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RELIGIOUS HISTORY OF THE ROMAN EMPIRE

Two of the most distinguished British scholars of Roman Religion have successfully brought together a collection of papers that does justice to the enormously ambitious title of the work. Of the seventeen contributions, several of which do not appear in L’année philologique and thus might well have escaped the knowledge of most classicists, seven were specially translated into English for this book. The editors make available important papers that show how scholarship on the religious history of the Roman Empire underwent dramatic changes in the late-twentieth century, what the editors call ‘a revolution’ (p. 3). Most papers have useful afterwords in which the authors reflect on scholarly developments since the original dissemination of their chapter. Greekless and Latinless readers are accommodated by the translation or glossing of the original languages to make this book fully usable by students of various disciplines. The editors highlight as the most striking ideas of recent scholarship (i) the vigour of the pagan religious tradition across the Empire; (ii) an appreciation of the different ways in which there was interaction between Roman religion and local forms of cult, and evolution of new forms of cult; (iii) the variety of so-called ‘elective cults’; (iv) the recognition that there were many varieties of Christianity in coexistence; and (v) the notion that ‘paganism’ developed only slowly. The papers are grouped under four headings: ‘Changes in Religious Life: Roman and Civic Cults’, ‘Elective Cults’, ‘Co-existence of Religions, Old and New’ and ‘Late Antiquity’. In Part 1, the longest section, J. Rüpke offers a critique of influential nineteenth-century ideas on the religion of empire and proposes a model based on the notion of religion as symbolic communication. Crucial is ‘the historical notion of a new understanding and type of religion shaped in and by the Roman Empire’ (p. 32). In a very useful paper R. Gordon argues convincingly that a more transcendental conception of power is needed for understanding imperial cult, and demonstrates the complex role played by imperial images under such a conception. J. Rives argues ‘magic’ should be retained as an important ‘etic, heuristic category’ (p. 100) and that from the second century A.D., because of changing social concerns, magic became criminalised as a form of religious deviance rather than as the kind of harmful actions covered by the Lex Cornelia de sicariis et veneficiis, and it appeared as a crime per se from Paulus’ Sententiae onwards.W. Van Andringa examines the Pillar of the Boatmen from Lutetia in Gaul as a monument that ratifies the supremacy of Jupiter and the emperor, but reveals a kind of new combination of gods that was possible in a provincial community and in religious systems that were historical constructions. N. Belayche argues that the epithet ὕψιστος in combination with the impersonal θεός metaphorically highlights the greatness of the divinity concerned within a specifically polytheistic context, i.e. it is not an indication of ‘pagan monotheism’. A. Bendlin shows how divination and the closely related concepts of providence and fate were live topics in the second and third centuries A.D. in the milieu of the Second Sophistic, as seen from epigraphic as well as literary evidence, and how argumentative strategies developed. He argues against the historicity of Alexander of Abunoteichos. In Part 2 P. examines the degree to which elective cults were actually homogeneous and exclusive, even if their individual cosmologies were inclusive. He shows that boundaries THE CLASSICAL REVIEW 202