SBL proposal Greco-Roman Religions Section
Abstracts Themed Session: ‘Mythmaking, Fictionalising, Entextualising: Creative
Moments in Graeco-Roman Religious Reality.’
Gerhard van den Heever (University of South Africa, Pretoria, South Africa)
Myth, Fiction, Text: Reading ‘Religion’ Between the Lines.
Invoking myth, inventing tradition, and entextualizing/authorizing tradition are ageold technologies for producing authority and replicating hierarchies of ‘powerdissipations’. This paper argues that these are related operations that, as an ensemble,
construct what is called ‘religious tradition’. Drawing on a range of theorists, from
Bruce Lincoln to Eric Hobsbawm and Fredric Jameson, it is demonstrated how myths
of creation and the consequent procession (or issuing) of gods are recontextualized in
various ‘religious’ contexts with a view to establishing authority and powerhierarchies. Particular attention is paid to the Isis/Osiris-Dionysus complex spanning
the period from Hellenistic Ptolemaic Egypt to Late Antiquity, traversing discursive
genres such as large-scale performances and mime, to philosophical discourse,
novelistic fiction and epic poetry (i.e., from Ptolemy II Philadelphos to Nonnos), and
highlighting the persistence of the topos of arrival of gods/divine mediating agency
even in such seemingly ‘independent’ traditions as early Judaisms and early
Christianities with their simultaneous anchoring of the discourse of arrival of divine
mediating agency in illo tempore and in historical circumstance. This paper is about
the recalibration of myth, the textualization of invented tradition, and the resultant
establishment of authoritative discursive formations. Redescription of Graeco-Roman
mythic invention through comparative work in this vein, also answers the theoretical
question: What is myth good for?
Nancy Evans (Wheaton College, Norton, Massachusetts)
From Mad Ritual to Philosophical Inquiry: Ancient and Modern Fictions of
Continuity and Discontinuity.
This paper will explore one of the more creative — and influential — moments of
mythmaking and fictionalizing from the ancient Mediterranean world: the (re-)
invention of prophetic madness. In particular, I will first look to the fictionalized
encounter between two Athenians, Socrates and Phaedrus. Plato’s Phaedrus records
their conversation, a talk that ranged over a vast terrain of topics ranging from
homoerotic lovers to skilled (and less skilled) rhetoricians. In the midst of this
dialogue Socrates famously interrupts himself, and invokes two powerful allies in his
search for true speech: first the mythic tradition surrounding the fall of Troy, and then
ancient rites of purification that facilitate human access to knowledge of the divine.
In this context of his palinode Socrates investigates the links between prophecy and
divine madness, and ultimately he applies the purported gifts of this madness to
pursuits that are generally considered to be more rational. After a brief analysis of
some of the rhetoric and syntax in Socrates’ palinode, I will open up the paper to
examine the possibilities and complexities of identity in the Athens of Plato and
Socrates. Multiple and overlapping social identities and cultic traditions are alluded
to in the palinode; drawing from the work of Walter Burkert, Eric Hobsbawm, Bruce
Lincoln and Jonathan Z. Smith I will examine how — and even whether — the
multiple religious identities that lie behind this dialogue could be thought to advance
and invent a tradition that came to be known as philosophy.
Tennyson Jacob Wellman (University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia)
Paradosis or Akoē? Or, Making a Tradition of an Ass.
Damaskios’ Philosophical History includes the puzzling account of Zenōn the
Alexandrian, a Jew who publicly joined the Platonist school and renounced his
Judaism “in the traditional manner” by driving a white ass through a synagogue on the
Sabbath. I will examine the resonances of this allegedly “traditional” ritual in a
creative Late Antique environment situated between three religious identities whose
overlaps and collisions were as significant as their differences. The social embedding
of the event provides us with a range of actors involved: Zenōn, his Jewish audience,
his Platonist colleagues, the wider public (including Jews, Hellenophones, and
Christians) and Damaskios’ omniscient post-fact narrator. In producing a new
“traditional” ritual which resituated the boundaries between groups that often
overlapped, Zenōn, and Damaskios’ remembering of the event, drew on a repertoire
of actions, symbols, and narratives to produce an event whose meaning was
recursively rich and nuanced. The notion of “tradition” to which Damaskios refers is
itself an ironic commentary on the relations between Christians and Jews, drawing on
narratives of Jesus’ entry into Jerusalem, as well as common anti-Jewish calumnies to
suggest the superiority of Platonic religious identities over Jewish ones. But
Damaskios’ final comments on Zenōn’s character demonstrate that the convert’s
social realignment with a Hellenic identity was contested even by his new colleagues,
and the ass is recast as a type by which the reader can better understand the man. This
foregrounds the tensions between traditionalism and innovation in a diverse and
contested field of cultural production, and the problematic interplay of identities in a
single figure. Zenōn’s “traditional” ritual marked precisely the moment when his
world was changing and requiring innovation to handle those changes.
Gail E. Armstrong (Brown University, Providence, Rhode Island)
Sacrificial Iconography: Creating History, Making Myth, and Negotiating Ideology
on the Ara Pacis.
The Ara Pacis Augustae, dedicated in 13 B.C.E. and finished in 9 B.C.E., serves as a
reflection of the Roman Senate’s participation in Augustus’ redescription of history.
The iconography of the monument, with its pictorial language of peace, fertility,
abundance, and piety, can be read as a text that engages with the history- and mythmaking of Augustus. It evokes texts such as Virgil’s Aeneid, and provides another,
supportive narrative of the fictional history that established the power and authority of
Augustus. In other words, the monument serves as the Senate’s recognition of the
Augustan redescription of Roman history.
This paper argues that the Ara Pacis functioned primarily as the Senate’s negotiation
of its own role within the “new order” established by the Augustan myth but also
secondarily, to identify itself as a continuing participant in the “field of cultural
production” (Bourdieu). Indeed, it engages in its own history-making, in which it
describes itself as an active partner in Augustus’ production of history and myth. The
ritualization of sacrifice that we see depicted on the Ara Pacis serves to legitimate the
power of Augustus and the power of the Senate as part of the new order. The senate is
working within the new myth already laid out by Augustus and it utilizes the imagery
and the ideology he has already established. The Senate might have “accepted” the
Augustan redescription, but it also needed to situate itself within it, and thus it became
an active participant in the process. The Ara Pacis, using the language of sacrifice and
thereby of religion, serves to index Augustus and the imperial family, and the Senate
as both producers and actors.
Pieter J. J. Botha (University of South Africa, Pretoria, South Africa)
The Quotidian of Mythology: Aspects of Place and Visual Environment in
Redescribing Greco-Roman Antiquity.
Two areas of the material world of the early Roman empire typically do not feature in
descriptions of “religious experience”: Roman art and the Roman house. Both aspects
are intricately saturated with myths and mythmaking. Consequently, an argument can
be presented that the Roman domus is about more than simply private life. The
remains of houses from the Empire are a major resource for investigating how people
living within the Roman world thought of themselves and how they communicated
this self-image to the world.
Secondly, against the backdrop of the epochal transformations — both in the structure
of society and in the individual’s relation to that structure — that mark the history of
the Roman empire, the changes in the functions of art need consideration. The
suggestion is to have a look at Roman art as both a key to, and reflection of Roman
syncretism, and to relate a cultural phenomenon which brought together an
extraordinary variety of races, nations, art forms, styles and cults in romanitas. It
seems that we still underestimate how much “secular” space was determined by
evocations of the sacred.
In order to emphasise and manage such interrelatedness a reduction of historical scale
to the description and understanding of everyday life and its multiformed ways of
storytelling is required. This shift of focus is an attempt to transcend a sharp
dichotomy opposing objective, material, structural, or institutional factors to
subjective, cultural, symbolic, or emotional ones. It is an expression of the effort to
join the historical, anthropological and sociological disciplines which have sharpened
their focus towards the micro-scale by considering stories (myths) in action,
storytelling not necessarily by means of formal literacy.
Daniel Ullucci (Brown University, Providence, Rhode Island)
Before Animal Sacrifice: A Myth of Innocence.
Meat has always been part of the human diet. Within Greek and Roman religions (as
well as many other religious systems worldwide), animal sacrifice was one of the
most omnipresent and socially significant religious practices. Yet, numerous Greek
and Latin writers tell of a golden age when humans were not dependent on killing
animals for food. In this idealized world, humans lived at one with the gods, and
animal sacrifice did not exist.
One classic example of this myth comes from Porphyry’s De Abstentia. According to
Porphyry, humans were originally vegetarians. When famine struck, people fell to
cannibalism. The eating of animal meat and the ritual of sacrifice, he claims, emerged
only as a substitute to murder and eating human flesh. Other stories of a golden age
without sacrifice are found in Hesiod, Herodotus, Ovid, and others.
These passages have often been read through the lens of the later Christian position on
sacrifice. According to this view, animal sacrifice was a barbaric and senseless act
which was abolished and replaced by the pure sacrifice of Jesus. In fact, Eusebius is
aware of the same version of the myth Porphyry tells and uses it to support his
rejection of sacrifice. Largely as a result of this Christian lens, scholars have not asked
what the myth of a world without sacrifice means in a world in which sacrifice
predominated.
This paper seeks to correct the above view by analyzing these texts as instances of
created myth. It approaches each occurrence of the myth as an instance of positiontaking by a player in the field of cultural production. The paper seeks to further a
redescription of Greco-Roman antiquity by revealing the variety of ancient positions
on sacrifice and their strategic use by competing cultural producers.