Reinventing the Amphaireion at Oropos

Publications > Reinventing the Amphaireion at Oropos

This new book by Dr Alexandra Wilding asks why politically-powerful entities invested in the Amphiareion, a sanctuary renowned for its precarity and dependency. The answer lies in unravelling the intricacies of the shrine’s epigraphical record and the stories about the communities and individuals responsible for creating it. By explaining patterns in inscribed display against the backdrop of broader events and phenomena emerging within central Greece, this book revisits the Amphiareion’s narrative and emphasises its political implications for its neighbours. This interpretation offers new perspectives on the sanctuary and exposes agents’ manipulation of it in the course of reinventing their self-image in a changing Greek world.

Find out more on the Brill website.

---

Material Religion in Pompeii

This special issue of the Open Arts Journal takes a fresh look at the relationship between religion and material culture in the ancient city of Pompeii – our most comprehensively preserved archaeological site from any period of antiquity. Its central aim is to use the case study of Pompeii to bring our work on Greco-Roman religion into conversation with some key theoretical movements in the disciplines of religious studies, anthropology and art history, and particularly the set of approaches grouped under the title of ‘material religion’. The essays collected here build on earlier studies of Pompeian religion to explore different aspects of the dynamic relationship between bodies, matter and senses in a range of Pompeian spaces, including bedrooms, kitchens, gardens, streets, temples, bars and theatres. Contributors focus on the materiality of objects, bodies and senses, investigating how these things worked with (or against) the literary texts which have often been the starting point for the study of Roman religion. What does our Pompeian evidence suggest about how webs of relations were created between human and other-than-human persons? How were the qualities of material objects activated through the senses? How might some of the emergent ‘key terms in material religion’ (S.B. Plate, 2015) – amongst them ‘time’, ‘emotion’, ‘space’, ‘ritual’, ‘food’, ‘maps’ and ‘magic’ – be brought to bear on our ancient data?

Click here to read issue 10.

Contents

• Jessica Hughes, MATERIAL RELIGION AND POMPEII: INTRODUCTION

• Annette Haug & Patric-Alexander Kreuz, THE DIVERSITY OF POMPEII’S DOMESTIC CULT ACTIVITY

• Emma-Jayne Graham, AT HOME WITH THE LARES: LIVED RELIGION REMATERIALISED AT POMPEII

• Nathaniel B. Jones, MATERIAL AND IMMATERIAL RELIGION IN POMPEIAN PAINTING

• Brittany DeMone & Lisa A. Hughes, SENSING HERMAPHRODITUS IN THE DIONYSIAN THEATRE GARDEN

• Mirco Mungari & Kamila Wyslucha, MATERIAL MUSIC IN RITUAL SOUNDSCAPES OF POMPEII

• Joe Sheppard, GUARDIANS OF THE THRESHOLD: THE IMAGE OF THE GLADIATOR AND ITS PROTECTIVE FUNCTION IN POMPEII

• Ivo van der Graaff & Eric Poehler, TRACING PROCESSION ROUTES FOR THE PRINCIPAL CULTS IN POMPEII

• Virginia L. Campbell, POMPA IN POMPEII: EXPERIENCING A FUNERAL PROCESSION IN THE ANCIENT CITY

Reassembling Religion in Roman Italy

Publications > Reassembling Religion in Roman Italy

By Emma-Jayne Graham, this book examines the ways in which lived religion in Roman Italy involved personal and communal experiences of the religious agency generated when ritualised activities caused human and more-than-human things to become bundled together into relational assemblages. Drawing upon broadly posthumanist and new materialist theories concerning the thingliness of things, it sets out to re-evaluate the role of the material world within Roman religion and to offer new perspectives on the formation of multi-scalar forms of ancient religious knowledge. It explores what happens when a materially informed approach is systematically applied to the investigation of typical questions about Roman religion such as: What did Romans understand ‘religion’ to mean? What did religious experiences allow people to understand about the material world and their own place within it? How were experiences of ritual connected with shared beliefs or concepts about the relationship between the mortal and divine worlds? How was divinity constructed and perceived? To answer these questions, it gathers and evaluates archaeological evidence associated with a series of case studies. Each of these focuses on a key component of the ritualised assemblages shown to have produced Roman religious agency – place, objects, bodies, and divinity – and centres on an examination of experiences of lived religion as it related to the contexts of monumentalised sanctuaries, cult instruments used in public sacrifice, anatomical votive offerings, cult images and the qualities of divinity, and magic as a situationally specific form of religious knowledge. By breaking down and then reconstructing the ritualised assemblages that generated and sustained Roman religion, this book makes the case for adopting a material approach to the study of ancient lived religion.

Find out more about this book on the Routledge website.

Vocal Expression in Roman Mourning

Publications > Vocal Expression in Roman Mourning

Tear stained cheeks, dishevelled hair, bloodied breasts and dark clothing transformed the body to give physical representation to the altered emotional state, ritually polluted condition and societal status of the Roman mourner. The expression of grief affected not just the physical surfaces of the body, but also its voice. This chapter explores the soundscape of Roman mourning, one that ranged from silence to clamour, from inarticulate groaning to finessed speeches. Mourners could wail, moan, cry, speak, shout, sing, and be accompanied by musical instruments. It is argued that the vocalisation of grief was not an uncontrolled emotional process, but an orchestrated performance, created to appease the dead, and also dictated by the status of the deceased, and the status and gender of the mourners. The acceptable and unacceptable aspects of vocalising grief are investigated through literary evidence, of diverse genres, and some visual depictions of death scenes.

Citation: Hope, Valerie (2019) ‘Vocal Expression in Roman Mourning’, in Shane Butler and Sarah Nooter (eds) Sound and the Ancient Senses, Routledge, Abingdon and New York: 61-76.

Find out more about the Sound and the Ancient Senses book on the Routledge website.