Legible Religion. Books, Gods, and Rituals in Roman Culture.

MACRAE, D.,

ISBN 10: 0674088719 / ISBN 13: 9780674088719

Published by Harvard University Press, 2016

About this Item

Harvard University Press, Cambridge (Mass.) / London, 2016. 259p. Original grey cloth with dust wrps. Spine gilt titled. 'As Duncan MacRae points out in his intensely thought-provoking debut, one of the many ways in which the ancient Romans were anomalous involved their relationship to the divine: temples abound in their cities, religious rites and offices abound in their societies on every level, and yet they had no sacred text. There were books of recorded prophecies, there were annual compilations like the Annales Maximi functioning as a kind of sacerdotal accounting of which celestial contracts were fulfilled and which weren?t, but there was nothing equivalent to the concept of a divinely-inspired sacred-in-jot-and-tittle central holy book like the Books of Moses were for the Jews or, later, the Koran would be for the Muslims. The Romans may have exhibited a rhetoric of rule-making, but their peculiar brand of public religion, what MacRae winningly dubs their civil theology, has none of the finger-of-God exclusivity to be found in virtually all other contemporary societies: Alongside these markers of sacredness, canonization of Scripture enables practices of religious reading and interpretation. Biblical commentary or midrash, for example, make use of a canon; bibliomancy ? the use of Scripture for divination ? also depends on an articulation of a closed canon. We look in vain for the development of an accepted written canon for Roman religion. The lack of that accepted written canon has led many scholars over the centuries to disparage the Roman religious experience, to relegate it to the mercantile and parvenu where so many aspects of ancient Roman society tend to settle. MacRae very effectively furthers recent calls for a reappraisal of this picture. His book concisely (the thing could have been three times as long, and MacRae is such a companionable author that most readers will wish it were) lays out the case for that most neglected of things: the Roman soul. He does this mainly through one man and one work: Varro?s Divine Antiquities ? which of course means that a prominent seat at this intellectual table is reserved for St. Augustine?s long point-by-point argument with Varro in City of God. As MacRae aptly puts it, [Augustin] 'did not consider Varro simply an authority; instead, he found in him an opponent.' Much like Cicero and other Roman intellectuals, Varro wrote extensively on Roman rituals and religious history, and St. Augustine, while railing against these treatises, preserved enough of them for MacRae to map out an invigorating new appreciation of what and more importantly how Romans approached the religious in their lives. The resulting book will have readers of Roman history and literature re-thinking everything from the scandal of Clodius Pulcher sneaking into the women-only Bona Dea rites to all the barbed religious commentary in the Golden Ass of Apuleius. Those readers will find it amazing and a bit chastising that they could so easily have dismissed something that runs through so much of what they know about ancient Rome; Legible Religion makes such dismissals impossible. (STEVEN DONOGHUE in Open Letters Monthly, July 2016).

Seller Inventory # 48103

Bibliographic Details

• Title: Legible Religion. Books, Gods, and Rituals in Roman Culture.
• Publisher: Harvard University Press
• Publication Date: 2016
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0674088719
• ISBN 13: 9780674088719
• Binding: Hardcover

About this title

Synopsis

Scholars have long emphasized the importance of scripture in religion, tacitly separating a few privileged "religions of the Book" from faiths lacking sacred texts, including ancient Roman religion. Looking beyond this distinction, Duncan MacRae delves into Roman religious culture to grapple with a central question: what was the significance of books in a religion without scripture? In the last two centuries BCE, Varro and other Roman authors wrote treatises on the nature of the Roman gods and the rituals devoted to them. Although these books were not sacred texts, they made Roman religion legible in ways analogous to scripture-based faiths such as Judaism and Christianity. Rather than reflect the astonishingly varied polytheistic practices of the regions under Roman sway, the contents of the books comprise Rome's "civil theology"-not a description of an official state religion but one limited to the civic role of religion in Roman life. Tracing the subsequent influence of these religious texts from the late first century BCE to early fifth century CE, MacRae shows how the establishment of the Roman imperial monarchy and the rise of the Christian Church shaped their reception and interpretation.

About the Author

Duncan MacRae is Assistant Professor of Classics at the University of Cincinnati.