomenon was by no means isolated, but rather found its counterpart in the baptism homilies of the fourth and fifth centuries ce. This development as such, which also could be conceived as a mixture of philosophical and religious discourse, can be seen in relation to the growing importance of religion for the individuation of members of the well-educated elite in imperial times.97

REFERENCES Assmann, Jan, and Stroumsa, Guy G. (eds) 1999. Transformations of the Inner Self in Ancient Religions. Studies in the History of Religions 83. Leiden: Brill. Baumgarten, Albert I. et al. (eds) 1998. Self, Soul and Body in Religious Experience. Studies in the History of Religions 78. Leiden: Brill. Bendlin, Andreas 2006. ‘Vom Nutzen und Nachteil der Mantik. Orakel im Medium von Handlung und Literatur in der Zeit der Zweiten Sophistik’, in Elm von der Osten, Dorothee, Rüpke, Jörg, and Waldner, Katharina (eds), Texte als Medium und Reflexion von Religion im römischen Reich. PAwB 14. Stuttgart: Steiner, 159–207. Berner, Ulrich 1998. ‘Mysterien/Mysterienreligion’, in Cancik, Hubert (ed.), Handbuch religionswissenschaftlicher Grundbegriffe, vol. IV. Stuttgart: Kohlhammer, 169–73. Brakke, David, Satlow, Michael L., and Weitzman, Steven (eds) 2005. Religion and the Self in Antiquity. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press. Burkert, Walter 1962. Weisheit und Wissenschaft: Studien zu Pythagoras, Philolaos und Platon. Nürnberg: Carl. 97 I thank Elisabeth Begemann for translating a first draft from German to English and Marios Skempis and Richard Gordon for improving the English of the final version.

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——1987. Ancient Mystery Cults. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. ——2009. ‘Pleading for Hell: Postulates, Fantasies, and the Senselessness of Punishment’, Numen 56, 141–60. Bremmer, Jan N. 2002. The Rise and Fall of the Afterlife: The 1995 ReadTuckwell Lectures at the University of Bristol. London: Routledge. Bremmer, Jan N. 2010. ‘Manteis, Magic, Mysteries and Mythography: Messy Margins of Polis Religion?’, Kernos 23, 13–35. Bremmer, Jan N. 2012. ‘Initiation into the Eleusinian Mysteries: A Thin Description’, in C. H. Bull, Lied, Liv Ingeborg, and Turner, John D. (eds), Mystery and Secrecy in the Nag Hammadi Collection and Other Ancient Literature: Ideas and Practices: Studies for Einar Thomassen at Sixty. Leiden: Brill, 375–97. Calame, Claude 1991. ‘“Mythe” et “rite” en Grèce. Des catégories indigènes?’, Kernos 4, 179–204. Cancik, Hubert 1998. ‘Mysterien/Mystik’, in Cancik, Hubert, Gladigow, Buckhard, and Kohl, Karl-Heinz (eds), Handbuch religionswissenschaftlicher Grundbegriffe, vol. IV. Stuttgart: Kohlhammer, 174–8. Carrithers, Michael, Collins, Steven, and Lukes, Steven (eds) 1985. The Category of the Person: Anthropology, Philosophy, History. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Clinton, Kevin 2003. ‘Stages of Initiation in the Eleusinian and Samothracian Mysteries’, in Cosmopoulos, Michael B. (ed.), Greek Mysteries. The Archaeology and Ritual of Ancient Greek Secret Cults. London: Routledge, 50–78. Cosmopoulos, Michael B. (ed.) 2003. Greek Mysteries: The Archaeology and Ritual of Ancient Greek Secret Cults. London: Routledge. ——2003a. ‘Mycenaean Religion at Eleusis: The Architecture and Stratigraphy of Megaron B’, in Cosmopoulos, Michael B. (ed.), Greek Mysteries: The Archaeology and Ritual of Ancient Greek Secret Cults. London: Routledge, 1–24. Egelhaaf-Gaiser, Ulrike 2000. Kulträume im römischen Alltag: Das Isis-Buch des Apuleius und der Ort der Religion im kaiserzeitlichen Rom. PAWB2 Stuttgart: Steiner. Fitzgerald, Augustine 1930. The Essays and Hymns of Synesius of Cyrene: Including the Address to the Emperor Arcadius and the Political Speeches. Trans. into English with introd. and notes by Augustine Fitzgerald. London: Oxford University Press. Fortenbaugh, William W. 2002. Aristotle on Emotion, 2nd edn, London: Duckworth. Furley, William D. 1996. Andocides and the Herms: A Study of Crisis in fifthcentury Athenian Religion. Bulletin of the Institute of Classical Studies Supplement 65. London: Institute of Classical Studies.

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Garland, Robert 1992. Introducing New Gods: The Politics of Athenian Religion. London: Duckworth. Goldhill, Simon 2006. ‘Religion, Wissenschaftlichkeit und griechische Identität im römischen Kaiserreich’, in Elm von der Osten, Dorothee, Rüpke, Jörg, and Waldner, Katharina (eds), Texte als Medium und Reflexion von Religion im römischen Reich. PAwB 14. Stuttgart: Steiner. 125–40. Graf, Fritz 1974. Eleusis und die orphische Dichtung Athens in vorhellenistischer Zeit. Religionsgeschichtliche Versuche und Vorarbeiten 33. Berlin: de Gruyter. —— 2003. ‘Initiation: A Concept with a Troubled History’, in Dodd, David B. and Faraone, Christopher A. (eds), Initiation in Ancient Greek Rituals and Narratives: New Critical Perspectives. London: Routledge, 3–24. —— and Johnston, Sarah Iles 2007. Ritual Texts for the Afterlife: Orpheus and the Bacchic Gold Tablets. London: Routledge. Habermehl, Peter 1996. ‘Jenseits’ (B IV/V; Via 2/c), RAC 17, 258–301; 309. Hadot, Pierre 2002. Exercices spirituels et philosophie antique. Collection des Études Augustiniennes: Série Antiquité. Paris: Institut d’Études Augustiniennes. Halliwell, Stephen 1995. Aristotle’s Poetics. London: Duckworth. Harris, William V. 2002. Restraining Anger: The Ideology of Anger Control in Classical Antiquity. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Harrison, S. J., Hilton, John, and Hunink, Vincent (tr.) 2001. Apuleius. Rhetorical Works. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Hirsch-Luipold, Rainer, et al. (eds) 2009. Religiöse Philosophie und philosophische Religion der frühen Kaiserzeit. Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck. Hoessly, Fortunat 2001. Katharsis: Reinigung als Heilverfahren. Hypomnemata 135. Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht. Kippele, Flavia 1997. Was heisst Individualisierung? Die Antworten der soziologischen Klassiker. Opladen: Westdeutscher Verlag. Konstan, David 2006. The Emotions of the Ancient Greeks: Studies in Aristotle and Classical Literature. Robson Classical Lectures. Toronto: University of Toronto Press. Köpping, Klaus-Peter 2002. ‘ “Meissle deine Maske”. Autonome Person, gespaltenes Selbst oder Modul?—Ethnologische Anmerkungen zu Marcel Mauss’, in Köpping, Klaus-Peter, Welker, Michael, and Wiehl, Reiner (eds), Die Autonome Person—eine europäische Erfindung? München: Fink, 45–66. Köpping, Klaus-Peter, Welker, Michael, and Wiehl, Reiner (eds) 2002. Die Autonome Person—eine europäische Erfindung? Munich: Fink. Krummen, Eveline 2007. ‘ “Schön nämlich ist das Wagnis”. Rituelle Handlung und mythische Erzählung in Platons Phaidon’, in Bierl, Anton, Lämmle, Rebecca, and Wesselmann, Katharina (eds), Literatur und Religion, vol. 2:

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Wege zu einer mythisch-rituellen Poetik bei den Griechen. Berlin: de Gruyter, 91–139. Lincoln, Bruce 2003. ‘The Initiatory Paradigm in Anthropology, Folklore, and History of Religions’, in Dodd, David B. and Faraone, Christopher A. (eds), Initiation in Ancient Greek Rituals and Narratives. New Critical Perspectives. London: Routledge, 241–79. Lloyd-Jones, Hugh (ed. and trans.) 1996. Sophocles: Fragments. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Mylonas, George E. 1961. Eleusis and the Eleusinian Mysteries. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Nightingale, Andrea W. 2004. Spectacles of Truth in Ancient Greek Philosophy. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Nussbaum, Martha C. 1996. The Therapy of Desire: Theory and Practice in Hellenistic Ethics. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. —— 2009. The Fragility of Goodness: Luck and Ethics in Greek Tragedy and Philosophy. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Reitzenstein, Richard 1927. Die hellenistischen Mysterienreligionen nach ihren Grundgedanken und Wirkungen. Leipzig: Teubner (1st edn 1910). (English trans., Hellenistic Mystery Religions: Their Basic Ideas and Significance. London 1978.) Richardson, Nicholas J. 1974. The Homeric Hymn to Demeter. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Riedweg, Christoph 1987. Mysterienterminologie bei Platon, Philon und Klemens von Alexandrien. Untersuchungen zur antiken Literatur und Geschichte 26. Berlin: de Gruyter. Rowe, Christopher J. 1986. Plato: Phaedrus, trans. and commentary by Christopher J. Rowe. Warminster: Aris & Phillips. Schlesier, Renate 2001. ‘Dionysos in der Unterwelt: Zu Jenseitskonstruktionen der bakchischen Mysterien’, in von der Hoff, Ralf and Schmidt, Stephan (eds), Konstruktionen von Wirklichkeit: Bilder im Griechenland des 5. und 4. Jahrhunderts. Stuttgart: Steiner, 157–72. Sorabji, Richard 2000. Emotion and Peace of Mind: From Stoic Agitation to Christian Temptations (Gifford Lectures). Oxford: Clarendon Press. Stroumsa, Guy G. 2005. ‘From Master of Wisdom to Spiritual Master in Late Antiquity’, in Brakke, David, Satlow, Michael L., and Weitzman, Steven (eds), Religion and the Self in Antiquity. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 183–96. Trampedach, Kai 2001. ‘ “Gefährliche Frauen”: Zu athenischen Asebieprozessen im 4. Jh.v.Chr.’, in von der Hoff, Ralf and Schmidt, Stephan (eds), Konstruktionen von Wirklichkeit: Bilder im Griechenland des 5. und 4. Jahrhunderts. Stuttgart: Steiner, 137–56.

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Usher, Stephen 1993. Demosthenes on the Crown (De corona), translated with an introduction and commentary by Stephen Usher. Warminster: Aris & Phillips. ——1995. Isocrates. Panegyricus and To Nicocles, ed. and trans. Stephen Usher. Warminster: Aris & Phillips. Versnel, Hendrik S. 1990. Inconsistencies in Greek and Roman Religion, vol. 1: Ter Unus: Isis, Dionysos, Hermes: Three Studies in Henotheism. Studies in Greek and Roman Religion 6. Leiden: Brill. Winkler, John J. 1985. Auctor and Actor. A Narratological Reading of Apuleius’ Golden Ass. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press.

10 Individualization and Religious Rhetoric in Imperial Anatolia Nicole Belayche

¸ªø c ŒÆd ÆP e e Łe, ŒÆ Æçıª  ŒÆd ØÆF Æ TÆÇ. Aelius Aristides, Sacred Tales I,171

Literature and evidence of religious practices in the Greek and Roman worlds both demonstrate that individual devotion and personal religiosity2 always coexisted with civic and other collective religious lives, all sharing some similar religious processes. Individual commitments in religious praxis and personal experiences of relationships with divine beings were neither apart from the network of institutionalized, religious spaces and times,3 nor independent from normative ritual formulas though being personal. Insights into individual communicative processes can be detected within traditional forms of 1 ‘Also speaking of the god, he named him a refuge and such things’ (trans. C. A. Behr, Leiden 1980). 2 I mean as ‘religiosity’ religious attitude originating in the tension between the (individual or collective) worshipper’s conception of the gods and the forms he or she consequently imagines for communicating with them. 3 Among many testimonies, like ears engraved on steles or altars (cf. Lambrechts and Van den Berghe 1955), a dedication from Nakoleia (Phrygia) ŁıºØŒfiH Pw dtfi Å ˜Ød Œ(Æd) ººøØ, Drew-Bear 1978, 48 nr. 24: this unicum in religious epigraphy (KŒ

 is the regular term, cf. Weinreich 1912) recalls that gods are known in all contexts to be attentive to prayers; at Apulum (Dacia), Nemesis is exaudientissima, CIL III, 1126.

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expression, the most regular pattern being that of a votive—that is, contractual—relationship which shapes communication with superior powers in Greek and Roman ‘paganisms’. And yet the spectrum was far larger, from thanksgiving dedications (possibly after a godly sign or epiphanic manifestation) up to narratives of sins followed by a recovered pax deorum, curses ensuring protection on funerary monuments, binding spells, identitarian utterances within competitive religious contexts, and so on. All these formulary patterns provide the general framework for investigating the balance between individual and collective expressions of religiosity. Personal experiences of relationships with divine beings are documented at every period, though scholarship from the last quarter of the twentieth century onwards puts more emphasis on civic religions and cultic practices following public patterns, such as the so-called sacred laws in Greek cities and the ‘modèle du culte public’ for Roman religion.4 Many Greek ‘sacred laws’ set down regulations on cultic acts performed by individuals, the idioi,5 attesting that public ceremonies did not encompass all homage paid to gods, and that public priests had their part and benefit from offerings made by individuals as well. Other instances of intricacy between the various levels of religious life and commitments are clearly displayed in local, ‘rural’ sanctuaries of Roman Anatolia,6 or in curses against the violators of tombs that list complementary ranges of penalties: the public one— paid to imperial and civic institutions,7 with an additional fine to the main local temple in some cases8—and the individual one, which was the more terrifying for it handed violators over to divine anger and cosmic sanction.9 Individual religious settings and personal relationships with deities could find easy and ample room for expression so long as traditional religions had no dogmatic theology served by a doctrinal authority ready to shape communication with superior beings within imperative lines. And yet, from the birth of the history of religions as an 4

Cf. Lupu 2005 (with previous bibliography) and Scheid 1990. See Dasen and Piérart 2005. 6 Cf. that of Zeus Tar(i)gyenos, Akkan and Malay 2007. 7 Strubbe 1997, no 113, 125, 72ter. 8 Strubbe 1997, no. 121, 114. 9 Strubbe 1997, no. 285: ‘may he not know the pleasure of children and of life, may the earth be not accessible and the sea not navigable, but may he die with all sufferings, childless and destitute and deformed’. 5

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autonomous field of study at the end of the nineteenth century onwards, historiography has singled out the Hellenistic and Roman imperial periods as characterized by increasing religious individualization.10 Such a reconstruction was based partly on the image of the decline of the polis and its structures, which is now being revisited at length, and partly on the use of Judeo-Christian definitions for measuring the value of ‘pagan’ religiosities. In a 1965 book that stands as a major step in the religious and cultural studies of the imperial period, E. R. Dodds asserted that personal anxieties were a main feature for that ‘age’ (from Marcus Aurelius to Constantine), and that they might form a relevant background for the transition towards Christianity.11 In the following generation, leaving Dodds’ affective and psychoanalysing perspective for an ethic one, Michel Foucault’s Care of the Self is another major step for reflections on individuality,12 opening up the examen de conscience and the birth of autobiography. These patterns still remain valid when ‘personal’ motives and religious behaviours and thinking are investigated, although they are now supported by better reconstructions of ritualistic polytheisms thanks to new hermeneutic tools,13 and, subsequently, by more reliable pictures of ‘traditional’ religious lives in cities, households, and associations. In the second half of the twentieth century, many studies searching for possible features of evolution from Hellenistic times onwards looked for cultural factors rather than diffusion:14 after the long-time prevalent paradigm set up by F. Cumont who claimed to have demonstrated ‘oriental’ influences,15 more attention is now paid to local or indigenous components, prompted by the development of post-colonial studies.

10

See more generally Wagner-Hasel 1998. Dodds 1965, e.g. 38 for the figures investigated in this chapter: ‘Virtually everyone pagan, Jewish, Christian or Gnostic, believed in the existence of these beings and in their function as mediators, whether he called them daemons or angels or aions, or simply “spirits” (pneumata).’ As a matter of intellectual history, it is remarkable that the French translation (Claix, 1979) was a Georges Devereux publishing project for the Bibliothèque d’ethnopsychiatrie, a collection he then directed. 12 Foucault 1984. 13 For Roman religion, Scheid 1988 and Scheid 2003. 14 I restrict the references to four seminal studies: Nock 1972; Pleket 1981; Versnel 1981; and Veyne 1986. 15 The category is revisited in Bonnet, Ribichini, and Steuernagel 2008; Bonnet, Rüpke, and Scarpi 2006; and Bonnet, Pirenne-Delforge, and Praet 2009. 11

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This limited and rough panorama recalls basic guidelines which are helpful when addressing the question of religious individualization as reflected in Anatolian religious epigraphy. Evidence is rich in numbers16 and diversity—thanks to individualization! Thus it can throw light on the still-discussed issue of an increasing trend of individualization in Roman times. Aside from pragmatic theology that will come into my argument—how did worshippers think of their gods and build their relationships with them?—inscriptions report emotional narratives built on despair, fear, pains, hope, satisfaction, and so on, that are the affective facet of many ranges of godly experiences,17 expressed in some cases in the first person: Ie F Pº ªH (“From now on I praise [the deity]”).18 Forms of expression of one’s individuality were diverse, though generally displayed within a community context. Many local cult places had been founded by private worshippers, like a sanctuary to Men by an Artemidoros, or one to Zeus by an Arios,19 but as far as we know their further development was along the lines of any other sanctuary. More regularly, devotees demonstrate individuality in choosing their own formula for expressing their deepest feelings about, and representation of, the relationship they have with the deity. These feelings and representation were expressed either in words—for instance PåÆæØ H in a cult place where PåÆæØ æØ  is the standard formula—or in image when worshippers ordered an unexpected (at least to our observers’ eyes) relief compared to the text of the dedication.20 The best topos to find expression of one’s individuality is in the way that worshippers address their god or

16 Besides the ‘epigraphic habit’, stated mainly on literacy practices within civic life, easy access to stones, probably cheaper to get, can explain the high number of dedicatory texts in rural contexts and remote places of Lydia and Phrygia. On the pavonazetto of the Dokimeion quarries: Christol 1991 and Drew-Bear 1994. 17 For emotions in rituals, see Chaniotis 2006; Chaniotis 2009. 18 SEG 35, 1158, a ‘confession-stele’. 19 Cf. CMRDM [=Corpus Monumentorum Religionis Dei Menis] III, 67–68 and Malay 2004. 20 For instance Stratonikos, ‘priest of the one and only god and of Hosios and Dikaios’, and his wife, choose a very traditional relief of sacrifice, TAM [=Tituli Asiae Minoris] V 1 (1981), 246 (at Kula in Lydia); see also infra n. 96.

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goddess:21 the theonyms, the more or less regular epithets or neologisms they single out,22 the accumulation of attributes shaping a theological claim—as in an ordinary vow ‘for him [the dedicant], his children and his oxen’, but addressed to a Łe ¼æØ  ªØ  KŒ

 ø æ.23 All these variations provide information for locating individual religious positions in respect both of personal religiosity and of the self-image that worshippers intend to display within a social context. Among the many superior beings honoured on stones, those with functional names like angeloi (’messengers’), or with impersonal or abstract naming, such as to Theion (‘the Divine’), related to Hosios kai Dikaios (‘the Holy and Just’) in some documents, offer in my opinion relevant case-studies (though few in number) for addressing the individualization issue, insofar as they betray a concern for adapting the naming to the personal experience of the divine otherness. Those documents attesting to private religious acts come mainly from the Lydian and Phrygian areas, with a remarkable exception at Stratonicea in Caria. As with any naming process in a ritualistic context,24 these reveal strategies of communication with the superior world. There are many hypotheses to account for them: worshippers did not actually experience personalized deities, or they wished to avoid addressing these deities with their proper theonym as a sign of deference, or they wanted to give them more personality by coupling them with a personalized deity. Focusing on the way that polytheistic systems operate might be a solution for explaining these choices of apparently non-personalized and anonymous figures, like angeloi and the Theion.

ADDRESSING IMPERSONAL OR ABSTRACT DIVINE BEINGS? Scholars who have studied these ‘beings’ have so far figured them out as intermediaries between humans and a superior deity, once this latter is imagined in a remote and inaccessible state, as a type of the Neoplatonic Supreme Being or of a One God. A reconstruction of 21 22 23

For the   Ie F OÆ , see Pernot 2005. For instance ÆłØ , Drew-Bear, Thomas, and Yildizturan 1999, no. 374. 24 Marek 2000, no. 1. Belayche, Brulé, et al. 2005.

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that kind gets its coherence from a related image of the architecture of the divine realm: paganism of the time preceding Christianity’s ‘victory’ would have shifted to a ‘pagan monotheism’. Its main lines are drawn on the basis of philosophical speculations whose concepts are directed towards enlightening ritual practices.25 Leaving aside the debate on cultural streams that might have their part in such a transformation,26 such a reconstruction sets up these figures with no personation or personalized names as mediators and intercessors between humans and a transcendental-like god—thus they are at a subordinate level. Their functions might have been as various as are their religious contexts: psychopomps27 or door-keepers of a celestial deity, infernal figures or ‘underground angeloi (IªºÅ ŒÆ ÆåŁ  Ø)’ like Hermes and Hecate,28 witnesses, heralds, or demiourgoi. Such a divine model could easily find an influential counterpart in a terrestrial monarchy and its servants.29 When evidence displays association between these abstract expressions of supernatural ‘beings’ (angelos, Theion, Hosios kai Dikaios), it had been hypothesized that all ‘figures’ could be equivalent and hold the same mediatory function. The interpretation goes back to F. Cumont’s seminal study of angeloi in paganism,30 and was later applied to evidence of the Theion, on the basis that they are associated in some dedications found in Carian Stratonicea.31 Therefore the Theion was identified with an angelic being and given a messenger 25

Athanassiadi and Frede 1999. During the twentieth century, they have shifted from a ‘Jewish connection’ displaying these anonymous and abstract figures as interfaces of a Biblical, angelic type (see infra) to an ‘indigenous connection’ that would have only borrowed a Semitic or Jewish lexicon (Sheppard 1980–1). 27 Diog. Laert 8.31. Cf. also a Lydian epigram in 148/149, De Hoz 1999, no. 23 ll. 15–17. 28 Audollent 1904, n. 75A (Attica): ŒÆ ƪæçø ŒÆd ŒÆ Æ[ ]Łø IªºÅ ŒÆ ÆåŁ  Ø  EæB ŒÆ ÆåŁ ø ŒÆd  EŒ Å ŒÆ[ Æ]åŁ Æ. 29 A long comparison in Apul. Mund. 26–7 on the basis of the centralized administration of the Persian kingdom. 30 Cumont 1915, 163: ‘Le culte des anges appartenait au paganisme sémitique aussi bien qu’au judaïsme et il a été propagé par les fidèles des dieux syriens en même temps que par les adorateurs de Jéhovah’; he considered that both cultural milieux were fed with the Persian, angelic representations; cf. Min. Fel. 26.11 and TJ Rosh hashanah 1.2.56d (a famous talmudic tradition which reports that angels’ names would come from Babylon). See also Nilsson 1963. 31 See Sokolowski 1960. Sahin 1982 (I Stratonikeia II 1) identifies the Stratonicean ‘Zeus hypsistos und das Göttliche’ with Isis and Sarapis, with no other argument than they were honoured in the city. 26

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function. For instance, M. Ricl, following A. A. R. Sheppard’s conclusions of his study of ‘pagan cults of angels’, considers that ‘the divine beings defined as e ŁE  often appear as subordinate to a divinity of higher order, transmitting its commands and wishes to humans’.32 S. Mitchell follows the same line: ‘the divine being or angel’, honoured separately or in association with a highest god of a ‘monotheistic’ type (Zeus or Theos Hypsistos),33 would have bridged humans and this figure, set up in such an inaccessible far-away aether that intermediaries are necessary as a link.34 For many reasons, the enquiry is far from being straightforward. Scholarly reflection on the whole data is driven to focusing on the angelos—examined though the lens of the ‘angel’ motif in Jewish35 and then in Christian figures36—because angelos and theion are associated in a few documents discovered in Stratonicea,37 despite 32 Ricl 1997, 41; cf. also 40 (‘a very remote god and his divine messenger [the theion]’). She cautiously hypothesizes an evolution from an angelic Hosios kai Dikaios to a Theos (or Theion) Hosios(n) kai Dikaios(n) with a divine nature, while acknowledging that ‘la limite [ . . . ] était très mouvante’ (Ricl 1992, 97–102). A document of great importance for her argument (Ricl 1991/2, no. 48, following Sheppard’s reading 1980–1, no. 8 87–9): %غƪºø ıøØ  ˇø fi ˜ØŒø fi På, has now to be rejected after a better reading (it is an ‘association of lovers of vine’); Malay 2005. 33 Mitchell 1993. 34 At Oinoanda, an oracle of the Clarian Apollo depicts the gods of the traditional pantheon, himself included, as being a small part of a transcendental God (ØŒæa / b Ł F æd ¼ª/º Ø E), Merkelbach and Stauber 1996, no. 25 ll. 1–9. See Mitchell _ 1999, 81–97; Busine 2005, 208–9 (‘Apollon s’y décrit souvent lui-même, ainsi que les autres divinités traditionnelles, comme des entités divines intermédiaires et subordonnées au dieu premier’, 208); Cline 2011, 19–45. 35 ‘Angelic’ figures are well documented in polytheistic and monotheistic Near East cultures. In Palmyra, Malakbel (Bel’s messenger) is part of the two triads of the great gods, Bel and Baalshamîm (cf. Teixidor 1979, 34–9 and 47–50 and Kaizer 2002, 133–43); offerings in Palmyrenian call for ‘To him whose name is blessed and to his angels’, e.g. PAT 0406, l. 1. See also the multi-denominational pilgrimage that gathered together Jewish, pagans and Christians at Abraham’s well in Mamre, Soz. hist. eccl. 2.4.3. Cf. Kofsky 1998, 19–20; Belayche 2001, 96–100; and Lichtenberger 2007. 36 There are but rare links with a (Judeo-)Christian context, for instance in a frequently quoted epitaph at Eumeneia in Phrygia: Y Ø b  æ  ŁØ,   ÆP fiH æe e Łe ŒÆd e ¼ªº  e   ıB  (If someone buries somebody else, leave him to God and to Roubes’ angel), Robert 1960, 430; in the same necropolis, the epitaph of Roubes servant of the great God (f   ıB fi ªº Ø Ł[ F] Łæ  Ø) with a christogram, IGR IV, 743; cf. Cline 2011, 97–102. See also a desperately lacunary Carian imprecation (Robert 1954, no. 191, ll. 7–8: !e H ı[æe?] _ __ Iªºø[]), which is supposed to have a Christian affiliation. _37 In the whole corpus of more than 1300 published inscriptions, 7 only read ¼ªªº  or IªªºØŒ, and not 17 as given by Hirschmann (2007, 135 n. 6), for anticipating an identity between angelos and theion.

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the fact that dedications to the Theion are almost three times more numerous. The method bears the risk of blurring definitions. Another obscurity arises from the grammatical status of the theion in some dedications, which is dubious, possibly stepping from a status of attribute (with gender) to that of a substantive designating an autonomous ‘being’. Dedicatory formulas in the dative are of no help for deciding on the point. Finally another pitfall lays in the translation of ‘¼ªªº ’ as ‘angel’,38 with insufficient care to the cultural tone of the word after its biblical background, or even preempting it,39 if one notices that the Greek Hermes when named ¼ªªº  has no other translation than ‘messenger’.40 As soon as we depart from using the ancient terminology as guidance, and pay attention to modern categories used in scholarship, a perspective on angelos or theion is offered which removes the discrepancies between the traditional understanding and the evidence on stone. In records of assistance and divine manifestation honouring these entities, they play the same role as ‘traditional’ gods and are glorified with the same religious rhetoric as used for exalting gods.41 When considering the way divine action is imagined, one notices that addresses to these ‘beings’ are actually similar to addresses to the deity itself in the process of communication with men; they give no clue of a (more or less) autonomous divine figure acting as the deity’s servant. The Theion is the god himself, namely the god’s power—its dunamis—as it can be interpreted on the basis of a consecration looking like tautological: ¨fiH Łø fi (‘to the god divine’).42 My argument is that figures invoked through these various appellations, the more so when they are coupled (always in the second rank) with a deity, are the personalized expression of homage paid to the deity’s dunamis, frequently documented in contemporary dedications as well: )ªºÅ ) Åæ ÆE Ø @ÇØ Æ ŒÆ å ıÆ ŒÆd )d ØÆ ı

38 e.g. Sheppard 1980–1, up to recently, Hirschmann 2007, who starts his study with the notions of daimôn and angelos in literary evidence (Greek, Biblical, and Persian), before singling out briefly (142–6, without discussion of problematic related dossiers) four dedications that might stand as exemplary. 39 Cf. Mitchell 1993, 46: ‘Belief in angels as divine messengers had a long history in central Anatolia, and was certainly encouraged by Jewish practice’ (italics mine). 40 For a lengthy examination, Belayche 2010b. Cline 2011, XV & 3, calls for similar caution when translating ¼ªªº  as ‘angel’. 41 42 Cf. Belayche 2010a. TAM V 1, 609.

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ŒÆd ƃ ıØ ÆP H.43 If the point is correct, the data betrays a shift in religious language attesting to a change in the way worshippers try to report their experience of the gods, but not in the architectural imagery of the divine world.

ANY DEITY IS A POSSIBLE ‘MESSENGER’ Postulating an equivalence between angelos and the Theion along a highly hierarchic structure of the divine world is firstly counteracted by some testimonies of angeloi that are obviously gods’ messengers of the type of the Greek ‘pantheon of the twelve gods’, documented from the Classical period onwards. For instance Hermes is ˜Øe ¼ªªº  at Panamara in the Hellenistic period.44 The traditional angelos’ field of action is obvious from the word itself. This common image was equally vivid in imperial times: in Cibyratis (south to Phrygia), in 125/126 a couple offered a votive poem to the god Men and a group of Greek deities (Zeus, Hera, Apollo, Helios), among which Hermes who brings to mortals the thinking of Zeus and of the other immortal gods ( EæB Iƪºº  Æ []æ[ ] EØ ‹Æ Zf çæ Ø Mb IŁÆ Ø Ł d ¼ºº Ø).45 _

A link of the same kind as this one between Zeus and his messenger, with a long pedigree in Greek culture,46 was also imagined for local great gods ‘interpreted’ as ‘Zeus’.47 Like Hermes ‘bringing good news’ ( EæE ¯PƪºøØ),48 all the divine powers might be honoured 43

TAM V 1, 317, ll. 1–3 (Kula, Lydia, 114–15). I. Stratonikeia 103: a priest offered e  EæB ˜Ø[U] ŒÆd ˙æÆØ ŒÆd HØ øØ (‘a Hermes statue to Zeus, Hera and the people’); the dedication ends with two hexameters where Hermes, speaking at the first person, defines himself as propitiatory ‘messenger of Zeus’. 45 Horsley 2007, no. 108, ll. 24–7. 46 Homeric Hymn to Hermes 3: ¼ªªº  IŁÆ ø KæØ Ø  (the benevolent [?] messenger of the immortals) and 551: ŁH KæØ Ø ÆE  (the benevolent [?] daimôn of the gods). The right meaning of KæØ Ø  remains obscure. 47 Cf. Malay 2004: ˜Ød æ ı ŒÆ ’ KØ Æªc KÅ e  EæB. See also a portrait of Zeus Ampeleites with a Hermes drawn on his right shoulder: Drew-Bear, Thomas, and Yildizturan 1999, no. 605. 48 IG XII 5, 235 (first century bce). 44

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as Pªªº Ø Ł ,49 or as ‘lords gods angeloi (ŒæØ Ø Ł d ¼ªº Ø)’ in an imprecation from Claudiopolis;50 in Ostia, Jupiter Heliopolitanus is named Angelus.51 It is important to stress the point that a messenger function is not restricted to a subordinate activity of transfer and mediation, and that all supernatural beings are commonly experienced without media, even when dedications say nothing about the form of their manifestation. The mediatory function claimed by Hermes in late-Hellenistic Panamara is to be found in the imperial period with an angelos of the god Men, though in a different religious context, that of ‘confession-steles’ which are listed within a trend of an increasing individualized relationship with the gods. Within a corpus of more than 150 ‘confession-texts’ (published so far) where divine signs and orders are regularly attested, whatever divinatory processes are,52 a ‘messenger’ of a supernatural power is explicitly mentioned in two texts only.53 A first stele from an unknown origin dates back to the third century: Chryserôs and Stratoneikos consulted the ancestral gods (Mæ ÅÆ f Æ æ ı Ł ) over known and unknown doings, according to the revelation of the messenger of the god Men Petraeites Axetenos (ŒÆŁg E KźŁÅ !e F Iªº ı F Ł F )Åe — æÆ ı  Å F); thus, I Ammias give_ _thanks for Dionysias, and we gave hundred denarii according to what ancestral gods wanted (ŒÆŁg KÇ ÅÆ ƒ  æØ Ø Ł E).54

This inscription recalls a divinatory context. Its divine landscape is peopled with a local pantheon of ancestral gods, acting as the village’s tutelary powers, and the probably prominent figure of a local Men.55 His angelos is the messenger of a master god: the message he delivers leads to a consultation of the local gods in order to know the ritual process (a fine in that case) ready to bring an end to the crisis opened 49 IG XII, Suppl. 124, ll. 12–13: a public rule on sacrifices in Lesbos to be offered Kd E Pƪº Ø E Ł Ø  Ø ŒÆd ÆÆØ. Cf. also the Dioscuri; Horsley 2007, no. 32. 50 I. Klaudiu polis 9 (third–fourth centuries), IV, 15–18. 51 CIL XIV, 24. Cf. Cline 2011, 73–4. 52 53 Cf. Belayche 2006 and Belayche 2012a. Cf. Petzl 1998, 10–13. 54 Petzl 1994, no. 38. Above the inscription, a relief depicts the two women in thanksgiving gesture. 55 See also at Kibyra, a faithful made two offerings to equally glorified gods, one ˚ıæø fi ¼[ø] ŁfiH, and the other Ł E ªº Ø ı Ø, I. Kibyra I, 93 & 94.

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by an impiety referred to by an impressionistic formula (‘known and unknown doings’). The other attestation is earlier (164/5). It comes from a village where public order was handed to the same god, Meis Axiottenos ÆæØ Æغø (‘who rules over Tarsi’).56 After a coat was stolen, and returned afterwards by the thief willing to escape from the torments associated with divine justice,57 the god ordered through a messenger the coat to be sold and his powers to be written on a stele (› Łe s KŒºı Ø’ Iªº ı æÆŁBÆØ e ƒ Ø ŒÆd  źº ªæÆçBÆØ a ıØ).58

It is plausible that the order was sent to the priests, either directly or under their supervision, as being in charge of the sanctuary where the coat was returned. In both narratives, the god Men is not inaccessible at all, though a prominent and ordering god; he is even benevolent in his ‘spontaneous’ manifestation.59 The ‘angelos’ does not act in the same way in both texts; this indicates that the ‘messenger’ cannot be interpreted as a formulary motive within ‘confession-texts’. Moreover, given the fact that the two inscriptions are the only evidence, it must be concluded that the representation of a mediator in the course of divine interventions was not a common pattern, even when deities were glorified.60 In these experiences of the angelos of an identified god, Zeus or Men, the priestly presence is noticeable, for the Hellenistic dedicant from Panamara and for Men’s local sanctuaries as well. Again in Sattaï, a Lydian city, a votive dedication is offered ‘and to the messenger Holy and Just (ŒÆd ªºø fi  ˇø fi [˜ØŒ]Æø fi ) through the assistance of the prophet (Øa æ ç [ı]) _Alexandros of Saïttai’,61 and in Sardis (?) G. Iulius Aniketos offered as a vow ¨ø fi  ˇø fi ŒÆd ˜ØŒÆø fi (to the Theion Holy and Just) the (rough) statue of a man with a caduceus of a Hermes type æ  Æ  çغå ı ʹ ƒæ .62 We

56

Cf. Belayche 2005b (with previous bibliography). For practices of divine justice, Versnel 1991; Chaniotis 2004; Petzl 2007. 58 Petzl 1994, no. 3, at Sattai (Lydia). 59 Versnel 1981, 35, rightly underlines that ‘one of the paradoxes of this religious mentality is that the exalted and omnipotent god owed much of his inaccessible majesty to the fact that he lent an ear to lowly mortals’. 60 Cf. Belayche 2005c. 61 Ricl 1991/2 (= 1991–1992b), no. 1; cf. Petzl 1998, 15. 62 Petzl 1978, no. 4, 756–61 and fig. 7–10 (= Ricl 1991/2, no. 6). 57

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lack a clue that would help to decide if this angelos figure is a rhetorical result of a theological explanation given by the priest, or if it is how the worshipper himself conceived his experience of the divine. Besides the peculiarity of each testimony, images of angeloi mentioned so far do not look like subordinate powers. Either the angelos is Hermes, with full divine status, or is a form of expression that designates the power himself, the god Men, as worshippers experience him. These texts fit well with contemporary religious epigraphic evidence as a whole. Gods are superior powers on the ontological level, able to ‘make things possible out of the impossible (K Iı ø ıÆ a ıE [sic])’.63 They are experienced when they manifest themselves64 and are regularly figured out as acting directly, as recalled by the ŒÆ ’ KØ Æª / ŒÆ ’ ZÆæ formulas.65 The very few attestations of angeloi can support the proposition that they are a form of expression personalizing the god in the communication process, more than as the designation of an autonomous divine figure acting as a servant for a divine being supposed to be too distant.66 If the angelos is a rhetorical form for expressing the god in action, then any god might be pictured as acting through an ‘angelos’. In a votive text from Dorylaion (second–third centuries), three worshippers who are some kind of cultic agents (they are ‘submitted to the gods’, ! ÆŒ ØŒ d ŁH) had engraved that the altar is the property of ‘the god Apollo and his angeloi, Hosios [and] Dikaios ([Ł] F _ ººø  ŒÆ[d ] / [ H] Iªºø ÆP F  ˇ ø / [Œb] ˜ØŒø)’,67— 68 _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ the qualities Apollo displays when in communication with men. The faithful express the divine être-au-monde with various expressions, as can be confirmed when examining dedications offered to the Theion. 63

Petzl 1994, no. 122 ll. 4–5. They are KØçÆE, cf. Zeus Panamaros and Hecate at Stratonicea, I. Stratonikeia 10, 15, 505, 512. See Platt 2011. 65 Cf. Van Straten 1976. 66 Petzl 2005, 76–77, rightly asks the question. 67 Ricl 1992b, no. 1, 95–96 (for ø as a genitive, Petzl, 1994, 124–5); see also Ricl 1997, 40–1 (where she confirms her thesis of a ‘divine and/or angelic nature of Hosios and Dikaios’ and of the equivalence between the Theion and a ‘divine messenger’). On a Galatian altar, Hosios and Apollo are individualized:  ˇø fi , ººøØ, Ł E KÅŒ Ø, Ricl 1991/2, no. 39. 68 F. Cumont himself balanced between an angelos as a distinct figure (Cumont 1906, 76), and theios (masc.), and angelos both being Zeus’ qualities (Cumont 1915, 161–2). The identity of ‘the Holy and the Just’ may be adapted to both genders and the neutral as well, cf. MAMA V 1, 183 (at Nacoleia in Phrygia):  ˇø Œb ˜ØŒø Œb  ˇÆ Œb ººø På; TAM V 1, 247: ¨fiH  ˇø fi ŒÆd ˜ØŒÆø fi ŒÆd  ˇÆ fi ŒÆd ˜ØŒÆÆ fi . _ 64

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TO THEION, AN ABSTRACT EXPRESSION OF THE DIVINE A group of altars found in Carian Stratonicea attest to a combination of the angelos and the Divine (to Theion) and can therefore support the same conclusion.69 Few dedications qualify the angelos as divine: Łø fi ªªºø fi 70 and Łø fi ªºø fi oPæÆø fi (with a supplementary honour to its celestial nature).71 The angelos is also given the same quality as the Divine: he is good (IªÆŁfiH ªºø fi ).72 Both when accorded divine quality and when qualified as similar to the Divine, the angelos is regularly invoked as the second term of addresses that give the first rank to Zeus hypsistos (˜ØU !ł ø fi ), and once to Theos hypsistos ([¨]fiH !ł[ ]ø fi ).73 The dedicatory formulas are similar when it is the Divine that is honoured as ‘messenger’: ¨ø fi IªªºØŒfiH (in two dedications closing with an acclamatory formula).74 When honoured alone, the Theion is given various qualifications, all belonging to the rhetoric of divine glorification in imperial times. Besides being good (agathon) like the angelos, it is royal (basilikon) like Zeus,75 great (mega)76 as expected for a great god like Zeus. It is thus celestial (ouranion) and honoured as the most high (hypsiston),77 like Zeus or Theos. A ‘royal and most high Divine’, all-powerful (¨ø fi Æ ı fi Å) in a votive

69 These reflections were also presented at the Lunchtime Conference Series of the School of Historical Studies, Institute of Advanced Study, Princeton, NJ, USA, 8 March 2010; I thank my fellow members for their comments. A lengthy study is in Belayche 2012b. 70 I. Stratonikeia 1117 (˜ØU !ł ø fi ŒÆd Łø fi ªªºø fi ) & 1308 ([¨]fiH !ł[ ]ø fi ŒÆd _ [fiH Ł]ø fi ªºø fi ). Bowersock 1990, 20, translates: ‘divine angel’. _ 71 I. Stratonikeia 1307: ˜ØU !ł ø fi ŒÆd Łø fi ªºø fi oPæÆø fi . 72 I. Stratonikeia 1118: ˜ØU !ł ø fi ŒÆd IªÆŁfiH ªºø fi . For the Theion, I. Stratonikeia 1114. 73 I. Stratonikeia 1308. 74 I. Stratonikeia 1119 (¨ø fi IªªºØŒfiH PåÆæØ F !bæ ø ÅæÆ) & 1120. Cf. Robert 1955, 55–61 and Pleket 1981, 184–8. 75 I. Stratonikeia 519 (˜ØU !ł[ ø fi ] ŒÆd ¨ø fi [fiH bÆ]غ،fiH); see also 1115 (˜ØU !ł ø fi ŒÆd ¨ø fi bÆغ،fiH) & 1116 (˜Ød !ł ø fi ŒÆd ¨ø fi bÆغ،fiH). For Zeus basilikos, __ MAMA V, R 8 & SEG 6, no. 79 (Dorylaion). 76 I. Stratonikeia 1111; cf. Herrmann and Polatkan 1969, no. 10, 53–4. Cf. also Malay 1994, no. 184 (en 182/3): ¨ø fi ª ø fi . 77 I. Stratonikeia 1309: ¨ø fi BÆغE ŒÆd  +ł ø fi . The grammatical status of hypsistos (attribute or substantive) is unclear, for Hypsistos is attested as an

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epigram found at Nakoleia (Phrygia),78 would hardly fit with the communis opinio asserting that the Theion is an inferior and subordinated power. On the contrary, all attributes fit with the nature of the superior world which is primarily conceived as a power (dunamis). Honouring the Theion in its royal function, or with equally apt epithets to stress a Divine in a magisterial position, is consistent with the desire to express the superior world as an otherness, although people experience it in the here-and-now. This manifestation is manifold, as one may conclude when reading a recently published thanksgiving ‘to the Theion with many forms (¨ø fi  ºıæçø fi )’.79 80 The epiclesis is almost a unicum in inscriptions. The formula might signify both the wholeness of the superior world (designated by a neutral impersonation) and acknowledgment of its various forms of manifestation, being detailed by other worshippers under the various epithets they use. The addressee is probably the god Men, whose symbol, the moon crescent, is engraved on the moulding of the altar. Worshippers made their own choices definitely. For instance in 190/ 191, in a village (the katoikia of the Alianoi), an individual engraved a dedication ‘to the god Men’, and the community added its own on the same altar ‘to Hosios kai Dikaios ( ˇø fi Œb ˜ØŒø fi )’,81 choosing for its part to stress the god’s qualities, perhaps because they are ethical rules presiding over the collective life. In a praise to Men Artemidorou, the use of the reflexive pronoun (ªÆ  Ø e ‹Ø , ªÆ  Ø e ŒÆØ ) leaves no doubt about the declination of god’s qualities.82 A Phrygian dedication offers a reverse case: a priest offers it to Hosios and Dikaios, adding the name of the god (Apollo) at the end:  ˇø fi

autonomous being as well (e.g. at the Pnyx sanctuary). Association of two substantives is attested in Anatolia (cf. Theos basileus (God-king)) and in a Syrian environment: ‘To Zeus-Messenger (˜ØU ªºø fi )’ in Arabia (Gatier 1982, no. 1, 269–70) or ‘To GodMessenger (¨fiH ªºø fi )’ on Berytus territory (Rey-Coquais 1999, 622, unpublished). Bowersock 1990, 19, reads ‘a pious reluctance to utter the name of the deity in the context of angel-gods’. 78 Merkelbach and Stauber 2001, SGO III, 16/35/01. This is a rare epigraphic epithet, which qualifies godly agents of any rank, the highest included, in Orphic hymns (12, 4, to Hermes) and ‘magical papyri’. At Kula (Lydia), Lêto is honoured as ˜ıÆ B fi ŁfiH, TAM V 1, 250. 79 Sahin 2002, no. 38: ¨ø fi  ºıæçø fi PåÆæØ æØ . 80 See IGVR 176, with polumorphos qualifying an unknown goddess, possibly Isis. 81 Ricl 1991/2, no. 81. 82 Malay 2003, 13–18. Contra Ricl 2008, 564, figures out ‘distinct divine entities’.

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Œ(Æd) ˜ØŒ[Æ]ø fi Påc Œ(Æd) ºøØ På.83 Such a construction of the addressee in a form of a proclamation of theological qualities is familiar in the context of acclamations and aretalogy-type utterances, like this Ephesian one often quoted: )ªÆ e Z Æ F Ł F, ªÆ e ‹Ø , ªÆ e IªÆŁ, ŒÆ ’ ZÆæ (Great is the god’s name, great is the Saint, great is the Good, after a dream).84 The Theion can also replace the deity’s name, according to a use attested in Hellenistic times, for instance in the narrative of a cultic agent called by a deity to his service. In the Cotiaeion area, Babou ‘requested by the divinity (!e F Ł ı) [to become] a priestess, and not having responded, she was requested again by the divinity’.85 Quite often the Divine is honoured with a god. At Menye, it designates probably the manifestation of Men Axiottenos, a local form of the lunar god whose crescent is engraved on the altar, and epiphany recalled on line 8: Artemôn consecrated the altar ‘to Men Axiottenos and the Divine . . . over the footprints of the godly manifestation ()Å|d Ø| Å|fiH ŒÆd ¨ø fi . . . IŁÅŒ Kd a YåÅ)’.86 The record of the epiphany characterizes the figure as supernatural. Such a context is far from being unique. At Sattaï in Lydia the statue of a local goddess, Larmene, is offered ¨fiH !ł ø fi ŒÆd ª[]ºø fi ¨ø fi KØçÆE (to the most-high god and the great divine, which manifests itself).87 Mightiness of the great and exalted god, who is anonymous for us but probably not for his worshippers, was experienced as being of another nature, divine, and possibly through local personalized figures, like this otherwise unknown goddess. This dedication might make a case for understanding the Theion as a subordinate figure if one interprets the Theos hypsistos as a figure of ‘pagan monotheism’.88 But it has already been noticed that there are very similar dedications where Zeus hypsistos is honoured in a traditional, though exalted, context of conception of the divine.89 A similar interpretation 83

Drew-Bear 1978, 40 no. 7. I Ephesos VII 1, n 3100. Ricl 1997, CIG 4142, 37: KØÇÅ ÅŁEÆ ƒæØÆ !e F Ł ı Œb c ! ŒæØ Å, ºØ KØÇÅ ÅŁEÆ !e F Ł ı [ . . . ]. 86 TAM V 1, 524 = CMRDM I, 85 (in 184/5). 87 TAM V 1, 186 (in 171–2). 88 Mitchell 1999, 104 (‘a form of monotheistic worship’), 121 and 127. Discussion on this argument in Stein 2001; Bowersock 2002; Wallraff 2003; Belayche 2005a. 89 e.g. I. Stratonikeia 1307 (˜ØU !ł ø fi ŒÆd Łø fi ªºø fi oPæÆø fi ). Cf. I. Stratonikeia 330, where ‘Zeus hypsistos’ is probably Zeus Panamaros. Mitchell 1999, 105–6 and 108, states also that these dedications ‘conformed to the normal 84 85

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might enlighten a 182/183 dedication from Kula (Lydia) ªºø fi ¨fiH ›ø fi ŒÆd ØŒÆø fi .90 This messenger of a great divine status, or the divine nature itself when it has a relationship with the world, formulates the same ability of the divine to communicate with men. Even when no direct communication is recorded, the Theion is a providential figure, as gods usually are. It is ‘la façon la plus générale et la plus abstraite d’invoquer la divinité’ to quote L. Robert.91 To theion is a familiar, abstract denomination in literature from classical times onwards for naming the notion of the divine, however large and complex its semantic field could be.92 In that respect, it cannot be inferior or subordinate to a god. At Iulia Gordos, a Phlakkos (Flaccus) made a vow to it for escaping from a great disease, with his city and friends: IæªÆºÅ  F  æ çıªE f Æ æØ ŒÆd çغ ØØ P  ¨ø fi .93 Therefore it is due piety to honour it as greatest (megiston) like any great god in a village or in a city like Stratonicea. Iconography supports the interpretation as well. In Dorylaion, an offering  ˇø fi Œb ˜ØŒø fi ¨ø fi (with iotacism) has this Theion figured as a radiating man,94 while elsewhere the megas Theos hosios kai dikaios is depicted as a masculine rider figure with a palm.95 In a 256–7 Lydian dedication, it is a rider-god the dedicant chose to engrave on the stele pediment, though introducing himself as ‘a priest of the one and unique god and of Hosios and Dikaios ( F e ŒÆd  ı Ł F æf ŒÆd F  ˇ ı ŒÆd ˜ØŒÆ ı)’.96 These devotions to the Theion fit in well with a broadly documented trend concerning religiosities in imperial Anatolia. People were attentive to interventions of divine beings and to the human ability of experimenting them directly. At Kula in Lydia, a funerary imprecation written in order to protect a tomb follows a well-attested formula: pattern of religious activity in the East Roman world’ in their majority, setting apart aniconism and the lack of bloody sacrifice. 90 Ricl 1991/2, no. 7. 91 Robert 1958, 113. 92 e.g. Xen. Mem. 1.4.18: ‘If you will worship the gods, you will come to understand that the divine is such that they (the gods) see and hear all, are everywhere, and care for everything.’ Cf. Rose 1954 and François 1957. 93 TAM V 1, 761. 94 Ricl 1991/2, no. 3, 97 (second century). 95 Petzl 1998, 16 fig. 6. 96 Contra Mitchell 1999, 104: ‘in the context of this text “Hosios and Dikaios”, the Phrygian god of justice, must be regarded as an angel, as he was elsewhere’.

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KıåŁÆ e ªÆ ¨E  B fi  ººfiÅ j E Å Ø H ÅÆ æ ÆÆæ BÆØ (we make a vow to the great Divine in order that nobody inflict injury to the stele or the monuments).97

The divine majesty invoked for protection is no more a mediatory figure than the traditional gods invoked for the same assistance in numerous similar testimonies.98 Superior powers are activated by the performative act of writing and the neutral formula is able to address any of them. When they are not explicitly written down as qualities of the gods,99 Hosios kai Dikaios would not be ‘messengers’, ‘divinité intermédiaire ou émanation’,100 but avatars or projections. They would express the divinity in its manifestation within the world as a holy power bringing justice, as a highest god with whom it can be equated, like the Theion epiphanès at Sattai. Going on this interpretative line, one understands why Hosios Dikaios are figured out as one being, and why they are sometimes depicted under the unique figure of a ridergod or under the figure of the god whose manifestation of the power they express, Men, Zeus, Helios, or Apollo. This ‘perception’ of divine manifestation hic et nunc might be qualified as angelos or angelikos, with no concern with emphasis on a secondary or subordinate divine status. According to the same line, the Theion can be angelikon, or called as angelos, as being the ‘perception’ of the power experienced down here.

CONCLUSION After the evidence studied so far, the Theion, the angeloi, Hosios kai Dikaios, all figures with non-personalized or abstract names, are not subordinate assistants of a too far-away power, but a modality of the 97

98 TAM V, 1 (1981), 434, ll. 11–15 (in 194–195). Strubbe 1997. Cf. a dedication offered % ø fi ’ ›ø fi ŒÆd )Åd ØŒÆø fi OçŁÆºH among others, Ricl 1991/2, no. 25. In an epigram from Philomelion, Menestratos paid homage to Apollo and Helios as ØŒÆØ  Ø X’  ØØ Ł[ E], Merkelbach and Stauber 2001, 16/55/01. See also TAM X, 158: a Phrygian votive stele offered ‘to Hosios and Dikaios Kfi ø, and )Å æd ÆŒÆæÆ fi  ˇÆ fi ˜ØŒÆÆ fi ’, where the female power might be one of _these _ _ _ Anatolian Mothers honoured altogether with the male tutelary god. 100 Robert 1958, 121. 99

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intervention of supernatural powers within the world, which is expressed through a personalized form. They are the divine power while manifesting itself,101 either in se with no individualization or in its personalized deities. This power can be honoured in inscriptions with any divine being, quite often after some kind of manifestation. It enters within human visibility when worshippers acknowledge a communication between the two worlds. The honours it receives proclaim that the power that has been experienced is actually of a divine nature. On this view, all these namings reveal the complex and delicate way through which ordinary devotees, who were not intellectuals embedded in paideia, tried to express the way they perceived divine action around and about them, according to their own religious experience; thus the lack of systems or theorizations, and of a uniform model. Both the messenger of a great divine status (in three instances), and the divine nature itself in its interaction with the human world (in the majority of instances), formulate the same ability of the divine to communicate with men. Playing the same role as ‘traditional’ gods, glorified or acclaimed in the same way, and coupled with a deity in some testimonies, these figures look like a rhetorical form naming the divine power, the dunamis that is frequently documented in contemporary dedications. If the point is correct, the data betray a change in religious language attesting a change in the way how gods are represented in their being-in-theworld, with a theological emphasis on their power to manifest themselves. These figures are an avatar or projection of any god whose status and qualities they share. They express the divinity in its manifestation within the world as a holy power bringing justice and benefactions, as any highest god it can represent. Far from bringing argument to the question of the hierarchical architecture of the pantheon (a communis opinio in scholarship greatly influenced by the word ‘angels’), it reflects a modality of the intervention of supernatural powers within the world. This evidence of practical theology is in line with the well-known concerns of the contemporary Second Sophistic, but here it comes after experiment, and not as a result of intellectual speculation. One point still remains obscure on the basis of the available evidence: what was the role played by priests and their own theological exegesis? 101 Cf. CMRDM I, 85 and TAM V 1, 186. For Philo also, angels were God’s powers, cf. De somnis 1.238–9 and De gigantibus 17.

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Reflection on the divine modes of action is a component of religious representation within polytheistic systems. Yet, the documents studied so far hold an important novelty, for the reflection on the divine one can grasp in these addresses does not concern ‘modalities of action’ connected with ‘fields of competence’ (to use a Georges Dumezil’s vocabulary). It concerns the ontology of divine figures, their nature as supernatural powers, hence the call for abstract (Theion) or imaged (angelikon) forms of expression able to describe divine intervention within the human world.

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Kernos Suppl. 23. Liège: Centre d’étude de la religion grecque antique, 51–68. Christol, Michel 1991. ‘Les carrières de Dokimeion à l’époque sévérienne’, Epigraphica 53, 113–74. Cumont, Franz 1906. ‘Les mystères de Sabazios et le judaïsme’, CRAI, 63–79. ——1915. ‘Les anges du paganisme’, RHR 62, 159–82. Dasen, Véronique and Piérart, Marcel (eds) 2005.  Æ ŒÆd ÅØÆ: Les cadres ‘privés’ et ‘publics’ de la religion grecque antique. Kernos Suppl. 15. Liège: Centre d’étude de la religion grecque antique. De Hoz, Maria Paz 1999. Die lydischen Kulte im Lichte der griechischen Inschriften. Asia Minor Studien 36. Bonn: R. Habelt. Dodds, Eric Robertson 1965. Pagans and Christians in an Age of Anxiety: Some Aspects of Religious Experience from Marcus Aurelius to Constantine. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Drew-Bear, Thomas 1978. Nouvelles inscriptions de Phrygie. Studia Amstelodamensia ad epigraphicam, ius antiquum et papyrologicam pertinentia 16. Zutphen: Terra Pub. Co. ——1994. ‘Nouvelles inscriptions de Dokimeion’, MEFRA 106.2, 747–844. ——Thomas, Christine M., and Yildizturan, Melek 1999. Phrygian Votive Steles. Ankara: Museum of Anatolian Civilizations. Foucault, Michel 1984. Histoire de la sexualite, vol. 3: Le souci de soi. Paris: Gallimard (Engl. trans. The Care of the Self, London: Penguin Books, 1990). François, Gilbert 1957. Le polythéisme et l’emploi au singulier des mots THEOS, DAIMÔN dans la littérature grecque d’Homère à Platon. Paris: Les Belles Lettres. Gatier, Pierre-Louis 1982. ‘Inscriptions religieuses de Gérasa’, ADAJ 26, 269–75. Herrmann, Peter and Polatkan, K.Z. 1969. Das Testament des Epikrates und andere neue Inschriften aus dem Museum von Manisa. Sitzungsbericht der Österreichischen Akademie der Wissenschaften, Phil.-Hist. Kl. 265, Abh. 1. Vienna: Bohlau in Komm. Hirschmann, Vera 2007. ‘Zwischen Menschen und Göttern: Die Kleinasiatischen Engel’, ZPE 40, 135–46. Horsley, Greg H. R. 2007. The Greek and Latin Inscriptions in the Burdur Archaeological Museum. Regional Epigraphic Catalogues of Asia Minor 5. London: British Institute at Ankara. Kaizer, Ted 2002. The Religious Life of Palmyra: A Study of the Social Patterns of Worship in the Roman Period. Stuttgart: Steiner. Kofsky, Aryeh 1998, ‘Mamre: A Case of a Regional Cult?’, in Kofsky, Arieh and Stroumsa, Guy (eds), Sharing the Sacred: Religious Contacts and Conflicts in the Holy Land. Jerusalem: Yad Izhak Ben Zvi, 19–30.

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Lambrechts, Paul and Vanden Berghe, L. 1955. ‘La divinité-oreille dans les religions antiques’, Bulletin de l’Institut historique belge de Rome 29, 177–97. Lichtenberger, Achim 2007. ‘Juden, Idumäer und “Heiden”: Die herodianischen Bauten in Hebron und Mamre’, in Günther, L.-M. (ed.), Herodes und Rom. Stuttgart: Steiner 2007, 59–78. Lupu, Eran 2005. Greek Sacred Law: A Collection of New Documents (NGSL), RGRW 152. Leyden: Brill. Malay, Hasan 2003. ‘A Praise on Men Artemidorou Axiottenos’, EpAnat. 36, 13–18. ——1994. Greek and Latin Inscriptions in the Manisa Museum, Denkschriften / Österreichische Akad. der Wissenschaften, Phil.-Hist Kl. 237, Ergänzungsbände zu den TAM 19. Vienna: Österreichischen Akad. der Wissenschaften. ——2004. ‘Dedication of a Herm to Zeus Ariou’, EpAnat. 37, 179–80. ——2005. ‘%¸`˝—¸ˇ in Phrygia and Lydia’, EpAnat. 38, 42–4. Marek, Christian 2000. ‘Der höchste, beste, grösste, allmächtige Gott: Inschriften aus Nordkleinasien’, EpAnat. 32, 129–46. Merkelbach, Reinhold and Stauber, Josef 1996. ‘Die Orakel des Apollon von Klaros’, EpAnat. 27, 1–54. ——2001. Steinepigramme aus dem griechischen Osten, vol. 3: Der ‘Ferne Osten’ und das Landesinnere bis zum Tauros. Munich: K. G. Saur. Mitchell, Stephen 1993. Anatolia: Land, Men and Gods in Asia Minor, vol. II: The Rise of the Church. Oxford: Clarendon Press. ——1999. ‘The Cult of Theos Hypsistos between Pagans, Jews and Christians’, in Athanassiadi, Polymnia and Frede, Michael (eds), Pagan Monotheism in Late Antiquity. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 81–148. Nilsson, Martin P. 1963. ‘The High God and the Mediator’, HThR 56, 101–20. Nock, Arthur D. 1972. Essays on Religion and the Ancient World. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Pernot, Laurent, 2005. ‘Le lieu du nom (   Ie F OÆ ) dans la rhétorique religieuse des Grecs’, in Belayche, Nicole, Brulé, Pierre et al. (eds), Nommer les dieux : Théonymes, épithètes, épiclèses dans l’Antiquité. Recherches sur les rhétoriques religieuses 5. Turnhout: Brepols, 29–39. Petzl, Georg 1978. ‘Vier Inschriften aus Lydien’, in Sahin, Sencer, Schwertheim, Elmar, and Wagner, Jörg (eds), Studien zu Religion und Kultur Kleinasiens, EPRO 66/2. Leiden: Brill, 745–61. Petzl, Georg 1994. Die Beichtinschriften Westkleinasiens, EpAnat. 22. Bonn: R. Habelt. ——1998. Die Beichtinschriften im römischen Kleinasien und der Fromme und Gerechte Gott, Nordrhein-Westfälische Akad. der Wissenschaften G 355. Opladen: Westdeutscher Verlag.

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Ø”, Ath. Mitt. des kaiserlich deutschen arch. Instituts 37, 1–68.

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11 Mark’s Gospel and the Pre-History of Individuation Ian H. Henderson

The problem of defining individuality, especially within a more or less distinctively, even revolutionary, ‘Western’ or ‘modern’ cultural experience seems particularly urgent in the twenty-first century. If ‘individuation’ is, roughly, the changing relationship between a deeply intuited sense of ‘self ’ and a more social-linguistic, communicative, and pragmatic sense of ‘persona’,1 then it is distinguishable from related processes of ‘individualization,’ of social valorization of individual over collective identity. Typically a relatively distinctive ‘Western’ or ‘modern’ mode of individuation is held to perceive the self as radically autonomous and free to commit to outward relationships, and the persona as therefore primarily expressive of the self.2 Imaginative literature—dramas, (auto)biographies, letters, or, as contemporary New Testament studies would insist, gospels—would seem to document in the first place the history of individuation, only more indirectly participating in processes of individualization. Competing grand narratives of the emergence of modern individuality may locate the decisive step in the transformations of renaissance and reformation, or in an earlier twelfth-century awakening,3 or, again, they may find an emblematic figure in Augustine4 or Francis of Assisi5 or Petrarch.6 Still grander narratives associate a leap in personal consciousness with the rise of comprehensive 1 3 5

2 Anheim 2005, 187–8. Taylor 1989, 185. 4 Haskins 1955; Morris 1972. Cary 2000. 6 McMichaels 1997. Anheim 2005; Gillespie 2008.

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religious cultures in an ‘axial age’.7 Some grand narratives seek a bottom line of human self-consciousness modulating historically through the diversity of cultural perceptions and expressions.8

MARK IN THE GRAND NARRATIVES It is tempting to claim that the earliest narrative Gospel marks a revolutionary step toward distinctively Christian individuation and therefore collaterally toward Western and modern senses of the person. In fact, the complexity and ambiguity of Mark’s narrative about individuals—and the ironies of Mark’s reception history— undermine any radical distinction between modernity and premodern or mythological perceptions of the self. Certainly Mark was, within the proto-Christian movement, a boldly innovative and experimental text,9 responding dramatically to critical events such as the martyrdoms of Peter and Paul in Rome, the ending of the Julio-Claudian order, the outbreak of the Jewish war, and perhaps also the destruction of Jerusalem and dispersion of its Jesus-community a few years later. Mark surely had oral and literary sources and models. Yet Mark’s Gospel was very probably the first ever attempt to frame Jesus’ death narratively within what Martin Kähler famously called ‘extensive introduction’.10 Moreover, Mark’s Gospel argues not only for the universal significance of Jesus’ self-awareness and self-sacrifice, but also for the possibility of individual hearers intentionally assimilating their own self-understandings to Jesus’ chosen servanthood and death. In reception, especially by influencing Matthew, Luke-Acts and, less directly, John, Mark’s Gospel thus decisively helped cause an original perception of the individual. Paul’s letters, written in the decade or so before Mark, express, to be sure, remarkable intensity and complexity of self-understanding among Paul and his contacts. Paul certainly locates the Christian self

7

Jaspers 1949; Armstrong 2006. 9 Sorabji 2006. Boring 2006, 6–9. 10 Kähler 1896, 60, ‘Passionsgeschichten mit ausführlicher Einleitung’ referring in the first edition to Mark, then later to all four canonical gospels under Mark’s influence. 8

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in relation to the Cross, but he does not narrate the Self as simultaneously agent and victim as focally as Mark does. The character ‘Paul’ in Paul’s letters is fascinatingly individuated, especially beside the much blander figure ‘Paul’ in Acts: Paul’s epistolary ‘Paul’ is among a very few individuals before Augustine whose literary self-references support strong claims about individual religious experience (the sophists Aelius Aristides and Apuleius might be others). Yet Paul historically did not presuppose or anticipate ‘the introspective conscience of the West’.11 Rather, as all recent scholarship has increasingly recognized, Paul never stopped locating his own strong individuality and even that of his non-Jewish converts inside an awareness of God’s covenant with Israel. So Paul scarcely asks what personal traits of the particular individual, Jesus, made him uniquely appropriate to embody a new sacrificial relationship between God and Paul’s readers.12 By contrast with Paul’s letters, Mark is not about the individuation of its (anonymous) authorial voice. Yet it is both programmatic and historicizing in its portrayal of Jesus and the individuals with whom he interacted or might interact in the imagined future. This is not simply a function of biographical or historiographic versus epistolary genre.13 Mark’s narration ends with an emphatic, almost postmodern, refusal to let the story end (16:1–8). The historic author of Mark’s Gospel consciously decided to narrate Jesus’ repeated predictions of his death and resurrection (8:31–3; 9:31; 10:32–4), to narrate in detail the predicted death, but then not to narrate the events of the predicted resurrection. The gospel-writer ends his book abruptly at the Empty Tomb, yet includes prophecies of the Son of Man’s nearfuture resurrection and distant-future coming in judgement. Closure in Jesus’ story and the story of his disciples is thus projected beyond the end of the book into an eschatological future inhabited by Mark’s audience and the coming Son of Man.14 Mark’s story is one of ironic individuation in self-sacrifice. The character Jesus knows himself as the Son of Man anointed to die (8:29–32; 14:6–9) yet nonetheless agonizingly required to choose his self-sacrificial destiny (14:32–42). Moreover, he communicates to those who would follow him both that individuating, self-sacrificial 11 13 14

12 Stendahl 1963. Though see e.g. Rom. 1:3; Gal. 4:4. Becker 2006, 50–2, 401–7. Mark 13; see Boring 2006, 442–53, esp. 451 n. 1.

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destiny and the inalienable necessity of individually choosing (8:34–8; 10:35–45). As a result, Marcan narrative individuation of Jesus and his followers is prescriptive and continuous to a degree not expressed by Paul’s letters. Reading Mark’s composition as a consciously experimental response to a crisis in proto-Christian self-understanding helps explain how a distinctive experience of individuation was mediated from a small sect to become a civilizational motif: in an effort persuasively to connect the life-stories of his projected audience with the story of Jesus, the gospel-writer devised partly original literary conventions of individuation of characters. Elsewhere I have argued that Mark was originally composed as a leadership training manual, addressed to a primary audience of aspiring second generation leaders implanted within a larger audience of ‘little ones who believe’ (9:42).15 Mark’s narrative ‘was designed both to argue for the universal relevance of Jesus’ story and also, more particularly, to persuade would-be protoChristian leaders to adopt a particular self-understanding in the light of the Marcan Jesus’ past, historic relations with his disciples, his opponents, and others’.16 If this is correct, differential individuation of would-be leaders is expressed in Mark’s representation of Jesus’ discourse of servantleadership. Leadership in Mark is represented not merely in Near Eastern terms of servanthood or even slavery toward a patron God; Marcan leadership is portrayed distinctively—and explicitly against Gentile political ideals—as servanthood downward, toward those who are led, grounded in Jesus’ own self-dedication (10:41–5; 9:35; 13:33–7). Individuation of Marcan leaders is paradoxically related to intense, self-reflective, and voluntary sacrifice of persona—servus non habet personam. Nevertheless, many ironies attend the history of Mark’s reception and influence. If Mark was originally designed to provide formation for proto-Christian leadership, then it was quickly received within a wider, vaguer framework of Christian devotion generally. The Christian–Marcan way of teaching individuation as self-devotion became an important ingredient in modern discourses of individuation, extended from would-be leaders to all Christians, even all moderns.

15

See Henderson 2000, 53.

16

Henderson 2009, 4.

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Mark’s Gospel can be performed out loud in about an hour and a half, but we know almost nothing about how often this actually happened prior to the gradual development of those Gospel lectionary practices which submerged Mark into a fourfold gospel canon.17 Many elements of Marcan discourse of individuation were immediately moderated or transposed by Mark’s early imitators, Matthew, Luke-Acts, and John. Thus, for example, the Marcan Jesus is said to be a teacher, but only speaks in parables and oracles; by contrast, the post-Marcan Jesus actually gets to teach. Or again, the fiercely astringent Marcan characterization of Peter is tempered by explicit notes of rehabilitation in each of Matthew, Luke-Acts, and John as well as by the hermeneutical tradition designating Mark the work of Peter’s literary executor.18 Marcan influence on the history of individuation was mediated and moderated, if not eclipsed, by more ecclesially useful gospels. In pre-modern Bible-reception ‘little attention was paid to Mark as a distinct Gospel’.19 A further irony is the rediscovery of Mark in modern criticism. In the mid-nineteenth century Mark’s Gospel emerged from its reception history, partly through recognition of its source-critical priority among narrative gospels, but also partly through a Romantic appreciation of its perceived simplicity, immediacy to oral tradition, and relative freedom from dogma.20 For the first time in its history, Mark became attractive precisely because it was not Matthew, Luke-Acts, John, or Paul—and specifically because its authorial voice seemed less individuated, less intrusive between Jesus and the reader as his follower. Liberal Historical Jesus Research—both scholarly and in popular media—sought in Mark’s laconic Jesus a character into which to read a modern, even post-Christian individuation. Such modernist re-reading of Mark has been very much concerned to relate the person, Jesus, freed from all but the barest outlines of the Marcan narrative, to the conventions of individuation in modern discourse. Mark itself became Kleinliteratur, the reflection of mythological orality, transparent to Jesus’ alien individuality precisely because it lacked any real individuation on its own.21 The irony of this long-delayed 17

18 Henderson 2006, 83–5. Papias in Eusebius HE 3, 9, 15. Yarbro Collins 2007, 103–15, quoting 110; Cahill 1998. 20 Holtzmann 1863; Yarbro Collins 2007, 116. 21 Schmidt 1923, 76: ‘Das Evangelium ist von Haus aus nicht Hochliteratur, sondern Kleinliteratur, nicht individuelle Schriftstellerleistung, sondern Volksbuch, nicht Biographie, sondern Kultlegende.’ 19

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appropriation of Mark is all the more palpable as late modern study has increasingly acknowledged the artful intentionality of Mark’s narration and characterization. The affinity between Mark and modern criticism continued past the initial assumption of Marcan naivety. In what follows, then, I step back from modernity’s grand narratives to examine instead the complexity and diversity of Marcan discourses of individuation. I prefer to emulate the contributors to a recent volume of studies on the individual in the Middle Ages: Plutôt que de revenir une fois encore sur le pont aux ânes de la naissance de l’individu et de la conscience individuelle (que chaque historien a de bonnes raisons de placer à son époque de prédilection!), nous avons préféré, plus modestement, nous pencher sur le problème de «sujet de discours», c’est-à-dire des multiples constructions discursives dans lesquelles nous, Modernes, avons—à tort—tendance à voir autant de préfigurations du sujet autonome.22

My goal will be to identify the plurality of ‘sujets de discours’ as a particular textual experiment in the representation of Jesus and his would-be disciples. Careful reading of Mark does not lead teleologically toward realization of some coherent Western or modern style of individuation. Instead, various possibilities and modes of individuation are portrayed in Mark’s narrative as rhetorically instrumental to making Mark a persuasive argument, initially about individuation of would-be leaders in a sectarian minority, and eventually about individuation of believers in a narratively-mediated presence of God within a Christian oikoumene. There may be some useful resemblance here to the ‘Digression on Historical Explanation’ which Charles Taylor inserted, somewhat unexpectedly, in the middle of his study of ‘Sources of the Self ’.23 Taylor is refreshingly clear that his readings of literary and artistic influence do not constitute even a failed historical explanation of ‘the rise of (one aspect of) the modern identity’.24 Yet Taylor still expects his diachronic description to cast meaningful light on the innate complexity and plurality of that identity. His study is thus about ‘sources’, not about the sources, still less about the source, yet he does think he is talking about ‘The Making of the Modern Identity’ as 22 24

Iogna-Prat 2005, 119. Taylor 1996, 199.

23

Taylor 1996, 199–207.

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his subtitle claims: modern identity is a construct at least relatively different from some other patterns of individuation, owing much to the sort of complex seminal narrative which Mark presents. Taylor is emphatic that he is not writing the history of Western identity; yet he is also insistent on keeping in mind the historicity of the literary processes of individuation which he parses in representative complexity.25 In this sense it is historically more useful to describe Mark’s textual, rhetorical representation of individuation as a variable equilibrium of selfhood and mission than it is to insist on Marcan seminality. In particular the descriptive task must respect the limit that while a text may refer to the self, it can only actually do so as part of its representation of aspects of persona: only the reader of Mark can in principle be present as a fully individuated unity of self and persona. Mark shows an awareness of this issue in its extreme parsimony of characterization: even in a narrative which seeks to proclaim good news to the self it is impossible to represent the incommunicable and irreducible ‘self ’ apart from the contingencies of persona. Mark therefore evokes ‘self ’ by a carefully restricted narrative characterization and isolation of personae. All Marcan characters are strikingly (though not equally) ‘flat’, even by comparison with those of other gospels.26 One of the most important—and historically influential—ways in which Mark represents individuation as problematic is in frequent references to the demonic which I will therefore take up here (with occasional excursus) as a representative sample of Mark’s whole discourse and narrative.

DEMONS AND INDIVIDUATION IN MARK Early Christianity presented itself as a movement of largely exorcistic therapy. Christians offered even to outsiders a regime of healing, forgiveness, and purification expressed paradigmatically in rituals and stories of demon expulsion. ‘One might justly say that Christians 25

Taylor 1996, 207. Rhoads, Dewey, and Michie 1999, 116–17; Struthers Malbon 2000, 10–11, 222 n. 45; Merenlahti 1999. 26

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made a specialty of demon discernment and control’.27 This discourse of resisting, restraining, and expelling demons certainly did not originate in Mark’s Gospel; it was inherited from Second Temple Judaism,28 surely through Jesus’ own historic practice. Yet early Christian literature canonized a relatively new ‘interest in the interiority of possession’. ‘It is in the New Testament literature that the notion of indwelling possession begins to dominate the perception of humanity’s interaction with demonic and divine spiritual forces.’29 Practices and narratives of exorcism dramatically violated boundaries between Christian and polytheist; by triumphantly expelling a demonic presence a Christian persona demonstrates God’s access to the damaged and enslaved pre-Christian self. Within the historical framework of early Christian interest in aggressive anti-demonic activity and discourse, different literary texts and genres differ significantly.30 Although the Pauline letters share a world-view within which the cosmic demonic struggle can be reflected in individual experience,31 especially linked to polytheist idolatry,32 Paul focuses on the abstraction ‘Sin’ as the trans-subjective enslaving force which threatens even believers.33 Johannine literature is acutely aware of conflict between spirits, in the world and in the continuing experience of the faithful, but this is mainly conceived of as a problem of community discipline resulting in excommunication rather than exorcism.34 Overwhelmingly, actual narratives of protoChristian exorcisms are composed and performed under the influence of the Marcan stories: this is one area where Marcan influence seems to be non-ironic in relation to the development of a communicative individuation between Christians and their neighbours. ‘Exorcisms are the most prominent among the mighty deeds done by Jesus, according to Mark.’35 The four specific Marcan narratives of demon expulsion by Jesus himself 36 are full of complexities suggesting the ambiguity and uniqueness of actual encounters between Jesus and demonic presence in human existence. These actual expulsion stories stand in a certain tension over against the relatively tidy theory expressed in summary statements37 and in the commissioning 27 29 31 33 35 37

28 Frankfurter 2009. Yarbro Collins 2007, 49, 66–9, 436; Oegema 2003. 30 Sorensen 2002, 119. Mittmann-Richert 2003, 477, 488 n. 31. 32 1 Cor. 2:6; 12:1–5, 10. 1 Cor 10:20–1. 34 Rom 5–8; cf. Sorensen 2002, 155–66; Forbes 2001. 1 John 2:18–28. 36 Yarbro Collins 2007, 49, 66. Mark 1:21–8; 5:1–20; 7:24–31; 9:14–29. Mark 1:32–4; 3:10–12; compare the storm miracles, Mark 4:35–41; 6:45–52.

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of the Twelve and others (3:13–19; 6:7–13; 9:38–41). Two further passages about the demonic are especially important for questions about individuation: Jesus’ self-defence against a charge of black magic (3:22–30) and Jesus’ shockingly exorcistic response to Peter, ‘Get behind me, Satan!’ (8:27–38). Mark’s stories about Jesus’ expulsions of demons are often compared with formally similar anecdotes elsewhere;38 more striking than such similarities, however, is the unusual importance of such stories within Mark’s narrative about Jesus’ salvific, exorcistic death and resurrection. Before examining aspects of individuation in the main passages separately, a few general comments on Mark’s representation of exorcism and demons may be helpful. In none of the actual exorcism stories in Mark is Jesus portrayed as intentionally seeking out ‘possessed’ persons on whom to ‘perform’ an ‘exorcism’. Mark does not use quite our language of ‘possession’, ‘performance’, and ‘exorcism’ for suffering, detecting, and expelling demons. In Mark demons are ‘thrown out’ of human persons, yet a human ‘has’, or is ‘in’, a demonic spirit; in Mark demons do not reside in humans.39 There is an irony intrinsic to the logic of exorcism, but developed to the edge of parody in the way that Mark has the demons attempt to name and ‘exorcize’ or ‘adjure’ Jesus.40 Mark’s Jesus performs exorcisms and other personal miracles and eventually mandates his disciples to do the same, but Jesus is more programmatically associated with speaking in parables about God’s Sovereignty (3:23; 4:1–34) and with the two feeding miracles to which Jesus draws his disciples’ particular attention (6:30–44, 51–2; 8:1–21). Mark does not scruple to represent Jesus as using rather magicallooking ‘techniques’41 in his healing and resuscitation miracles (although Mark’s translations of Aramaic words emphasize, after all, their banality as ordinary speech). Moreover, Mark includes dramatic after-effects in exorcism stories as the demons leave their hosts. Nevertheless, the four exorcism anecdotes in Mark all emphasize the sovereignty of Jesus’ word; against Theodore J. Weeden, Mark is not polemic against a theios anēr Christology.42 38

Yarbro Collins 2007, 66–7, 164–6. Contrast Matthew 12:43–5 and Luke 11:24–6. 40 Mark 1:24; orkizō, 5:7; cf. Mittmann-Richert 2003, 488 n. 31; Theissen 1974, 96–7 n. 19; contra Sorensen 2002, 132 n. 88. 41 e.g. spittle, 7:33; 8:23; Aramaic voces barbarae, 5:41; 7:34. 42 Weeden 1971; see Focant 2004, 43. 39

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In the earlier episodes the demon initiates contact with Jesus, evidently seeking to gain pre-emptive control over Jesus by the ageold technique of naming his secret name (1:21–8; 5:1–20). Early in Mark the demons establish the possibility of expressing at least partially true propositions about Jesus’ persona, which nevertheless remain invalid expressions of his identity because of the voice in which they are spoken. ‘On fait l’impasse sur les conditions d’un dire vrai sur Jesus. Or ce qu’enonce l’“esprit”, est irrecevable par manque de sujet humain pour le dire.’43 The demons’ accurate but limited and illegitimate knowledge of Jesus’ persona ignores the centrality of the Cross and therefore does not give the expected control over his selfhood. The demons present themselves as voices, stolen from the personae of their victims and informed by an alien intelligence; the demons are not even potentially whole selves. In both the earlier stories the demonic voice dramatizes its strangely transpersonal quality by switching between singular and plural (‘we’ and ‘I’); in Mark 5 the alien plurality of the invasive demonic presence in one ‘host’ is further dramatized and politicized in the name ‘Legion’ (5:9), which it is forced to reveal on Jesus’ demand. Jean Delorme reminds us that in Mark there is no ontology of demons.44 In the two later Marcan exorcism stories a parent initiates contact with Jesus. In each of these scenes the parent engages Jesus in sharp repartee; the parent’s determination is vicariously instrumental in securing Jesus’ successful intervention (7:24–31; 9:14–29; also 5:22–3). Two stories (5:1–20; 7:24–31) explicitly relate demon-expulsion to the encounter between Jesus’ Jewish, monotheistic identity and Gentile polytheism: they are Jesus’ only personal encounters with Gentile ‘pagans’ in Mark prior to the day of his death, though other narratives also seem to be located in predominantly Gentile space.45 Subaltern political humour is unavoidable in the story of Jesus expelling a

43

Delorme 2008, I 124. ‘Rappelons qu’en Mc il n’y a pas de manifestation d’esprits impurs en dehors de corps ou ils peuvent loger. Un esprit impur ne peut pas parler sans le faire à travers un corps humain qui lui sert de moyen de communication. Quand le collectif démoniaque nommé ‘Légion’ se retrouve chez les porcs, il ne parle plus mais il les conduit à la mort (5, 6–13). Ce qui veut dire que Mc ne s’intéresse pas au diable lui-même (à la démonologie), mais aux effets des esprits impurs chez les êtres humains.’ Delorme 2008, II 84n. 47; compare Boring 1999, 451–9. 45 Mark 10 :33; 15:1–47, esp. 38–9; 7 :31–8:9. 44

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‘Legion’ of demons from a Gentile into a herd of pigs which then destroys itself (5:1–20). Insofar as exorcism is a sign of restored individuation, it is for Mark quite consciously a sign of the possibility of political transformation in Jesus’ community and, eschatologically, in the world. For an enquiry into the history of individuation, the Marcan exorcism stories have the dangerous advantage that they are clearly symbolic narratives, recounted in part for their capacity for handling explicitly yet indirectly motifs of ethnic-political and personal conflict.46 Mark’s exorcism stories are about the ‘Verdrängung menschlicher Subjektivität’,47 but it is a misleading reduction to characterize ‘das “Dämonische”’ in Mark as ‘wesentlich das Unpersönliche bzw. das “Ausbleiben der Innerlichkeit”’.48 Above all, exorcism focuses a programmatic continuity between Jesus’ own narrated behaviour in Mark and the prescribed behaviour of his disciples, both in the narrated story and in the continuing story beyond the book’s ending. Early in Mark Jesus establishes within his discipleship group an inner circle of Twelve with an open-ended mission ‘to proclaim and to have authority to throw out demons’ (3:13–19). Within the Twelve, Jesus further designates Three, giving them somewhat ambiguous, if not gently mocking, nick-names: Simon ‘Rock’; James and John ‘sons of Thunder’. The Three hold no special office, but they are privileged witnesses to key moments in the representation of Jesus’ intimacy with the Father.49 Narratively, the mission of the Twelve is actualized several chapters later when Jesus sends them out in pairs to proclaim repentance, expel demons, and heal the sick (6:7–13, 30). Generally in Mark the Twelve, the Three, and Peter are portrayed pitilessly as uncomprehending and ineffective, despite their privileged access to Jesus;50 they serve as literary foils through whom the narrator instructs the readers and invites them to more effective discipleship through alertness and self-enslavement. Peter’s spectacular failures in particular are given only the faintest hint of redemption in Mark (16:7) in contrast with the much more extensive indications

46

47 Theissen 1974, 45–50; 254. Theissen 1974, 97. Drewermann 1989, I 265 n.34, italics original. 49 Raising Jairus’ daughter, 5:35–43; the Transfiguration, 9:2–10; Gethsemane, 14:32–42. 50 Yarbro Collins 2007, 708–9. 48

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of post-Easter rehabilitation in the other canonical gospels.51 Mark thus comes close indeed—though not quite all the way—to being a polemic against the official disciples52 or even an anarchist tract against any ‘leadership’.53 The mission in chapter 6 is the only passage in Mark where the disciples are shown as fully functional. More characteristic of Mark are two later stories predicated upon the disciples’ continuing yet troubled practice of exorcism. In one Jesus expels a demon from a young person after his disciples had failed to do so (9:14–29). In the other story Jesus permits someone who is not a disciple of his disciples to perform exorcisms in his name (9:38–41). Jesus’ disciples are supposed to throw out demons, but they control no special technology or exclusive licence for doing so. We may now review more specifically and at the risk of some repetition the main references to demonic activity in their narrative order within Mark’s Gospel, without pretensions to exegetical adequacy, but only noting Marcan ways of representing individuation.

1:21–8 The first miracle attributed to Jesus in Mark is programmatic: set in a Sabbath-meeting, the story insists on Jesus’ ‘teaching’ and its ‘authority’, so unlike that of the scribes. Yet the narrator paradoxically gives Jesus’ teaching no propositional content; Jesus only speaks to command the impure spirit to be silent and leave its victim. The main speech is attributed to the ‘person in an impure spirit’ who begins in the first person plural, asking Jesus formulaically, ‘What is there for us and for you?54 Have you come to destroy us?’ then switches to the singular, ‘I know who you are, the Holy One of God.’ The demonic persona is ambiguous in its relationship to its human presence and in its ability to express truth falsely. The designation ‘impure spirit’ is typical of Mark, but by no means self-evident: Mark uses both daimonion55 and pneuma akatharton 51

Matt. 16:17–19; John 21; Luke 24:12; Acts 1:15; 2:14 passim. Weeden 1971. 53 Horsley 2001, 81–97. 54 Judg. 11:12; 1 Kings 17:18; Mark 5:7; John 2:4. 55 Mark 1:34, 39; 3:15, 22; 6:13; 7:26–30; 9:38; see also daimonizomai 1:32; 5:.15–18. 52

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frequently,56 but the latter predominates in the actual exorcism stories. Clinton Wahlen (2004) has rightly insisted on important connotative difference between these terms, above all in Mark. In pre-Marcan Jewish literature57 a ‘spirit of impurity’ is a spirit which inspires humans, especially false prophets, to authorise or adopt idolatrous practices.58 In Mark it seems that the impure spirits are themselves the impurity, regardless of any adverse behavioural consequences they have for those who ‘have’ or are ‘in’ them. Moreover, these impure spirits are expelled by Jesus or in his name and not by any particular ritual practice. The ‘holiness’ of Jesus, and the spirit he mediates, and the impurity of the various demonic spirits in Mark constitute a system of purity59 which seems to operate at the level of personal (dis)individuation regardless of the procedural or propositional knowledge one might expect from ‘new authoritative teaching’: in Mark human selves are profaned by what comes out ‘from within from the heart’ (7.14–23). Finally, we also notice from this early story onward just how ‘flat’ most Marcan characters are: we learn absolutely nothing about the further development of the demon-freed persona.

3:22–30 Jesus’ self-defence against the charge of being a sorcerer, using demonic influence to manipulate demons, moves Mark’s discourse away from an interest in individuation toward a more abstract dualism of Satan’s sovereignty versus God’s sovereignty in Jesus. Both Matthew and Luke follow this story shortly with the Q tradition of the return of an impure spirit to the house—the person—from which it had formerly been expelled.60 The Marcan parable works rather differently,61 with Satan as the strong ‘master of the house’ (ba‘al zěbûl)62 who is bound by one who is stronger and his belongings and house plundered. On this reading humanity as a whole finds itself 56 57 58 59 60 61 62

Mark 1:23, 26–7; 3:11, 30; 5:2, 8, 13; 7:25; 9:25. Zechariah 13:1–6, Jubilees 10:1, and Qumran. Lange 2003, 254–68; Yarbro Collins 2007, 167–8 nn. 60, 63. Neyrey 1986. Matt. 12:43–5, Luke 11:24–6. Twelftree 1993, 112; compare LXX Isa. 49:24–5, Sorensen 2002, 140–2. Focant 2004, 153.

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objectified (ta skeuē autou, 3:27) under Satan’s proprietorship and dominion, rather than just those individuals who are singularly ‘demon possessed’. Thus humanity’s deliverance comes not from being individually pilfered, but from the strong man being definitively bound by one who is stronger. The Marcan parable makes demonic dominance a universal aspect of the human condition to be transformed by the victory of the Cross. Jesus’ parables and his exorcisms as recounted in Mark have very similar functions. Both Marcan genres are designed to effect in Mark’s auditors transformations of identity and relationship rather than, say, changes in doctrine about demonology. Individual exorcisms, then, function mainly to indicate that it is Jesus who is ‘strong’ enough to bind Satan—stronger than John the Baptizer (1:7); stronger than others not strong enough to exorcize (5:4, 9:18); stronger than those not strong enough even just to stay awake (14:37). Jesus’ opponents in Mark do not deny the success of his exorcisms, but instead regard them reductively as demonological transactions; this is the unpardonable blasphemy in Mark because it destroys the point of re-telling these stories, which is that the crucified Jesus exorcizes the world in a way which is good news to all readers.63 More prosaically, Mark is training the reader not to be too interested in the exorcisms as such.

5:1–20 The long exorcism story of the swine-legion presents many exegetical challenges which need not detain us here. I have also already mentioned typical characteristics of Marcan exorcisms which climax in the telling of this story, notably the hint of ritual parody as the demons try futilely to exorcize Jesus; the sub-personal character of demons apart from human hosts; and the symbolic extension of Jesus’ action: in Mark 1 to synagogue and Sabbath observance, in this story into an ethnicized and politicized Gerasene (or Gadarene in Matthew) space beyond Israel. Here it remains to note this story’s

63

Boring 2006, 64.

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unusual emphasis on the personal aftermath of the demon expulsion for the individual who has been delivered and for his community. After the exorcism and the spectacular, if geographically implausible, self-drowning of the pigs, people come out from the polis ‘to see what it was that had happened’ (5:14). What these people see is unspectacular, but also far from introspective: they see ‘the demoniac sitting, clothed, behaving (sōphronounta), after having had the “legion”’ (5:15). Even before hearing details of the man’s transformation and of the destruction of the pigs, the people from the polis respond to their neighbour’s new sanity with fear (5:15). ‘To be afraid’ (phobeisthai) in Mark is worth a short excursus here.64 In Mark fear characterizes a basic subjective state of the self after significant contact with Jesus’ persona yet prior to transformation by him. Just before the story of the demoniac, Mark uses exactly the same form for the response of Jesus’ disciples to his quite exorcistic rebuke of the tempest and his challenge to them, ‘“Do you not yet have faith?”—and they feared a great fear’ (4:40–1). In the first of the two interlocking miracle-stories which follow the Legion episode, the woman who has felt herself healed after touching Jesus is ‘afraid and trembling’ when Jesus asks who has touched him (5:33). A few sentences later Jesus tells Jairus, who has just heard of his daughter’s death, ‘Do not fear; only trust!’ (5:36). Here fear and trust, that is faith, are explicitly constructed as the competing paradigmatic responses to Jesus; fear constructs the self as liminal, on the threshold of faith, but also capable of failing to act. Fear is thus likewise Herod’s interim response to John the Baptist (6:20). After walking across the storm-waves Jesus commands his disciples not to fear (6:50). Jesus’ priestly and scribal enemies are temporarily restrained by their fear of him and the crowd (11:18, 32; 12:12). In an extremely important sequence, Jesus’ disciples and followers respond to his predictions of the Cross with fear (9:32; 10:32). Finally, in Mark’s last words, the women at the Empty Tomb fail to deliver the resurrection message ‘for they were afraid (ephobounto gar)’ (16:8). Fear in this Marcan sense does not individuate, since groups can fear, but it does define the Marcan self, in the presence of Jesus, but hesitating on the verge of faith or trust.

64

Yarbro Collins 2007, 799–800.

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It remains to note how uniquely the Gerasene story establishes the exdemoniac as an agent in the non-Israelite future of the gospel (5:18–20). Perhaps Mark’s story was based on a specific ‘foundation-story’ of Gentile churches in the Trans-Jordan.65 As told by Mark, however, the ending of the story becomes paradigmatic for an eventual universal mission in which leadership is not confined to the symbolically Israelite Twelve. The presumably non-Israelite ex-demoniac approaches Jesus and asks to be ‘with him’ in the same phrase that the narrator had used to describe one aspect of Jesus’ calling of the Twelve (3:1).66 Jesus refuses, but assigns the man to go home and tell his own people what the Lord had done. The man goes and begins proclaiming Jesus in Gentile territory (5:20). This is a significant moment in Mark as the exdemoniac models an effective leadership which is not apostolic and not Jewish, but which is nonetheless based in a strongly individuated calling by Jesus. Mark’s readers cannot become members of Jesus’ Twelve and cannot be ‘with him’ in Galilee, but Mark’s readers can individually choose to emulate the ex-demoniac in the hope of receiving a similar personal mandate.

7:24–31 The story of the Syrophoenician Hellenic woman is another limited opening toward a post-Easter Jesus movement among non-Jews, as the story stresses the serious, but not absolute, priority (prōton) of Jews over non-Jews in Jesus’ programme (7:27). Mark expects a mission to Gentiles before (prōton) the eschaton (13:10), but the pre-Easter Jesus has almost no contact with Gentiles except in these two exorcisms. Against the background of ethno-religious identities and large-scale eschatology, the fate of the woman’s daughter depends on the mother and Jesus negotiating an exceptional, private arrangement in a shockingly unguarded exchange. Like the Gerasene and other anonymous one-episode characters, the woman is strongly but superficially individuated: we know little about her, but the story absolutely hinges on her metic, agonistic initiative in relation to Jesus’ sovereign disposition. Her individuation is only schematically indicated, but is central to the story.67 In Mark 65 67

Boring 2006, 150. Ringe 2004, 79–100.

66

Cf. Boring 2006, 153.

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the largely dysfunctional named disciples stand in striking contrast with a series of minor characters who command attention as constituting a remarkable discourse of individuation. In contrast with the official disciples, anonymous, single-episode characters in Mark are portrayed as in themselves remarkably effective. Yet, although they individually receive Jesus’ positive attention and miraculous help, they do not become his followers. These minor characters are presented as exemplary for Mark’s readers, and yet Mark seems to invite its readers to commit themselves further to following Jesus beyond the crisis of a single episode. In their brief moments of narrative time [minor characters] serve as models for attitudes and behaviors appropriate also for the major characters of the narrative and especially for the implied audience. . . . Only minor characters, never major characters such as the disciples or the religious leaders, are healed by Jesus in the Markan narrative, and the minor characters whom he has healed exemplify faith in Jesus’ power and authority.68

Such characters in Mark represent a self stripped of persona yet able to approach Jesus and elicit his most positive responses. This abstract yet positive representation of the self in approach to Jesus is sufficiently pronounced as to be often modified in post-Marcan redaction. Thus, for example, the story of Jesus’ anointing at Bethany, one of few episodes to appear in some form in each of the canonical gospels, is told in Mark as the semantically isolated gesture of an anonymous woman—not a repentant sinner,69 nor a named character.70 Mark’s Jesus reserves to himself the right to interpret her ‘noble action’ (14:6), as a preparation for his death, and strangely predicts, still without naming the woman, that, wherever the Good News is proclaimed in the whole world, what she has done will be told as her memorial. (14:9)

8:27–38 Mark 8:27–38 is not usually regarded as an exorcism story. Peter’s challenge to the necessity of Jesus’ death is recounted, however, in 68 69

Struthers Malbon 2000, 198; 199. 70 Luke 7:36–50. John 12:1–8.

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exorcistic terms. In Mark 8.27 Jesus asks his disciples, ‘Who do people say that I am?’ Next he asks the disciples who they themselves say that he is (8:29). Only then does Jesus begin explaining the destiny of the suffering (8:31) and coming (8:38) Son of Man. The sequence is important: the initial question invites the disciples to focalize external, alien perceptions of Jesus’ persona, his rhetorical and social ethos. Jesus invites a distinction between such perceptions and the disciples’ own discernment. The disciples themselves have posed the question in Jesus’ quite exorcistic calming of a storm, ‘Who is this person?’ (4:41). In a further, even more supernatural, incident, of Jesus walking upon the storm, Jesus assured the disciples that he is not a phantasm (6:49) with the numinous words ‘It is I (egō eimi); do not fear’.71 Projecting what others say about Jesus, the disciples exemplify a strategy of transpersonal identification: some said Jesus was John the Baptist, others Elijah, others still one of the prophets (8:28). Mark’s audience have already heard this ‘popular’ speculation, and especially that Jesus was somehow functioning as a resurrected John the Baptist (6:14–15). In Mark these are false associations, but they are taken seriously. Furthermore, a complex identification between John the Baptist and Elijah as eschatological forerunners is implicitly affirmed by Jesus himself (9:11–13): in John’s death Elijah’s role as eschatological restorer of Israel has (paradoxically) been fulfilled in rather the same (unclear, and evolving) way that Jesus’ impending suffering, condemnation, and resurrection (9:9–10) will inaugurate and fulfil the role of the Son of Man.72 This raises the central explicit issue of individuation within Mark’s narrative, that of the Marcan Jesus’ implicit, nuanced, deferred selfidentification with the linguistic symbol of ‘the Son of Man (ho huios tou anthrōpou)’. The phrase ‘the Son of Man’ is notoriously restricted to direct speech attributed to Jesus. Bultmann’s heuristic triage of the Synoptic Jesus’ ‘Son of Man’ speech-habit has become standard, dividing sayings about the present authority of Son of Man (2:10, 28; 10:45); sayings about suffering and rising Son of Man;73 and sayings about the coming, judging (Danielic) Son of Man.74 This is not the place to untangle the tradition-historical problem posed by this speech pattern, or even to discuss the Marcan usage as a 71 73 74

72 6:50, cf. 13:6; 14:62. Joynes 2005, 455–67. Mark 8:31; 9:9, 12, 31; 10:33–4, 45; 14:21, 41. Mark 8:38; 13:26–7; 14:62; cf. Bultmann 1953, 31.

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whole.75 But we cannot think of individuation in Mark without noting the centrality of the literary and christological construction of Jesus’ implicit, deferred, and oblique yet insistent self-identification as the one who speaks of ‘the Son of Man’ and whose destiny is that, at least, of the suffering and rising Son of Man. Here the Marcan Jesus projects a level of individuation close to radical self-hood, yet in its content and development that self-identity is also systematically deflected away from realization as a distinct narrative character: Eugene Boring rightly emphasizes that in Mark the ‘Christological language of the Son of Man sayings is thoroughly theocentric’.76 The tension between Mark’s ‘historical’, that is narrated, John the Baptist and eschatological Elijah mirrors the even more complex and pervasive tension between Jesus appearing in Mark’s narrative and the suffering, rising, and eventually judging Son of Man appearing in Jesus’ own super-narrative accounts of himself. The tension between Jesus, as Mark narrates his character, and ‘the Son of Man’, as Jesus defers himself in his own self-presentation, is a key challenge to Mark’s reader. Full individuation of either John or Jesus must wait. Martin Dibelius famously called Mark ‘a book of secret epiphanies’:77 Jesus’ persona is both revealed and hidden throughout the story, to be fully exposed only in the mysterious connection among the Cross, as narrated inside Mark, the Resurrection, at the threshold between Mark’s narrative and the readers’ world, and a still future Judgement. Individuation in Mark is eschatological, at best proleptic in any narrative about the present or past. The present, whether of Mark’s story or of Mark’s reader, displays an unsettling eschatological permeability of personae. In Jesus’ statements about himself (or ‘the Son of Man’) as well as in the story of the crucifixion of the one who commands the tempest, the reader experiences the eschatological significance of the haunting indeterminacy of self. When Jesus asks the disciples themselves who they say that he is, Peter answers, ‘You are the anointed’ (8:29), an answer which at the mid-point of Mark’s narrative is still deeply under-determined, but which is at least categorically different than answering, ‘You are John the Baptist’. Jesus silences the disciples about this perception and begins teaching them with new clarity about the necessity of ‘the Son of Man’ dying and being raised. This is the first of three 75 77

76 Wink 2002; Hooker 1967; Boyarin 2010. Boring 2006, 252. Dibelius 1919, 64, 78, 232, ‘ein Buch der geheimen Epiphanien’.

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passion-and-resurrection predictions which structure the centre of Mark’s book (8:31–3; 9:31; 10:32–4). Peter ‘rebukes’ (epitiman) Jesus, but is himself rebuked like storms and demons elsewhere already in Mark;78 Peter and Jesus are engaged in the same kind of power struggle as that between ‘Legion’ and Jesus earlier (5:7–9). The exorcistic force of Jesus’ address to Peter as ‘Satan’ cannot be ignored,79 though it need not be exaggerated: Satan in Mark is a more complex character than the petty demons which reflect his influence.80 Jesus’ procedure stands out among exorcism-stories in that it is not the expulsion of a demon from a human victim, but rather the repression of Satan himself identified here with Peter. Does this exorcism free Peter? In the next narrative, that of Jesus’ transfiguration, Peter is brought up the mountain of epiphany, but continues to behave erratically (9:2–10). I cannot tell whether Mark was written for an audience which was already familiar with traditions of Peter’s eventual glorious martyrdom; internal to Mark’s book, Peter is a privileged failure. Only here, however, in his attempt to dissociate Jesus’ anointing from the death of the Son of Man, is Peter’s persona presented as unequivocally satanic: curiously being satanic here depends on Peter thinking in merely human terms (8:33). Peter’s marginalization has huge implications for the existence of the readers. After dismissing Peter, Jesus turns to ‘the crowd, with his disciples’ and says (8:34–5): If anyone wishes to follow behind me, let him deny himself and let him take up his cross and let him follow me. For whoever wishes to save his life (psychē) shall lose it, But whoever loses his life (psychē)—for my sake and the gospel’s— shall save it.

These words are a momentous turning-point. Hitherto in Mark Jesus attracts crowds and suppliants, but people become his followers only by his direct, imperious nomination (1:16–20; 2:14). Volunteers are

78 Mark 8:32–3; see 1:25; 3:12; 4:39 (Focant 2004, 323; Mittmann-Richert 2003, 488 n. 31) and later 9:25 (Yarbro Collins 2007, 261 and n. 27). 79 Focant 2004, 323; Boring 2006, 242. 80 Mark 1:12–13; 3:23–6; 4:15; cf. Yarbro Collins 2007, 407.

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not accepted (5:19). Now, in view of Peter’s demonic failure, Jesus articulates a way by which anyone—especially Mark’s reader—may individually choose to become Jesus’ follower. ‘Taking up one’s cross’ here is more metonymic than metaphoric: especially if readers know stories of Peter’s death and Neronic martyrdoms,81 the condition of the post-Marcan disciples requires a new identification between them and Jesus which resembles, by opposition, the relationship between Satan and humanity.82 Some projected readers who choose this new possibility may reasonably expect to suffer for it, even on crosses of their own. Later Jesus will associate following him in one person’s case with a level of voluntary divestment.83 Psychē then does not mean ‘self ’ only as a locus of thought or will, though Jesus mentions both these faculties in the immediate context; psychē refers to ‘self ’ as a continuum of particularity across time, especially between a challenging immediate future and a divinely-determined eschatological future. Voluntarily losing ‘self ’ or ‘life’ here is not radical disindividuation, but rather pragmatic self-sacrifice and deferral for a cause which promises eschatological reconstitution.

9:14–29 Ulrike Mittmann-Richert notes the paradigmatic importance of the remaining exorcism story as a response to the frighteningly ambiguous scene of Peter’s messianic confession and demonic catastrophe.84 In a dramatic sequence which any reader or listener is likely to perceive consciously, the story about expelling a demon from an apparent epileptic is separated from the story of Peter’s confessionexorcism only by the Transfiguration. The exorcism episode begins, as we noted above, from the premise of the disciples’ failure: in Jesus’ absence they are not strong enough (9:18) to fulfil their mission. If this is a picture of the post-Easter church,85 it is not a comforting one. Later the disciples ask privately why they failed and Jesus answers unhelpfully, ‘This kind cannot come out in any way except in prayer’ (9:29). Mark’s Jesus often prays or commands prayer, but he is not 81 83 85

Boring 2006, 244. Mark 10:21, cf. 12:41–4. Boring 2006, 273.

82

Mittmann-Richert 2003, 488. 84 Mittmann-Richert 2003, 494.

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very instructive on the subject, mentioning it almost as an afterthought to the destruction of the Temple (11:15–19; 23–5). Jesus is even less helpful about ‘kinds’ of demon. Frustration with Jesus’ answer is reflected in the manuscript tradition with the scribal addition of ‘ . . . and fasting’: at least some readers longed for more technical guidance on the arts of exorcism and prayer here. In Mark, prayer is not presented as the power to exorcise; rather, in Mark human subjects retain or retrieve their subjective identity by admitting powerlessness and seeking help.86 This final exorcism story is also remarkable for its thick representation of the suppliant father, in an exceptionally long and lively dialogue with Jesus. Once again in Mark Jesus is approached by a desperate parent; parents desperate for the healing or exorcism of a sick or disturbed child were a significant and receptive part of Mark’s potential Greco-Roman audience—and of the clientele of protoChristian exorcists.87 The suppliant and initially frustrated father here is likely an effective communicative link between Mark’s discourse and extra-textual personae in Mark’s social world. This coheres with the father’s identification as ‘one from the crowd’ (9:17). He addresses Jesus as ‘Teacher’, a form of address which is rarely unambiguous in Mark (9:17),88 and he describes his son symptomatically as ‘having an unspeaking spirit’, rather than the narrator’s preferred ‘impure’ spirit.89 Although the father also describes other, life-threatening behavioural distortions (9:18, 22), the spirit’s salient characteristic is incommunicativity. Jesus must therefore adjure the spirit without ascertaining its magical name (9:25); the demon leaves, now making lots of noise and nearly killing the son, who is ‘raised’ by Jesus, but who doesn’t get to speak in his own voice, not even to prove Jesus’ success (9:26–7). The long-lasting (‘since childhood’) inarticulate relation between son and demon in this story seems more ferociously destructive than hitherto in Marcan demon stories. The heart of the story, however, remains the dialogue between Jesus and the father, beginning with the father’s report of the disciples’ failure. Jesus responds, echoing divine complaints against the faithlessness of Israel and humanity.90 Jesus asks how long the son 86 88 89 90

87 Delorme 2008, II 102–3. Bolt 2003. Cf. 4:38; 10:17, 20, 35; 12:14, 18, 32; 13:1. Cf. Mark 9:25. Num. 14:11; Mark 8:12, 38; cf. Boring 2006, 273–4.

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has been afflicted with the demonic presence and the father answers ‘from childhood’ (9:21): this father has never known his son apart from this self-destructive possession (9:22). Finally the father appeals to Jesus’ power (‘If you can . . . ’) and to his emotions in words which recall Jesus’ purification of a leper in Mark 1:40–1. Jesus’ reply, echoing the father’s words, ‘“If you can . . . ”! All things are possible for one who believes’ (or ‘trusts’) (9:23), also echoes other moments when Jesus declares all things possible for God (10:27; 14:36) and in which prayer and believing or trusting are emphatically linked (11:23–5). The father then begins crying out, ‘I do believe, help me in my unbelief ’ (or ‘distrust’)! (9:24). The progressions in the father’s discourse hint at his individuation: he begins by telling the disciples what to do, then moves through polite request to abject prayer toward Jesus; moreover, the father’s requests move from ‘I have brought my son to you’ (9:17), to ‘help us, pitying us’ (9:22), to ‘help me’ (9:24). The father in this, for Mark, extremely important story expresses progression toward increasingly ‘radical reflexivity’,91 culminating in a classic formulation of the paradox of Christian existence as prayer.

9:38–41 One last passage is essential in any review of the demonic and individuation in Mark, especially as it also models continuity between the literary representation of exorcism and the anticipated experience of Jesus’ agents in a post-Easter world. In context, Jesus is addressing his core group of twelve disciples (though others are present, including at least one child). John, one of the innermost Three,92 questions Jesus about an outsider who performs (apparently successful) exorcisms ‘in your [Jesus’] name’ (9:38). The discussion is not simply about people in general who admire Jesus, but specifically about people who exercise special power in his name. This is, moreover, the only place in Mark where one of Jesus’ official ‘followers’ claims that others ought to ‘follow’ them. Jesus’ response makes it practically impossible for his ‘followers’ to have

91

Taylor 1996, 130–1.

92

Mark 3:16–17; 5:37; 9:2; 14:33.

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‘followers’ of their own. This is a major structural decision for the Jesus movement, with massive implications for Christian individuation: in Mark Jesus’ disciples do not have disciples. Rabbis, philosophers, and artisans take on disciples who, if they are successful, grow up to take on disciples of their own, thus perpetuating the ‘school’ or the ‘craft’ and to some extent replicating the persona of the founder. Mark’s Jesus is not founding such a school. Later in Mark Jesus’ startling redirection of Passover symbolism enacts a more intense identification of mutual embodiment in the covenant community.93 Beyond identifying with the exodus community in the Passover re-enactment, Jesus’ disciples ingest (especially in his ‘blood’) his most intimate identity, an identity paradoxically poured out to establish covenant ‘for many’ (14:24; 10:45). Privileged disciples are, moreover, permitted to identify with Jesus’ own ‘cup’ as the sign both of the particularity and the communicability of personal destiny (14:36; 10:38–40). Thus, when John and James seek to determine Jesus’ will by their own volition (thelein),94 they receive instead the assurance that they will share Jesus’ personal cup and personal baptism. Competition from charismatically self-authenticating alternative leaders is not a hypothetical situation for Mark’s original audience. The ‘apostle’ Paul went, by his own testimony, from being an active opponent of Jesus’ movement to being an apparently self-declared leader and major innovator within it, never fully accepted. Paul swears that he moved into Christian leadership without consulting those who could legitimate their leadership by appeal to pre-Easter affiliation.95 Instead Paul appeals to a direct inner revelation of Jesus expressed in the literary framework of a biblical prophet-vocation narrative.96 Paul himself never claims to have cast out demons, yet Acts attributes exorcisms to him (16:16–24; 19:11–19). Mark 9:38–41 suggests that Paul was not the only alternative leader dynamic enough to contest the official disciples’ reasonable claim to represent Jesus in exclusivity. Indeed, by the very fact of providing for the first time a narrative gospel Mark offers its readers a newly independent textual and 93

Mark 14:22–4; see 1 Cor. 11:23–6, 12:12. Mark 10:35, 36, 43, 44; see also 1:40; 3:13; 6:22; 7:24; 8:34, 35; 9:13, 35; 9:30; 10:51; 14:7, 36; 15:12. 95 96 Gal. 1:20; Acts 1:21–2. Gal. 1:13–24; 1 Cor. 15:10; Jer. 1:5; Isa. 49:1. 94

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voluntary access to Jesus apart from oral tradition and community discipline—even, in principle, apart from intense charismatic experience. Mark’s book allows non-followers of the apostles to construct themselves individually through reading, imagination, and faithful application as followers of Jesus in a strong and particular sense. Unlike Paul’s reader (though curiously like Paul himself), the Marcan reader may choose to become like the Twelve, not only a believer, but also Jesus’ agent. The Marcan Jesus solemnly (and in rather strange phrasing) approves of honouring the disciples, not in virtue of their superior apostolic legitimacy, but because they are directly possessed by Jesus as God’s Anointed (9:41).

CONCLUSION I believe this restricted survey is a fair representation of the central problems of individuation in Mark, of the individuation of the character ‘Jesus’ in sovereign yet self-sacrificial tension with the verbal symbol ‘the Son of Man’ and, of the individuation finally of the reader in a parallel tension with the story’s characters, incidents, argument and harrowing plot. One strength of Charles Taylor’s Sources of the Self is that it takes seriously not only theoretical texts, but also what he calls the ‘epiphanic’ quality of post-Romantic, modernist art, marked paradoxically by ‘a slide to subjectivism and an anti-subjectivist thrust’.97 By an ‘epiphany’ Taylor has in mind a work of art as the locus of a manifestation which brings us into the presence of something which is otherwise inaccessible, and which is of the highest moral or spiritual significance; a manifestation, moreover, which also defines or completes something, even as it reveals. . . . it may no longer be clear what the work portrays or whether it portrays anything at all; the locus of epiphany has shifted to within the work itself.98

Mark’s Gospel was certainly designed both to portray (in the past) and to manifest (in a now remote present) the possibility of covenant with an otherwise inaccessible God through remarkably individual 97

Taylor 1996, 456.

98

Taylor 1996, 419.

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interaction with Jesus: Mark is a parable and an apocalypse not an epiphany in Taylor’s non-portrayal sense. Mark’s Jesus is not a cipher of modern selfhood; rather he is the literary, self-consciously parabolic evocation of the one who has gone on ahead back to Galilee (14:29; 16:7). Ironically, as a stark portrayal of selves in relation to Jesus, Mark quickly elicited the revisionary attentions of later gospelwriters, more interested than Mark in, for example, Jesus’ ethics. Marcan literary/imaginative individuation of characters was designed experimentally to shape the deepest self-understanding of readers with whom we can only very tentatively identify: perhaps it is this experimentality which allows Mark to address a late modern self.

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Cary, Phillip 2000. Augustine’s Invention of the Inner Self: The Legacy of a Christian Platonist. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Cook, J.G. 1997. ‘In Defence of Ambiguity: Is There a Hidden Demon in Mark 1.29–31?’, NTS 43, 184–208. Delorme, Jean 2008. L’heureuse annonce selon Marc: Lecture intégrale du deuxième évangile. (ed. Jean-Yves Thériault), 2 vols. Paris: Cerf. Dibelius, Martin 1919. Die Formgeschichte des Evangeliums. Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck. Drewermann, Eugen 1989. Das Markusevangelium: Bilder von Erlösung vol. I: Mk 1,1 bis 9,13; vol. II: Mk 9,14 bis 16,20. Olten: Walter-Verlag. Focant, Camille 2004. L’évangile selon Marc. Commentaire biblique, Nouveau Testament 2. Paris: Cerf. Forbes, Chris 2001. ‘Paul’s Principalities and Powers: Demythologizing Apocalyptic?’, Journal for the Study of the New Testament 82, 61–88. Frankfurter, David 2009. ‘Review of Graham H. Twelftree, In the Name of Jesus: Exorcism among Early Christians’, Review of Biblical Literature. . Gillespie, Michael Allen 2008. The Theological Origins of Modernity. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Haskins, Charles Homer 1955. The Renaissance of the Twelfth Century. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Henderson, Ian H. 2000. ‘ “Salted with Fire” (Mark 9:42–50): Style, Oracles and (Socio)Rhetorical Gospel Criticism’, Journal for the Study of the New Testament 80, 45–67. ——2006. ‘Early Christianity, Textual Representation and Ritual Extension’, in Elm, Dorothee, Rüpke, Jörg, and Waldner, Katharina (eds), Texte als Medium und Reflexion von Literatur in der Kaiserzeit PAwB 14. Stuttgart: Franz Steiner Verlag, 81–100. ——2009. ‘Reconstructing Mark’s Double Audience’, in Struthers Malbon, Elizabeth (ed.), Between Author and Audience in Mark: Narration, Characterization, Interpretation. Sheffield: Sheffield Phoenix Press, 4–26. Holtzmann, Heinrich Julius 1863. Die Synoptischen Evangelien: Ihr Ursprung und ihr geschichtlicher Charakter. Leipzig: Engelmann. Hooker, Morna Dorothy 1967. The Son of Man in Mark: A Study of the Background of the Term “Son of Man” and its Use in St. Mark’s Gospel. London: SPCK. Horsley, Richard A. 2001. Hearing the Whole Story: The Politics of Plot in Mark’s Gospel. Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox Press. Iogna-Prat, Dominique 2005. ‘Introduction: Sujets de Discours’, in BedosRezak, Brigitte Miriam, and Iogna-Prat, Dominique (eds), L’individu au moyen âge: Individuation et individualisation avant la modernité. Paris: Aubier, 119–21. Jaspers, Karl 1949. Vom Ursprung und Ziel der Geschichte. Munich: Piper.

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Jaspers, Karl 1953. The Origin and Goal of History (trans. Bullock, Michael). London: Routledge. Joynes, Christine E. 2005. ‘The returned Elijah? John the Baptist’s Angelic Identity in the Gospel of Mark’, Scottish Journal of Theology 58, 455–67. Kähler, Martin 1956. Der sogenannte historische Jesus und der geschichtliche, biblische Christus. Leipzig: A. Deichertsche Verlagsbuchhandlung, 1892; 2nd edn. 1896. Munich: Kaiser. Lange, Armin 2003. ‘Considerations Concerning the “Spirit of Impurity” in Zech 13:2’, in Lange, Armin, Lichtenberger, Hermann, and Römheld, K.F. Diethard (eds), Die Dämonen: Dämonologie der israelitisch-jüdischen und frühchristlichen Literatur im Kontext ihrer Umwelt. Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 254–68. McMichaels, Susan W. 1997. Journey out of the garden: St. Francis of Assisi and the Process of Individuation. New York: Paulist Press. Merenlahti, Petri 1999. ‘Characters in the making: individuality and ideology in the Gospels’, in Rhoads, David M. and Syreeni, Kari (eds), Characterization in the Gospels: Reconceiving Narrative Criticism. Journal for the Study of the New Testament Suppl. 184. Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press, 49–72. Mittmann-Richert, Ulricke 2003. ‘Die Dämonen und der Tod des Gottessohns im Markusevangelium’, in Lange, Armin, Lichtenberger, Hermann, and Römheld, K. F. Diethard (eds), Die Dämonen: Dämonologie der israelitisch-jüdischen und frühchristlichen Literatur im Kontext ihrer Umwelt. Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 476–504. Morris, Colin 1972. The Discovery of the Individual, 1050–1200. London: SPCK. Neyrey, Jerome H. 1986. ‘The Idea of Purity in Mark’s Gospel’, Semeia 35, 91–124. Oegema, Gerbern S. 2003. ‘Jesus’ Casting Out of Demons in the Gospel of Mark against its Greco-Roman Background’, in Lange, Armin, Lichtenberger, Hermann, and Römheld, K. F.Diethard (eds), Die Dämonen: Dämonologie der israelitisch-jüdischen und frühchristlichen Literatur im Kontext ihrer Umwelt. Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 505–18. Rhoads, David, Dewey, Joanna, and Michie, Donald 1999. Mark as Story: An Introduction to the Narrative of a Gospel. 2nd edn. Philadelphia, PA: Fortress Press. Ringe, Sharon H. 2004, ‘A Gentile Woman’s Story, Revisited: Rereading Mark 7.24–31a’, in Levine, Amy-Jill, and Blickenstaff, Marianne (eds), A Feminist Companion to Mark. Cleveland, OH: Pilgrim. Schmidt, Karl Ludwig 1923. ‘Die Stellung der Evangelien in der allgemeinen Literaturgeschichte’, in Schmidt, Hans (ed.), Eucharisterion: Studien zur Religion und Literatur des Alten und Neuen Testaments II, H. GunkelFestschrift. Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 50–134.

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Sorabji, Richard 2006, Self: Ancient and Modern Insights about Individuality, Life, and Death. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Sorensen, Eric 2002. Possession and Exorcism in the New Testament and Early Christianity. Wissenschaftliche Untersuchungen zum Neuen Testament 2/157. Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck. Stendahl, Krister 1963. ‘The Apostle Paul and the Introspective Conscience of the West’, Harvard Theological Review 56, 199–215. Struthers Malbon, Elizabeth 2000. In the Company of Jesus: Characters in Mark’s Gospel. Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox Press. Taylor, Charles 1989. Sources of the Self: the Making of the Modern Identity. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Theissen, Gerd 1974. Urchristliche Wundergeschichten: ein Beitrag zur formgeschichtlichen Erforschung der synoptischen Evangelien. Studien zum Neuen Testament 8. Gütersloh: Gütersloher Verlagshaus Mohn. Twelftree, Graham H. 1993. Jesus the Exorcist: a Contribution to the Study of the Historical Jesus. Wissenschaftliche Untersuchungen zum Neuen Testament 2/54. Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck. Wahlen, Clinton 2004. Jesus and the Impurity of Spirits in the Synoptic Gospels. Wissenschaftliche Untersuchungen zum Neuen Testament 2/185, Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck. Weeden, Theodore J. 1971. Mark: Traditions in Conflict. Philadelphia, PA: Fortress Press. Wink, Walter 2002. The Human Being: Jesus and the Enigma of the Son of the Man. Minneapolis, MN: Fortress Press. Yarbro Collins, Adela 2007. Mark: a Commentary. Hermeneia. Minneapolis, MN: Fortress Press.

12 The Individual and the Word in Hellenistic Judaism: Cases in Philo and Josephus Tessa Rajak

When sacred writings play a fundamental part in a religious system, as they most conspicuously did among the Jews of the Hellenistic and Roman periods, important spaces open up for the recognition of the individual and for the individual experience within the religious system. In offering this somewhat paradoxical proposition to our project, I explore a major strand in post-biblical Judaism, that of Greek-Jewish writing, from the particular angle of what is today understood as a text-centred culture. Those individual responses existed within, or alongside, the group reception of the Holy Scriptures which had, at this time, as in later times, a high visibility in Judaism. To be tied to that definitive set of texts would seem prima facie to entail major restrictions on individual thought and behaviour: most obviously, submission to a normative value system, control by some kind of elite of authoritative interpreters, and the prioritization of the interests of the collective that owns and transmits the tradition. Yet there are also built-in safety valves: a system focused on ethics requires individual moral agents before whom choices must be placed, while interpretation of a large and complex body of literature that is non-negotiable will have to be to a degree open-ended and mutable. No interpretative elite is likely to reign wholly unchallenged, nor any one reading to remain standard. Moreover, the collective goes only so far. While the public reading of the Torah and the prophets was a ritual practice of enormous importance, it was in essence a learning experience that served to influence each member of the congregation separately. Full engagement with discourse, oral

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or written, can only be on an individual basis, and so, where discourse reigns supreme, the individual participant cannot be entirely sidelined. My texts come from Philo and Josephus, along with one inscription, and they are chosen to allow exploration of two aspects of this proposition: first, to consider the precise relationship between the collective and the individual in the reception of the text; and second, to present instances where inspiration, creative or prophetic, comes by way of a personal revelation of the divine that appears to be enabled by, and mediated through, scripture, and that is recounted in some measure autobiographically. The extent of the individual’s scope vis-à-vis the words is the heart of the matter. The authors belong to what is customarily referred to in the scholarship as ‘Hellenistic Judaism’, that is to say the religious culture of the Jews as it expressed itself in Greek, a culture which is deemed (in spite of the label ‘Hellenistic’) to have continued right through the Roman period and into late antiquity.1 For the pre-rabbinic period in the record of Judaism (to the end of the first century ce), the literature in Greek, albeit severely depleted, makes up a very large part of our whole picture; and it is a not insignificant one, even for Judaea, where, of course, other languages dominated. I hardly need stress that, in such a hybrid environment, it is largely futile to distinguish, as was once customary (for a variety of ideological reasons), the Jewish from the Greek: it is not a case of ‘either Jewish or Greek’ but of ‘both Jewish and Greek’, or, indeed, as ‘Jewish-Greek’. Obviously, different streams of tradition went into the making of this fluid identity, and they are occasionally detectable. But the waters flowed together—and how does one separate out confluent streams of water? The task is to think ourselves into a world dominated by the Torah, its narratives, its prescriptions, and the role models to be found there (Pentateuch), and in the rest of the biblical books (even if the corpus was not yet fully canonized). Scripture was infused into the entirety of life, while in the Jewish literature of the period intertextuality was a governing principle. I tried to understand something of what this meant in my recent study2, and it may be helpful for me to give a flavour, from our very inadequate evidence, of Jewish attachment to the sacred text within the Graeco-Roman milieu. Here are just a few 1 2

For an account of the continuities in this culture, see Rajak 2009, 216–22. Rajak 2009.

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of the ways in which this adherence evidently expressed itself in the lives and priorities of participants. First, and indisputably, the Greek Bible was the source of the Jewish-Greek sense of history, a building-block of both collective and individual identity. We can grasp that the mental furniture of literate Greek-speaking Jews was biblical from the way they are depicted as expressing themselves at moments of crisis or high drama. One might think of the ready use of moral examples and helpful quotations even in unlikely places in the literature of the period, for example, in the desperate yet learned appeal which Josephus ascribes to himself, delivered from the walls of Jerusalem to the besieged inhabitants and recalling in detail moments when God had wrought miracles to rescue his people from Egyptians, Philistines, Assyrians, and Persians, in contrast to those occasions when their sins had brought about the capture of Jerusalem by Babylonians, Seleucids, and Romans.3 Or again, we might think of the scripturalization, of the petitionary prayers composed for prominent figures such as Judith, or Esther (in her Greek guise), or Eleazar the High Priest in 3 Maccabees, or Asenath in Judith and Asenath, all of these protagonists in Jewish narratives written in Greek. These prayers are built around scripture, in the form of citation or allusion and even simple midrash. The Aramaic and Hebrew literature of the time shares in this literary development, and Tobit, Jubilees, or 2 Baruch give us equally striking examples.4 Second, public expression as recorded in inscriptions, whether commemorating the dead, protecting their tombs, recognizing donors and benefactors, or settling scores, drew on the rich resources of the Greek Bible, for formulae, for phrases, and from time to time in longer quotations. In three or four epitaphs from Rome we find, in slightly differing Greek translations, a phrase from Proverbs 10:7: ‘may the memory of the righteous ones be for a blessing’.5 Widely used in later times, we may suppose that this was more familiar already in the commemorative expression of late antiquity than our limited evidence allows us to see.

3

Ios. bell. Iud. 5.375–419. A full study of this phenomenon is Newman 1999. For passages with commentary see Kiley et al. 1997. 5 For the texts, Noy 1993, nos. 112, 276, 307. On the quotations and their form, van der Horst 1991, 37–9. 4

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Third, and perhaps most obviously, the Greek Torah was for Greek-speaking Jews the chief (and perhaps sometimes sole) determinant of Jewish practice and observance, which were evidently governed by a pragmatic interpretation of the requirements laid down in the five books. Circumcision was not in doubt; nor was some version of the dietary laws of Leviticus and Deuteronomy. In the Letter of Aristeas, when an explanation is offered, in response to alleged widespread curiosity, of ‘the legislation concerning foods and drinks and wild animals regarded as unclean’, the climax of the explanation is the symbolic intent in the Lawgiver’s teaching (144–52). The forbidden animals are wild, carnivorous, and ‘procure their food with injustice’. The forbidden animals are gentle, and, because they ‘part the hoof ’, they inculcate discrimination between right and wrong. But even when the interpretation is allegorical, the foundation is in the admonitions of scripture, explicitly referred to (155) and of course in its very precise requirements. Practical ethics, too, were biblicized. In the well-known verses in archaic Greek which purport to be the work of the Greek gnomic poet Phocylides (and are therefore ascribed to a ‘Pseudo-Phocylides’), no mention is made of Jews, Judaism, the Law, or scripture, and we miss any critique of idolatry. But the influence of Jewish traditions is clear in matters such as assisting the poor, humility, treatment of the enemy, burial of the dead, and abhorrence of homosexuality (the latter given a rather prominent position). And when we come down to the detail, a number of propositions derived from the Greek Torah in a straightforward way, such as the injunction to keep away from false witness, or to give just measure (metra nemein ta dikaia), while precepts are also drawn from the wisdom literature and the prophets.6 Another moral principle enunciated by Pseudo-Phocylides (184–5) is the widely trumpeted abhorrence of infanticide. Philo, in the only surviving extended Jewish attack on the practice, drew this unconditional ethical imperative from Exodus (21:22–5).7 6 Since Jakob Bernays’s investigation Ueber das phokylideische Gedicht. Ein Beitrag zur hellenistischen Litteratur of 1856, the author of Pseudo-Phocylides has been generally regarded as a Jew. If we are looking at a pagan Greek Judaizer, who had become absorbed in the Jewish texts and fascinated by aspects of Jewish morality, then this individual has taken so much of Judaism on board that it comes to much the same. See especially van der Horst 1978; Thomas 1992; Collins 1997, 158–77; Wilson 2005. 7 See Reinhartz 1992, 42–58.

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‘Text-centredness’ was equally, perhaps even more, characteristic of the other Jewish cultures of the period, those that expressed themselves in Hebrew and Aramaic: the world of the Qumran sectaries and the texts found at Qumran, the priestly culture of the Jerusalem Temple (of which little survives), and, in due course, the thoughtworld of the rabbis. There were many points of contact and interaction between what was expressed in Semitic languages and what was expressed in Greek. While for my first author, Philo, scripture means Greek scripture, that is to say the old Jewish translation of Alexandria, which was in due course to constitute the Septuagint, by contrast Josephus, who started life as a priest in Jerusalem, in fact wrote his first (lost) work in Aramaic, yet he spent the greater part of his life as an exile in Rome, writing in Greek, thus spanning both linguistic spheres. At the same time, the material presented here comes exclusively from Jewish discourse in Greek and in some respects is distinctive of that discourse. I shall start, however, by fast-forwarding, looking ahead not to literary documents but to a very small epigraphic text that comes from a later phase of Jewish-Greek culture, towards the end of a long tradition: oæø ŒºÆ IªøŁØ çºÆ  having found, having opened, read, observe 8

This enigmatic utterance was found inscribed on a free-standing stone, in the central area of the main hall of the late antique synagogue of Sardis. Walter Ameling, its most recent and authoritative editor, suggests it was somehow associated with one of the hall’s two Torah arks, and the reference would seem to be to a Torah scroll such as was to be found within the ark. In the assembly place of a community that was so well integrated into its Greek civic environment, there stood an exhortation that echoes the language of several Septuagintal passages concerned with ‘finding’ and ‘reading’, or with ‘breaking open’, and that enjoins devoted attention to the sacred text.9 But to whom is the demand addressed? Significantly, the imperative is singular, speaking therefore not to the collectivity of potential readers, but rather seeking to elicit a response from each individual reader, 8

Ameling 2004, no. 131. See Ameling’s commentary, IJO (n.8), p.287, and note especially the language in Luke 4:16–17; Isa. 19:11–12; Rev. 5:1ff; Jer. 11:6; Jer 43:20; Luke 18:21. 9

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and this choice of tense is not readily explained away as arising out of the quotational character of the text for as it stands it is not an exact citation from any source known to us. The direct call rings out so loud and clear that it seems to me that the form and the substance of this address serve to illustrate precisely the essentially private nature of the expected relationship with the text. Each individual has to find their own way to the scroll, personally to break open the thing that is sealed, to read, and, having internalized it, to become the guardian of what is inside: çºÆ , like the Hebrew shmor, means both to protect and to observe (commandments). So the stone stood there, to be read by each worshipper, to remind him or her of what was at the heart of the synagogue, but also of his or her own discoveries and obligations. As we return to Philo of Alexandria, we move from the pious observance deemed by the Sardis inscription to be the goal of opening the Torah, to the spiritual fruits of study. But the two texts are perhaps comparable in their focus on inwardness and on individual enlightenment, though on a very different scale. Philo’s treatise On the Contemplative Life depicts, in Philonic terms, the practices of an ascetic community, engaged in a very special kind of Bible study, under the leadership of a proedros. We observe in the following extract the leader conducting the proceedings, which are followed by singing and by a communal meal, and then, after the meal, there come more elaborate hymns, sung by both male and female choirs:10 ÇÅ E Ø H K E ƒæ E ªæÆØ j ŒÆd ! ¼ºº ı æ ÆŁb Kغ ÆØ, çæ  Çø b Pb KØø P ªaæ B Kd Ø Å Ø ºªø PŒºÆ Oæª ÆØ, ŁÆŁÆØ  ØÆ  ŁH IŒæØ æ  ŒÆd ŁÆ  c çŁ BÆØ E N ŒÆd c › ø Oı æŒ FØ, e ª F F ÆŁE ¥ æ  ÆæÆºØ  å ıØ. 76 ŒÆd › b å ºÆØ æÆ fi åæB ÆØ B fi ØÆŒÆºÆ fi , Øƺºø ŒÆd æÆø ÆE KÆƺłØ, KªåÆæ ø ÆE łıåÆE a  Æ Æ B fi ªaæ æÅÆ fi F P æåø ŒÆd Iı d ıæ   › H IŒæ øø  F ı Ææ E IıÆ H ! æÇØ ŒÆd I º ÆØ B ŒÆ ƺłø H ºª ø 77 ƒ b IøæŁØÆŒ  a t Æ ŒÆd f OçŁÆº f IÆ  ÆŒ  N ÆP e Kd ØA ŒÆd B ÆP B åø KØ   IŒæ H ÆØ, e b ıØÆØ ŒÆd ŒÆ غÅçÆØ Æ Ø ŒÆd ºÆ Ø ØÆÅÆ   e b ÆØ  F ºª   ƒºÆæ Å Ø ŒÆd B fi åÅ æØƪøªB fi F æ  ı, c b ØÆæÅØ MæÆØ æÆ fi ŒØØ B ŒçƺB ŒÆd ¼Œæø fi ÆŒ ºø fi B ØA åØæ·

På w  b H ŒÆ ÆŒŒºØø ƒ Ææ H   Ø æ å ıØ. 78 ƃ 10

Phil. comtempl. 75–8.

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b KŪØ H ƒæH ªæÆ ø ª  ÆØ Ø !  ØH K IººÅª æÆØ· –ÆÆ ªaæ   ŁÆ  ŒE E IæØ  Ø K ØŒÆØ Çfiø fi ŒÆd HÆ b åØ a ÞÅ a ØÆ Ø, łıåc b e KÆ Œ  ÆE ºØ IæÆ   F, K fiz XæÆ º ªØŒc łıåc ØÆçæ ø a NŒEÆ ŁøæE. X. (75) He [the leader] seeks out something in the sacred writings, or solves something proposed by another person, with no thought of display, for he is not aiming at a reputation for clever oratory but only wants to see certain things more accurately, and having seen them, not to begrudge others, who, even if they do not have such acute vision, do at any rate have a similar desire to learn. (76) He follows a rather slow teaching method, dwelling on it and lingering, with repetitions, so as to imprint the thoughts deep in their souls; for when the understanding of hearers cannot keep up with the exposition of someone running on fluently and breathlessly, they lag behind and fail to grasp what is said. (77) But the hearers, fixing their eyes and attention upon the speaker, remain in one and the same position listening attentively, indicating their attention and comprehension by their nods and looks, and their praise of the speaker by their cheerfulness and a slight change of expression, gently turning the head and pointing with the forefinger of the right hand. And the young men who are standing around pay attention to this explanation no less than the guests who are sitting at the table. (78) And the interpretations of the sacred scriptures are conducted through what is hidden in allegories, for the whole of the law appears to these men to resemble a living animal, with its spoken commandments as the body, and the invisible meaning that lies concealed beneath the plain words as the soul. Through this the rational soul begins in a very fine way to contemplate what belongs to itself.

The pious monastics described here by Philo and called by him the therapeutai (servants?) lived on Lake Mareotis, near Alexandria. While he does not define them as a Jewish group, their devotion to the Bible is in itself evidence enough that they were connected with Judaism. The group appears to be remote from the mainstream, though elements in the description bear a relation to both Philo’s and Josephus’ accounts of the Essenes, and indeed also to the community regulations and practices described in the sectarian scrolls from Qumran. Some have argued that the therapeutai are purely fictitious, although lately Joan Taylor has mustered strong arguments pointing to their historicity.11 Either way, this is a wonderful 11

Taylor 2003.

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portrayal here of the arrangements for the public immersion in scripture, strikingly foreshadowing later monastic practice. The atmosphere is one of incredible order and discipline. There is leadership from a reader who is also an expositor. There is a correct method for interpretation, the allegorical method, at which Philo himself was adept and which he here justifies. There is a discoverable ultimate truth. And yet the separate reaction of each individual member is of the essence—how he or she (and there indeed existed female therapeutai, who, we learn, formed a separate choir) attends to the reading, how it is absorbed, how it is comprehended, how it is processed to yield insight. The vital impact is on the individual mind and soul and because some will be more adept at learning than others the discussion, we are told, proceeds deliberately slowly. We witness individual piety weaving, as it were, in and out of the communal experience; we see how the pace of each individual’s involvement carries the group and then feeds back to the individual, just like the interweaving of the antiphonal chanting that follows. This chanting is likened, in passing, to Bacchic rites (86), but more emphatically to the thanksgiving of the Israelites, led by the prophet Moses and the prophetess Miriam after the splitting of the Red Sea (87), which reminds us again of the biblical background to it all. The scenes described may strike us as highly conformist, and certainly no invitation is envisaged, at any point, to divergence or disagreement, or to a person’s branching out on their own into free expression. But still, the individual state of mind is at stake. And when the singing is over, each participant returns to his or her private world of reverence (semneia). The philosopher convinces us that, even if, as is quite likely, he has never set eyes upon the therapeutai, he is drawing on lived and felt experience—presumably in part his own participation in the school of allegorizers.12 Philo acknowledges a personal experience of revelation in a wellknown and moving personal passage from de Migratione Abrahami, that evokes a familiar state of writer’s block, albeit in distinctly Philonic language.13 Divine inspiration rescues the philosopher:

12 For Philo’s theory of contemplation in the framework of his wider philosophy, see Winston 1985. 13 Phil. migr. 34–9.

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e KÆı F Ł , n ıæØŒØ ÆŁg r Æ, ØŪ   PŒ ÆNå ÆØ·  ıºÅŁd  Ø ‹  ŒÆ a c ıŁÅ H ŒÆ a çغ  çÆ  ª ø ªæÆçc KºŁE ŒÆd L åæc ıŁEÆØ IŒæØH N, ¼ª   ŒÆd  EæÆ !æg c Ø ØÆ ¼æÆŒ  IźºªÅ, c b ŒÆŒÆ B Nø, e b F Z  Œæ  ŒÆ ƺƪ, Ææ n a B łıåB I ªıŁÆ  ŒÆd ıªŒºŁÆØ  æÆ ıÅŒ. 35  Ø b ‹  Œe KºŁg ºæÅ KÆçÅ KªÅ KØØç ø ŒÆd Øæ ø ¼øŁ IçÆH H KŁıÅ ø, ‰ !e ŒÆ åB KŁ ı Œ æıÆ ØA ŒÆd  Æ Iª E, e  , f Ææ Æ, KÆı , a ºªÆ, a ªæÆçÆ. åe ªaæ æÅØ oæØ, çø e IºÆıØ, OıæŒ  Å ZłØ, KæªØÆ H æƪ ø IæØź  Å, ¥ Æ ª Ø  i Ø OçŁÆºH KŒ Æç  Å ø. 36 e b s ØŒ  e IØæÆ  ŒÆd IØ ŁÆ  ŒÆd IØæÆ  K Ø, e ºØ  IªÆŁ, n ŒÆd a B łıåB ØŒæÆ çıŒ  ƺº  ªºıŒÆØ, ı ø ı ø Æææ ıÆ ŒººØ , Ø y ŒÆd a c æç  Æ æ çc ª ÆØ ø æØ · ºª ÆØ ªaæ ‹ Ø “Ø ÆP fiH ŒæØ  º , ŒÆd Kƺ ÆP e N e oøæ,” e Œåı  ŒÆd ºÆH Æ ŒÆd ØŒæÆ ª  Æ  F, ¥ Æ ªºıŒÆŁd æøŁB fi . 37 e b º  F P   æ ç, Iººa ŒÆd IŁÆÆÆ Kƪªºº ÆØ· e ªaæ º  B ÇøB K ø fi fiH ÆæÆø fi çÅd çı FŁÆØ, c IªÆŁ Å Æ  æıç æ ıÅ !e H ŒÆ a æ  Iæ H ŒÆd H ŒÆ  ÆP a æø· Æo Å ªaæ e Æ Æ  ŒÆd ¼æØ  K łıåB fi ŒŒºæø ÆØ  . 38 › b ›æH K Ø ›  ç· ıçº d ªaæ j Iıæ d a ZłØ ¥ ª ¼çæ . Øa F ŒÆd f æ ç Æ KŒº ı æ æ  f º  Æ· ŒÆd › IŒÅ c K Æ t Æ OçŁÆºH I Ø f NE L æ æ  XŒ ı, ŒÆd ıªåØ F ŒÆŁ ‹æÆØ Œºæ ı e K IŒ B !æ. 39 N ªaæ e ›æH Æ  æÆcº  ÆåÆæ  ÆØ e ÆŁø ŒÆd ØÆŒÆºÆ ØÆ, yæ Kı  q  ÆŒ, Ø y ŒÆd e ›æA ª ÆØ çH e ŁE . (34) I am not ashamed to relate what has happened to me, which I know from having experienced it ten thousand times. Sometimes, when I have desired to get to my usual task of writing on the doctrines of philosophy, though I have known exactly what it was necessary to set down, I have found my mind barren and unproductive, and have given up without achieving anything, indignant at my mind and filled with amazement at the power of He who is by whom the womb of the soul is at times opened and at times closed up; (35) and sometimes when I have come to my work empty I have suddenly become full of ideas, showered from above and sown invisibly, so as to be a Bacchic worshipper under the influence of Divine possession, and to know nothing, nor the people present, nor myself, nor what I was saying, nor what I was writing; for I gained interpretation, discovery, an enjoyment of light, a most penetrating vision, the most distinct clarity of things, such as might be received by the eyes from the clearest display. VIII. (36) That then

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which is shown is the thing worthy of being beheld, worthy of being contemplated, worthy of being loved, the perfect good, the nature of which is to change and sweeten the bitternesses of the soul, the most beautiful additional seasoning, full of all kinds of sweetnesses, by the addition of which, even those things which are not nutritious become salutary food; for it is said, that ‘the Lord showed him [Moses] a tree, and he cast it into the water’ (Ex. 15:25) that is to say, into the mind that is lax and soggy and packed with bitterness, to sweeten and control it. (37) But this tree promises not only food but likewise immortality; for it says that the tree of life was planted in the midst of the paradise, being, in fact, goodness surrounded as by a body-guard by all the particular virtues, and by the actions that accord with them. For it is virtue which has been allocated the most central and excellent place in the soul. (38) And he who sees is the wise man while the foolish are blind or dim sighted. That is why they used to call the prophets seers (1 Sam. 9:9); and the trainer of self was eager to give his ears in exchange for his eyes and to see what he had previously heard. He goes beyond an inheritance of hearing to one based on sight derived from hearing; (39) for the coin of learning and instruction, after which Jacob was named, is re-minted into the seeing Israel.

In this account, it is contemplation of the Divine Light, identified, in terms of his own Platonizing philosophical system, as the perfect good, that releases Philo from his mental agony and doubt, fills him with creativity, and allows him to continue working. But he goes on to explain that almost miraculous refreshment of the immortal spirit in terms of biblical references, allegorizing a series of prototypes. This explication is built principally around the story of the bitter and sweet waters of the Exodus, the image of the tree of life in the creation story, the figures of the prophets in their role as seers, and the person of Jacob in his guise of the seer Israel (his other name). Thus Philo’s resurgent creativity is linked to the Bible’s primal act of creation and to prototypes of regeneration and vision. Significantly, Philo is consistent and complete in his etymologizing of the designation ‘Israel’, as applied to an entire people, in terms of seeing God, to an extent where even non-Jews can apparently qualify for the accolade.14 Thus, the collective name par excellence for the national group becomes a name earned by, and accorded to, select individuals. But such status is not a public matter, and it is not conferred by society; rather it comes 14 On the meaning of ‘Israel’ in Philo, see Birnbaum 1996, especially 91–127 on ‘the ones who can see’.

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to some from the insight born of meditative study. As for Philo himself, he is depicted as a man entirely on his own, in every sense, as he seeks, and finds, a route out of his despair. A similar moment of release is recorded on another occasion, where we learn that Philo’s cares now stem from public life and the behaviour of others. Pining for his erstwhile exposure to the Divine Light of wisdom, his gratitude is profound for those moments when God makes it possible for him still to interpret the sacred words of Moses and to expound their meaning where they have not been understood.15 At the end of the first century ce, Josephus defined and eulogized Judaism in a polemic against its detractors, known to us as Against Apion. Writing about prayer, he trades community off against individual:16 [196] ŒÆd Kd ÆE ŁıÆØ åæc æH  !bæ B Œ ØB håŁÆØ ø ÅæÆ, r Ł !bæ Æı H: Kd ªaæ Œ ØøÆ fi ªªÆ ŒÆd Æ Å › æ ØH F ŒÆŁ Æ! e N ı ºØ Æ ŁfiH ŒåÆæØ . [197] ÅØ   ø æe e Ł, På ‹ø fiH IªÆŁ, øŒ ªaæ ÆP e Œg ŒÆd AØ N   ŒÆ Æ ŁØŒ, Iºº ‹ø åŁÆØ ıŁÆ ŒÆd ºÆ  çıº ø. [198] ±ªÆ Kd ÆE ŁıÆØ ØæÅŒ ›   Ie Œ ı Ie ºå ı Ie Œ ØøÆ B æe ªıÆEŒÆ ŒÆd  ººH ¼ººø. L ÆŒæe i YÅ ªæçØ. Ø F  b › æd Ł F ŒÆd B KŒ ı ŁæÆÆ ºª  E K Ø, ›  ÆP e –Æ ŒÆd  . (196) And at the sacrifices we must first offer prayers for the common welfare, and then for ourselves; for we were born for communal fellowship and the person who sets greater store by this than by his own personal concerns would be especially pleasing to God. 197 And let appeal be made to God through prayer, and request, not that he might give good things—for he has given them of his own accord and made them available to everyone—but that we might be able to receive them, and when we have them, to keep them. (trans. Barclay).

When we pray, Josephus says, we pray for the community first, and only then for ourselves. Moreover, we pray not to make crude requests for things, but for the capacity to accept good things, for something, then, that is a question of individual character. The scriptural basis for Josephus’ pronouncement lies in the distinctions drawn in the Levitical account (Lev. 4–7) of the prescribed sacrifices: the first to be listed are those offered to atone for the sins of priests or

15

Phil. spec. 3.6.

16

Ios. c. Ap. 2.196–7.

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of the community as a whole. The Levitical sacrifices already give considerable attention to the offerings brought by individuals within the centralized public cult; what is of interest to us here is how those passages have paved the way for the internalization in Josephus. Although he writes as though the sacrifices still existed, the Temple, destroyed some thirty years earlier, has instead acquired a symbolic role, and the place of these sacrifices is in fact not on the Temple Mount, but in the collective memory. Josephus depicts quintessential, historical Judaism (and just conceivably the Judaism of the future). But at the same time, the wider context makes it clear that he is presenting and defending, ostensibly to a hostile audience, and with some urgency, something which he views as current, the Jewish value system of the here and now. He quickly switches his attention from sacrifice to prayer. Within his system the claims of the community are honoured, even in private prayer; yet the individual is not expected simply to stand aside, and his (or her?) psychology is a matter of importance. Communal and individual prayer alike have their place, and the main objective of the provision is to exclude egoism and selfishness, rather than to proscribe any personal appeals. The parallel passage in Josephus’ Jewish Antiquities, cited in John Barclay’s commentary,17 is markedly less explicit; while Philo,18 also cited, had confined himself wholly to the sphere of sacrifices, and he had followed the arrangements of Leviticus. Of course, when Philo wrote, the Temple, which he had once visited on pilgrimage, still stood. Now Josephus himself had been given, earlier in his career, a firstrate opportunity to test the effectiveness of heartfelt personal prayer. The renegade general-turned-writer comes clean, astonishingly clean indeed, as to how he secured his own survival, after the town of Jotapata in central Galilee, which he had defended unsuccessfully, fell to the Roman siege in the summer of 67 ce. This curious honesty is best explained out of his own words. Writing in the third person, he views his actions, including the notorious surrender to the Roman general Vespasian, as forwarding not his but the public good: his private salvation became fused with that of the Jewish people. He was God’s messenger:19

17 18

Ios. ant. Iud. 4.243. See Barclay 2007, n. ad. loc. 19 Phil. spec. 1.168. Ios. bell. Iud. 3.350–4

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’¯ ØÇ   b F  ø ı ŒÆd æe e ˝ØŒ æÆ e b  æÆ Øø ØŒe ! OæªB KŒŒÆØ e ºÆØ  uæÅ , ŒÆ Eå  ÆP f ›  ºÆæå  ÇøªæBÆØ e ¼æÆ çغ Ø  . [351] ‰  ‹  ˝ØŒøæ æ ŒØ ºØÆæH ŒÆd a Iغa F  º ı ºŁ ı ›  Å  ÆŁ, IÅØ ÆP e H Øa ıŒ e Oæø Næå ÆØ, Ø z › Łe   ºº Æ ÆP fiH ıç æa æ ÆØ  ıÆø ŒÆd a æd f   øÆø ÆغE KÆ. [352] q b ŒÆd æd ŒæØ Oæø ƒŒÆe ıƺE a Içغø !e F Ł ı ºªÆ, H ª c ƒæH ºø PŒ MªØ a æ çÅ Æ ‰ i ÆP   J ƒæf ŒÆd ƒæø ªª  : [353] z Kd B   uæÆ Ł ı ª  ŒÆd a çæ،ŠH æ ç ø Oæø Æ çÆ Æ Æ æ çæØ fiH ŁfiH ººÅŁıEÆ På, [354] ŒIØc e  ıÆø, çÅ, çFº  OŒºÆØ  ŒE  Ø fiH Œ Æ Ø,  Å b æe  øÆ ı åÅ AÆ, ŒÆd c Kc łıåc Kºø a ºº  Æ NE, øØ b  øÆ Ø a åEæÆ Œg ŒÆd ÇH, Ææ æ ÆØ b ‰ P æ  Å, Iººa e r Ø ØŒ  . (350) Now as Josephus was hesitating before Nicanor, the soldiers in their anger rushed to set fire to the cave, but the tribune held them back, as he aspired to take the man alive. And now, as Nicanor pressed his appeals, and Josephus found out how the enemy masses threatened, a recollection came to him of his dreams of the night, in which God had signalled to him in advance both the future calamities of the Jews and the events that concerned the Roman emperors. Now when it came to interpreting dreams, he was skilled at conjecturing the meaning of ambiguous utterances that are sent by the Deity. Moreover, he was not unacquainted with the prophecies contained in the sacred books, being a priest himself, and a descendant of priests. At that moment he was filled with their divine inspiration and, seizing on the terrifying images of his recent dreams, he put up a secret prayer to God: ‘Since it pleases you, who have created the Jewish people, to bring it down, and since all our good fortune is gone over to the Romans, and since you have chosen this soul of mine to foretell what is to come to pass, I willingly give my hands to the Romans, and am content to live. And I testify that I go not as a deserter but your minister.’

We see here an astonishing collection of possible kinds of communication with the divine, drawing on a magnificent mix of Jewish and Greek traditions. Josephus reports dreams (sent by the Almighty), priestly insights, prophetic inspiration, help from the text of scripture, and an outpouring of prayer on his own part.20 He was in a very deep 20 On dreams in Josephus, see Gnuse 1996, and on prayers: Jonquière 2007. The priest-prophet combination is studied in detail in Gussman 2008, 288–304.

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hole. He admits as much himself, and one can dismiss his words too easily as a hotchpotch of obfuscation, designed to impress the reader, as they once impressed Vespasian. At the very least it must be appreciated that, far from ringing hollow, each component of the bundle reflects a genuine aspect of Second Temple Jewish religiosity, phrased in terms that could make sense also to Greek readers. Therein lies Josephus’ Janus-faced skill. There is much to say about each of the elements.21 I want here to emphasize the prophetic powers which are the key to the situation. This is the skill that ultimately empowers Josephus. And it is linked, in his description, to a special understanding of the biblical text that both flows from his priesthood and stands as an individual, apparently newly-discovered gift. Josephus may have asserted elsewhere that scripture was to be studied and treasured by everyone,22 but here he offers an insistently elitist view of interpretation and inspiration. The biblical books had been written by prophets. And the great age of prophets in that sense was over—prophecy had ceased, as Josephus stated categorically, and the rabbis were later to stress.23 Yet, in his view, individuals could still emerge who were endowed with the power to understand the present and to predict the future, in line with God’s will, as expressed in the revelation of the Torah to Moses, the greatest of all the prophets. True prophets, as marked out by signs, are highlighted in the biblical narratives of Josephus’s Antiquities; and his writings are by contrast peppered with an array of pseudoprophets, whose misreading of key passages had, he believed, played a disastrous part in inciting the Judaeans to embark upon revolt against Rome in 66.24 It is not clear exactly to which prophetic texts Josephus was referring when he spoke of his uniquely privileged interpretation. We know from the Antiquities that Daniel’s predictions of the rise and fall of kingdoms were important to him, and that Josephus deemed Daniel a wonderful prophet and author, in contrast to later Jewish reckoning, but in keeping with what was to be the Christian 21 For a careful exploration of the episode, see Gray 1993, 35–70; Gussman 200, 204–9. 22 The classic expression of this is Ios. c. Ap. 2.169–78. 23 Ios. c. Ap. 1.41. On the problem of the demise of prophecy, see Gray 1993, 7–34. 24 On true and false prophets, see e.g. Ios. ant. Iud. 8.230–45 (Jeremiah and Iddo), and 8.295–7. On the lead-up to the Great Revolt, Ios. bell. Iud. 2.258–63; 6.285–7; ant. Iud. 20.167–72.

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understanding.25 Prophecies from Isaiah or Jeremiah or Balaam’s prophecy from Numbers 24 are also possible. And, again, we must ask what exactly Josephus’ own prophecy amounted to. For sure, as uttered before Vespasian, it was about the future of empires, the understanding that world domination had passed to the Romans; and Josephus thus foretold Vespasian’s coming to power, so saving his own life and ensuring for him liberation and honours, when it came true two years later, in 69 ce. But Josephus seems also to be alluding here to his being divinely imbued with a new and numinous sense of his own personal destiny and mission, and perhaps even, as Joseph Klausner suggested, of his future significance as record-keeper, endowed with a mission to preserve the memory of the great catastrophe.26 On all counts, it is a particular (and, he insists, correct) reading of scripture that fuels the personal revelation at the heart of this extraordinary episode, and the Josephan narrative cannot disguise its predominantly personal consequences, however much it harps on the public dimension. There was no one quite like Josephus, and his situation was a oneoff. But a more general impression of Second Temple understanding emerges from his partly self-serving account. The sacred writings conferred capacity on individuals, touching and transforming lives. Personal experiences of the divine were embedded in knowledge of the writings and sprang out of them. One might suggest that, if a text is to operate effectively as a conveyer of meaning to the individual, transference of that text to the individual consciousness and a kind of actualization or contemporization are required, and that this gives prophetic revelation a special role, as a powerful link between public document and private understanding. It was not uncommon in Judaism to define the ability to receive such insight as the property of a privileged few, a status that Josephus vigorously claimed for himself as priest, scholar, and divinely-favoured recipient of dreams—whatever others might have said about him. Philo’s selfconception was in terms of the hard-won attainment of the accolade of true seer. In the Sardis synagogue, on the other hand, the exhortation to open, read, and observe presumably went out to each and every literate worshipper who saw it. It would be worth exploring further on another occasion the extent to which elitism governed

25

Ios. ant. Iud. 10.263–70. See Vermes 1991.

26

Klausner 1958, 183–92.

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ancient Jewish conceptions of a person’s contact with the divine within the encompassing framework of the inspired reading of scripture, together with the forms which such elitism might take. For the moment, we must admit uncertainty as to how far, in any Second Temple Jewish context, an individual not specially singled out or called could be deemed capable of real and independent understanding.

REFERENCES Ameling, Walter (ed.) 2004. Inscriptiones Iudaicae Orientis, vol. 2: Kleinasien. TSAJ 99. Tubingen: Mohr Siebeck. Barclay, John M. G. 2007. Against Apion. Flavius Josephus Translation and Commentary (ed. Steve Mason), vol. 10. Leiden: Brill. Birnbaum, Ellen 1996. The Place of Judaism in Philo’s Thought. Israel, Jews and Proselytes. Brown Judaic Studies 290. Studia Philonica Monographs 2. Atlanta, GA: Scholars Press. Collins, J. J. 1997. Jewish Wisdom in the Hellenistic Age. Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox Press. Gnuse, Robert Karl 1996. Dreams and Dream Reports in the Writings of Josephus: A Traditio-Historical Analysis. AJEC 36. Leiden: Brill. Gray, Rebecca 1993. Prophetic Figures in Late Second Temple Palestine: The Evidence from Josephus. New York: Oxford University Press. Gussman, Oliver 2008. Der Priesterverständnis des Flavius Josephus. TSAJ 124. Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck. Horst, Pieter W. van der 1978. The Sentences of Pseudo-Phocylides. Studia in Veteris Testamenti Pseudepigrapha 4. Leiden: Brill. —— 1991. Ancient Jewish Epitaphs. Kampen: Kok Pharos. Jonquière, Tessel 2007. Prayer in Josephus. AJEC 70. Leiden: Brill. Kiley, Mark (ed.) 1997. Prayer from Alexander to Constantine: A Critical Anthology. London: Routledge. Klausner, Joseph 1958. Historia shel Ha-bayyit Ha-sheni. Jerusalem: Achiasaf. Rajak, Tessa 2009. Translation and Survival: The Greek Bible of the Ancient Jewish Diaspora. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Newman, Judith H. 1999. Praying by the Book: The Scripturalization of Prayer in Second Temple Judaism. Atlanta, GA: Scholars Press. Noy, David (ed.) 1993. Jewish Inscriptions of Western Europe, vol. 2. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Reinhartz, Adele 1992. ‘Philo on Infanticide’, Studia Philonica Annual 4, 42–58. Taylor, Joan E. 2003. Jewish Women Philosophers of First-Century Alexandria: Philo’s ‘Therapeutae’ Reconsidered. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

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Thomas, J. 1992. Der jüdische Pholylides. Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht. Vermes, Geza 1991. ‘Josephus’ Treatment of the Book of Daniel’, Journal of Jewish Studies 42, 149–66. Wilson, Walter. T. 2005. The Sentences of Pseudo–Phocylides. Berlin: de Gruyter. Winston, David 1985. ‘Philo on the Contemplative Life’, in A. Green (ed.), Jewish Spirituality from the Bible to the Middle Ages. London: SCM Press, 198–231.

13 Fighting for Differences: Forms and Limits of Religious Individuality in the ‘Shepherd of Hermas’ Jörg Rüpke

INTRODUCTION For a historian of religion, to inquire into individualization is a twofold enterprise. On the one hand, it is an attempt at revisiting established historical narratives about the rise of individuality, frequently connected to the notion of modernization. As such, it demands a long perspective on institutional changes and histories of mentality and a comparative view that necessitates the cooperation of scholars of different regions and periods. This is exactly what the ‘Kolleg-Forschergruppe’ ‘Religious Individualization in Historical Perspective’ tries to instigate. On the other hand, individualization is an offer of different perspective that might elucidate selected monumental or textual sources, helping to better understand them. This is exactly what this volume tries to do. Terms like ‘individuation’ and ‘individuality’ and the differentiation of types of these provoke questions that could be applied and must be adapted to individual texts. Three groups of questions are of particular importance. First, how is the relationship between the main character or characters and society and its different forms of communities and associations described? How are socialization and individualization thought of as two sides of the same coin? How are the constellations, roles, and conflicts (to use modern conceptualizations) of individual and society

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described and evaluated by contemporaries? Secondly, the description of agency. Who are the agents, what are their capacities, in what situations do they act? Again, we have learned to ask about conceptualizations as a primary focus of textual analysis, and yet the attempt to pose the question of references to social reality (itself shaped by such conceptualizations) should not be entirely discarded. And thirdly, individualization invites us to enquire into concepts of the self, again taking note of intertextuality and the place of a text in larger discourses. As a historical enquiry, we have to be aware of the available apparatus of concepts as we have to pay attention to the originality of the text in this regard. This bundle of questions, mapping axes of analysis that have to capture the specific content and position of the text analysed, finally must be specified in order to concentrate on the notion of religious individualization. Without disregarding the general historical context, interest is concentrated on the specifically religious aspects of processes of individualization. Of course, this refers to the role of religious organisations and groups, but ‘religious’ needs a definition, in particular for cultures as distant as the Roman empire. I propose to base the analysis on an action-oriented definition of religion. ‘Religion’ is social actions, symbols, and concepts based on the notion of supra-human powers. Thus, in the different respects the questions listed above are concentrated on the place given to gods, to divine mediators, and to human institutions connected with them.

THE TEXT ANALYSED With a length of four thousand ‘verses’ (according to the count of the Codex Claromontanus)1 the ‘Shepherd of Hermas’ is much longer than every book of the canonical New Testament; the same Codex gives 2900 verses to Luke, and 2600 each to Matthew and the Acta apostolorum. The ancient headlines structure the text into five visions (vis), twelve mandates (entolai, mand) and ten parables (sim). The mandates are dictates of the appearance of the shepherd, who enters

1 Schneemelcher 1990, 30. These are 115 chapters in the counting of Whittaker 1967.

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the text only here. They are partly short, partly longer paranetic texts that might include dialogues and visions (for instance mand 11). The headlines are not precise in generic terms. Within the twelfth mandate the appearance changes and introduces itself as an angel of penitence.2 As such it presents ten parables; the longest (9) repeats the vision of the building of a white tower of vision 3, supplemented by a detailed allegorical interpretation.3 In an earlier treatment I argued that the imagery is informed by Hermas’ own profession as a producer of salt.4 Hermas’ vision of the transformation of creation into church5 is not only inspired by the Jesuanic metaphor of the ‘salt of the earth’, but also by his contemporary Roman world and technology and myths of his profession about the use of salt as a building material. Without doubt, the first four visions originally formed an independent text to which the later part refers. Only now the whole book could acquire the title Poimên or in Latin Pastor, ‘Shepherd’. Herma, a common name in the city of Rome, is addressed as such only in the earlier layer of the text.6 At the same time, there is much to support the assumption that the text as a whole stems from a single author.7 Self-interpretation and self-correction is a principle of the reasoning from the very beginning.8 The growth of the text seems to reflect oral communication,9 or more precisely an oral communication supported by writing and confined by the circulation of earlier texts.10 Thus, the imagery is restricted and subjected to varied, even contradictory interpretation. For our reading of the text this has important consequences. Different passages of the text might illuminate each other, but any strictly synchronic and systematic approach is bound to fail. The text reflects a longer doctrinal development, even if we do not have the slightest indication of the length and absolute dating of this development. The fields of shift, 2

PH mand 12.4,7; 12.6.1. Benz 1969, 150 points to the general tendency of visionary interpretation of images to be didactic or even pedantic (Hermas serving as an example, 151); see also 651. 4 Rüpke 1999. 5 Thus Leutzsch 1989, 89. Cf. Schneider 1999, 93–163, who points to the paraenetic function of this aspect of Hermas’ ecclesiology (163). 6 Lampe 1989, 135–53. 7 This is now opinio communis, Hilhorst 1988, 682–701, here 685; Ehrmann 2003, 166. For the unity Henne 1992 and Rüpke 1999 for the unity of the imagery. 8 9 10 Leutzsch 1989, 13. Leutzsch 1989, 17. Osiek 1999, 10, 13. 3

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however, make this more a problem for historians of dogmatics than of individualization. Most attempts to date the ‘Shepherd’ point to the second quarter of the second century.11 The claim of the Canon Muratori that Hermas was the brother of the Roman bishop Pius and had written the text during the latter’s time of office (lines 73–7), traditionally dated to the 140s, converges with the period indicated before.12 Even if there was no monarchical episcopate at Rome by the time and the dating was a construct of a later time,13 the implied synchronism is interesting. It might imply that an important presbyter, Pius, supported a contemporary visionary—who took care to refrain from any mention of the relationship.14 Methodologically, we are not able to decide whether Hermas’ visions were authentic. Despite the long growth of the text, the literary strategies so clearly visible in the earliest part of the book, containing visions 1 to 4, are elaborate, consciously introducing the concept of apocalypsis, as I have shown in a treatment of this part of the book.15 This is no argument against authenticity.16 There is nothing but formed language and generic frames to communicate individual experience. A roughly contemporary apocalyptic text, 4 Ezra, which might have been produced in the city of Rome too (it claims to be written in ‘Babylon’),17 demonstrates the acceptance of the genre and the possibility of visionary experience.18 At least, such texts—apart from possibly many individual narratives that never were turned into writing—enabled contemporaries, as later readers, to conceptualize their own experiences as religious and visionary experiences.19 Within a perspective on individualization, together with the likewise not pseudepigraphic apocalypse of John the ‘Shepherd’ it attests to a ‘democratization’ of visionary experience. 11

Cf. Ehrmann 2003, 169: 110–140 ce. Without further substantial arguments Staats (1986, 100–8, 104) accepts the Canon Muratori and dates the texts to the 130s or even 120s. 13 Probably from the last quarter of the 2nd cent., see Lampe 1989, 343. 14 See Rüpke 2005, also Lampe 1989, 334 and Joly 1993, 524–51, in particular 546. 15 Rüpke 2005. 16 Frenschkowski 2006, 350–2, reaches a similar conclusion. 17 Stone 1990, 10, speculates about a production in Judaea, if the Babylon reference is not meant historically. He postulates a Hebrew original (ibid. 1). 18 See Stone 2003. 19 See Jung 2006, 21, on the interrelationship of individual, emotional experience and communicated and even institutionalized meanings. 12

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‘Democratization’ or rather ‘popularization’ is indicated by the history of reception of the ‘Shepherd’. Among the early texts of the majority church that did not make it into the canon of the 27 books of the New Testament, the Shepherd of Hermas was among those that achieved canonical rank at least temporarily. Already by the second century the text, probably written at Rome, found its way to Gaul (Irenaeus) and Africa (Tertullian): it was especially popular in Egypt20 and quoted by the Alexandrine authors Clemens and Origines. The Canon Muratori (which I date to the late second century, too)21 protests against the text: the ‘Shepherd’ should be read, but not be read out to the people. Obviously, the ‘danger’ of canonical status was seen as large.22 The Codex Sinaiticus contains the ‘Shepherd’, together with the letter of Barnabas, at the end.23 Despite the distancing from, or even ignoring of, the Shepherd by the Fathers of the fourth and fifth century—Hieronymus says apud Latinos paene ignotus est, ‘it is close to unknown among the Latins’ (vir. ill. 10)—the text was multiplied in Latin translations of the second and fourth century and had been diffused in the Western as well as in the Eastern part of the empire in many manuscripts; many papyri go back as far as the second century.24 Perhaps the text even inspired paintings in catacombs, surely in the catacomb of San Gennaro at Naples where a group of young women building a tower was depicted in the early third century.25 At least partial translations were made into Achminic and Sahidic Coptic, Ethiopic, and middle Persian. From 1513 onwards four printed editions of the sixteenth century demonstrate the interest in the text from Martin Luther to Carl Gustav Jung.26 The ‘Shepherd of Hermas’ is one of the earliest texts of the ‘followers of Christ’ that is neither an epistolary treatise nor a biography of 20

Osiek 1999, 5. The dating has been questioned by Sundberg 1973, 1–41, and Hahneman 1992, dating it to the 4th century. Opposed by Kaestli 1994, 609–34, and Hill 1995, 437–2. This need not question the authenticity of the claim, see Wilson 1993 and 1995, who dates the ‘Shepherd’ to 80 to 100 ad. 22 Canon Muratori l. 77–80. 23 See Brox 1991, 70–1 and Henne 1990, 81–100. 24 P. Michigan 130; s. also Carlini 1991. 25 Osiek 1999, 7–8, also pointing to a possible influence on the popularity of the depiction of Jesus as a shepherd (8). 26 Cf. Brox 1991, 69–70 with literature quoted in notes 75–7. 21

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Jesus or a collection of his sayings. It is the text of a Roman Jew27 from the first half of the second century who is bothered by the moral status of his fellows, thus displaying a post-Matthew theology.28 He tries to communicate the visions of an ideal church, which he has received, to his and other groups of co-religious. This is not to follow Völter’s identification of an originally Jewish kernel of the text, but the denial of a dichotomic view.29 Hermas does not thematise ‘Jews’ as people different at all.30 His (Jewish) group does follow Christ, and surely he would have accepted the term Christianus as a description of himself. Hermas is not interested in those who do not, he has no interest in differentiation among these, and is certain that many more will join. His concern, however, is those that have followed for whatever time, but stopped doing so in different stages.31 Unlike his contemporary, the author of Hebrews, comparable in many aspects,32 Hermas is not interested so much in Christology, even if that is one of his concerns—and a subject of highly unusual (in the light of later developments) solutions.33 The text offers visionary, apocalyptic literature like 4 Ezra or John, that tries to come to grips with the realities of Roman power, but its plot is clearly autobiographical (unlike the other apocalyptic texts, apart from John) and intensively localized.34 Thus it is prima vista suitable for an analysis of specifically religious individuality. However, I will return to this aspect only at the end.35 My main thesis will be that for Hermas, a specifically religious individuality was the solution to the more general problem of a lack of distinction of the new ekklêsia in his contemporary world. Thus, I will first address Hermas’ characterization of the contemporary

27

Völter 1900, 20. I am grateful to Ian Henderson for this hint as to the reflection of Matthew on the divide between the followers of Jesus and the rest, given his strongly ethical message and developed ecclesiology and Christology. 29 But cf. Rutgers 2009, 121 for the conception of early Christians as ‘high tension minority groups’ that were clearly separated from the Jews. 30 See Brox 1991, 430. For the implied permeability of the Greco-Roman notion of ‘people’ see Janowitz 2000, 213–14. 31 Sim 9.11–13 = 88.9–91.2. 32 See Rüpke, Hebrews (forthcoming). 33 Summarily Brox 1991, 485–95. 34 See Osiek 1999, 24. 35 I am grateful to Martin Harrer, Wuppertal, for stressing this aspect in a discussion. 28

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social and religious setting of the problem that the text is addressing. The solution will be interpreted in terms of different types of individuality and their limits and the interplay of personal experience and social responsibility, which forms the framework of the narration of all the visionary material. A brief look into Hermas’ conceptualization of agency (of course never called this) follows. As a conclusion, the place of the whole text in the history of religion of the second century will be discussed.

THE PROBLEM TO BE SOLVED If there is one feature of the whole text that is most peculiar, it is Hermas’ interest in typologies. This holds true for the categorization of virtues and vices. After a first summary,36 a list of virtues and vices is the organizing principle of the mandata, even up to the point that temperance (enkráteia) is presented as ‘twofold’, to be observed in some cases (not to do the bad), not in others (not to not do the good).37 Even more extreme—but central—is his classification of the members of the ekklêsia, visualized as stones (vis 3, sim 9) or tested by rods (sim 8). Obviously, to differentiate neatly between types and degrees (even percentages) of good and wicked believers, is of importance for him. Simile 8 leads to 28 different types of believers.38 I quote only the earliest example:39 Vis 3, 5 [chapter 13]: (1) ‘Hear now about the stones that go into the building. On the one hand, the squared and white stones that fit together at the joints are the apostles, bishops, teachers and deacons who live reverently towards God and perform their duties as bishops, teachers, and deacons for the chosen ones of God in a holy and respectful way; some of these have fallen asleep, but others are still living. And they have always been harmonious with one another and at peace with one another, and they have listened one to another. For this reason their joints fit together in the building of the tower.’

36

PH 16 (vis 3.8). 4–5. PH 38 (mand 8).1–2. A similar list is given in 92 (sim 9.15), 2. 38 Leutzsch 1989, 226. In her anti-individualistic interpretation, Osiek (1999, 201) stresses the appearance in (at the start) 13 groups. 39 This and the following translations are by Osiek, Loeb Library. 37

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(2) ‘But who are the ones drawn from the depths of the sea and placed into the building, who fit together at their joints with the other stones already built in it?’ ‘These are those who have suffered on account of the name of the Lord.’ (3) ‘But I also want to know, Lady, who the other stones are, the ones brought from the dry land.’ She said, ‘Those that go into the building without being hewn are ones the Lord has approved, because they walk in the uprightness of the Lord and carry out his commandments.’ (4) ‘And who are the ones brought and placed in the building?’ ‘These are those who are new in faith and faithful. They are admonished by the angels to do good; for this reason, no evil has been found in them.’ (5) ‘But who are the ones who were tossed aside and cast out?’ ‘These are those who have sinned but wish to repent. For this reason they are not cast far away from the tower, because they will be useful for the building, if they repent. And so if those who are about to repent do so, they will be strong in faith—if they repent now while the tower is still under construction. But if the building is completed, they will no longer have a place, but will be outcasts. This alone is to their advantage, that they lie next to the tower. (6 [14]:1) ‘But do you want to know about the ones that are broken off and cast far from the tower? These are the children of lawlessness. For they came to faith hypocritically and no wickedness ever left them. And so they have no salvation, since, because of their wickedness, they are useless for the building. This is why they were broken off and cast far away, because of the Lord’s anger, since they aggravated him. (2)But with respect to the many other stones you saw lying on the ground and not coming into the building—the ones that are rough are those who know the truth but do not remain in it nor cling to the saints. This is why they are of no use.’ (3) ‘But who are the ones with cracks?’ ‘These are those who hold a grudge against one another in their hearts and have no peace among themselves. Even though they seem to be peace-loving, when they leave one another’s presence, their wickedness remains in their hearts. These are the cracks the stones have. (4) But the ones that are broken are those who have believed and live, for the most part, in righteousness, but also have a certain share lawlessness, this is why they are broken off and not whole.’ (5) ‘But who are the white stones, Lady, which are rounded and do not fit into the building?’ She replied to me, ‘How long will you be foolish and ignorant, asking everything, and understanding nothing? These are the ones who have faith, but also are wealthy in this age. But when affliction comes, because of their wealth and their business affairs, they deny their Lord.’

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(6) And I responded to her, ‘And so when, Lady, will they be useful for the building?’ ‘When the wealth that beguiles them is cut off from them,’ she said, ‘then they will be useful to God. For just as a round stone cannot be made square unless it has something cut off and discarded, so also with those who are rich in this age: if their wealth is not cut off from them, they cannot be useful to the Lord. (7) You should know this above all from your own case. When you were wealthy, you were of no use; but now you are useful and helpful in life. All of you should be useful to God. For you yourself are also being taken from the same stones. (7 [15]:1) ‘But the other stones that you saw cast far from the tower and falling on the path and rolling from the path onto the rough terrain, these are the ones who have believed, but have left their true path because they are of two minds. They are lost, thinking they can find a better path; and they are miserable, walking over the rough terrain. (2) But the ones that fall into the fire and were burned are those who completely abandoned the living God; and they no longer think about repenting because of their licentious desires and the wicked deeds they have performed.’ (3) ‘But who are the other ones, which fall near the water but cannot be rolled into it?’ ‘These are the ones who have heard the word and wanted to be baptized in the name of the Lord. But then when they recall what the life of purity involves, they change their minds and return to pursue their evil desires.’

But Hermas is a fine observer and scrupulous elsewhere, too. As Leutzsch has shown in his analysis, for the publication of Hermas’ visions in the ekklêsia, Hermas is aware of different audiences and groups of addressees,40 which will not be reviewed here. Applying instead a very simple model (that will have to be modified) for the social settings, Hermas is in an inner circle of his co-religious, which itself is surrounded by an outer circle. In one of the earliest formulations, the revelatory figure speaks of the ‘righteous’ on the one hand, and the ‘peoples’ (ethnoi) and ‘apostates’ on the other.41 As already mentioned, the interest in the ‘ethnic’ part of the outer circle as such is very limited. However, as the pairing of ‘peoples’ and ‘apostates’ already suggests, the borderline between the two circles is permeable. And it is very easily permeated. Following Hermas’ descriptions, it is easy to become a believer, and it is very easy to drop out afterwards. Or more precisely: it is very easy to get into the borderlands. The latter are the concern of Hermas’ classifications. Even if the majority 40

Leutzsch 1989, 66–82.

41

4.2 = vis. 1, 4.2.

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is clearly within, as is demonstrated by the test of the willow rods,42 this fact is stated only once. The majority of classes, and the interest of the text, is on the grey zone to both sides of the borderline. The central problem is formulated in the simile of the trees in winter:43 You cannot see which one is still living. You cannot tell the bad and the just from seeing them. They cannot be differentiated in this world: Sim 3 [52]:1 He showed me many trees that did not have leaves but appeared to me to be withered. And they were all alike. He said to me, ‘Do you see these trees?’ ‘I see them, Lord,’ I replied. ‘They are like one another and withered.’ He said, ‘These trees you see are the people who dwell in this age.’ (2) ‘Why then, Lord,’ I asked, ‘do they seem withered and like one another?’ ‘Because’, he said, ‘neither the upright nor the sinners stand out clearly in this age, but they are like one another. For this age is a winter for those who are upright: they do not stand out clearly while dwelling with the sinners. (3) For just as the trees that shed their leaves in the winter all look alike, with the withered indistinguishable from the living, so too in this age it is not clear who the upright are and who the sinners, but they all appear alike.’

What seems to be so difficult for the first-century intellectual Paul is judged as easy for the second-century literate entrepreneur Hermas: Pistis, belief, is easy to attain or proclaim. The problems begin only afterwards. This is transformed into the image of the tower. Quickly raised to impressive size, the building has to be revised, stones have to be removed.44 The interruption points to the present halt to the eschatological completion,45 but there is an historical basis to the speed. This success is—not explicitly—related to the Roman empire. It is easy to spread the word, and all the peoples of the word come to believe.46 Hermas never claims the believers to be the majority, but that is not seen as the major problem. Clearly, the victory is only an eschatological one. The problem is the very character of the borderline. Who is really within and who is really outside? To bring all of those in the grey zone inside, to bring them to conversion (metanoia),47 is Hermas’ foremost intention.

42 44 46

43 PH 67 (sim 8.1).16. For the repetition of the image, see Marin 1982. 45 PH 82 (sim 9.5).2; 83 (sim 9.6).3–5. Osiek 1999, 222–3. 47 PH 94. Osiek 1999, 29.

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What are the (ideal) differences between the ‘peoples’ and the believers? Hermas remains remarkably silent—in accordance with his just quoted statement. The very few statements remain vague. In the discussion of marriage and separation, ‘to do the same as the peoples’ is regarded as equivalent to adultery, leading to the pollution of the flesh.48 Whether ‘pollution of the flesh’ is related to sacrificial meals is far from clear.49 With regard to Israel’s relationship to Yahweh, idolatry is regarded as adultery in the Tenakh, but there is no clue suggesting this association.50 Idolatry, however, is mentioned in another context. To take counsel from some professional divinatory is equated with it: Mand 11 [43]:1 He showed me some people sitting on a bench, and someone else sitting on a chair. And he said to me, ‘Do you see the ones sitting on the bench?’ ‘I see them, Lord,’ I replied. ‘These people’, he said, ‘are faithful, and the one sitting on the chair is a false prophet who destroys the understanding of the doubleminded, not of the faithful. (2) And so, doubleminded people come to him as if he were a soothsayer, and ask him what is about to happen to them. And that false prophet, having within himself no power of the divine spirit, speaks with them in the light of the requests and the evil desires they have, and he fills their souls as they themselves wish. (3) For he, being empty himself, gives empty answers to those who are empty. For whatever he is, he answers in a way befitting the emptiness of the person. But he also speaks some true words. For the devil fills him with his own spirit, to see if he can dash one of the upright. (4) And so, all those who are strong in the faith of the Lord and have been clothed with the truth do not cling to such spirits, but abstain from them. But all those who are of two minds and who are constantly changing their minds [Or: who are always repenting] consult the oracle as do even the outsiders. And they bring a greater sin upon themselves by thus committing idolatry. For the one who asks a false prophet about any matter is an idolater, devoid of the truth, and foolish. (5) For no spirit given by God is consulted, but having divine power it speaks all things from its own authority, because it comes from above, from the power of the divine spirit. (6) But the spirit that, when consulted, speaks in light of human desires is earthly and insubstantial, having no power. And it does not speak at all, unless it is consulted.’

48

49 PH 29 (mand 4.1).9. See PH 60 (sim 5.7). Such a reference is assumed by Brox 1991, 208, pointing to passages like Hos. 2:4; 3:1, Jeremiah and Ezekiel. 50

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This text is at the same time a remarkable testimony for the strength of divinatory practices and prophets in early Christian groups.51 In simile 8, Hermas speaks of ‘the deeds of the peoples’ as the ultimate indicator of full reintegration into the gentiles (as ethnoi is usually translated) or rather ‘outsiders’ (as suggested by Osiek).52 Again, any substantiation is lacking. Hermas’ central concern regarding the others is always formulated from a point of view from within. It is the rich who are most endangered. Against a Jewish background the mechanism of euergetism, prestige, and eternal memory were problematic, even if benefactory behaviour could easily be reconciled with piety.53

FALSE AND RIGHT INDIVIDUALITY Again, the description goes far beyond mere topoi. Of course, being a rich man usually has some problematic corollaries. Avidity for more wealth and other women, luxury, and sumptuous meals are frequently correlated.54 Yet, to eat too much endangers one’s health, Hermas rightly observes already in the earliest book of visions in Stoic tradition.55 Riches endanger the contact among believers, whom the rich avoid in order to avoid being addressed by beggars, unacceptable behaviour by every standard.56 Business causes contacts with the ‘people’.57 Hermas formulates an elaborated model for the psychological mechanisms and sequences: Sim 8. 9 [75]:1 ‘Those who handed over sticks that were two parts withered and the third part green are those who have been faithful, but who also have grown wealthy and maintained a high standing among the outsiders. These have clothed themselves with great arrogance and become conceited; they have abandoned the truth and do not cling to those who are upright, but live with the outsiders. And this path has become very sweet to them. Still, they have not fallen away from God, 51

52 Osiek 1999, 141. PH 75 (sim 8.9).3. Schwartz 2010, 174. Cf. Katz 2006, 2 for the similarity in lifestyle with the nonJewish environment and 5 for the notion of ‘porous Judaism’. 54 PH 36 (mand 6.2).5; 45 (mand 12.2).1. 55 PH 17 (vis 3.9).3. See Osiek 1999, 81. 56 PH 97 (sim 9.20).2. See Osiek 1999, 246. 57 PH 40 (mand 10.1).4. 53

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but have remained in the faith, even though they do not do the works of faith. (2) And so many of these have repented, and their dwelling is in the tower. (3) But others have taken up residence, once and for all, with the outsiders. These have fallen away from God by being borne along by vanities of the outsiders and acting like them. And so these are counted among the outsiders.

Being rich is more than a casual condition of one’s place in society. It is something to be sought after, a matter of distinction and a competitive individuality. Even if the generation of wealth is full of problematic corollaries, it is fundamentally to be accepted.58 It is economic hardship that is the clearest signal of divine punishment, of thlipsis, otherwise associated with official persecution, for Hermas.59 Such an economic loss leads to a relocation in society, making an apokatastasis eis ton topon necessary (66,6). From the earliest layer of text onwards Hermas reflects on the religious consequences. Rich believers will in situations of thlipsis, of trouble—that is, persecution—tend to become apostates.60 In the choice between this world and the other, owners of fixed property will themselves be fixed: they will tend to opt for the earthly city and forfeit their true citizenship.61 Gaining profit from work instead of dealing may reduce such dangers,62 but cannot remove them. Hermas himself might be following such a strategy, as the change in the places of the visions indicates.63 After two visions on his way to Cumae64 and interludes in his home two visions happen in his fields of salt production, perhaps identical to the place at the side of the Via Campana.65 This change must be seen as a progress in occupation.66 Distant Cumae is the aim

58

Osiek 1999, 209, attributes a morally more negative view to Hermas. PH 3.1. See also PH 66 (sim 7).6 (cf. 66.1: tlipsis) with Brox 1991, 343. 60 PH 14 (vis 3.6).5. 61 PH 50 (sim 1), 4. See also Osiek 1999, 159. 62 PH 27 (mand 2).4 63 Rüpke 2005; cf. Brox 1991, 163–66. 64 For the problem of the text see Brox 1991, 80 with n. 13 and 105, and Lusini 2001, 96. The Greek archetype had kômas, ‘villages’ (confirmed by the Ethiopian text), the Latin for the second instance either cum his or regionem Cumanorum; see the discussion in Rüpke 2011, 251, n. 40; Osiek 1999, 43, remains negative for the possibility of Cumae. 65 The text is sufficiently sure as to reject the emandations of Peterson (1954, n. 50), which finally lead to a localisation of the events in the ‘Hinnomtal bei Jerusalem’. 66 See Lampe 1989, 188–91 (without a clear conclusion, based on his misunderstanding of the character of the field). 59

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of the merchant and versatile business man.67 The salt fields are the aim of the reliable and stable owner or long-term tenant. Extensively Hermas even reflects upon the psychological situation of the business man caring about his balances, on his activism and irascible character.68 The permanency of such a character trait (as I would conceptualize this) is expressed by Hermas’ postulation of an angelos tryphês, an angel of luxury, who is at the same time an angel of deceit.69 According to him, dishonesty is a necessary implication of the mercantile business.70 Obviously, these mechanisms of competitive individuality71 with all their negative consequences are accepted as given by Hermas, even if they endanger the ekklêsia, the community of the believers. To concentrate on exchange, to be a merchant, is especially dangerous, thus Hermas seems to personally recommend productive work, one would suppose (taking Hermas himself and general libertine behaviour as an example) as autonomous artisan rather than in the form of paid labour. Economic upward mobility is a trait of the libertine (if we believe the text) author that is beyond theological reflection and potential social change. I stress the notion of individuality, as this is the framing given by the text. The interest in typologies is not an interest in theorizing about groups but in catching the situation of a person as precisely as possible. This is underlined by the interest in psychology—eupsychos and dipsychos are central terms to characterize a person72—and the conceptualization of agency, to which I will turn below. It is firmly underlined by the entirely individual eschatology that forms the consequence of any behaviour.73 Against the backdrop of the situation as characterized before, compensation and remedies are sought in a specifically religious individuation and individuality. The whole process is seen as a 67 For the economic ethics of Hermas see Leutzsch 1989, 113–37. Clearly, they are influenced by the orientation towards upward mobility of libertines, as Osiek 1983, has shown. 68 e.g. PH 34 (mand 5.2).2. 69 PH 62 (sim 6.1),1. 70 Rüpke 2011, 55. 71 For the concept see Rüpke, p. 13 this volume. 72 e.g. PH 12 (vis 3.4), 3; 39 (mand 9).9–11; eupsychos: 3 (vis 1.3).2. For dipsychia see Osiek 1999, 30–1. 73 Stressed by Leutzsch 1989, 207: ‘Tendenz zur Individualisierung der Eschatologie’. Contrarily Osiek 1999, 30 and 37.

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biographical one. The conception of ‘repentance’, metanoia, is such a biographical process, indicating a change of mind. It is the consequences of this change that are of interest for Hermas, not any ritual correlates of some ‘sacrament of repentance’ never referred to by the author.74 Competitive individuality is a helpful term to go beyond the notion of compensation. Compensation remains useful in a specific respect. Only very occasionally Hermas goes as far as to suggest that one’s wealth might be donated,75 but that is never described as a change of status. Sim 1 [50]:8 Instead of fields, then, purchase souls that have been afflicted, insofar as you can, and take care of widows and orphans and do not neglect them; spend your wealth and all your furnishing for such fields and houses as you have received from God. (9) For this is why the Master made you rich, that you carry out these ministries for him. It is much better to purchase the fields, goods and houses you find in your own city when you return to it. (10) This kind of extravagance is good and makes one glad; it has no grief or fear, but joy instead. And so, do not participate in the extravagance sought by outsiders; for it is of no profit for you who are slaves of God. (11) But participate in your own extravagance in which you can rejoice. And do not counterfeit or touch what belongs to another, or desire it. For it is evil to desire someone else’s goods. But do your own work, and you will be saved.

Again, Hermas is fighting with the fact that lavishness is not easily discernible as something specific for the believers. Even his suggestion of a self-restriction in the accumulation of capital beyond ‘autarkeia’76 is entirely compatible with the ethics of leiturgeia.77 The following simile, however, specifies the usage of the surplus within a religious framework. Employing the specific Italian imagery of the elm as a support of the vine,78 Hermas goes into biological details to describe a sort of religious symbiosis of rich and poor, pointing to the institution of patronage and the exchange of services between patron and client:79 Sim 2 [51]:8 And so, people may think that the elm tree bears no fruit; but they neither know nor understand that when drought comes, the

74 76 78

75 Similarly, Osiek 1999, 29. Osiek 1999, 160. 77 PH 50 (sim 1).6. Fundamental: Veyne 1976. 79 Osiek 1999, 162. Thus Rankin 2004, 306.

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elm nourishes the vine by holding water; and the vine, since it has an undiminished supply of water, produces fruit for two, both for itself and for the elm. Thus also those who are poor who pray to the Lord on behalf of the rich bring their own wealth to completion; and again those who are rich and supply the poor with what they need bring their souls to completion. (9) Both then share in an upright work. And so the one who does these things will not be abandoned by God, but will be recorded in the books of the living. (10) Happy are those who have possessions and understand that their riches have come from the Lord; for the one who understands this will also be able to perform a good ministry.

The economic remains important even for the specifically religious fields of attaining one’s full religious role. The counsels given by the ephiphanic figures do not support a competition in purely religious activities. Too much prayer is (like too much food, one could add) not healthy. It weakens the body, as stated in the third vision.80 Here, Hermas is thinking of a combination of fasting and praying. In a later text, the Shepherd is more explicitly critical about fasting, recommending a moral life instead.81 The following simile demands the reckoning of the money saved by fasting (that is, living on bread and water for one day) and the donation of the equivalent to the poor.82 The temporal limitation is explicit: it is not on the field of asceticism that Hermas proposes a competition for religious excellence. The latter is, however, recommended. Even if living according to God’s commandments qualifies for ‘inscription’ among the ‘number of the keepers of the commandments’,83 more could be done. To do more increases doxa, honour, and honour by God. The excess to be performed is called leiturgiai.84 Of course, all of this would never reach the level of those who ‘suffer on behalf of the name’ (never called ‘martyrium’ nor ‘Christ’) torture or wild beasts, but this type of victory (they are accorded a wreath and palms85) is part of an encompassing classification only. It is not part of the everyday life for which one has to think about rules and moral behaviour.

80 PH 18 (vis 3.10).7. For Hermas’ interest in embodiment, i.e. taste and smells, see Fredrikson 2003. 81 PH 54 (sim 5.1).3–5. The formulations of this criticism are very restrictive, see Osiek 1999, 169. 82 PH 56 (sim 5.3).7. 83 See Leutzsch 1989, 94–5 on the forms of the heavenly use of writing. 84 PH 56 (sim 5.3).2–3. This in quite in contrast to general use, Osiek 1999, 174. 85 PH 68 (sim 8.2).1. For the notion of the name, see in particular Gieschen 2003.

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There is another area of religious individuation, which, however, is not explicitly conceptualized in terms of degrees, quantities, and excellence. This is religious knowledge—one of the virtues.86 Distinction is brought into play performatively. Hermas himself is addressed or even ironically criticized for his appetite for knowledge regarding the visions or textual revelations he is granted. This is a feature that links the early visions and the late parables.87 The problem of ‘foreign’—not even bad or wrong—teachings within the group88 is referred to only once.89 Finally, it is knowledge (gnosis) or, rather, the lack of it, that offers the only clear definition of the ‘peoples’. They do not know their creator.90 In this respect, the dubitant is particularly close, as he reflects ‘whether God is or is not’.91 Relevant distinction is related to God: it is religious distinction.

LIMITS OF RELIGIOUS INDIVIDUALITY There are limits to religious individuality that go beyond its general social functionality, of the rich sustaining the poor, of the glad and firm strengthening the sad and doubting. In the ‘Shepherd of Hermas’ individualization and socialization, individuality and sociality are not contradictions, but are inseparably intertwined. Two types of limitation by social roles are of special importance: the role of the head of the family, and functions within the religious community. According to the autobiographical92 sketch at the very beginning, the first-person narrator of the text was raised as a slave, not necessarily as a homebred one (verna),93 freed and able to found a business (first as a merchant, than a producer of salt) and a family.94 Despite 86

PH 16 (vis 3,8), 5 and 7. e.g. PH 11 (vis 3.3).1; 28 (mand 3).4; 57 (sim 5.4).1 – 58 (sim 5.5).1. 88 Stressed by Osiek 1999, 207. 89 PH 72 (sim 8.6).5. 90 PH 53 (sim 4).4. 91 PH 12 (vis 3.4).3. 92 For arguments for fictionality cf. Joly 1958, 17–21, but see Leutzsch 1989, 29–46, for the lack of any linguistic signals for fiction. 93 The latter might be indicated by the term threpsas for the first owner, see Lampe 1989, 182; Leutzsch 1989, 139, but a foundling would be an even more fitting solution: Osiek 1999, 42. 94 Rüpke 2011, 66–8. 87

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all individual shortcomings, his vicissitudes in terms of business as visions are not related to his own behaviour only. Several times he is admonished to care morally and religiously for his wife, children, and family. This is frequently put into the formula of ‘you, your children, and your house’, the last obviously including any further servile members of his household.95 This does not only refer to a common moral standard or style of life. There are references to specific instances of misbehaviour of his wife or his children.96 In one instance of Hermas’ suffering, he is explicitly freed from any personal fault, but made the object of punishment for the transgressions of his children:97 Sim 7 [66]:2 ‘Listen,’ he said, ‘your sins are many, but not enough for you to be handed over to this angel. But your household has committed great sins and lawless acts, and the glorious angel is embittered by their deeds. This is why he commanded you to afflict for a time, to lead them to repent and cleanse themselves from all worldly desires. When they repent and are cleansed, then the punishing angel will leave.’ (3) I said to him, ‘Lord, even if they are acting in ways that embitter the glorious angel—what have I done?’ ‘It cannot be otherwise,’ he said, ‘They cannot be afflicted unless you are as well, since you are the head of the household. For if you are afflicted, of necessity they are too; but if you are flourishing, they can experience no affliction.’

The role assumed by Hermas is the role delineated by the Roman social and legal concept of the paterfamilias and his noxial liability for any damage caused by his household, including its slaves and beasts.98 Again, Hermas shows himself to be a member of Roman society and presupposes his fellows to share this framework which limits individual liberty. The second concerns formal roles within the ekklêsia. Such a role obliges its bearer to carefully fulfil its duties. This, again, is a concern in the earlier, as in later, parts of the text. This reflection is applied to episcopoi (I avoid the translation as bishop, as there is no clear difference from the occasionally mentioned presbyters99), teachers, 95

PH 1 (vis 1.1).9; 27 (mand 2).7; 56 (sim 5.3).9 etc. PH 6 (vis 2.2).2–4; the reference seems to relate to a specific instance: Osiek 1999, 54 rather than to be generic. 97 PH 66 (sim 7).2–3. 98 Thus Leutzsch 1989, 57–9; Rankin 2004, 312–14 (without knowledge of Leutzsch). 99 Cf. Maier 1991, 63, suggesting the episcopoi to be a special type of presbyteroi; cf. Simonetti 2006, 6, who shows that it is the latter rather than the former who are 96

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and deacons.100 One of the problems singled out is internal strife, later explained101 as fighting for pre-eminence and ranks of dignity.102 In the very last instance the even more fundamental misuse of the office of deacon for personal enrichment is addressed.103 Several times a figura etymologica stresses the connection between office and fulfilling the office. Hermas himself never attains a formal role. It is his character as a visionary that gives him—always feeble—legitimation to fulfil his office vis-à-vis his co-religious.104

THEORETICAL CONCEPTS AND PERFORMATIVE ASPECTS OF RELIGIOUS INDIVIDUALITY Within the apocalyptic tradition of Hellenistic Judaism, John is the first to produce a non-pseudonymous apocalyptic text.105 But whereas John’s personality disappears behind his visions, Hermas’ autobiography frames and permeates the whole text. And it is not any function or social position that is invoked to induce authority. The opening of the text is personal, even intimate. 1:1 The one who raised me sold me to a certain woman named Rhoda, in Rome. After many years, I regained her acquaintance and began to love her as a sister. (2) When some time had passed, I saw her bathing in the Tiber river; and I gave her my hand to help her out of the river. When I observed her beauty I began reasoning in my heart, ‘I would be fortunate to have a wife of such beauty and character.’ This is all I had in mind, nothing else. (3) When some time had passed, I was travelling to the countryside glorifying the creation of God and thinking how great, remarkable, and

explicitly credited with the task of directing the community. Osiek 1999, 23 thinks of synonyms. 100 PH 13 (vis 3.3).1. 101 Brox 1991, 151 does not see this problem being referred to already in the earliest text. 102 PH 17 (vis 3.9).7–10; expanded in 43 (mand 11).12 (on prophets) and 73 (sim 8.7).4: proteia and doxê. 103 PH 103 (vis 9.26).2. 104 See the detailed analysis in Rüpke 2002. 105 On the general trait see Russell 1982, 311–26.

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powerful they are. On the way I fell asleep and a spirit took me and carried me through a certain deserted place that was impassable, for the place was steep and split up by the courses of water. When I crossed the river I came to level ground and bowed my knees; and began praying to the Lord and confessing my sins. (4) While I prayed the sky opened up and I saw the woman I had desired, addressing me from heaven: ‘Hermas, greetings!’ I looked at her and said, ‘Lady, what are you doing here?’ (5) She replied to me, ‘I have been taken up to accuse you of your sins before the Lord.’ (6) I said to her, ‘So now are you accusing me?’ ‘No,’ she said, ‘but listen to what I have to say to you. The God who dwells in heavens and who, for the sake of his holy church, created, increased and multiplied that which exists out of that which does not exist, is angry at you for sinning against me.’ (7) I answered her, ‘Have I sinned against you? In what way? When did I speak an inappropriate word to you? Have I not always thought of you as a goddess? Have I not always respected you as a sister? Why do you make such evil and foul accusations against me, O woman?’ (8) But she laughed and said to me, ‘The desire for evil did rise up in your heart. Or do you not think it is evil for an evil desire to arise in the heart of an upright man? Indeed,’ she said, ‘it is a great sin. For the upright man intends to do what is right. And so, when he intends to do what is right his reputation is firmly established in heaven and he finds that the Lord looks favourably on everything he does. But those who intend in their hearts to do evil bring death and captivity to themselves—especially those who are invested in this age, who rejoice in their wealth and do not cling to the good things yet to come.’

To view Rhode, his former owner and a co-religious, who freed him, naked in the Tiber106 is not only a displaced literary topos from novels without much consequence for the further text.107 Instead, it offers the possibility of starting the whole series of admonitions from an extreme example, sinful thoughts or thought sins.108 It is this very personal dimension, only open to the divine world (comprising much

106 This is the most probable conclusion from the situation; see in general Fagan 1999, 24–9, in particular 25, n. 33; cf. for the associations of bathing: Dunbabin 1989, 6–46; for Christian perspectives on mixed bathing: Zellinger 1928, 34–46. 107 Thus Brox 1991, 76–7. 108 See PH 1 (vis 1.1).8; cf. 2 (vis 1.2).1. It is noteworthy that the economic dimension of the marriage Hermas is reflecting upon, indicated by ‘of this kind’, i.e. social standing, is not thematised by the appearance.

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more than God alone), that produces the characteristic ring of the whole text. The opening introduces a second idea, to be elaborated in the book of visions as in the address by the Shepherd. The consciousness about one’s religiously moral status is rather opaque or even non-existent. It is from outside that insight is brought, from revelatory figures who— in accordance with the religious capacity of the person—shift in character. A fellow human is replaced by someone taken from local knowledge, the Cumeaen Sibylla, to be revealed as the Ekklesia, to be replaced and supplanted in the later visions by the—very personal109 and personally responsible110—Shepherd, who at the same time is an angel, a figure bearable only to the strong.111 Thus, this is a biographical process that takes weeks, months, and years, even within the framework of the narrative. These figures are, however, more than external messengers that might be helped by written revelations.112 They are conflicting113 internal factors, parts of the personality. Following traditions present particularly in the Septuagint114 and New Testament writings, the exact place is located in the heart. This is most explicitly formulated in mandate 6: Mand 6,2 [36]:1 ‘Hear now’, he said, ‘about faith. A person has two angels, one of righteousness and the other of wickedness.’ (2) ‘And how, then, Lord,’ say I, ‘will I know the inner workings of these, since both angels dwell with me?’ (3) ‘Listen,’ he said, ‘and you will understand these things. The angel of righteousness is sensitive, modest, meek and mild. And so, when he rises up in your heart, he immediately speaks with you about righteousness, purity, reverence, contentment, every upright deed, and every glorious virtue. When all these things rise up in your heart, realize that the angel of righteousness is with you. These are the works of the angel of righteousness. Trust this one, therefore, and his works. (4) See now also the works of the angel of wickedness. First of all, he is irascible,

109

110 PH 25 (vis 5).3. PH 108 (sim 9.31).6. For the angelology and the angelological Christology of PH see Osiek 1999, 34–6; Bucur 2007; Bucur 2009, 113–38. 112 See PH 25 (vis 5).5. Literacy enables permanent usage. For the importance of writing to establish Hermas’ authority see Osiek 1999, 14. 113 For the implied dualism see Osiek 1999, 31–2, with further literature in n. 241; Fredrikson 2001 (going back to a Septuagint tradition of 1 Sam. 16). 114 For contemporary Greek bible translation see Rajak 2009. 111

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bitter, and senseless, and his works are wicked, bringing ruin on the slaves of God. And so, when this one rises up in your heart, recognize him from his works.’ (5) ‘I do not understand, Lord,’ I said, ‘how to perceive him.’ ‘Listen,’ he replied. ‘When any irascibility or bitterness should fall on you, realize that he is in you. Then there is desire for many activities and numerous extravagant foods and drinking bouts and many wild parties and various completely unnecessary luxuries, and desires for women and greed and a certain great haughtiness and arrogance, and everything that is closely connected to these things. And so, when these things rise up in your heart, realize that the angel of wickedness is in you. (6) So then, since you know his work, draw away from him and do not trust him at all, because his works are wicked and harmful to the slaves of God. This, then, is what you need to know about the inner workings of both angels. Understand these things, and trust the angel of righteousness. (7) But withdraw from the angel of wickedness, because his teaching is wicked in everything he does. For if a man is completely faithful, but the thought from the angel should rise up in his heart, that man or woman must commit a sin. (8) But again, if there is a most wicked man or woman, but the works of the angel of righteousness should rise up in his heart, that one must necessarily do something good.

The last sentence makes the modus operandi very clear—or rather, complicates it further. There is interplay between personality and the external, spiritual115 influence that leads to unexpected results. This has important consequences, if the perspective is changed. It is very difficult to judge a person from outside. This conforms to the statement of the later parable. In this world it is impossible to differentiate the good and the wicked in an absolute sense. Thus, Hermas’ narrative is essential for his purpose. The complicated story of a person can be narrated diachronically, as a history. Only for the divine a synchronic analysis is possible. And even here it is not possible to apply a dichotomy, but only complex typologies and measure rods as fine as the twigs of the willow. To the temporal element a spatial one is added. The placing of the visions is important, not only as a way to communicate changes in occupational preferences. There is an opposition between town and countryside. It is the latter that is the primary locus of revelations. 115 Hermas is following here specific Jewish traditions about an angelic spirit: Bucur 2009, 116–19.

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Only late in the sequence of visions, Hermas’ bedchamber becomes the place of a revelatory event, first a dream, then a vision.116 However, for the most important vision, that of simile 9, a place in the countryside—Arcadia—has again to be found.117 This is very much reminiscent of the idyllic conception of religious experience formulated by another inhabitant of the megapolis of Rome, Seneca in letter 41.118 The bedchamber as well as the rurality ensure a type of practical individuality of being on one’s own—up to the point of encountering a mythical beast as at the beginning and end of visio 4.119 It is not a large distance to Rome, which is important. The places—near traffic routes (Via Campana) or on Hermas’ fields of salt production or in an Arcadia—suggest a return to his home for the night.120 The common denominator is the contrast to the intensive interaction within the city, the place of the different religious publics of presbyters, widows, and meetings, too. The city is a complex place, and complex to judge.

CONCLUSION Like the real city, the real community is difficult to judge. The ‘Shepherd of Hermas’ has to draw on the resources of an incipiently reflexive individuality in order to come to grips with the problem of the indifferentiability of so many real-life people. There would have been alternatives which he did not choose.121 He neither drew on the wealth of traditional texts (as for example his—probably—slightly older urban fellow ‘Clemens Romanus’, the author of 1 Clemens) nor did he opt for praise of martyrdom (as—perhaps—his contemporary Ignatius does) in order to create clear boundaries. Instead, he opts for an ideal of moral individuality. Even if agency is described as a competition between different interior powers,122 it is the action of the social person and his or her emotional status that is the decisive indicator for the state of the competition and the willingness or 116

117 PH 18 (vis 3.10).7 and 25 (vis 5).1. PH 78 (sim 9.1).4. 119 On which see Rüpke 2011a, 120–3. PH 22–4. 120 PH 88 (sim 9.11).2. Not thematized by Osiek 1999, 228. 121 Cf. the fine analysis of the strategy to define the community addressed to differentiate itself by a different economic ethos in Dunning 2009, 88–90. 122 See Markschies 1997 for the notion of the ‘interior man’. 118

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reluctance to exchange the real for the imagined community of the ecclesia. This reluctancy is a structural problem that—for the ‘Shepherd’, for the Jewish Roman believer in God’s new ‘name’—could be solved only by individualizing, by religiously individualizing. A strategy based on observation of some individuality, but a strategy aiming at a much sharper religious individualization. Obviously it was a strategy that found many contemporary and later readers.

REFERENCES Benz, Ernst 1969. Die Vision: Erfahrungsformen und Bilderwelt. Stuttgart: Klett. Brox, Norbert 1991. Der Hirt des Hermas. Kommentar zu den Apostolischen Vätern 7. Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht. Bucur, B.G. 2007. ‘The Son of God and the Angelomorphic Holy Spirit: A Reading of the Shepherd’s Christology’, ZNW 98, 120–42. ——2009. Angelomorphic Pneumatology: Clement of Alexandria and other Early Christian Witnesses. Leiden: Brill. Carlini, Antonio (ed.). Papyrus Bodmer XXXVIII: Erma: Il Pastore. Genf: Fondation Martin Bodmer. Dunbabin, Katherine 1989. ‘Baiarum grata voluptas: Pleasures and Dangers of the Baths’, PBSR 57, 6–46. Dunning, Benjamin H. 2009. Aliens and Sojourners: Self as Other in Early Christianity. Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press. Ehrmann, Bart (ed. and trans.) 2003. The Apostolic Fathers, vol. II: Epistle of Barnabas; Papias and Quadratus; Epistle to Diognetus; The Shepherd of Hermas. Loeb Classical Library. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Fagan, Garrett G. 1999. Bathing in Public in the Roman World. Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press. Fredrikson, Nadia I. 2001. ‘L’esprit saint et les esprits mauvais dans le “Pasteur” d’Hermas: sources et prolongements’, VCh 55.3, 262–80. ——2003. ‘La douceur et l’amertume das le langage spirituel des saveurs’, VCh 57.1, 62–93. Frenschkowski, Markus 2006. ‘Vision als Imagination: Beobachtungen zum differenzierten Wirklichkeitsanspruch frühchristlicher Visionsliteratur’, in Hömke, Nicola and Baumbach, Manuel (eds): Fremde Wirklichkeiten: Literarische Phantastik und antike Literatur. Heidelberg: Winter. Gieschen, Charles A. 2003. ‘The Divine Name in Ante-Nicene Christology’, VCh 57.2, 115–58.

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Hahneman, Geoffrey M. 1992. The Muratorian Fragment and the Development of the Canon. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Henne, Philippe 1990. ‘Canonicité du Pasteur d’Hermas’, Revue Thomiste 90, 81–100. ——1992. L’unité du Pasteur d’Hermas: Tradition et rédaction. Cahiers de la Revue Biblique 31. Paris: Gabalda. Hilhorst, Anton 1988. ‘Hermas’, RAC 14, 682–701. Hill, Charles E. 1995. ‘The Debate over the Muratorian Fragment and the Development of the Canon’, Westminster Theological Journal 57, 437–52. Janowitz, Naomi 2000. ‘Rethinking Jewish Identity in Late Antiquity’, in Mitchell, Stephen and Greatrex, Geoffrey (eds), Ethnicity And Culture In Late Antiquity. Swansea: Classical Press of Wales, 205–19. Joly, Robert 1993. ‘Le milieu complexe du “Pasteur d’Hermas” ’, ANRW II.27.1, 524–51. Jung, Matthias 2006. ‘Making life explicit—The Symbolic Pregnance of Religious Experience’, Svensk Teologisk Kvartalskrift, 16–23. Kaestli, Jean-Daniel 1994. ‘La place du Fragment de Muratori dans l’histoire du canon: À propos de la thèse de Sundberg et Hahneman’, Cristianesimo nella storia 15, 609–34. Katz, Steven T. 2006. ‘Introduction’, in Katz, Steven T. (ed.): The Cambridge History of Judaism, vol. 4: The Late Roman-Rabbinic Period. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press: 1–22. Lampe, Peter 1989. Die stadtrömischen Christen in den ersten beiden Jahrhunderten: Untersuchungen zur Sozialgeschichte. Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck. Leutzsch, Matthias 1989. Die Wahrnehmung sozialer Wirklichkeit im ‘Hirten des Hermas’. Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht. Lusini, Gianfrancesco 2001. ‘Nouvelles recherches sur le texte du Pasteur d’Hermas’, Apocrypha 12, 79–97. Maier, Harry O. 1991. The Social Setting of the Ministry as Reflected in the Writings of Hermas, Clement and Ignatius. Studies in Christianity and Judaism. Waterloo, Ont.: Wilfrid Laurier University Press. Marin, M. 1982. ‘Sulla fortuna delle Similitudini III e IV di Erma’, VCh 19, 331–40. Markschies, Christoph 1997. ‘Innerer Mensch’, RAC 18, 266–312. Osiek, Carolyn 1983. Rich and poor in the Shepherd of Hermas: An Exegetical–Social Investigation. Washington, DC: Catholic Biblical Association of America. ——1999. Shepherd of Hermas: A Commentary. Minneapolis, MN: Fortress Press. Peterson, Erik 1954. ‘Die Begegnung mit dem Ungeheuer’, VCh 8, 52–71. Rajak, Tessa 2009. ‘The Greek Bible Translation among Jews in the Second Century ce’, in Levine, Lee I. and Schwartz, Daniel R. (eds): Jewish

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Identities in Antiquity: Studies in Memory of Menahem Stern. Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 321–32. Rankin, David I. 2004. ‘Class Distinction as a Way of Doing Church: the Early Fathers and the Christian Plebs’, VCh 58, 298–315. Rüpke, Jörg 1999. ‘Apokalyptische Salzberge: Zum sozialen Ort und zur literarischen Strategie des “Hirten des Hermas” ’, Archiv für Religionsgeschichte 1, 148–60. —— 2005. ‘Der Hirte des Hermas: Plausibilisierungs- und Legitimierungsstrategien im Übergang von Antike und Christentum’, Zeitschrift für antikes Christentum 8, 276–98. —— 2011. Von Jupiter zu Christus: Religionsgeschichte in römischer Zeit. Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft. —— 2011a. Aberglauben oder Individualität: Religiöse Abweichung im römischen Reich, Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2011. Russell, David S. 1982. ‘Apokalyptik—Prophetie—Pseudonymität’, in Koch, Klaus and Schmidt, Johann (eds): Apokalyptik, WdF 365. Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 311–26. Rutgers, Leonhard Victor 2009. Making Myths: Jews in Early Christian Identity Formation. Leuven: Peeters. Schneemelcher, Wilhelm (ed.) 1990. Neutestamentliche Apokryphen in deutscher Übersetzung, 1: Evangelien. Tübingen: Mohr. Schneider, Athanasius 1999. ‘Propter sanctam ecclesiam suam’: Die Kirche als Geschöpf, Frau und Bau im Bußunterricht des Pastor Hermae. Rome: Institutum Patristicum Augustinianum. Schwartz, Seth 2010. Were the Jews a Mediterranean society? Reciprocity and Solidarity in Ancient Judaism. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Simonetti, Manlio 2006. ‘Roma cristiana tra vescovi e presbiteri’, VCh 43.1, 5–17. Staats, Reinhart 1986. ‘Hermas’, TRE 15, 100–8. Stone, Michael E. 1990. Fourth Ezra: A Commentary on the Book of Fourth Ezra. Minneapolis, MN: Fortress. —— 2003. ‘A reconsideration of apocalyptic visions’, HThR 96.2, 167–80. Sundberg, Albert C. 1973. ‘Canon Muratori: A Fourth Century List’, HThR 66, 1–41. Veyne, Paul 1976. Le Pain et le Cirque: Sociologie Historique d’un Pluralisme Politique. Paris: Seuil. Völter, Daniel 1900. Die Visionen des Hermas, die Sibylle und Clemens von Rom: Ein Beitrag zur Geschichte der altchristlichen Literatur. Berlin: Schwetschke und Sohn. Whittaker, Molly 1967. Die apostolischen Väter 1: Der Hirt des Hermas, GCS 48. Berlin: Akademie.

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Wilson, John C. 1993. Toward a Reassessment of the Shepherd of Hermas: Its Date and Its Pneumatology. Lewiston, NY: Mellen Biblical Press. —— 1995. Five Problems in the Interpretation of the Shepherd of Hermas: Authorship, Genre, Canonicity, Apocalyptic, and the Absence of the Name ‘Jesus Christ’. Lewiston, NY: Mellen Biblical Press Series 34. Zellinger, Johannes 1928. Bad und Bäder in der altchristlichen Kirche: Eine Studie über Christentum und Antike. Munich: Hueber.

14 Willing to Die for God: Individualization and Instrumental Agency in Ancient Christian Martyr Literature Karen L. King

In the early third century ce, the Roman procurator Hilarianus condemned a young matron and new mother named Vibia Perpetua to be publically executed in the amphitheatre of Carthage for refusing to sacrifice for the good of the emperor and for confessing to be a Christian. Her death and those of her fellow confessors were staged as part of the celebration of the Roman emperor Geta’s birthday, probably on 7 March 203.1 In The Martyrdom of Perpetua and Felicitas, the anonymous teller of her tale sets out her story (and those of her companions) so that it may be read aloud for the glory of God, and so that ‘no one of weak or despairing faith may think that supernatural grace was present only among those of ancient times, either in the grace of martyrdom or of visions, for God always achieves what he promises, as a witness to the non-believer and a blessing to the faithful.’2 Some fellow Christians, however, were horrified at this attitude. In their view, it made God the Father into a vain and boastful advocate of human sacrifice—a practice denounced even by pagans.3 ‘The true witness’, one Christian claims, is ‘when a person comes to know 1 For a brief discussion of manuscripts, authorship, dating, and historical value of The Martyrdom of Perpetua, see Barnes 1968, 521–5. 2 MPF = Martyrdom of Perpetua and Felicitas 1.5 (Musurillo 1972, 106–7). 3 See Wisdom of Solomon 12.5–6; Plin. nat. 30.12–13; Plut. qu. R. 83; and the discussion of Rives 1995.

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himself and God who presides over the truth; then he will be saved and crowned with the crown unfading’. Only the foolish could possibly think that a mere verbal confession ‘I am a Christian’ could be sufficient to effect salvation; if that were true, ‘the whole world would endure this thing and would be saved’, declares the author of the Testimony of Truth. Such thinking only shows these people’s ignorance, and leads them to hand themselves over to the clutches of ‘the principalities and the authorities’ so as to destroy themselves in a ‘mortal death’.4 Much was at stake for ancient Christians threatened with persecution. Not only their very lives, but the truth of their beliefs and way of life—and the shape of what Christianity would become—hung on how Christians understood their situation. Are Christian martyrs the heroes of the faith or the dupes of demonic powers? Is violent death a gateway that God has opened to eternal life or a desperate attempt of impotent demigods and their agents to stop the spread of the gospel truth?5 In the contemporary period, martyrdom remains very much a topic of controversy, but the questions under debate have shifted, exposing different assumptions both about religion and about the nature of the individual person. Debates now frequently concern whether martyrs are best perceived as sacred heroes fighting against oppression, psychologically disturbed individuals, or examples of a religious group’s capacity to exert social control over its members. Such questions lead us into heady and complex discussions in multiple fields in the humanities and social sciences, anthropology and sociology, psychology and philosophy, religion, ethics, and law. In these varied domains of academic discussion, notions of ‘the individual’, ‘individualization’, ‘individuality’, and ‘individualism’ have acquired diverse and often over-determined sets of significations and meanings.6 Our assigned task, to situate ‘religious individualization in the Hellenistic

4 Testimony of Truth 31.22–32.21; 44.30–45.6. See also 43.1–7: ‘But when they are “perfected” with the (martyr’s) pathos, this is the thought that have within them: “If we deliver ourselves over to death for the sake of the Name, we will be saved.” These matters are not settled in this way.’ (Text and translation of the Testimony of Truth Giversen and Pearson 1981, with modification). 5 For further discussion of Christian controversies over martyrdom, see King 2010. 6 Beck and Beck-Gernsheim 2002 distinguish between ‘the neoliberal idea of the free-market individual (inseparable from the concept of “individualization” as used in the English speaking countries) and the concept of Individualisierung in the sense of institutionalized individualism’ (xxi). My usage is follows more closely that of Kippele 1998, 20–1.

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and Roman period’ in such a varied conversation, is thus itself a complicated matter, rich with opportunities and pitfalls. What I propose in this chapter is to examine the question of religious individualization in terms of the representation of Christians faced with the prospect of Roman persecution in the Carthaginian Martyrdom of Perpetua and Felicitas (MPF), Origen of Alexandria’s Exhortation to Martyrdom (ExMart), and (more briefly) The Letter of Peter to Philip (LetPetPhil). In order to understand what these works might offer to our topic, it will be important to distinguish ancient from contemporary notions. To help clarify my terminology, I propose using the term ‘person’ as a neutral nomenclature,7 neutral in the sense that such an entity is not essentialized or normative but considered to be diversely constituted historically and socially; ‘individuation’ to refer to the general problem of how persons are embedded in social life; ‘individuality’ to refer to notions about the distinctiveness of a person; ‘individual’ and ‘individualism’ generally with regard to post-Enlightenment conceptualities; and ‘self ’, ‘human being’, or persona with regard to ancient conceptualities. The introduction to this volume has further defined ‘individualization’ as a long-term historical process that implies an emancipation from traditional social or cultural determination of individual action; the editor suggests that religious action or thought might offer one reflection, or even one cause, of such emancipation. The concluding remarks will reflect upon what these early Christian works might offer to discussions of religious individualization more broadly.

SOME PRELIMINARY GENERALIZATIONS To help avoid anachronisms in ascribing distortive contemporary notions of individualism to ancients, it may be useful to lay out some preliminary generalizations about our topic, despite their obvious deficiencies in representing the complexities and diversity of either ancient or modern discussions. Much contemporary discussion of individuation values modern notions of the individual as an 7 No term—and certainly not ‘person’—is without a history laden with diverse meanings and deployments. For consideration of the history of the term ‘person’ (prosôpon/persona), see Mauss 1985; Carrithers, Collins, and Lukes 1985; Frede 2007.

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autonomous, ego-centred, self-conscious agent acting purposefully for self-fulfilment and justice against social conventions and coercions, and many consider such a notion of individualism necessary for furthering egalitarian democracy, tolerance in conditions of pluralism, or universal human rights.8 It is widely recognized, too, that this kind of individualism is a relatively recent product of a particular social-political organization, which arose in the modern West with the increase in population and the division of labour, and which is characterized by a change in worldview or belief system.9 While Durkheim, Mauss, Dumont, and others have helpfully taught us that individualism has a history, the histories they constructed were problematic insofar as they intended to demonstrate the progressive development of notions of the self from more primitive to higher forms of selfhood, positing the modern autonomous individual as the highest achievement.10 In these histories, Christianity is often accorded a crucial role insofar as it is claimed to have sacralized human life and placed individual conscience above institutional and political demands, whether such impulses are located in the early church or in later periods of Western history. Such ‘histories’ are now widely regarded to be implicated in largely discredited universalizing, colonialist, and ‘evolutionary’ intellectual frameworks—and hence the charge of the Erfurt project ‘to replace sweeping theories of individualization and corresponding universal histories with scrutiny of the preconditions for, and forms of, phases of increasing and decreasing individualization, together with investigation of the handing down and diffusion of religious concepts of individuality’. Moreover, from Robert Bellah and others, much recent criticism has focused on the negative effects of individualism,11 especially its anti-social, self-serving aspects; and moral philosophers have 8

For an excellent overview of the state of the question, see Kippele 1998. See Kippele 1998, 201. 10 See, for example, Mauss 1985; Dumont 1985; and the discussions of Kippele 1998; Rapport and Overing 2000, 178–85. 11 Stout 2001 has usefully attempted to clarify the matter lexically by distinguishing ‘good’ and ‘bad’ senses of the term: ‘Individualism (good sense): The idea that the well-being of each human being, no matter how powerless or wretched or distant, should carry weight in our moral deliberation, with the burden of proof falling heavily on anyone proposing differential treatment of a sort that might place the well-being of one over that of another. Individualism (bad sense): Preoccupation with acquiring such goods as physical pleasure, fame, money, and power for oneself; best described in old-fashioned terms as vicious and self-idolatrous’ (302–3). 9

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attempted to articulate alternatives.12 Ulrich Beck has argued that we have entered a ‘second modernity’ in which the inadequacy of the neoliberal, free-market autarkic individual is widely recognized. He writes, ‘It is not freedom of choice but the insight into the fundamental incompleteness of the self which is at the core of individual and political freedom in the second modernity.’ For him, ‘“individualization” means disembedding without reembedding’, a process that he cautions may lead to greater social inequality and even to a desire for ‘a new, and perhaps seemingly “democratic”, authoritarianism’.13 If accurate, such a description undermines some of the fundamental assumptions that are typical of individualism, sociologically, psychologically, and politically. Despite such critiques, however, individualism remains privileged in many domains, not the least of which concerns notions of religion and agency. Two views are particularly important for our discussion. The first is the association of religion with intolerance and social control (more on this below); the second is the evaluation of religious beliefs as fantasy or false consciousness. We can see one effect of this latter view for our topic operating in existential anthropology as described by Nigel Rapport and Joanna Overing: Indeed, there is no other source of human agency but individuals. In search for relief from, or denial of, the burdens of responsibility in their lives, individuals sometimes imagine other sources—gods, ancestors, natural forces, linguistic grammars, cultural traditions, unconscious histories, social conditions—but these are fantasies, and serve as puppets in the hands of their individual users. This denial of responsibility and turning oneself into an object created, construed and controlled from without, Sartre calls ‘bad faith’ living one’s life ‘inauthentically’. What it is also important to say is that it [e.g. turning oneself into an object—or an instrument of another] too is an instantiation of individual agency and subjectivity; here are individuals making themselves into certain kinds of objects. An existentialist appreciation of human life becomes ‘humanist’ at that point when it is felt that individuals can do better for themselves than spend their lives falsely objectifying the fantastical, and perhaps they can be influenced toward more truthful construals of their condition. Hence: ‘I experience and become myself in particular environments at particular moments, and in recognizing my responsibility 12 Bellah et al. 1985; see the essays in Carrithers, Collins, and Lukes (eds) 1985, and Heller, Sosna, and Wellberry (eds) 1986. 13 Beck and Beck-Gernsheim 2002, xxi–xxiv.

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for the above I abide by my individual integrity: I accede to the dignity of my individuality’.14

This point of view recognizes agency in the construal of oneself as an instrument or object, but evaluates it nonetheless as an evasion of responsibility, and hence of integrity and dignity. From this perspective, Perpetua’s actions can only be regarded as ‘bad faith’ since her self-understanding as God’s instrument could have been based only on an inaccurate (self-deceived?) construal of the human condition. In what follows, I want to suggest that such evaluations are premature, and the discussion may be helpfully complicated by distinguishing ancient notions of the self (and the human) from modern individualism; addressing the preparatory function of certain ancient Christian martyr literature; analysing the performative and indeterminate space for agency and resistance in the Roman law court and arena; considering how notions of instrumental agency functioned in the context of persecution; and recognizing the inner-Christian debates over scripting the cosmic drama of martyrdom.

ANCIENT NOTIONS OF THE SELF/HUMAN In antiquity, philosophers explicitly debated normative questions of what it meant to be human and how the moral self should be cultivated, and the notions they articulated can be seen operating more broadly in various fields, including in distinctively Christian discourse on martyrdom. Ancient philosophical notions of the ‘self ’ or ‘human’—themselves diverse and in some respects contested— were most frequently represented in terms of specific characteristics that distinguished humans from animals (or gods), while yet affirming that humans also had some commonalities with both. Christopher Gill, for example, suggests that both Aristotle and the Stoics characterized human beings in terms of ‘the capacity of rationality (including having beliefs and inferential reasoning), the use of language, sociability (in familial and communal life), the desire and

14

Rapport and Overing 2000, 192.

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capacity to search for knowledge of the truth, and (in Stoic thinking) the capacity to recognize the order and regularity of nature’.15 In the Roman period, it became increasingly common to claim that all persons were able to progress toward happiness through the exercise of reason and self-control (especially control or extirpation of the passions) regardless of their distinctive characteristics (individuality).16 Differences in physical endowment, personal appearance, and temperament or in social situation (whether slave or free, rich or poor, male or female, and so on) were not necessarily impediments to attaining truth and moral perfection.17 Stoics in particular argued that a virtuous character is invulnerable to exterior factors and contingent circumstances (e.g. what is ‘not up to oneself ’), including torture, aging, sexual seduction, or loss of loved ones.18 Rather all persons were potentially capable of exercising proper moral decisionmaking, that is, assenting to actions which are based on true beliefs about the nature of reality and are arrived at through the proper application of reasoned judgements formed in interpersonal (family and community) life and in dialogue with others. Such ancient views are markedly distinguished from contemporary individualist views by the conviction that moral life is not grounded in a specifically individual stance or disinterested rationality and abstraction from interpersonal relations, but precisely in social life.19 Like modern notions of individualism, ancient philosophical views could emphasize rational judgement, agency, and autonomy. 15 Gill 1996, 414. I have found Gill’s work in Personality (1996) and The Structured Self (2006) to be particularly useful in articulating the distinctions between ancient and modern views of the individual/self in what follows. 16 Cicero’s discussion of the passions in Tusc. IV.11–12; 22, provides a good summary of the ancient philosophical discussion; on individuality with regard to duties, see off. I.30–4 where he discusses characteristics such as physical endowment, personal appearance, and character, concluding that ‘Countless other dissimilarities exist in natures and characters, and they are not in the least to be criticized’ I.30 (109). 17 See Gill 2006, xvii. 18 Gill 2006, 88. 19 This distinction is particularly apparent in certain features of Gill’s characterization of modern Western and ancient Mediterranean conceptions of the individual person/human self in terms of certain thematic patterns (see esp. Gill 1996, 11–12; Gill 2006, 377). As Gill himself emphasizes, such patterns are only heuristic devices to begin to comprehend the multiple ways in which ancient philosophers discussed questions of moral perfection and selfhood; they should not be reified. Rather they help us to gain some comprehension of discursive modes of moral development broadly shared in antiquity. The question here is how do such patterns help us to understand Perpetua’s actions and her own representation of them, as well as Origen’s

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But they understood these fundamentally in terms of sociability, requiring interaction and dialogue with others to develop fully. Ideally a person would be formed by participation in a community way of life shaped by true beliefs. Hence interest was centred not on forming one’s self apart from or against social duties and demands, but on making correct judgements about fulfilling one’s proper roles. Norms of truth, justice, and goodness were inextricably woven into the fabric of the social group, which furthered one’s moral development not least through performance of the duties owed to it. Moral individuality is therefore not about an I-centred, interiorized consciousness acting from solely self-selected motives and world view, but concerns persons fundamentally embedded in, and embodying, the (normative) life and beliefs of the social group(s) to which they belonged. In this sense freedom is not a matter of the scope of choices available, but is gained in willingly fulfilling one’s proper nature and social duties. Proper action, therefore, must fit a person’s individuality in terms of what is proper to that person’s natural character; also such action must not be coerced, but be of one’s own will. Perhaps the most explicit example of this ancient understanding of moral individuality occurs when Perpetua declares to her father that ‘I cannot be called by anything other than what I am, a Christian’.20 This response so angers her father that he barely restrains himself from assaulting her. Later, he begs her to consider her duty to her family, who will all suffer because of what she is doing. In the end, this confession will cost Perpetua her life in a highly public execution—a consequence of which she is entirely aware. Although we might say she is making a choice, Perpetua portrays herself as without a choice—she cannot be other than what she is. It is hard not to think of Epictetus here. He offers a number of anecdotes aimed at illustrating how it is that persons maintain their own proper character under duress. At one point, he imagines a conversation where someone demands he shave his beard. ‘If I am a philosopher, I answer, “I will not shave it off.”’ His adversary then threatens him, ‘But I will take off your neck’—obviously another strategy for removing the beard. To this Epictetus responds, ‘If that will do you any good, take it off.’21 Epictetus’s point is that a person has advice to (potential) martyrs and the disagreements among Christians about how to make rational and virtuous decisions based on differing cosmological schemas. 20 21 MPF 3.2. Epict. diatr. 1.2.29.

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to act based on his proper character, and not sell one’s freedom of will (proairesis) cheaply. But proper judgement has to be based on awareness of what one’s own proper character is, and this is not simply given, but a matter of training: ‘He must prepare himself and must not plunge recklessly into what is inappropriate for him’, emphasizes Epictetus.22 Thus who-one-is is at once a matter of natural character, of judgement, and of practice. This ‘identity’ is not, however, that of modern individualism, but belongs to one’s proper (socially determined and constructed) social station and role. Epictetus offers an example of a wealthy citizen named Florus who was expected to make a contribution toward a festival in honour of the emperor Nero—perhaps even at risk of his life if he does not. He debates about what to do, concerned that acceding to this kind of implicitly coerced behaviour will reduce him to the level of the crowd. His advisor, Agrippinus, counsels him to contribute, even though he himself will not take part. Why? ‘Because’, he says to Florus, ‘you regard yourself as but a single thread of all that goes to make up the garment. What follows, then? This, that you ought to take thought how you may resemble all other men, precisely as even the single thread wants to have no point of superiority in comparison with the other threads. But I want to be the red, that small and brilliant portion which causes the rest to appear comely and beautiful. Why, then, do you say to me, “Be like the majority of people?” And if I do that, how shall I any longer be the red?’

Perpetua, we might say, wants to be the red thread. And here we see a real glimmer of what might constitute individuality within the imperative of group belonging: a person acts to preserve his or her own proper character—a philosopher, a noble, a Christian—in the face of those who wish to force him or her to play a different role, to take on a different persona. Epictetus goes on to illustrate his point with the story of a senator threatened by the emperor Vespasian with death if he appears in the assembly and speaks out. The man declares that, as a senator, he is required to attend and speak his mind, even on pain of death—that is his role. What, Epictetus asks, does the action of a single person achieve, leading as it does only to death? As he puts it, ‘What good does the red do the mantle?’ The answer: ‘What else than that it stands out conspicuous in it as red, and is displayed as a goodly example to the rest?’23 So, too, Perpetua, red not with the noble 22

See Epict. diatr. 1.2.30–2.

23

See Epict. diatr. 1.212–24.

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purple of the toga praetexta but with her own blood, profits the whole crowd by standing out as an exemplum of the Christian persona. Yet to be the bright exemplum, she is required to consider her other duties as daughter and mother to be lesser demands and give them up. Where a person’s multiple roles conflict, a hierarchy of duty has to be established.24 As these examples illustrate, agency and its concomitant possibilities for individuation were conceived in terms of properly determining and developing one’s personhood as a fully social human being. They also show how the ancient focus on moral perfection in terms of ‘what is up to us’ pointed toward a concern with the limits of autonomy in a society where Roman rulers used public displays of humiliation, torture, and execution to demonstrate their power to define norms of justice and determine social order. It was under such constraints as these that ‘dying well’ became a crucial site to display one’s honour, virtue, and freedom. It was also such constraints that offered opportunities for the expression of moral and representative individuality such that a woman and martyr like Perpetua could be portrayed as a moral agent and exemplum.

PREPARATION FOR MARTYRDOM 25: PERPETUA’S STORY AND ORIGEN’S ADVICE What we know of Perpetua’s story is told by the anonymous author of The Martyrdom of Perpetua and Felicitas.26 Embedded within this

24 See the discussion of Epictetus’s hierarchy of roles in Frede 2007, 163–5. We are not told why Perpetua initially joined the Christians nor do we know if motherhood, family roles, and civic duties as a Roman matron were burdensome to her or if she accepted them willingly. We only know that when she declared herself a Christian before the Roman magistrate her child, her legal status, her dignity, and her life were forcibly taken from her, and (eventually?) she willingly accepts these losses. 25 I use the term ‘martyrdom’ here capaciously to refer to the historical, literary, and theological practices of Christians vis-à-vis Roman persecution. This usage is in contrast to ways in which the term has more frequently been used to refer to a particular set of ‘orthodox’ interpretations of such practices; indeed early Christians’ debates over who is a ‘true martyr’ reflect this kind of attempt to restrict the term to a set of theological meanings or materials and practices. 26 The historical reliability of these accounts is not the issue here, but rather the analysis of their literary representations.

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narrative are excerpts from Perpetua’s first-person account of her imprisonment,27 along with another first-person account of a vision by a fellow martyr named Saturus.28 In the scenes from her own account, Perpetua adamantly rejects her father’s attempts to dissuade her, seeing them as temptations of the devil.29 When he appeals to her to have pity on him and to think of her brothers, her mother, aunt, and even her own baby, she merely replies that everything will happen according to God’s will.30 When the Roman governor similarly appealed to her to have pity on her father and infant son, she maintained her position and was condemned, returning in elation to prison with her comrades.31 Gifted with prophecy, Perpetua and Saturus were both granted visions. Perpetua dreamed they would step on the head of a dragon, ascending a ladder to an immense garden filled with ‘many thousands of people clad in white garments’. A kind, elderly shepherd gave her milk, and all the crowd affirmed ‘Amen’.32 In another dream, the deacon Pomponius takes her into the arena, where she is stripped naked and becomes a man; she defeats an Egyptian gladiator and her trainer then offers her the branch of victory, greeting her as ‘Daughter’.33 Saturus dreams that after they died and ‘put off the flesh’ they are carried by angels beyond this world into an intense light. Within it is a marvellous garden where other angels pay them homage and admire them. They then enter a heavenly building, where they are greeted by ‘an aged man with white hair and a youthful face’ along with numerous elders. After leaving that place, they go outside and meet up with their bishop and a presbyter who beg them to ‘make peace between us’. After greeting them, they proceed into the garden and there recognize many fellow Christians. At this point, the dream ends and Saturus tells readers that he ‘woke up happy’.34 Such dreams Some scholars have disputed the authenticity of Perpetua’s ‘diary’; see the discussion of Bremmer 2002; Kraemer 2004; Heffernan 1995. 28 It should also be noted at the outset that we are quite likely dealing with excerpts from the accounts of Perpetua and Saturus, selected no doubt for their usefulness in illustrating the larger themes of interest to the author of the Martyrdom. These excerpts relate especially to Perpetua’s struggles with her father and the Roman procurator, and describe the prophetic visions that she and Saturus had. They aid in furthering the author’s stated goal to supply consolation and exempla for imitation by other Christians. 29 30 31 MPF 3.1–3. MPF 5. MPF 6.3–6. 32 33 MPF 4. MPF 10. 34 For Saturus’s dream see MPF 11–13. 27

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are interpreted as messages from God, affirming that while the imprisoned Christians would all be condemned to suffering and death, in the end they would win the victor’s crown and gain eternal life among other Christian martyrs and saints.35 The anonymous author elaborates these themes in additional scenes that describe the courage of the pregnant slave Felicitas, Perpetua’s audacious demand to their jailors that the prisoners be treated well, and the condemned Christians’ final ‘free banquet’ where, readers are told, their strong words so amazed the surrounding mob that ‘many of them began to believe’.36 The story ends with a lengthy description of the public execution itself, stressing the martyrs’ steadfastness, joy, and courage, demonstrated by their actions and their interactions with guards, gladiators, and especially the audience. The anonymous author’s final lines ring with praise: Ah, most valiant and blessed martyrs! Truly are you called and chosen for the glory of Christ Jesus our Lord! And anyone who exalts, honours, and worships His glory should read for the consolation of the church these exempla which are no less than (those) of old. For these new (exempla) of virtue will bear witness to one and the same Spirit who still operates, and to God the Father almighty, to his Son Jesus Christ our Lord, to whom is splendour and immeasurable power for all the ages. Amen.37

It is possible to construe such martyr acts as exemplary literary representations of an early individualism: an ‘I’-centred ego who exercises autonomy in establishing rational moral principles for herself by which she frees herself from conformity to societal demands; a unified, conscious self displayed in the practice of ‘autobiography’ and focused upon her personal salvation such that she reasonably (from the Christian point of view) and willingly gives up interpersonal ties to her newborn child and family, and overcomes emotions such as maternal feeling or fear and grief at her imprisonment and impending execution; and finally, the assertion of a personal identity, ‘Christiana’. From this perspective, Perpetua’s literary ‘autobiography’ might seem to offer a particularly significant instance of an 35 It is interesting to note that in the visions of both Perpetua and Saturus, other Christians known to them appear—perhaps an indication of a conviction that the solidarity they felt in prison would continue in heaven? 36 MPF 17. 37 MPF 21.11 (translation modified).

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interiorized self-consciousness. Indeed, for some, she represents a heroic individualism which ties Christian conversion to resistance to Roman domination.38 It is possible to read Joyce Salisbury’s statement this way: If one is looking for a metaphor of personal change, one cannot do better than a transformation of one’s gender, which is at the heart of one’s self-identity. In her dream, Perpetua was changed into a man. Led by the deacon of her new community, she was fully transformed from her old self into a new empowered individual who could stand in the arena and fight for what she believed. Here she was remembering in a dream-form her own baptism—the dramatic change from catechumen to baptized Christian.39

We can, however, easily see elements here that suggest individualism would be the wrong (or at least an incomplete) way to read Salisbury’s statement. She points to significant communal elements: hierarchical organization (the leadership of a deacon), conversion (belonging to a new community), and ritual (baptism). To these we could add Perpetua and Saturus’ sense of communal belonging in the frequent use of the plural ‘we’, the mutual support of the imprisoned Christians, as well as the care provided for them by those on the outside (bribing guards to bring them food and other necessities— and perhaps writing materials for both Perpetua40 and Saturus). Sex/ gender identity, too, is deeply implicated in social roles and structures, such that she is ‘male’ in relation to defeating the Egyptian in battle, but is ‘daughter’ in relation to her ‘trainer’. Gender functions 38 Ancient notions of the person emphasized the development of character and virtuous action in the context of social relations, including dialogue to secure a rational basis for thought and action. Origen and MPF both understood martyrdom as a rational choice and urged readers to prepare themselves for martyrdom by practising true piety and cultivating virtue. The portraits of the martyrs in Origen’s ExMartyr and MPF were offered as ekphrastic exempla for imitation. They are heroes, but not in the modern sense. Gill has argued that figures like Homer’s Achilles or Euripides’ Media should not be viewed as ‘self-assertive individuals, radically questioning or rejecting communal or shared human standards’, but rather ‘their nonstandard actions should be seen as “exemplary gestures”, designed to dramatize, and protest at, exceptional breaches in communal or common human norms’(Gill 2006, 378). So, too, the representations (and self-representations) of Perpetua and Saturus are better seen in this light. 39 Salisbury 1997, 109. 40 That Perpetua was well-educated is indicated first by the claim that she herself wrote down the account (MPF 2.3), but also by Saturus’ (admittedly oneiric) example of her speaking Greek (MPF 13.4).

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here fluidly mark different and shifting social relations, not an essentialized identity.41 That Perpetua’s transformation was conveyed in a prophetic vision also leads us to ask about what notion of agency or consciousness is operative here, a topic to be discussed below. Moreover, when we turn our gaze on the institutions of prison, legal system, and arena, the larger social-political world looms large, not merely as that over against which the individual stands (heroically), but as the context which both enables and constrains Perpetua’s speech, writing, and other actions. If one measure of modern individualism concerns the extent of the scope for individual action (freedom and autonomy), that of ancient Christians called before Roman magistrates seems particularly constricted: apostatize and sacrifice or be cruelly tortured and executed. Yet, as we saw above, it is within this highly constrained context that Christians struggled mightily to enact the duties required of the Christian persona as they understood them. My point here is not merely to make the rather obvious remark that all notions of personhood are socially constructed, but rather to ask: What notions of individuation are operating in the literary representation of The Martyrdom of Perpetua and Felicitas? How might this literary work have been used in practice by the third century Christians who heard it read? That is to ask not merely ‘What does a text say?’ but also ‘What does a text do?’ ‘(T)exts’, Catherine Bell writes, ‘are entities that act in the world.’42 Much of the literature Christians produced to address persecution by the Romans functioned most clearly as ‘preparation for martyrdom’.43 Works such as MPF, Origen’s ExMart, or the Letter of Peter to Philip frequently set out exempla for imitation,44 demonstrating how to master one’s passions, especially fear and grief, and how to face death with cheerful equanimity. They advocate prayer, point to scripture, and encourage believers to focus on the blessed joys of eternal life, rather than on the ephemeral pain and suffering of the flesh. ‘Preparation for martyrdom’ texts also frequently offer counter-narratives that (re)frame and (re)signify the meaning of these deaths, challenging the 41

See here esp. Castelli 1995, 85–92. Bell 1992, 81. 43 See King 2009; Kelley 2006. 44 These include not only Christ, apostles, or Biblical figures, but frequently include Socrates, Lucretia, or other notable ‘pagans’ as well. They also occasionally offer counterexamples of ‘failed martyrs’; for example, Quintus in The Martyrdom of Polycarp 4. 42

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implicit Roman claims that the bodies they shame, torture, and kill demonstrate the just punishment of criminals and enemies. Instead Christian literature like MPF or Origen’s ExMart represents them as witnesses to the true God, examples of virtue (‘manliness’45) in the battle against false gods and idolatry. Others, as we will see in examining the LetPetPhil, suggest that Christians who are killed for preaching the gospel illustrate the evil nature of the world rulers and their impotence in opposing the gospel. For all Christians, these tortured and humiliated bodies do not attest to the greatness of Roman law and order, but to the courage and endurance of those who love God. Such literature was not meant to provide an objectively impartial record of the past or even hagiographical encomia, but to provoke ekphrasis, the disciplined training of the soul through imagination.46 By painting mental portraits of Christians struggling with the same kind of very real fears, hesitations, and objections they felt, readers were to shape their own feelings and beliefs, so that if necessary at the appropriate time they, too, could overcome the fear of death and die well. Such advice on how to face death was no Christian invention; it was offered by famous Roman teachers, such as Lucretius, Cicero, and Seneca. Seneca, Edwards says, teaches, ‘It is through rehearsing in our minds the deeds of these great individuals of the past that we may summon up the strength to act with equal bravery. Thus we too may feature among the exempla.’47 The anonymous author of MPF explicitly states that the acts of the martyrs he offers are aimed to ‘console the church’ as well as to provide ‘exempla of virtue’ that bear witness to the divine. That such exempla serve specifically to help prepare Christians for (possible) martyrdom is pointed out by Origen in ExMartyr.48 In writing 45 For the important gendered dimensions of torture and martyrdom, which will not be discussed here, see e.g. Cobb 2008, and Moore and Anderson 1998. 46 See, for example, Sen. Ep. 6.5. For a thorough and illuminating discussion of Roman attitudes toward death, including a discussion of fighting the fear of death as a common trope in Roman notions of dying nobly, see Edwards 2007, esp. 78–112, 144–60, 207–20. 47 Edwards 2007, 90. 48 All citations of the Greek text are from Koetschau 1899; English translation by O’Meara 1954. Although Origen explicitly addresses his treatise to two specific persons, Ambrose and Protocteus who had been imprisoned around 235 ce during the persecution of Maximin Thrax, O’Meara argues (and I agree) that the work was aimed at a wider audience (and it certainly reached a broader audience subsequently); see O’Meara 1954, 10–12.

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to Ambrose and Protoctetus, he gives numerous examples from Scripture, but especially points to Eleazar and the seven brothers from 2 Maccabees (LXX). Of Eleazar he exclaims: ‘What dead person could be more deserving of praise than he who of his own choice elected to die for his religion? (   ¼ o ø ePºªø KÆ E ŁÅŒg ‰ › ÆP æ ÆØæ ø te ¨Æ  !bæ PÆ IÆ  ).’49 Origen insists that Eleazar voluntarily chose torment and a glorious death, based upon ‘reasoning in a noble-minded manner’ (º ªØe I E ).50 So, too, Origen exhorts his readers: When you are at the gates of death, or rather liberty, I beg of you, especially if you are subjected to torture—and certainly the designs of the opposition do not permit us to expect that you will not suffer—to say words such as these: To the Lord who hath the holy knowledge, it is manifest that, whereas I might be delivered from death, I suffer grievous pains in my body because I am scourged; but in my soul I am well content to suffer these things because I fear Thee. Thus did Eleazar die, and it can be said of him that he left not only to the young men, but also to most of his nation, his death for an example of noble character and a memorial of fortitude (ªÆØ Å  !تÆ ŒÆd Åı  Iæ B).51

To those who are older, Origen offered the example of the seven Maccabean brothers, asking them to think about whether they were going to let themselves be outdone by youngsters!52 Readers are also given an example of a parent who, when summoned to advise her child ‘for his safety’, instead ‘mocks the tyrant’ and exhorts her youngest son to persevere. When this youth then challenges his executioners not to hesitate in their work, Origen comments: ‘Like a king handing down a decision on subjects to be judged, he also gave judgement on the tyrant, condemning him rather than being condemned by him.’53 Origen concludes this section with two other comments that are important for our discussion. In the first, he credits the Maccabees’ mother with piety and holiness for not allowing ‘the fires of a mother’s feelings, which inflames many mothers in the presence of most grievous ills, to be kindled within her heart’.54 In Origen’s hands, this scriptural story teaches that ‘love of God does not tolerate

49 51 53

50 ExMart 22.25–6. ExMart 22.28. 52 ExMart 22.13–22. ExMart 23. 54 ExMart 26 (O’Meara 1954, 166). ExMart 22.27.

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the co-existence of human weakness (I¨æøÅ I¨ØÆ), but drives it away as an enemy alien from the whole soul. And this weakness has become powerless in the case of one who can say, “The Lord is my strength and my praise, and I can do all things in Him who strengthens me, Christ Jesus, Our Lord”.’55 We see here important aspects of ancient moral development: that the highest virtue is possible for anyone, whether young or old, child or parent, man or woman; that control of ‘natural’ feeling and passion (including maternal affection) is the mark of highest virtue when such selfcontrol is properly guided by rational beliefs, for example, the view that such death is really liberty; that dying well requires death to be willingly accepted without fear. Persons with these attitudes appear as praiseworthy kings who judge tyrants—not criminals or mere victims. Origen offers a wide variety of other practices aimed at moulding character and proper belief within the context of Christian community. Believers should learn to focus on the rewards they will be given in heaven rather than the suffering they will undergo, learn appropriate prayers, and practise proper responses to insults, accusations, and temptations.56 He teaches that martyrdom occurs because of divine providence; and God is the only audience whose judgement they should care about.57 Their enemies can kill only the body; they cannot harm the soul.58 Their contest is against Satan, not man. They can prepare for this battle by giving up concern for reputation and wealth and even by learning to hate their families.59 They should feel neither fear nor shame, for they are in truth athletes in a triumphal procession, exalted in the eyes of God.60 Their deaths will be an effective witness to non-Christians, atoning and ransoming not just themselves but other people as well.61 Cultivating these beliefs and practices should instil constancy in feelings of joy and tranquillity, and ensure that Christians will display no anxiety to non-believers even under interrogation and torture.62 Such people will ascend more quickly than others to God,63 and they will receive the highest honour from their fellow Christians:

55 58 61

56 ExMart 22.27. ExMart 2; 11; 19. 59 ExMart 34. ExMart 15; 3; 37. 62 ExMart 35; 50; 30. ExMart 4.

57 60 63

ExMart 23. ExMart 1; 36–7; 50. ExMart 14.

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As they who have endured tortures and pain gave more illustrious evidence of virtue in martyrdom than those who have not endured such trials, so they have cut and torn not only the bonds of love for life and body, but also these other great worldly bonds, have shown a great love for God and have truly taken up the word of God that is living and effectual and more piercing than any two-edge sword. Having cut so great bonds, they have made for themselves wings like those of an eagle, and can fly up to the house of him who is their Lord. Just as they who have not gone through the trial of tortures and pain give pride of place to those who have proved their constancy on the rack through diverse tortures and fire, so we too who are poor, even if we be martyrs, are urged by reason to yield first prize to you, if for the love of God in Christ you trod underfoot reputation, deceitful and sought by the masses, your great possessions, and the affection of a father for his children.64

Only Christians belong to the elect race ( F KŒºŒ F ª ı NªÆØ), because they alone worship God in truth.65 Origen warns that Christians who think it is enough to confess God in the solitude of their hearts are deceived; salvation requires confession in public speech.66 It is clear from even this brief summary that Origen’s Exhortation has much in common with the Martyrdom of Perpetua and Felicitas. Its author, too, emphasizes that Christians die willingly; they show courage in mocking the powerful who condemn them, and indeed insist that it is their executioners who will themselves be condemned in the end by God. When led into the arena, they sang a psalm, loudly exhorted the onlookers, and even challenged the Roman governor Hilarianus directly by their motions and gestures, suggesting, our author tells us, that ‘you have condemned us, but God will condemn you’. For this behaviour, the crowd demanded they be scourged—a punishment they accepted with joy because it meant ‘they had obtained a share in the Lord’s sufferings’.67 Like the Maccabees’ mother, Perpetua does not allow ‘motherly feeling’ to stop her, even when she initially thinks her baby might well die without her. So, too, both Origen and the author of MPF hold up figures like those of the elderly Eleazer, the young Maccabees, or the new mothers Perpetua and Felicitas as particularly exemplary cases of how the ‘weak’ may stand firm against the strong.

64 65 66

ExMart 15 (O’Meara 1954, 156). ExMart 5.28. For discussion of Christians as a ‘race’, see Buell 2005. 67 ExMart 5. MPF 18.7–9.

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We see Perpetua herself move from uncertainty, anxiety, and grief to an increasingly calm demeanour and bold speech, until in the arena she presents a joyful figure, singing, facing down the crowd’s gaze, and dying without fear—a portrait that the author no doubt intends as a display of her virtue in overcoming the passions. Indeed, describing how she herself guided the gladiator’s sword to her throat, the editor insists that ‘it was as though so great a woman, feared as she was by the unclean spirit, could not be dispatched unless she herself were willing (nisi ipsa uoluisset)’.68 Throughout the Martyrdom of Perpetua and Felicitas, readers are given examples of prophetic insight affirming the presence and will of God in all that happens. Visions of eternal blessings and high honour the martyrs will receive take up a significant portion of the narrative, proving that after the flesh is gone, the soul will ascend to a heavenly place of peace and plenty. When Perpetua stands up against her father’s pleading (as against the devil), when the Christians’ behaviour convinces their jailors of their virtue, and when they boldly admonish the crowd for their idle curiosity, readers see appropriate responses to temptation, false accusations, and insults. Rather than feel shame at attempts to humiliate them—by displaying their bodies naked before the crowd, taunting them, and subjecting them to brutal treatment for entertainment—the Christians are portrayed as displaying honour through their courage and their insistence that they are not victims, but (instrumental) agents of divine providence. In all these ways, the Martyrdom of Perpetua and Felicitas offers much the same instruction in preparation for martyrdom as does Origen, albeit in a narrative mode. What appears more forcefully in the Martyrdom of Perpetua and Felicitas, however, is the communal aspects of the martyrs’ experience. The condemned support and encourage one another in prayer and presence, sharing their visions as well as their suffering, so much so that Felicitas is worried that her pregnancy will delay her execution, meaning that she would have to undergo it alone (but by the grace of God, readers are told, this does not happen). Other Christians support the confessors as well, bribing guards to bring them food and secure better accommodation. Both works, however, amply provide evidence that early Christians understood and represented becoming a Christian as a process involving

68

MPF 21.10.

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participation in a community (‘family’), adopting rational (true) beliefs, and the cultivation of piety and virtue. For both Origen and the author of MPF, the Christian way of life was demonstrated most vividly by believers who publicly confessed their identity as Christians and died willingly and fearlessly, even in the face of physical torture, humiliation, and the loss of social standing, wealth, and family.

PERFORMANCE AND INDETERMINACY Let us now return to the question of agency. As we saw, both the Martyrdom of Perpetua and Felicitas and Origen emphasized the importance of the martyr’s willingness to die, exemplified in both speech and actions. How are we to understand these representations in terms of religious individuation? Some historians, notably Donald Riddle, have seen Christian martyrdom as a particularly acute example of social control.69 From this perspective, a Christian group had to ‘secure from its adherents the behaviour which was necessary if the movement were to survive’. To do this they engaged in ‘a specific method’ of indoctrination, in the production of proper attitudes, and in constant surveillance of the potential martyr—practices described above as preparation for martyrdom.70 Yet the notion of social control is arguably tied to a discourse of individualism, which sets democracy and freedom of the individual over against the coercion of institutions such as church and (monarchical or tyrannical) state.71 Despite the fact that both 69

See Riddle 1931. Riddle 1931, 24. This process is described in more detail on 24–6; see also chapters 2–4 on the ‘Preparation of the Martyr’, ‘The Production of Attitudes’, and ‘The Influence of the Group’. 71 Strangely enough, Riddle 1931 does not, however, understand this kind of social control to be opposed to individualization. Rather he argues that the ‘basis of control’ was the individual, by which he means that it is the individual rather than the social group who is promised salvation. He grounds this notion in a historical account, arguing that individualism arose in the Hellenistic world with the breakdown of social-political associations (city-state); Christianity became an individualistic religion of personal salvation as it separated from Judaism (which, in his view, based salvation on the common life of the group) (126–34). This position problematically offers a ‘universal’ history of the kind we have considered above. It treats Judaism and Christianity as monolithic entities, and defines Christianity largely over and against Judaism—here as individualism versus communalism. Instead, it is necessary to 70

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Romans and Christians variously declared themselves to be agents of divine justice, from the point of view of social control their claims can only be treated as manipulative ideology. In this discourse of individualism, social control is criticized as a functionalist use of tortured and humiliated bodies by often abstract entities, such as the Roman empire or the Christian Church, to secure power for themselves—but at the cost of refusing agency and moral virtue to those who are being so used. A more adequate framework for understanding how power operates in the establishment, maintenance, and negotiation of social relations is suggested by current anthropological and sociological theory that insists that agency does not belong to abstract social entities or even to individual persons per se, but to situations. To say this is in no way to condone the use of violence and torture, but to note that only from this perspective is it possible to see how agency is possible at all. Agency is not located in controlling structures, in the inner life of the autonomous individual, nor in the authorial subject; rather it ‘refers to the socio-culturally mediated capacity to act’.72 From the perspective of this kind of practice theory, human actions are both enabled and constrained by social norms, practices, institutions, and discourses operating in a given situation, such that people are neither entirely free agents nor entirely socially determined products, however constraining the conditions. Crucial to this perspective is the notion of indeterminacy, that is, the inherent tensions, contradictions, excesses, and instabilities of any practice.73 Performance theory provides analytic categories that, while limited,74 are useful in bringing out the social dynamics of these practices (and their representations). As Gavin Brown writes:

look at the specific situations in which a person is embedded within his or her social group(s) to answer questions about individualization. Over time, and in different geographical locations and situations, Jews and Christians have articulated the relationship of individuals to the group in different ways. Moreover, as we have seen, ancient Christians characterized themselves as Christians in terms of group belonging, not personal salvation. Indeed the conception of Christianity as a religion of ‘personal salvation’ (understood in terms of an individualistic notion of the self ) is anachronistic for the Roman period. 72 Ahearn 2001, 120. 73 See also the discussion of ‘disorder’ as inherent in (some) ritual by Dirks 1994. 74 See, for example, Bell’s critique in 1992, 42–6.

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To speak of performance is to explore what is achieved in the very act of performing: action decoded as action, not only ideas in action.75 Performance is scripted action: it is never spontaneous or accidental, it is reliant on a priori cultural imagination. . . . Even so, no script can ever fully encapsulate the performance; there is a significant unscripted dimension in all performances. It is, like any mode of action, susceptible to contingency and indeterminacy; meaning constantly threatens to escape the structure of the performance.76

While indeterminacy makes negotiation and resistance possible, the scripted (ritualized) character of the performance also requires consent and appropriation in order for action to be not only effective but intelligible. Because of this indeterminacy, neither domination nor resistance can ever be total (although we should not forget the relative power of the actors).77 Catherine Bell summarizes the point well when she writes: ‘the interaction of the social body with a structured and structuring environment, specifically affords the opportunity for consent and resistance and negotiated appropriation on a variety of levels.’78 Each of these terms is crucial to our discussion: interaction, social body, structured and structuring environment, consent, resistance, negotiation, appropriation. In the case of martyrdom, investigation would involve the spaces and types of interaction, specifying the social group and how social relations both structure and are structured by the acts of participants, as well as where we see consent, resistance, negotiation, and appropriation. This kind of framework shifts our attention from individuals oppressing other individuals to the social-political dynamics of the law court and the arena as sites of public performance, and to the discourses of power, truth, and virtue operating strategically in those spaces. From this perspective, established social relations were not merely played out in the law court and the amphitheatre; rather these were sites where the field of social relations was constantly being differentiated and integrated, established and subverted.79 One way to 75

For more on ideas in action, see the discussion of Stanley Tambiah by Bell 1992, 41. Brown 2003, 6. 77 See the discussion of Ahearn 2001, esp. 120. 78 Bell 1992, 209. 79 As Bell 1992 puts it, ‘ritual systems do not function to regulate or control the systems of social relations, they are the system’ (130). The previous sentence paraphrases her: ‘In other words, the more or less practical organization of ritual activities neither acts upon nor reflects the social system; rather, these loosely coordinated 76

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highlight these social dynamics and the indeterminacy inherent in them is to examine representations of Roman interrogations and public executions as ritualized performances80 and spectacles.81 As Potter describes the scripted character of events in the arena: Public executions were rituals of great emotional force. The audiences expected to witness a series of events carried out in a particular order, and to witness behavior of a consistent type. They expected to see a picture of society’s power painted upon the canvas provided by the bodies of the condemned to the agents of the central government, they expected to see penitence and terror in the condemned, they expected to hear them scream, and they expected to see the terror in their faces as they confronted the beast or the other savage forms of execution which were employed in the arena. When the condemned did not display suitable contrition, the audience might demand additional flogging or torture. If, on the other hand, they thought that the authorities were exceeding their mandate, they might demand that the authorities change their behavior.82

Law court interrogations, too, were carefully but loosely scripted by the Romans, giving considerable latitude for the Roman magistrate both in the precise questions of the interrogation and (somewhat) in his sentencing.83 But the Romans were less able to script the responses of those being accused—and this indeterminacy potentially could turn the interrogation into a dramatic contest about truth.84 Set types of performances were also offered in the amphitheatre, including athletic competitions and gladiatorial fights as well as the dramatic public executions of criminals, but again the Romans were not always fully able to force the condemned to play their prescribed roles—condemned Christians like Perpetua and Saturus, for example,

activities are constantly differentiating and integrating, establishing and subverting the field of social relations’ (Bell 1992, 130). 80 For discussion of martyrdom as ritual, see for example, Young 2001. 81 Much recent work has been done on the issue of martyrdom and spectacle; see, e.g. Coleman 1990; Frilingos 2004; Gleason 1999; Castelli 2004, 104–33; Bowersock 1995, 41–57; Kyle 1998. On honour and shame, see esp. Barton 1994. 82 Potter 1993, 53. 83 Both these elements of fixity and fluidity are in evidence in the extant records: see Bisbee 1988. 84 A notable example here is represented in The Martyrdom of Pionius, which, in Christian authorial hands, depicts a strikingly successful oratorical performance on the part of the arrested Pionius.

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actively resisted playing the desired roles of subdued and shamed criminals, marked by appropriate displays of fear and grief. Because of this indeterminacy, these loosely structured contests were particularly fecund sites for Christians to cast themselves in different roles—as figures of virtue, victorious athletes and gladiators rather than as depraved slaves, criminals and victims—by devising and performing alternative scripts, both in how they responded to interrogation, accusations, insults, and torture, and in how they died. Audiences, too, were important actors in these dramas, not merely passive observers. Their response to the actions of those in the arena and to the authorities in charge could signal not only whether the performance was effective, but they could also influence some outcomes—whether a gladiator be killed or spared; how a criminal might be treated, and so forth. The Christians’ actions could pose scripting dilemmas for audiences whose role as judges was to affirm the basic aims of the Roman script by acknowledging events of the law court and amphitheatre as displays of legitimate Roman authority and justice. Christians sought to put the expected response of the audience into doubt, and even to ‘convert’ them to the Christian scripting. Much was at stake for Christians in these contests, for although their lives were forfeit from the moment they refused to sacrifice, the truth of their beliefs and way of life, their innocence of the criminal charges,85 and indeed their very humanity remained at issue. To quote Potter again: A trial was one thing but death in the arena was another matter. It was a political as well as a judicial ritual, a ceremony which served to reinforce the existing power structure by reducing the condemned to the level of an object. . . . A person sentenced to die in the arena lost human identity, lost control of his or her body, became a slave. . . . According to Gaius, ‘those condemned to the extreme penalty immediately lose their citizenship and freedom. This fate anticipates their death . . . ’; they cease to exist as human beings. . . . The criminal was not on a par with the great figures who won fame and fortune as athletes and gladiators.

85 The precise legal charges are not clear, and most likely varied from emperor to emperor and sometimes in different geographical areas, but the most frequent suggestions involve treason, atheism, immorality, or superstitio. The more precise reasons why the Christians were persecuted are also debated; see the Pliny–Trajan correspondence (Plin. Ep. 10.96–7); Sherwin-White 1952; de Ste-Croix and SherwinWhite debate (1974) in Finley 1974, 210–55; Selinger 2004 ; Lieu 1998.

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The condemned was a prop, deprived of self, something for the real stars to play with.86

Forced to play the roles of ‘props’ in the drama, Christians countered this ritualized performance by dying well, a practice already highly valorized in the rhetoric of elite Roman philosophical discourse. As Seneca wrote, ‘One who has learned to die has unlearned slavery. He is superior to all powers, and certainly beyond their reach. What to him are prison, guards, and fetters? He has an open door.’87 In order for this strategic resistance to work, however, Christians had to be able to display their fearlessness under acute trials and suffering. Audacious behaviour and speech would not be enough; it was the final moment of death that was crucial.88 Seneca makes the point quite clearly: ‘Death will give judgement on you. I say this: debates and erudite conversations and collected sayings from the precepts of philosophers do not reveal true strength of mind. Even the most fearful can make a brave speech. What you have achieved will be revealed at the moment when you send forth your spirit.’89 Lucretius agrees: ‘So it is more helpful to examine someone in dangerous peril and to learn in harsh circumstances what kind of person they are; for only then are true words drawn from the depths of the heart. The mask is pulled off, the reality remains.’90 Death alone will reveal a person’s character beyond doubt. Willingness to die was also a pre-eminent way to display one’s freedom from all domination. As Edwards documents, Seneca and Tacitus both associated death with libertas. This kind of thinking drew deeply from Stoic moral philosophy, in which ‘freedom . . . had come to have the sense of “total independence of the person from all the passions and from all wrong desires”.’91 Such thinking highly valued agency—the capacity for action based on rational deliberation and judgement—and understood dying well as perhaps the one action possible no matter how constrained one’s circumstances. Such a display was possible no matter what a person’s social status 86

Potter 1993, 65. Sen. Ep. 16.10; cited from Edwards 2007, 101. 88 The following discussion depends heavily upon the excellent study of Edwards 2007. Although her analysis focuses on Lucretius, Cicero, and Seneca, her results arguably display a set of attitudes that were widespread. 89 Sen. Ep. 26.6, cited from Edwards 2007, 110. 90 Lucr. 3.1039–42; cited from Edwards 2007, 84. 91 Edwards 2007, 101. 87

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or situation; dying well was something that high and low, men and women, young and old, could accomplish. Through their willingness to die, the slave and the criminal asserted their freedom beyond the power of authorities. Edwards argues that in this way, death could have ‘a specifically political message’, since fearlessly accepting one’s own death proved that ‘tyrants have power over no one’.92 This is clearly one of the messages of MPF. The author repeatedly presents the Christians as God’s agents, asserting their identity as Christians against the admonitions and opinions of Roman officials, jailors, crowds, and family. Both Origen and MPF teach that Christians should be willing to give themselves up freely to the authorities (even volunteering themselves as Saturus does93), to surrender all their legal and social standing, and even to display signs of joy in facing wild beasts and executioners, cooperating with them, as Perpetua does when she guides the sword to her neck and as Saturus and others do in taunting the governor in the arena. Indeed the author of MFP comments that God answered their prayers and gave each the death he or she desired (desiderauerat).94 We can see here perhaps the kind of theatricality Marcus Aurelius found so distasteful when he commented: What a soul is that which is ready to be released from the body at any requisite moment, whether to be quenched or dissipated or to survive (ıEÆØ)! But the readiness must spring from one’s inner judgement (NØŒB Œæø), and not be the result of mere opposition [as is the case with the Christians]. It must be associated with deliberation (ºº ªØø) and dignity and, if others too are to be convinced, with nothing like stage-heroics (I æƪfiø)95

At the least, the portrait of Saturus in MPF represents him as performing the role of martyr with great relish and grand gestures. From beginning to end, these Christians are portrayed as active participants 92

Edwards 2007, 103. Perpetua tells us that Saturus turned himself in (MPF 4.5; 110–11), and once in prison, the author displays him as speaking and acting provocatively, warning onlookers of God’s judgement and ridiculing their curiousity (MPF 17; 124–5). 94 MPF 19.1. 95 M. Aurel. Meditations 11.3 (modified). The brackets indicate some question among scholars about whether or not the enclosed words are a later addition. But whether or not that is the case, the point holds with regard to Saturus: Would his death have been seen by the Roman administrators and the audience as marked by inner judgement, deliberation, and dignity or by sheer opposition and theatrics? 93

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in the events of their own destruction—to the point where modern scholars have discussed whether to classify at least some of these deaths as suicides, especially given that self-killing could have a positive valence as an honourable death for Greeks and Romans.96 Christian literature clearly intends this active role to score a political point against persecutors, as well as a matter of displaying their moral character of Christians. As we have seen, it was the Romans who, no doubt unwittingly, made the spectacle of Christian virtue possible. They, of course, had their own political ends in view, setting up the tribunal and the arena as spaces in which they could offer demonstrations of their power, as well as claim legitimate authority. Those who were executed were by definition criminals and enemies of the empire, often low-class persons and foreigners. In killing them, the emperor and his representatives were demonstrating their dutiful capacity to maintain peace and order for Rome’s subjects. It was crucial for the success of this performance that the accused and condemned play their proper roles. The former should either confess and offer signs of remorse or prove their innocence; the latter should demonstrate grief and especially fear. Cowardly behaviour was assumed to demonstrate a weak moral character and thereby to confirm the unlawful behaviour of such persons, hence it was important that the condemned display fear in order to testify to the justice of Roman order. The law court and the arena may have offered contests of truth and virtue, but the Roman authorities expected to win. Audiences maintained the position as judges—and hence actors, not mere passive sponges of the ideology played out before them—but they, too, were deeply implicated in assenting to the Roman drama and maintaining its ideologies and structures of domination. Christians are often treated as resistors, but they, too, were actors in the ritualized drama. As Bell puts it, ‘ritual systems do not function 96 See especially the discussion of Droge and Tabor 1992; Middleton 2006. Ancient philosophers did not question that a person could take his or her own life, but they did discuss what would be the proper motivations, circumstances, and behaviours. There was some discussion among ancient Christians as well about the proper motives for true martyrdom and whether a person ought to volunteer for martyrdom. The question revolved around how to understand whether God had elected a person for martyrdom or not. The negative examples of persons who gave themselves up, but then were unable to go ahead with it, were shown to illustrate the point that unless God wills a death, it will not succeed—and indeed if God does will such a death, it cannot be avoided.

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to regulate or control the systems of social relations, they are the system’.97 From this kind of practice theory perspective, Christians are not outside the Roman system opposing it, rather they are actively appropriating its ‘rules’ and strategies, even if for their own ends. The Romans may torture them and put them to death, but they cannot (fully) determine Christians’ behaviour within those (extreme) limits. Within this restricted scope of action, Christians sought to rewrite the system of ancient social relations through their own ritualized embodiment in torture and execution. Moreover, because ancients agreed that the capacity to develop a firm moral character had to be based upon true beliefs and reasoned judgements, fearlessness in death testified not only to a person’s character but to the truth of one’s beliefs. Christian literature clearly is framed to represent the fearless, indeed joyful, deaths of martyrs as public demonstrations of the truth of Christian teaching and way of life. The actual spectacles would, however, have had at most a limited capacity to convey anything about Christians beyond their courage (or their audacity in opposing just law and piety, depending upon one’s viewpoint). As Judith Perkins has emphasized, a survey of the surviving ancient literature indicates that ‘if Christianity was known at all (to pagans), it was known for its adherents’ attitude toward death and suffering’.98 For some, however, this attitude was apparently enough for them to seek out Christians and learn more—an end the Romans no doubt did not intend. By understanding agency not as the property of individuals but as a function of the production of power and the shaping of social relations in specific situations, it is possible to reconsider how we might talk about the representations of Perpetua and other Christians as martyrs. The emphasis placed upon willing and courageous conduct by Origen and the author of MPF have to be understood in terms of discourses of moral perfection and the specific situational structures of the law court and amphitheatre. By analysing them as sites for ritualized spectacle, it becomes possible to see how the Roman arrangement of interrogations, tortures, and executions opened indeterminate spaces in which Christians could (to a limited degree) shape their own roles in the drama, and thereby simultaneously

97

Bell 1992, 130.

98

Perkins 1995, 20.

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reshape the structure of social relations that were at stake.99 In these situations, Christians claimed to display the truth of their beliefs and way of life by ‘dying well’—but to convey this message, Christians had to appropriate and redeploy the dominant cultural codes, moral discourses, and performance strategies that were devised by the Romans precisely to display Christians as criminals and enemies of the social order. In this sense, the representation of the acts of the Christian martyrs functioned less to distinguish Christians from Roman society than to integrate them within it—but on their own terms, terms which hierarchically subordinated the Roman emperor and his subjects to, and under the gaze of, God. In the process, they (re)formed (a particular version of ) Christianity itself—not as an abstract entity, but in and through particular, ritualized bodies in particular time-space.100 This Christian ‘rescripting’ was intelligible only because the Roman script was widely and clearly recognized. While the ‘scripted’ character of the ‘performance’—or even calling it ‘ritual’—may seem to undercut the notion of individual action or agency and speak more of the social-control functions of martyrdom, the indeterminacy of social practices is one way to talk about how such practices are always active constructions of social relations, not mere repetitions or reinscriptions of them. As such, they allow for relations to be altered, negotiated, and resisted through the acts of particular persons. Because social relations are not merely reproduced, but shaped through such ritualized productions, the potential for social change by ‘disruptions’ in the law court or arena is considerable. Because such performances were staged in public, not only the government officials and the condemned Christians, but the entire Christian 99 Thus Bell 1992: ‘ritual does not disguise the exercise of power, nor does it refer, express, or symbolize anything outside itself. . . . Ritual is the thing itself [politics]. It is power; it acts and it actuates’ (195). ‘In ritualization, power is not external to its workings; it exists only insofar as it is constituted with and through the lived body, which is both the body of society and the social body. Ritualization is a strategic play of power, of domination and resistance, within the arena of the social body’ (Bell 1992, 204). 100 See the discussion of Bell 1992: ‘(W)hat ritualization does is actually quite simple: it temporally structures a space–time environment through a series of physical movements . . . , thereby producing an arena which, by its molding of the actors, both validates and extends the schemes they are internalizing. Indeed, in seeing itself as responding to an environment, ritualization interprets its own schemes as impressed upon the actors from a more authoritative source, usually from well beyond the human community itself ’ (109–10).

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community, the local civic audience, the jailors, gladiators, executioners, animal keepers, and other participants were potentially involved in reordering social relations. Certainly the martyr literature required Christian (or prospective Christian) readers to remap their own social relations, not only in terms of their membership in the Christian group, but to understand that being Christian required a (potential) reorientation toward one’s entire social network, including imperial and civic authorities, local communities (including neighbours, so-called patronage relations, participation in public festivals and so on), and families (domestic relations, including gender and master-slave relations). The discussion thus far has yet to take up the question of religious change. For both the Romans and the Christians, the drama of power and truth being performed was one in which the gods or God were understood not only as a (or even the) prime audience,101 but as actors. How does that perspective affect the analysis of agency and individualization?

INSTRUMENTAL AGENCY 102 Most academic frameworks of analysis have no place for God on the map of social relations, relegating theological matters to (delusional) ideology or symbolism. One does not have to agree with ancient belief in God or gods to see that that absence would, however, significantly distort the representation of the dynamics given by Origen, by the author of the MPF, or in Perpetua’s own account. They represent God alone as an entirely free and powerful agent; it is God who fulfils his promises and gives witness, who condemns their oppressors and grants salvation to faithful believers. The martyr is always God’s instrument.103 In MPF, readers are told that people of weak and despairing faith are able to submit willingly and joyfully to torture 101 Origen, for example, writes that the Maccabees consoled themselves with the conviction that ‘the eye of God was watching over their sufferings’ and he ‘takes pleasure in the truth in us’ (ExMart 23; O’Meara 1954, 164). 102 For a discussion of the notion of instrumental agency employed below, see Ahearn 2001, esp. 130; Asad 2003, 67–124; but esp. Keller 2002, 65. 103 This point is one made by many scholars, see for example, Chadwick 1990, 45; Miles 2005, 21.

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and humiliation only by receiving ‘supernatural grace’.104 It is within this framework that the martyrs are represented as exhibiting the capacity for active agency. Being willing to die is not, however, a choice in modern individualism’s sense of unconstrained moral freedom, but is conceived as giving assent to truth and reality: as Perpetua tells her father, ‘I cannot be called anything other than what I am, a Christian.’105 Correct moral ‘choice’ in this sense requires assenting to God’s will, not asserting one’s own. In this discourse, the martyrs’ courage and steadfastness are not represented as coming from within these persons themselves as autonomous individuals, but from God’s grace and empowerment. Their instrumental capacity is demonstrated not only in the use of their bodies to proclaim the glory and power of their God by gladly suffering torture and death, but also in the visions of Perpetua and Saturus. Such dreams are not understood as the products of their individual psyches, but as divine action on a receptive soul-mind. The visions offer certainty that all is happening according to God’s will; they will suffer and die in the arena, but God will grant them victory and eternal life. Indeed, these Christians apparently believed that publicly confessing to be a Christian would make them into particularly powerful agents of God. Perpetua, for example, believes she is a prophet able to communicate directly with God, to secure the welfare of her deceased brother, who had been in pain but after her intervention appears to her in a dream happy and ‘cured’,106 and to have the strength and skill to win the contest of the arena against a trained gladiator and the (seemingly) overwhelming power of the Roman state. Saturus, too, indicates confidence in his efficacy. Trying to convert a soldier named Pudens, he asked for Pudens’ ring, dipped it into his wound, and then returned it ‘as a pledge and as a record of his bloodshed’.107 What exactly Saturus hoped to achieve by this act is not clear to me, but he seems to think that his blood has some special efficacy. How much of this portrait belongs to MPF ’s author and how much to Saturus is not clear, but the account Saturus gives of his own vision indicates his high expectation of heavenly regard. In his dream, he is not only welcomed in heaven with homage from the angels, but the Lord Himself touches him with His hand. Then a bishop and presbyter 104 106

See MPF 1.5; 21–5. See MPF 7–8.

105 107

MPF 3.2. See MPF 21.5.

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accept his authority and ask for his patronage. Saturus takes this dream as an assurance that his behaviour will secure him not only eternal life, but a position of great prestige exceeding even that of the bishop. How should we view these scenes? First of all, we have to understand these representations of instrumental agency within the social dynamics operating in the law court and arena. In the contests staged in these spaces, people are all represented as agents of their respective deities.108 At stake in the contest is whose gods (or God) are truly divine and what these gods demand. That the Romans condemned Christians as atheists, criminals, and traitors to the authority granted them by the gods makes clear their point of view. In the Christian scenario, the dramatic contest is staged as a battle between the instruments of Satan and those of God, between idolatry and true worship. Origen admonishes his readers that not only humans, but also the angels of God and the powers of the lower world will be watching and judging their performance; the cosmos itself will rejoice if they win the contest.109 From this perspective, the scope of potential religious change is enormous. Because Romans based the legitimacy of their authority on their piety toward the gods and the gods’ favour to them, religious resistance potentially challenged the entire hierarchical structure of social relations. It is widely recognized that in antiquity the playing field of religion (in Bourdieu’s terms) was not merely a matter of domestic (‘private’) practices but was embedded in political and economic activities, as well as ethnic identity, social status, and family relations. As we know from hindsight, the Christian project would (audaciously) seek to reform each of these spheres under the gaze of their God. In her writing, as well as in MPF’s author’s representation of her speech and actions, Perpetua effects a reordering of imperial and familial relations in which God is placed over (and against) Roman claims to power, and her natal family is replaced with Christian ‘family’.110 Eventually, these and other disciplined bodily practices will substantively change the social order. We know from hindsight that enormous changes were wrought in the name of 108 The Romans can be seen as instrumental agents as well. The Emperor is the supreme instrument of the gods. The Roman authorities are more directly the instrumental agents of the Emperor, as well as fulfilling the destiny granted them by the gods. 109 See Origen, ExMart 18; O’Meara 1954, 158. 110 See here particularly the exemplary work of Buell 1999, 2005.

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Christianity over the next centuries, in every aspect of social-political life, including transformed notions of suffering and selfhood, obedience and resistance to power and authority, and understandings of sexuality, family, and ethnicity. Given the limited role allotted to the accused Christian—to sacrifice or be executed—these consequences for social and religious change are stunning in their scope. They can be accounted for only when agency is analysed as a function of the indeterminate, embodied discourses and structures of particular situations; when we shift our attention from the motives and choices of single individuals to the effective agency of writing and representation; and when we consider the scope afforded by religious discourse. By rescripting the celebration of the emperor’s birthday (or some such performance of Roman authority, law, and order) into a battle between the forces of God and the forces of Satan, Christians significantly shifted not only the interpretation of events in the law court and the arena, they endowed them with an alternative cosmological and theological significance. That scripting was, however, itself contested even among Christians.

WHAT KIND OF GOD IS THIS? What kind of God is this for whom Perpetua acted as an instrument? What kind of God requires his children to suffer such horrible and humiliating deaths in order to affirm their humanity and glorify his Name? As we saw at the beginning of this chapter, Christians disputed not only with the Romans, but with each other, about the nature of their God and His demands. Thus far it could seem that we have been talking as though there were a singular, homogenous ideology and set of practices in ancient Christianity, referred to in shorthand as ‘martyrdom’ and represented by Origen and MPF—and indeed there is considerable coherence among some early Christian literature.111 This impression, however, would historically speaking 111 This coherence should not, however, be overstated. Even among the literature that was included within the bounds of what became Christian orthodoxy, there is considerable theological and practical diversity. Moreover, MPF, for example, offers much more clearly a set of practices of moral development than the content of Christian teaching. What would we know of Christian beliefs if this text were the only knowledge we had of Christianity? Perpetua is portrayed as an exemplum of

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be inaccurate. Christians themselves were deeply engaged in articulating the theological meaning of their suffering and violent deaths at the hands of the Romans, and they disagreed, sometimes stridently and angrily, with each other about what to think and what to do.112 These disputes are already evidenced in the writings of theologians such as Irenaeus and Tertullian, but manuscripts discovered in Egypt over the last century provide more specific evidence of the content of these disputes. To describe these controversies adequately would require much more space than the topic can be given here, but it is important at least to mention them because so much was at stake in what Christianity became. Several of these rediscovered works can be considered as ‘preparation for martyrdom’ and, like Origen and MPF, they stress the need to receive true teaching given by Jesus’s revelation in order to overcome the passions of grief and fear.113 They stress, too, that only the teachings of Jesus bring certain knowledge of God, and these teachings must be preached to the whole world for human salvation. But they disagree on (at least) two points that are crucial for our discussion. I offer a brief discussion of The Letter of Peter to Philip as an example.114 First, while Christians like those who wrote The Letter of Peter to Philip accepted that believers must suffer and be killed, they did not believe that in themselves such humiliations and tortures brought salvation, or even special status before God. Rather such consequences

Christian faith, but the content of that faith is surprising: images of a shepherd giving her milk and a leader crowning her with victory, stepping on the head of a dragon and defeating a fearsome gladiator. In her own writing, we hear of no imitation of a suffering and dying Christ, no language of atoning sacrifice or sin and repentance, and other Christian teachings that were to become fundamental are similarly absent. This may be a function of the genre, but the works discussed below, such as The Letter of Peter to Philip and The Apocryphon of James, which are also ‘preparation for martyrdom’ literature, include considerably more theological instruction. 112 One of the most angry voices can be heard in the recently published Gospel of Judas (see Pagels and King 2007, esp. 33–75). See also the discussion of Koschorke 1978. 113 Particularly relevant are The Testimony of Truth, The Apocalypse of Peter, I and II Apocalypse of James, The Apocryphon of James, The Gospel of Mary, and The Letter of Peter to Philip. For more detailed discussion of the texts and topics of this paragraph, see King 2009 and King 2010. 114 The results given here are argued at more length in King 2010. The Letter of Peter to Philip is preserved in Coptic translation in two fourth–fifth century manuscripts; for texts and English translations, see Meyer 1991 and Kasser et al. 2007.

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arose from preaching the gospel in a world ruled by violent and arrogant demigods. These Christians denied that violence of any kind was part of God’s plan, and hence their writings offer no images of the judgement or punishment of those who oppressed them. Second, they did not believe that immortality included the resurrection of the fleshly material body. While they could affirm that Jesus had indeed come in the flesh, truly suffered and died, his resurrection proved that human beings are fundamentally spiritual beings, not fleshly.115 By rising from the dead, he exposed the impotence and deception of the powers that attempted to keep people enslaved to their worldly rule, and he showed people the way to return to God. As with the other Christian literature we have examined, a central function of these texts is the formation of the self as a specifically Christian self. The Letter of Peter to Philip, for example, emphasizes a way of life based on moral development through overcoming the passions, practices of evangelism as the central activity of the Christian way of life, and accepting correct teaching about the nature of God, the cosmos, and humanity as necessary for salvation. (In this latter sense, this kind of Christianity was not more ‘rationalized’ than other forms.) How does this controversy impact on our question of individuation? As we have seen, in antiquity it was understood that a person develops morally by living virtuously in accord with a true account (for Christians, the revelation) of the ‘way things are’. For all Christians, this meant a clear differentiation from the hegemonic religiouspolitical-social norms of their social contexts. The Romans greatly aided this ‘differentiation’ by killing them for professing Christianity, but at the same time these public displays put theological issues into play that were crucial to Christian teaching about what it meant to be fully human. For Origen and MPF, one’s full humanity was embodied in facing death fearlessly; for LetPetPhil, one’s full humanity was embodied in a way of life that rejected the body as the self. In this way, the self was more fully ‘interiorized’ and simultaneously ‘divinized’—not in the sense of modern individualism, but in that a person became fully human by conforming to a transcendent nature not bound by the restrictions of materiality, political power, or conventional social-economic roles. Such people practised the transcendent

115

See Marjanen 2002.

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life in the daily world—a radical kind of relationship of the individual to society. This way of life, too, would have significant implications for social and religious change in late antique Roman society, as it provided exempla vis-à-vis monastic and mystical traditions within Christianity.116 My point, briefly, is simply that we cannot equate Christian martyr literature with the production of only one kind of religious individuation, but rather it is necessary to examine in more detail a broader range of this kind of literature and the various situations in which these works were read.

CONCLUDING REFLECTIONS What does this consideration of literary representations in ancient Christian martyr literature offer to a study of religious individualization in the Roman period? As was noted at the outset, the topic arises at least in part from contemporary concerns, conditions, and normative questions. When these issues are broadened, however, first by defining individualization more abstractly as ‘emancipation from tradition social or cultural determinations of individual action’, and second by addressing this question to the Hellenistic and Roman period, as well as to religion in particular, then new perspectives, problems, and possibilities arise. By differentiating the various conceptualizations of persons in antiquity from those in modernity, perspectives appear in which the appearance of individuality does not require emancipation from social determinations, but can be conceived precisely as exemplifying the ethical ideals and duties attached to social belonging. In the situation of the law court and the arena, as well as in the Christian representation of martyrs as exempla, we can see various kinds of individuality enacted. The Martyrdom of Perpetua alone offers several examples: 

Dramatically evident in Perpetua’s exchanges with her father are examples of how the situation of Roman persecution offered many opportunities for a kind of practical individuality, necessarily disembedding Christians from their usual social roles and

116 It is thus no surprise that the Nag Hammadi collection was found near a Pachomian monastery.

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Karen L. King rupturing their social relations while more exclusively embedding them in another group. The situation is not one of absolute social dissolution, but rather Perpetua must choose among her persona (mother, daughter, Christian) since her situation brings about their conflict. By choosing Christian, she marks her Christian identity (family) higher than natal familial relations. Perpetua is also distinguished from others in terms of her moral individuality—like other martyrs, she is represented as the red thread, affirming her particular character by pursuing her Christian duty to the point of public execution. This behaviour can also be seen in terms of representative individuality, where fulfilling her social role as a Christian martyr is portrayed as a personal feat. The inclusion of her own written account of her trial and imprisonment (the so-called diary) further offers a kind of reflexive individuality through the development of the genre of an individualizing first-person discourse. While competitive individuality is more usually reserved for aristocratic struggles, the agonistic character of Roman social life, displayed performatively in the arena, allowed a rescripting of the action and thus a place for persons to stand out in terms of their exemplary behaviour. Certainly Perpetua and other martyrs like Saturus are not competing for a higher standing in the social-political world, but they are clearly doing so within the frame of the heavenly world to come. In that place, not only will roles be reversed with their persecutors, but martyrs will even achieve higher standing than bishops and deacons.

These expressions of individuality are represented not as emancipation from social determinations, however, but as examples of how to fulfil one’s duty and point others to a common ethos that will embed them firmly within the proper social group, the Christian family or church. Moreover, it was by exemplifying and appealing to normative concepts of social roles and ethical standards, such as overcoming the passions and displaying noble death, that Christian martyrs attempted to persuade their audiences of the truth of their beliefs and way of life. In this sense, their actions must be read as not only resisting Roman domination, but as employing oppositional strategies within the discursive frameworks of their social-political

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world. Thus a model of individualization in terms of emancipation has to be modified, not only to include the ways in which human activity is always both constrained and enabled by shared discourses, social-political structures, and material conditions, but also by alternative (normative) construals of human flourishing. Neither are the actions of Perpetua and the other martyrs represented as the heroic acts of free agents, but rather in terms of instrumental agency—and it is here in particular that the notion of specifically religious individualization appears. The Christian scripting of martyrdom gave Christians the roles of God’s representatives: they are the tools through whom he brings about his will. This kind of instrumental agency gave God a predominant role in the drama, enabling Christians to enlarge the playing field. Thus, while exemplary individuality could potentially appear in any area of social and political life, religious individualization had a potentially extensive capacity to enable social change because religion in antiquity intersected so many domains, from family to the nature of the cosmos and humanity’s place in it.117 By analysing agency not as something belonging to individuals, but to situations, it becomes possible to understand better how a religious literature that extolled death could effect social change—and thereby understand better one aspect of the impact of religious individuation in the Hellenistic and Roman period. Yet, while the framework proposed here allows us to map a broader range for processes of individualization beyond emancipation from social constraint, and while it allows us to see the particular workings of instrumental agency and imagination in some specific cases of religious individualization, the analysis by no means settles normative questions of what is required for human flourishing. We certainly are able to redescribe these Christians’ actions, for example, as those of individuals resisting unjust domination or fanatics killing themselves

117 There are, however, questions whether notions about the legitimate use of violence shifted. Although early Christian literature includes many admonitions against revenge, see, for example, 1 Peter 3.9; Clem. Al. strom. IV.4 (14.1), images of Christians’ courageously standing up to Roman torture and persecution were often coupled with fiery diatribes describing the punishments God would wreak on their oppressors, see, for example, Revelation; Tert. spect. 30. Indeed, it was not long after Constantine’s conversion before Christians themselves persecuted heretics and nonbelievers. See the discussion of Gaddis 2005; Grig 2004. Note, too, Grig’s observation: ‘It is important to note here that the use of torture is not criticized on principle by any writer, Christian or otherwise’ (64).

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or recommending others do so, but it is important to recognize that whether they are evaluated positively or negatively, all these frameworks imply decentring (if not ignoring altogether) the Christians’ own logic of behaviour that was to them emancipating (‘salvific’). We do not have to believe as they did in order to appreciate analytically how powerful and how persuasive religious imagination and ideology can be precisely in situations in which the scope for action is limited and people are willing to die for God.

REFERENCES Ahearn, Laura A. 2001. ‘Language and Agency’, Annual Review of Anthropology 30, 109–37. Asad, Talal 2003. Formations of the Secular: Christianity, Islam, Modernity. Cultural memory in the present. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Barnes, Timothy David 1968. ‘Pre-Decian Acta Martyrum’, JTS 19, 509–31. Barton, Carlin 1994. ‘Savage Miracles: The Redemption of Lost Honor in Roman Society and the Sacrament of the Gladiator and the Martyr’, Representations 45, 41–71. Beck, Ulrich and Beck-Gernsheim, Elisabeth 2002. Individualization. Institutionalized Individualism and its Social and Political Consequences. London: SAGE. Bell, Catherine 1992. Ritual Theory, Ritual Practice. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Bellah, Robert N., Madsen, Richard, Sullivan, William M., Swidler, Ann, and Tipton, Steven M. 1985. Habits of the Heart: Individualism and Commitment in American Life. New York: Harper and Row. Bisbee, Gary A. 1988. Pre-Decian Acts of Martyrs and Commentarii. Philadelphia, PA: Fortress Press. Bowersock, Glen W. 1995. Martyrdom and Rome. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Bremmer, Jan 2002. ‘Perpetua and Her Diary: Authenticity, Family and Visions’, in Ameling, Walter (ed.), Märtyrer und Märtyrerakten. Stuttgart: Franz Steiner Verlag, 77–120. Brown, Gavin 2003. ‘Theorizing Ritual as Performance: Explorations of Ritual Indeterminacy’ Journal of Ritual Studies 17.1, 3–18. Buell, Denise 1999. Making Christians. Clement of Alexandria and the Rhetoric of Legitimacy. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. —— 2005. Why This New Race? Ethnic Reasoning in Early Christianity. New York: Columbia University Press.

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Carrithers, Michael, Collins, Steven, and Lukes, Steven (eds.) 1985. The Category of the Person: Anthropology, Philosophy, History. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Castelli, Elizabeth A. 1995. Visions and Voyeurism: Holy Women and the Politics of Sight in Early Christianity. Berkeley, CA: Center for Hermeneutical Studies. ——2004. Martyrdom and Memory. Early Christian Culture Making. New York: Columbia University Press. Chadwick, Henry 1990. ‘The Early Christian Community’, in McManners, John, (ed.), The Oxford Illustrated History of Christianity. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 21–61. Cobb, L. Stephanie 2008. Dying to be Men. Gender and Language in Early Christian Martyr Texts. New York: Columbia University Press. Coleman, Kathleen 1990. ‘Fatal Charades: Roman Executions Staged as Mythological Enactments’, Journal of Roman Studies 80, 44–73. De Ste-Croix, G. E. M. 1974. ‘Why Were the Early Christians Persecuted? ’, in Finley, Moses I. (ed.), Studies in Ancient Society. London: Routledge, 210–49. ——1974a. ‘Why Were the Early Christians Persecuted? A Rejoinder’, in Finley, Moses I. (ed.), Studies in Ancient Society. London: Routledge, 256–62. Dirks, Nicholas B. 1994. ‘Ritual and Resistance: Subversion as a Social Fact’, in Dirks, Nicholas, Eley, Geoff, and Ortner, Sherry B. (eds), Culture, Power, History: A Reader in Contemporary Social Theory. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 483–503. Droge, Arthur J. and Tabor, James D. 1992. A Noble Death: Suicide and Martyrdom among Christians and Jews in Antiquity. San Francisco, CA: Harper. Dumont, Louis 1985. ‘A Modified View of our Origins: the Christian Beginnings of Modern Individualism’, in Carrithers, Michael, Collins, Steven, and Lukes, Steven (eds), The Category of the Person: Anthropology, Philosophy, History. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 93–122. Edwards, Catherine 2007. Death in Ancient Rome. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Foucault, Michel 1994. ‘The Hermeneutic of the Subject’, in Ethics. Subjectivity and Truth: Essential Works of Michel Foucault 1954–1984, vol. 1, ed. Rabinow, Paul. New York: The New Press, 175–205. ——1994. ‘Self-Writing’, in Ethics. Subjectivity and Truth: Essential Works of Michel Foucault 1954–1984, vol. 1, ed. Rabinow, Paul. New York: The New Press, 93–106. ——1994. ‘Technologies of the Self ’, in Ethics. Subjectivity and Truth: Essential Works of Michel Foucault 1954–1984, vol. 1, ed. Rabinow, Paul. New York: The New Press, 207–51. Frede, Michael 2007. ‘A Notion of Person in Epictetus’, in Scaltsas, Theodore and Mason, Andrew S. (eds), The Philosophy of Epictetus. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 153–68.

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Frilingos, Christopher A. 2004. Spectacles of Empire: Monsters, Martyrs, and the Book of Revelation. Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press. Gaddis, Michael 2005. There is No Crime for Those Who Have Christ: Religious Violence in the Christian Roman Empire. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Gill, Christopher 1996. Personality in Greek Epic, Tragedy, and Philosophy: The Self in Dialogue. Oxford: Clarendon Press. —— 2006. The Structured Self in Hellenistic and Roman Thought. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Giversen, Soren and Pearson, Birger A. (eds) 1981. Nag Hammadi Codices IX and X. Nag Hammadi Studies 15. Leiden: Brill. Gleason, Maud W. 1999. ‘Truth Contests and Talking Corpses’, in Porter, James I (ed.), Constructions of the Classical Body. Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 287–313. Grig, Lucy 2004. Making Martyrs in Late Antiquity. London: Duckworth. Grimes, Ronald L. 2006. ‘Performance’, in Kreinath, Jens, Snoek, Jan, and Stausberg, Michael (eds), Theorizing Rituals: Issues, Topics, Approaches, Concepts, vol. 1. Leiden: Brill, 379–94. —— 2000. ‘Ritual’, in Braun, Willi and McCutcheon, Russell (eds), Guide to the Study of Religion. London: Cassell, 259–70. Heffernan, Thomas 1995. ‘Philology and Authorship in the Passio Sanctarum Perpetuae et Felicitatis’, Traditio: Studies in Ancient and Medieval History, Thought, and Religion 50, 315–25. Heller, Thomas C., Sosna, Morton, and Wellberry, David E. (eds) 1986. Reconstructing Individualism: Autonomy, Individuality, and the Self in Western Thought. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Hollywood, Amy 2002. ‘Performativity, Citationality, Ritualization’, History of Religions 42.2, 93–115. Kasser, Rodolphe, Wurst, Gregor, Meyer, Marvin, and Gaudard, François 2007. The Gospel of Judas together with the Letter of Peter to Philip, James, and a Book of Allogenes from Codex Tchacos: Critical Edition. Washington, DC: National Geographic Society. Keller, Mary 2002. The Hammer and the Flute: Women, Power & Spirit Possession. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press. Kelley, Nicole 2006. ‘Philosophy as Training for Death: Reading the Ancient Martyr Acts as Spiritual Exercises’, Church History 75.4, 723–47. King, Karen L. 2009. ‘Martyrdom and Its Discontents in the Tchacos Codex’, in DeConick, April (ed.), The Judas Codex: Proceedings of the International Congress on Codex Tchacos held at Rice University, Houston, Texas, March 13–16, 2008. Nag Hammadi and Manichaean Studies. Leiden: Brill, 23–42. —— 2010. ‘Toward a Discussion of the Category “Gnosis/Gnosticism”: The Case of the Epistle of Peter to Philip’, in Schröter, Jens and Frey, Jörg (eds),

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Jesus in apokryphen Evangelienüberlieferungen. Wissenschaftliche Untersuchungen zum Neuen Testament 254. Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 445–65. Kippele, Flavia 1998. Was heisst Individualisierung? Die Antworten soziologischer Klassiker. Opladen: Westdeutscher Verlag. Koetschau, Paul 1899. Die Griechischen Christlichen Schriftsteller der ersten drei Jahrhunderte: Origenes, vol. 1. Leipzig: J. C. Hinrichs’sche Buchhandlung. Koschorke, Klaus 1978. Die Polemik der Gnostiker gegen das Kirchliche Christentum. Leiden: Brill. Kraemer, Ross S. (ed.) 2004. ‘A First-Person Account of a Christian Woman’s Persecution’, in Women’s Religions in the Greco-Roman World: A Sourcebook. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 356–68. Kyle, Donald G. 1998. Spectacles of Death in Ancient Rome. London: Routledge. Lieu, Judith 1998. ‘Accusations of Jewish Persecution in Early Christian Sources’, in Tolerance and Intolerance in Early Judaism and Christianity. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 270–95. Marjanen, Antti 2002. ‘The Suffering of One Who is a Stranger to Suffering: The Crucifixion of Jesus in the Letter of Peter to Philip’, in Dunderberg, Ismo, Tuckett, Christopher, and Syreeni, Kari (eds), Fair Play: Diversity and Conflicts in Early Christianity. Essays in Honour of Heikki Räisänen. Leiden: Brill, 487–98. Mauss, Marcel 1985. ‘A Category of the Human Mind: the Notion of Person; the Notion of Self ’, in Carrithers, Michael, Collins, Steven, and Lukes, Steven (eds), The Category of the Person: Anthropology, Philosophy, History. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1–25. Meyer, Marvin W. 1991. ‘NHC VIII, 2: The Letter of Peter to Philip’, in Sieber, John H. (ed.), Nag Hammadi Codex VIII. Nag Hammadi Studies 31. Leiden: Brill, 227–51. Middleton, Paul 2006. Radical Martyrdom and Cosmic Conflict in Early Christianity. London: T&T Clark. Miles, Margaret R. 2005. The Word Made Flesh: A History of Christian Thought. Oxford: Blackwell Publishing. Moore, Stephen and Anderson, Janice Capel 1998. ‘Taking It Like a Man: Masculinity in 4 Maccabees’, JBL 117, 249–73. Musurillo, H. (ed. and trans.) 1972. ‘The Martyrdom of Perpetua and Felicitas’, in The Acts of the Christian Martyrs, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 106–31. O’Meara, John J. (intr. and trans.) 1954. Origen: Exhortation to Martyrdom. Ancient Christian writers 19. New York: Newman Press. Pagels, Elaine and King, Karen L. 2007. Reading Judas. The Gospel of Judas and the Shaping of Christianity. New York: Penguin. Pearson, Birger A. 1981. Nag Hammadi Codices IX and X. Nag Hammadi Studies 15. Leiden: Brill.

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Perkins, Judith 1995. The Suffering Self: Pain and Narrative Representation in Early Christianity. London: Routledge. Potter, David 1993. ‘Martyrdom as Spectacle’, in Scodel, Ruth (ed.), Theater and Society in the Classical World. Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 53–88. Rapport, Nigel and Overing, Joanna 2000. Social and Cultural Anthropology. The Key Concepts. London: Routledge. Riddle, Donald W. 1931. The Martyrs. A Study in Social Control. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Rives, James 1995. ‘Human Sacrifice among Pagans and Christians’, Journal of Roman Studies 85, 65–85. Salisbury, Joyce E. 1997. Perpetua’s Passion. The Death and Memory of a Young Roman Woman. New York: Routledge. Selinger, Reinhard 2004. The Mid-Third Century Persecutions of Decius and Valerian. 2nd edn. Frankfurt: Peter Lang. Sherwin-White, A. N. 1952. ‘The Jewish Persecutions and Roman Law Again’, Journal of Theological Studies 3.2, 199–213. —— 1974. ‘Why Were the Early Christians Persecuted? An Amendment’, in Finley, Moses I. (ed.), Studies in Ancient Society. London: Routledge, 250–5. Sorabji, Richard 2007. ‘Epictetus on Proairesis and the Self ’, in Scaltsas, Theodore, and Mason, Andrew S. (eds), The Philosophy of Epictetus. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 87–98. Stout, Jeffrey 2001. Ethics after Babel: The Languages of Morals and their Discontents. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Young, Robin Darling 2001. In Procession before the World: Martyrdom as Public Liturgy in Early Christianity. The Père Marquette Lectures in Theology. Milwaukee, WI: Marquette University Press.

Master and Disciple

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15 Religio mentis: The Hermetic Process of Individualization Giulia Sfameni Gasparro

Hermes. He who has not failed to get knowledge of these things is able to form an exact conception of God; nay, if I am to speak boldly, he is able to see God with his own eyes (ÆP  Å), and having seen God to be blest. Tat. Blest indeed, father, is he who has seen God. hermes. But it is impossible, my son, for one who is yet in the body to attain this happiness. A man must train (æ ªıÇØ) his soul in this life, in order that, when it has entered the other world, where is permitted to see God, it may not miss the way (which leads to Him). But men who love the body will never see the vision of the Beautiful and Good. How glorious, my son, is the beauty of that which has neither shape nor colour! Tat. But can there be anything, father, that is beautiful apart from shape and colour? Hermes. God alone, my son, or rather that which is too great to be called God.1

This dialogical passage which concludes the extensive exposition on the astrological doctrine of the Decans, contained in the Discourse of Hermes to Tat conserved in the Anthologium of Stobeus,2 offers one of the most significant exemplifications of a central theme in the Hermetic tradition which we could call ‘spiritual guidance’. It shows this tradition 1 SH VI, 18–19. The Hermetic texts of the CH, of the Ascl, of the FH and SH are quoted according to the translation of Scott 1914–36 [Hermetica]. Cf. HT and Copenhaver 1992; Holzhausen 1997. For a critical review of the bibliography, complete up to 1980, see Gonzales Blanco 1984 and more extensively that updated to the last 50 years by Ramelli 2005, 1549–619. 2 Cf. HT, vol. 3, XXXVIII–LXI.

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as a privileged way to achieve a highly ‘individualizing’ intellectual and at the same time religious experience. Although the characters involved in the dialogue are father and son, their intimate family relationship is not defined in the purely natural terms of blood bonds but rather according to the bond of authority which links the master to his disciple. The latter, in fact, at the beginning of the dialogue remembers that he received ‘in your former General Discourses (ˆØŒ  ºª Ø)’3 the promise of a detailed explanation on the nature and activity of the thirtysix Decans, and the master repeats his willingness to teach a doctrine that, he underlines, ‘of all my teachings . . . will be of supreme importance, and will stand highest among them’ (SH VI, 1). Having thus stressed the importance of the logos that he is about to perform for the benefit of his pupil, the master presents an extensive exposition of the Decanal astrological theory, above all, of Egyptian origin,4 punctuated by brief interventions from the disciple who, with appropriate questions, requests one or another aspect of the issue under discussion to be examined in greater depth. For example, when the disciple asks whether the Decans have influence (KæªØÆ) over men, Hermes replies: Yes, my son, they act on us most potently. If they act on the heavenly bodies, how could it be that they should not act on us also, both on individual men and on communities? The force (KæªØÆ) which works in all events that befalls men collectively comes from the Decans; for instance, overthrows of kingdoms, revolts of cities, famines, pestilences, overflowings of the sea, earthquakes, none of these things, my son, take place without the working (KæªØÆ) of the Decans.

And he continues: For if the Decans rule over the seven planets, and we are subject to the planets, do you not see that the force set in action by the Decans reaches us also, whether it is worked by the Decans themselves or by means of the planets? (SH VI, 7–9)

3 On the ˆØŒ d ºª Ø as reflection of a cycle of teaching propaedeutic to more indepth study of a theological and religious nature, see Fowden 1986, 97–100; French trans. Paris 2000, 149–54. They are mentioned at various points in the hermetic texts which have survived. Cf. CH X, 1 and 7; CH XIII, 1 (in the General Discourses the theme of the divine condition was discussed ‘in an enigmatic form’: æd ŁØ Å ); SH III,1; NH VI, 6.63.2–3 where the writings defined as (Di) exodica are also mentioned as equally relevant to a lower degree of teaching. Cf. Mahé, HHE, vol. 1, 132. 4 Cf. introduction in HT, vol. 3.

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The teaching, apparently of merely ‘technical’ relevance, insofar as it relates to a particular astrological doctrine, de facto involves the anthropological existential dimension, since the astral powers, planets, Decans and demons coming from them regulate and determine human destiny.5 Above all, the didactic exposition, highly specialized in its astrological, ‘scientific’ dimension, culminates in the quoted passage, in which the attention suddenly shifts from the level of doctrinal enunciation to the religious one of the ‘mystical’ quest for knowledge, or rather for the vision of God.6 This quest is seen in its full existential dimension, implying a ‘beatitude’ of man gratified by the divine vision and imposing a ‘gymnastic exercise’ of the soul, which already in its earthly abode (KŁ) must free itself from bodily ties in order to rise up to God, without failing in the path that will lead it to the sought-after goal. Lastly, we are given a definition of the divine being, platonically identified with the Good and the Beautiful and, in a sort of sketch of apophatic theology, declared to be ‘that which is too great to be called God’. The father-master in our text is the Hermes Trismegistos in whose name a rich and varied literature was composed that extends over many centuries, from the early Hellenistic age up until the third to fourth century ad, and his son-disciple is Tat, a unique figure whose name is an alternative form of the name of the same Egyptian god Thoth underlying the Hellenistic figure of Trismegistus.7 He is the addressee and main protagonist of this literature, which however also 5

6 Cf. Mahé 1993. Kingsley 2000. On the prerogatives and functions of the ancient deity, cf. Boylan 1922; Derchain-Urtel 1981; Couroyer 1987, 1988, 1988a. On the Egyptian religious picture in early and late Hellenism, after Milne 1924; Bagnall 1993; and Bowman 1996, cf. Frankfurter 1998. The Egyptian custom of proclaiming the greatness of the deity by repeating the adjective ‘great’ is perhaps the reason for the name of the character (cf. Mahé 1996), in which the prerogatives of wisdom of the Egyptian Thot and the Greek Hermes had been combined since the early Hellenistic age. Two Greek ostraka from the second century bc (circa 170–164 bc) found in the region of Saqqara, on the site of an oracle of Thot (Emery 1966), seem to provide an early testimony of the designation of the god as (Hermes) Trismegistos, since he was given three names ªØ  ªØ  ªº  (Skeat and Turner 1968). The presence of a cult of Hermes Trismegistos in Hermopolis, which was in fact the holy city of Thoth, in the 4th century ad, as attested in the correspondence of Teofanes scholasticus, a senior functionary in the imperial administration (Rees 1968–9; cf. Gabra 1971; Quaegebeur 1975) naturally does not affect the issue of possible ‘Hermetic communities’ which are discussed with regards to the literature surviving today. 7

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mentions other ‘disciples’, such as Asclepius and Ammon, and in some extremely unusual cases, sees Hermes himself as the beneficiary of teaching by the supreme Nous (CH I and XI). An important section, with peculiar connotations and a strongly Egyptian hallmark, lastly, sees Isis as mediating the teaching of Trismegistus to her own son Horus, maintaining the dialogical scheme of the intimate discussion between master and disciple (KK = SH XXIII; SH XXIV–XXVII).8 De facto, this literature, in appealing to a figure which is composite, but which has clear exceptional traits such as Trismegistus—whether intended in a divine sense due to his specific relationship of continuity with the Egyptian god of wisdom and his Greek counterpart, or whether presented as a great ancient sage—has the distinguishing trait of being a literature of revelation, according to the Hellenistic model which, above all, magisterial studies by A.-J. Festugière have helped illustrate.9 The variety of issues, from astrology to alchemy, botany and astrological medicine to magic, philosophy, ethics, and the religious doctrine of the eusebeia, are dealt with in teaching that is considered not the result of rational human investigation but rather of a higher authority, that of a master who is himself God or the repository of divine knowledge. Having established this peculiar aspect of the Hermetic tradition, in all its expressions, no less relevant is the role of the master–disciple dialectic relationship. This is reflected on the formal level of the literary dialogue but also, and more incisively, in terms of contents, determining the meaning of the transmission of knowledge and its effects in the existential experience of the disciple. The literary scheme of ‘revelation dialogue’ is also found in a wide variety of forms of Hellenistic literature10 and appears to have been widely used, as a preferred means of communicating the knowledge bestowed by the Saviour and by the various ‘envoy-revealers’ of the divine world, in the field of Gnosticism in the early centuries ad.11 This poses, as we know, serious unresolved questions regarding possible historical and typological intersections with Hermetism itself.12 8

Cf. Betz 1966; Carozzi 1982; and Jackson 1986. Festugière 1949, 1950, 1953, 1954, 1967. 10 Cf. Festugière 1950, 332–54. 11 Rudolph 1968; Perkins 1980. 12 Among an extremely extensive bibliography I will merely mention Reitzenstein 1904, passim; Festugière 1953, 85–96; Haenchen 1956; Jonas 1963, 147–73; Filoramo 1983, 168–72; Pétrement 1984, 170–81 and 631–7; Rudolph 1977, 1984, 107–9 and 9

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The problem of the historical collocation of the latter, moreover, also extends to the adjacent fields of Judaism13 and Christianity,14 some of whose most authoritative representatives showed that it appreciated the teaching of Trismegistus, viewing him as a ‘prophet’ of the Christian message.15 The dialogical structure, however, is already present in the most ancient Hermetic works,16 represented as we know by the works of a ‘scientific’ nature listed above, which in the classification proposed by Festugière fall within the so-called ‘popular Hermetism’, as opposed to the treatises, the expression of a ‘learned’ or philosophical-religious Hermetism, which have survived in a direct form in the collection of the Corpus Hermeticum (CH), in an indirect form in the Anthologium of Stobeus (SH) as more or less extensive ‘extracts’ of the originals, and lastly in Latin translation, such as the Asclepius, a reworking of the Logos teleios, and then also in Coptic translation, in the Codex VI of Nag Hammadi (NH). We need not insist on the reductive nature of the term ‘popular Hermetism’, since the topics in question were fully covered by the scientific tradition of the time, as were their variously marked magical components, due to the many points of intersection between the sphere of Hellenistic magic, based on the principle of universal sympatheia, and fields such as medicine, botany, mineralogy, and so on.17

passim. Büchli 1987 identified in the CH I a form of programmatic ‘paganization’ of a system of Christian gnosis (cf. W. C. Grese, in Critical Review of Books in Religion 1990, 263–5). Camplani 1993 adopts a similar position. The debate on the relations between Hermetism and Gnosticism emerged in the forefront following the discovery of the Coptic Codes of NH. Cf. Mahé 1986a, 1988, and 1989. Quispel 1992 affirms the pre-Christian origin of Hermetism, as a phenomenon linked to Alexandrian Judaism and influencing the very origins of Christian gnosticism. Pertinent observations on the similarities, but also profound differences between the two phenomena on the soteriological issue, can be found in van den Broek 1996. 13 Cf. Dodd 1964, 99–209; Philonenko 1975 and 1979; Pearson 1981; Idel 1988. 14 Bardy 1911; Lyman 1930; Dodd 1953, 10–53; Braun 1955, 26–42; 259–90; Grese 1979 and 1983. 15 Cf. Siniscalco 1966–7; Sfameni Gasparro 1971; Pépin 1982; Moreschini 2000; van den Broek 2000a; Löw 2002. 16 Mahé 1996, in particular 359. 17 Among an extensive bibliography, we mention merely Bernand 1991; Graf 1994; Faraone and Obbink 1991; Meyer and Mirecki 1995; Schäfer and Kippenberg 1997; Jordan, Montgomery, and Thomassen 1999; Flint et al. 1999; Piñero 2001; Pérez Jiménez and Cruz Andreotti 2002; Mirecki and Meyer 2002. A useful compilation of the ancient sources is collected in Luck 1985 and an extensive bibliographical review

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For our purposes, however, we are interested in the fact, by now clearly illustrated by the many studies on the theme, of the fundamental homogeneity which can be seen in the vast literary panorama of Hermetism, not only from the point of view of its common quality of revelation of a divine knowledge that illuminated the most varied fields of knowledge, but also due to the interaction between its various sub-genres. If in fact the technical-scientific works sometimes display an interest in themes and issues of a philosophical-religious nature, it is above all in these that this characteristic is found to be most attentive also to ‘scientific’ matters, above all of an astrological nature. In any case, the reason for the transmission of reserved knowledge, of great significance for humans, who use it as the source of tools necessary for the understanding of the laws governing cosmic life, is expressed in the forms typical of master–disciple teaching also in the technical-scientific Hermetic tradition. Since such writings are of greater antiquity than the philosophical-religious writings, they in fact seem to be the historical locus in which this scheme was established18 and from which the latter genre inherited it. Trismegistus in fact joined knowledge of scientific disciplines with a rich heritage of teachings on the nature of beings, God, the world, and man, aimed at providing the latter with the means to achieve personal ‘salvation’.19 However, it seems that only in the transformation of the Hermetic tradition in its shift from one sphere of interests and issues to the other did the formal scheme of the teaching logos assume that series of ethical-religious values which made it, as we shall see, the expression of what amounted to a propaedeutics of intellectual education and a means of ‘spiritual guidance’, aimed at the construction of a particular ‘religious identity’, establishing the Hermetic ‘believer’ as a can be found in Calvo Martínez 2001. The bibliographical repertory compiled by Moreau and Turpin 2000 (T. IV) is vast. 18 Cf. Festugière 1942. 19 Mahé proposes a development of the Hermetic literature starting from the gnomologoi (cf. de Durand 1976) in HHE, vol. 2, 273–457 and Mahé 1976 and Paramelle and Mahé 1990–1. On the Egyptian origin of Hermetism, of which the very etymology of the name Poimandres (‘the understanding of Rê’ or ‘heart (i.e. intelligence) of Rê’) would be a reflection, see Kingsley 1993. Also considering the Egyptian cultural horizon as a primary origin of Hermetism is the ‘new proposal for the origin of the hermetic God Poimandres’ advanced by Jackson 1999, using somewhat unconvincing arguments. The study by Löhr 1997 focusing on CH II, in showing the clear roots of the text in imperial Hellenic philosophy, does not fail to take into consideration also the Egyptian referents of the Hermetic tradition.

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‘new man’ characterized by a deeply personal and transforming religious experience. Although it is difficult to reach definite conclusions, due to great complexity of the tradition of Hermetic scientific works, too often available only in late and highly stratified versions (since the original Hellenistic core was assimilated and more or less extensively reworked in subsequent versions), it seems legitimate to affirm that the dialogical scheme or in any case the module of the Master-revealer to disciple communication remains, in these works, only on the surface, as a general framework to contain the enunciation of the doctrine, whether this be of an astrological, medical, alchemical or other nature. We thus need to turn to the other side of the hermetic tradition to assess the significance and weight of the formal structure of the dialogue between the master and the disciple. We in fact want to verify whether also in this context it remains a mere literary convention or whether it has a decisive role in conferring upon the doctrines set forth not simply a theoretical-didactic nature but rather the distinctive traits of ’ ‘spiritual guidance’, in which the communication of a series of concepts is aimed not only at the intellectual but also at the existential education of the individual, from an ethical and religious point of view. This issue, moreover, touches the heart of the scientific debate on the very nature of the phenomenon of Hermetism as an important component of the cultural heritage of the Mediterranean world in early and late Hellenism. From the positions of Reitzenstein on the ‘Poimandres-Gemeinde’20 to the opposed thesis of an exclusively literary dimension of the phenomenon supported firmly by Festugière in his extensive studies on the issue, and the recent reassessments of the historical context for its formation and spread in community terms,21 it clearly emerges that the crucial aspect of the scientific interpretation of Hermetism is to be found in the definition of its historical substance as a literary product of educated circles interested in theoretical problems of theology, cosmology, and anthropology. Solutions to such problems were attributed to the 20

Reitzenstein 1904. A history of the studies is outlined by J.-P. Mahé (HHE, vol. 2, 9–32) which gives priority to the community dimension of Hermetism expression of a living religiosity on the part of individuals and groups also linked by ritual practices: Mahé 1991. Along these lines, see also Fowden 1986; Giversen 1989; Luck 1991; Camplani 2000; Kingsley 1993 and 2000; van den Broek 1996 and 2000. 21

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authority of a god or an ancient sage-revealer, but were actually the reflection of a long scholastic tradition, or the expression, not only literary but also ethical-religious, of communities of the ‘Hermetic faithful’ observing particular rules of conduct and possibly also specific ritual practices. I need not stress the extent and difficulty of the problem, implying a wide-ranging study of the internal and external documentation on the phenomenon. Without presuming to tackle this issue here, I would rather analyse, albeit only by sampling the vast field of Hermetic treatises, the theme of the master–disciple relationship as the works present it from time to time, with the aim of identifying that movement from the intellectual-cognitive level towards a real ‘guidance of conscience’, which is of particular importance for this volume’s agenda. At the same time, we could assess how far such a process influences the overall image of Hermetism emerging from the relevant literature.

A TAXONOMY OF HERMETIC LOGOI:

1 Teaching in Dialogue This analysis intends to avoid espousing one or another of the alternatives proposed a priori, since it is the results of the analysis which must provide evidence to support one or another of the possibilities suggested by research, or indicate different solutions. In other words, the best approach seems to be that of examining the Hermetic documentation without any pre-established interpretive formulas, and rather to focus on the arguments of the individual contexts, mainly structured as dialogues.22 The dialogical scheme is involved in varying degrees in the definition of their doctrinal contents. We can thus establish a sort of taxonomy of the Hermetic logoi which, in the common type of revelation discourses given by a master to one or, less frequently, a number of disciples, display fairly clear and significant differences. Each ‘class’ thus formed displays within itself variations in tone, but is also sufficiently homogeneous and provides elements which may help establish the specific values of the hermetic tradition as a whole. 22

Exceptions are CH III, VII and XI.

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The first category is formed by those treatises which adopt the dialogical scheme as a sort of literary frame for the enunciation of a philosophical theme, which often assumes the characteristics of a theological teaching but without involving the listener personally. This is the case of CH IIB, which could be defined as a school exercise on the theme of movement, of the bodily and the un-bodily, in which the recipient of the teaching, Asclepius, is de facto a silent witness of Trismegistus’ discourse. Similarly, in CH VIII, a series of stoicallyinspired doctrinal enunciations on the God-world-man triad is aimed at an interlocutor addressed as ‘my son’, who intervenes only once in the course of the exposition with a question which provokes a rebuke from the master.23 Within the same type we also find CH IX, consisting of a doctrinal exposition of a philosophical nature on the theme of intellection and sensation, addressed to Asclepius, who participates with only one fairly banal question on the writing of the essay (} 2). However, we see a move of Trismegistus’ teaching in an ethicalreligious direction, as he shows the divine seeds opposed to the demonic-astral seeds as forces influencing the human soul and ethical choices, and insists on the theme of knowledge as a divine gift which generates faith in opposition to incredulity, the spring of ignorance.24 The result is an ethical parenesis, based on the distinction between two classes of men, material and spiritual, according to consolidated dualistic anthropological canons, also widely attested in hermetic literature. Above all, the Poimandres25 and CH XIII propose an

23

CH VIII, 1 and 5. CH IX, 3–4: ‘For all man’s thoughts are brought forth by his mind,—good thoughts, when the mind is impregnated by God, and bad thoughts, when it is impregnated by some daemon, who enters into the man that has not been illuminated by God, and deposits in his mind the seed of such thoughts as it is the special work of that daemon to beget . . . But the seeds which God deposits in the mind are few in number, but potent, and fair, and good; they are virtue, and self-control, and piety. Now piety is the knowledge of God; and he who has come to know God is filled with all things good; his thoughts are divine, and are not like those of the many ( F ªaæ Ł F a æÆ Æ OºªÆ, ªºÆ b ŒÆd ŒÆºa ŒÆd IªÆŁ, Iæ c ŒÆd øçæ Å ŒÆd PØÆ· PØÆ  K Ø Ł F ªHØ,  › Kت f ºæÅ ª   ø H IªÆŁH a  Ø ŁÆ YåØ, ŒÆd P E  ºº E)’. 25 Cf. CH I, 15: after having indicated the foundation of the current dichotomy of the anthropological structure in the marriage of Anthropos and Physis, the revealing God declares: ‘And that is why man, unlike all other living creatures upon earth, is twofold. He is mortal by reason of his body; he is immortal by reason of the man of eternal substance (Øa e PØÅ ¼Łæø ). He is immortal, and has all things in his power; yet he suffers the lot of a mortal, being subject to Destiny. He is exalted 24

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anthropological conception with a dichotomic basis, which places the material body, dominated by a sensibility seen negatively as the source and playing field of vices,26 against the spiritual element, soul or intellect, of divine affinity. This anthropology, which is sometimes combined with an attitude of restraint or repulsion against the cosmic reality27 due to its material substance and its being compromised with the astral destiny, despite not ever amounting to Gnostic anticosmism, has made it possible to distinguish two ‘currents’ in the Hermetic sphere, termed respectively ‘pessimistic’ and ‘optimistic’.28 The latter includes all those contexts in which a clear pro-cosmic attitude is proposed, on the basis of the notion of the universal divine demiurge and of man’s possibility to achieve knowledge of God through contemplation of the cosmos.29 The presence, sometimes even within the same treatise, of the two tendencies briefly mentioned, is one of the major obstacles to the assessment of Hermetism as an organic and compact phenomenon and above all to the possibility of collocating it within a precise above the structure of the heavens; yet he is born a slave of the Destiny. He is bisexual (IææŁÅºıc) and sleepless, as his Father is sleepless; yet he is mastered by carnal desire and by oblivion’. The tension between the two components of man becomes entirely explicit in the subsequent parenesis of Poimandres, who warns the seer: ‘And he who has recognized himself has entered into that Good which is above all being; but he who, being let astray by carnal desire, has set his affection on the body, continues wandering in the darkness of the sense-world, suffering the lot of death’ (CH I, 19). In fact, ‘the man of eternal substance (Øa e PØÅ ¼Łæø )’ is composed of light and life, like the divine Anthropos from which he derives; through gnosis and by practising the fundamental ethical precepts, he obtains protection of the Nous, and after death returns to his divine origin. 26 CH XIII, 7: in order to obtain ‘spiritual rebirth’ the man must cleanse himself ‘from the irrational torments of matter’, identified with the vices that ‘force the man who is bound in the prison of the body to suffer what they inflict’. Cf. CH IV, 1–8: refusal and disdain for the body as an indispensible condition for obtaining the gift of intellect. 27 The strongest expression of this attitude is provided by a ‘sentence’ in CH VI, 4, according to which ‘the kosmos is one mass of evil (ºæøÆ B ŒÆŒÆ)’. 28 The distinction was formulated by W. Bousset, who attributed to the group of treatises of an optimistic nature CH II, V, VIII, XIV and Ascl., and to the dualisticpessimistic group CH I, IV, VII and XIII (cf. Bousset 1914). 29 Among the many definitions of the positive nature of the cosmos, a divine work and means of knowledge for man, we may mention those of “an immortal being” (CH VIII,1), ‘one mass of life (ºæøÆ B ÇøB)’ (CH XII, 15), ‘God’ (CH XII,12; X, 12) or ‘second God’ (CH VIII, 1), ‘a great god and an image of Him who is greater’ (CH XII, 15). The importance of the divine demiurge in Hermetic literature and its peculiar manifestations, which show important links with the Egyptian background of the phenomenon, in addition to traces of biblical influence, are illustrated in Mahé 1986.

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community context. Various scholars have in fact insisted that it is impossible for an individual or a community to accept and profess such an amalgam of doctrines, in which pro-cosmic attitudes exist alongside more or less radical tendencies to refuse any bodily reality, often within a single argumentative structure. To resolve this contradiction Fowden proposed the interpretative formula of the two ‘degrees’ of access to knowledge proposed to the Hermetic believer, in an initiatory process which moved from acknowledgement of the positivity of the cosmos as seen to be accessible to the immediate perception of the senses, progressively towards an entirely spiritual and inner form of gnosis, imposing detachment from material, bodily and cosmic reality.30 This interpretation has been recently taken up and examined in detail by P. Kingsley, who stresses the esoteric, we could say ‘Pythagorean’ aspect of the cognitive-initiatory process that he sees at the basis of Hermetism, intended not as a pure literary phenomenon but on the contrary as the reflection of a precise socio-cultural and religious reality of a community nature with strong traditional Egyptian foundations.31 The scholar, also contesting the epistemological category of ‘contradiction’ adopted in previous studies on Hermetism, acknowledges the ‘fluid’ nature of this religious tradition and underlines ‘the importance of contradiction as an aspect of the teaching process in its specific quality’. Along these lines he mentions the stimulating function, on a cognitive level, of enigmas and riddles in Pythagorean teaching. The acquisition of Hermetic knowledge would thus be the result of a long process in which previous certainties and knowledge were put in doubt and continuously subjected to contestation, with the aim of achieving a radical transformation of the worshipper’s not only intellectual, but existential identity.32 Without wishing to take anything away from the stimulating interpretations of the scholars mentioned, aimed at understanding these two often inextricably interwoven tendencies, one strongly procosmic, sometimes adopting a pantheistic perspective (God is All), 30

Fowden 1986, 95–115 (French trans. 147–75). On the Egyptian components of the phenomenon, to varying extents favoured by modern research, in addition to the contributions already mentioned, cf. Derchain 1962; Doresse 1972; Daumas 1982; Fóti 1989; Kákosy 1989; Podemann Srensen 1989; Ponsing 1980. The interpretative thesis of Iversen 1984 exaggerates in tracing back Hermetism entirely to its Egyptian ‘roots’. 32 Kingsley 2000. 31

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and the other aimed at stressing the tension, if not actual opposition, between the material and spiritual levels, Festugière’s observations on the profound Platonic inspiration of Hermetism still remain valid.33 The origins of the phenomenon in the Egyptian tradition, which the latest research seems to favour, does not actually rule out at the same time a strong involvement of Hermetic authors in the Hellenistic ideological universe, permeated by the Platonic lymph that combines dualistic metaphysics with the exaltation of the current cosmos, as the ‘best of all possible worlds’ (Timaius) and on an anthropological level favours the desire to ‘flee from the world’ (Tht. 176 a-b; cf. Phaedr. 247c) to achieve the supreme objective of ‘assimilation to God’ (‰  Ø ŁfiH). Also in this way, it is thus in principle possible that Platonicallyinspired cultural environments accepted both of the prospects enunciated, giving priority from time to time, in particular situations and for different argumentative purposes, to one aspect or another. In this way it would have been possible to reconcile the pro-cosmic intellectual attitude with that of the religious tension to overcoming the body and material dimension, in a picture dominated by soteriological aims of a ‘Gnostic’ type. The dialogical method of teaching is shown to be the most suitable instrument for reconciling the didactic interests of hermetic literature, clearly involved in the debate on fundamental themes of the contemporary scholastic tradition, with the religious need for ethical education and the inner transformation of those who sought the revelation of Trismegistus.

2 Didactic Interaction We observe in fact that a second and richer type includes those logoi in which the structure of the dialogue is aimed at performing a didactic activity of various kinds involving the person of the disciple, who intervenes repeatedly with questions or objections which are designed to stimulate the discussion. This in turn deals with topics of theological relevance which, albeit developed according to unoriginal consolidated scholastic modules, frequently move in an ethical33 Cf. Festugière 1949, XII. The two tendencies are illustrated respectively in the second volume of Festugière’s La révélation d’Hermès Trismégiste, dedicated to Le dieu cosmique, (Festugière 1949) and in the fourth, which deals with the theme Le dieu inconnu et la gnose, (Festugière 1954).

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religious direction or provide opportunities for what amount to devotional exhortations. CH V, which announces its contents with one of those expressions borrowed from mystery symbology, often recurring in Hermetic discourse,34 and elaborates the theme of God at once hidden and manifest, is addressed by Hermes to Tat. The latter does not intervene in any way in the course of Trismegistus’ argumentation, which thus assumes the form of a monologue. The master, however, does not forget his interlocutor. On the contrary, the didactic exposition changes immediately into an exhortation to prayer to obtain a knowledge connoted as a blessed vision: ‘Begin then, my son Tat, with a prayer to the Lord and Father, who alone is good; pray that you may find favour with him (Yºø ıåE) and that one ray of him, if only one, may flash into your mind that so you may have power to grasp in thought that mighty Being’ (CH V, 2).35 This vision will be possible through the mediation of the cosmic elements and of all the beings that populate them,36 and above all through the consideration of the perfect structure of the human body. The god to whom the man turns is here in fact a cosmic god,37 who is both IçÆ and › çÆæ Æ  since he is contemplated by the intellect and seen by the eyes, the One and the All, to whom the Master raises an impassioned hymn of praise celebrating his universal

34 CH V, 1: ‘This doctrine also, Tat, I will expound to you, that you may not remain uninitiated in the mysteries of him who is too mighty to be named’ (‘ . . . c IÅ  fi j F Œæ   Ł F OÆ ’). Cf. Sfameni Gasparro 1965; Tröger 1971. 35 Cf. Mazzanti 1999 and also Hamman 1980, in particular 1233–8. On Gnostic prayer, see Sevrin 1980. For the traditional style of Greek and Roman prayer, see Chapot and Laurot 2001. 36 CH, V, 2–3: ‘For the Lord manifests himself ungrudgingly through all the universe; and you can behold God’s image with your eyes, and lay hold on it with your hands. If you wish to see Him, think on the Sun, think on the course of the Moon, think on the order of the stars’. 37 For an analysis of some late antique theologies inspired by that ‘cosmic religion’, to whose definition are linked the names of great scholars such as F. Cumont, A.-J. Festugière, M. P. Nilsson, P. Boyancé and J. Pépin, who started and cultivated a line of research that it would be superfluous to consider here in detail, I will merely refer to a couple of my essays (Sfameni Gasparro 2003; 2009), now brought together (Sfameni Gasparro 2010), with other contributions on the same theme. These contain the relevant documentation, for which there is not space here. The peculiar astral—and in particular solar—connotations of the ‘cosmic religion’ have been highlighted in the line of research mentioned above. We need merely mention Cumont 1909; 1909a; 1935. A history of the theme can be found in Boyancé 1962. Cf. also Nilsson 1940 and 1946; Festugière 1949; des Places 1937; Boyancé 1936; 1942 and 1951; Pépin 1964 and 1986.

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presence. The devotional enthusiasm of Trismegistus, in the general immanentist perspective of the treatise, culminates in the affirmation of a ‘mysticism of identification’. The supreme principle, whose essence is the incessant activity of creation and generation,38 is exalted as he ‘who is both the things that are and the things that are not’ (V, 9), since ‘there is nothing that He is not, for all things that exist are even He’.39 Consequently, the prayer made to him assumes the tones of an invocation to the entire reality which is summed up in God, derives from him and is resolved in him: Who then can speak of Thee or to Thee, and tell Thy praise? Whither shall I look when I praise Thee? Upward or downward, inward or outward? For Thou art the place in which all things are contained; there is no other place beside Thee; all things are in Thee.40

As in CH XIII, this undivided and indivisible totality of being— whose “personal” prerogatives of ‘father’ and ‘god’ are shown to have the corresponding functional faculties of ‘making’ (ÅØ ıæªE) and ‘acting’ (KæªE)41—leads to an identification or rather to a total ‘immersion’ of the worshipper in the God-All, expressed in a pregnant invocation: And at what time shall I sing hymns to Thee? For it is impossible to find a season or a space of time that is apart from Thee. And for what shall I praise Thee? For things Thou hast made manifest, or for the things Thou has concealed? And wherewith shall I sing to Thee? Am I my own, or have I anything of my own ? Am I other than Thou? Thou art whatsoever I am, Thou art whatsoever I do, and whatsoever I say. Thou art all things, and there is nothing beside Thee, nothing that Thou art not. Thou art all that has come into being, and all that has not come in to being. Thou art the Mind, in that Thou thinkest; and Father, in that Thou createst; and God, in that Thou workest; and Good, in that You makes all things (V, 11).42 38 CH V, 9: . . . ı F K d PÆ e ŒØ  Æ ŒÆd  ØE. This is one of the contexts in which we find together the functions of generating and producing and their relative terminologies, as methods of divine activity. 39 CH V, 10: . . . P K Ø y  n PŒ  Ø·  Æ ªaæ  Ø ŒÆd y  K Ø. 40 CH V, 10. 41 CH V, 11 . . . f A e ª , f e c ª ,  F , 

 , Æ cæ , ÅØ ıæªH, Łe , KæªH, IªÆŁe , ŒÆd  Æ  ØH. 42 CH V, 11. . . .   b b !ø; h  ªaæ uæÆ  F h  åæ  ŒÆ ƺÆE ıÆ . !bæ   b ŒÆd !ø; !bæ z K ÅÆ, j !bæ z PŒ K ÅÆ; !bæ z KçÆæøÆ, X !bæ z ŒæıłÆ; Øa  b ŒÆd !ø ; ‰ KÆı F þ, ‰ åø

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The silent presence of the disciple during this prayer will not be ignored: it shows the exemplary character of the prayer and of the religious attitude inspiring it with regard to the recipient of the logos which, as already observed, is not designed to be a pure transmission of philosophical notions, but rather an initiatory vehicle for the knowledge of God. Among the examples of a similar argumentative process which passes from the exposition of a particular doctrine (in this case the theme of the ‘common intellect’) performed according to the best known scholastic topoi and extended to numerous themes subject to debate among the various philosophical currents of the time (the soul–intellect–body relationship, the astral Heimarmene, the irrational element of the human soul and the soul of animals, the nature of the cosmos and many others) to the level of ethical warning and devotional practice, we need merely mention once again CH XII. After the reaffirmation of a pantheistic position which identifies God and the All, Hermes exclaims to Tat: ‘This God, my son, I bid you worship and adore. And there is but one way to worship God; it is to be devoid of evil’ (} 23). The convergence of a didactic programme and of a spiritual education aimed at realising the ‘divinization’ of the soul through a path of knowledge and ethical purification seems to be realised coherently in the Logos entitled ‘The Key’ (CH X), which starts with the Platonic axiom identifying God with Good and examines the topic of the universal divine ‘paternity’. The expression that visually communicates this conception (‘But God makes by his will the very existence of all things; and it is in this sense that he is the Father of all things’, CH X, 3) is, moreover, immediately related to a special, ‘visionary’ type of knowledge, which is not accessible for everyone, but only ‘to him who is able to see it’ ( . . . fiH ıÆø fi NE). This leads to the immediate reaction of the disciple, Tat, who exclaims: ‘Father, you have given me my fill of this good and the most beautiful sight; my mind’s eye is almost blinded by the splendour of the vision’.43

Ø YØ , ‰ ¼ºº  þ; f ªaæ x ‘ []a  z, f x n ¼  ØH, f x ‹ i ºªø. f ªaæ  Æ x ŒÆd ¼ºº Pb  Ø·. An analysis of Hermetic hymnology can be found in Proto 2000. An extensive exemplification of the hymnic tradition in the Greek world, from the Archaic age to the Hellenistic period is provided by Furley and Bremer 2001. 43 CH X, 4· ‘ ºæøÆ z  Åæ, B IªÆŁB ŒÆd ŒÆºº Å ŁÆ ŒÆd Oºª  E { KŁÅ {  ı › F  F OçŁÆºe !e B ØÆ Å ŁÆ’.

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The evocation of that inner ‘eye’ which so often intervenes in the Hermetic perspective, induces the master to develop the theme of intellectual vision—distinguished from the physical vision to which it is opposed—which is granted only to a few privileged people and takes place in an ecstatic form, implying total detachment from the body:44 Nay, the vision of the Good is not a thing of fire, as are the sun’s rays; it does not blaze down upon us and force us to close our eyes; it shines forth much or little, according as he who gazes on it is able to receive the inflow of the incorporeal radiance. It is more penetrating than visible light in its descent upon us; but it cannot harm us; it is full of all immortal life. Even those who are able to imbibe somewhat more than others of that vision are again and again sunk in blind sleep by the body; but then they have been released from the body, then they attain to full fruition of that most lovely sight, as Uranus and Kronos, our forefathers, have attained to it.

The disciple joins the discussion, showing his desire to enjoy this vision (‘Would that we too, my father, might attain to it’)45 but Trismegistus curbs his enthusiasm, pointing out that the cognitive process is gradual and that long exercise is required before the eviction of the bodily senses and complete spiritual transformation can be achieved: Would that we might, my son. But in this life still too weak to see that sight (ZłØ); We have not strength to open our mental eyes, and to behold the beauty which no tongue can tell: Then only will you see it, when you cannot speak of it; for the knowledge of it is deep silence, and suppression of all the senses. He who has apprehended the beauty of the Good can apprehend nothing else; he who has seen it can see nothing else; he cannot hear speech about aught else; he cannot move his body at all; he forgets all bodily sensations and all bodily movements, and is still. But the beauty of the Good bathes his mind in light, and takes all his soul up to itself, and draws it forth from the body, and changes the whole man into eternal substance. For it cannot be, my son, that a soul should become a god while it abides in a human body, it must be changed. And then behold the beauty of Good, and therewith become god.46

44

45 CH X, 4–5. CH X, 5. CH X, 6. In relation to this perspective of absolute interiorisation of the experience of the divine, prayer also becomes entirely internal, in harmony with the ŁÆ Øø. Interesting observations on the practice of the ‘silent Prayer’ in the ancient world can be found in van der Horst 1994. 46

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This intense mystical dimension of the cognitive process, insofar as it is aimed at a total transformation of the individual in the PÆ and at the I ŁØ of the soul, is followed by a didactic exposition on the relationship between the individual souls and the Soul of the All, in reply to a question from Tat on the meaning of ‘divinization’. It also touches on the fundamental notions of salvific knowledge and ignorance, as a vice of the soul which bars it from immortality and immerses it in a cycle of metensomatosis down to the lowest levels of animality.47 ‘On the other hand the virtue of the soul is knowledge. He who has got knowledge is good and pious; he is already divine’ (CH X, 9). At the disciple’s request, the master draws the picture of the pious man, who has already become ŁE , having already experienced in earthly existence that process of  Æ ºÆ towards the high, from the forms of animal—from beasts to men—then demonic and astral life that he previously indicated as the path of the soul seeking knowledge and piety.48 He is ‘one who does not speak many words, nor listen to much talk’, in other terms, who limits to the utmost the use of sensorial tools to turn inwards to himself and listen to the inner voice of the intellect: ‘for knowledge of God the Father cannot be taught by speech, nor learnt by hearing’. ‘But knowledge is the perfection of science, and science is a gift of God’ (CH X, 9: ‘ªHØ  K Ø KØ Å e º , KØ Å b Hæ  F Ł F’). To exemplify the cognitive process, however, Trismegistus appeals to the theme of knowledge mediated by the contemplation of the cosmos, now defined ‘not indeed evil, but not good’, by virtue of its generated and material nature, immersed in becoming and mutability (CH X, 10). There follows a didactic development of the argumentation on the cosmos–man relations and on their respective natures, both in a condition of dependence and filiation with respect to the One and Only (CH X, 11–14) to then resume the ethical-religious theme of the ªØ F Ł F as a salvific tool, and that of the relationship between the soul and the intellect (CH X, 15–18). This relationship, although illustrated with a series of technical arguments, is directed at the salvation of the soul: Now the human soul, not indeed every human soul, but the pious soul,—is daemonic and divine. And such a soul, when it has run the 47

CH X, 8.

48

CH X, 7.

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race of piety, and this means, when it has come to know God, and has wronged no man, becomes mind throughout; and it is ordained that after its departure from the body, when it becomes a daemon, it shall receive a body of fire, so that it may work in God’s service. But the impious soul retains its own substance unchanged; it suffers self-inflicted punishment, and seeks an earthly body into which may enter. (CH X, 19)

And continues: But when the mind has entered a pious soul, it leads that soul to the light of knowledge; and such a soul is never weary of praising and blessing God, and doing all manner of good to all men by word and deed, in imitation of the Father. Therefore, my son, when you are giving thanks to God, you must pray that the mind assigned to you may be a good mind. (CH X, 21–22)

This exhortation confirms that, in the context of didactic exposition, of a scholastic register, and displaying various contradictions, attention is always focused on the education and ‘spiritual guidance’ of the disciple, who is shown a precise ‘path’ to follow, on which he must at the same time practise the intellectual exercise of inner and mystical knowledge, the ethical exercise of eusebeia, and devotional exercise, expressed in celebrating God (! FÆ) and prayers of thanksgiving ( . . . PåÆæØ F Æ fiH ŁfiH E håŁÆØ). Particular significance can lastly be found in the dialogue between Hermes and Tat which constitutes Excerptum II B of Stobeus. This, as has been demonstrated by editors,49 certainly constitutes the followon and probably the conclusion of the previous SH II A. It takes the form of a traditional school essay, namely that of whether man is able or not to obtain truth. Trismegistus subscribes to the view that humans are absolutely incapable of achieving this objective in the world: ‘There is no reality on earth; it cannot come into being here below; but none the less it is possible for some men to think truly about reality’ (SH II A, 2–4). Only God can allow man, in fact, only a few privileged men, to achieve a certain notion of truth (SH II A, 6). After a celebration of this theme in various registers, it is concluded that, while ‘the One and Only’ insofar as it is immaterial is identified with the prime Truth, everything else in the world is pure illusion (SH II A, 15). 49

HT vol. 3, XIV–XXIII.

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The second fragment begins with a self-affirmation by Trismegistus of his mission: he has composed his logos ‘on account of the benevolence towards men and piety towards God’ (SH II B, 1). In this proclamation of philanthropia and eusebeia the son-disciple, however, seems to perceive a contradiction with the pessimistic claims of his father’s previous teaching and thus poses a crucial question: ‘If then there is nothing real here below, what must a man do, father, to live his life aright?’ (SH II B, 2). We thus clearly perceive the peculiar existential repercussions of what might seem to be a purely dialectic exercise, since the dialogical module of the discourse of teaching assumes a clear ethical-practical dimension. We in fact see that the disciple’s human identity is involved, as he states that he does not want to hear doctrinal enunciations on theoretical matters, even the most important ones such as the nature of God, the world, and man, but is more interested in an answer to a concrete, pressing question, namely to know how ŒÆºH Øƪª Ø e  . Trismegistus then embarks on a discourse that amounts to an ethical-religious directive, aimed at governing the disciple’s life and leading it towards spiritual salvation: He must be pious, my son. And he who seeks to be pious will pursue philosophy. Without philosophy, it is impossible to be pious: but he who has learnt what things are, and how they are ordered, and by whom, and to what end, will give thanks for all things to the Maker, deeming him a good Father and kind fosterer and faithful guardian; and thus rendering thanks, he will be pious. And he who pursues philosophy to its highest reach will learn where reality is, and what it is; and having learnt this, he will be yet more pious. (SH II B, 2–3).

According to the consolidated modules of the Greek-classical and above all Hellenistic tradition, philosophia is not merely a rational exercise but also total dedication to an ethical ideal of life.50 Accentuating this aspect in religious terms, Trismegistus links philosophical exercise to eusebeia insofar as the knowledge of beings leads the disciple to acknowledge the Demiurge in his universal provident charity and to pay him due homage, expressed in fact in terms of ‘piety’. The discourse proceeds by invoking the essential traits of a dichotomic anthropology which, as already observed, is found at the heart of much Hermetic literature—the type defined as Gnostic-dualistic, 50

Cf. Malingrey 1961; Hadot 1987.

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since it pits the intellectual-spiritual component of man, identified in the nous, in other words in the rational part of the soul (the logos) considered divine in nature, against the somatic, material part, the seat of vice and mortality. We in fact see the struggle that the rational part of the soul must enter into against the two irrational elements, the bearable and the concupiscible, which want to drag it down, and thus immerse it in corporality, and enslave it. It instead must reach upwards, taking the path that leads to the knowledge of good.

‘This, my son, this is the consummation of piety; and when you have attained to it, you will live your life aright, and be blest in your death; for your soul will not fail to know whither it must wing its upward flight’, Trismegistus exclaims, and then concludes: ‘For this, my son, is the only road that leads to Reality. It is the road our ancestors trod; and thereby they attained to the Good. It is a holy and divine road; but it is hard for the soul to travel on that road while it is in the body. For the soul must begin by warring against itself, and stirring up within itself a mighty feud; and the one part of the soul must win victory over the others, which are more in number.’ (SH II B, 5–6) A last significant example of the type in question can be found in what is the most extensive of the Hermetic treatises surviving, ‘A holy book of Hermes Trismegistus addressed to Asclepius’ (º  ƒæa æe ŒºÅØ), or ‘Perfect Discourse’ (¸ª  ºØ ), of which a complete Latin translation and the Greek text of the final prayer exist, now available also in Coptic from NH Codex VI, 7, 63, 33–65, 7,51 which also includes the passage of the so-called ‘small apocalypse’.52 This complex tradition is a clear sign of the popularity and diffusion of the text, thus considered to be significant enough to be made accessible to readers of Greek, Latin, and Coptic and, as regards the final prayer, also to the users of the abundant magical literature, recorded on large number of papyri, of which important examples 51

An edition of the Coptic text, in synopsis with the Greek and Latin text (Ascl. 41), can be found in HHE vol. 2, 135–67. Cf. edn of Dirkse and Brashler 1979. English translation by Brashler, Dirkse, and Parrot 1977. Cf. Mahé 1974. 52 NH VI, 8.65.15–78.43 = Ascl. 21–29. An edition of the Coptic text, in synopsis with the Latin translation, can be found in HHE vol. 2.145–207. Cf. Dirkse and Parrott 1979; Brashler, Dirkse, and Parrot 1977; 1996, 330–8. See Mahé 1974b. For the Egyptian components of the Hermetic ‘apocalypse’, see Krause 1969; Wigtil 1984; van den Broek 2000b. For the anti-Christian polemic aspects, see Sfameni Gasparro 2009.

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survive. We in fact know that this prayer is found in the large magical papyrus in Paris conventionally known as the Mimaut Papyrus,53 confirming the exchanges taking place among the various cultural and religious scenes in late antiquity. Regarding in particular the Hermetic tradition, this allowed scientific, doctrinal, and religious concepts to overflow from one area to another. With regard to this treatise, which is arranged as a sort of ‘summary’ of Hermetic teaching in dealing with the great themes of God, the world, and man, whose mutual relationships are configured according to a harmonistic perspective, I would like here to briefly mention its introduction. This outlines the scenario of a meeting or small group of individuals around a master who provides doctrinal teaching on the principal problems of theology, cosmology, and anthropology, but at the same time proposes rules of ethical conduct and directs them towards a religious choice implying complete dedication to an ideal of life which gives priority to spiritual values to the exclusion of any interest in material reality. The final prayer, a hymn of praise to the deity exalted as the giver of knowledge, intellect, and reason, a cause of joy for man and foundation of his salvation and immortalization,54 together with the reference to a shared meal, lacking any food of animate origin,55 closes the scene56 and confirms its peculiar value as the image of a 53 PGM III, 591–610 ed. Preisendanz, 1973–1974, vol. 1, 56–9. Cf. Merkelbach, Totti 1991, 1–33. 54 Ascl. 41: gratias tibi summe, exsuperantissime; tua enim gratia tantum sumus cognitionis tuae lumen consecuti, nomen sanctum et honorandum, nomen unum, quo solus deus est benedicendus religione paterna, quoniam omnibus paternam pietatem et religionem et amorem et, quaecumque est dulcior efficacia, praebere dignaris condonans nos sensu, ratione, intellegentia: sensu ut te cognoverimus; ratione, ut te suspicionibus indagemus; cognitione, ut te cognoscentes gaudeamus. ac numine salvati tuo gaudemus, quod te nobis ostenderis totum; gaudemus, quod nos in corporibus sitos aeternitati fueris consecrare dignatus. haec est enim humana sola gratulatio, cognitio maiestatis tuae. cognouimus te et lumen maximum solo intellectu sensibile; intellegimus te, o uitae uera uita, o naturarum omnium fecunda praegnatio; cognouimus te, totius naturae tuo conceptu plenissimae [cognouimus te] aeterna perseueratio, in omni enim ista oratione adorantes bonum bonitatis tuae hoc tantum deprecamur, ut nos uelis seruare perseuerantes in amore cognitionis tuae et numquam ab hoc uitae genere separari. Cf. Carozzi 1980. 55 Ascl. 41: ‘Having prayed thus, let us betake ourselves to a meal unpolluted by flesh of living things (Haec optantes conuertimus nos ad puram et sine animalibus cenam)’. 56 Ascl. 41: De adyto vero egressi cum deo orare coepissent, in austrum respicientes . . . To the proposal of Asclepius, to accompany the prayer ‘with an offering of incense and

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small ‘school’ that also acts as a ‘chapel’ in dealing with the transmission of an intellectual knowledge seen as prepaedeutical to ethicalreligious teaching. This characteristic clearly emerges from the language of Trismegistus who, at the beginning of the discourse, congratulates Asclepius since ‘it is God that has brought you to me, Asclepius, to hear a teaching which comes from God (ut divino sermoni interesse adduxit)’ (Ascl. 1). Tat and Ammon are also invited to take part in the meeting, to the exclusion, however, of anyone else: But summon no one else, lest a discourse which treats of the loftiest of themes, and breathes the deepest reverence, should be profaned by the entrance and presence of a throng of listeners. For it would be impiety to make public through the presence of many witnesses a discussion which is replete with God in all his majesty.57

After this warning the characters accede to an adytum which ‘was made holy by the pious awe of the four men, and was filled with God’s presence’: in the silence and the devoted attention given by the disciples, Hermes begins his teaching, inspired by a ‘divine Eros’, he himself moreover becoming diuinus Cupido. This attribution of character exalts the theme of philanthropia already proclaimed by Trismegistus as the inspiration for his work of teaching and accentuates its religious value to the utmost: from the Hermetic perspective, the wise revealer of knowledge is inspired exclusively by a desire to improve the disciple in intellectual and in ethical and religious terms. He is thus a master of spiritual life in an all-embracing sense, aware that the exercise of reason, which his words also stimulate and whose results are clear and conserved in a long scholastic tradition of which he is in various ways the spokesman, is aimed at achieving a higher level of knowledge, that which comes from a divine source, where it leads those who aspire to achieve salvation. perfumes’, Trismegistus imposes silence, since ‘it is the height of impiety to think of such a thing with regard for Him who alone is Good’. As in CH I, 29 and in XIII, 16 the Hermetic prayer rises as night falls, in the direction of the sun at sunset. This is the only form of worship allowed, a º ªØŒc ŁıÆ (CH I, 31; XIII, 18), which clearly exemplifies the entirely inner nature of Hermetic ritual, even when expressed in ouward gestures, always in any case characterized by radical essentiality. For the ‘pure offerings of speech’, see Tagliaferro 1984. 57 Ascl. 1: Praeter Hammona nullum uocassis alium, ne tantae rei religiosissimus sermo multorum interuentu praesentiaque uioletur. Tractatum enim tota numinis maiestate plenissimum inreligiosae mentis est multorum conscientia publicare.

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3 Initiatory Practice This theme receives its supreme sanction and practical actuation in the context of what we may identify as the third type of Hermetic teaching (logos), in other words, as testified by some precious treatises, in which we witness the ‘mystical’ experience of spiritual regeneration, as the didactic path becomes an initiatory practice which radically transforms the identity of the disciple and of the master himself, who experienced it first. In these cases, then, a deep harmony is established between the master and the disciple, once the latter, gradually led by the former along the path of spiritual improvement, is admitted to an inner experience of ‘immortalization’ which his master had already successfully been through. The teaching, therefore, begins to be identified with an inner journey, at the same time intellectual, ethical, and religious, which must be experienced at first hand in order to then be transmitted to others: only those who have completed this journey can be a ‘spiritual guide’ for a disciple, and direct him on the same path. The Hermetic texts which reflect this experience are, as is known, the thirteenth treatise of the CH and the new text available in a Coptic translation from Codex VI of NH, entitled The Eighth and the Ninth. Both of these documents reveal the knowledge and use of one of the most important testimonies of the Hermetic religious tradition displaying a peculiar Gnostic-dualistic feature, the Poimandres. Although this treatise, illustrating an exceptional experience of revelation obtained directly from the supreme deity, ‘Poimandres the Mind of the Sovereignty (› — ØæÅ, › B ÆPŁ Æ  F)’, does not mention Trismegistus, of the same Hermetic tradition,58 in addition to outside witnesses such as Zosimus of Panopolis,59 identified the divine sage with the seer-prophet of this document. The anonymous compiler of the collection of the CH, taking into account this tradition, placed it at the beginning of the collection. Without being able here to discuss in detail the historical problems of its origin and its historico-religious significance, it is worth noting that, even though it uses the dialogical scheme as a means of

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CH XIII, 15. See below. Zosimus, Final quittance = Alch. gr. ºı ÆÆ I å 3.51.8 ed. Berthelot. Cf. Reitzenstein 1904, 214 n. 1; Hermetica, vol. 4, 110–12; HT vol. 1, XXXVIII f. A translation of the whole passage of Zosimus can be found in Festugière 1950, 275–81. 59

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transmitting theological, cosmological, anthropological, and soteriological knowledge, with forays in an eschatological direction,60 the highly special quality of ‘master’, the divine Nous, the type of experience of the ‘disciple’, a vision that reaches the foundations of reality and their progressive manifestation in a theo-cosmogonic and anthropogonic movement, and the final conclusion, at once prophetological and eschatological, make the Poimandres a unique work, but one which can, however, be collocated in the genre of ‘revelation Dialogue’. It is significant that both the texts that propose an experience of inner ‘initiation’ as the culmination of the process of teaching and ‘spiritual guidance’ given by Trismegistus to his son-disciple Tat, profoundly transforming the latter’s personality, are explicity intended to be linked to the visionary experience of the anonymous character in Poimandres, who is identified with Hermes. This relationship is explicitly affirmed at the conclusion of the palingenesis experienced by Tat according to CH XIII, when, turning to his father, he asks him to listen to ‘that hymn of praise which, as you have told, Poimandres predicted that you would hear the Powers sing when you had ascended to the eighth sphere of heaven (Ogdoas)’. His father, by consenting to the request, adopts the mysticalvisionary experience described in CH I and makes it the indispensible parameter for the communication of his teaching to the disciple: My son, you do well to seek that; for you are purified, now that you have put away from you the earthly tabernacle. Poimandres, the Mind of the Sovereignty, told me no more than stands written in the book; for he knew that I should be able of myself to apprehend all things, and to hear what I would, and to see all; and he left it to me . . . And also the Powers which are in all things sing within me. (CH XIII, 15)

There follows ‘the Hymn of the Rebirth’61 which is presented as that which ‘is not taught . . . but is kept hidden in silence’. Hermes exclaims: I am about to sing the praise of Him who is both the All and the One (!E ººø e [ B Œ ø ŒæØ ,] ŒÆd e A ŒÆd e / (CH XIII, 17) 60

Cf. Sfameni Gasparro 1995. CH XIII, 17–20. We may observe that ‘the hymn hidden in silence (! Æ ŒæıÅ) pronounced by Trismegistus, later also called ‘eulogy of the Aion’ (} 20) adopts a clear cosmosophic perspective, according to which the deity is defined as ‘the One and the All’ and ‘Lord of all creation’. For the analogies between ‘the hymn hidden in silence’ and the numerous Hymns of the PGM, see Merkelbach and Totti 1991, 131–45. 61

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After having presented an extensive cosmic scenario, with the invitation to ‘all the nature of the world’ to listen, to the earth, to the receptacle of rain and to the heavens to open to the invocation, to the trees to stop rustling and to the winds to calm,62 the ‘initiate’ to the ‘mystery’ of the Rebirth of CH XIII63 begins the Hymnodia krypté with an enunciation of great theological importance. Here, two otherwise distinct perspectives converge and are reconciled, that of ‘dominion’ over the ktisis which appeals to a transcendation of the latter by the divinity, and that ‘totalizing’ perspective of a e A ŒÆd e / which evokes an undivided and indivisible compactness of being, both divine and cosmic at the same time. The Treatise, entirely built on the variously resolved tension between a dualistic vision (which opposes the body, subject to the constrictive power of astral destiny,64 to the spiritual nature, nous and logos, of man ready to detach himself ‘from the trickery of the cosmos’)65 and a cosmosophic perspective66 (which in fact identifies God and Everything),67 tackles the theme of ‘One and the All’ also in anthropological terms. In fact, right from the first words of the discussion between Trismegistus and his son Tat, we see the realisation of the objective desired in terms of becoming ‘a god and son of God . . . the All in All’.68 After 62 CH XIII, 17: AÆ çØ Œ ı æ åŁø F o ı c IŒ . I ªÅŁØ ªB, I ت ø  Ø A  åºe Zæ ı, a æÆ c Ł. !E ººø e B Œ ø ŒæØ , ŒÆd e A ŒÆd e . I ªÅ  PæÆ , ¼    B . › ŒŒº  › IŁÆ  F Ł F, æ Łø  ı e ºª . 63 Critical exegesis has focused for some time on this treatise, one of the most significant documents of the Hermetic tradition, with varying results. A brief historical review of the studies can be found in Grese 1979 and an extensive analysis in Tröger 1971. The hymn, in particular, has been subject to numerous interpretations which have underlined its more or less clear echoes of biblical language and imagery. See especially Dodd 1964, 99–209 and 1953, 44–53 (St. John’s Gospel). Cf. also Zuntz 1972, who also notices a significant Greek component. 64 CH XIII, 7. The twelve bodily ‘punishments’ clearly evoke the signs of the zodiac, mentioned explicitly later in defining the nature of the body-tent: ‘The earthly tabernacle, my son, out of which we have passed forth, has been put together by the working of the zodiac which produces manifold forms of the one and the same thing to lead men’ (CH XIII, 11). In CH I, 12–15 the subjection of man to astral destiny— ‘dogma’ more or less general in late-antique culture—is motivated through the account of the descent of the celestial Anthropos through the planetary spheres and of the gifts that the Seven Governors-Planets confer on him, from which, in ascension after death, the ‘essential man’, composed of light and intellect in the manner of the supreme God, frees himself, after having been purified of passions and having received gnosis (CH I, 24–6). Cf. Sfameni Gasparro 1998. 65 66 CH XIII, 1. Borgia 1989. 67 68 Cf. also CH XIII, 12–13. CH XIII, 2.

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the experience of regeneration, in fact, the wise revealer stresses: ‘Do you not know that you have become a god and a son of the One, even as I have?’69 This notion, peculiar to a ‘mysticism of identification’, is also expressed in the eulogia, the ‘Hymn of the Rebirth’ chanted by Tat: ‘Ye Powers that are within me, praise ye the One and the All; sing ye in concord with my will, all ye Powers that are within me.’70 We now note that ‘The Hymn of Rebirth’ in CH XIII presents the traditio mystica of the palingenesia, which represented the subject of the treatise, as being opposed to the didactic, rational process. Without being able here to analyse its full religious significance, we need merely stress that the process of regeneration is shown to be modulated according to a mystery scheme which does not represent a literary convention but rather draws on the profound meaning and results of the disciple’s experience, in turn conducted according to the exemplary model of that already experienced by the master. The typical insistence on the motif of the experiential rather than didactic quality of the event, defined as both ‘birth’71 and ‘action’ (æªÆ),72 is accompanied by its evocation, as far as regards the experience undergone by Trismegistus, and by its celebration in the present nature of the ‘mystery’ experienced by the disciple. This takes place in various stages, corresponding to the phases of an initiatic journey which culminates in the total transformation of the individual. This all takes place within an anthropological vision of a clearly dualistic nature which opposes the spiritual component of man to the material body, the receptacle of ‘the irrational torments of matter’, identified with the twelve vices.73 The sanction of this regenerative experience comes from the words of Hermes to Tat when he exclaims: ‘Thus, my son, has the intellectual being been made up in us; and by its coming to be, we have been 69

CH XIII, 14. CH XIII, 18. The whole Hymn is given rhythm by the invocation of the deity as e : ‘Ye Powers that are within me, praise ye the One and the All . . . Thou, my Unselfishness, praise the All through me. . . . Through me accept from All an offering of speech; for the All is from thee, and to thee returns the All’ (18–19). 71 CH XIII, 2: ‘

F e ª , z Œ , P ØŒ ÆØ, Iºº Z Æ ŁºÅ, !e Ł F IÆØŒ ÆØ.’ In the Nock and Festugière edition, on p. 201, the term genos is made banal, being rendered with the expression ‘this sort of thing’. I instead feel that it should be maintained in its strong sense of ‘stock’, ‘race’, ‘descendence’ or ‘birth’. We could thus propose a translation in the wide sense of ‘divine descendence’. 72 CH XIII, 3: ‘ e æªÆ F P ØŒ ÆØ Iººa Œæ  ÆØ K تB fi ’. 73 CH XIII, 7. 70

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made gods.’74 The théosis procured by the noerà genesis brings together in profound spiritual harmony father and son, master and disciple, since the action of one on the other goes beyond the confines of intellectual and ethical teaching to become totally exemplary, in the pursuit of a religious ideal with deeply mystical connotations, oriented in a decidedly Gnostic direction. All these traits seem to be a more exalted in the new Hermetic text given to us by the codices of Nag Hammadi. Nor is it a coincidence that this treaty, together with two small, but significant, sections of the ‘Perfect discourse’, was included in this collection of documents relating without doubt to the sphere of Gnosticism, regardless of the authors or the recipients of the collection and the aims they obeyed in its composition. We find, in fact, the perception of a fundamental ‘family area’ between the Hermetic revelation and the variegated Gnostic phenomenon, as de facto found precisely in relation to the Hermetic texts being discussed here. The sixth treatise of Codex VI also requires an attentive exegesis which, already tackled by various scholars,75 however still demands an effort of critical examination which cannot be dealt with here. Seeing that also here we see a process of spiritual transformation by degrees, according to a typical initiatic-mystery procedure similar to that described in the CH XIII, with a whole wealth of developments and connotations also of a magical nature,76 confirming the extraordinary

74

CH XIII, 10. In addition to the editions and translations mentioned, see the first critical edition by Krause and Labib 1971 and that of Keizer 1974. 76 They emerge clearly in the hymns in which we see the typical sequence of voces magicae (NH VI, 6, 56, 15–26; 61, 5–17) and in the conclusion of the treatise, with the complex instructions regarding the engraving ‘of the book on steles of turquoise in hieroglyphic characters’ placed under the surveillance of the ‘frog-faced’ and ‘catfaced’ guardians and sealed by a imprecatory formula, designed to protect the Name from negative uses (NH VI, 6, 61, 18–62, 33). On the peculiar Egyptian overtones of this scenario, see Motte 1989. We may note that this ‘magical’ precaution is aimed at preventing the readers of the book from ‘oppos[ing] the acts of fate’ (62, 25–8), or from distorting for utilitarian purposes the correct purpose of the revelation, indicated in the following terms: ‘Rather they should submit to the law of God, without having transgressed at all, but in purity asking God for wisdom ( çÆ) and knowledge (ªHØ)’ (trans. Brashler, Dirkse, and Parrot 1996, 326). This confirms the information provided by Zosimus on the Hermetic ban on performing magic in violation of the laws of the Heimarmene. For the role exercised by the magical component in the ideological horizon of gnosticism, cf. Sfameni Gasparro 2000. 75

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complexity of the Hermetic facies,77 for our purposes we need merely examine the prologue. Here, there emerge some distinctive traits of that dialectic relationship between master and disciple aimed at achieving, under the guidance of, and according to, the model of the former, the spiritual mutation of the latter. The religious experience achieved in this context is presented, in both cases, as that which achieves a perfect interiorization of the teaching and thus of the didactic-cognitive aim. In this sense we may talk of a process of ‘individuation’, in other words, an awareness that the acquisition of the heritage of knowledge of the Hermetic tradition is a factor of existential and religious experience, able to cause the inner transformation of the individual. The two protagonists of the dialogue are identified throughout as father and son, and at the beginning of the text the latter recalls the promise received that he would be introduced into the Ogdoad and then into the Ennead, according to that which, as the father himself stated, was ‘the order of tradition’.78 This then is a paradosis which will immediately be defined in terms of knowledge and also experience, or rather experiential knowledge that flows from the father to the son by virtue of a spiritual generation, distinct from, and opposed to, physical generation. After I had received the spirit (FÆ) through the power (ÆØ) [Hermes states79] I set forth the action (KæªØÆ) for you. Indeed the understanding (ÅØ) dwells in you; in me (it is) as though the power (ÆØ) were pregnant. For when I conceived from the fountain (Ū) that flowed to me, I gave birth. (NH VI, 6, 52, 14–20)

There is thus a flow of energy represented by a pneuma received from above, which passes from father to son in a movement of spiritual generation. It is not, however, limited to a single character, in other words to the Tat of tradition who is also the protagonist of the dialogue, but extends to a number of sons, who are such 77 On the relations between Hermeticism and magic, cf. Festugière 1950, 283–308. On the role of mageia cf. KK (SH XXIII, 68). On this theme, see Grese 1988 and Quispel 2000. 78 NH VI, 6.52.1–7: ‘[My father] yesterday you promised [me that you would bring] my mind into [the] eighth and afterwards you would bring me into the ninth. You said that this is the order of the tradition (Ææ Ø)’ (trans. Brashler, Dirkse, and Parrot 1996, 321). 79 The name of the master-revealer is not made explicit until later, when on a number of occasions the disciple addresses his father-master by the name of Hermes (NH VI, 6.58.28) or Trismegistus (NH VI, 6.59.24).

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exclusively according to the laws of the spirit and the traditio of teaching, based entirely on the experience of a spiritual regeneration which leads to an ascensus to the heights of the divine world. In effect, in reply to his son-disciple’s question about the ‘many brothers’ whose existence Hermes has mentioned, he exhorts him to seek knowledge of them and honour them ‘because they come from the same father’ (NH VI, 6, 52, 26–53, 11). The relationship between master and disciple is extended in this way to a community of brothers, between whom there exists a deep unity in terms of nature, origin, and intents, sanctioned by prayer and the expectation of a conferral of the spirit by the divinity, necessary for revelation: ‘Let us pray, my son,’ declares Hermes in reply to the request to begin the discourse on the Eight and the Ninth, ‘to the father of the universe, with your brothers who are my sons, that he may give the spirit of eloquence’ (NH VI, 6, 53, 24–31). After the repeated mentions of the ‘books’ whose reading has allowed the disciple to pursue continuous progress in wisdom, Tat appeals to the ‘power’ (ÆØ) he will receive from the discourse pronounced by his father and invites him to shared prayer: My father, from you I will receive the (power) of the discourse (that you will) give. As it was told to both (of us), let us pray, my father.

Hermes approves the request and exclaims: My son, what is fitting is to pray to God with all our mind, and all our heart and our soul and to ask him that the gift of the Eight extend to us, and that each one receive from him what is his. Your part, then, is to understand; my own is to be able to deliver the discourse from the fountain that flows to me. (NH VI, 6.55.10–22)

Having reaffirmed the typical disciple-master relationship expressed in the dialectic of understanding and instruction, however, the fundamental notion of the entire hermetic horizon is stressed, in other words the peculiar quality of such a relationship which, from a purely dialectic and rational point of view, overflows into the dimension of personal experience, involving in equal measure the disciple and master, while distinguishing between their respective roles. Teaching is thus transformed into prayer, and knowledge is a ‘gift’ which comes down from above, the sign of particular divine grace. This, however, requires an intermediary, the person of the master and the long exercise of teaching to which he subjects the disciple, to be communicated in its entirety and in its beneficial salvific effects.

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At the end of this analysis we are once more posed with the initial question as to whether the phenomenon of Hermetism was purely literary or instead had an identity historically definable in terms of communities of individuals grouped around an ethical-religious teaching and possibly around devotional practices. These practices, in line with its typical spiritual goals and the various mentions of the logikai thysiai or ‘spiritual sacrifices’ running through hermetic literature, involve above all prayer and rituals of mystical elevation of the type mentioned in the quoted texts. The examination of a particular theme, as proposed here, can only provide some parameters of reference with which to start looking for a solution to a complex problem which, in the absence of external evidence, is to a large extent entrusted to the scholar’s choice of focusing on one component of the picture rather than another. A conclusion which is prudent, but also open to further detailed study, seems, however, to emerge from the data analysed, as we see the importance, or even centrality, in Hermetic discourse of the revelation of a peculiar insistance on the ethical-practical—and more specifically religious-devotional—component, alongside that of the intellectual aspect, which also characterizes it. This discourse, in addition to transmitting doctrines which, moreover, to a large extent, reflect the most common scholastic topoi of the time and, being entirely unsystematic, even contain marked contradictions, is designed to be a tool of moral education and a stimulus to adopt a particular style of life and religiosity. This religiosity alternates cosmosophic or even pantheistic overtures with dualistic tensions between the divine and cosmic level and, above all, on the anthropological level, between the somatic and spiritual component, the latter sometimes perceived as having a divine origin and nature. The scheme of the master-disciple relationship, usually expressed in the form of a dialogue, gives the discourse itself a marked personalistic tone, giving priority in fact to the ‘educational’ aspect rather than to more strictly doctrinal or intellectual concerns. It is difficult to decide whether all this merely reflects a literary convention, whose historical ascendance and evolution compared to traditional models should be investigated, or whether it is a mirror, albeit idealized, of a

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concrete historical reality. Certainly, insofar as they are literature, the Hermetic texts had writers and readers: in the dialectic between the environment of production and the recipients we can imagine a wholesome human substrata of averagely cultured humans interested in the philosophical-theological issues of their time and also, sometimes above all, in their repercussions on the concrete nature of personal human experience. We may thus suppose that Tat’s question to his father (‘If then there is nothing real here below, what must a man do, father, to live his life aright?’) expressed a need shared by the writers and readers of Hermetic texts and helped forge between them relationships stronger than mere intellectual affinity. The definition of such relationships in the sense of a real community institution, with specific ritual practices, possibly initiatory, will be dealt with in further studies providing an attentive examination of the various positions on the issue. We need in any case to adopt a balanced, prudent approach, which on one hand takes into account the common and distinctive devotional attitude inspiring and qualifying this literary tradition which, as a form of divine revelation mediated by a master of wisdom, himself of a superhuman nature such as Trismegistus, with soteriological aims, continuously provides declarations of personal religious commitment, with prayers, hymns,80 ritual gestures, and real ‘liturgies’, more or less articulated and dynamically performative.81 On the other hand, in the case of such a rich tradition spread over the centuries, of which there are many testimonia, above all Christian— the latter often interested in producing the inspired word of Trismegistus as an authoritative pagan confirmation of its own truth on a theological, anthropological, and eschatological level—we cannot ignore the weight of such a total and general absence of information on the existence of ‘communities’ and individual bearers of this heritage. Only one voice seems to break this general silence, although its elusiveness makes it impossible to draw certain conclusions. I am referring to Arnobius who, in a polemic against the adversaries of 80 Cf. n. 61 and passim, and also Whitehouse 1993. An analysis of the language of the ‘Coptic Hermetic prayers’ can be found in van den Kerchove 2007. The peculiarities of the ‘philosopher’s prayer’ are already well seen in the Platonic horizon (cf. Motte 1980; Simon 1980). The type of the ‘silent prayer’ is well known (van der Horst 1994), and is linked to forms of inner religiosity such as that encouraged in Hermetism. 81 A particular aspect of this activity is discussed in Mahé 2006.

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Christian truth apostrophes those who follow the teaching of Hermes, Pythagoras, and Plato.82 Although this is the only case which evokes, rather than the books of Trismegistus, the real people who follow his teaching, the hurried mention by the Christian author does not specify whether they constituted actual communities as such or were merely the readers and authors of the works placed under the authority of the Egyptian master. In this situation, the argument e silentio, albeit not definitive, has a certain weight and suggests that we proceed with necessary caution. One possible way of escaping from the inevitable impasse in which an examination of the issue risks finding itself, despite the current consent on the existence of ‘Hermetic communities’, perhaps overly conditioned by the discovery of the Coptic codices of Nag Hammadi, may be the use of an interpretive model of an anthropological type designed to investigate the formation of modern religious groups83 and applied with good foundation to the analysis of the so-called ‘Sethian’ sector of Gnosticism, for which the alternative between ‘Churches or books’84 is also posed. It distinguishes various degrees of religious organization, and, in particular, proposes different methods of grouping for so-called ‘cult movements’, which, it is stressed, ‘attempt to satisfy all the religious needs of converts’ and consequently exclude the possibility of belonging to other groups, and for ‘audience cults’, which do not display formal organization or constitute structured groups devoted to a dogmatic creed, but rather participate in a common heritage of knowledge and interest, widely diffused through the mass media. Naturally, the transposition of such a model to a historical reality such as that of the Hellenistic-Roman world, in which the Hermetic phenomenon was formed and spread, inevitably requires important ‘adjustments’. While this was a world which in its way was on a trajectory of ‘globalization’,85 and witnessed the widespread circulation of human and religious knowledge and experience, it was unaffected—

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Arnobius II, 13.57.27–58.2 CSEL IV: uos, uos appello qui Mercurium, qui Platonem Pythagoramque sectamini, uosque ceteros, qui estis unius mentis et per eadem uias placitorum inceditis unitate. Cf. Festugière 1967. 83 This model was elaborated by Stark and Bainbridge 1985. 84 Cf. Scott 1995. 85 On the possibility of an analogical and conditioned use of this modern category in relation to the cultures of the Mediterranean in late antiquity, cf. Sfameni Gasparro 2004 and more extensively in the essays collected in Martin and Pachis 2004. Cf. also Scarpi 2003.

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with the exception of Judaism and later Christianity—by ‘dogmatic’ closures and rigid fences. Rather, it allowed the formation of religious movements of an identitary type which, without implying an exclusive choice on the part of its members with regards to the general national religious context they belonged to, however gave individuals who were part of it a distinctive qualification and sometimes brought them together in a specific worshipping experience.86 The best-known examples of this are the Dionysiac associations,87 the specialized groups devoted to the worship of one or another deity and the mystery cults, both Greek and later of Oriental deities.88 Starting in the classical age, Orphism and Pythagorism, with all their complex related historiographical problems, are meanwhile the best-known manifestations of more strictly ideological and philosophical movements. I feel that the place Hermetism occupied in this picture is not yet clear, due to the difficulty of unravelling the central problem as to whether more or less structured ‘communities’ existed according to the ‘cult movement’ typology—mutatis mutandis—mentioned or, as I consider more likely, there were various environments linked by philosophical interests and peculiar religious needs, according to the type of the ‘audience cults’. The peculiarity of the Hermetic phenomenon, as deduced from the literary heritage in our possession, moreover, remains unresolved not only due to its specific historical dimension, which cannot be seen in terms of the modern phenomena analysed by the anthropological model in question, but also—in its very historicocultural context—due to its singular use of devotional language and figures as means of expression of its theological vision. The formula of the ‘One and All’ expresses an important, albeit not exclusive, dimension of this vision, whose complex and diverse aspects preclude systematic unity. A conclusion, albeit partial and provisional, seems to emerge from these observations. The religious and emotional aspect is confirmed as the distinctive trait of the vast and complex ideological milieu 86

Cf. Harland 2003; Kloppenborg and Wilson 1996; Belayche and Mimouni 2003. An exemplification of this type can be found in the collective work, Jaccottet 2003. 88 For an approach to this vast issue, in recent decades subject to renewed research, I need merely mention here the results of the international project ‘Les religions orientales dans le mondé gréco-romain’, which saw the collaboration of Italo-FrancoGerman research groups. Cf. Bonnet, Rüpke, and Scarpi 2006; Bonnet, Ribichini, and Steuernagel 2008; Bonnet, Pirenne-Delforge, and Praet 2009. 87

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reflected in Hermetic literature—extremely composite and not without tensions and contradictions: alongside a cosmosophic and harmonistic vision we also find frequent affirmations of a dualistic, anti-somatic89 and sometimes—albeit rarely—anticosmic nature (defining, with an extremely harsh expression, the world as the ‘pleroma of evil’).90 Yet it is precisely in this dimension of tensions and contradictions that this milieu seems to display a fundamental unity. The Hermetic tradition is situated in the vast contemporary panorama within which its place is difficult to fix with certainty, as an expression of precise communities with forms of organization and ritual practices, or of individuals and groups united by their adherence to a markedly ethical and religious teaching, considered the fruit of divine revelation, manifested in a literary heritage of ancient authority, whose soteriological aim could be pursued only through the practice of that religio mentis and the celebration of the logikai thysiai it mentions so frequently. A BB R E V IA T I O NS Hermetica: Scott, Walter (ed. and trans.) 1914–36. Hermetica. The Ancient Greek and Latin Writings Which contain Religious or Philosophic Teachings Ascribed to Hermes Trismegistus, 4 vols. Oxford: Clarendon Press. HHE: Mahé, Jean-Pierre (ed. and trans.) 1978–82. Hermès en HauteÉgypte. Les textes hermétiques de Nag Hammadi et leurs parallèles grecs et latins, BCNH Section Textes 3. Québec: Presses de l’Université Laval. HT: Nock, Arthur D. and Festugière, André-Jean (eds) 1954–60. Hermès Trismégiste. Paris: Belles Lettres.

R E F E R E NC E S AA.VV. 1986. L’ association dionysiaque dans les sociétés anciennes : Actes de la Table ronde organisé par l’École française de Rome (Rome 24–25 mai 1984). CEFR 89. Rome: École Francaise. 89 Cf. CH I, 20: the material body has its origin in the primordial Darkness, from which damp Nature emerged and in it ‘it drinks death’. 90 CH VI, 4. This affirmation, moreover, is offset by the many proclamations of the goodness of the cosmos, defined as ‘fullness of life’ (CH XII, 15 HT vol. I, 180).

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——1989. ‘La Catégorie Platonicienne du Démonique’, in Ries, Julien and Limet, Henri (eds), Anges et Démons: Actes du Colloque de Liège et de Louvain-la-Neuve, 25–26 Novembre 1987. Homo Religiosus 14. Louvainla-Neuve: Centre d’Histoire des Religions, 205–21. Neusner, Jacob, Frerichs, Ernest, and McCracken Flesher, Paul V. (eds) 1989. Religion, Science and Magic: In Concert and in Conflict. New York: Oxford University Press. Nilsson, Martin P. 1940. ‘The Origin of Belief among the Greeks in the Divinity of the Heavenly Bodies’, HThR 33, 1–8. ——1946. ‘The New Conception of the Universe in Late Greek Paganism’, Eranos 44, 20–7. Nock, Arthur D. and Festugière, André-Jean (eds) 1954–60. Hermès Trismégiste. Paris: Belles Lettres. Ogden, Daniel 2002. Magic, Witchcraft, and Ghosts in the Greek and Romans Worlds: A Sourcebook. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Paramelle, Joseph and Mahé, Jean-Pierre 1990–1. ‘Nouveaux parallèles grecs aux Définitions hermétiques arméniennes’, Revue des Études Armeniennes 22, 115–34. Pearson, Birger A. 1981. ‘Jewish Elements in Corpus Hermeticum I (Poimandres)’, in van den Broek, Roelof and Vermaseren, Maarten J. (eds), Studies in Gnosticism and Hellenistic Religions presented to Gilles Quispel on the Occasion of his 65th Birthday, EPRO 91. Leiden: Brill, 336–48, reprinted in Pearson, Birger A., Gnosticism, Judaism, and Egyptian Christianity. Minneapolis, MN: Fortress 1990, 136–47. Pépin, Jean 1964. Théologie cosmique et théologie chrétienne. Paris: Presses univ. de France. ——1982. ‘Grégoire de Nazianze, lecteur de la littérature hermétique’, VCh 36, 251–60. ——1986. ‘Cosmic Piety’, in Armstrong, Arthur H. (ed.), Classical Mediterranean Spirituality: Egyptian, Greek, Roman. New York: Crossroads, 408–35. Pérez Jiménez, Aurelio and Cruz Andreotti, Gonzalo (eds) 2002. Daimon páredros: Magos y prácticas mágicas en el Mundo Mediterráneo. Madrid: Ediciones Clásicas. Perkins, Pheme 1980. The Gnostic Dialogue: The Early Church and the Crisis of Gnosticism. New York: Paulist Press. Pétrement, Simone 1984. Le Dieu séparé : Les origines du gnosticisme. Paris: Cerf. Philonenko, Marc 1975. ‘Le Poimandres et la liturgie juive’, in Dunand, Francoise and Lévêque, Pierre (eds), Les syncrétismes dans les religions de l’antiquité, Colloque de Besançon (22–23 octobre 1973). EPRO 46. Leiden: Brill, 204–11.

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Philonenko, Marc 1975a. ‘Une allusion de l’Asclepius au livre d’Henoch’, in Neusner, Jacob (ed.), Christianity, Judaism and other Greco-Roman Cults: Studies for Morton Smith at Sixty. Studies in Judaism in Late Antiquity 12. Leiden: Brill, 161–3. ——1979. ‘Une utilisation du Shema dans le Poimandres’, Revue d’Histoire et de Philosophie Religieuses 59, 369–72. ——1988. ‘O vitae vera vita (Asclépius 41)’, Revue d’Histoire et de Philosophie Religieuses 68, 429–33. Piñero Saenz, Antonio (ed.) 2001. En la frontera de lo imposible: Magos, médicos, taumaturgos en el Mediterráneo antiguo en el tiempos del Nuevo Testamento, En los Orígenes del Cristianismo 13. Madrid: Univ. Complutense. Podemann Srensen, Jrgen 1989. ‘Ancient Egyptian Religious Thought and the XVIth Hermetic Tractate’, in Englund, Gertie (ed.), The Religion of the Ancient Egyptians: Cognitive Structures and Popular Expressions, Proceedings of Symposia in Uppsala and Bergen 1987 and 1988. Uppsala: BOREAS, 41–57. ——1993. ‘The Egyptian Background of the Hieros Logos (CH III)’, in Bilde, Per, Nielsen, Helge, and Podeman Srensen, Jrgen (eds), Apokryphon Severini presented to Srensen Giversen. Aahrus: Aarhus University Press, 215–25. Ponsing, Jean-Pierre 1980. ‘L’origine égyptienne de la formule: un-et-seul’, Revue d’Histoire et de Philosophie Religieuses 60, 29–34. Preisendanz, Karl (ed. and trans.) 1928. Papyri Graecae Magicae: Die griechischen Zauberpapyri. Leipzig: Teubner. [1973: Henrichs, Albert (ed.), rev. edn. Stuttgart: Teubner.] Proto, Antonino 1995. Ermete Trismegisto. La teurgia come via teosofica. Milan: Nuovi Autori. ——2000. Ermete Trismegisto. Gli Inni. Le preghiere di un santo pagano. Milan: Mimesis. Quaegebeur, Jan 1975. ‘Teëphibis, dieu oraculaire?’, Enchoria 5, 19–24. Quispel, Gilles 1992. ‘Hermes Trismegistus and the Origins of Gnosticism’, VCh 46, 1–19, reprinted in van den Broek, Roelof and van Heertum, Cis (eds), From Poimandres to Jacob Böhme: Gnosis, Hermetism and the Christian Tradition. Pimander 4. Amsterdam: Bibliotheca Philosophica Hermetica 2000, 145–65. ——2000. ‘Reincarnation and Magic in the Asclepius’, in van den Broek, Roelof and van Heertum, Cis (eds). From Poimandres to Jacob Böhme: Gnosis, Hermetism and the Christian Tradition. Pimander 4. Amsterdam: Bibliotheca Philosophica Hermetica, 167–231. Ramelli, Ilaria 2005. Corpus Hermeticum: Testo Greco, Latino e Copto. Edizione e commento di A.D. Nock e A.-J. Festugière, ed. dei testi ermetici

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copti e commento di Ilaria L. E. Ramelli; a cura di Ilaria L. E. Ramelli. Milan: Bompiani. Rees, B.R. 1968–9. ‘Theophanes of Hermopolis Magna’, BJRL 51, 164–83. Reitzenstein, Richard 1904. Poimandres: Studien zur Griechisch-Ägyptischen und frühchristlichen Literatur. Leipzig: Teubner. Ritner, Robert K. 1993. The Mechanics of Ancient Egyptian Magical Practice. Studies in Ancient Oriental Civilization, 54. Chicago: Oriental Institute of the University of Chicago. Rudolph, Kurt 1968. ‘Der gnostische “Dialog” als literarische Genus’, in Nagel, Peter (ed.), Probleme der koptischen Literature. Wissenschaftliche Beiträge. Halle: Martin-Luther-Universität, 85–107. ——1977. Gnosis. Wesen und Geschichte einer spätantiken Religion. Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht. 2nd edn, 1980, Eng. Trans, 1984 (Gnosis: The Nature and History of Gnosticism (trans. Wilson, Robert McLachlan, Coxon, Peter W., and Kuhn, Karl Heinz), Edinburgh: T&T Clark). Salaman, Clement, van Oyen, Dorine, Wharton, William D., and Mahé, Jean-Pierre (eds) 2000. The Way of Hermes, New Translation of the Corpus Hermeticum and the Definitions of Hermes Trismegistus to Asclepius. Rochester, VT: Inner Traditions. Scarpi, Paolo 2003. ‘Polythéisme et “globalisation ”. L’anomalie de la religion grecque antique face au monde contemporain’, Atala 6, 89–100. Schäfer, Peter, and Kippenberg, Hans (eds) 1997. Envisioning Magic: A Princeton Seminar and Symposium. Leiden: Brill. Scott, Alan B. 1995. ‘Churches or Books? Sethian Social Organization’, JECS 3, 109–22. Scott, Walter 1914–36. Hermetica. The Ancient Greek and Latin Writings Which contain Religious or Philosophic Teachings Ascribed to Hermes Trismegistus, 4 vols. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Segal, Alan 1981. ‘Hellenistic Magic: some questions of Definition’, in van den Broek, Roelof and Vermaseren, Maarten J. (eds), Studies in Gnosticism and Hellenistic Religions presented to Gilles Quispel on the Occasion of his 65th Birthday, EPRO 91. Leiden: Brill, 349–75. Sevrin, Jean-Marie 1980. ‘La prière gnostique’, in Limet, Henri and Ries, Julien (eds), L’experience de la prière dans les grandes religions, Actes du Colloque de Louvain-la-Neuve et Liège (22–23 novembre 1978). Homo religiosus 5. Louvain-la-Neuve: Centre d’histoire des religions, 367–74. Sfameni Gasparro, Giulia 1965. ‘La gnosi ermetica come iniziazione e mistero’, Studi e Materiali di Storia delle Religioni 36, 43–61, reprinted in Sfameni Gasparro, Giulia 1982, 309–30. ——1971. ‘L’ermetismo nelle testimonianze dei Padri’, Rivista di Storia e Letteratura Religiosa 7, 215–51, reprinted in Sfameni Gasparro, Giulia 1982, 261–308.

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16 The Discourse of Revelation as Source for the Gnostic Process of Individuation Giovanni Filoramo

PRELIMINARY CONSIDERATIONS It is necessary, in order to cast light on the objective of this chapter and to justify the choice of a particular type of source, to take into account some preliminary considerations. One such general consideration, on which I will not dwell, is the awareness of the importance of a series of criticisms of modern research on Gnosticism made by the deconstructive nouvelle vague that in the last years has reached even this field of study.1 These criticisms notwithstanding, I believe that—roughly between the second and third centuries—something like Gnosticism existed as a religious phenomenon.2 In the first part of this chapter, then, while fully aware of the complexity and fragmentary nature of the Gnostic world, I will stress its common features, without distinction of schools and ‘families’. A second premise that deserves further explanation is my conception of the Gnostic process of individuation mentioned in the title. As we all know, the available data about the Gnostics as characters, and about their social organization and way of life are rather scarce, due to the (mostly) mythological nature of the direct sources and the few— and problematic—data regarding Gnostic individuals and their Schools. This predicament explains why the research on the sociology 1

See Williams 1996; King 2003. For a criticism Filoramo 2010. See Pearson 2007, 7 sg. In the typology proposed by Brakke 2006, 247–8, I will locate myself in the first type. 2

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of Gnosticism is based on hypotheses—outstanding ones, sometimes— but generally lacking in documentary support. Therefore, when discussing the Gnostic ‘process of individuation’ within this context, we face a double challenge: firstly, the general one of agreeing on a terminology, and secondly, the specific difficulty of anchoring such terminology to concrete cases rather than dealing with it in the realm of hypotheses. Regarding the first issue,3 I will point out two considerations. The first one concerns some viable hypotheses about the socio-cultural background of the Gnostic process of individuation that can be put forward on the grounds of the Gnostics’ particular ideology. The Gnostic religion is typically a religion of the Self: should one try to reconstruct the terminology of an ideal process of individuation, soon a self-reflective lexicon would impose itself overbearingly. Gnostic dualism—intended as anthropologic dualism, regardless of its varieties—creates a fracture between the psycho-physical dimension— the empirical ego (termed ‘banal individuality’ by the introduction)— and the individual’s foundation, the pneumatic self. In the context of contemporary Christianity, as proved by Irenaeus’ anthropological debate against the Gnostics, the mystery of incarnation leads to the identification of the whole of humanity with the object of redemption and thus to conceive, even in an eschatological perspective, the salvation of the single individual as the salvation of a unique, nonrepeatable person: the process of individuation is grounded, then, on the task of regaining and conquering this personal identity. The Gnostic case is different: personal identity is a consequence of corporeity and therefore, of little interest; it is in fact seen as a hindrance to get rid of. The process of Gnosis consists, consequently, of a gradual separation from this psycho-social identity. The empirical self aims at digging the ‘hidden treasure’ of the individual self— the spark of light—out of its own depths. This individual self allows the Gnostics to insert themselves, with total awareness, into the universal Self. From an ideal, typical point of view, the Gnostic individual is an ‘I’ in a quest for itself. Gnostic individualism, therefore, is not concrete but abstract: it calls for a process of abstraction from the psycho-social singularity, in virtue of which the Gnostics, rather than celebrating their own individual singularity, paradoxically 3 I have found very useful the typology proposed by Rüpke 2010. See also for the contemporary studies Beck and Beck-Gernsheim 2002; Harskamp and Halman 2001.

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celebrate their own ‘universal’ being, that is, the possibility of actualizing the individual self as a moment and as a contribution to the (self) actualization of the pleromatic self. The Gnostic process of individuation thus points to a particular concept of individual. If it is true that the individual does not exist except by means of all social bonds, the peculiar Gnostic individual refers to a perception—and even to a mutation—of the social field, its relations and processes of individuation, that allows for a new type of individual construction. This change is typical of the social relations that along the course of the second century had undergone a process of re-definition all around the societies of the empire. The Gnostic individuality is closely intertwined with a crisis of the traditional forms of individuation and socialization; a social pathology that several hypotheses try to explain. The Gnostic process of individuation implies a capacity of the individual to act on the basis of a reflective attitude regarding his or her own social conditioning, to embark on a series of experiments with the aim of determining an alternative biographic trajectory, and to actualize such endeavours in an alternative life project. The Gnostic is on a quest for himself, for his true self. As a consequence, he is likely to radicalize the subjective basis of his experience in the quest of the ‘personal God’ who dwells within himself and coincides, or rather is, the very foundation of his own self. From this point of view, the object of his or her choice is himself or herself. Set in this way, the socio-cultural problem that the Gnostics of the second century had to face was, in many an aspect, similar to the one that the several groups of Christian followers were facing at the same time. No longer able to root their own identity as a group in the traditional ethno-cultural ways, the Christians had to find alternative paths and build themselves a series of community images (Verus Israel, tertium genus, civitas peregrina, and the one that seems to have prevailed to the end: ‘the people of God’) with the aim of providing themselves with an identity that enabled them to be recognized by the rest of the society, thus laying down the foundations of their inner and an outer plausibility. Similarly, some Gnostic groups like the Sethians had to make up mythical genealogies such as the ones linked to Seth’s progeny, in order to build up an alternative social bond with which to identify themselves. Underneath these genealogies lays the need to find a ground that transcends individuality, no longer recognizable in the predominant forms of identity

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legitimisation. Hence the necessity of building an alternative social corpus mythically represented as an Anthropos, that coincides with the world of the pleroma and thus with the universal Self, understood as foundation and bond between the limbs or the individual selves. Against this backdrop, Gnostic individuality is no longer a datum, that is, it does not constitute the socio-cultural, ethnical or political identity with which one was born, but becomes a task. Therefore, if it breaks up with the traditional individuality—contrarily to what happens with Christianity, where individuality is based on free will and ethically grounded on the imitation of Christ—Gnosticism shapes this individuality as a rediscovery, as an anamnesis of a pre-existent collective bond and link that the Gnosis reveals as the true foundation of personal identity. The Gnostic process of individuation, in other words, transcends and denies the traditional national and socio-cultural identity of the empirical self and aims at embracing the universal dimension of the personal self. This calls for a systematic—if not altogether exaggerated—level of self-reflection. The challenge is to break up with the individual’s acquired processes of social individuation that were firmly established in the cosmopolitan milieu of the cities of the Roman empire, which constitute the most reliable socio-cultural background for the spread of the Gnostic religion. As a consequence of dualism, this fracture is radical: it concerns not only the person’s corporeal and socio-political identities that tie up the Gnostic aspirant to the various political and religious forms, inasmuch as they are—to a different extent—the expression of the negative Powers that rule the Cosmos. To achieve this, it is necessary to carry out alternative experiments that might foster a re-reading and recycling of the religious traditions of belonging (adapting them to the new set of mind), or their systematical rejection. In any case, the Gnostic-to-be is a person of research who finds him- or herself in need of making radical decisions. This can happen only by means of a particular religious experience that produces a fracture between the two levels, thus allowing the person to reach an awareness of the inconsistency of their own empirical individuality and to experience the inner transformation that will make it possible to build up a new identity rooted in a new form of social Cosmos; that of the Gnostic pleroma—known by a variety of names—that provides an alternative form of socialization. The Gnostic texts present this experience in several ways: as a vision, as an internal enlightenment, a process of anamnesis or a saviour’s revelation. With the exception of

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some problematic cases, these are generally idealized experiences projected onto mythical or stereotypical characters, often framed within literary wrappings that hinder the possibility of knowing the concrete features of such experiences. Given the lack of records or autobiographical descriptions and the problems raised by the scarce sources linked to, for example, the rituals of baptism4—that, as it often happens with rites of initiation, could help to understand better this dimension—we are challenged by the need of drawing from these literary wrappings some plausible hypotheses regarding the nature of the experience of Gnosis. It is against this backdrop, briefly sketched, that I find justification for the choice of the Gnostic Gospel of Revelation as a source, since it reveals some aspects of the religious experience of transformation which is at the basis of the Gnostic process of individuation. Last but not least, it has to be said that just like their Jewish and Christian counterparts, the Gnostic communities are textual communities, in the sense intended particularly by Brian Stock.5 The community in question can be more or less responsible for the production of the text, but it is certainly concerned about its use and about its incidence in the shaping of its life structure. Despite the fact that, in the case of the Gnostics, the usage of the term ‘community’ remains a problem, it is true that in some situations the Gnostic texts circulated within Schools and groups whose physiognomy was rather easy to outline, such as the Valentinians or the Sethians. Although these texts lacked normative or canonic value, and even when it is difficult to establish whether—and to what extent—the community preceded the text, and the ways in which it was used within the Gnostic circles (readings under the lead of a teacher, as in philosophical Schools, or rather a prevailingly individual appropriation, as it presumably was the case in certain circles like the Hermetists), the fact remains that the Gnostic texts that interest us seem to reflect distinctive characteristics of the textual communities, such as the centrality of the reception, appropriation, and mental reconstruction of the texts made by the readers, the importance of the comparison between analogous and opposing texts, the attention to inter-textuality and to the exegetic work that they underwent.

4

See Sevrin 1986; Cosentino 2007.

5

See Stock 1990, ch. 7.

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The Gnostic literature knows a rich variety of literary genres. Even if we were to limit our scope only to the corpus of Nag Hammadi, we could find works that mirror the biblical models: letters (The Secret Book of James, The Treatise on Resurrection, Eugnostos the Blessed, The Letter of Peter to Philip), gospels (The Gospel of Truth, The Gospel of Thomas, The Gospel of Philip, The Gospel of the Egyptians, to which has to be attached The Gospel of Mary of the Gnostic Codex Berolinensis and The Gospel of Judas), revelations (The Revelation of Paul, The First and Second Revelation of James, The Revelation of Adam, The Revelation of Peter), Acts (The Acts of Peter and the twelve Apostles), and dialogues (The Dialogue of the Saviour). All these genres were appropriated by the Gnostics and used freely to suit their own particular purposes, as happened with other literary genres that they took from profane literature, such as philosophical treatises that they used with polemic and propagandistic aims. From the heresiologists we learn that leaders such as Basilides or Valentine also made use of hymns, prayers, and other literary forms, while authors like Heracleon left us the first commentaries to the revealed text. Some scholars have pointed out that there is an intertext underlying these texts, called the Gnostic Logos of revelation.6 It underlies texts that belong to different literary genres, such as The Secret Book of John, The Gospel of Mary and The Gospel of Judas, The Revelation of Paul and The First and Second Revelation of James, writings of various types like The Letter of Peter to Philip, The Book of Thomas, The Wisdom of Jesus Christ, plus the Pistis Sophia and the two Books of Jeu. From the formal point of view, these texts are joined together by a series of elements that develop the issue of the evangelium quadraginta dierum, that is, the particular revelations that the Resurrected, having become the Gnostic revealer, would have communicated to a favourite disciple (Mary Magdalene, Judas) or to a restricted circle of disciples that became, in their turn, the initiators of the Gnostic-esoteric tradition sealed in the sacred text. Taking his cue from evangelic geography and apocalyptic

6

Rudolph 1968; Perkins 1980.

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tradition, the Resurrected appears in one of the spots of post-Easter evangelic geography (Jerusalem, Mount Tabor), preceded by cosmic signals and accompanied by photisms and extraordinary phenomena that confirm that he has achieved perfection. After a series of selfproclamations in the Ich-Stil form, he initiates the conveyance of the Gnosis through a dialogue with the circle of disciples. Generally, the scene closes with the missionary order given to the recipients of the revelations to keep them with great zeal and to pass them on only to their own kin. Notwithstanding the fact that it is very easy, in the Gnostic dialogue, to identify the appropriation of traditional literary elements such as apocalyptic cues, elements typical of the literary genre of quaestiones et responsiones, or yet again the didactic elements that mark out the Hermetic Logos of teaching,7 what really characterizes the Gnostic Logos of revelation is the model of a possible path of knowledge that it presents. At first sight, the speculative datum of the conveyance of the mythical content seems to prevail, while the literary frame gives the impression of having merely the instrumental function of differentiating the appropriation and transmission of the particular version that identifies and links the groups that use the text; a more attentive analysis of these literary frames casts light on their dynamic (not merely instrumental) dimension. The particular performance that takes place between the Revealer and the disciple or circle of disciples actually outlines the trajectory of an ideal experience of Gnostic transformation, thus providing a possible base for the Gnostic individual or the assembly of Gnostic aspirants to reflect on the dynamics of the process of Gnostic individuation, to actualize it, or to revive it. The Revealer, as a matter of fact, performs the typical function of ‘awakener’. He does not limit himself to the conveyance of the contents because the Gnosis is not a simple learning process, but the preparation of the experiential ground on which the knowledge will be embedded. The Logos of revelation actually describes an experience of transformation grounded on the distinctive relationship between the disciple and the Revealer. The conveyance of the cognitive contents fosters— but at the same time requires—an inner mutation, an awareness without which the learning of the myth would be useless.

7

See Sfameni Gasparro, ch. 15 this volume.

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We ignore whether and to what extent this process of appropriation was intended only for the individual’s meditative reading, or if it was rather meant for a context of comparison with the others under the ‘direction’ and guidance of a teacher. The first possibility seems to be the case for these texts, since in several aspects they remind us of the ‘spiritual exercises’ studied by Pierre Hadot.8 The reading and the reflection on the mystic Logos of revelation seem to be part of the process of spiritual formation typical of the Platonic and Neo-platonic tradition, where the teacher does not present himself—contrary to what happens in Christianity—as a role model of ethical behaviour and righteous life, but as the guide that has to prepare the disciple for the self-awakening of his own nous in order to arrive by himself— according to Plotinus’ model—at the supreme reality.9 Besides, unlike that of Plotinus, the Gnostic God is not a solitary god, but an Anthropos and therefore an androgynous, collective reality to which the Gnostic individuals discover their own belonging and with which they hope to merge. In this way, she or he can contribute to the reintegration of a wounded primordial unit that refers, from the point of view of the social forms, to the awareness that the forms of social recognition so far experienced are now facing a definitive crisis. The Logos provides the Gnostics with the fundamental coordinates of this socio-mythical territory and also with the reasons of the legitimacy of a choice that leads them to see the confirmation of their own salvation in the sense of belonging, in joining a group that has the power and the authority to bestow on them a new identity through the words of the Revealer. Thus, the experience of enlightenment and the particular process of individuation that the Gnostic Logos designs in the privileged relationship between the Revealer and the disciple become a possible ‘place’ where to experience, in his turn, the Gnostic path to salvation.

THE GOSPEL OF JUDAS For our purposes, I will limit this analysis to two texts where this process stands out most clearly: the Gospel of Judas, nowadays mostly

8

Hadot 2002.

9

Zambon 2006.

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dated to the second half of the second century, and the Pistis Sophia.10 Unlike the Apocalyptic, who passively receives the revelations of the future without this implying a transformation of his Self, or the contemporary forms of Christian spiritual direction exemplified for instance in Origen’s De oratione, where the text only provides—again after the model of the ‘spiritual exercises’—a series of ethical guiding principles that the Christian, according to his own free will, chooses to actualize by means of hard ascetic exercises,11 the Gnostic Logos of revelation points to a different type of religious experience. The aim is to find the shortest path to the intuition of a hidden truth. Only after this inner transformation that the Exegesis of the Soul describes as ‘conversion, a dive into the depths of one’s own “matrix” (NHC II, 131. 19ff.), will it be possible to receive, in a fruitful manner, the mythical contents of the text.12 The Gospel of Judas13 is today at the centre of a heated interpretative debate14 facilitated by its own numerous lacunae and the difficulty to understand some key passages, and more generally, by the fact that the interpretative conflicts of this field of studies are projected onto the comprehension of the text. From the very beginning, the text is introduced as a secret logos of revelation (apophasis) that takes place the week previous to Jesus’s passion. Since it is a wellknown text, I will only hint at the elements that I deem relevant for our study. The Gospel, of which the original Greek version dates from midsecond century, features the typical elements of the Gnostic Logos of revelation. Although it is the voice of pre-Easter Jesus the one that speaks here, not that of the resurrected Christ (obviously, it could not have been otherwise), the Jesus in question is an extraordinary being, capable of assuming any shape he wants and of moving from the 10

To them could be added some Hermetic treatises with a Gnostic background, such as the Poimandres and mainly the CH XIII and the Coptic treatise De Ogdoade et Enneade. Since there is another chapter that deals specifically with the Hermetic texts, I will limit my analysis to the two Gnostic writings. 11 Monaci Castagno 2006, 190–1. 12 Obviously this is not necessarily its one and only function. The text could also be used to confirm the individual’s own experience within the community. In any case, the function was primarily soteriological. 13 See the critical edition in Kasser, Meyer, and Wurst 2007 to compare with Brankaer and Bethge 2007. 14 See Pagels and King 2007 and the essays collected in Scopello 2008; Deconick 2009.

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inferior to the superior world without much fuss. As Judas himself claims, he comes from the immortal kingdom of Barbelo and therefore is able to reveal to Judas all the mysteries of this realm. The text then is formally constructed according to the rules of the genre: a narrative frame—in this case particularly dramatic—that has at its centre the narration of a Gnostic myth of the Sethian type. Most unfortunately, it is precisely this part that has suffered more damage. The title of ‘Gospel of Judas’ appears only in the end, as an underwriting. Unlike other Gnostic gospels that are attributed to an apostle (Philip, Thomas) the compiler who has added this title (probably to seal up his editorial work) did not mean that the Gospel had been written by Judas, but that the thirteenth apostle was the main subject of the Gospel. In fact, the ultimate question raised by the text is: does the author of the Gospel reckon that Judas is the role model of the perfect Gnostic, or—as it could be gathered from some details— while being superior to the other apostles, he does not belong to the perfect generation and therefore he is not a Gnostic? I believe that, as far as we know, the most accurate hypothesis is yet another one. It stands out as obvious that the text refers to the hard conflicts that characterized the various groups of followers of Christ by the second half of the second century. As some interpreters have underlined, at the very core of the struggle, behind the adamant condemnation of sacrifices, there was the criticism of what was considered a useless sacrifice: martyrdom.15 The author understands martyrdom in terms of its political value as an essential means to affirm mono-Episcopal authority, and as such, he violently criticizes and rejects it. To this ‘practice’ of bloody sacrifice as public token of faith, the author compares Jesus’ sacrifice, and even that of Judas who, paradoxically, through his betrayal—a symbolic reference to the ‘delivery’ of Jesus’ body so that the Saviour could be definitely freed from the prison that held his spirit—is ready to suffer until death in order to complete the task that he has been assigned. In this re-reading, Judas represents the Gnostic aspirant who undergoes a gradual process of learning and reflection before getting to glimpse the possibility of reaching a superior level of reality. From this viewpoint, the Gospel of Judas then is of a piece with other Christian literature of the second century that offers a sophisticated message of spiritual transformation in this

15

This is the thesis of Pagel and King 2007.

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life rather than the messianic hope for a future world restored to justice and peace that we find in other Christian texts. If we accept this hypothesis, the Logos of revelation contained in the Gospel of Judas offers the reader, or the community of readers, a typical course of Gnostic individuation. Using the characteristic terminology of the Valentinian School, it could be said that it draws the trajectory that goes from the formation following the substance to that following the Gnosis. To these two phases correspond two dream-visions16 that Jesus promptly explains. In the interpretation of the dream concerning the temple and its sacrifices, Jesus proves that the apostles—a covert reference to the heads of the Church that defended the usefulness of martyrdom, thus showing that they were ready to send to the slaughter even their own beloved—are in reality the sons of the demiurge. In this way, Jesus reveals the purely psychic nature of the twelve apostles and their successors. Judas is depicted as their opposite; he is the one who knows who Jesus really is and where he comes from. A challenge casts light on this difference. To the apostles that angrily refuse to understand their own nature Jesus retorts: ‘[Let] any one of you who is [strong enough] among human beings bring out the perfect human and stand before my face (p. 35, 3–6)’. The apostles claim to possess such strength but in fact the only one able to stand is Judas, although he cannot yet look at Jesus directly in the eyes. Jesus’ challenge is evidently linked to a Gnostic re-reading of the creation of Adam, to which the text presently alludes (p. 52, 14– 19): the archonts model Adam after the image of the superior Anthropos that they have glimpsed and they animate him with their own breath, but they fail to make him stand straight (estos) since only the Spirit can cause this kathorthosis. Judas, in his declaration of the real nature of Jesus—an overt copy of Peter’s statement in the gospel of Mark 8:27–33—proves to be potentially Gnostic, having been formed following the substance, although the fact that he cannot yet look directly at the face of the Gnostic Revealer shows that he still needs to be formed following the Gnosis. The second part of the Logos sees to it. First, Jesus talks privately to Judas, pre-announcing the revelation of the mysteries of the kingdom and the task that awaits him; then he departs and comes back the next 16 In the case of Judas, it is clearly stated that it is a ‘great vision’ (p. 44, 17–18, cf. 44, 24–5). In what concerns the apostles, p. 37, 22–4, the text is unclear but it could be deduced that it is a night dream.

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morning. To the disciples that ask him about his whereabouts he answers that he has been to ‘another generation, great and holy’ (p. 37, 29). In the logic of the Gnostic Logos of revelation, this means that Jesus has ascended to his original homeland to assume his nature of perfect Revealer: in fact, only after being formed following the Gnosis himself will Jesus be able to form the Gnostic aspirants. At this point the double exegesis of the two visions, firstly that of the apostles, secondly that of Judas, starts. As mentioned above, the exegesis of the former helps unveil the psychic nature of the apostles, thus carrying out a negative process of dissociation, of separation from what one was or thought to be: a hopeless psychic dimension. Only after the deliverance of the mind from this hoax it is possible to proceed to the positive side: the communication of the superior mysteries, of the contents of the particular myth of the group, of that pleromatic genealogy that allows for the discovery of one’s own self and its divine root. Because of all this, Judas will have to suffer: obvious allusion to his death, which the text describes as a lapidation by the other apostles, but also an allusion to the inner suffering entailed by the conflictive nature of this process. Judas’ suffering warns him—and through him all other Gnostic aspirants— of the difficulties involved in the discovery and re-conquest of one’s spiritual dimension, and in the inevitable and painful consequence of clashing with one’s own previous identities and the groups that represent them. Finally, after having revealed to Judas the nature of the true world and of the generation that dwells in it, and having answered some questions regarding Judas’ relationship with this world, Jesus concludes his speech by stating that he had said it all. Now, formed following the Gnosis, Judas is prompted to lift up his eyes. In this way he not only can see the Revealer’s face, but also the luminous cloud that represents the pleromatic world: ‘the star that shows the way is your star’ (p. 57, 19–20). Judas sees the shining cloud, and he goes inside it. Regardless of the question whether and to what extent Judas’ final fate is that of a perfect Gnostic who belongs to the superior generation or if, due in any case to the task he has been forced to carry out—even going beyond the level of the mere psychics as happens in other Gnostic contexts—he is bound to remain in the plerome’s periphery, ‘it is possible that Judas becomes, for readers of the gospel, a Gnostic paradigm of discipleship. After all, this is the Gospel of Judas. It is possible, I would grant, that Judas may not attain ultimate bliss. Or he may be on his way to the thirteenth to dominate

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the powers of the world from there, as noted above. Yet what is clear from the text is the role of the disciple Judas who, though opposed by the other disciples, understands who Jesus is, learns the mysteries of the kingdom from Jesus, and does what Jesus says he will do.’17 In conclusion, the relationship between Jesus and Judas presents an ideal course of transformation in which the role of the saviour is represented in the text and by the text. Even though the sociological dimension and that of the textual praxis evade us, we find in the text an example of a possible process of individuation caught in its structural elements that could be a reference for a Gnostic-to-be.

PISTIS SOPHIA I will now analyse briefly the Logos of revelation present in the Pistis Sophia. Beyond the evident differences, what strikes us as most remarkable is the structural analogy. In this text of a later period— its final version probably dates from at least a century after the Gospel of Judas, that is, not before the second half of the third century—the literary frame has, at first sight, a different aim: that of introducing the pneumatic exegesis of some of Solomon’s Psalms, a requirement in order to re-read the drama of the heroine of the text, the Pistis Sophia. In charge of this exegesis are the members of Jesus’ favourite group of disciples. The resurrected Christ stays with them for eighteen months, which he spends communicating to them the mysteries of a superior world that has become extremely complex, and the vicissitudes of the Pistis Sophia. Also in this text the frame of the Logos carries out the function of describing a typical Gnostic experience of transformation, strained between the formation following the substance and that following the Gnosis. As it happens in the Gospel of Judas, also in the Pistis Sophia, the Revealer himself the first one to be submitted to this process, so that he can then prompt it in the apostles. With its typical verbosity, the Pistis Sophia lavishly describes the stages of this process, casting light on many of its details.

17

Meyer, in Scopello 2009, 54.

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In the Pistis Sophia, this theological element is dramatically represented. While the Resurrected is meditating on his destiny, he receives the celestial robes that he has left before descending on Earth. With these robes, he can now ascend to the supreme place where he will take the two robes of the Ineffable and of the First Mystery, which will bestow on him the definitive and complete Gnosis, making him the perfect Revealer. In his ascent, Jesus makes a significant action: the formation of the disciples following the substance. Thus, the dialogue between the Revealer and the disciples aims at revealing the new reality which has been formed in the disciples, following the vision of the perfect revealer: the Man of light. That is the Gnostic formation of the pneumatic substance of the disciples. In the text of the Pistis Sophia the pneumatic regeneration coincides with a vision: it is by seeing the nature of the Revealer that, one by one beginning with Mary Magdalene—again we come across the issue of the kathorthosis already met in the Gospel of Judas—the disciples are able to rise to their feet and carry out their pneumatic exegesis, since the Man of light has now been awakened in them. This is also possible due to the particular bond between the Revealer and the disciples, which represents the relationship between the individual self and the universal Self that I have already mentioned. The Pistis Sophia depicts this relationship as a (re)generative vision of one’s own self reflected in the mirror represented by the Revealer, who in his turn represents the universal Self. Indeed, the disciple is now ‘awakened’, because he has received his pneuma, which is light and life, from the Saviour. As a result of this transmission, a new reality is now acting in him: the Man of light. He is bubbling, restless, standing, willing: all verbs which are typical of the theogonic process by which the Son is eternally generated and are now used to indicate the generation of the new Gnostic reality. A disciple synthesizes the vitality of the new reality in this way: ‘my man of light has moved me, has joyed and bubbled in me, desiring to go out from me to penetrate into you’.18 Following a typical process present also in the Hermetic tractates, the bubbling and the joy indicate the mythic model of an individual process which is characterized by ‘spiritual’ emotions.

18

Ch. 113 (Schmidt-Till, 119, 12 sg.).

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As a matter of fact, the First Mover in this process is the pneuma. It is shown both as a ‘male’ principle, acting and fertilizing, and as ‘female’ matter, capable of generating. Its two dimensions are based on the ‘neutral’ nature of the foundation of being. What else could it mean by the fact that the Gnostic now desires to ‘penetrate’ into the saviour, other than that it is equivalent to the structural tension already found in the Gospel of Judas, represented by the reunification of the individual self with the universal Self?

CONCLUSION 19 The hero of Hellenistic novels is one who, at the end of many vicissitudes, has not changed. What a difference with that contemporary novel represented by the spiritual vicissitudes of the Gnostic pleroma, with its wanderings, edipical faults, division without reunification! Certainly, in their way, the Gnostic myths are also tales of journeys and final reunions. But what a journey and what a reunion! It is, indeed, a typical voyage of discovery of one’s own interiority. In the Gnostic perspective, interiority, after all, is a strange place: despite the cosmic descriptions, it does not exist in itself as a town or a temple, but only inasmuch as one decides to return to oneself: it is a process, a reality to be experienced. As a conclusion, what I have tried to describe in the analysis of these two examples of the Gnostic Logos of revelation is the literary expression of an experience that, in its concrete dynamics, in its assumptions and social context, still remains elusive. What our texts can help us understand is mostly the habitus of a self-reflective practice that settled down and allowed for a delimitation of this particular social individual: the Gnostic. Moreover, these two texts that are so different and so separated in time—to which others could be easily added—feature, beyond or underneath the profound ideological differences, the same way to structure a certain religious experience that can, in its turn, structure other experiences, thus becoming a generating principle, an organizer of practices and representations with the capacity of self-regulation, thanks to the peculiar dynamics of the Gnostic textual communities. 19

I took some ideas from a previous essay: see Filoramo 1999, 149–58.

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Beck, Ulrich, and Beck-Gernsheim, Elisabeth 2002. Individualization. Institutionalized Individualism and its Social and Political Consequences. London: SAGE. Bellah, Robert N. et al. 2007. Habits of the Heart: Individualism and Commitment in American Life, 3rd edn, Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Brakke, David 2006. ‘Self-differentiation among Christian Groups: the Gnostics and their Opponents’, in Mitchell, Margaret M. and Young, Frances M. (eds) The Cambridge History of Christianity, vol. I: Origins to Constantine. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 245–60. Brankaer, Johanna and Bethge, Hans-Gebhard (eds) 2007. Codex Tchacos. Texte und Analysen. Texte und Untersuchungen zur Geschichte der Altchristlichen Literatur 161. Berlin: de Gruyter. Cosentino, Augusto 2007. Il battesimo gnostico: Dottrine, simboli e riti iniziatici nello gnosticismo. Cosenza: Giordano. Deconick, April (ed.) 2009. The Codex Judas Papers. Proceedings of the International Congress on the Tchacos Codex held at Rice University, Houston, Texas, March 13–16 2008. Nag Hammadi and Manichaean Studies 71. Leiden: Brill. Dulmen, Richard van (ed.) 2001. Entdeckung des Ich: die Geschichte der Individualisierung vom Mittelalter bis zur Gegenwart. Cologne: Bohlau. Filoramo, Giovanni 1999. ‘Transformation of the Inner Self in Gnostic and Hermetic Texts’, in Assmann, Jan and Stroumsa, Guy (eds), Transformations of the Inner Self in Ancient Religions. “Studies in the History of Religions 83. Leiden: Brill, 137–49. —— 2010. ‘Gnosticismo’, in Melloni, Alberto (ed.), Dizionario del sapere storico-religioso del Novecento. Bologna: Mulino, 976–88. Harskamp, Anton van, and Halman, Loek (eds) 2001. The many faces of individualism. Leuven: Peeters. Hadot, Pierre 2002. Exercices sprituel et philosophie antique, rev. edn, Paris: Albin Michel. Kasser, Rodolphe, Meyer, Marvin, and Wurst, Gregor 2006, 2nd edn, 2008. The Gospel of Judas. Washington, DC: National Geographic. Kasser, Rodolphe, Meyer, Marvin, Wurst, Gregor, and Gaudard, Francois (eds) 2007. The Gospel of Judas together with the Letter of Peter to Philip, James, and a Book of Allogenes from Codex Tchacos. Critical Edition. Washington, DC: National Geographic. King, Karen K. 2003. What Is Gnosticism? Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press. Kippele, Flavia 1997. Was heißt Individualisierung? Die Antworten der soziologischen Klassiker. Opladen: Westdeutscher Verlag.

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Meyer, Marvin 2007. Judas: The Definitive Collection of Gospels and Legends about the Infamous Apostle of Jesus. San Francisco: Harper. ——2009: ‘Ten Passages in the Gospel of Judas’, in Scopello, Madeleine (ed.), Gnosis and Revelation. Ten Studies on Codex Tchacos. Florence: Olschki, 41–55. Monaci Castagno, Adele 2006. ‘Una direzione spirituale di élite: Origene e Giovanni Crisostomo’, in G. Filoramo, G. (ed.), Storia della direzione spirituale, vol. I: L’età antica. Brescia: Morcelliana, 189–222. Nagel, Peter 2007. ‘Das Evangelium des Judas’, Zeitschrift für das Neutestamentliche Wissenschaft 98, 213–76. Pagels, Elaine H. and King, Karen L. 2007. Reading Judas: The Gospel of Judas and the Shaping of Christianity. New York: Viking. Pearson, Birger A. 2007. Ancient Gnosticism. Traditions and Literature. Minneapolis, MN: Fortress. Perkins, Pheme 1980. The Gnostic Dialogue: The Early Church and the crisis of Gnosticism. New York: Paulist Press. Rudolph, Kurt 1968. ‘Der gnostische “Dialog” als literarisches Genuss’, in Nagel, Peter (ed.), Probleme der koptischen Literatur. Halle: MartinLuther-Universität, 85–107. Rüpke, Jörg 2010. ‘Wann begann die Europäische Religionsgeschichte? Der hellenistisch-römische Mittelmeerraum und die europäische Gegenwart’, Historia religionum 2, 91–102. Scopello, Madeleine (ed.) 2008. The Gospel of Judas in Context. Proceedings of the First International Conference on the Gospel of Judas, Paris, Sorbonne, October 27th–28th, 2006. Nag Hammadi and Manichaean Studies 62. Leiden: Brill. ——(ed.) 2009: Gnosis and Revelation. Ten Studies on Codex Tchacos. Florence: Olschki, 41–55. Seigel, Jerrold 2005. The Idea of the Self: Thought and Experience in Western Europe since the Seventeenth Century. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Sevrin, Jean-Marie 1986. Le dossier baptismal séthien: Etudes sur la sacramentaire gnostique. BCNH Section ‘Etudes’ 2. Québec: Presses de l’Université Laval. Stock, B. (1990) Listening for the Text: On the Uses of the Past. Baltimore, MD: John Hopkins University Press. Troeltsch, Ernst 1913. Religiöser Individualismus und die Kirche, in Troeltsch, Ernst, Gesammelte Schriften, vol. 2. Tübingen: Mohr. Williams, Michael A. 1996. Rethinking ‘Gnosticism’: An Argument for Dismantling a Dubious Category. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.

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Beyond the Empirical Individual

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17 Cicero and Seneca on the Fate of the Soul: Private Feelings and Philosophical Doctrines Aldo Setaioli

The notion of individuality is frequently associated with an interest in a prolongation or final attainment of individuality beyond the traits of biological life. For two important thinkers, Cicero in the mid-first century bc, and Seneca in the mid-first century ad, reflexions about the fate of the soul will be investigated.

CICERO ON IMMORTALITY Though the problem of the fate of the soul after death is an important issue treated in Cicero’s philosophical works, his personal attitude is anything but easy to ascertain in those writings, which often present conflicting attitudes and ideas defended by different philosophical schools,1 while his own Academic leanings prevent him from accepting any one of them as the absolute truth.2 It is therefore advisable to turn to his philosophical treatises only after we have tried to extract his own position from the works in which he appears to speak in his own name,

1 Cicero himself warns the reader not to attribute to the author the standpoints defended by the characters of his philosophical treatises: cf. Cic. nat. deor. 1.10: qui autem requirunt quid quaque de re ipsi sentiamus, curiosius id faciunt quam necesse est. 2 Cf. the words immediately following those quoted in the preceding note.

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although his non-philosophical writings only sporadically refer to the problem of afterlife. We should not expect to find much relevant material in his public speeches, since Cicero must obviously take into account both the expectations of his audience and the specific circumstances in which a particular speech was delivered. For example, in the speeches against Catilina he predicts that the conspirators will suffer eternal punishments after death in the first one,3 but presents these very same afterlife punishments as a politically expedient fiction in the less emotional fourth speech.4 The same vacillation appears in other speeches too: afterlife punishments are sometimes denied,5 sometimes upheld, though apparently, once again, because of political expediency.6 In this case we may confidently assume that Cicero personally rejected the idea, as made clear by some passages of his philosophical works which for once appear to be unequivocal.7 Things are not so simple when the issue is immortality itself, rather than the punishments associated with the Hades of mythology and literature. Among Cicero’s speeches, however, there is one in which we may be reasonably sure that he is expressing his own point of view. I am referring to his speech Pro Archia, an enthusiastic praise of poetry and literature, in which the theme of the soul’s ontological survival appears to be fused into, and somehow superseded by, the immortality achieved through fame.8 At the end of the speech, however, Cicero formulates the so-called ‘Socratic alternative’—the dilemma posited by Socrates in the final page of Plato’s Apology,9 according to which death is either the human being’s total annihilation or a passage to a

3 Cic. Catil. 1.33: tu, Iuppiter . . . homines bonorum inimicos, hostis patriae, latrones Italiae, scelerum foedere inter se ac nefaria societate coniunctos, aeternis suppliciis vivos mortuosque mactabis. 4 Cic. Catil. 4.8: itaque, ut aliqua in vita formido improbis esset posita, apud inferos eius modi quaedam illi antiqui supplicia impiis constituta esse voluerunt, quod videlicet intellegebant, his remotis, non esse mortem ipsam pertimescendam. 5 Cic. Cluent. 171. 6 Cic. Phil. 14.32: illi igitur impii quos cecidistis etiam ad inferos poenas parricidii luent, vos vero, qui extremum spiritum in victoria effudistis, piorum estis sedem et locum consecuti. Elsewhere Cicero quotes Plato’s Phaedo and its doctrine of the immortality of the soul: Scaur. 4. 7 Cf. e.g. Cic. Tusc. 1.10–11, 48; nat. deor. 2.5. 8 Cic. Arch. 29–30. Cf. also Rabir. 29–30. 9 Plat. apol. 40c ff.

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new and better life.10 Significantly, this position—the acceptance of Socrates’ dilemma, though with a sentimental, non-logical preference for the thesis of the immortality of the soul—does not basically differ from the standpoint we encounter even in Cicero’s much later and undoubtedly much more ideologically developed philosophical works. We might expect that the writings from which we could gather an inkling of Cicero’s personal position on the problem should be his letters, especially those to Atticus, in which he expresses himself in all sincerity. Cicero’s letters have in fact been analysed for this purpose by several scholars, though diverging conclusions have been reached. Some believe that the letters reveal the author’s leaning towards a belief in the immortality of the soul,11 but in my opinion it is hardly possible to find in them any unequivocal statement upholding that thesis. The perpetua vita Cicero refers to in a letter to Atticus12 obviously hints at the infinity of time as opposed to the shortness of our life;13 these words surely prove that Cicero was not insensitive to what will happen after our death,14 but in this earthly world, not in a world beyond our own. On the other hand these words are clearly explained by a further letter to Atticus,15 a text of the utmost interest to us, inasmuch as it treats of the fanum, the temple that Cicero was planning to build in order to ensure the survival of his dead daughter. As in the previous text, the infinity of time is opposed to the shortness of our life, but this time it is unequivocally stated that after our death we do not exist any more: longum illud tempus cum non ero. If Cicero believed in immortality, we would expect some reference to a reunion after death with his beloved daughter; this was indeed a common topic of consolatory writings,16 and it is used by Cicero himself at the end of his De senectute, where Cato expresses the wish to be reunited 10 Cic. Arch. 30: sive a meo sensu post mortem afutura est, sive, ut sapientissimi homines putaverunt, ad aliquam mei partem pertinebit. Cf. Cic. Sest. 47. 11 e.g. Hooper 1917–18, 90; Guazzoni Foà 1957, 223. 12 Cic. Att. 10.8.8: id spero vivis nobis fore. Quamquam tempus est nos de illa perpetua iam, non de hac exigua vita cogitare. 13 Cf. Benkner 1914, 9 n. 12 (‘das Fortleben in der Geschichte, im Munde der Nachwelt’); Shackleton Bailey 1968, 249 (‘it is time for me to be thinking of eternity rather than this brief span’). 14 As rightly remarked by van den Bruwaene 1937, 51–2, polemicizing with Laurand 1914, whose interpretation is repeated by Sullivan 1943–4, 17. 15 Cic. Att. 12.18.1: longum illud tempus, cum non ero, magis me movet quam hoc exiguum, quod mihi tamen nimium longum videtur. 16 Cf. Setaioli 2001a, 58–9.

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with his son in afterlife.17 We shall return to this letter and those written in the same period in connection with the Consolatio that Cicero addressed to himself after his daughter’s death. Some of Cicero’s letters are themselves consolatory writings addressed to a number of mourning friends. In two of them, to Sulpicius and to Brutus respectively,18 we do not find the slightest hint at any afterlife; in another, to Titius,19 Cicero once more formulates the ‘Socratic alternative’, with no attempt to solve it either in one way or in the other.20 We shall see that his attitude is quite different when it comes to the consolation addressed to himself after his own daughter’s death.

THE SOCRATIC ALTERNATIVE Cicero’s Consolatio was unique at the time, inasmuch as it was addressed by the author to himself in order to alleviate his own grief, as he remarks in a letter to Atticus.21 This claim must be assessed as a literary vindication: Cicero is asserting that he has outdone all previous writings belonging to the consolatory genre.22 One hundred years later Seneca implicitly claims to have surpassed Cicero himself: the latter consoled his own grief, but Seneca consoles his mother’s distress for a misfortune—the exile to Corsica—that has affected the author himself.23 Cicero’s literary claim does not, of course, impair his 17 Cic. sen. 84: proficiscar enim . . . ad Catonem meum . . . cuius . . . animus . . . in ea profecto loca discessit, quo mihi ipsi cernebat esse veniendum. 18 Cic. fam. 4.5; Cic. ad Brut. 1.9. 19 Cic. fam. 5.16.4. 20 A letter to Cicero by Servius Sulpicius Rufus (Cic. fam. 4.5.6) admits the possibility of an afterlife in order to introduce the topos of the dead person’s dislike of the surviving relatives’ mourning (cf. Plat. Menex. 248b; Menand. Rhet. III 412, 21 Spengel). 21 Cic. Att. 12.14.3: quin etiam feci, quod profecto ante me nemo, ut ipse me per litteras consolarer . . . Adfirmo tibi nullam consolationem esse talem. 22 Cf. Cic. Att. 12.14.3. 23 Sen. Helv. 1.2: praeterea, cum omnia clarissimorum ingeniorum monimenta ad compescendos moderandosque luctus evolverem, non inveniebam exemplum eius qui consolatus suos esset, cum ipse ab illis comploraretur. Just like Cicero (Att. 12.14.3; 12.21.5), Seneca claims to have read all previous consolatory writings, and to have found none like his own. Later authors consoling relatives for a misfortune affecting themselves too are Plutarch (Ad uxorem) and Porphyry (Ad Marcellam).

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sincerity; but his mood at the time he was writing the Consolatio is one of the factors that make this work different from most of his literary production. As he tells us himself,24 he was under the pall of his recent loss and resorted to all possible remedies to alleviate his grief. For this reason the fragments of the Consolatio must be assessed and evaluated in comparison with what Cicero says on the fate of the soul in his philosophical works, mostly written later, when his grief had somewhat subsided. Just like his letters, and even more so, Cicero’s philosophical works have been read by several scholars as the document of his supposed faith in the immortality of the soul;25 but, not rarely, they seem to forget that the arguments developed by the supporters of this faith in Cicero’s philosophical dialogues can hardly be taken as his own beliefs. The oldest work in which the theme of afterlife is developed is the Somnium Scipionis, concluding the partly lost De republica. A superficial approach to this text might suggest that Cicero unquestionably believed in the immortality of the soul. However, we should remark that Scipio’s vision is presented as a dream. This undoubtedly aimed to avoid the criticisms that had been levelled at Plato, who had presented his afterlife picture as a report by a man—Er of Pamphylia—who had risen from the dead, as already observed by Macrobius;26 but we should not forget that, according to Cicero, the belief in the immortality of the soul based on the appearance of dead people in dreams was nothing but a primitive and totally groundless idea, as he tells us in the Tusculanae.27 In the Somnium Scipio’s very dream is physiologically motivated: he dreams of his grandfather because he had spoken about him with Masinissa.28 At the very end, however, the presence of the first Africanus is suddenly presented as real: ille discessit: ego somno solutus sum.29 Obviously, only 24 25

Cic. Tusc. 3.76: erat enim in tumore animus, et omnis in eo temptabatur curatio. Cf. e.g. Laurand 1914; Guazzoni Foà 1970, 90; Alfonsi 1954; Salinero Portero

1958. 26

Macr. in somn. Scip. 1.1.9–2.1. Cic. Tusc. 1.29: qui nondum ea, quae multis post annis tractari coepta sunt physica didicissent, tantum sibi persuaserant quantum natura admonente cognoverant, rationes et causas rerum non tenebant, visis quibusdam saepe movebantur, iisque maxime nocturnis, ut viderentur ei, qui vita excesserant, vivere. More texts in Ronconi 1961, 18–19. 28 This explanation of dreams was widespread: parallels in Ronconi 1961, 18. 29 Cic. somn. Scip. 29. 27

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someone who has really come can depart; and if the younger Scipio really spoke with his grandfather, then the latter’s revelation is subreptitiously presented as real, in spite of the dream frame. We shall see that Seneca resorts to the same device at the end of his Consolation to Marcia: the brilliant picture of a heavenly afterlife is first sketched as an imagination,30 but the very last words suddenly present it as real.31 So, in the text of the Somnium itself, aside from the very last words, there are elements pointing to the fact that Cicero’s picture is anything but an objective representation of a state of things accepted as real.32 The real way in which the Somnium must be interpreted is suggested by Cicero himself almost ten years later, in another work of his, the Laelius, in which he expressly demotes the picture presented in the Somnium Scipionis to a mere literary description of the positive instance of the ‘Socratic alternative’, in no way dogmatically asserting the reality of the immortality of the soul.33 It is true that in this very context of the Laelius,34 as well as in the roughly contemporary Tusculanae disputationes and De senectute, Cicero’s sentimental leaning toward the thesis of immortality is clearly apparent, but it is equally true that in none of these writings is this thesis proclaimed as unquestioned reality. In the first book of the Tusculanae disputationes35 the arguments in favour of the immortality of the soul are preceded and followed by a portion devoted to the opposite hypothesis: the total annihilation of the human being brought about by death. In spite of Cicero’s sentimental attitude we just hinted at, both theses are not merely equally envisaged, but made subservient to the author’s real goal: proving that 30

Sen. Marc. 26.1: puta itaque (cf. Sen. ep. 102.28 imaginare tecum). Sen. Marc. 26.7: felicem filium tuum, Marcia, qui ista iam novit! 32 See the clear picture presented by Görgemanns 1968. We may add that Cicero’s translation from Plato’s Phaedrus (245c ff.) at somn. Scip. 27 (cf. Tusc. 1.53) skips Plato’s opening words: pasa psychē athanatos. Cf. van den Bruwaene 1939, 129. 33 Cic. Lael. 14: cuius (Scipionis) disputationis fuit extremum de immortalitate animorum, quae se in quiete per visum ex Africano audisse dicebat. Id si ita est, ut optimi cuiusque animus in morte facillime evolet tamquam e custodia vinclisque corporis, cui censemus cursum ad deos faciliorem fuisse quam Scipioni? Quocirca maerere eius eventu vereor ne invidi magis quam amici sit. Si autem illa veriora, ut idem interitus sit animorum et corporum nec ullus sensus maneat, ut nihil boni est in morte, sic certe nihil mali; sensu enim amisso fit idem, quasi natus non sit. 34 Cic. Lael. 13–14. 35 Even van den Bruwaene 1937, 54–83 believes that in this text Cicero unconditionally accepts the thesis of immortality. Ciafardini 1921 appears to realize that this merely corresponds to a sentimental need of Cicero’s, but he too believes that it finally turned into faith. 31

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death is not an evil in either case, as expressly stated in the text.36 We shall see that Seneca’s attitude is no different. Besides, in Cicero’s case, asserting the reality of either hypothesis against the other is totally foreign to his Academic approach, which he confirms in this work too,37 adding a warning against the errors easily entailed by uncritical fideism.38 In the De senectute we first encounter the idea of the heavenly origin of the soul39 and shortly after the theme of the body as a prison for the soul, which will finally be freed by death40—ideas frequently found in his writings;41 but the ‘Socratic alternative’, which had been previously formulated in this work,42 reappears totally unsolved in the very final words, though they do express, through the speaking Cato, Cicero’s sentimental leaning towards immortality, while at the same time this is declared to be a mere hypothesis: ‘if I am mistaken, my mistake gives me joy’, quod si in hoc erro . . . libenter erro.43 Powell is quite right, when he remarks in his commentary: ‘Cicero the rhetorician . . . triumphs over Cicero the philosopher’.44 The frequently repeated theme of the divine origin of the soul does not unquestionably prove its immortality in Cicero’s other works any more than it does in the De senectute. In the De legibus the soul is repeatedly declared not merely divine,45 but explicitly immortal;46 but a fragment from a lost part of the same writing, transmitted by Lactantius, proves that the ‘Socratic alternative’ reappeared totally 36

Cic. Tusc. 1.82 ff. Cic. Tusc. 1.17: geram tibi morem et ea quae vis, ut potero, explicabo, nec tamen quasi Pythius Apollo, certa ut sint et fixa, quae dixero, sed ut homunculus unus e multis probabilia coniectura sequens. Ultra enim quo progrediar, quam ut veri similia videam, non habeo; certa dicent i, qui et percipi ea posse dicunt et se sapientis esse profitentur; 1.23 harum sententiarum quae vera sit deus aliquis viderit; quae veri simillima, magna quaestio est. 38 Cic. Tusc. 1.77: ‘ut videtur, sed me nemo de immortalitate depellet’. 78 ‘Laudo id quidem, etsi nihil nimis oportet confidere. Movemur enim saepe aliquo acute concluso, labamus mutamusque sententiam clarioribus etiam in rebus; in his est enim aliqua obscuritas. Id igitur si acciderit, simus armati’. 39 Cic. sen. 77–8. 40 Cic. sen. 81. 41 On the heavenly origin of the soul cf. Cic. somn. Scip. 15; Hortens. 115 Grilli; Tusc. 1.51; consol. F 21 Vitelli; leg. 1.26 (for the soul as a particle of God cf. nat. deor. 1.27; Tusc. 5.38; divin. 1.70; somn. Scip. 16; 26; Tim. 4). On the body as a prison for the soul cf. e.g. somn. Scip. 14; Tusc. 1.75; divin. 1.110; Lael. 14. Cf. Ronconi 1961, 78–9; Powell 1988, 252; 254; 260. 42 43 Cic. sen. 66–7. Cic. sen. 85. 44 45 46 Powell 1988, 265. Cic. leg. 1.24; 1.59. Cic. leg. 2.27. 37

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unscathed in this work too.47 At most, the idea of the divine origin of the soul is associated with the positive instance of the ‘Socratic alternative’, as was the case in the Hortensius, where this association appeared at the end of the work48—the same position as in the De senectute.

PUNISHMENT AFTER DEATH The ‘Socratic alternative’, as formulated by Plato’s Socrates and by Cicero himself in the works so far analysed, makes provision for just two hypotheses: total annihilation or passage to a new and better life. Cicero takes pains to rule out a third, unsettling hypothesis, which, as we saw, he does envisage in some non-philosophical works:49 eternal punishments after death.50 Already on this account we may confidently assume that the Consolatio differs from those works, since one important fragment expressly states that after death the soul receives punishments or rewards.51 Strictly speaking Cicero’s attitude in this text does not greatly differ from the one we encounter in a fragment of the Hortensius,52 since the doctrine is in both cases attributed to previous thinkers and the eternity of retribution is more implied than explicitly stated. But in the Consolatio at least we may be fairly sure that it reflects Cicero’s own positions—which strike us as different from those defended in other works. At any rate, this text was perceived as different from others by ancient readers, as proved by Lactantius’ remarks as he reports this precious fragment. The 47 Cic. leg. fr. 4 (Lact. inst. 3.19.2): mors aut meliorem . . . aut certe non deteriorem adlatura est statum; nam sine corpore animo vigente divina vita est, sensu carente nihil est mali. 48 Cic. Hortens. 115 Grilli: aut si hoc quo sentimus et sapimus mortale et caducum est . . . aut si, ut antiquis philosophis iisque maximis longeque clarissimis placuit, aeternos animos ac divinos haberemus; cf. nat deor. 3.12. 49 Cf. notes 3 and 6 above. 50 Cic. sen. 67: tertium certe nihil inveniri potest; cf. Tusc. 1.118. 51 Cic. consol. F 22 Vitelli: nec enim omnibus . . . idem illi sapientes arbitrati sunt eundem cursum in caelum patere. Nam vitiis et sceleribus contaminatos deprimi in tenebras atque in caeno iacere docuerunt, castos autem animos, puros integros incorruptos, bonis etiam studiis atque artibus expolitos leni quodam et facili lapsu ad deos id est ad naturam similem sui pervolare. 52 Cic. Hortens. 114 Grilli. Here the idea of the rewards and punishments after death is presented as the doctrine of consulares philosophi.

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Christian writer expressly states that here Cicero envisages an instance he does not consider in other writings, namely that after death the soul may receive not merely a reward, but also a punishment.53 Obviously, then, the Consolatio differs from the works previously examined; if these punishments are eternal, as remarked by Lactantius and as everything seems to suggest, we are very far from the eschatological picture sketched in the Somnium Scipionis, where no eternal punishments are envisaged.54 The alternative posited by the Consolatio is different from the ‘Socratic alternative’ found in other writings: both instances—eternal reward or eternal punishment—are placed within an encompassing frame in which the survival of the soul is unquestionably assumed. The Consolatio is indeed Cicero’s only work in which the immortality of the soul is unreservedly asserted. An important reason must, of course, be sought in the personal and private sphere; a loving father’s grief can only be soothed by cherishing a picture in which his beloved daughter survives in a state of happiness, actually—as we shall soon see—of deification.55 On the other hand, though, this attitude had been recognized and received in the rhetorical modes applying to the consolatory genre.56 The rhetoricians appropriated many philosophical ideas concerning the fate of the souls after death, but subjected them to their own pre-eminently literary goals, with little concern for doctrinal consistency, and at times for logic itself. Ps. Dionysius of Halicarnassos, for example, adopts as his own the doctrine of the body as a grave and a prison for the soul, which is set free by death,57 but advises the authors of Consolations to resort to it only when writing about people who died young.58 In this way this very philosophical doctrine, as well as the connected idea of earthly life as a punishment for the soul, ran the risk of becoming a mere device used to introduce and justify the 53 Lact. inst. 3.9.3–5: argute, ut sibi videtur, quasi nihil esse aliud possit. Atquin utrumque falsum est. Docent enim divinae litterae non extingui animos, sed aut pro iustitia praemio adfici aut poena pro sceleribus sempiterna . . . Quod adeo verum est, ut idem Tullius in Consolatione non easdem sedes incolere iustos atque impios praedicaverit. Cic. consol. F 22 follows. 54 Cic. somn. Scip. 29: even guilty souls finally return to heaven, though multis agitati saeculis. 55 Cf. Cumont 1949, 163; Kumaniecki 1968, 43. 56 Cf. e.g. Menand. Rhet. III 414, 16–27; 421, 14–17 Spengel. 57 Ps. Dionys. Hal. ars rhet. 6.5, II 282, 11–14 U.-R. 58 Ps. Dionys. Hal. ars rhet. 6.4, II 282, 6 ff. U.-R.

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rhetorical topos of the lamentatio vitae, the ‘lamentation over life’, aimed at alleviating the grief for a loved one’s death by insisting on life’s negative side, and was thus sharply separated from the consistent eschatological picture of which the idea of the immortality of the soul was part. The concept of the survival of the soul was in fact given a central role in consolatory writings—as testified for instance by the outline sketched by Menander Rhetor59—but to the detriment of any real philosophical significance. As a matter of fact the ancient theme of earthly life as a punishment for the soul,60 which can be found in many consolatory writings, from Crantor’s Peri Penthous61 down to Seneca’s Consolatio ad Polybium,62 played a central role in Cicero’s Consolatio,63 and also appeared in the Hortensius.64 But it should not escape us that this idea can hardly be logically separated not merely from the immortality of the soul, but also—and most of all—from the doctrine of reincarnation. In his Hortensius, which has no consolatory purposes, Cicero has no problem in stressing this connection: human beings are born, he says, in order to atone for faults incurred in a previous life: ob aliqua scelera suscepta in vita superiore poenarum luendarum causa. We do not know how Cicero reconciled this assertion with the ‘Socratic alternative’ which, as we saw, appeared at the end of the Hortensius,65 but it cannot be doubted that in this work several successive reincarnations of the soul were envisaged. By contrast, in the fragments of the Consolatio, as well as in the rhetorical outlines of consolatory writings sketched by both Menander Rhetor and Ps. Dionysius, no trace of the doctrine of reincarnation can be detected; and also a complete, nonfragmentary consolatory writing like Seneca’s Consolatio ad Polybium does indeed contain the idea of earthly life as a punishment for the

59

Cf. the texts quoted at note 56. At least as old as Philolaos (44 B 14 D.-K.); cf e.g Aristot. protr. fr. 10b Walzer; etc. 61 Crantor, F 6a Mette (= Ps. Plut. cons. ad Apoll. 27, 115B). 62 Sen. Pol. 9.6. Cf. below, note 94. 63 Cic. consol. F 1 Vitelli: luendorum scelerum causa nasci homines; F 7 Vitelli iteravit id ipsum postea quasi obiurgans eum qui vitam non esse poenam putet. 64 Cic. Hortens. 112 Grilli: ex quibus humanae . . . vitae erroribus fit ut interdum veteres illi vates sive in sacris initiisque tradendis divinae mentis interpretes, qui nos ob aliqua scelera suscepta in vita superiore poenarum luendarum causa natos esse dixerunt, aliquid dixisse videantur . . . 65 Cic. Hortens. 115 Grilli, quoted in note 48. 60

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soul, but not the slightest hint at reincarnation.66 It is true that Cicero mentions not merely eternal rewards, like Menander’s and Ps. Dionysius’ rhetorical outlines, but also eternal punisments; but he does not succeed in reconciling his eschatological picture with the idea of earthly life as a punishment for the soul, while not including the doctrine of reincarnation any more than the two rhetoricians do. Obviously, writers of Consolations could not afford to charge the dead person they were celebrating with any fault, even if incurred in a previous life—which might have offended, rather than consoled, his mourning relatives. Cicero can make the connection in the Hortensius, which has no consolatory aims, but hardly in the Consolation addressed to himself for the loss of his beloved daughter. As we have already remarked, in consolatory writings the theme of earthly life as a punishment for the soul ended up by being reduced to the function of introducing the rhetorical topos of the lamentation over, and devaluation of, earthly life as a means of assuaging the mourners’ grief. In Cicero’s Consolatio, then, there is no mention of reincarnation as retribution and punishment for faults incurred during earthly life. These are punished in a different way, namely through an eternal hell sketched with archaic traits, such as darkness, lying in the mud, and so forth. All the more inconsistent then is the persistence of such an incompatible idea as the punishment of the very same faults through being born in an earthly body. The rhetorical, rather than philosophical, approach of the Consolatio is impossible to miss. This does not in any way imply a lack of sincerity on the part of Cicero.

DIVINE STATUS? The fragment 22 of the Consolatio we have been examining so far contains the assertion of the divine nature of the soul, which naturally entails its return to a godly state after death.67 This was one of the ‘philosophical’ ideas borrowed by the rhetoricians in connection with consolatory writing.68 In Cicero it appears frequently, in several

66 67 68

For the case of Crantor see Setaioli 1999, 145–56. Cic. consol. F 22 Vitelli: ad deos id est ad naturam similem sui pervolare. Menand. Rhet. III 414, 21–3 Spengel.

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works,69 even though, as he says in the part of the Tusculanae disputationes which contains arguments in favour of immortality, he considers it neither possible nor important to establish the exact nature of the soul, provided its affinity with godliness is accepted.70 But in the Consolatio Cicero strives to prove the immortality of the soul by connecting it with Aristotle’s quinta natura. The soul’s ‘quintessential’ nature is what quite literally makes it divine and immortal.71 The difficult problems entailed by this connection as well as by Cicero’s references to this supposedly Aristotelian doctrine are too intricate to be addressed here. I will only refer to the detailed treatment I have provided elsewhere.72 Here we shall only remark that the ascent of the soul after death to the godly upper regions, which, as we saw, is sketched elsewhere in the Consolatio,73 closely reminds us of the description of the return of the soul to the heavens by force of merely physical factors found in the Tusculanae disputationes,74 where we also find the same movement attributed to the soul after death, even if it is made of quinta . . . natura.75 Clearly, this vertical ascent can hardly be reconciled with the circular movement typically ascribed to this substance. Cicero obviously mixes the Aristotelian element with later Stoic ideas. But, as we just remarked, Cicero himself stresses the importance of the point to be proven, rather than the means by which it is proven. What should retain our attention here is that in the Consolatio he resorts to this theory to support the unreserved assertion of the immortality of the soul, which has no real parallel in his other writings. The last fragment of the Consolatio is of the utmost interest, in that it prompts a veritable apotheosis of Tullia.76 This too was an idea 69

See note 41. Cic. Tusc. 1.70: quae est eius natura? Propria, puto, et sua. Sed fac igneam, fac spirabilem: nihil ad id de quo agimus. 71 Cic. consol. F 21 Vitelli. 72 See Setaioli 1999, 163–7; Setaioli 2001b, 505–15. 73 Cic. consol. F 22 (quoted in note 67). 74 Cic. Tusc. 1.42–3. 75 Cic. Tusc. 1.41: si vero aut numerus quidam est animus . . . aut quinta quaedam . . . natura, multo etiam integriora ac puriora sunt, ut e terra longissime se ecferant. 76 Cic. consol. F 23 Vitelli: cum vero . . . et mares et feminas compluris ex hominibus in deorum numero esse videamus et eorum in urbibus atque agris augustissima delubra veneremur, adsentiamur eorum sapientiae quorum ingeniis et inventis omnem vitam legibus et institutis excultam constitutamque habemus. Quod si ullum umquam animal consecrandum fuit, illud profecto fuit. Si Cadmi progenies aut Tyndari in caelum tollenda fama fuit, huic idem honos certe dicandus est. Quod quidem faciam teque 70

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received in the rhetorical outlines, which make provision for both themes developed in the fragment: the comparison of the dead person with the deified heroes of yore and his apotheosis through the efforts of the surviving relatives;77 but in Cicero it acquires special depth through his personal involvement.78 The immortality he wishes to grant Tullia can hardly be regarded as ontological; on the one hand it is assumed on the basis of beliefs and religious customs, on the other it takes for granted that the living have the power to bestow immortality and godly status upon the dead.79 Some scholars believe that Cicero is referring to the doctrines of Euhemerus;80 but the widespread theme of the attainment of divine status through culture is more clearly recognizable.81 Cicero calls Tullia doctissima, which manifestly refers to the attainment of divine status that is promised to the souls of those who are bonis . . . studiis atque artibus expolitos, in the phrasing of the previous fragment of the Consolatio.82 It may be worth recalling that Cicero had already developed this theme a long time before his daughter’s death: in the Somnium Scipionis the way to heaven is open not merely to great statesmen, but also to artists and scholars.83 Cicero’s reference to general customs and beliefs probably implies the acceptance of the Stoic doctrine of the koinai ennoiai,84 but it is clear that what he is really interested in is not so much objective reality as the recognition of the generality of people, from which the deification and immortality of Tullia is made to depend. omnium optimam doctissimam adprobantibus dis immortalibus ipsis in eorum coetu locatam ad opinionem omnium mortalium consecrabo. 77 Menand. Rhet. III 414, 23–7 Spengel. 78 The one parallel that can be quoted is found in a writing by the late rhetorician Himerius, who expresses his will to make his dead son immortal: Himer. or. 8.23, 73, 207–16 Colonna. Cf. Setaioli 2001a, 64–5. 79 A similar attitude can be found in the Epitaphios attributed to Demosthenes: [Dem.] 60.34. Cf. Setaioli 2001a, 35. 80 For example Vitelli 1977, 40–1. We believe Boyancé 1944, 180–1 to be closer to the truth. 81 See Boyancé 1937; Cumont 1942 (esp. ch. IV). On the related theme of poetry as source of immortality cf. Setaioli 1995a, 63–5. 82 Cic. consol. F 22 Vitelli (cf. note 51). 83 Cic. somn. Scip. 18: quod docti homines nervis imitati atque cantibus aperuerunt sibi reditum in hunc locum, sicut alii qui praestantibus ingeniis in vita humana divina studia coluerunt. 84 The doubt expressed by Benkner 1914, 7 is probably groundless. Cicero undoubtedly refers to this doctrine to support the immortality of the soul in the part of the first book of the Tusculanae disputationes devoted to prove this point: Cic. Tusc. 1.27–30; 36.

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As always, Cicero cannot really renounce the need for such recognition. But in this way the concept of the immortality of the soul draws dangerously near the idea of the survival of fame after death—a theme strongly stressed and almost ubiquitous in Cicero’s works. The key to the correct interpretation of this text is provided by Cicero himself; the object of his efforts to promote Tullia’s apotheosis is clearly stated: he aims to succeed in having everyone accept and recognize her divine status: ad opinionem omnium mortalium. We have already mentioned Cicero’s intention to build a temple (fanum) to honor his deified daughter, as revealed by numerous letters he wrote after her death.85 A similar intention is expressed in several ancient texts,86 but what is peculiar to Cicero is his concern with what will happen after his own death: cum non ero.87 Rather than hoping to be reunited with his daughter, he is afraid that people may forget Tullia, when he is not there to prevent this from happening. Immortality appears to depend solely on the memory of those who survived.88 This of course implies that even in his most earnest effort to supply the thesis of the immortality of the soul with a somewhat solid basis Cicero is not able to go beyond an attitude of mere voluntarism. He does his best to convince himself and the others that his daughter survives after death. It is hardly an exaggeration to assert that this amounts to a potentially religious need, which, however, does not develop into fervent faith. Surely the fragments of the Consolatio do not reveal the least trace of the negative instance of the ‘Socratic alternative’, that of total annihilation after death, which never altogether disappears in his other writings. He resorts to all possible arguments in favour of the immortality of the soul, with no great care for philosophical consistency. He strives to convince himself more than anybody else; as he says himself in the Tusculanae 85

Cf. Boyancé 1944; Shackleton Bailey 1966, 404–13; Lepage 1976. With no need to mention Simonides’ bōmos d’ho taphos, parallels can be found in funerary inscriptions (e.g. CE 1551e.1–2: templa viri pietas fecit p[ro] munere magno | Pomptillae: meruit [femi]na casta coli). Cf. Lattimore 1942, 102; Boyancé 1937, 331–4. Cicero himself (Att. 12.18.1) testifies that some consolatory writers encouraged the building of temples to honor the dead. Menand. Rhet. III 414, 23–7 Spengel recommends the making of cultic images of the dead. In view of this the remark of Shackleton Bailey 1966, 404 n. 1 (‘who put this idea into Cicero’s head there is no telling’) cannot but appear rather startling. 87 Cic. Att. 12.18.1. Cf. note 15 and text to notes 15–17. 88 This is a rather common idea in funerary inscriptions and in consolatory writings. Cf. Setaioli 2001a, 63–5. 86

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disputationes,89 in the Consolatio he resorts to all means at his disposal to console himself; but the letter to Atticus previously quoted proves that he could not imagine a real and objective immortality which could nurture man’s hope to be reunited with his loved ones after death. He cannot make his own the attitude he lends to his Cato at the end of the De senectute—who, it should not be forgotten, places the hope of being reunited with his son after death within the frame of the positive instance of the persisting ‘Socratic alternative’, which at least disappears in the Consolatio. In conclusion, Cicero’s attitude concerning the fate of the soul after death never goes beyond a sentimental leaning: he longs for immortality, but harbours no unquestioning faith in it. When he is touched in his own paternal feelings he makes an earnest effort to convince himself and the others that his daughter survives after death. If we compare the Consolatio with the consolatory letters he wrote to some bereaved correspondents of his,90 we realize that he tries to convince himself that her fate is different from that of all the others. It is a rhetorical rather than philosophical attempt, which in no way affects the deep sincerity of the author.

SENECA AGAINST THE EVIL OF DEATH Though Seneca’s attitude to death and the fate of the soul constitutes one of the problems most hotly debated by scholars,91 it is at least clear that, like Cicero, he is mainly concerned with proving that death is no evil. His multifarious, and often discordant, statements become consistent when they are seen in the light of this purpose, one of the main goals of his moral adhortatio. We should also never lose sight of the fact that Seneca was, or meant to be, a consistent Stoic, whereas Cicero’s Academic leanings did not prevent him from eclectically borrowing doctrines and ideas suiting his goals wherever he could find them. 89 Cic. Tusc. 3.76 (= consol. F 16 Vitelli): erat enim in tumore animus et omnis in eo temptabatur curatio. 90 See text to notes 18–20. 91 Traina 1987, 90 rightly remarks that the relevant bibliography is as extensive as it is inconclusive.

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It is well known that for Seneca death, and particularly voluntary death—suicide—, is the guarantee of man’s freedom. This is not the place for a detailed discussion of this truly crucial Senecan idea,92 but the texts in which death is presented as the only remedy against the supplicium of earthly life should retain our attention. In a passage of the Consolatio ad Polybium Seneca clearly hints at the same mystical doctrines presenting life as a punishment for the soul, which we have already encountered,93 as made clear by his reference to ‘those who saw most deeply into the truth’ and by his Platonizing language.94 The same idea is found in the Consolatio ad Marciam,95 but the whole context makes it clear that the ‘punishment’ of the soul does not consist in being severed from higher, noetic entities, but rather in the material worries and hardships of earthly life.96 Seneca’s third Consolatio, addressed to his own mother, provides a clear confirmation: only the body is liable to the supplicia, whereas the soul is way above them.97 It is clear, then, that in Seneca, as in Cicero, the idea that earthly life is a punishment for the soul has been detached from its philosophical background, which, to be consistent, had to make provision for reincarnation, since birth in the body could be a punishment only of faults incurred in a previous life; and, in fact, there is no hint at reincarnation in any of Seneca’s Consolations. This further provides the proper clue for the correct interpretation of the frequent Platonizing expressions with which Seneca describes the relationship between the body and the soul. The former is called the burden, the chain, the veil, the temporary abode, the cage, and the prison of the soul, or downright the ‘punishment’ (poena)98 of the soul. 92

I may refer to the literature quoted in Setaioli 2000, 277 n. 17. See above, text to notes 60–6. 94 Sen. Pol. 9.6: si velis credere altius veritatem intuentibus, omnis vita supplicium est. In hoc profundum inquietumque proiecti mare, alternis aestibus reciprocum et modo adlevans nos subitis incrementis, modo maioribus damnis deferens adsidueque iactans, numquam stabili consistimus loco, pendemus et fluctuamur et alter in alterum inlidimur et aliquando naufragium facimus, semper timemus; in hoc tam procelloso et ad omnes tempestates exposito mari navigantibus nullus portus nisi mortis est. 95 Sen. Marc. 20.2: haec (mors) est, inquam, quae efficit ut nasci non sit supplicium. 96 Tyranny is one of the most prominent of these worries: cf. Marc. 20.3. This is a current theme in the Consolatio ad Marciam (19.4) and elsewhere (e.g. ep. 91.21). 97 Sen. Helv. 11.7: corpusculum hoc, custodia et vinculum animi, huc atque illuc iactatur; in hoc supplicia, in hoc morbi exercentur: animus quidem ipse sacer et aeternus est et cui non possit inici manus. Cf. ep. 24.17. 98 Sen. ep. 65.16: corpus hoc animi pondus et poena est. Cf. besides Sen. ep. 24.17–18, 26.12, 65.16, 102.26; Marc. 24.5 (burden); Marc. 24.5; Pol. 9.8; Helv. 11.7; ep. 65.21; nat. 93

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These are undoubtedly Platonic ideas, but, as we have already hinted, in Seneca a material meaning, more in keeping with Stoic monism, tends to superimpose itself upon the metaphysical import of the original conception, as confirmed by Seneca’s own statement that the supposed ‘punishment’ ends up affecting the body rather than the soul. Though at times this brings about a rather incongruous philosophical blend,99 we shall see that Seneca’s Stoicism is not basically impaired by this undeniable Platonizing strand. In order to achieve his goal of freeing his public from the fear of death, Seneca must of course, first of all, do away with the terrors of the Hades of poetry and mythology.100 Once more, he agrees with Cicero, who, as we have seen, resorted to these only for reasons of political expediency, but did not believe in their reality.101 Like Cicero,102 he purports to have nothing but contempt for the Epicurean rigmarole on the vanity of afterlife terrors,103 because no one in his right mind would believe in, and be scared by, such fantastic tales. In fact, though Seneca at times adopts an ‘Epicurean’ position by denying the very idea of the survival of the soul together with the terrors of Hades, he goes beyond Epicurus—and Lucretius—in that he is fully aware that even when we are convinced that these terrors are vain fictions we will nevertheless be anguished at the thought of total annihilation.104 We may indeed distinguish two strands which reappear time and again in Seneca’s writings: one may be conventionally called ‘Epicurean’, in the sense that death is assumed to bring about total annihilation105—which entails that the dead are no more liable to be affected by any evil; in this connection Seneca also revalues folkloric 1 pr. 12 (chain or fetters); Marc. 25.1 (veil or garment); ep. 120.14 (temporary abode); ep. 88.34 (cage); Pol. 9.3; Helv. 11.7; ep. 79.12; cf. 76.25 (prison). 99 e.g. Sen. ep. 120.14: habebat perfectum animum et ad summam sui adductum, supra quam nihil est nisi mens dei, ex quo pars et in hoc pectus mortale defluxit, quod numquam magis divinum est quam ubi mortalitatem suam cogitat et scit in hoc natum hominem, ut vita defungeretur, nec domum esse hoc corpus sed hospitium, et quidem breve hospitium, quod relinquendum est ubi te gravem esse hospiti videas. Platonic ideas mix with the apology of suicide, which Plato condemns. 100 e.g. Sen. Marc. 19.4; ira 2.35.2; ep. 82.16. 101 See text to notes 3–7. 102 Cic. Tusc. 1.10–11, 48; nat. deor. 2.5 (cf. note 7). 103 Sen. ep. 24.18. 104 Sen. ep. 82.16: etiam cum persuaseris istas fabulas esse nec quicquam defunctis superesse quod timeant, subit alius metus: aeque enim timent ne apud inferos sint quam ne nusquam. 105 e.g. Sen. ep. 36.9; 54.4; Troad. 397; fr. 28 Haase = 63a Vottero.

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themes antedating Epicurus, though frequently incorporated into Epicureanism, such as the idea that death brings us back to our state before birth: nonexistence.106 This of course denies the existence of metaphysical entities, in keeping with Stoic monism, but also with Epicurean materialism. The other strand may be identified with the ‘Socratic alternative’: death is either total annihilation or the passage to a new and better life.107 This is more comprehensive, in that it includes the first strain; but its real point is that death is no evil in either case. As this is what Seneca is striving to prove, there is no real contradiction between the standpoints we have just illustrated and a text in which Seneca incidentally asserts the immortality of the soul on the basis of the doctrine of the koinai ennoiai,108 just as Cicero had done a century before.109 Actually, Seneca—again like Cicero, in his works other than the Consolatio—never steps out of the bounds defined by the ‘Socratic alternative’, which is formulated time and again in his writings:110 mors quid est? aut finis aut transitus.111 The positive instance of the Cf. e.g. Sen. Marc. 19.5: mors dolorum omnium exsolutio est et finis ultra quem mala nostra non exeunt, quae nos in illam tranquillitatem in qua antequam nasceremur iacuimus reponit. Si mortuorum aliquis miseretur, et non natorum misereatur; id enim potest aut bonum aut malum esse quod aliquid est; quod vero ipsum nihil est et omnia in nihilum redigit, nulli nos fortunae tradit . . . nec potest miser esse qui nullus est. The same idea is expressed—in the frame of the negative instance of the ‘Socratic alternative’—at Pol. 9.2. It is older than Epicureanism, as it appears in Bion of Borysthenes, F 67 Kindstrand, and also in Eurip. Troad. 636. It was accepted by Epicureanism, as shown by Lucr. 3.832–42; Philod. de morte 24.5. Cf. Epic. ad Menoec. 125; rat. sent. 2; but it had become a commonplace: it is repeatedly found in Cicero too: Tusc. 1.13. 91; fin. 1.49; Lael. 14 (note 33). In Seneca again at ep. 54.4–5; 65.24; 77.11. The theme had become a consolatory commonplace: cf. e.g. [Plut] ad Apollon. 15; 109EF. 107 Cf. e.g. Sen. ep. 24.18: mors nos aut consumit aut exuit; emissis meliora restant onere detracto, consumptis nihil restat, bona pariter malaque summota sunt. 108 Sen. ep. 117.6: multum dare solemus praesumptioni omnium hominum et apud nos veritatis argumentum est aliquid omnibus videri; tamquam deos esse inter alia hoc colligimus, quod omnibus insita de dis opinio est nec ulla gens umquam est adeo extra leges moresque proiecta ut non aliquos deos credat. Cum de animarum aeternitate disserimus, non leve momentum apud nos habet consensus hominum aut timentium inferos aut colentium. On this passage see Cumont 1949, 165; Hoven 1971, 124–5; Scarpat 1970, 293 and n. 34. 109 Cf. text to note 84. There are clear similarities between Sen. ep. 117.6 and Cic. Tusc. 1.27–30; 36. 110 e.g. Sen. ep. 24.18; 65.24; 71.16; 76.25; 93.9–10; 99.29; Pol. 5.1–2; 9.2–3. 111 Sen. prov. 6.6. 106

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‘Socratic alternative’, for Seneca as well as for Socrates himself in Plato’s Apology, and for Cicero in his writings other than the Consolatio, cannot be but an afterlife better than earthly existence.112 At times, as we shall see, Seneca appears to be carried away by this ‘beautiful dream’, but a sobering afterthought invariably brings him back to the reality of Socrates’ unsolved dilemma. He never unreservedly endorses the thesis of the immortality of the soul. We have seen that there is no hint at the doctrine of reincarnation even in Seneca’s consolatory writings, where the idea that earthly life is a punishment for the soul would have required its acceptance in order to sketch a philosophically consistent picture.113 Some scholars have maintained that Seneca did accept reincarnation, on the basis of a text from the Epistulae morales114 which in reality refers to an orthodox Stoic idea, even though the language may sound vaguely Lucretian. In fact, it may remind us of the expressions Seneca uses to describe the attitude toward death of his Epicurean friend Bassus, who referred to the cycle of matter, eternally shaping bodies bound to be dissolved and reformed anew.115 But in the passage from which Seneca’s acceptance of reincarnation has been wrongly assumed he is clearly referring to the Stoic doctrine of apokatastasis or palingenesia—the reappearance, in a new cosmic cycle, of individuals corresponding to those that existed in the previous one.116 Another reference to the same doctrine, again with a Lucretian ring in the language, may be found in another text that might remind us of

112

Sen. ep. 24.18; 71.16; 76.25. Cf. Cic. Tusc. 1.118; sen. 66–7. See text to notes 93–98. 114 Sen. ep. 36.10: quod si tanta cupiditas te longioris aevi tenet, cogita nihil eorum quae ab oculis abeunt et in rerum naturam, ex qua prodierunt ac mox processura sunt, reconduntur consumi: desinunt ista, non pereunt, et mors, quam pertimescimus et recusamus, intermittit vitam, non eripit; veniet iterum qui nos in lucem reponat dies, quem multi recusarent nisi oblitos reduceret. Motto 1955, 188 n. 35 believes this passage to prove Seneca’s acceptance of reincarnation. Mazzoli 1967, 231 thinks the reference to be to the palingenesia of Pythagoreanism and to prove the immortality of the soul (but at note 66 more correctly suggests that it may hint at the apokatastasis of Stoicism). Benoit 1948, 42–3 is quite right in asserting that ep. 108 proves that Seneca never believed in reincarnation, in spite of the enthusiasm for Pythagoreanism he went through in his youth. 115 See Sen. ep. 30.11: sed nunc supervacuum est naturae causam agere, quae non aliam voluit legem nostram esse quam suam: quidquid composuit resolvit, et quidquid resolvit componit iterum. 116 See SVF II 623. As in Sen. ep. 36.9, in this Chrysippus fragment the first person plural is employed (nos  hēmas). 113

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Bassus’ Epicurean conception, if the mention of God’s providential plan did not assure us that we are firmly on Stoic ground.117 There is no doubt, however, that the Epicurean doctrine of the eternal aggregation and dissolution of matter did bear some resemblance to the Stoic theory of apokatastasis. If a Platonizing element can be detected in Seneca’s formulation of this idea, it should be seen in his reference to the ‘forgetfulness’ of those who accept to return to life: quem multi recusarent, nisi oblitos reduceret.118 If oblitos (obviously implying oblivion of a former life) is taken as a reference to the interruption of consciousness between two successive existences,119 it becomes difficult to explain Seneca’s recusarent, which seems to imply that those who return to life have a freedom of choice, of which they would avail themselves except for their ‘forgetfulness’, as it is the case in well-known Platonizing conceptions.120 Seneca is probably influenced by these, as can be gathered from a further passage in which oblivion of a former life is expressly mentioned and the body is described as the cage of the soul.121 We should not forget, however, that the Stoics debated whether an individual of a new cosmic cycle and the one corresponding to him in the preceding cycle were to be conceived as one and the same or not,122 and it appears that the answer varied in time.123 The problem of the continuity or interruption of their consciousness we encounter in Seneca may appear as the natural development of this dispute, even though a Platonizing element is apparent in his formulation. There can be no doubt, however, that the ‘forgetfulness’ or oblivion of those who return to life is Seneca’s way of emphasizing the interruption of consciousness. There can be no doubt, then, that the end of the 117 Sen. ep. 71.14: nobis solvi perire est; proxima enim intuemur . . . alioqui fortius finem sui suorumque pateretur, si speraret, omnia illa, sic vitam mortemque per vices ire et composita dissolvi, dissoluta componi, in hoc opere aeternam artem cuncta temperantis dei verti. A further reference to the Stoic doctrine of apokatastasis is probably to be seen at ep. 65.20: semel haec mihi videnda sint an saepe nascendum. 118 Sen. ep. 36.10 (see note 114). 119 In Lucretian terms, the interruption of the repetentia nostri (Lucr. 3.851). 120 For a detailed discussion of these I refer to Setaioli 1995b, 52–62. 121 Sen. ep. 88.34: quomodo libertate sua usurus cum ex hac effugerit cavea; an obliviscatur priorum et illinc nosse se incipiat unde corpori abductus in sublime secessit. Doignon 1984, 254–6 has misunderstood this passage. Cf. Setaioli 2000, 293 n. 105. 122 SVF II 627. 123 Chrysippus asserted their complete identity (SVF II 624); later they were assumed to be ‘undistinguishable’, or ‘slightly different’, and therefore not the same (SVF II 626).

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cosmic cycle is the limit of the individual’s conservation and survival. This is again in agreement with orthodox Stoicism: Cleanthes believed that the soul survived until the end of the cycle, whereas Chrysippus accorded this privilege only to the souls of the wise.124

LIMITS TO THE AFTERLIFE The most lively description of the fate of the soul after death to be found in Seneca—the final pages of the Consolatio ad Marciam, whose closeness to Cicero’s Somnium Scipionis is unanimously recognized125—refers precisely to this doctrine of Chrysippus’: the souls of Metilius, Marcia’s son, of his grandfather Cremutius Cordus, and of the great and wise men surrounding them are the only ones that will survive until the conflagration marking the end of the cosmic cycle.126 In this writing there are numerous Platonizing elements:127 for example, the body is described as the burden of the soul, which must wage an unceasing fight with it;128 and as in Plato the soul is conceived as divine129 and as man’s real self;130 but we have already seen that this does not affect Seneca’s basic Stoic orthodoxy.131

124

See SVF I 522; II 811. e.g. by Badstübner 1901, 1–18; Rogge 1921, 39; Cumont 1949, 164–70; Abel 1964, 240; Mazzoli 1967, 218 and n. 41; Mazzoli 1984, 974; Johann 1968, 125; Bocciolini Palagi 1979, 165 and n. 1; Manning 1981, 133; 145. 126 Sen. Marc. 23.1; 24.5–26.7. The final words of the Consolatio (26.6–7) leave no doubt: cum tempus advenerit quo se mundus renovaturus extinguat . . . omni flagrante materia uno igni quidquid nunc ex disposito lucet ardebit. Nos quoque felices animae et aeterna sortitae, cum deo visum erit iterum ista moliri, labentibus cunctis et ipsae parva ruinae ingentis accessio in antiqua elementa vertemur. Manning 1981, 135; 152 is wrong in stating that it cannot be determined whether Seneca follows Cleanthes or Chrysippus. Clearly, Seneca accepts the latter’s doctrine. 127 Plato’s Phaedo is indeed quoted at Marc. 23.2. 128 Sen. Marc. 24.5. 129 Sen. Marc. 23.1; 24.5. 130 Sen. Marc. 24.5; 25.1. Cf. Plat. Alcib. I 130a–c; Phaedo 115c–e; [Plat.] Axioch. 365e. Cf. also Sen. ep. 24.17; 65.21; 102.22, 27; 120.14. 131 It may be worthwhile to recall that the ancients themselves were aware of the mixing of Stoic and Platonizing elements in such descriptions. The Bern scholiast, commenting on Lucan’s picture of the survival of Pompey’s soul, which is closely related to Seneca’s description in the Consolatio ad Marciam, remarks: mixtum dogma cum Platonico Stoicum (Comm. Bern. in Lucan. 9.6). 125

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The most remarkable of these elements is probably Seneca’s mention of the necessity of a period of purgation in the space above the earth but below the heavenly spheres before the souls can be admitted to heavenly bliss,132 although in Metilius’ case this period will be brief, since he died young and his soul had no time to defile itself deeply through contact with matter.133 This was probably a topos typical of consolatory writings, as suggested by its presence in Plutarch’s Consolatio ad uxorem;134 but the idea of purgation after death also appears in Cicero’s Somnium Scipionis135 and in the sixth book of the Aeneid.136 The idea of the need for purgation137 obviously implies a negative conception of the body and of matter; it is hardly surprising that no appropriate parallel can be found in the Stoic tradition. This is the only unquestionable trace of retribution for faults incurred during earthly life that can be found in Seneca. Significantly, it occurs in a Consolation, which is also the oldest of his preserved writings. Like the younger Scipio in Cicero’s Somnium Scipionis, Metilius is received and instructed in the heavens by his grandfather, who dwells in the high spheres,138 possibly in the Milky Way, like the souls of the blessed in Cicero.139 Also like the younger Scipio, Metilius looks down toward the earth, but due to the changed political situation he addresses his interest to his surviving loved ones,140 rather than to the Roman state. Cremutius’ final words141 refer to Chrysippus’ doctrine: the souls of the wise survive only until the end of the cosmic cycle. His statement, however, seems to be self-contradictory. At the same time as he is 132 Sen. Marc. 25.1: paulumque supra nos commoratus, dum expurgatur et inhaerentia vitia situmque omnem mortalis aevi excutit . . . 133 Sen. Marc. 23.1 (on those who die young): facilius quidquid est illud obsoleti inlitique eluunt. 134 Plut. ad uxor. 10.611EF. 135 Cic. somn. Scip. 29. 136 Verg. Aen. 6.739–42. 137 For this idea see the detailed treatment in Setaioli 1995b, 207–37, with the literature quoted and discussed. 138 See Sen. Marc. 25.1: ad excelsa sublatus is clearly opposed to the lower region (supra nos) in which Metilius must go through his purgation. Cf. Marc. 26.1: arx caelestis. Seneca however does not specify: cf. Pol. 9.8 locum, quisquis ille est, qui solutas vinculis animas beato recipit sinu. 139 Cic. somn. Scip. 16. 140 Sen. Marc. 25.2–3. 141 Sen. Marc. 26.7 (see note 126).

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saying that those souls will dissolve into the whole, he asserts that their lot is eternity: aeterna sortitae. In order to make this statement consistent, the adjective aeternus must be understood in a relative sense: as enduring one whole cosmic cycle.142 Possible instances of this meaning of the word can indeed be adduced;143 but there are many more Senecan texts in which the same adjective is used in reference to the human soul apparently with no such limitation,144 including a passage from the Consolatio ad Marciam coming shortly before the one we are discussing.145 The possibility that Seneca’s sentimental longing for an unlimited immortality of the soul may have superimposed itself upon orthodox Stoic doctrine cannot therefore be ruled out. This may have been favoured also by the model Seneca is obviously following in this part of the Consolatio ad Marciam, and also in some letters to Lucilius:146 the Somnium Scipionis. In the final analysis, however, this sentimental longing does not entail a breach in Seneca’s orthodox Stoicism. As he tells us in a letter, at the end of each cosmic cycle all divine entities are dissolved into the one cosmic godhead.147 No doubt, this is also the fate of those particles of God that are human souls. This way the inevitable interruption of their consciousness is confirmed. As already hinted, some elements of the description of afterlife bliss at the end of the Consolatio ad Marciam are paralleled in other Senecan texts. One is the light eternally surrounding the souls of the blessed,148 which is opposed to the darkness of life in the body.149 Seneca is clearly taking up the Platonic image of darkness 142

As done, e.g. by Benoit 1948, 43 n. 26; Hoven 1971, 45 n. 5; 110 n. 7; 120. Cf. Philippson 1941, 20 and n. 2; 29; 32; 36. As he remarks, in Cicero sempiternus (nat. deor. 2.16), aeternus (nat. deor. 2.36) and aeternitas (nat. deor. 2.43; 51) are referred to one cosmic cycle. 144 As remarked by Benoit 1948, 43; Hoven 1971, 120; Manning 1981, 152. None of these scholars mentions the passage of the Consolatio ad Marciam quoted in the following note. 145 Sen. Marc. 24.5: ipse quidem aeternus meliorisque nunc status est . . . illum aeterna quies manet. 146 e.g. Sen. ep. 86; 102. In the first letter the connection is guaranteed by the figure of Scipio, in the second by the opening image of the dream (102.2 tam bellum somnium). 147 Sen. ep. 9.16: resoluto mundo et dis in unum confusis . . . (Iuppiter) acquiescit sibi cogitationibus suis traditus. 148 Sen. Marc. 25.2; 26.3. 149 Sen. Marc. 24.5; cf. Pol. 9.8; ep. 71.16; 79.12; 102.28. Cf. also the description of Seneca’s nephew: Lucan. 9.11–14. 143

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(cave, prison, grave) connected with the state of the embodied souls, as opposed to the light surrounding them when they are finally freed. It must be remarked, however, that what Seneca has in mind is no transcendent, noetic light: Stoic monism superimposes itself upon Platonic dualism; there can be no doubt that for Seneca the light in which the souls of the blessed are immersed comes from the stars surrounding them.150 In this, again, Seneca is following Cicero’s Somnium Scipionis;151 but it is also a clear reminder of the limits which his ‘Platonism’ never exceeds. In a passage of the important letter in which Seneca describes the ‘beautiful dream’ of immortality he says that thanks to this otherworldly life we shall be able to grasp the secrets of nature (naturae arcana) that the darkness of the earthly world did not permit us to penetrate.152 The very same expression (arcana naturae) also appears in the final scene of the Consolatio ad Marciam, to describe the secrets of the universe that are revealed to Metilius under his grandfather’s guidance.153 In the same way, Cremutius himself, as a historian, is no more restricted to a short period of time or to a small-scale geographic environment, but is able to grasp the whole cycle of past, present, and future.154 It is immediately evident that the object of this contemplation of the blessed are not transcendent realities, such as Platonic ideas, but rather the marvels and the secrets of our own universe, which, according to the Stoics, is no doubt divine, but also tangible and material. It is the same universe that we try to investigate during our lifetime, though only after death shall we be able to grasp and comprehend it in its entirety;155 and the time Cremutius’ soul

150 Sen. Marc. 25.2: nepotem suum . . . adplicat sibi nova luce gaudentem et vicinorum siderum meatus docet; and, even more clearly, ep. 102.28: imaginare tecum quantus ille sit fulgor tot sideribus inter se lumen miscentibus. 151 Cic. somn. Scip. 16: erat autem is splendidissimo candore inter flammas circus elucens . . . erant autem eae stellae quas numquam ex hoc loco vidimus. 152 Sen. ep. 102.28: aliquando naturae arcana retegentur, discutietur illa caligo et lux undique clara percutiet. 153 Sen. Marc. 25.2: ille nepotem suum . . . vicinorum siderum meatus docet, nec ex coniectura sed ex vero peritus in arcana naturae libens ducit. 154 Sen. Marc. 26.5: iuvabat unius me saeculi facta componere in parte ultima mundi et inter paucissimos gesta: tot saecula, tot aetatium contextum, seriem, quidquid annorum est, licet visere; licet surrectura, licet ruitura regna prospicere et magnarum urbium lapsus et maris novos cursus. 155 Cf. also, e.g. Pol. 9.3: divina vero, quorum rationem tam diu frustra quaesierat, propius intuetur.

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ranges over from his heavenly abode is not transcendent eternity, but clearly the scene of the history of the world.

CONTEMPLATION OF THE UNIVERSE AND THE IRRELEVANCE OF IMMORTALITY It is interesting to observe that the theme of the contemplation of the cosmos—one of Seneca’s most typical—reappears only once in unquestioned connection with afterlife outside the Consolatio ad Marciam, and—what’s more—in another consolatory writing: the Consolatio ad Polybium.156 Elsewhere it refers to the contemplation of the beauty and secrets of the cosmos the wise carry out during their earthly lifetime, even though it is often accompanied by the remark that this is nothing but an anticipation of their activity in the next life, in which it will no more be hindered in any way.157 As in the final description of the Consolatio ad Marciam the objects of this earthly contemplation are the cosmos and the time of history.158 Seneca’s position can once more be elucidated through a comparison with Cicero.159 His reference to time seems to be peculiar to him; but in two works of Cicero’s which present numerous similarities with Seneca’s thought on the fate of the soul, namely the Tusculanae disputationes and the Somnium Scipionis, we find the idea that the contemplation of nature during earthly life will make the soul’s ascent to heaven, where it will be free to pursue this object with no hindrances, quicker and easier.160 As in Seneca, the wise do not contemplate transcendent realities, but this very universe of which we are part. 156 Besides the passage quoted in the preceding note, cf. also Sen. Pol. 9.8: omniaque rerum naturae bona cum summa voluptae perspicit. 157 Sen. Helv. 11.6: quandoque emissus fuerit ad summa emicaturus; interim . . . celeri et volucri cogitatione divina perlustrat; ep. 79.12 erit autem illic antequam hac custodia exsolvatur. More indirectly at Helv. 8.6; 20.2; ep. 65.16, 20; 102.2, 20–22; nat. 3 pr. 18. Cf. Doignon 1984, 255–7. 158 Sen. Helv. 8.6; ep. 65.16, 20; 79.12; nat. 3 pr. 18 (cosmos); brev. 14.1–5; ep. 102.2 (time); Helv. 11.6–7; 20.2; ep. 102.21–2 (both). 159 Doignon 1984, l. c. compares Cic. leg. 1.61 and Tusc. 5.69–70. The two passages quoted in the following note appear to me to be even more important. 160 Cic. Tusc. 1.44–7; somn. Scip. 29: idque ocius faciet, si iam tum cum erit inclusus in corpore, eminebit foras, et ea quae extra erunt contemplans quam maxime se a corpore abstrahet; cf. 20.

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This drive of the soul toward the contemplation of heavenly realities and its detachment from the material bonds of the body may or may not be inherited from Posidonius; undoubtedly, however, it is one of Seneca’s most deeply felt ideas, which often is expressed in vibrantly religious tones.161 Sometimes these tones are undeniably Platonic, as in the letter in which Seneca asserts that the soul, though united with the body, remains nevertheless in heaven with its better part, just as the sun, though illuminating the earth, remains in the sky.162 The same image reappears over three centuries later in a Roman Neoplatonist: Macrobius.163 Similar ideas may be found in Plotinus,164 and—with striking similarities with Seneca—in his pupil Porphyry.165 In Porphyry, however, the image is immediately followed by the pointed remark that the soul is a transcendent entity, which makes it radically different from the sun or any other source of material light. Seneca, by contrast, often asserts that the soul is akin to the cosmos, or even its most magnificent part, and for this reason it tends to investigate higher realities.166 This, again, should warn us against attributing to Seneca a type of Platonic dualism opposing spirit and matter. When everything is said and done, it must be recognized that he basically sticks to the monistic positions of his own philosophical school: Stoicism. In the final analysis, the contemplation of nature and the cosmos, for Seneca, can hardly be distinguished from scientific research. In the flight of his fancy, it may anticipate the activity of the blessed in afterlife, but, in a more sobering attitude, it is more often seen as carried out during earthly life, and is addressed to the whole realm of nature, including even the inquiry concerning the fate of the soul after

161

See the masterful treatment by Mazzoli 1967. Sen. ep. 41.5: (animus) maiore sui parte illic est unde descendit. Quemadmodum radii solis contingunt quidem terram sed ibi sunt unde mittuntur, sic animus magnus ac sacer . . . conversatur quidem nobiscum, sed haeret origini suae; illinc pendet, illuc spectat ac nititur, nostris tamquam melior interest. Cf. also ep. 65.18; ben. 3.20.1. 163 Macr. in somn. Scip. 1.21.34: sicut solem in terris esse dicere solemus, cuius radius advenit et recedit, ita animorum origo caelestis est, sed lege temporalis hospitalitatis hic exulat. Minucius Felix (Oct. 32.7–9) had already transferred the image to God. 164 Plot. 4.3.22, 1–7. See Setaioli 1995b, 29 n. 164, with more Neoplatonic texts and bibliography. 165 Porph. fr. 261F, pp. 288–9 Smith. 166 e.g. Sen. Helv. 8.4; 6; nat. 1 pr. 12. 162

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death.167 He reports the attitude of Julius Canus, who, after being condemned by Caligula, planned to use his own death as a scientific experiment enabling him to learn for sure about the fate of the soul: vos quaeritis an immortales animae sint: ego iam sciam.168 It should not escape us, however, that at the same time as he praises Julius Canus and calls him worthy of eternal life, he seems to conceive of this only as stemming from the memory of the survivors, and devoid of any metaphysical or ontological reality.169 We cannot help being reminded of Cicero’s attitude to Tullia, whose survival, in the final analysis, depended on her father’s efforts to keep her memory alive— in spite of his attempts to convince himself of her objectively real immortality. The two texts in which the theme of the drive of the soul toward higher realities is developed in greatest detail can be found in the Naturales quaestiones and in the De brevitate vitae. In the preface to the first book of the Naturales quaestiones not only every single theme of the final description in the Consolatio ad Marciam is taken up, but the influence of Cicero’s Somnium Scipionis can be as clearly recognized as in that Consolation. All those themes, however, are transferred from the picture of a fantastic afterlife to the inebriating state of mind of those who contemplate the cosmos during earthly life: their soul roams through the stars;170 it looks down to earth;171 it goes back to its own origin;172 it can observe all the phenomaena of the cosmos at close range;173 it finally learns what it had long investigated.174 The conclusion, therefore, does not ring unexpected: all this is tantamount to overcoming our mortal state.175 Through the linguistic and stylistic means of metaphorical expression176 everything is transferred to the

167

Sen. ep. 65.20; 82.6; 102.2; brev. 19.1; ot. 5.5. Sen. tranq. 14.8. 169 Sen. tranq. 14.10: ecce animus aeternitate dignus . . . dabimus te in omnem memoriam. Seneca is aware of his ability to bestow immortality through his own writings: cf. ep. 21.5. Immortality through memory also at Pol. 18.2; ep. 93.4; 102.30. 170 Sen. nat. 1 pr. 7: inter sidera vagantem. 171 Sen. nat. 1 pr. 8–11. 172 Sen. nat. 1 pr. 12: in originem redit. 173 Sen. nat. 1 pr. 12. 174 Sen. nat. 1 pr. 13: demum discit quod diu quaesiit. 175 Sen. nat. 1 pr. 17: haec inspicere, haec discere, his incubare, nonne transilire est mortalitatem suam . . . ? (cf. 13: domicilii prioris angustias). 176 Cf. the masterful treatment by Mazzoli 1984, 974–5. 168

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level of real, earthly experience: the living wise man’s contemplation is not so much a prefiguration of a future activity in an afterlife as it is its equivalent in our life and in our world, inevitably pushing the eschatological picture to the background. The soul’s drive toward higher realities corresponds to heavenly immortality; the purification from vices obtained through it is the equivalent of the purgation after death described in the Consolatio ad Marciam;177 the asceticism through which the wise man’s soul is freed from the burden of material yearnings ethically corresponds to the soul’s physical lightness, which makes it ascend to heaven after death.178 This interpretation is confirmed by the De brevitate vitae.179 A crucial passage develops a theme we have already encountered: the wise man is lord of the totality of time and can communicate with all great souls. Thus he overcomes his mortality, and actually changes it to immortality. Clearly, the free ranging of the wise man’s soul through the whole series of time is not so much the anticipation as it is the equivalent of, and the substitute for, eschatological immortality. Seneca’s rationalism is apparent in this approach. If Cicero had already substituted the resurrection of Plato’s Er of Pamphylia through the dream of his own Scipio, Seneca proceeds beyond. Both in the Consolation to Marcia and in the letter on the ‘beautiful dream’ of immortality he develops the cherished picture of a blessed afterlife by appealing to imagination. Puta itaque, he says to Marcia.180 So, all the beautiful description is only the bereaved mother’s imagination. Only at the end, in the very last words of the writing (‘how happy is your son, Marcia, who already knows these realities!’),181 it is subreptitiously 177 Cf. Sen. nat. 1 pr. 11: si secum minimum ex corpore tulit, si sordidum omne detersit. Cf. also ep. 79.12 erit autem illic . . . cum vitia disiecerit purusque et levis in cogitationes divinas emicuerit. 178 Sen. nat. 1 pr. 11: expeditus levisque et contentus modico emicuit. The ascent of the soul after death due to its physical lightness is an idea accepted by Sen. Pol. 9.8; Helv. 11.6; ep. 57.8. It is a Stoic doctrine (cf. SVF II 812) fully developed by Cicero in a famous passage (Tusc. 1.42–3). Cf. above, text to note 74. 179 Sen. brev. 15.4–5: hi (the great thinkers of the past) tibi dabunt ad perpetuitatem iter et te in illum locum ex quo nemo deicitur sublevabunt. Haec una ratio est extenuandae mortalitatis, immo in immortalitatem vertendae . . . omnia illi (= sapienti) saecula ut deo serviunt. Transit tempus aliquod, hoc recordatione comprendit; instat, hoc utitur; venturum est, hoc praecipit. Longam illi vitam facit omnium temporum in unum conlatio. Cf. also ep. 98.9; fr. 27 Haase = F 62 Vottero. 180 Sen. Marc. 26.1. 181 Sen. Marc. 26.7: felicem filum tuum, Marcia, qui ista iam novit! Cf. text to notes 27–33.

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presented as reality, just like Cicero had done at the end of his Somnium Scipionis. And the dream of the letter, though reminiscent of Scipio’s dream in Cicero, is nevertheless a dream with eyes wide open.182 This rationalistic attitude culminates in the transposition of the images associated with a blessed afterlife to the earthly experience of philosophical contemplation. So, the elaborate picture at the end of the Consolatio ad Marciam is exposed for what it really is: the transposition to a fanciful afterlife of an all too earthly philosophical ideal, which is not, and cannot be, the solution of the ‘Socratic alternative’, but merely a vivid and colourful presentation of its positive instance. When so understood, it is no more felt as contradictory in relation to the formulation, in Epicurean colours, of the negative instance, which can be found in the same writing only a few pages before.183 The same juxtaposition can also be found in the Consolatio ad Polybium, where the two opposed instances of the ‘Socratic alternative’ are used to prove that death is no evil in the very same chapter.184 A further confirmation comes from a letter to Lucilius we have already repeatedly hinted at: epistle 102, which vividly describes what Seneca himself calls the ‘beautiful dream’ of immortality.185 Many of the themes related to the eschatological picture we have sketched above reappear in this letter: unrestrained command of all time and space;186 the conception of the body as a burden and of the soul as man’s real self;187 the darkness of earthly life as against the light of the abode of the blessed, which enables them to descry hidden truths impossible to reach in this lower world.188 But, when all is said and done, Seneca takes it for granted that death amounts to the total annihilation of man, and says unequivocally so in this very same letter.189 As Bocciolini Palagi190 has clearly demonstrated, the paragraphs devoted to the 182

Sen. ep. 102.28: imaginare tecum. Sen. Marc. 19.4–5. Cf. note 106. 184 Sen. Pol. 9.2 as against 9.6–8. Something similar can be observed at Marc. 19.1: dimisimus illos, immo consecuturi praemisimus as against 19.4–6. 185 Sen. ep. 102.2: iuvabat de aeternitate animarum quaerere, immo mehercules credere . . . cum subito experrectus sum epistula tua et tam bellum somnium perdidi. 186 Sen. ep. 102.2, 21–2. 187 Sen. ep. 102.22; 26; 27. 188 Sen. ep. 102.28. 189 Sen. ep. 102.4: itaque illam partem rectam et ad mores pertinentem tractavi, numquid stultum sit ac supervacuum ultra extremum diem curas transmittere, an cadant bona nostra nobiscum nihilque sit eius qui nullus est, an ex eo quod, cum erit, sensuri non sumus, antequam sit aliquis fructus percipi aut peti possit. 190 Bocciolini Palagi 1979. 183

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‘beautiful dream’ in this letter appear to testify to Seneca’s belief in the immortality of the soul only if separated from the writing’s living body and context. In reality, as far as ontological immortality is concerned, Seneca does not differ from Cicero’s agnosticism: there are philosophers, he says, that promise immortality, but cannot prove it. This is a ‘beautiful dream’ we can indulge in, as long as we are aware that it only fulfils a sentimental need, just as does Cicero’s Cato at the end of the De senectute.191 Not surprisingly, the letter ends with the sobering remark that real immortality can only be secured by the memory that virtue leaves behind.192 This is the immortality Seneca personally longs for as far as he himself is concerned. In a letter in which some autobiographical experiences are vibrantly alluded to193 he says that he will not die as long as the friends to whom he has transmitted his thoughts and ideas are alive, because he will live through them, per illos.194 On the other hand, the text in which Seneca’s philosophical position, as far as the place and function of the eschatological theme in his moral philosophy is concerned, is most lucidly revealed is probably to be found in a letter,195 in which, within the persistent frame of 191 Cic. sen. 85: quod si in hoc erro, qui animos hominum immortales esse credam, libenter erro, nec mihi hunc errorem, quo delector, dum vivo, extorqueri volo. Cf. Tusc. 1.39. 192 Sen. ep. 102.30: quamvis enim ipse ereptus sit oculis, tamen ‘multa viri virtus animo multusque recursat | gentis honos’ (Verg. Aen. 4.3–4). Cogita quantum nobis exempla bona prosint: scies magnorum virorum non minus praesentiam esse utilem quam memoriam. 193 Sen. ep. 78.6: multorum mortem distulit morbus et saluti illis fuit videri perire. It is impossible not to think of Seneca’s own experience under the realm of Caligula, when he escaped capital punishment only because his sickly constitution seemed to portend his imminent death. 194 Sen. ep. 78.6: non iudicabam me, cum illos superstites relinquerem, mori. Putabam, inquam, me victurum non cum illis, sed per illos; non effundere mihi spiritum videbar, sed tradere. 195 Sen. ep. 93.9–10: et tamen quousque vivimus? Omnium rerum cognitione fruiti sumus: scimus a quibus principiis natura se attollat, quemadmodum ordinet mundum, per quas annum vices revocet, quemadmodum omnia quae usquam erunt cluserit et se ipsam finem sui fecerit; scimus sidera impetu suo vadere, praeter terram nihil stare, cetera continua velocitate decurrere; scimus quemadmodum solem luna praetereat, quare tardior velociorem post se relinquat, quomodo lumen accipiat aut perdat, quae causa inducat noctem, quae reducat diem: illuc eundum est ubi ista propius aspicias. ‘Nec hac spe’ inquit sapiens ille ‘fortius exeo, quod patere mihi ad deos meos iter iudico. Merui quidem admitti et iam inter illos fui animumque illo meum misi et ad me illi suum miserant. Sed tolli me de medio puta et post mortem nihil ex homine restare: aeque magnum animum habeo, etiam si nusquam transiturus excedo’.

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the ‘Socratic alternative’, we again encounter most of the ideas we already know. Contemplation during earthly life is once more pronounced to be an anticipation of heavenly bliss, and the secrets of the cosmos are again declared to be fully accessible only to the unhindered contemplation of the blessed. Here, however, a new theme is grafted onto this idea, namely the concept, well attested in the tradition of diatribe, that no feat accomplished by man can save him from inevitable death. At Rome this idea had been expressed by illustrious forerunners, such as Lucretius and Horace.196 In this text the contemplation of the cosmos, though still considered to be an anticipation of eternal bliss, does not exempt the wise from the common fate of all mortals: eundum est ubi ista propius aspicias. But at the same time we encounter a manly acceptance not merely of death, but also of the possible mortality of the soul. In the wise man’s speech that follows immediately the possibility of immortality is surely not denied; he even seems to consider it more probable than the opposite hypothesis. But surely the wise man does not see immortality as indispensable to his own happiness, which can only stem from his own virtue. We have just seen that Seneca is anything but insensible to the memory he will leave after his death; but, quite differently from Cicero,197 his wise man can do without it. When he is certain of having acted rightly, posthumous glory is totally irrelevant. Much more: any eschatological reward is both unnecessary and unmeaningful.198 Immortality is not relevant, in that the perfection of virtue is totally independent of duration in time199 and it must be pursued in this earthly life. The perfect ethical action is a value in itself and is in need of no sanction in another life.200

196 See Setaioli 1995a, 62–3. Like Horace (c. 1.28.1–11) Seneca asserts here that scientific discoveries do not save from death. There are also some Horatian stylistic modes (Sen. ep. 93.9 eundum est  Hor. c. 2.14.17–18 visendus ater . . . | Cocytos). 197 See e.g. Cic. Tusc. 1.91: itaque non deterret sapiens mors . . . quo minus in omne tempus rei publicae suisque consulat, cum posteritatem ipsam, cuius sensum habiturus non est, ad se putet pertinere. Quare licet etiam mortalem esse animum iudicantem aeterna moliri, non gloriae cupiditate, quam sensurus non sit, sed virtutis, quam necessario gloria, etiamsi tu id non agas, consequatur. 198 See Dagura Mara 1961, 152. This is a perfectly orthodox Stoic position: cf. Benoit 1948, 45; Hoven 1971, 84. 199 This idea is expressed by Seneca so often as to make it unnecessary to quote any text. Cf. nonetheless ep. 73.13; 93.2; ben. 5.17.6; the whole of De brevitate vitae, etc. 200 Cf. e.g. Sen. ben. 4.22.1–2: nihil iam superest, quo spes porrigatur . . . est videlicet magna in ipso opere merces et ad alliciendas mentes hominum ingens honesti potentia.

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We now understand why Seneca never needs to solve the ‘Socratic alternative’. Once he has proved that death is no evil in either case, the ethical significance to be attached to the mortality or immortality of the soul is void and irrelevant: immortality is nothing but an ‘indifferent’, a Stoic adiaphoron, just like death.201 Ordinary people, Seneca’s proficientes, to whom Seneca’s moral philosophy is primarily addressed, must be convinced that death is no evil, whatever the subsequent fate of the soul; as for the wise, neither death nor whatever may come after can in any way affect their demeanour. Seneca’s thinking on afterlife, therefore, cannot in any way be called inconsistent. His undeniable longing for immortality does not breach his Stoic monism and his basically rationalistic frame of mind. Though at the personal level he shares most of Cicero’s attitudes, in the final analysis Seneca’s Stoicism makes him more consistent; his longing for immortality does not lead him to claim or assume individual exceptions to the general rule, as Cicero could not help doing when he was personally faced with a circumstance similar to those which had elicited from his pen consolations to others, which made no provision for eternal bliss in a heavenly afterlife.

REFERENCES Abel, Karlhans 1964. ‘Poseidonios und Senecas Trostschrift an Marcia (dial. 6, 24, 5 ff.)’, Rheinisches Museum 107, 221–60. Alfonsi, Luigi 1954. ‘Verso l’immortalità (Cicerone, De senectute 21, 77 ss.)’, Convivium N.S. 1, 385–91. Badstübner, Ernst 1901. Beiträge zur Erklärung und Kritik der philosophischen Schriften Senecas. Hamburg : Lütcke. Benkner, G. 1914. Ciceros Unsterblichkeitsglaube im Zusammenhang mit seiner Psychologie (im Rahmen der römischen Philosophie). Diss. Erlangen. Benoit, Paul 1948. ‘Les idées de Sénèque sur l’au-delà’, Revue des Sciences Philosophiques 32, 38–51. Bocciolini Palagi, Laura 1979. ‘Seneca e il sogno escatologico’, Studi Italiani di Filologia Classica 51, 155–68. Boyancé, Pierre 1937. Le culte des Muses chez les philosophes grecs: Études d’histoire et de psychologie religieuses. Paris: Boccard. ——1944. ‘L’apothéose de Tullia’, Revue des Études Anciennes 46, 179–84. 201

Cf. Sen. ep. 82.13–16; Marc. 19.5.

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Bruwaene, Martin van den 1937. La théologie de Cicéron. Louvain: Bibliothèque de l’Université. ——1939. ‘1ıå et  F dans le “Somnium Scipionis” de Cicéron’, L’Antiquité Classique 8, 127–52. Ciafardini, E. 1921. ‘L’immortalità dell’anima in Cicerone (il primo libro delle Tusculane)’, Rivista di Filosofia Neo-scolastica 13, 245–63. Cumont, Franz 1942. Recherches sur le symbolisme funéraire des Romains. Paris: Geuthner. ——1949. Lux perpetua. Paris: Geuthner. Dagura Mara, Léon 1961. ‘El pensamiento escatológico de L. A. Séneca’, Humanidades 13, 53–81; 141–65. Doignon, Jean 1984. ‘L’âme dans l’empyrée: Sur un passage controversé de Sénèque, Epist. 88, 34’, in Hommages à Lucien Lerat, I. Paris: Les Belles Lettres, 253–62. Görgemanns, Herwig 1968. ‘Die Bedeutung der Traumeinkleidung im Somnium Scipionis’, Wiener Studien N.F 2, 46–69. Guazzoni Foà, Virginia 1957. ‘I problemi metafisico ed etico nelle epistole ciceroniane’, Giornale di Metafisica 12, 223–9. ——1970. I fondamenti filosofici della teologia ciceroniana. Milan: Marzorati. Hooper, William D. 1917–18. ‘Cicero’s Religious Beliefs’, The Classical Journal 13, 88–95. Hoven, René 1971. Stoïcisme et stoïciens face au problème de l’au-déla. Paris: Les Belles Lettres. Johann, Horst-Theodor 1968. Trauer und Trost: Eine quellen- und strukturanalytische Untersuchung der philosophischen Trostschriften über den Tod. Munich: Fink. Kumaniecki, Kasimierz 1968. ‘Die verlorene “Consolatio” des Cicero’, Acta Classica Univ. Scient. Debrecen. 4, 27–43. Laurand, L. 1914. ‘Deux mots sur les idées religieuses de Cicéron’, Recherches de Science Religieuse 5, 70–99. Lepage, Y. G. 1976. ‘Cicéron devant la mort de Tullia d’après sa correspondance’, Les Études Classiques 44, 245–58. Manning, C. E. 1981. On Seneca’s ‘Ad Marciam’. Leiden: Brill. Mazzoli, Giancarlo 1967. ‘Genesi e valore del motivo escatologico in Seneca. Contributo alla questione posidoniana’, Rendiconti Istituto Lombardo 101, 203–62. ——1984. ‘Il problema religioso in Seneca’, Rivista Storica Italiana 96, 953–1000. Motto, Anna L. 1955. ‘Seneca on Death and Immortality’, The Classical Journal 50, 187–9. Philippson, Robert 1941. ‘Cicero, De natura deorum Buch II und III. Eine Quellenuntersuchung’, Symbolae Osloenses 21, 11–38.

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Powell, Jonathan G. F. (ed.) 1988. Cicero: Cato Maior De Senectute. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Rogge, Hildegard 1921. Die Entwickelung der Anschauungen Senecas über die Probleme: Gott, Freiheit, Unsterblichkeit. Diss. Giessen. Ronconi, Alessandro (ed.) 1961. Cicerone. Somnium Scipionis. Florence: LeMonnier. Salinero Portero, José 1958. ‘La inmortalidad del alma en Cicerón (el libro primero de las Tusculanas)’, Humanidades 10, 71–95. Scarpat, Guiseppe 1970. La lettera 65 di Seneca, 2nd edn, Brescia: Paideia. Setaioli, Aldo 1995a. ‘Orazio e l’oltretomba’, in Setaioli, Aldo (ed.), Orazio: umanità, politica, cultura. Atti del Convegno di Gubbio, 20–22 ottobre 1992. Perugia: Universitá di Perugia, 53–66. ——1995b. La vicenda dell’anima nel commento di Servio a Virgilio. Studien zur klassischen Philologie 90. Frankfurt: Lang. ——1999. ‘La vicenda dell’anima nella Consolatio di Cicerone’, Paideia 54, 145–74. ——2000. Facundus Seneca. Aspetti della lingua e dell’ideologia senecana. Bologna: Pàtron. ——2001a. ‘Il destino dell’anima nella letteratura consolatoria pagana’, in Alonso del Real Montes, Concepción (ed.), Consolatio. Nueve Estudios. Pamplona: EUNSA, 31–67. ——2001b. ‘El destino del alma en el pensamiento de Cicerón (con una apostilla sobre las huellas ciceronianas en Dante)’, Anuario Filosófico 34, 487–526. Shackleton Bailey, David R. 1966–8. Cicero’s Letters to Atticus. Cambridge: University Press. Sullivan, Francis A. 1943–4. ‘Intimations of Immortality among the Ancient Romans’, The Classical Journal 39, 15–24. Traina, Alfonso 1987. Lo stile ‘drammatico’ del filosofo Seneca, 4th edn, Bologna: Pàtron. Vitelli, Claudio 1977. Sull’edizione mondadoriana della Consolatio di Cicerone. s.l., s.d.

18 ‘Humanity was Created as an Individual’: Synechdocal Individuality in the Mishnah as a Jewish Response to Romanization Charlotte Elisheva Fonrobert

BIBLICAL PROLOGUE The conceptual background for the following analysis of the most formative rabbinic texts of the late second and early third century ce is a claim advanced by the twentieth century philosopher of religion Jacob Taubes (1923–87) with regard to a much earlier text, namely, the late sixth and early fifth century bce biblical prophetic text attributed to Ezekiel. For Taubes, Ezekiel’s famous injunction that everyone is to be responsible for his own transgression, ‘marks a turning point in the history of religion’,1 a break with the inability of mythic consciousness to recognize the individual as such. As stated by Ezekiel ‘the soul that sins, it shall die. The son shall not bear the iniquity of the father, neither shall the father bear the iniquity of the son: the righteousness of the righteous shall be upon him, and the wickedness of the wicked shall be upon him’ (Ezekiel 18:20, my emphasis). Following an insight first articulated by the German-Jewish and neoKantian philosopher Hermann Cohen (1842–1918), Taubes is led to * I would like to thank my brilliant graduate students, Mira Balberg and James Redfield, for their careful reading and improvement of the manuscript, as well as Jörg Rüpke for his encouragement to undertake this project. 1 Taubes 1983, cited from the English 2010 edition.

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an assertion that I quote at length, as it provides the context within which Taubes thought about the emergence of the rudimentary notion of individuality in Jewish intellectual history: Ezekiel 18 marks a turning point in the history of religion. It is indeed a constitutive chapter in the ‘ur-history of subjectivity’, because in the prophet’s speech the power of the mythical nexus of guilt and atonement within the chain of generations is broken and the mythic horizon of consciousness is decisively transcended. . . . In that the mythical nexus is broken, the human being gains, what since Ezekiel we call his ‘soul’: his individuality [Ich]. ‘Thus the new human is born, and on this path the individual turns into an individuality [Ich]’ (Hermann Cohen). This individuality, however, is not a ‘Man without Qualities,’ neutral to good and evil, to true and false. What for Nietzsche and for today’s Nietzsche-lings, mythically blinded as they are, appears merely as a reversal of instinct from outside inward, for Ezekiel is the key to repentance: ‘Cast away from you all your transgressions, whereby you have transgressed, and make for yourselves a new heart and a new spirit’ (Ezekiel 18.31). Hermann Cohen comments, ‘in the recognition of his own sin, man became an individual. Through the power to create for himself a new heart and a new spirit, however, he comes into his individuality [Ich].’2

The turning-point in the history of religion that Taubes diagnoses recognizes the potential of the biblical heritage for a genealogy of the concept of individuality, if not for ‘the’ history of ‘the’ individual.3 Indeed, in Ezekiel 18 we find one of the all too rare moments of innerbiblical explicit citation and immediate revision, making this an ideal instance for such a diagnosis. The prophetic speaker starts out by citing the proverb used ‘on the soil of Israel’ only to reject it: ‘“The fathers eat unripe grapes, and the sons’ teeth become blunt”.4 As I live, the words of my Lord God, there will no longer be among you those who use this proverb!’ (Ezekiel 18:2–3). On the contrary, so the 2 Taubes 1983, cited from the English 2010 edition, 306–7 (my emphasis), in a slightly revised translation. On Hermann Cohen’s reading of Ezekiel, see also Seeskin 2007. 3 Taubes’s essay here connects to Horkheimer and Adorno’s project to construct a ‘Urgeschichte of subjectivity’ as part of their critique of enlightenment, the Dialectics of Enlightenment (orig. 1947). However, while they developed that Urgeschichte through their famous reading of Odysseus’ list, Taubes points to biblical literature and Ezekiel as ultimately the more profound turning-point in the history of religion. 4 See also Jer. 31:29–30, which also cites the proverb as rejected, but in this case as a future event.

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prophetic speaker, ‘whichever soul sins, it shall die’ (18:4 and 20). As the interlocutor asks incredulously ‘why did the son not bear the sin of the father?’ (18:19) the prophetic voice channels God’s affirmation that ‘the son shall not bear the sin of the father, neither shall the father bear the sin of the son’ (18:20), thus overtly overturning Moses’ pronouncement in no less than the second of the ten commandments that Israel’s God is one who visits ‘the guilt of the fathers upon the sons, upon the third and upon the fourth generations’ (Exodus 20:5).5 In the prophetic literature and its critique of the collective transgressions of the Israelite people and their cultic institutions, then, the individual comes into view. Certainly, it is not only enlightenment philosophy and its neo-Kantian inheritor who realize this, but also much earlier readers and heirs to the archival library of biblical literature, namely the rabbinic movement emerging in the margins of the Mediterranean world during the Roman imperial period.6

RABBINIC INTRODUCTION Of the many imaginable paradigms for thinking about rabbinic Judaism during its foundational era in the earlier Roman imperial period, ‘individualization’ appears to be one of the more unlikely. Indeed, the kind of piety and religiosity that is shaped by Jewish sages in the Roman province of Provincia Judaea during the second and early third centuries ce, and that finds its first and foundational expression in the compendium work that would become known as the Mishnah, might arguably be considered an exemplary case of a religious culture in which individuality is almost completely 5 Cf. Exod. 34.7 and Deut. 5:9. See also Fishbane 1985, 284 and 293. As Mira Balberg reminds me, it should be pointed out that contrary to the theological concept of cross-generational punishment, biblical law as per Deut. 24:16 prohibits the transference of capital punishment from father to son: ‘Fathers shall not be put to death for sons, nor sons be put to death for fathers: a person shall be put to death only for his own sin’, a law that is referenced in 2 Chr. 25:4, another moment of innerbiblical citation. Levinson 2003, 31–6 argues that Ezekiel uses Deut. 24.16 to construe his rejection of divine vicarious punishment. For further discussion, see also Berkowitz 2006, 127 and 263, n.2. 6 In the Babylonian Talmud (bMakkot 24a) we find a homiletic teaching that Ezekiel ‘annulled’ the threat pronounced earlier by Moses in Exod. 20:5 and 34:7.

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subsumed under the mantle of tradition and collectivity.7 The Mishnah appears as the expression of a religious culture in which observance (and, for the rabbinic sages themselves, study) of the law and of tradition (= Torah) is of paramount value to such a degree that the particularity of any individual practitioner—whether sage, disciple, or follower—is subsumed under it, to the point of vanishing altogether. Indeed, the very textuality of the Mishnah reflects this dynamic, in that the Mishnah presents itself as a multi-vocal text, with barely a narrative included to represent any voice in particular as an individuated person or personality and garbed in the rhetoric of legal discourse, by definition aimed at creating norms rather than foregrounding differentiation. Furthermore, in what might otherwise have been an opportunity for a representation of individualized authority, it does not even provide a narrator or a voice claiming responsibility for the compilation as a whole.8 Almost paradoxically, the paradigm of individualization precisely brings these characteristics of the Mishnah into clearer view. For the very compendium that seems to undo any coherent notion of individuality contains one of the most powerful articulations of the absolute valuation of the individual human being that has come down to us from late ancient Jewish culture: . . . Therefore a singular adam [human being] was created (‘adam yehidi nibra)9, to teach you that one who destroys a single soul (nefesh) from humanity (benei ‘adam),10 Scripture accounts it to him as though he had 7 Hence most of the studies on constructions of Jewish identity in late antiquity have been interested dominant in the collective. Among the most recent studies see Baker 2002 who proposes ‘that rabbinic Judaism, in its nascence, represented a peculiar sort of “nationalist” project—one that sought to (re)create its own version of a Jewish “nation” out of the ashes of the shattered Temple’, 8. 8 In marked contrast to Roman legal texts, such as the Institutes of Gaius, roughly contemporaneous with the production of the Mishnah. As Simon-Shoshan points out, Gaius speaks with a single, authoritative voice, as do for that matter other ancient legal collections, such as cuneiform law collections. By contrast, ‘the text of the Mishnah tells us neither who composed these laws nor when, nor under what circumstances’, 75. 9 Alternately: ‘the human being was created singularly’ or as I have formulated in the title of this paper, ‘humanity was created as an individual’. 10 Some manuscripts famously have ‘Israel’ instead of a term roughly equivalent to ‘humanity’ (benei ‘adam, sons/ children of ‘adam). There is no way to decide which one might be the ‘original’ version of this text, a philological problem that applies to much of rabbinic literature from late antiquity, for which we have manuscripts only

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destroyed an entire world; and if one saves a single soul from humanity, Scripture accounts it to him as though he had saved an entire world. and [the singular creation of the first human being is taught] for the sake of peace among creatures (beriyot), that a person should not say to his fellow, ‘My father is greater than yours’; and to proclaim the greatness of the Holy One, blessed be He; for a human being (‘adam) stamps many coins with one seal and they are all alike; but the King of kings, the Holy One, Blessed Be He, has stamped every human being (‘adam) with the seal of the first human being, yet not a single one of them resembles his fellow. Therefore every single person must say: For my sake was the world created. Mishnah Tractate Sanhedrin 4:5

This famous11 and celebrated passage, in modern times cited as a religious source for Judaism’s support of human rights,12 is found in the context of the Mishnaic laws of capital punishment and the threat against potential false witnesses in capital cases, who are held responsible for the potential killing of an innocent suspect. As a homily of sorts with a clustering of overt theological images and arguments not commonly found in the Mishnah, it transcends its specific legal context. The homily can easily be read as a principled evaluation of the very concept of individuality, celebrating it both ontologically and theologically: every human being is unique (equivalent to ‘an entire world’), and different from every other human being (‘not a single one resembles his fellow’), and yet sub specie aeternitatis all are equal, so that no one can ride on the wave of his particular ancestry. Thus the Mishnaic statement seems to articulate precisely that notion of individuality that Michael Trapp (among others) regards as lacking entirely from the endeavours of philosophical reflections on the self in the Roman empire, namely cultivation of uniqueness and differentiation: ‘For, in all cases [of ideas about self and selfhood in Imperialperiod writing], what is being discovered is emphatically not self in

from the early medieval period onwards. For this problem see Schäfer 1986 and Milikowsky 1988. For our purposes, it does not matter which of the two versions, the more ethnocentric (‘Israel’), or the more universally human minded (humanity), is to be preferred, since either way it is the value of the individual that is foregrounded. 11 Already the Qur’an seems to know of a version of this teaching, or parts of it, see Sura 5.32 (I thank my colleague Robert Gregg for this reference). 12 Belkin 1960; Daube 1979; Fishbane 1988; now see also Balberg 2012, forthcoming.

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the sense of individuality. The truths to be grasped, as self is discovered, concern one’s membership of a class, the class of humans, articulate rational beings, not any propositions about uniqueness, or intriguing differentiation from other members of that class.’13 However, our homily is hardly considered representative of the Mishnah’s overall discourse, a view that will in part be substantiated below. The overall vision of the Mishnah, rather, is one of a social order in which each and every (Jewish) individual is to be embedded. Indeed, its goal may be articulated as an attempt to formulate a newly normative Jewish identity that subsumes all individual uniqueness under what it might mean to embody the notion of ‘Israel’,14 the Mishnah’s choice referent for the individual Jew embodying the norms it promulgates, and a term inherited and adapted from the Bible. To return to the homily for a moment, we can observe that the Mishnaic insistence on human uniqueness is attributed to the sacred authoritativeness of Scripture: ‘Scripture accounts it to the false witness’ in a capital case and therefore potential murderer as if he were a world destroyer. As such, we might uphold this doctrinal statement as the development of the biblical heritage regarding human creation in the image of the creator-God, and herewith as a clear example of an effort to cultivate a recognition of the absolute and inherent value of the individual human being. As we have seen above, in modernity already Hermann Cohen, and following him Jacob Taubes, recognized the potential of the biblical tradition itself for a genealogy of the concept of individuality, particularly with its prophetic break from the ‘mythical nexus of guilt and atonement’ or ‘the mythic horizon of consciousness’.15 Cohen, and following him Taubes, locate the historical moment of what they consider an epistemic shift in the moral and ethical thinking in Ezekiel and therefore the early post-exilic period (late sixth or early fifth century bce). What the social force 13

Trapp 2007, 115. The Mishnah’s choice of the biblical and biblicizing term ‘Israel’ as the referent for the individual Jew is a noted and much discussed phenomenon, although much of the recent discussion has focused on its polemical force vis-à-vis rival Christian writers who laid claim to it, such as Justin Martyr, an approximate contemporary to the Mishnah. See e.g. Fonrobert 2001, and Boyarin 2004. This will be discussed further below. 15 Taubes (2010), 306, cited in the first section of this chapter. Taubes’s use of ‘myth’ (Mythos) and ‘mythic’ is fairly broad. In this context specifically he adopts Paula Philippson’s notion of ancient ‘genealogy’ as a mythic form, in that the line of conception and birth creates a ‘nexus’ of guilt. 14

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of this epistemic shift might have been is of course another question altogether, and one that interested neither Cohen nor Taubes necessarily very much. Nor were they concerned with the question of this epistemic break’s pre-modern effects in the history of religion, or its immediate intellectual afterlife and its historical trajectory among the readers of the biblical texts in later antiquity. It stands to reason that the sensibility of which our mishnaic homily is but one expression, and a pointed one at that (‘For my sake was the world created’), is a product of the much earlier epistemic shift from the collective to the individual as the prime subject of reflection in Jewish antiquity.16 The role of the homily in the overall project of the Mishnah thus perhaps deserves reconsideration. In the context of this volume I want to explore how far it actually represents another moment in the genealogy of the individual, or Taubes’s ‘ur-history of the subject,’ one that may not be as non-representative of the Mishnah and rabbinic culture as one might have assumed. In what follows I will focus my reflections on rabbinic Judaism predominantly on the Mishnah, rather than on a more extensive body of texts from the late ancient rabbinic period. I do so for strategic reasons mostly, although some of the arguments advanced here could be extended to later texts in the rabbinic corpus. First of all, the Mishnah can be approximately dated,17 to the end of the second and perhaps early third century ce, something that becomes much more difficult with many of the later rabbinic texts. It can be approximately located, to Roman-occupied Galilee, in the Provincia Judaea.18 It, further, is one of the few if not the only overtly self-identified Jewish text from the second century, by which I mean the only text from the

16 Balberg 2013 (forthcoming) beautifully and convincingly delineates a ‘heightened emphasis on the particularity of each human being’ in the Mishnah in specific contexts such as the laws of compensation for bodily injury and human valuation. She attributes this to the Mishnah’s Graeco-Roman intellectual environment, whether Stoic philosophical reflection or Roman legal discourse. I am grateful that I was able to see the manuscript of this article. I would just add, based on the foregoing, that the biblical heritage itself—as per Taubes, etc.—has an important role to play in the genealogy of the concept of individuality. 17 For a general introduction, Stemberger 2011 still remains one of the most useful. The English translation reflects an earlier edition, see Strack and Stemberger 1992. More recently, see also Fonrobert and Jaffee 2007. 18 On the consequences of the Roman annexation to the Roman empire, see Schwartz 2006.

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end of that century concerned with Jews as Jews, articulated by scholastically inclined Jewish sages with a particular vision of the biblical heritage as a live rather than merely a past tradition.19 Finally, the significance of the Mishnah as a foundational articulation of rabbinic Judaism allows me to discuss some of the fundamental values and practices shaped in the context of this religious culture that over the course of some centuries did turn into normative values and practices, although for a larger segment of the Jewish population only much later than the Mishnah itself. Until recently we considered the Mishnah as the normative expression of Roman Jewish religiosity in the second century, at least in Palestine, in part because it is apparently the only text articulating a vision of Jewish life and culture there, and because the text lays claim to legal authority it was understood to also rule Jewish life. In recent years, however, the scholarly consensus has shifted as to what segments of the Jewish population of the early Roman imperial period can be imagined as actually being represented or affected by the cultural and religious values articulated in the Mishnah. If hitherto we might have believed, perhaps somewhat naively, that the Mishnah and the rabbinic sages who produced it held sway over the vast majority of the Jewish population, at least those dwelling in the Provincia Judaea, it now seems that our sociohistorical contextualization has turned minimalist. That is, the early rabbinic movement of the Roman period is imagined as a small movement consisting of something like master and disciple circles,20 whose learning finds its cumulative expression in the Mishnah. In socio-historical terms the Mishnah is thus to be read as the cumulative expression of an initially marginal religious movement,21 one that 19 This leaves aside recent attempts to reread as Jewish literary expressions some of the literature normally identified as ‘Christian’ or ‘Jewish-Christian’. It further leaves aside the pseudo-epigraphic texts such as IV Maccabees and II Enoch, which may or may not be dated into the second century, and may or may not be of Christian or Jewish provenance, whatever that might mean at that early stage of the evolution of these respective traditions. The Mishnah may have been the only ‘Jewish’ text produced in the second century, although its apparent uniqueness may also be the result of reception and transmission, since neither the later Christian church nor the rabbinic community would necessarily have had an interest in preserving other-than-rabbinic Jewish texts. 20 Jaffee 2001, particularly his chapter on ‘Torah in the Mouth of Galilean Discipleship Communities’, 126–53. See further Hezser 1997 who describes the rabbinic movement as an ‘informal network of relationships which constituted a personal alliance system’. 21 Thus convincingly Schwartz 2001, 49, more developed in Schwartz 2001, Part 3.

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remained mostly self-referential within the larger Jewish population at least until significantly later in the imperial period. Its marginality in socio-historical terms notwithstanding, however, still much remains to be learned from this text historically, if not necessarily about the socio-historical practices and life of second-century Jews. The Mishnah was to attain phenomenal historical success, not just as a scholastic text for institutions of rabbinic learning and rabbinic academies, but as one that had influence on shaping the social values and institutions of Jewish culture beyond the reach of the Roman empire, both pre-Christian and Christian, and beyond the Byzantine period into the medieval and modern periods.22 As I have put forth some bold and generalizing claims in the introduction we need to substantiate some of these in what follows. What I have so far merely postulated is that, contrary to the sentiment expressed in the homily discussed above, the Mishnah’s general tendency, not least of all in its very textuality, is to undo the notion of ‘individuality’ altogether. This I will need to demonstrate first, before making a case for reading the Mishnah and the cultural and anthropological sensibility of which it is an expression, and indeed the first historical articulation, as evidence for precisely the possibilities of talking in any meaningful way about processes of individualization in the context of late ancient Jewish culture. While an overt interest in the individual as such is arguably pushed into the background by the Mishnah, it may be extrapolated from it, once the creation of the Mishnah is viewed in its macro-political context: the political and cultural Romanization of the formerly Jewish land of Israel. I will therefore argue that the Mishnah is indeed very much invested in the individual, its overt dedication to (re)constructing and perpetuating a Jewish collective through its normativizing (‘legal’) discourse notwithstanding. The Mishnah’s equation of the biblical collective (‘Israel’) with the individual Jew (‘Israel’) constitutes a conceptual individualization of biblical heritage, which can best be defined as a notion of synecdochal individuality. I hope to demonstrate that once we consider this conceptualization of the Mishnah, the homily above will turn out to be a perfect example of this. Further, 22 See also Simon-Shoshan 2012, who suggests that it was not merely historical accident that shaped the later success of the rabbinic movement, but the Mishnah itself that ‘played a role in consolidating and spreading rabbinic ideology in the centuries following its redaction’, 91.

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as I will show, this stands in marked contrast to a Pauline concept of the body politic. However, since the collective nature of the Mishnah’s textuality plays a significant role in this argument, mostly by confronting us as a hurdle, it does behove us to start out by reflecting first—at least briefly—on the economy of representation in Jewish literature in the first and second centuries ce.

FROM INDIVIDUAL AUTHORIAL VOICE TO COLLECTIVE DISCOURSE Consider the following development from the first to the late second centuries ce in terms of the Jewish literary culture known to us. The first century ce witnesses the production of literary works by the three great Jewish writers Philo of Alexandria (died c.50 ce), Titus Flavius Josephus alias Josephus, son of Matthias (died c.100 ce), and Paul of Tarsus (died presumably in the late 60’s ce). Obviously, each of these has a vastly different agenda, with a vastly different audience, although each is a biblical scholar (not to mention historian, theologian, and intellectual) in his own right, and all three of them write in Greek: Philo for his Alexandrian Jewish community, Greek-speaking and philosophically cultivated, Paul for his Jewish and other sympathetic audience all around the Eastern Mediterranean world, and Josephus for his Roman mixed audience, after the great Roman–Jewish war of 66–70 ce. For our purposes it bears emphasizing that each of them composes their texts in their own name,23 as individual authors of different types of genres, but as authors; as Jewish authors, with particular claims to their own authoritativeness respectively, supported by their membership in the rich provincial elites.24 Not only that: each of them supplies autobiographical data, at least to some degree: Philo describes his (reluctant) involvement with politics and struggles on behalf of the Jewish

23 For Josephus see bell. Iud. 1.3. For Paul, see the salutations of all his epistles, e.g. Gal. 1:1, Rom. 1:1, 1 and 2 Cor. 1:1. 24 This is certainly the case for Philo and Josephus. For Philo, see Niehoff 2001, 8ff.

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community in Alexandria.25 He is an individual with a reputation, with a ‘name’. Josephus describes him as a ‘man held in the highest honour, brother of Alexander the Alabarch, and no novice in philosophy’ (Antiquitates Judaicae 18.259). Paul repeatedly provides autobiographical references, often for rhetorical purposes, mostly of an apologetic or persuasive nature.26 Finally, Josephus writes his own vita, largely for apologetic purposes as well.27 Throughout his writings he references his own work,28 espousing a sense of himself as a self-conscious ‘author’. Whatever the socio-economic reasons in the first century ce allowing the emergence of this cluster of individual and individuated Jewish authors, it demonstrates the possibility of authorial and literary individualization in the orbit of Jewish culture, and particularly biblically inspired culture. Almost ironically, the very fact that Josephus, Philo, and Paul are ‘individuated’ writers has presented scholars with enormous difficulty in considering them as representative of anyone but themselves.29 By contrast, from the second century ce onwards we do not have a single text by an individual writer who self-identifies as Jew, either in Greek or in Hebrew. The richly diversified body of Jewish literature of the first century ce, populated by individual authors as it was, is seemingly replaced by an archive of texts, beginning with the Mishnah, that are largely anonymous in provenance, and if anything present a chorus of voices rather than texts that pose as the product of an ‘individual mind’. In terms of this literary history, some of the features of the Mishnah are crucial for our consideration here. Contrary to the distinctive and distinguishable Gestalt of individual Jewish authors of the first century ce, the Mishnah is not ‘authored’, 25 Legatio Ad Gaium, about his trip to Rome in 40 ce on behalf of the Alexandrian Jewish community. See Smallwood 1970 and 1981, and Niehoff 2001. 26 e.g. Phil. 3:4–6; see also Gal. 1:15–22 on his own account of his radical transformation from persecutor to proclaimer of ‘the faith’. 27 On the Vita as an autobiography and its relationship to the tradition of the Roman commentarii, see Cohen 2002, 101–9. See also P. Stern 2010. I thank my colleague Steve Weitzman for this reference. 28 Ant. Iud. 1.5–10; c. Ap. 1.1 29 See for instance Niehoff 2001 who points out that ‘Philonic texts are not studied here as reflections of a given reality, but as creative constructions of an individual writer. . . . Philo’s voice is distinct and to some extent even unique. It cannot be taken as representative of others and certainly not as typical of the whole Greek-speaking diaspora’, 9–10. But she does point out that, given the enormous loss of primary sources, Philo’s’position on Jewish identity and culture can . . . be fully appreciated only in the context of a vibrant and diverse community’, 10.

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certainly not by an individual.30 It is the collection, compilation, edition, or redaction of traditions of study from various circles of disciples assembled around sages,31 whose names appear in the Mishnah, variously attributed with opinions about a given subject matter of law or otherwise normative practice. The names that appear in the Mishnah have no biographical details, let alone biographies, attached to them.32 They are represented mostly as disembodied voices that only in later rabbinic texts will be supplemented with hagiographic lives, or moments of lives.33 None of these voices operate in isolation. They only work as a collective conversation. None of the names, should the opinions attributed to them across the Mishnah be gathered by names, seem to represent a particularly coherent or distinctive ideological disposition either.34 At least we would be hard pressed to reconstruct the theological or philosophical predisposition of a particular sage in matters of Jewish practice or

30 See n. 8. Later Rabbinic tradition does attribute a significant role in shaping the Mishnah to a specific name, namely to the sage and community leader known as Rabbi Judah the Patriarch, see Epstein 1957 for a listing of the sources. But even if it were the case that a historical individual had a shaping role to play, and this itself is contested by historians of rabbinic literature, the Mishnah’s text does not represent Rabbi Judah the Prince as that outstanding individual. Rhetorically, he is one voice among others. 31 See Jaffee 2007. He writes: ‘Rabbinic compositional style within the conventions of the anthology points to a literary culture in which the minds and intentions of authors are displaced by the interpretive experiments that emerge among people engaged in mutual discourse over the shared text’, 35. Some scholars such as A. Goldberg seek to organize such traditions of study chronologically and into chronological ‘layers’ of the text. For a cogent presentation of this approach see Goldberg 1987. 32 Of course, this is in part due to the genre, since the Mishnah is largely a legal text and lacks narrative altogether, with the exception of some case stories, which are not designed to provide biographical details. 33 Against earlier historiographical attempts to reconstruct biographies of second century rabbinic sages from these much later hagiographical texts, much of Daniel Boyarin’s work has been devoted to making sense of the practice of Talmudic hagiography in its own cultural context. See Boyarin 1991, here in particular the last chapter, ‘(Re)producing Men: Constructing the Rabbinic Male Body’, 197–227. For the relevance of Talmudic hagiography to Jewish and Christian mutual self-definition see Boyarin 2004, also Rubenstein 1999 and 2010. 34 One tractate of the Mishnah seems to attempt just this, in that the tractate (Eduyot, ‘Testimonies’) is not organized thematically, but by names. This, however, served arguably mnemonic purposes more than anything else. Another tractate (Avot, or ‘Fathers’, i.e. ‘Sayings of the Fathers’), collects and anthologizes ethical pronouncements to scholars listed by name. Neither of these tractates would help us to discern the individuality of any particular scholar.

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learning.35 These various voices are held together by an anonymous editor or editors, giving rise to much speculation as to whose name could be attached to the anonymous traditions and editors. How can one meaningfully talk about religious individualization when dealing with such a textual tradition?! Whatever notion of individuality and processes of individualization we consider for the case of rabbinic Judaism will have to be read from within the construct of a collective conversation that the Mishnah, along with most subsequent rabbinic texts in late antiquity, poses. Of course, what has to be considered in this context as well is the question of genre. As a compendium of a legal character, the Mishnah by definition does not smoothly compare to single-authored texts such as Josephus’, nor should it. Indeed, the Mishnah cannot easily be viewed on the same literary-historical trajectory with Philo, Paul, and Josephus, our first-century scholarly scriptural thinkers. Responsible historians of rabbinic literature more commonly look to the Dead Sea Scrolls and other Second Temple texts such as Jubilees as predecessors of the rabbinic formulation of post-biblical Jewish law,36 and if anything consider these the textual predecessors of the Mishnah, in terms of literary history. Such historians focus on the genre of Jewish law and how they reorganize and reinterpret biblical laws, an effort that allows these texts to share one literary history from which the single-authored, Greek texts are commonly excluded.37 Accordingly, the creators of the Mishnah merely inherit a collective mode of discourse, rather than choosing one. Still, the contrast sketched here between the first and second century ce is remarkable. From a phenomenological angle the first century presents us with an extraordinary moment of individualization in the rise of the Jewish author, and indeed one that gave rise to the first autobiography in literature produced by Jews, and for that matter one of the first, if not the first, in Western literature. Nothing 35

Although some scholars have made that effort, from the hagiographic approach, such as Finkelstein 1936 to the more critical accounts, such as for instance Gilat 1984; Neusner 1970 and 1973; Goshen-Gottstein 2000, who is much more attuned to the difference between narrator and narrated. 36 See Shemesh 2009 and Fraade 2007, but classically Goldberg 1987, 212. So also, most recently, Simon-Shoshan 2012, 74. 37 See Simon-Shoshan (2012), who in his chapter on ‘The Mishnah in Comparative Context’ (73–95) discusses ancient cuneiform legal collections, the Torah, the Damascus Scroll, and Roman legal collections as comparanda for the Mishnah.

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quite like this confluence of individual authors distinguishable by name can be found before the first century in biblical literature, nor after it, until the early medieval period in Jewish literature. Differently put, one of the many effects of the great destruction of the Roman– Jewish war in the first century (66–70 ce) and then again of the Bar Kokhba Revolt in the second century (132–5 ce) was the erasure altogether of the individuated Jewish authorial voice, whether as a result of political circumstance (the Greek-speaking Jewish diasporas lost their elite status and with that their literary culture), or—as will be part of my argument below—by self-conscious effort (in the case of rabbinic textuality). All I wish to point out for now is that individual authorship was a possibility at least during the first century, available perhaps to few people only among the elite, but a Jewish option no less. And it remained one in other, not unrelated contexts in the Roman world, such as in the case of Justin Martyr’s Dialogue with Trypho, to name but one example of a second century author who in recent years has come to inhabit the role of an almost contemporary interlocutor of the Mishnah, and a biblical interpreter at that, aside from playing a significant role in the recent discussions of the parting of the ways between Judaism and Christianity.38 In light of the existence of this option I wish to suggest that it is fair to assume that the creators of the Mishnah did not just inherit a mode of discourse and representation, but made a more or less strategic choice in composing their text the way they did. Granted, it would be extremely difficult to go further than this and regard them as making a strategic choice against writing and composing texts like Philo, Paul, or Josephus. We cannot know whether they knew Josephus’, Paul’s, or Philo’s writings, although it makes eminent sense to assume that they knew some of their readers. Nonetheless, for the purposes of this chapter I want to assume for argument’s sake a strategic choice, and suggest that the Mishnah’s crafting of a collective discourse could be read as an effort at erasing the notion of authorial-as-individual voice in its very textuality.39 This allows us to ask the question as to 38 See Boyarin 2004. Ironically, Justin provides us with a portrait of a second century ce Jewish individual, namely Trypho, ‘a Hebrew of the circumcision’, (dial. 1.2) who, however, is in all likelihood a literary device rather than a historical interlocutor. Again, I thank my colleague Robert Gregg for pointing this out to me. 39 One that is captured in the famous talmudic—and therefore much later— narrative about Rabbi Eliezer, the individual sage, who is defeated in a debate with

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what end such a strategy would have been employed. More than that, this allows us to make the culture of Judaism, emerging from the rabbinic text, a more meaningful part of the examination of premodern processes of individualization. Before I engage in this speculation, briefly, we need to examine the relationship of individual to collective that the Mishnah seeks to establish.

SOCIAL EMBEDDING OF THE INDIVIDUAL SUBJECT OF THE RELIGION OF TORAH The erasure of the individual authorial voice represents one aspect of what I am here suggesting we have to think of as the absorption of individuality into the normative and collectivizing formulation of Jewish identity put forth by the rabbis. A parallel aspect of this project is the imposition of two primary social frameworks onto the individual Jewish person, namely the household on the one side and the law (both in the sense of study or devotion and of practice) on the other. These frameworks may not yet be stable institutions,40 but the Mishnah certainly seeks to establish them as such. As institutions they are to frame the existence of every individual Jew, and specifically Jewish man. In the Mishnah’s vision the individual Jewish man remains suspended between them. In the first institutional context, the household, he is required by religious injunction to embed himself in social relations, to marry, and to reproduce. He is not granted the option of withdrawal from this social obligation, although this obligation remains by no means

his colleagues and subsequently banished from the house of study (bBava Metzia 59a–b). This foundational narrative of rabbinic scholastic culture institutes the principle of ‘majority rule’ (‘to incline of the many’) in matters of law, thus reflecting in narrative what is shaped in textuality. 40 See, however, Sivertsev 2005 who argues that ‘family-based piety’ (households) became central for the formation of the Jewish religious movements (often called ‘sects’) of the Second Temple period, 272, and claims that rabbinic Judaism grew out this social matrix, so much so that ‘tannaitic texts time and again demonstrate the importance of individual households and their halakhic practices for shaping rabbinic law’, 271. However, to Sivertsev, the ‘transition from household to disciple study circle as the basic social unit within Judaism is what marks the transition from Second Temple to Rabbinic Judaism’.

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uncontested within rabbinic discourse,41 not to mention the extrarabbinic contestation of marital obligation in Paul’s first epistle to the Corinthians 7 and in Christian discourse ever since.42 All this is wellknown, but deserves consideration in this study of how to frame the notion of rabbinic individuality in a meaningful way. The idealized subject of Jewish law as the Mishnah conceives of it is the individual person, and, more specifically, the individual man, who is charged with building up a household structure. The classic—albeit in its own Mishnaic context already antiquated—exposition of this ideology is Mishnah tractate Kiddushin (Laws of Betrothal) 1.1–6 which provides a list of parts of the household and the means by which they are to be acquired,43 starting from top to bottom in the household structure: wife, Hebrew and Canaanite slave, large and small animals, and property: 1.1 A woman is acquired (for the purpose of betrothal) in three ways, and she acquires herself in two ways. She is acquired through money, through a contract, or through sexual intercourse.44 ... And she acquires herself by a bill of divorce or by the death of her husband. ... 1.2 A Hebrew slave is acquired through money or through a contract, and acquires himself through [service lasting six] years, through [the onset of] a Jubilee [year], or through [redeeming himself at] the outstanding value. A Hebrew maidservant has an advantage over him, for she acquires herself through signs [of puberty]. 41 See Fraade 1986, on which others have built. Boyarin 1991 traces the innerrabbinic struggle with the injunction to marry and reproduce, and its interference with devotion to the religion of Torah, dramatized in later Talmudic narratives. But the aggadic contestation and the rare exceptional sage notwithstanding, no Jewish man is exempted from the obligation to marry. 42 Brown 1986. 43 The first chapter of the tractate operates with terminology (‘acquisition’) that differs markedly from the ideology and terminology of rabbinic marriage otherwise developed in the tractate, namely ‘sanctification’, as in the Tractate’s name, which has led scholars to consider the opening section an older, antiquated piece. Even if this were the case—and there is no manuscript evidence for that—it is not marked as such in the text. 44 These three ways parallel Roman law according to Gaius (usus, confarreatio and coemptio), on which see Wegner 1992 and Gardner 1986.

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[A slave] who is pierced is acquired through piercing, and acquires himself through a Jubilee [year] or through the death of the master. 1.3 A Canaanite slave is acquired with money, a contract or establish ment of possession; and acquires himself with money by a third party or a contract by himself; these are the words of Rabbi Meir. The Sages say: even with money by himself and a contract by a third party, providing that the money belongs to a third party. 1.4 A large animal is acquired through transfer [of the reins], and a small animal through lifting [it] - these are the words of Rabbi Meir and Rabbi Eleazar. The sages say: A small animal is acquired through pulling [it]. 1.5 Property for which there is a security is acquired through money, through a contract, or through establishment of possession; and that for which there is no security is acquired only through pulling [it]. ....

The implied subject of the Mishnah’s legal discourse is the acquiring male householder, who is enjoined to embed himself in this social institution that—contra Paul and his valuation of ‘virginity’ in I Corinthians 7—will constitute the centre of Jewish society of the Mishnah’s vision. Granted, this injunction to social embedding in and by itself does not turn the ‘I’ into a ‘we’, the ‘we’ of a couple, as if the ‘acquisition’ of a wife would compel the male householder to think of himself as a part of a ‘we’. The implied subject is by definition he, who acquires, the male householder and thus enriched individual, while everyone else is acquired or can at best re-acquire themselves. Nor is a socially disembedded devotee of the philosophical tradition more of an individual than the married devotee of the tradition of the Oral Torah, just because the Mishnah enjoins him to be the head of a social unit, the household. However, in the Midrashic, exegetical literature, mostly likely to be dated somewhat later, but still of Galilean provenance, the notion of human completion in marriage is further developed: ‘He who has no wife is not a complete man.’45 Indeed, the 45 Genesis Rabba 17.2, where this quasi-doctrinal statement is attributed to a named sage of the rabbinic third century ce, but in a collection of exegetical statements underwriting the importance of marriage. Note that the notion of human

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Mishnah rules—again, inspired by the biblical myth of creation in the image of the Divine—that no person (‘adam) may abstain from ‘fertility and reproduction’ (Gen 1.28), unless he already has children. The School of Shammai hold: ‘two sons’, but the School of Hillel hold: ‘a son and a daughter’, for it is written: ‘Male and female created he them’ (Gen 5.2).46

The implied male subject of the Mishnaic discourse is embedded in familial bonds, and remains incomplete unless he forms these social bonds, marriage and reproduction in particular. Hardly any other Roman philosophically and religiously inspired sub-culture insists as much and as emphatically on the centrality of the family to its devotional life.47 The other institutional context, (rabbinic) law and tradition, compels the individual Jew to submit to a devotional life of the study and teaching of that law and tradition—a particular style of learning and conversation or discourse that shapes the entirety of human experience into a particular religious language, the language of ‘Torah’ broadly defined as devotional knowledge. The language of Torah is to envelop the individual from birth and shape him or her. Already the Mishnah emphasizes the importance of education, of shaping the mind and intellect of one’s children, again specifically sons. For example, the very tractate that develops the laws of engagement (Kiddushin or ‘Sanctification’) and thereby the fundament of the family ends with a brief homiletic passage on the crafts a father should teach his son, with some pronounced ambiguity about various common professions of the ancient world (barber, butcher, shepherd, sailor, shopkeeper, physician). The passage concludes with an ode to teaching ‘Torah’ to one’s son:

completion applies to the male, for whom the wife is a means of completion, while rabbinic texts do not make reverse statements. The issue of gender and the notion of individuality will be raised at the end of this chapter. 46 Mishnah Yevamot 6.6, again a well-known passage. A parallel tradition to this Mishnaic passage, recorded in the Tosefta, develops the notion of the fulfilling the imago Dei through reproduction to such a degree that it ends up equating abstention, henceforth, with murder (see Tosefta Yevamot 8.7), on which see Boyarin 1991, 134 ff. 47 With the possible exception of the Stoic tradition, following Zeno’s declaration that the sage should marry and beget children (Diog. Laert. 7.121), but see the important qualifications of this tradition in Trapp (2007), 161–5.

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Rabbi Nehorai says: I would set aside all the crafts in the world and teach my son nothing but Torah, for a man (‘adam) enjoys the reward thereof in this world and its whole worth remains for the world to come. But with all other crafts it is not so; for when a man (‘adam) falls into sickness or old age or troubles and cannot engage in his work, behold, he dies of hunger. But with the Torah it is not so, for it guards him from all evil while he is young, and in old age it grants him a future and hope.48

In fact, teaching Torah to one’s son is listed as one of the obligations that the Mishnah imposes on the father. That is, the householder list, cited above, continues with a well known meta-halakhic categorization of the laws or ‘commandments’ (mitzvot) which are the subject of the Mishnah: Any commandment regarding a child/ son which is incumbent upon the parent/ father – men are obligated, and women are exempt. And any commandment regarding one’s parent/ father which is incumbent upon the child/ son – men and women are equally obligated.49

The passage is justly famous for its effort to map gender onto law, and law onto gender, but the main point for now is that other, and, most likely, later, rabbinic texts develop what may or may not be implied in the first category, namely the kinds of rabbinical-instituted parental obligations, such as ‘teaching him [sic] Torah’.50 A father is to teach his son Torah, and is to include him in the project of collective learning and discussion, and is to shape his son’s mind and character according to the cultural and religious language of Torah, as it is developed by the rabbinic sages. Ideally, every son is to turn into a sage, and in the Mishnah at least the household can still be envisioned as organically linked with the institution of learning and teaching Torah or devotional knowledge.51 The child, and to be precise, the

48

Mishnah Kiddushin 4.14, which concludes with biblical proof texts and an invocation of Abraham who observed the Torah and its laws in its entirety, which may have an anti-Pauline polemic to it, a subject that cannot be expanded on here. 49 Mishnah Kiddushin 1.7. 50 Tosefta Kiddushin 1.12, cited also in the Talmudic discussion (Babylonian Talmud Kiddushin 29a–b), which labours hard to exclude the mother from the parental obligation of teaching, and therefore from the enterprise of learning, a discussion that has occupied much of the Jewish feminist scholarship over the past few decades. 51 On the role of the household in the shaping of rabbinic Judaism see Sivertsev 2002. On the late institutionalization of rabbinic learning in the form of ‘academies’ see Goodblatt 1975 as well as 1981. See also Gafni 1990.

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son—ideally every son—is to be drawn into the tradition of learning, to be made a member of it, represented in the Mishnah’s collective conversation as nothing more than a name to whom pronouncements of various sorts can be attached. While devotional learning is to shape the life of the individual Jew, it does not individualize him, since here again Michael Trapp’s assessment of the Stoic cultivation of knowledge applies in almost equal terms to the rabbinic version: Intellectual activity, as envisaged in this kind of theorizing, whether engaged in during incarnate life, or after the separation of soul/intellect from body, is an essentially impersonal business, which seems to allow no room for individual variation. Truth is truth, and can be contemplated in one way only; there can be no variations of taste, for taste depends on variations in desire, which belong to the dimension of the soul (or of the soul’s activity) left behind in contemplation. Nor is there even much room for individuality in the sense of consciously separate existence: the contemplating intellect seems to come as close as it can to the realities contemplated, and even to merge its individual identity into theirs.52

Finally, the Mishnah does consider also the question of ‘teaching Torah’ to one’s daughter in a different context, with much more pronounced ambiguity than is the case with a son, although never outrightly prohibiting it.53 However, the primary role assigned to women in the Mishnaic legal discourse is the role of wife, and not as a potential member of the scholastic culture that the Mishnah envisions. In this scholastic culture, then, women’s lives are to be shaped predominantly by one institutional context, namely marriage and the family, while men’s lives are to be suspended between two potentially conflicting institutions, family and devotional learning.

52

Trapp 2007, 114. Mishnah Sotah 3.4, which represents the question as a controversy among rabbinic sages, one which also imports an association of illicit sexuality. On this passage and its importance for the general question of women’s exclusion from the culture of Torah study in rabbinic culture, see Boyarin 1991, 171ff, where he also traces resistance to this exclusionary practice, as per the subtitle of the relevant chapter, ‘Studying Women: Resistance from Within the Male Discourse’. Suffice it to acknowledge here that much has been written in recent decades on the centuries’ long exclusion of women from the culture of Torah learning, built on the early rabbinic controversy. 53

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FROM COLLECTIVIZING THE INDIVIDUAL TO INDIVIDUALIZATION OF THE COLLECTIVE A third aspect of the overall collectivizing ethos of the Mishnah is reflected in the taxonomy of people and specifically its terminology for the individual Jew. Rabbinic Hebrew does not pride itself on an abstract term for individual—or, for that matter, for self.54 The term yahid (‘single’ person, or ‘single’ opinion) is rare and is mostly a technical numerical term: der Einzelne, or one person versus the many, such as in pitching an individual opinion against the opinion of a hypothetical plurality.55 In the compound of reshut ha-yahid (domain of the individual) versus reshut ha-rabbim (domain of the many),56 often translated as private versus public realm, the distinction concerns accessibility rather than private ownership, or how many people have access to the domain in question. The yahid in these contexts is not Kafka’s modern individual in front of the law and condemned by the law. Most commonly the Mishnah uses an array of collectivizing terms. As a text posing as law it is in part the genre that predetermines the predilection for collectivizing terminology, and for categories and types of people. The preponderance of classification is therefore not surprising. This is what legal discourse does invariably. Sex, age, social, ritual, and economic status57 intersect in various ways to inscribe rabbinic law into a person’s life. Vis-à-vis biblical law the

54 There is, however, a genre of rabbinic literature that is devoted to character formation specifically of the scholar, a literature that is often characterized as ‘ethical literature’. Jon Schofer’s work has been devoted to this literature. On the formation of the sage see Schofer 2005 and 2005a. Schofer points out that there is no language for the self, but he is quite optimistic about using the rabbinic texts as sources for studying how ‘rabbinic selves’ would have been made (Schofer 2005a, 197). His recent book, Schofer 2010, expands his interest beyond the specifically ‘ethical’ texts of the rabbinic corpus. On the recent interest in studying the self in rabbinic legal discourse, specifically the Mishnah, see Balberg 2011, and on rabbinic conceptualizations of the pathic drives, see Rosen-Zvi 2011. 55 ‘In a case where there is one and many, the law follows the many’, a principle cited frequently in the Babylonian Talmud (bBerakhot 9a a.o.), not in the Mishnah itself. 56 Mishnah Shabbat 11.1; Eruvin 10:4–7, 8; Tohorot 6.1–9, a.o.; esp. Tosefta Shabbat 1.1–6. 57 In the particular context of the Mishnah, ritual status refers to the distinction of people with an inherited priestly status versus a levitical or commoner status. This plays a role in certain ritual contexts.

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Mishnah designs new categories, the product of greater differentiation: depending on legal context, a person as man or woman, as dual-sexed or not-yet-sexed person. A boy or girl may be classified as either minor, pubescent, or (independent) adult. A Jewish man may be categorized as eunuch, or a woman as the female equivalent, and so on. In terms of ethnic and religious identities, the Mishnah draws distinctions not only between Jews and non-Jews (goyim, benai noach, ‘idolators’), but between different types of Jews, those that it considers not only normative but orthodox (‘Israel’), versus others that are clearly marked as heterodox and even heretic (Samaritans, Sadducees, Boethusians, minim (heretics), amei ha’-aretz). Suffice it to emphasize that the Mishnah does not merely reflect a pre-existing body politic, but quite self-consciously constructs and shapes that body politic, all of which is a much-discussed phenomenon. The clearly privileged subject of the Mishnah, however, is the male Jew, who is often merely the implied subject of a legal discourse, such as we have seen already above in the list of acquisitions for one’s household. Legal cases are most commonly introduced as ‘he who does x, then y will be the ruling’ or ‘[if] someone does . . . ’. For instance, ‘Someone who dwells with a non-Jew in the same courtyard’ (mEruvin 6.1) or ‘someone who dwells with an am ha-aretz in the same courtyard’ (mTohorot 8.1) implies the generic Jew who follows the law of the Mishnah, or who is projected to fall under the auspices of the mishnaic legal discourse. Alternately, although less frequently, a generic female subject may be implied when the verb is gendered accordingly.58 At times, the Mishnah also uses ‘adam to refer generically to ‘person’, ‘human being’,59 although often enough referring more specifically to a generic Jewish man.60

Less frequently, in legal context that concern specifically women: ‘She who has a miscarriage’ (mNiddah 3.1) or ‘If she was sitting on a bed’ (mNiddah 1.1), for example. 59 mOhalot 1.8, on the 248 parts of a human body, and frequently in this tractate which deals with the impurity of death, and therefore with the boundary between life and death: ‘A person (‘adam) does not convey impurity till his nefesh (“life-spirit”) goes out’ (mOhalot 1.6), see also mNega’im 6.7 on the twenty-four tips of his limbs. For a discussion of the use of the term adam specifically in the context of the mishnaic purity laws see Balberg 2011, 100ff. 60 e.g. mBerakhot 9.5 (‘an adam should bless in response to the bad just as he blesses in response to the good . . . an adam should not behave light-headedly towards the eastern gate of the Temple) a.o. 58

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None of this is surprising, given the rhetoric of law: it categorizes, and as case law—as with the Mishnah—it differentiates. The referent that deserves more thought, however, particularly in our context, is the one used frequently throughout the Mishnah, namely ‘Israel’, not yehudi (‘Jew’)61 and not ‘ivri (Hebrew).62 ‘Israel’ is the biblicizing signifier both for the collective and the individual Jew, that is, the male Jew. The referent for Jewish woman is commonly bat Israel or ‘daughter of Israel’ or, collectively, as benot Israel (‘daughters of Israel’), never just ‘Israel’.63 That is, the proper name Israel for the collective serves at the same time as a referent to the individual.64 Expressly, the term is never used in its plural form (yisraelim),65 whereas for groups categorized as others this is the case throughout (zaduki/ zedukim; kuti/ kutim; min/ minim, etc.).66 As mentioned above, the term has been discussed in the literature mostly for its polemical force in a cultural context in which various groups and writers contended for the place of heir of the biblical people of Israel.67 The Mishnah employs the term often in contrast to other non-Jews and Jewish-type groups, confirming the 61 On the use of this term in biblical texts such as Jeremiah and Esther, see Cohen 1999, 82ff, who argues, convincingly I think, that in those texts and in the Greek equivalent thereof ‘a yehudi is a Judaean’, 83, i.e. a geographical referent and that should be rendered as ‘Judaean’. 62 Recall that Paul identifies himself as ‘a Hebrew born to Hebrews’ (Phil. 3.5); Justin has Trypho identify himself as a ‘Hebrew of the circumcision’ (dial. 1). In the Mishnah ivri for person appears only in the compound of ‘Hebrew slave’ versus ‘Canaanite slave,’ as in the householder list above. 63 On this observation see Wegner 1992. Women categorically inhabit a derivative role. They are not Israel, they are related thereto or derivative thereof. See also my discussion in Fonrobert 2004. I think it is fair to say that in this locution collective and individual connotation of the term overlap. 64 Some translators render the referent as ‘Israelite’, such as Danby (1933) throughout, although not consistently. Linguistically speaking this is misleading: the individual is Israel, he is not merely a member of the people of Israel. The Mishnah poignantly does not use the adjective. 65 With very rare exceptions, as in Mishnah Eruvin 6.1, although here the most reliable manuscripts have the singular or an abbreviation. 66 kuti (Samaritan, e.g. mBerakhot 7.1, 8.8); kutim (e.g. mNiddah 4.1); zaduki (Sadducee, e.g. mEruvin 6.2); zedukim (e.g. mNiddah 4.2, mYadayim 4.6–7). For minim see mBerakhot 9.5, although here some manuscript version have zedukim. But see Shremer 2010, 166 n. 56. 67 Both Paul (Rom. 9–11) and Justin Martyr make strategic use of the term. See recently Boyarin 2006, with a particular interest in the emergence of heresiography as a cultural practice: ‘the rabbis appropriate the name Israel for those who hold their creed and follow the ways that they identify as the “ways of Israel” ’ in response to those others (61–2, my emphasis); also Fonrobert 2001.

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heresiographical force of the term,68 although it does use the term in other contexts.69 What has, however, not been thought through sufficiently, I believe, is what the use of the collectivizing proper name Israel as a referent—not as a name!—for the individual Jew means, and what this expresses about the Mishnah’s understanding about the relationship between individual and collective. Sacha Stern’s study of the making of Jewish identity in early rabbinic texts is somewhat of the exception in this regard, but with a contrary solution. He argues that the Mishnah’s choice of ‘Israel’ as a referent for the individual betrays a conception of Israel (collective) as an ‘organic unity’, or ‘single, homogenous’ or ‘monolithic’ entity.70 Although I do not find Stern’s account to be convincing it does speak to the overall collectivizing ethos cultivated in the Mishnah and briefly sketched out here. However, I submit that the strategy of equating individual and collective also constitutes the moment we can consider significant in the trajectory from biblical literature to the Mishnah, and therefore a significant moment in the genealogy of the Jewish notion of individuality. The Mishnah transfers what in biblical terms operates almost entirely as a term for the collective—the people of Israel—to the individual Jew. ‘Israel’ is now also the individual person. In and of itself this move demonstrates an investment in the individual through the biblical term: the ancient collective is contracted into the individual and thereby individuated in a manner of speaking. In the Mishnah’s conceptualization, it is not just that the collective overdetermines the concept of the individual as Stern would have it. On the contrary, it is in the individual Jew that the collective is instantiated. He is ‘Israel’, and not merely part of it (as in benei Israel, the biblical ‘children of Israel’), and more precisely he performs—and does not merely represent—‘Israel’ by observing of the law. One ‘Israel’ embodies and 68

e.g. Mishnah Berakhot 8.8 (vs Samaritan), Demai 5.9 (vs non-Jew and Samaritan) and 6.1 (Samaritan, non-Jew); Nedarim 3.10–11 (kutim (Samaritans), umot haolam (peoples of the world, circumcised non-Jews etc.); Niddah 4.1–2 (Samaritans, Sadducees, non-Jews); Tohorot 8.1 (am ha-aretz) a.o. 69 e.g. Mishnah Shabbat 14.4, but much more rarely. 70 See e.g. Stern 1997, xvi–xvii and 10–13. Stern takes a quasi-anthropological approach and draws on anthropological studies of for instance the Australian Aboriginal mentality to discuss rabbinic collectivism. The methodology is somewhat questionable, not because comparison between Mishnah and the supposed Australian Aboriginal mentality should be ruled out by definition. But it strikes me—and that is the point advanced here—that the Mishnah’s strategy should first be properly historicized.

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enacts the whole, just as one person—one human being—in the homily on the purpose of the creation of humanity as an individual is the analogue of an ‘entire world’. I want to suggest that this model can be meaningfully described as a synecdoche: one ‘Israel’ (the individual person) has a synecdochal relationship to ‘Israel’, the collective rather than merely a fragmentary one. By contrast, consider Paul’s corporate model of the community developed in his first epistle to the Corinthians. His overt purpose is unitarian, to mould diversity into unity: ‘For just as the body is one and has many members, and all the members of the body, though many, are one body, so it is with Christ. For in the one Spirit we were all baptized into one body’ (1 Cor. 12:12–13). He continues to develop the body metaphor at great length: ‘Indeed, the body does not consist of one member but of many. If the foot would say: “because I am not a hand, I do not belong to the body”, that would not make it any less a part of the body’ (1 Cor. 12:14), and then emphasizes: ‘As it is, there are many members, yet one body.’ In this conceptualization, somewhat evocative of modern sociological models such as, famously, Herbert Spencer’s ‘social organism’,71 the individual members get to play their specific and partial roles in the whole, and are always only fragments of the whole. Whether or not differentiation in this model on principle entails a social hierarchy, in Paul’s model it most definitely does.72 By comparison, the Mishnah does not provide a similar metaphorical representation of the body politic, but I want to suggest that its language—an individual ‘Israel’ who embodies the collective ‘Israel’—implies a conceptual model in which the individual is not only a fragment of the whole, but the whole itself. In this model, no single ‘Israel’ is above another (other than, of course, everyone who is not conceptualized as an ‘Israel’, namely women and slaves in this social order as per the household code above). Clearly, in this conceptualization the ‘individual “Israel”’ is only a type, and is precisely 71 See Urry 2000, 23. Urry traces the history of metaphorical thinking in modern social theory and here attributes Spencer with the most famous articulation of the key organismic metaphor, where ‘the workings of the social body are regarded as analogous to those of the human body’, ibid. 72 Hence Paul’s pointed question at the end of developing the body metaphor: ‘Are all apostles? Are all prophets? Are all teachers?’ (1 Cor. 12.29). The question of whether or not the organismic metaphor is hierarchical or merely functionally differentiated is, of course, a point of contention among the various theorists who use the metaphor. Martin 1995, 92–6 discusses this issue in Paul in the context of the ancient and philosophical tradition of homonoia.

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not to excel through differentiation but is rather to embody the law in its totality. Still, I submit that this conceptualization can be meaningfully described as the outcome of a diachronic process of individualization with respect to biblical literature, and one in which the individual is invested with ultimate significance. Finally, we can perhaps think meaningfully of individualization on a secondary level, by way of extrapolation from the Mishnah’s conceptualization itself. The individual ‘Israel’ is called upon to differentiate himself, basically every moment of his daily life, from the am ha-aretz, the Samaritan, the Sadducee, the ben noach, from the idolator, from the non-Jew, i.e. to differentiate himself from the rest of the Roman (and non- and/or anti-rabbinic Jewish) population. Not to disengage, but to differentiate. This is what the Mishnah and its model of orthopraxy institutes. That is, with the destruction of the Temple and Jerusalem by the Romans, Jews—and among them the rabbis—were faced with the total loss of socio-political institutions that constitute and bind a socio-political whole by providing collective boundaries. From the second century ce onwards, the new political boundaries for whatever was left of the Jews as a collective were potentially those of the Roman empire. With respect to this other body politic, the Mishnah’s project—or rather the project of the creators of the Mishnah—was to compel their followers to differentiate themselves pronouncedly, notably not as a separatist group (at least not altogether) but by embodying ‘Israel’ through daily performance and practice.

RABBINIC BODY POLITIC IN THE MISHNAH: COLLECTIVIZING AS ANTI-COLONIAL RESPONSE Here I arrive at the moment when the three aspects of the Mishnaic project of defining Judaism—collective discourse; the delineation of the self as primarily social embedded in family and shaped by law; and the individual Jew as synecdoche of the collective—can be combined to bring into view the larger cultural-political project of the Mishnah which was successful, so much so as to emerge as the dominant model of Judaism towards the end of late antiquity. This step will allow us to frame how we might be able to begin thinking about

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religious individualization in the case of rabbinic Judaism. That is, given alternative, no less Jewish options as discussed above, these three aspects of the Mishnah move into view as strategies, strategies of shaping Jewish identity, rather than as repetitions of biblical and post-biblical modes of Jewish discourse and law. Indeed, why is there so little overt interest in this literature in the self qua self, or as Jörg Rüpke puts it, in ‘the relationship of the individual to herself or himself ’?73 Whence the overarching concern and focus on marriage and reproduction as that which constitutes the (male!) individual as individual, however synecdochally? Why the insistence of envisioning the individual as always already social individual? Whence the pronounced foregrounding of the social, the collective, both in discourse (collective voice) and in rhetoric (an ‘Israel’)? I would argue that these strategies derive at least in part from, or are a product of, the urgent rabbinic interest in preserving and promulgating the body politic of ‘Israel’. As has been pointed out by others, the Mishnah institutes the creation of a hybrid body politic that is ‘ethnic’74 as well as ‘religious’, that is, based on performative criteria. A good—rabbinic—Jew is he who produces—rabbinically— Jewish children, by virtue of marrying—rabbinically—a good Jewish wife, and one who lives his live according to the precepts of the— rabbinic—Torah, and devotes his life to its study. A good (rabbinic) Jew both produces (rabbinically) Jewish bodies and (rabbinically) Jewish knowledge. This hybrid body politic, I want to argue, can be best understood in the context of colonization. The historical defeat, and especially the Roman destruction of the Temple as the symbolic, 73 This requires an immediate qualification, for one because of the rabbinic ‘ethical’ texts to which Jon Schofer’s work has been devoted, namely those texts that instruct rabbinic disciples ‘in the development of sagely character and exemplary behavior’, as Schofer 2010 succinctly summarizes. But even this literature arguably is not about self-cultivation per se. Rather, ‘the perfected rabbi is a sage, a wise man whose desires are fully shaped by the wisdom of Torah and the practices that it sets out’, Schofer 2010, 315, and therefore not distinct from the vision of the Mishnah’s creators. Second, Rosen-Zvi 2011 traces the genealogy of the rabbinic notion of the yetzer of drive throughout the rabbinic archive, the same notion that Schofer makes part of his analysis of the rabbinic notion of ‘self ’. Rosen-Zvi, however, demonstrates that this notion has as much to do with ancient traditions of demonology as with shifts in anthropological models. In her 2011 dissertation Mira Balberg investigates the making of a rabbinic self in one of the orders of the Mishnah (‘Purities’). 74 As expressed by the formulation of the matrilineal principle, on which see Cohen 1999, 263–308.

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political, and institutional centre of the socio-political body politic in the century preceding the Mishnah’s formulation, played into the hands of those groups, such as the Pauline groups, that argued for a different body politic altogether. In sociological terms therefore, the destruction of the Temple in Jerusalem amounts to a radical crisis of de-traditionalization, with the potential of radical individualization. With the erasure of the cultic system, old institutional, priestly models of authority are undermined and the integrity of former models of Judaism radically questioned. Perhaps ironically, the destruction of the Temple and what it signified fulfils one of the two meanings that Ulrich Beck regards as implied in the ‘catch-word’ individualization, namely ‘the disintegration of previously existing social forms—for example, the increasing fragility of such categories as class and social status, gender roles, family, neighbourhood, etc.’75 Beck’s specific example is the fall of the Berlin Wall and the Soviet system which for people in the GDR and Eastern bloc countries meant ‘the collapse of state-sanctioned normal biographies, frames of reference, role models’. They were caught up in a dramatic ‘plunge into modernity’. According to Beck: ‘wherever such tendencies towards disintegration show themselves the question also arises: which new modes of life are coming into being where the old ones, ordained by religion, tradition, or the state, are breaking down?’76 By this social theoretical reasoning we can equate the fall of the Temple and Jerusalem with the fall of the Berlin Wall, although one would be hard pressed to argue that the Jews of Palestine were caught up in a plunge into modernity. However, they were indeed caught up in a collapse of formerly cultically and perhaps politically sanctioned frames of reference, a collapse that entailed necessitating rethinking and reformulating connections with the past. Against Beck’s own argument for individualization as a phenomenon that applies exclusively to modernity and ‘second modernity’, we can retroject at least this aspect into the landscape of first and second century Jewish Palestine to make sense of the collectivizing effort of the Mishnah that shaped rabbinic Judaism so profoundly. The collapse of Temple Judaism—a collapse that was already 75 Beck and Beck-Gernsheim 2001, 2. The other meaning is more specifically modern, namely the new demands, controls, and constraints imposed on individuals in modern capitalist societies. 76 Beck and Beck-Gernsheim 2001, 2.

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presaged by Roman colonization—and everything it stood for brought with it the potential (as well as actual) fragmentation of the Jewish body politic. In light of this, the promulgators of the Mishnah can be read as precisely refusing a process that is launched by Paul and his followers, as well as other groups, and responding with a model of the body politic that ultimately does not ever permit a Jew to conceive of himself as only an individual, as independent and separate from the body politic as they re-conceive of it. The choice of the nomenclature of ‘Israel’ as a referent to the individual Jew expresses precisely this: an individual (Torah observant, etc.) ‘Israel’ is always already the embodiment of Israel the collective. At the same time, it is precisely in the (male) individual that the collective is performed. If indeed we understand processes of individualization to be inseparably bound up with the political and not merely social, then under the condition of empire and its shattering force of colonization, the Mishnah draws on ‘religion’ in the form of a reinvented devotional knowledge to counter that condition. By way of conclusion, it behoves me to return once more to the Mishnah’s homily cited at the beginning of this analysis, to account for the tension between the absolute theological valuation of the individual in his or her particularity and the collectivized individual who is the ideal subject of the Mishnaic legal discourse. ‘He who destroys a single soul (nefesh) from humanity/Israel (benei ‘adam/ isra’el), Scripture accounts it to him as though he had destroyed an entire world; and if one saves a single soul from humanity/Israel, Scripture accounts it to him as though he had saved an entire world.’77 In light of the foregoing we can also make sense of the manuscript variants: the individual (rabbinic) Jew is the synecdoche of Israel, and by extrapolation, the individual is the synecdoche of humanity. Theologically speaking, the Mishnah values the individual infinitely, because it charges every individual (rabbinic) Jew with embodying the whole, with the task of performing ‘Israel’. The individual is played out against individuality; the individual is everything, but individuality is nothing. It is because the individual is theologically valued infinitely, that she or he can come to represent

77 Here for once the text arguably operates gender inclusively. ‘Single soul’ can refer to both men and women, who are equally subject to the laws of capital punishment.

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the whole, although in the mishnah’s thinking (rabbinic) Jewish men always more so than (rabbinic) Jewish women.

REFERENCES Balberg, Mira 2011. ‘Recomposed Corporealities: Purity, Body, and Self in the Mishnah’. PhD dissertation, Stanford University. ——2013. ‘Pricing Persons: Consecration, Compensation, and Individuality in the Mishnah’, Jewish Quarterly Review, forthcoming. Beck, Ulrich and Beck-Gernsheim, Elisabeth 2001. Individualization: Institutionalized Individualism and its Social and Political Consequences. London: SAGE. Belkin, Samuel 1960. In his Image: The Jewish Philosophy of Man as Expressed in Rabbinic Tradition. London: Abelard-Schuman. Berkowitz, Beth A. 2006. Execution and Invention: Death Penalty Discourse in Early Rabbinic and Christian Cultures. Oxford-New York: Oxford University Press. Boyarin, Daniel 1991. Carnal Israel: Reading Sex in Talmudic Culture. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. ——2004. Border Lines: The Partition of Judaeo-Christianity. Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press. Brown, Peter 1986. The Body and Society: Men, Women and Sexual Renunciation in Early Christianity. New York: Columbia University Press. Cohen, Shaye J. D. 1999. Beginnings of Jewishness: Boundaries, Varieties, Uncertainties. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. ——2002. Josephus in Galilee and Rome: His Vita and Development as a Historian. Leiden: Brill. Daube, David 1979. ‘The Rabbis and Philo on Human Rights’, in Sidorsky, David (ed.), Essays on Human Rights: Contemporary Rights and Jewish Perspectives. Philadelphia, PA: The Jewish Publication Society of America, 234–46. Epstein, J. N. 1957. An Introduction to Tannaitic Literature. Mishnah, Tosephta and Halakhic Midrashim, ed. E. Z. Melamed. Jerusalem (Hebr.). Finkelstein, Louis 1936. Akiba: Scholar, Saint, Martyr. Philadelphia, PA: Jewish Publication Society. Fishbane, Michael 1988. ‘The Image of the Human and the Rights of the Individual in Jewish Tradition’, in Rouner, Leroy S. (ed.), Human Rights and the World’s Religions. Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 17–32. Fishbane, Michael 1989. Biblical Interpretation in Ancient Israel. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

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Fonrobert, Charlotte E. 2001. ‘When Women Walk in the Ways of Their Fathers In Gendering the Rabbinic Claim for Authority’, JHS 10, 398–415. —— and Jaffee, Martin S. (eds) 2007. The Cambridge Companion to the Talmud and Rabbinic Literature. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Fraade, Steven 1986. ‘Ascetic Aspects of Ancient Judaism’, in Green, Arthur (ed.), Jewish Spirituality Through the Ages: From the Bible through the Middle Ages. New York: Crossroads, 253–88. ——2007. ‘Ancient Jewish Law and Narrative in Comparative Perspective: The Damascus Document and the Mishnah’, Diné Yisrael 24, 65–99. Gafni, Isaiah 1990. The Jews of Babylonia in the Talmudic Era. Jerusalem: Yale University Press. Gardner, Jane F. 1986. Women in Roman Law and Society. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press. Gilat, Yitzhak 1984. Rabbi Eliezer ben Hyrcanus: A Scholar Outcast. RamatGan: Bar-Ilan University Press. Goldberg, Abraham 1987. ‘The Mishnah—A Study Book of Halakha’, in Safrai, Shmuel (ed.), The Literature of the Sages, vol. 3a. Assen: Van Gorcum, 211–63. Goodblatt, David 1975. Rabbinic Instruction in Sasanian Babylonia. Leiden: Brill. ——1981. ‘New Developments in the Study of the Babylonian Yeshivot’, Tsiyon 46, 14–38. Goshen-Gottstein, Alon 2000. The Sinner and the Amnesiac: The Rabbinic Invention of Elisha ben Abuya and Eleazar ben Arach. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Hezser, Catherine 1997. The Social Structure of the Rabbinic Movement in Roman Palestine. Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck. Jaffee, Martin 2001. Torah in the Mouth: Writing and Oral Tradition in Palestinian Judaism 200 bce to 400 ce. Oxford: Oxford University Press. ——2007. ‘Rabbinic Authorship as a Collective Enterprise’, in Fonrobert, Charlotte E. and Jaffee, Martin (eds), The Cambridge Companion to the Talmud and Rabbinic Literature. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 17–38. Levinson, Bernard M. 2003. ‘ “You Must Not Add Anything to What I Command You”: Paradoxes of Canon and Authorship in Ancient Israel’, Numen 50, 1–51. Martin, Dale 1995. The Corinthian Body. New Haven: Yale University Press. Milikowsky, Chaim 1988. ‘The Status Quaestionis of Research in Rabbinic Literature’, Journal of Jewish Studies 37, 201–11. Neusner, Jacob 1970. A Life of Yohanan ben Zakkai. Ca. 1–80 c.e. Studia Post Biblica. Leiden: Brill. ——1973. Eliezer ben Hyrcanus: The Tradition and the Man. Leiden: Brill. Niehoff, Maren 2001. Philo on Jewish Identity and Culture. Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck.

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Rosen-Zvi, Ishay 2011. Demonic Desires: Yetzer Hara and the Problem of Evil in Late Antiquity. Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press. Rubenstein, Jeffrey 1999. Talmudic Stories: Narrative Art, Composition, and Culture. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press. ——2010. Stories of the Babylonian Talmud. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press. Schäfer, Peter 1986. ‘Research into Rabbinic Literature: An Attempt to Define the Status Quaestionis’, Journal of Jewish Studies 37, 139–52. Schofer, Jon 2005. The Making of a Sage: A Study in Rabbinic Ethics. Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press. ——2005a. ‘The Beastly Body in Rabbinic Self-Formation’, in Brakke, David, Satlow, Michael, and Weitzman, Steven (eds), Religion and the Self in Antiquity. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 197–222. ——2010. Confronting Vulnerability: The Body and the Divine in Rabbinic Ethics. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Schwartz, Seth 2001. Imperialism and Jewish Society 200 b.c.e. to 640 c.e. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. ——2006. ‘Political, Social, and Economic Life in the Land of Israel, 66-c.235’, in Katz, Steven T. (ed.), The Cambridge History of Judaism, vol. 4: The Late Roman-Rabbinic Period. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 23–53. Seeskin, Kennet 2007. ‘Ethics, Authority, and Autonomy’, in Morgan, Michael and Gordon, Peter Eli (eds), The Cambridge Companion to Modern Jewish Philosophy. Cambridge University Press, 192–208. Shemesh, Aharon 2009. Halakhah in the Making: The Development of Jewish Law from Qumran to the Rabbis. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Shremer, Adiel 2010. Brothers Estranged: Heresy, Christianity, and Jewish Identity in Late Antiquity. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Simon-Shoshan, Moshe 2012. Stories of the Law: Narrative Discourse and the Construction of Authority in the Mishnah. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Sivertsev, Alexei M. 2002. Households, Sects, and the Origins of Rabbinic Judaism. Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck. Smallwood, E. Mary (ed.) 1970. Philonis Alexandrini Legatio ad Gaium. 2nd edn, Leiden: Brill. ——1981. The Jews under Roman Rule: from Pompey to Diocletian; a Study in Political Relations, 2nd edn, Studies of Judaism in Late Antiquity 20. Leiden: Brill. Stemberger, Günther 1996. Einleitung in Talmud und Midrasch. Munich: Beck. Stern, Penina 2010. ‘Life of Josephus: The Autobiography of Flavius Josephus’, JSJ 41.1, 63–93.

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Stern, Sacha 1997. Jewish Identity in Early Rabbinic Writings. Leiden: Brill. Strack, Hermann, and Stemberger, Günther 1992. Introduction to Talmud and Midrash. Minneapolis, MN: Augsburg Fortress Press. Taubes, Jacob 1983. ‘Zur Konjunktur des Polytheismus’, in Bohrer, K. H. (ed.), Mythos und Moderne: Begriff und Bild einer Rekonstruktion. Suhrkamp: Frankfurt. Reprinted in Vom Kult zur Kultur: Bausteine zu einer Kritik der historischen Vernunft (ed. Assmann, Jan, Assmann, Aleida, and Hartwich, Wolf-Daniel). Munich: Wilhelm Fink, 1996. English trans. From Cult to Culture: Fragments Toward a Critique of Historical Reason (ed. Fonrobert, Charlotte, and Engel, Amir). Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press 2010. Trapp, Michael 2007. Philosophy in the Roman Empire: Ethics, Politics and Society. Aldershot: Ashgate. Urry, John 2000. Sociology Beyond Societies: Mobilities for the Twenty-First Century. London: Routledge. Wegner, Judith Romney 1992. Chattel or Person? The Status of Women in the Mishnah. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

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Index of Sources [A blank line marks texts which are not an oeuvre of the author mentioned before, but anonymous texts quoted by their title] Epigraphical and Papyrological Sources Ameling 2004 no.131 302 Audollent 1904 no.75A 248 no.188 166 BGU 4.1024–7 165 Canon Muratori l.73–7 318 l.77–80 319 CIG 4142.37 257 CIL 3.1126 243 3.6423 76 6.930 142 8.22672 9 13.1751 150 14.24 252 14.2862 67 CMRDM 1.85 260 3.67–8 246 Daniel and Maltomini 1990–2 no.46–51 165 no.72, 1–5 170 no.66 = SEG 41.1619 176 De Hoz 1999 no.23, 15–17 248 Drew–Bear 1978 no.7 257 no.24 243 Drew–Bear, Thomas, and Yildizturan 1999 no.374 247 Drew–Bear, Thomas, and Yildizturan 1999 no.605 251 Gatier 1982 no.1, 269–70 256 Graf and Johnston 2007 no.2, 6–7 225 no.26 a,b 225

Herrmann and Polatkan 1969 no.10, 53–4 255 Horsley 2007 no.108, 24–7 251 no.32 252 IAM 94 92 I. Ephesos 7.1.3100 257 IG 1³.974 126 1³.977 123 1³.980 124 1³.981 125 9.1².1700= 9.1.654 120 12.3.421 129 12.3.422 128 12.3.464 128 12.3.863 128 12.3.1328 129 12.3.1334 130 12.3.1336 128 12.3.1338 130 12.3.1340 130 12.3.1342–3 130 12.3.1344 128, 130 12.3.1345–7 129 12.3.1350 128 12.5.235 251 12. Suppl. 124 252 IGR 4.743 249 IGVR 176 256 I. Kibyra 1.93–4 252 I. Klaudiupolis 9.4, 15–18 252 ILS 3005–7 75 3019 75

524 ILS (cont.) 3051 75 3160 75 3168 75 3170 75 3229 75 3263 75 3274 75 3339 75 3392 75 3503 75 3534 75 3542 75 3659 75 3685 67 I. Magnesia 215a 120 I. Stratonikeia 2.1 248 103 251 330 257 519 255 1111 255 1114–20 255 1307 255, 257 1308–9 255 LSAM 31 119 48.18 216 Malay 1994 no.184 255 MAMA 5.1, 183 254 5. R 8 255 Marek 2000 no.1 247 Merkelbach and Stauber 1996 no.25, 1–9 249 Merkelbach and Stauber 2001, SGO 3.16.35.01 256 3.16.55.01 259 Nag Hammadi Codex (NH) 2.131.19 443 6.6.52.1–7 414 6.6.52.26–53.11 415 6.6.53.24–31 415 6.6.55.10–22 415 6.6.58.28 414 6.6.59.24 414 6.6.63.2–3 388

Index of Sources 6.7.63.33–65.7 406 6.8.65.15–78.43 406 Papyri Demoticae Magicae 14.1168 (Johnson 1975) = 249 (Betz 1986) 173 14.515 (Johnson 1975) = 224 (Betz 1986) 173 14.266 (Johnson 1975) = 211 (Betz 1986) 173 P. Derveni col. Xx 3 133 Papyri Graecae Magicae 1.82–4 175 1.84–5 169 1.92–4 175 2.50–9 173 3 173 3.591–610 407 4.52–85 175 4.296–466 165 4.792–5 177 4.886 171 4.2441–6 170 4.2446–7 171 4.2622–6 170 4.3206 177 7.323–7 171 7.737 174 7.863–4 170 12.104 169 13 173 22a 165 P. Leidenses J 384 verso 166 P. Michigan 130 319 P. Oslo 1 165 Petzl 1978 no.4 253 Petzl 1994 no.3 253 no.38 252 no.122, 4–5 254 Pippidi 1983 no.54 122 Ricl 1991–2 no.1 253 no.3, 97 258 no.6 253 no.7 258

Index of Sources no.25 259 no.39 254 no.48 249 no.81 256 Ricl 1992b no.1, 95–6 254 Robert 1954 no.191, 7–8 249 Sahin 2002 no.38 256 SEG 6.79 255 29.799 216 29.1205 120 35.1158 246 Strubbe 1997 no.113–14 244 no.121 244 no.125 244 no.285 244 TAM 5.1.186 257, 260 5.1.246 246 5.1.247 254 5.1.250 256 5.1.317, 1–3 251 5.1.434, 11–15 259 5.1.524 = CMRDM1.85 257 5.1.609 250 5.1.761 258 10.158 259 Literary Sources ACHILLES TATIUS 1.1.1 52 ACTS 1.15 280 1.21–2 292 2.14 280 16.16–24 292 19.11–19 292 19.19 165 AELIUS ARISTIDES Hieroi Logoi 1.17 243 AENEAS OF GAZA Theophrastus 54.4–10 Colonna 174

AMBROSIUS Ep.77 192 AMMIANUS MARCELINUS 15.5.18 99 17.4.10 171 APOLLODOROS 3.5.1 (5.55) 127 APULEIUS Apol. 53 9 55.8–9 236 90 176 Met. 11.30.2 237 11.30.5 237 11.1.4–2.4 237 11.21.5–9 236 Mund. 25–6 108–9 26–7 248 ARISTOTELES frg.15 Ross 231 Poet. 1449 b 233 Pol. 1341a 21–4 232 1341b 32 232 1342 a 5 232 protr. frg. 10b Walzer 464 [ARISTOTELES] Peri kosmou 397 b 9–398 b 28 107 ARNOBIUS OF SICCA Adv. nat. 2.13.57.27–58.2 CSEL IV 418 ASTERIUS OF AMASEIA Against Avarice 1.3 202 On Phocas 9.2 201 12 197 13 198 On the Holy Martyrs 1.1 201 4.4. 195 ATHENAIOS Deipn. 2, 40 d 215 AURELIUS VICTOR Caes.39 99

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AURELIUS VICTOR (cont.) 2 BARUCH 300 BASIL OF CAESAREA Ep. 49 192 95 201 142 202 197.2 192 278 201 Hom. in Ps. 114.1 205 115 196 Homilia in XLMartyres 8=PG 31, col. 524 A3–13 195 In Gordium 1 201 In Mamantem 1 196, 198, 204, 396 2 201 BIBLIOTHECA HAGIOGRAPHICA GRAECA 1201 193 BION OF BORYSTHENES F 67 Kindstrand 472 BOETHIUS c. Eutych. 1–3 10 2 CHRONICLES 25.4 491 CICERO Arch. 29–30 456, 458 Att. 10.8.8 457 12.14.3 458 12.18.1 457, 468 12.21.5 458 ad Brut. 1.9 458 Cael. 26 148 Catil. 1.33 456 4.8 456 Cluent. 171 456 consol. F 1 Vitelli 464 F 7 Vitelli 464 F 16 Vitelli 469 F 21 Vitelli 461, 466 F 22 Vitelli 462–3, 465–7 F 23 Vitelli 466–7

div. 1.70 461 1.110 461 2.1–7 68 2.50 68 fam. 4.5–6 458 5.16.4 458 fin. 1.17 9 1.49 472 Hortens. 112 Grilli 464 114 Grilli 462 115 Grilli 461–2, 464 Lael. 14 460–1, 472 leg. 1.24 461 1.26 461 1.59 461 1.61 479 2.19 69 2.22 72 2.25 69 2.27 461 2.46–53 72 leg. agr. 2.18–19 63 nat. deor. 1.10 456 1.27 461 1.71 9 2.5 456, 471 2.16 477 2.36 477 2.43 477 3.12 462 off. 1.30–4 348 Phil. 14.32 456 Rabir. 29–30 456 Scaur. 4 457 sen. 66–7 461–2, 473 77–8 461 81 461 84 458 85 461, 484

Index of Sources Sest. 47 458 somn. Scip. 1.53 460 14–16 461 16 461, 476, 478 18 467 27 460 29 459, 463, 476, 479 Tim. 4 461 21 9 Tusc. 1.10–11 456, 471 1.13.91 472 1.17 461 1.27–30 467, 472 1.29 459 1.39 484 1.41 466 1.42–3 466, 482 1.44–7 479 1.51 461 1.70 466 1.75 461 1.77–8 461 1.82 461 1.118 462, 473 3.76 459, 469 4.11–12 348 5.69–70 479 5.38 461 CLEMENT OF ALEXANDRIA Strom. 4.4.14.1 379 5.70.7–71.2 231 CODEX THEODOSIANUS 9–16 19 COMM. BERN. IN LUCAN. 9.6 475 1 CORINTHIANS 2.6 276 7 504–5 10.20–1 276 11.23–6 292 12.1–5 276 12.12 92, 513 12.12–14 513 12.29 513 15.10 292

2 CORINTHIANS 1.1 498 CORPUS HERMETICUM 1 390, 396 1.12–15 411 1.15 395 1.19 396 1.20 420 1.24–6 411 1.29 408 1.31 408 2 395–6 3 394 4.1–8 396 5 395–6, 399 5.1–3 399 5.9–11 400 6.4 396, 420 7 388, 394, 396 8.1 395–6 9.2–4 395 10.1 388 10.3 401 10.4–6 401–2 10.7–18 403 10.12 396 10.19–22 404 11 390, 394 12.12 396 12.15 396, 420 12.23 401 13 395–6, 400, 410–13, 443 13.1 388, 411 13.2 411–12 13.3 412 13.7 396, 411–12 13.10 413 13.11 411 13.12–13 411 13.14 412 13.15 409–10 13.16 408 13.17–20 410–11 13.18 408, 412 14 396 DEMOSTHENES On the Crown 259–60 228 [DEMOSTHENES] Epitaphios 60.34 467

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DEUTERONOMY 5.9 491 24.16 491 DIO CASSIUS 65.10.2 141 DIOGENES LAERTIUS 7.121 506 8.31 248 [DIONYSIOS OF HALICARNASSUS] ars rhet. 6.4, II 282, 6 U. – R. 463 6.5, II 282, 11–14 U. – R. 463 2 ENOCH 496 EPICTETUS diatr. 1.2.29 349 1.2.30–2 350 1.212–24 350 EPICURUS Ad Menoec. 125 472 rat. sent. 2 472 EUMELOS F 11 Bernabé 127 EURIPIDES Troad. 636 472 EUSEBIUS hist. eccl. 3.9.15 273 EXODUS 15.25 307 20.5 491 21.22–5 301 34.7 491 EZEKIEL 18.2–4 490 18.20 489, 491 18.31 490 4 EZRA 318, 320 FESTUS 91.24 L 62 146L 91 284.18–21 L 70 422.26 L 71 440.13 L 66 478.15 L 66 FRONTO 3.10 220

GALATIANS 1.1 498 1.13–24 292 1.15–22 499 1.20 292 GAUDENTIUS OF BRESCIA Tractatus 17 192 AULUS GELLIUS 5.12.12 63 16.4.3–5 7 GENESIS 1.28 506 5.2 506 GENESIS RABBAH 17.2 505 GREGORY OF NAZIANZUS Adv. Iulian. 1.69 196 carm. 2.20 198 2.76 198 Epigr. 76–7 199 118 199 165 199 In Cyprianum 3–4 203 17 193 18 198 19 195 In Gregorium Nyssenum 5 203 In novam domenicam 11 201 GREGORY OF NYSSA Ep. 1 188 25 200 30 192 Passio XL Martyrum 1a 201 2 198–9 13 193 Steph. 2 195 Theod. 194–5, 201 Vita Macrinae 13.1.19 199 34.250–3 199 HELIODOROS Aithiop.

Index of Sources 3.16.3–4 178–9 HELLANIKOS 4 F 36 J (ap. Schol. Eust. Hom. Il. G 75) 52 HERMÈS TRISMÉGISTE (HT) Nock and Festugière 1954–60 vol.1, 38 f. A 409 vol.1, 180 420 vol.3, 14–23 404 vol.3, 38–61 387 HERODOTUS 2.171.2 232 4.79.1 216 8.65 216 HIERONYMUS vir. ill. 10 319 HIMERIUS or. 8.23, 73, 207–16 Colonna 467 HOMERIC HYMN TO DEMETER 363–9 224 471–85 221 HOMERIC HYMN TO HERMES 3 251 HORACE car. 1.28.1–11 485 2.14.17–18 485 3.30.6–9 148 HOSEA 2.4 325 3.1 325 IAMBLICHUS De myst. 1.11.39.14–40.8 234–5 JOSEPHUS ant. Iud. 1.5–10 499 4.243 309 8.230–45 311 8.295–7 311 20.167–72 311 10.263–70 312 18.259 499 bell. Iud. 1.3 498 2.258–63 311 3.350–4 309–10 5.375–419 300 6.285–7 311 c. Ap. 1.1 499

1.41 311 2.169–78 311 2.196–7 308 ISAIAH 19.11–12 302 49.1 292 49.24–5 281 ISOCRATES Panegyricus or. 4.28 222 JEREMIAH 1.5 292 11.6 302 31.29–30 490 43.20 302 JOHN 2.4 280 5.1 302 12.1–8 285 21 280 1 JOHN 2.18–28 276 JUBILEES 10.1 281 JUDAS, GOSPEL OF p.35, 3–6 445 p.37, 22–4 445 p.37, 29 446 p.44, 17–18 445 p.52, 14–19 445 p.57, 19–20 446 JUDGES 11.12 280 JUSTIN MARTYR dial. 1 511 1.2 502 1 KINGS 17.18 280 LACTANTIUS inst. 3.9.3–5 463 3.19.2 462 TITUS LIVIUS 1.55–6 141 5.22.5–8 144 29.10–11 143 29.14.5–13 144 22.57 62

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Index of Sources

1.55–6 (cont.) 31.9.6–10 63 33.41.1 60 LETTER OF ARISTEAS 144–52 301 LEVITICUS 4–7 308 LUCAN 9.11–14 477 LUCIAN OF SAMOSATA Philops. 31 165 LUCRETIUS 3.832–42 472 3.851 474 3.1039–42 366 LUKE 4.16–17 302 7.36–50 285 11.24–6 281 18.21 302 24.12 280 2 MACCABEES 357 3 MACCABEES 300 4 MACCABEES 496 MACROBIUS in somn. Scip. 1 116 1.1.9–2.1 459 1.21.34 480 MARCUS AURELIUS Meditations 11.3 367 MARK 1.7 282 1.12–13 288 1.16–20 288 1.21–8 276–8, 280–1, 288 1.32–4 276, 280 1.40–1 291–2 2.10, 28 286 2.14 288 3.1 284 3.10–12 276, 281, 288 3.13–19 277, 279, 292 3.15 280 3.16–17 291 3.22–30 277, 280–2, 288 4.1–34 277, 288 4.35–41 276, 283, 286, 288, 290

5.1–20 276, 278–9, 281–3 5.7–9 277–8, 280, 288 5.14–18 280, 283 5.18–20 284, 289 5.22–3 278 5.33 283 5.35–43 277, 279, 283, 291 6.7–13 277, 279–80 6.14–15 286 6.20 283 6.22 292 6.30–44 277 6.45–52 276–7, 283, 286 7.14–23 272 7.24–31 276, 278, 280–1, 284–5, 292 7.33–4 277 8.1–21 277, 290 8.23 277 8.27–38 271–2, 277, 285–8, 292, 445 9.2–10 279, 286, 288, 291 9.11–13 286, 292 9.14–29 276, 278, 280–2, 288–91 9.30 292 9.31 271, 288 9.32 283 9.35 272 9.38–41 277, 280, 291–3 9.42 281 10.17 290 10.21 289 10.27 291 10.32–4 271, 283, 286, 288 10.35–45 272, 286, 292 10.51 292 11.15–19 283, 290 11.23–5 290–1 12.12 283 12.14 290 12.41–4 289 13 271 13.1 290 13.6 286 13.10 284 13.26–7 286 13.33–7 272 14.6–9 271, 285, 292 14.21–4 286, 292 14.29 293 14.32–42 271, 279, 282, 286, 291–2 14.62 286 15.1–47 278, 292 16.1–8 271, 279, 283, 293

Index of Sources MARTYRDOM OF PERPETUA AND FELICITAS (MPF) 1.5 342, 372 2.3 354 3.1–3 349, 352, 372 4–5 352, 367 6.3–6 352 7–8 372 10–13 352, 354 17 353, 367 18.7–9 359 19.1 367 21.5 372 21.10 360 21.11 353 110–11 367 124–5 367 MARTYRIUM POLYCARPI 4 355 18 191 MATTHEW 12.43–5 277, 281 16.17–19 280 MENANDER RHETOR 3.412, 21 Spengel 458 3.414, 16–27 Spengel 463 3.414, 21–3 Spengel 465 3.414, 3–7 Spengel 467–8 3.421, 14–17 Spengel 463 METHODIUS de resurrectione 2.24.1 Bonwetsch 111 MINUCIUS FELIX Oct. 26.11 248 32.7–9 480 MISHNAH mBerakhot 7.1 511 8.8 511–12 9.5 510–11 mDemai 5.9 512 6.1 512 mEruvin 6.1 510–11 6.2 511 10.4–7 509 mKiddushin 1.7 507 4.14 507

mNedarim 3.10–11 512 mNega’im 6.7 510 mNiddah 1.1 510 3.1 510 4.1–2 511–12 mOhalot 1.6 510 1.8 510 mShabbat 11.1 509 14.4 512 mSanhedrin 4.5 492–3 mSotah 3.4 508 mTohorot 6.1–9 509 8.1 510, 512 mYadayim 4.6–7 511 mYevamot 6.6 506 NUMBERS 14.11 290 24 312 NUMENIOS frg.55 Des Places 234 ORIGEN Contra Celsum 8.35–6 110 Exh. Mart. 1–4 358 5 359 11 358 14–15 358–9 18 373 19 358 22.13–22 357 22.25–8 358, 357 23 357–8, 371 26 357 30 358 34–7 358 50 358 ORPHIC HYMNS 12.4 256 OVID Fast. 4.179–372 144

531

532 PARISINUS SUPPL. GR. 1020 192 PASTOR HERMAE (PH) 1 (vis 1.1.).1–8 333–4 1 (vis 1.1).9 332 3 (vis 1.3).1 327 3 (vis 1.3).2 328 6 (vis2.2).2–4 332 11 (vis 3.3).1 331 12 (vis 3.4).3 331 12 (vis 3.4), 3 328 13 (vis 3.3).1 333 14 (vis 3.6).5 327 16 (vis 3.8).4–5 321, 331 17 (vis 3.9).3 326 17 (vis 3.9).7–10 333 18 (vis 3.10).7 329, 337 22–4 (vis 4) 337 25 (vis 5).1 337 25 (vis 5).3 335 25 (vis 5).5 335 27 (mand 2).4 327 27 (mand 2).7 332 28 (mand 3).4 331 29 (mand 4.1).9 325 34 (mand 5.2).2 328 36 (mand 6.2).5 326 36 (mand 6,2).1–8 335–6 39 (mand 9).9–11 328 40 (mand 10.1).4 326 43 (mand 11).1–6 325 43 (mand 11).12 333 45 (mand 12.2).1 326 50 (sim 1).4 327 50 (sim 1).6 328 50 (sim 1).8–11 328 51 (sim 2).8–10 328–9 52 (sim 3).1–3 324 53 (sim 4).4 331 54 (sim 5.1).3–5 329 56 (sim 5.3).2–3 329 56 (sim 5.3).7 329 56 (sim 5.3).9 332 57 (sim 5.4).1 – 58 (sim 5.5).1 331 60 (sim 5.7) 325 62 (sim 6.1).1 328 66 (sim 7).2–3 332 66 (sim 7).6 327 67 (sim 8.1).16 324 68 (sim 8.2).1 329 72 (sim 8.6).5 331 73 (sim 8.7).4 333

Index of Sources 75 (sim 8 . 9).1–3 326–7 78 (sim 9 .1).4 337 82 (sim 9 .5).2 324 83 (sim 9 .6).3–5 324 88 (sim 9 .11).2 337 92 (sim 9.15), 2 321 94 (sim 9.17) 324 97 (sim 9.20).2 326 103 (vis 9.26).2 333 108 (sim 9.31).6 335 PATROLOGIA GRAECA 31, cols. 589–600 204 1 PETER 3.9 379 PHILIPPIANS 3.4–6 499 3.5 511 PHILO OF ALEXANDRIA De gigantibus 17 260 De somniis 1.238–9 260 De Migratione Abrahami 34–9 305–7 Spec. 1.168 309 3.6 308 Vit. Cont. 75–8 303–4 PHILODEMUS OF GADARA de morte 24.5 472 PHILOLAOS 44 B 14 D. – K. 464 PHILOSTRATUS Vita Apoll. 5.12, 7.20 178 PHLEGON OF TRALLES Mirabilia 10 65 37.5.2–4 65 [PHOCYLIDES] 184–5 301 PINDAR Ol. 2 223 3.41 215 PISTIS SOPHIA 113 448 PLATO Alcib. 1.130 a–c 475 Apol.

Index of Sources 40 c 456 Ep. 7.334 b7 226 Leg. 909 de 116–17 10.907 b 116 10.909 d 133 Menex. 248 b 458 Phaedo 58 e 230 77 e–78 a 230 115 c–e 475 Phaedrus 245 c 460 247 c 398 250 b–c 228–9 Rep. 364 bc 133 364 b–365 a 224–5 560 de 229 614 b–615 d 223 Symp. 201 d–212 c 229 Tht. 176 a–b 398 [PLATO] Axioch. 365 e 475 PLINIUS (iun.) Ep. 3.4.2 132 4.1.4 132 4.22 141 9.39 121 10.96–7 365 PLINIUS (sen.) nat. hist. 30.1.12 61 30.5 176 30.12–13 342 PLOTINUS Enn. 4.3.22, 1–7 480 5.8.6 171 PLUTARCH ad uxor. 10.611 EF 476 frg.178 Sandbach 234 Num. 10 62 qu. R. 83 342

533

Rom. 21 148 [PLUTARCH] cons. ad Apoll. 15, 109 ef 472 27, 115 b 464 PORPHYRY frg.261F Smith 480 Vit. Plotini 10.15–25 = 1, 17 Henry–Schwyzer 178 PROCLUS In Remp. 2.108.17–30 Kroll 235 PROVERBS 10.7 300 QUR’AN Sura 5.32 493 RHETORICA AD HERENNIUM 2.5. 12 ROMANS 1.1 498 5–8 276 9–11 511 1 SAMUEL 9.9 307 SCHOL. LYCOPHR. 273 127 SENECA Ben. 3.20.1 480 4.22.1–2 485 5.17.6 485 Brev. 14.1–5 479 15.4–5 482 19.1 481 De superstitionibus frg.62 Vottero = 27 Haase 482 frg.63 a Vottero = 28 Haase 471 frg.69–70 Vottero = 35–7 Haase 73 Dial. 1.5.9 9 Ep. 6.5 356 9.16 477 16.10 366 21.5 481 24.17–18 470–3, 475 26.6 36

534 Ep. (cont.) 26.12 470 30.11 473 36.9–10 471, 473–4 41 337, 480 54.4–5 471–2 57.8 482 65.16 470, 479 65.18 480 65.20 474, 479, 481 65.21 470, 475 65.24 472 71.14 474 71.16 472–3, 477 73.8 9 73.13 485 76.25 471–3 77.11 472 78.6 484 79.12 471, 477, 479, 482 82.6 481 82.13–16 471, 486 86 477 88.34 471, 474 91.21 470 93.2 485 93.4 481 93.9–10 472, 484–5 98.9 482 99.29 472 102 477 102.2 479, 481, 483 102.4 483 102.21–2 475, 479, 483 102.26 470, 483 102.28 460, 477–8, 483 102.30 481, 484 117.6 472 120.14 471, 475 Helv. 1.2 458 8.6 479–80 11.6–7 470, 479, 482 20.2 479 Ira 2.35.2 471 Marc. 19.1 483 19.4–5 470–2, 483, 486 20.2–3 470 23.1–2 475–6

Index of Sources 24.5 470, 475, 477 24.5–26.7 475 25.1 470–1, 475–6 25.2–3 476–8 26.1 460, 476, 482 26.3 477 26.5 478 26.6–7 460, 475–6, 482 Nat. 1 pr.7–11 481–2 1 pr.12 471, 480–1 1 pr.13 481 1 pr.17 481 3 pr.18 479 Pol. 5.1–2 472 9.2 472, 483 9.3 470, 478 9.6–8 464, 470, 476–7, 479, 482–3 18.2 481 Prov. 6.6 472 Tranq. 14.10 481 Troad. 397 471 SIMONIDES CE 1551 e.1–2 468 SOLON frg.13.26–8 223 SOPATROS Rhet. Gr. 8.114 237 SOPHOCLES frg.837 222 SOZOMENOS hist. eccl. 2.4.3 249 STOBAEI HERMETICA (SH) 6.1 388 6.7–9 388 6.18–19 387 2. A–B 404 2. A, 2–4 404 2. A, 6 404 2. A, 15 404 2. B, 1 405 2. B, 2 405 2. B, 2–3 405 2. B, 5–6 406 3.1 388 23 390

Index of Sources 23.68 414 24–7 390 STOICORUM VETERUM FRAGMENTA (SVF) 1.522 475 2.623 473 2.624 474 2.626–7 474 2.811 475 2.812 482 STRABO 8.7.5 120 SUETONIUS Vesp. 8 141–2 TACITUS Ann. 6.10 9 14 88 14.44.3 89 Hist. 3.72 140 4.53 140 TALMUD, BABYLONIAN bBava Metzia 59 a–b 503 bBerakhot 9 a 509 bKiddushin 29 a–b 507 bMakkot 24 a 491 TALMUD, JERUSALEM Rosh Hashanah 1.2.56d 248 TERTULLIAN Apol. 24.4 98 Spect. 30 379 TESTIMONY OF TRUTH 31.22–32.21 343

535

43.1–7 343 44.30–45.6 343 THODORETUS OF CYRRHUS Graecarum affectionum curatio 8 195–7 8.63 197 THEOPHRASTUS Characters 16 .12 217 TOSEFTA Kiddushin 1.12 507 Shabbat 1.1–6 509 Yevamot 8.7 506 VIRGIL Aen. 4.3–4 484 6.234–5 76 6.739–42 476 WISDOM OF SOLOMON 12.5–6 342 XENOPHON Anab. 3.1.6 119, 121 5.3.5–6 119 5.3.9–13 117–8 5.3.12 122 Mem. 1.4.18 258 ZECHARIAH 13.1–6 281 ZOSIMUS Final quittance = Alch. gr.3.51.8 ed. Berthelot 409

General Index Abydos 170 acculturation 16, 43–4 Adam 445, 492–3, 506–7, 510 benei ‘adam 492–3, 517 Africa Proconsularis 165 agency 6, 8, 24–8, 41, 46, 53, 78, 138, 256–7, 269–380 action, individual freedom of 58–9, 68–72, 138, 201–2, 206, 221, 355, 362 instrumental agency 371–4 religious action, individual 4, 7, 14, 15, 16, 24–5, 78, 115–16, 138, 147–8, 153–4, 168, 337, 344, 349–50, 354–5, 363, 366, 369–70, 377–80 Agenor 50–2 agnosticism 217, 484 agones 50–2, 141, 364–5 agonistic spirit 8, 10, 18, 143, 219, 227, 378 competition in religious context 4–5, 59, 78–9, 85, 190, 219, 226, 230–1, 244, 292, 330, 337–8 secular games 59, 64–6 votive games 63–4, 66, 144, 150 aion 246, 410 Alexander the Great 41–53 Ambrosius of Milan 192 Ammianus Marcellinus 99, 171 Amphilochius of Iconium 188, 199 Anastasi, Giovanni 166–7, 169, 176, 179 anathemata see votives Anatolia see Asia Minor angels 110, 164, 175, 177, 245–60, 317, 322, 328, 332, 335–6, 352, 372–3 angeloi as mediators 245–61 angelos tryphês 328 Antoninus Pius 149–50 Aphrodite Ourania 170 apocalypse 294, 318–20, 333, 375, 406, 440–3 Apollo 65, 126, 174, 191, 251, 254, 256, 259 Apollo Claros 249

Apollo Hersos 125 Apollo Ietros 122 Apollo Stephanephoros 129 see also oracles apostates 323, 327 apostles 292–3, 321, 355, 440, 444–6, 513 see disciples apotheosis 466–8 see also death; soul Apuleius 9, 98, 108, 176, 236–8, 248, 271 Aelius Aristides 20, 243, 271 aristocracy see elite Aristotle 9, 98, 107, 219, 231–5, 347, 464, 466 Armenia 187–207 Arnobius the Younger 417–18 Artemis, cult place and hunting 118–120 see also temples ascetism 171, 231, 303, 330, 443, 482 Asclepios, god 19–20, 46–9, 174 Amenhotep–Asclepius 177 see also cult; Eshmun; health asebeia 116 Asia Minor 25, 47, 75, 107, 150, 187–207, 243–61 Astarte 42, 44, 47–8 Asterius of Amaseia 188, 195–8, 201–2 astrology 15, 20, 141, 168, 179, 387–93 astral destiny 389, 395–6, 411 atheism 115–16, 133, 365, 373 Athens 51, 116, 117, 123, 127, 128, 131, 165, 222, 227 Attica 123, 215, 248 Augustine 74, 269, 271, 368 Augustus 18, 21, 64–6, 141, 146 Aurelius Victor 99 Marcus Aurelius 220, 245, 367 authority 23, 43, 45, 49, 58–64, 70–2, 93–4, 302, 343, 364–74, 388, 498 authority, divine 75, 325, 346, 390 authority, religious 147, 152, 169–78, 201, 206, 244–5, 279–86, 298, 333–5, 394, 417–20, 442, 444, 492, 516

General Index Baal 44–7, 51 Babylon 47, 248, 300, 318 see also Talmud baptism 238, 292, 323, 354, 439, 513 Basil of Caesarea 188, 191–3, 195–207 basilikon 255–6 belief 6, 26, 43, 49, 59, 68, 74, 77–8, 115–16, 194–8, 203, 250, 283–5, 291, 322, 324–7, 335–6, 342–3, 345–9, 356, 358–61, 365, 369–71, 375, 379, 395, 444, 499 believers – non–believers, Christian 201, 274, 276, 291, 293, 321, 323–9, 338, 343, 355, 358, 361, 371, 375 Hermetic believer 397, 392 orthodoxy 116, 133, 351, 374, 473, 475, 477, 485, 510 ‘true faith’–‘bad faith’ 346–9, 356, 361, 365, 369–71, 373, 375–6, 378–9, 202, 281 see also atheism; norms Bethany 285 biography 4, 7, 8, 15, 22, 24, 136–49, 270–1, 273, 319–20, 329, 335, 437, 500, 516 autobiography 22, 26, 245, 270, 299, 320, 331, 333, 353–4, 439, 484, 498–501 individuation as biographical process 7, 14, 24, 136–7, 149, 152, 329, 335 birth 7, 8, 44, 47, 223, 308, 353, 396, 464–5, 470, 472, 494, 506 see also body; family; psyche; soul body 11, 27, 47–8, 193–7, 226, 229–30, 304, 307, 330, 356–9, 362, 364–5, 367, 370, 372–3, 376, 387–8, 395–7, 399, 401–6, 411–12, 475–7, 480, 483–4, 495, 508, 510 body, imprisonment of the soul 229, 389, 396, 444, 461, 463, 470–1, 474, 478, 479, 482 body politic 498, 510, 513, 514–18 incarnation 436, 508 reincarnation 223, 464–5, 470–1, 473 social body 363, 370, 513 see death; gender; health; psyche; soul Boethius 10 Bostan esh-Sheik 47–8 Byblos 42, 44

537

Caligula 481, 484 Canon Muratori 318–19 canonization 15, 273, 276, 280, 285, 299, 316, 319, 395, 439 Cappadocia 25, 187–207 Caria 247–9, 255 Carthage 165, 342–80 see Cyprian Ceres 120–2 see also Demeter Charis 124, 126 charisma 45, 146, 292–3 children, childhood 8, 44, 47–8, 94, 145, 151, 176, 195–6, 201, 204, 230, 244, 247, 290–1, 332, 351, 353, 357, 358, 506–7, 515 male–female child 140, 143, 151, 510 temple children 47–8 see also family Christ see Jesus Christianity 5, 6, 19, 20, 85–6, 89, 101, 138, 139, 187–8, 197, 216, 245, 248, 275, 343, 345, 361–2, 369, 370, 374–7, 391, 419, 436, 438, 442, 502 church, ecclesia 187–8, 192–3, 200, 203–5, 284, 289, 317–21, 323, 328, 332, 334–5, 338, 345, 353, 356, 361–2, 378, 418, 445, 496 church leaders 19, 188, 201–3, 205 ecclesiology 317, 320 Cibyratis 251 citizenship see cult Cicero 7, 9, 27, 67–74, 116, 348, 356, 455–86 Claudiopolis 252 Clemens of Alexandria 231–2, 319, 379 Clemens Romanus 337 Codex Claromontanus 316 Codex Theodosianus 19, 216 Codex Sinaiticus 319 comitia 60–1 see also politics communication, with the divine 15, 16, 19–20, 78, 132, 178–9, 244–7, 250, 254, 258, 260 addressing the divine 247–51 cultural mediation 46, 49–51, 95, 362 language and religion 43, 48, 97–8, 167, 216, 251, 260, 277, 287, 299, 302, 318, 347, 408, 411, 419, 506–7; see also death; epigraphy; dedications; Egypt; votives Mediterranean cultural area 3–4, 6, 8, 15–17, 25, 43–5, 48, 51, 85, 88–9, 166, 216, 348, 393, 418, 491, 498

538

General Index

communication, with the divine (cont.) network, connectivity 9, 24, 43–45, 48–9, 52–3, 100, 192, 226, 243, 371, 496 religious mediation 42, 45–6, 76, 136, 177, 272–4, 281, 299, 309–10, 316, 335, 390, 399, 403, 415, 417–18 see also authority; angels; priesthood social–cultural negotiations 42–3, 362–3, 370 see also elite; knowledge; politics community, and religion 69–70, 76, 119–20, 122, 127–32, 145, 153, 226, 230, 246, 256, 348–9, 354 community, Christian 101, 190–5, 200–3, 270, 276, 279, 283, 292–3, 309, 328, 331, 333, 337–8, 358, 361, 370–1 community, Hermetism 393, 396–7, 415, 417, 437–9, 443, 445 community, Jewish 302–8, 497–500, 513 see also groups confession see metanoia; sin; repentance confession, of faith 342–3, 349, 359–61, 368, 372 see also martyrs ‘confession stele’ 246, 252–3 Constantine, emperor 98, 101, 191, 245, 379 contemplation 231, 304–7, 508 cosmos, contemplation of 28, 396–9, 403, 479–86 conversion 22, 85, 98, 324, 354, 379, 418, 443 consecration 71–2, 116, 142 Corinth 4, 51, 237 Corinthians 504–5, 513 Cos 48–9, 51 cosmos 11, 107, 373, 438 cosmos, nature of 379, 396, 401, 480 cosmology 154, 173, 349, 374, 376, 393, 407, 410 cosmosophic perspective 410–11, 416, 420 moon 177, 224, 256, 399 planets 388–9, 411 stars 179, 226, 366, 399, 478, 481 sun 225, 399, 408, 480 see also contemplation creation 9, 331, 307, 310, 317, 333, 400, 410, 445, 492–5, 506, 513 demiurge 248, 396, 405, 445

Chrysippus 473–7 cult citizenship, and cult practice 4, 45, 50–2, 69, 71–3, 79, 86, 88, 90–5, 101, 118, 122, 127–32, 153–4, 327, 350, 365 see also politics ‘civic religion’ 3–5, 16, 58–9, 78, 86–90, 101, 139, 243, 244 cult, countryside context 14, 47, 121, 123, 127–9, 132, 169, 188, 244, 246, 336–7 cult, local character 17, 24, 44–9, 77, 89, 91, 100–1, 121, 132, 165, 190–1, 193, 200–1, 244–6, 251–3, 257, 335 see also elite; politics cults, ‘locative–utopian’ 86–102 cult, ‘public’–‘private’ 3–7, 16, 19, 42, 63, 69–73, 87, 100, 115–17, 119, 122–3, 127, 130–1, 139, 149–50, 153, 168–9, 187–8, 200, 216–18, 227, 230, 244, 246–7, 303, 305, 309, 312, 373, 463, 509 see also sacra cult foundation, individual initiative 116–34, 187–93, 200, 246, 284, 284, 301 cult images 21, 71, 73–4, 118–9, 121–2, 144–6, 246, 251, 468 cult mobility 17, 88–9, 191–3, 225, 324, 343, 438 cult of the dead 6, 62, 151, 458, 467–8 cult places 47, 116, 131, 139, 191, 246 see also sanctuary; temples cult places, restoration of 120–3, 139–43, 146, 153 domestic cult see family exclusivity and cult practice 17, 101, 139, 217, 226, 280, 292, 398, 408, 419, 508 healing cults 7, 11, 15, 20, 47, 49, 127, 131, 220, 224 see Asclepius (god); Eshmun; health; Jesus hero cult 128, 132, 196–7, 223, 467 imperial cult 94, 96–100, 110, 149–51, 342, 350, 373–4 martyrs cult 25, 187– 209 see also martyrs neighborhood and cult 7, 118, 123, 132, 153, 276, 283, 371, 516 ‘new religions’ 138–9 ‘oriental’ cults 4–6, 87, 149–50, 216–17, 419

General Index ‘polis religion’ 3–6, 17–18, 86–8, 96, 115, 117, 216, 218, 222, 226, 230, 245, 361 property and cult 71–2, 116, 119–22, 127, 131–2, 170, 192–3, 198, 200, 254, 327, 329–30, 504–5 relics cult 190–200 see also martyrs saints cult 187, 191–2, 197, 202, 322, 353 see also martyrs ‘separatim’–‘privatim’ 69–70 ‘publice’–‘privatim’ 115–16, 127 see also authority; economics; politics; ritual; sacra Cumae 75, 327 Cybele see Magna Mater Cyprian 192–5, 198, 203 Cyprus 47, 165, 192 Dea Dia 96 see also priesthood daemones, demons 98, 167–8, 173–8, 196, 198, 245, 250–1, 275–93, 389, 395, 403–4 see exorcism; magic death, as freedom 351, 357–8, 366–7, 461 afterlife 22, 47, 133, 218–19, 221, 223–7, 230, 234, 396, 406, 411, 455–86 burial ad sanctos 198–201 burial alive as sacrifice 61–3 burial rituals 3, 6, 136, 149, 152, 190, 201, 226, 301 consolatory writings 27, 352–3, 356, 371, 457–86 eschatology 133, 271, 279, 284, 286–7, 289, 324, 328, 410, 417, 436, 463–5, 482–5 funerary inscriptions 43, 133, 152–3, 154, 170, 200, 226, 244, 249, 258, 300, 468 mourning 7, 458, 465 punishment, in afterlife 218, 223–4, 227, 456, 462–5 resurrection 111, 198–9, 204, 226, 271, 277, 283, 286–8, 376, 440–1, 443, 447–8, 459, 482 Socrates’ death 116, 133, 219, 227, 229, 230, 355, 456–69, 472–3, 483–6 suicide 368, 379–80, 470–1 tombs, tombs protection 7, 18–19, 166, 198–9, 225, 244, 258, 271, 283, 300 see also apotheosis; body; martyrs; memory; psyche; soul dedications 14, 43, 66–7, 69, 71–2, 75–7, 100, 119–21, 123–31, 137–8, 142–3, 151–4, 243–61

539

dedicatory epigrams 50–1, 129–30, 248, 256, 259 gifts to the gods 45, 67, 69, 72, 77, 117, 129, 144, 150–5, 197, 221–2 gifts from the gods 222, 352, 395–6, 403, 411, 415 thanksgiving 130, 244, 252, 256, 404 see also communication; cult; epigraphy; votives Demeter 25, 215–17, 221–4; see also Ceres; mysteries democracy 42, 93, 227, 229, 345–6, 361 Demosthenes 228, 467 dialogue, genre 10, 229–30, 459, 502 ‘revelation dialogue’, Hermetism 388–420 gnostic ‘revelation dialogue’ 440–9 discipleship Christian, master – disciple relation 271–2, 274, 277–80, 283–93 gnostic, master – disciple relation 435–449 Hermetism, master – disciple relation 388–420 followers, Christian 272–3, 283, 285, 288–9, 291–3, 319, 320, 437, 444, 492 rabbinic discipleship 492, 496, 500, 503, 515 see apostles destiny 45, 47, 48, 312 see astrology; Jesus devotion, individual 73–5, 126, 187–8, 194–5, 200–1, 243–58, 272 devotional learning, Hermetism 304, 398–404, 416–20 devotional learning, Judaism 503–8, 517 Dikaios 246–9, 254–9 see Hosios, Theion díkê 224 Dio Cassius 141 Diocletian, emperor 99, 188 Diogenes Laertius 248, 506 Dionysos 45, 125–7, 225, 227–8; see also groups; mysteries Dionysius of Halicarnassus 463–5 Dionysius of Milan 192 Dioskouroi see Samothrace divination 6, 15, 20, 67–8, 168–9, 171, 173–4, 176–9, 252, 325–6 lecanomancy 173, 178 lychnomancy 173

540

General Index

divination (cont.) medium in divinatory praxis 169, 173, 176–9 dogma 244, 273, 318, 411, 418–19, 475 Dorylaion 254, 255, 258 dreams as medium 117, 128, 131–3, 167, 169–70, 173, 176–9, 193, 204, 220, 257, 310–13, 337, 352, 354, 372–3, 445–6, 459–60, 473, 477–8 see also incubation dunamis 250–1, 256, 260, 414–15 see power Easter 280, 284, 289, 291, 292, 441, 443 economics 7, 45, 86, 88, 90, 92, 127, 152, 201–2, 330, 337, 373, 499 economic status 14, 18, 94–5, 152, 327–8, 334, 345, 376–7, 509 financial resources and cult 64, 71, 73, 76, 118–20, 166, 330, 504–5 wealth 14, 51, 117, 128–9, 197, 200, 202, 224, 322–3, 326–7, 329–34, 348, 350, 358, 361, 498, 505 education 8, 14, 152, 232, 235, 392–3, 398, 401, 404, 416, 506 literacy 8–9, 246, 335 paideia 231, 233, 260 philosophical schools 11, 15, 219, 226, 292, 305, 439, 455, 480 teacher figure 230, 273, 290, 321, 332, 356, 439, 442, 513 see also discipleship; revelation Egypt 25, 46, 97, 163–79, 197, 300, 319, 352, 354, 375, 388–90, 392, 396–8, 406, 413, 418, 440 hieroglyphics, sacred language 167, 170–1, 413 Ptolemaic period 41, 128, 130, 168, 171 Eleusis, king of 221–2; see also mysteries Elijah 286–7 elite 13, 18, 23, 26, 70, 147–8, 151, 218, 220, 236, 238, 298, 366, 378, 502 elite, local 9, 14, 45, 47, 51–2, 91–6, 120, 122, 132, 498 elitism 311–13 see also authority; politics emotions 5, 11, 20–1, 74, 194–6, 219–20, 237, 246, 291, 318, 337–8, 353, 364, 419–20, 448; fear 73, 121–2, 174, 219, 223, 227–30, 232–3, 235, 246, 283, 286, 329, 353, 355–61, 365–9, 375–6, 471 see also pathos

Enlightenment 344, 490–1 Epictetus 154, 349–51 Epicurus 11, 127, 471–4, 483 epigraphy ‘epigraphic habit’ 94–6, 246 epigraphic medium 4, 45, 69, 86, 142, 146–9, 152–5 see death; dedications; memory; Phoenicia; votives epiphany 244, 257, 259, 287–8, 293–4 see dreams; revelations; visions Eshmun 46–9 ethics 11, 13, 27, 154, 179, 223, 256, 286, 294, 298, 301, 320, 328–9, 343, 377–8, 390, 392–409, 413, 416, 420, 438, 442–3, 482, 485–6, 494, 500, 509, 512, 515 euergetism 8, 10, 95, 130, 132, 300, 326 prestige, personal 49, 51–2, 132, 326, 373 see elite Euripides 355, 472 Eusebius of Caesarea 273 eusebeia 390, 404–5 execution 342, 349, 351, 353–5, 357, 359–60, 364, 367–71, 374, 378 see law; martyrs; torture exorcism 275–93 experience, religious 8, 15, 20–2, 24, 27, 77–9, 131–2, 145–6, 148–9, 151, 153, 163, 202, 216–219, 227, 233–8, 305, 360, 388, 393, 437–9, 441–9 personal religious 25, 47, 49, 58, 75, 79, 132–3, 138, 176, 178–9, 194, 198, 201, 206–7, 220, 229–33, 243–4, 246–7, 251–60, 271, 276, 287, 291–3, 299, 305–8, 312, 321, 337, 347, 402, 409–15, 417–19 feelings 77, 246, 356–8, 455–86 enlightenment, personal 172–3, 303, 438–9, 442 inner transformation, gnostic 438–9, 441–5, 447 inner transformation, Hermetism 392, 397–8, 402–3, 412–14 senses perception 194, 259, 395, 397, 402 testimony, Christian 194–5, 197, 279, 292, 342–3, 356, 358, 364, 371, 395, 408–9 “false witness” 301–4, 342, 493 see dreams; incubation; mysteries; visions

General Index faith see belief family 7–8, 10, 18, 19, 22, 45, 47–8, 51–2, 58, 68, 70–2, 77, 88, 93, 100, 116, 122, 132, 146, 151–2, 198–200, 222, 226, 322, 331–2, 347–9, 351, 353, 358, 361, 367, 371, 373–4, 378–9, 388, 435, 458, 465, 467, 503, 506, 508, 514, 516 household and cult 3–4, 7, 15, 19, 22, 87–8, 115–16, 123, 127, 236, 245, 332, 373, 503–14 marriage 8, 90, 195, 325, 332–4, 395, 504–8, 515 matrona 125, 144, 148, 342, 351 wedding 149, 195, 151, 503–4, 506, 515 Fatae 66 festivals 4, 7, 51, 118–21, 127, 132, 148, 151, 216, 224, 350, 371 Lupercalia 148 panèguris, martyr festivals 190–1, 200–5 Parilia 148, 151 Festus 62, 66, 70–1, 91 food regulations 172, 301, 307, 326, 330, 336, 407 fasting 290, 330 Fortuna 21, 67 Francis of Assisi 269 freedom, individual 218, 230, 234, 346, 361, 372 freedom of choice 346, 349, 474 freedom of will 350, 438, 443 see also agency; authority; individual; norms; politics Gaius, Roman jurist 365, 492, 504 Galilee 284, 294, 309, 495, 505 Gallus, Aelius 71–2 games see agones Gaudentius of Brescia 192 Gaul 61–3, 319 Gellius, Aulus 7, 62–3 gender 10, 13, 14, 15, 136, 354–6, 371, 506–7, 510, 516–17 see also body; family Gerasene 282–4 Geta, emperor 342 Gibbon, Edward 99, 101–2 gladiators 352–3, 360, 364–6, 371–2, 375 amphitheater 342, 363–5, 369 gnostic 27, 245, 390–1, 396, 398–9, 405, 409, 413, 418

541

gnostic – individuation process 435–49 Gregory of Nazianzus 188–207 Gregory of Nyssa 188–207 groups 4, 5, 8, 14, 15, 16, 17, 27, 68, 70, 77, 78–9, 88, 151, 245 Christian 279, 304, 316, 320, 326, 328, 331, 343, 350, 361, 371, 444 Dionysian 17, 133, 138, 215–238, 305, 306, 419 gnostic 437, 439, 441–2, 446 Hermetism 407, 418–20 social groups 4, 8 , 13, 58, 136, 154, 226, 349, 361–3, 378 Hades 222–5, 456, 471; Dis Pater 65–6 health 11, 20, 42, 45, 47, 326, 330, 390–1, 393 healing cults see cult; Asclepius (god); Eshmun; Jesus healing martyrs 190, 195–9, 204 heka 164, 168, 172 Hekate 129, 248, 254 Heliodorus 178 Heliopolis 170–1 Helios 174, 251, 259 Hellenization 15, 41–45, 48–53 Hellenistic Judaism 298–313, 333 Hellenistic period 5, 8, 11, 14, 16, 17, 21, 22, 23, 41–53, 87, 98, 100, 119, 122, 138, 216, 219–20, 231, 245, 251– 3, 257, 298–313, 343, 361, 377, 379, 389–91, 393, 398, 405, 418, 449 Hera 127, 251 Heracles 19, 45–6, 51 heresy 204, 379, 440, 510–12 Hermas 18, 26, 315–338 see also Jesus Hermes 170–1, 248, 250–4, 256 Hermes Trismegistos 387–420 Hermetism Asclepius, Hermetism 387, 390–1, 395–6, 406–8 Hero of Alexandria 21 Herodotus 46, 215, 216, 232 Heroissai 130 Hieronymus 319 Himerius 467 Hilarianus, Roman governor 342, 359 Homer 46, 354 Homeric hymns 25, 215–16, 221–7, 251, 256

542

General Index

Homonoia 128–31 Horace 148, 485 Hosios 246–9, 254, 256, 258–9 hymns 176, 256, 303, 400, 410, 413, 417, 440 Iamblichus 179, 234–6 identity 3, 16, 22, 27, 44, 78–9, 92, 136, 142, 153, 274–5, 290, 299, 350, 355, 365 collective identity 3, 220, 269, 300, 438, 442 ethnic identity 4, 44, 52–3, 79, 279, 282, 284, 323, 373–4, 437–8, 510, 515 individual identity 7, 143, 153–4, 230, 269, 300, 354, 436, 438, 508 Jewish identity 492–4, 499, 503, 512, 515 religious identity 46, 78–9, 88–9, 146, 235, 278, 282, 284, 292, 353, 361, 367, 378, 392, 397, 405, 409, 416, 437–8, 442, 446, 510 self-identity 218–19, 287, 354 social identity 24, 50–1, 78–9, 89, 92, 137, 149, 151, 153–4, 220, 269, 300, 373, 436, 438 idolatry 276, 281, 301, 325, 356, 373, 510 aniconism 150, 258 incubation 87, 197–8 individual 115–33, 136–55, 298–313, 489–518 individua 9, 10 individual–collective religious practice 25, 27, 42, 44, 48, 115, 139, 151, 187–8, 196, 200, 206–7, 243, 244, 256, 298–9, 307, 491–518 individual religious choices 4–5, 7–8, 14–18, 24, 68, 100, 115, 122, 130–3, 137–9, 153–4, 177, 179, 194, 203, 206, 247, 256, 298, 407, 419, 437, 442, 474 individual, social bonds 13, 17, 359, 437–8, 506 individualism 9, 153–4, 343–50, 353–5, 361–2, 372, 376, 436 individuality 5, 7–9, 11–14, 19–20, 22–8, 78–9, 115, 136, 154, 163, 206–7, 215–38, 245–6, 269, 271, 273, 315–38, 343–5, 347–51, 377–9, 436–8, 455, 489–518

competitive individuality 12–14, 25, 218–19, 327–9, 378 moral individuality 12, 13, 337, 349, 378 practical individuality 12, 13, 337, 377–8 reflexive individuality 12, 13, 27, 218, 337, 338 religious individuality 7, 20, 24, 78, 221–7, 320, 331–8 representative individuality 12, 13–14, 351, 378 see also sociality, socialization individualization 187–207, 243–61, 342–80 individualization, religious 25, 100, 153–5, 163, 179, 227, 245–7, 316, 338, 343–4, 377–9, 501, 515 individualization, understanding of 3–28 see also sociality, socialization individuation, and Christian discourse 269–94 individuation, as process 7, 12, 23–4, 26, 136–7, 149, 151, 218, 236, 275, 351, 414, 435–49 individuation, religious 7–8, 14–15, 23–4, 26–7, 137, 152, 220, 227, 238, 328, 331, 361, 377, 379 individuation, understanding of 3–28, 100, 217–18, 230, 269, 315, 344–5, 355, 376, 416 institutionalization, institutional structure 8, 12, 14, 15, 19, 20, 23, 26, 27, 51, 71, 86, 87, 90, 91, 93, 164, 179, 187–8, 193, 205, 232, 243, 244, 315–16, 318, 343, 345, 355, 361–2, 417, 491, 497, 503–8, 514, 516 see agency; authority; law; politics intellect 11, 396, 399, 401–4, 407, 411, 506, 508 nous 390, 396, 406, 410–11, 442 intellectuals, intellectualization 5, 15, 23, 163, 178, 220, 260, 324, 345, 392–4, 397–9, 402–9, 412–13, 416–17, 490, 495, 498, 508 interpretatio 43–7, 49, 87–9 Irenaeus 319, 375, 436 Isis 4, 178, 226, 228, 232, 237, 248, 256, 390

General Index Isocrates 222–3 isonomia 42 Israel 271, 282, 284, 286, 290, 305, 307, 325, 437, 490–4, 497, 510–18 benei isra’el 512, 517 Istros 122 Ithaca 120 Italy 4, 21, 61–2, 143, 147 Iulia Gordos 258 Janiculum 21 Jerusalem 27, 141, 270, 300, 302, 327, 441, 514, 516 Jesus 4, 26, 87, 189, 204, 270–4, 276–94, 319–20, 330, 353, 355, 358–9, 375–6, 440, 443–8, 513 ‘Good shepherd’ figure 204, 315–38, 352 Jesus’ death 270–1, 277–8, 283–6, 288, 444 Jesus’ destiny 271–2, 286–7, 292, 448 Jesus, healer 275–7, 279, 283, 285, 290 ‘Son of Man’ 26, 271, 286–8, 293 John, apostle 270, 273, 276, 279, 280, 285, 291, 292, 318, 320, 333 John the Baptist 282, 283, 286–8 Josephus 26, 298–312, 498–9, 501, 502 Judaea 299, 311, 318, 491, 495–6, 511 Judaism 3, 5, 6, 20, 276, 298–313, 326, 333, 361, 391, 419, 491–6, 501–3, 507, 514–16 see also angels; community; Hellenism; identity; law; rabbis Judas, gospel of 375, 440, 442–9 kingdom of Barbelo 444–7 Juno 65, 73, 140 Juno Regina, Veii 144, 146 Jupiter 4, 60, 65, 67, 73, 456, 477 Jupiter Dolichenus 75–6 Jupiter Heliopolitanus 252 see also temple Justin Martyr 494, 502, 511 katharsis 232–5 see purification knowledge, religious 68–9, 91, 164, 169, 178, 204–5, 217, 222, 229–31, 252–3, 278, 312, 369 knowledge, of divine names 47, 171, 174 knowledge, theological 133, 163, 168, 171, 178, 194, 244, 246–7, 254, 257, 260, 280, 306–7, 322–3, 329–31,

543

335–6, 342–3, 374–6, 389, 393, 395, 398–9, 404–7, 410–12, 417, 419, 493, 498, 500, 517 religious competence 17, 25, 261 see also authority; legitimacy; ritual religious specialists 6, 117, 133, 163, 216, 224–6, 230 secrecy 168, 216–7, 226, 234, 278, 287, 310, 440, 443 wisdom 172, 175, 178–9, 301, 308, 389–90, 413, 415, 417, 440, 515 wise man 307, 408, 412, 475–6, 479, 482, 485–6, 515 see also education; gnostic koinè 42, 49, 51 Kula 246, 251, 256, 258 Lactantius 461–3 Late Antiquity 4, 6, 16, 19–20, 89, 101, 163–79, 187–207, 231, 299–300, 302, 377, 399, 407, 411, 418, 492, 501, 514 law, Roman legal culture 10, 11, 13, 14, 15, 26, 60–2, 89–94, 131, 343, 349, 351, 355–6, 365, 367, 368, 496 biblical law 414, 491, 501, 509 law court 10, 16, 20, 23, 93–4, 165, 167, 177, 189, 227, 244, 347, 363–5, 368–70, 373–4, 377–8 dikastès 50–1 divine justice 253, 259–60, 362, 445 divine sanction 126, 244, 485 God’s judgment 198, 271, 287, 348, 357–8, 365, 367–8, 376 human rights 8, 13, 345, 493 Jewish legal discouse 301, 492–3, 495, 497, 500–10, 517 sacred laws, cultic regulations, leges sacrae 7, 60–4, 70–2, 115–16, 120, 126, 133, 142, 244 see authority; impiety; martyrs; norms; politics leiturgiai 329–30 letters, epistolary genre 92, 120–1, 147, 169, 188–90, 192, 200–2, 226, 301, 319, 344, 355–6, 375–6, 440 see Cicero; Paul; Pliny the Younger; Seneca Liber Pater see Dionysos Livy 60, 62–3, 141–6, 149–50 logos, gnostic 440–9 logos, Hermetism 388–411, 441 Lucretius 356, 366, 471–4, 485

544

General Index

Lugdunum 149–51 Luke 270, 273, 277, 280, 281, 285, 302, 316 Lydia 246–8, 251, 253, 256–8 Macrobius 116, 459, 480 madness 73, 127, 155 magic 6, 15, 20, 61–2, 87, 163–79, 198, 236, 277, 290, 390–1, 406–7, 413–14 amulets 6, 165, 166 curse tablets 6, 165, 244 personal formulary recipes 164–7, 171–7 incantation 164, 170, 178, 224 magical formularies 164–9, 172–9 magical papyri 25, 123, 163–79, 256 paredros 174–5 spells 165, 169, 170–1, 224, 244 temple magic 167–9, 171 voces magicae 168–9, 177, 277, 413 Magna Mater 60, 69, 87, 125–7, 143–4, 146, 149–51, 226 dendrophorus 149–51 taurobolium 149–51 Mark 26, 269–94, 445 martyrs 13, 270, 288–9, 337, 444–5 Babylas martyr 191–2 Felicitas, martyr 342, 344, 351, 353, 355, 359–61 inventio, relics 191–3 Julitta, martyr 196 Mamas, martyr 196, 198, 201, 204–6 martyrdom 190–1, 270, 288, 289, 338, 342–80, 444–5 martyrs as exempla 352–6, 375, 377 martyrs’ death 26, 190, 201, 342–80 martyr literature 26, 342–80 martyrs’ tomb 189–99 Perpetua, martyr 189, 342–80 Phocas, martyr 196–8, 201 Polycarp, martyr 190–1, 355 Saturus, martyr 352–4, 364, 367–8, 372–3, 378 translatio, relics 191–3 see also confession; cult; death; execution; festivals; persecution; torture Matthew 270, 273, 277, 281, 282, 316, 320 Melanesia 155 Meleager of Gadara 50 Melqart 46, 51 memory

commemoration of the dead 152, 154, 190–1, 204, 300, 357, 457, 468, 481 memory, cultural 53, 92, 309, 312 memory, social 10, 22, 94, 145, 147, 326, 484–5 Mnemosyne 225 monumentalization 94–5, 124, 142, 150, 152–3 see also epigraphy Memphis 170 Men (god) 246, 251–4, 256–7, 259 Men Axiottenos 253, 257 Menander Rhetor 458, 463, 465, 467–8 metanoia 324, 329 see repentance; sin Methodius 98, 111 Middle Ages 274 mind 11, 217, 231, 305–7, 329, 366, 372, 395, 399–404, 409–410, 414–15, 438, 446, 506–7 Minerva 73, 140 miracles 190, 276–7, 280–1, 283, 300 Mishna 27, 489–518 Mithras 4, 177, 226, 228 mobility 8, 14, 16, 88, 90 diaspora 16, 152, 499, 502 merchants 16, 126, 328, 331 migration 8, 13, 15, 16–7, 88 social mobility 152–3, 328 travel 13, 143, 146, 196, 204, 225–7, 234, 333, 406, 409, 412, 449 modernity 7–8, 19, 23, 26, 49, 53, 154, 270, 274, 346, 377, 494, 516 Moerae 66 monarchism 85–102, 248, 318, 361 ceremonial 98–9 king as ruler figure 256, 357–8, 493 monastics 304–5, 377 see therapeutai monotheism 139, 248–9, 257, 278 Moses 164, 176, 305, 307, 308, 311, 491 Eighth Book of Moses 173 muses 224, 225 mysteries 5, 25, 47, 87, 177, 179, 215–38, 399, 411–13, 419 Dionysian mysteries 17, 138, 216, 218, 220, 225–6, 228, 231–2, 236, 305–6, 419 ecstasy 126, 150, 228, 232–3, 402 Eleusis mysteries 215, 220–37 initiation 27, 138, 150–1, 216–38, 397, 399, 401, 409–415, 417, 439 see also death; experience; knowledge; groups

General Index mystic 377, 389, 400, 403–4, 409–10, 412–13, 416, 442, 444–8, 470 mythology 4, 51–2, 60, 65–6, 89, 137–8, 148, 168, 176, 215, 219, 225, 229, 232, 235, 270, 273, 317, 337, 435, 437–9, 441–4, 446, 448–9, 456, 471, 489–90, 494, 506 Nag Hammadi, codices 377, 388, 391, 406, 409, 413–15, 418, 440 Naples, catacomb of San Gennaro 319 neokoros 119 Nero 289, 350 norms 7–8, 13, 15, 18, 58–9, 85–6, 91–6, 101, 145–7, 243, 298, 347–51, 354, 362, 376–80, 439, 492–7, 500, 503, 510 behavior 13–14, 19, 21, 25, 42–3, 47, 49, 53, 58–9, 75, 115–6, 133, 155, 164, 245, 279, 283, 288, 290, 298, 308, 326, 328, 330, 332, 350, 359–61, 364, 366–9, 373, 378, 380, 442, 510, 515 see also martyrs deviance 15, 28, 116 de-traditionalization 7, 9, 19, 23, 516 emancipation 58, 100, 137, 148–9, 344, 377–80 values 7–8, 10, 18, 59, 74, 91–2, 122, 148, 187, 298, 309, 392, 407–8, 439, 444, 485, 496–7 see also agency; authority; freedom; law nous see intellect Numenius 234 Nymphs cult 124–7, 131 see also possession Olympia 4, 117–18, 120 oracles 17, 20, 65–7, 86, 117–19, 121, 132, 143–4, 178, 233, 249, 273, 325, 389 Delphi oracle 117–19, 121, 132, 143, 233 Origen 98, 110, 319, 344, 348–9, 354–61, 367, 369, 371–7, 443 Orphism 4, 17, 176, 225, 419 Orphic gold leaves 225–6 Osiris 170–1 Ostia 4, 144, 252 ‘paganism’ 58–9, 74–80, 85–86, 89, 98, 196, 200, 216, 226, 244–5, 248–9,

545

257, 278, 342, 355, 369, 391, 417 see monotheism; polytheism Palestine 496, 516 Palmyra 97, 249 Pan 124–7 Panamara 251–4, 257 pantheism 397, 401, 416 pathos 21, 219, 227–35, 343 Paul 270–3, 276, 292–3, 324, 440, 498–9, 501–2, 504–5, 507, 511, 513, 516–17 Paulinus of Nola 200 performance, ritual 25, 117, 139–49, 152, 224, 361–71, 373–4, 441, 514 Pergamon 143 Perge 127–31 persecution 16, 189, 191, 203, 218, 225, 327, 343–7, 351, 355, 365, 377–80, 499 thlipsis 327 Persephone 221–6 Proserpina 65–6 Persian Empire 43, 46, 49, 99, 110, 117, 119–20, 172, 176, 248, 250, 300, 319 paradeisos 46, 120 Persian king 98, 107, 108–9, 120, 121, 248 satraps 98, 107, 110 persona 26, 100, 146, 153–4, 218, 269–92, 344, 350–1, 355, 378 personality 230, 335–6, 492 personhood 9–12, 97, 154–5, 351, 355 Peter, apostle 270, 273, 277, 279, 285–9, 445 Letter of Peter to Philip 344, 355–6, 375–6, 440 Peter, bishop of Sebaste 192–3 Petrarch 269 philanthropia 405, 408 Philo 11, 26, 260, 298–309, 312, 498–9, 501, 502 Philostratus 178 Phlegon of Tralles 65 Phocylides, poet 301 Phoenicia, Phoenician cults 41–53 Phoenician kings 42, 44–5, 47–8, 51–2 Phoenician kingdom 41–2, 44–6, 49, 51 royal inscriptions 42, 44, 47 phylacteries 165–6, 168

546

General Index

piety 122, 140, 172, 192–5, 200, 236, 258, 303–5, 326, 354, 357, 361, 369, 373, 395, 403–8, 468, 491, 503 impiety 111, 253, 404, 408 pilgrimage 15, 21, 48–9, 118, 192–3, 197, 249, 309 Pindar 215, 223 Pistis Sophia 440, 443, 447–9 Plato, Platonism 9, 10, 25, 99, 116–17, 133, 219, 223–38, 307, 398, 401, 417–18, 442, 456, 458–60, 462, 470–8, 480, 482 Pliny the Elder 61–2, 176, 342 Pliny the Younger 117–23, 127, 132, 141, 154, 365 Plotinus 9, 171, 178, 442, 480 pluralism, religious 16, 88, 138, 345 Plutarch 22, 62, 148, 220, 233–7, 342, 458, 464, 472, 476 pneuma 245, 280, 414, 436, 447–9 politics and religion 3, 6, 7, 20, 23–4, 41–2, 45–6, 48–9, 52–3, 58, 62, 64, 72, 79, 86, 88–101, 116, 130–1, 142–4, 217, 220, 227, 230, 272, 278–9, 282, 345–6, 355, 361–8, 370, 372–4, 376, 378–9, 438, 444, 456, 471, 476, 497–8, 502, 510, 513–17 census 92–3, 144 hierarchy, divine 46, 251, 260 hierarchy, social 16, 23, 93, 351, 354, 370, 373, 513 integration–disintegration 7, 49, 51–2, 90, 95, 516 legitimacy 8, 10, 20, 44, 70, 93–4, 96, 100, 131–3, 139, 141–2, 171–2, 177, 229, 278, 292–3, 333, 365, 368, 373, 379, 438, 442 Roman administration 10, 16, 63, 90–4, 108, 188, 367, 389 Roman emperor 97–100, 110, 141–2, 149–51, 197, 310, 343, 350, 365, 368, 370, 373–4 Roman government 90–102 Roman magistrates 63, 72, 93–6, 110, 140, 142–3, 146, 351, 355, 364 tax collection 91–3 polytheism 17, 42, 74, 86, 99, 137–9, 218, 245, 247, 249, 261, 276, 278 see monotheism; ‘paganism’ Pompeii 4, 19 Pontus 187–207 populus 60, 63, 69–70, 92, 121, 140, 143

Porphyry 178, 458, 480 Poseidon Pelagios 129 Posidonius 480 possession possession, by the Nymphs 126–7, 131–2 possession, in Dionysus cult 231, 235, 306 possession, by demons see exorcism power 3, 24, 42, 93–102, 149, 172, 351, 362–5, 367 individual empowerment by martyrdom 345–80 power(s), divine 63, 65, 74, 75, 234, 244, 250–61, 285, 291, 307, 316, 325, 353, 366, 389, 395, 410, 412, 438 power of formulae 168, 171, 174–9 power of relics 194–9 see dunamis; politics prayers 50, 69, 116, 119, 144, 149, 300, 330, 440 listening gods 129, 243 prayer, Christian 194–5, 289–91, 330, 334, 355, 358, 360, 367 prayer, Hermetism 399–408, 415–17 prayer, personal intention 195, 308–10, 334 prayer, temple-magic 169 Priapos 129–30 priesthood 16, 42, 59–69, 71–2, 76–7, 94–5, 122, 130, 140, 142, 144–51, 167–72, 178, 192, 220, 222, 224–5, 233, 236–7, 244, 246, 251, 253–4, 256–8, 260, 283, 300, 302, 308, 310–12, 509, 516 Arval Brothers 146–7 bishops 187–8, 191–3, 201–2, 206, 231, 318, 321, 332, 352, 372–3, 378 deacons 321, 333, 352, 354, 378 episcopoi 187, 318, 332, 444 epulones 60 haruspices 120–1, 132, 140, 143 pastophori 237 pontifices 63–4, 70–2, 91, 140–2, 146, 148 presbyters 318, 332, 337, 352, 372 priestesses 116, 146, 227, 257 priestly colleges 60, 63–4, 71, 142 quindecimviri 64, 150–1 vestals 62, 140, 146, 148, 151 proairesis 350

General Index processions 148, 203, 237, 358 see cult; rituals Proclus 235–6 prophecy 66–7, 167, 171, 178–9, 253, 271, 286, 292, 298–9, 301, 305–7, 310–13, 325–6, 333, 352, 355, 360, 372, 391, 409–10, 489–91, 494–5, 513 false prophets 281, 311, 325 Phrygia 243, 246–7, 249, 251, 254, 256–9 psyche 230, 288–9, 372 see also soul purification 22, 131, 140, 173, 224, 228–9, 232–4, 275, 410–11, 482 see katharsis purity 144, 171–3, 323, 335, 413, 515 impurity 281, 510 Pythagoras 133, 176, 397, 418–19, 473 Qumran 281, 302–4, 493 rabbis, rabbinic movement 292, 302, 311, 489–518 rabbinic Judaism 299, 491–518 rabbinic texts 489–518 see Mishnah; Talmud; Torah ‘rabbinic individuality’ 504, 509, 514–18 see also family; gender; law rationality 9, 10, 11, 15, 16, 23, 304, 348, 353–61, 366, 390, 405–8, 412–15 religiosity, personal 117, 122, 154, 243–7, 393, 416, 417 repentance 279, 285, 322–3, 325, 327, 329, 332, 375, 490 see metanoia; sin revelations 153, 167, 170, 175, 177–8, 192–3, 221, 226, 229, 231, 252, 287, 292, 299, 305–6, 311–13, 331, 335–6, 375–6, 379, 390, 392, 394, 398, 409–10, 413–17, 420, 435–49, 460 revealer figure 390, 393–5, 408, 412, 414, 440–2, 444–8 see also dreams as medium, prophecy, visions rituals ceremony 47, 98, 141–6, 215, 217, 228, 236, 244, 365 communal meal 118, 132, 303, 325, 326, 407 creativity 43, 53, 77, 147, 206, 299, 307, 499 evocatio 144–6 liturgy 98, 200, 201, 203, 205, 417

547

innovation 19, 46, 58–60, 65, 68–70, 73, 78–80, 122–3, 147, 166, 177, 270, 292 invention 11, 16, 46, 99, 171, 218, 237, 356, 517 music and dance 228, 232–4 rites de passage 3, 149–51 see also cult; sacra; sacrifice Rome 4, 16, 17, 19, 21, 65, 68, 70–1, 88, 90–3, 139–50, 165, 178, 270, 300, 302, 311, 317–19, 333, 337, 368, 485, 499 sacra municipalia 91 privata 7, 70–2 publica 70–2, 139, 150 sacrifice 66, 71, 93, 224, 246, 257–8, 308–9, 325, 342, 355, 365, 374–5, 416, 444 animal sacrifice 63, 76, 118–20, 122, 126, 129, 133, 222 human sacrifice 61–3 public sacrifice 70, 115–8, 127, 132, 138, 150, 216, 252 self–sacrifice 270–2, 289, 293, 375 see also death; martyrs Samothrace 128–9, 228, 252 sanctuary 6, 7, 17, 18, 19–21, 45, 47–9, 117, 119–23, 126–7, 143, 153, 191, 216, 222, 244, 246, 253, 256 cave, cult places 123–7, 128, 131 dance floor, cult places 124–6 sacred grove 118–20, 147 garden, cult places 7, 19, 123–7 sanctuary of martyrs 193–4, 196, 198–9, 201 Sardis 120, 253, 302–3, 312 Satan 277, 281–2, 288–9, 325, 352, 358, 360, 373–4 Sattai 253, 257, 259 Second Sophistic 203, 233, 260 sects 5, 272, 503 seers 121, 224, 307, 312, 396, 409 see also divination; prophecy; visions self, notion of 9–12, 26, 27, 78–9, 90, 148, 153–5, 230, 316, 344–7, 351, 362, 493–4, 500 ‘Christian’ self 270–2, 276, 376 self, individual – universal 436–49 self–care 20, 22, 48, 219, 245 see also cult; health

548

General Index

self, notion of (cont.) self–consciousness 24, 99, 154, 270, 345, 499, 502, 510 self-fashioning 94–5, 100, 149 selfhood 155, 275, 278, 287, 294 ‘rabbinic self ’ 509, 514–15 see also identity; sacrifice senate 60–3, 69, 108, 140, 143 see also authority; politics Seneca 9, 22, 27, 28, 73–5, 154, 337, 356, 366, 455–86 sex 11, 354, 509–10 sexuality 47, 167, 301, 348, 374, 504, 508 Sibylline Books 65–7, 143, 335 Sidon 24, 42–52 sin 13, 22, 199, 224, 244, 276, 300, 308, 325, 332, 334, 336, 375, 489–91 see metanoia; repentence Skillous 117–21 Scythia 191, 197 Sebaste, the Forty Martyrs of 189–93, 195, 198–9, 201, 205 Seth, gnostic 418, 437, 439, 444 slaves 14, 67–8, 75, 88, 90, 331, 348, 353, 365, 367, 371, 396, 504–5, 511 freedman 14, 94, 331, 334, 328 master–slave relation 108, 371, 505 Smyrna 190–1 sociality, socialization 7–9, 27–8, 90, 93, 136–8, 151–3, 218, 222, 226, 315–16, 331, 437–8 Socrates see death soldiers 16, 108, 140, 143–6, 153, 198, 310, 372 Solomon 342, 447 Solon 223 Sophocles 222 soteriology 4, 5, 226, 279, 309, 322, 343, 353, 359, 361–2, 371, 375–6, 390–2, 398, 403–8, 410, 417, 420, 436, 438–40, 442–3, 444, 447–9 see also death soul 7, 9, 11, 22, 75, 196, 203, 228–230, 232, 234–6, 304–7, 310, 325, 329, 330, 356–8, 360, 367, 372, 387, 389, 395–6, 401–6, 415, 443, 455–86, 489–93, 508, 517 ‘divinization’ of the soul 401, 403 see apotheosis life as punishment of soul 470–3 metempsychosis 223

mortality–immortality of the soul 27, 51, 307, 376, 403, 406, 455–69, 472–3, 477–86 see also body; death; psyche Sparta 117, 132 Stobeus 387–420 stoicism, stoic views 11, 13, 238, 326, 347–8, 366, 395, 466–86, 495, 506, 508 Strabo 120 Stratonicea 247–9, 251, 254–5, 257–8 Suetonius 141–2 Sulla 60, 141, 142 superstition 22, 68, 70, 72–7, 217, 365, 484 Symmachus 147 synagogue 282, 302, 303, 312 syncretism 43 Synesius of Cyrene 231 Syria 4, 21, 76, 97, 248, 256, 284 Tabula Banasitana 92 Tacitus 9, 88–9, 139–42, 146, 149, 366 Talmud 248, 500, 502–4 Babylonian Talmud 491, 507, 509 Tarentum 66 temple 14, 15, 16, 17, 18, 19, 21, 22, 69, 71–2, 96, 121–2, 128, 137, 141–2, 144–5, 150, 164, 169–72, 216, 244, 445, 449, 457, 468 Capitoline temple 73, 139–42, 146 Ephesian Artemis temple 117–9, 122–3 Jerusalem temple 27, 276, 290, 302, 309, 311–13, 492, 501, 503, 514–16 shrines 7, 70, 87, 116, 118–23, 125–8, 130–2, 140, 170, 195, 197, 200–1, 206 temple magic 167–9, 171 Tertullian 98, 319, 375, 379 Thebes 50–2 Theion 247–61 see Dikaios, Hosios Theodoretus of Cyrrhus 195–7 theology see knowledge; monarchism Theophrastus 217 Theos Hypsistos 248, 249, 255–8 Thera 24, 117, 123–31 therapeutai 304–5 theurgy 20, 179, 234 thiasoi 133, 216 see also Dionysos; groups tolerance 345–6 Torah 298–303, 311, 492, 496, 501, 504–8, 515, 517

General Index Thoth 170, 389 Tiber 19, 66, 144, 333–4 Timocharis 50–1 torture 330, 348, 351, 355–61, 362, 364, 365, 369, 371–2, 375, 379 see martyrs; persecution Tyche 130 tyranny 52, 141, 227, 470 tyrant, Christian discours 193, 357, 358, 361, 367 Tyre 42, 44–6, 50–1 Verrius 66 Varro 59–60 Venus Proba 75 Vespasian 139–42, 146, 153, 309–12, 350 Via Campana 327, 337 Virgil 76, 476, 484 visions 67, 170, 173, 176, 196–8, 220, 234, 304, 306–7, 316–18, 320–1, 323, 326–7, 330–7, 343, 352–3, 355, 360, 372, 387, 389, 399, 401–2, 410, 438, 446–8, 459–60 see also dreams, as medium; revelations votives 6, 14, 17, 19, 87, 119, 127, 197, 218, 244

549

anathemata 196–7 votive altars 69, 71, 76, 118, 126, 128–31, 149–52, 236, 243, 254–7 votive games 63–4, 66, 144, 150 votive reliefs 94, 124, 125, 126, 246, 252, 346 votive formulae 148, 243–61 votive inscriptions 24–5, 126, 137, 152, 251, 253–6, 259 votive offerings 197, 218, 224, 244–59, 308–9, 407–8, 412 vows 69, 76–7, 117, 121, 200, 247, 253, 258–9 see also dedications; epigraphy Xenophon 24, 117–27, 132 yahid 509 Yahweh 164, 325 worship see cult Zeno 506 Zeus 51, 118, 129–30, 224, 228, 246, 251–9 see Theos Hypsistossee also Jupiter Zosimus of Panopolis 409, 413