Final Pagan Generation: Rome's Unexpected Path to Christianity: Rome's Unexpected Path to Christianity Volume 53 (Transformation of the Classical Heritage, 53, Band 53) - Hardcover

Watts, Edward J.

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0520283708 ISBN 13: 9780520283701

Verlag: University of California Press, 2015

Inhaltsangabe

The Final Pagan Generation recounts the fascinating story of the lives and fortunes of the last Romans born before the Emperor Constantine converted to Christianity. Edward J. Watts traces their experiences of living through the fourth century’s dramatic religious and political changes, when heated confrontations saw the Christian establishment legislate against pagan practices as mobs attacked pagan holy sites and temples. The emperors who issued these laws, the imperial officials charged with implementing them, and the Christian perpetrators of religious violence were almost exclusively young men whose attitudes and actions contrasted markedly with those of the earlier generation, who shared neither their juniors’ interest in creating sharply defined religious identities nor their propensity for violent conflict. Watts examines why the "final pagan generation"—born to the old ways and the old world in which it seemed to everyone that religious practices would continue as they had for the past two thousand years—proved both unable to anticipate the changes that imperially sponsored Christianity produced and unwilling to resist them. A compelling and provocative read, suitable for the general reader as well as students and scholars of the ancient world.

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Edward J. Watts is Alkiviadis Vassiliadis Endowed Chair and Professor of History at the University of California, San Diego. He is the author of Riot in Alexandria and City and School in Late Antique Athens and Alexandria, both from UC Press.

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"Edward Watts has produced a scintillating portrait of the transformative fourth century of the Roman Empire. He employs the creative device of looking at the history of an era through the eyes of its own generation—like our Woodstock generation or Gen X—to show how its men and women witnessed, experienced, and engaged with the big and little events of their day. The results are variously quotidian and startling, ordinary and surprising, but never banal or entirely as expected. Understanding the oceanic changes in belief and behavior of the 'last pagan generation' in real time helps readers see that world from the perspective of the persons who lived it and not, as we often do, as if in some cosmic rear-view mirror. A real page turner!"—Brent D. Shaw, Andrew Fleming West Professor in Classics at Princeton University

"Edward Watts is a leading authority on the intellectual history of the later Roman Empire. Deeply nuanced and profoundly humane, this book shows what it meant to live through the Roman Empire's initial transition to Christianity. In clear and eloquent prose, Watts introduces us to a wide range of persons who responded to the Emperor Constantine’s conversion in widely different ways, from hostility or distaste to excitement and profound life changes. Watts provides a fresh and exciting vision of one the great generations of Mediterranean history, whose choices shaped the legacy of antiquity and the future of Christianity. This is a book that should be of interest to anyone who wants to understand the rich variety of religious experience."—David Potter, Francis W. Kelsey Collegiate Professor of Greek and Roman History at the University of Michigan

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The Final Pagan Generation

By Edward J. Watts

UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA PRESS

Copyright © 2015 The Regents of the University of California
All rights reserved.

ISBN: 978-0-520-28370-1

Contents

List of Illustrations, 
Acknowledgments, 
Introduction, 
1. Growing Up in the Cities of the Gods, 
2. Education in an Age of Imagination, 
3. The System, 
4. Moving Up in an Age of Uncertainty, 
5. The Apogee, 
6. The New Pannonian Order, 
7. Christian Youth Culture in the 360s and 370s, 
8. Bishops, Bureaucrats, and Aristocrats under Gratian, Valentinian II, and Theodosius, 
9. Old Age in a Young Man's Empire, 
10. A Generation's Legacy, 
Notes, 
Bibliography, 
Index, 

CHAPTER 1

Growing Up in the Cities of the Gods

The Roman Empire was full of gods in 310. Their temples, statues, and images filled its cities, towns, farms, and wildernesses. Whether they willed it or not, people living within the empire regularly experienced the sight, sound, smell, and taste of the gods' celebration. Traditional divinities also dominated the spiritual space of the empire as figures whose presence could not be sensed but whose actions many felt they could discern. Although such a situation seems quite foreign to the modern Western mind, people of the time saw this as an unremarkable reality that had existed for millennia. Later Romans could draw on a long history of living in a world like this, and they had developed ever more sophisticated technologies and techniques for interacting with the gods around them. The gods belonged to the empire's natural environment, and Romans had spent centuries learning how to make use of this vital resource.

The religious infrastructure of the Roman Empire cannot be equated to the aqueducts, pipes, and fountains that enabled Romans to redirect the water of rivers and streams into their cities and homes, but both systems attempted to channel in productive ways forces that could either sustain life or unleash immense destruction. Indeed, while a water system dependent on aqueducts and pipes differed dramatically from a spiritual system dependent on temples and rituals, both also produced a sort of passive and unconscious acceptance of their necessity. Temples, statues, and festivals were so omnipresent that they mostly faded into the sensory background as a sort of white noise or ambient odor that lurked without much acknowledgment within the empire's physical space.

RELIGIOUS INFRASTRUCTURE

A short fourth-century catalog of the types of buildings found in the city of Alexandria offers a window into this environment. It lists almost 2,500 temples in the city, nearly one for every twenty houses. Some of these were massive structures, like the Serapeum described in the introduction. The Serapeum sat on the highest spot in the city, an augmented limestone ridge at the southwestern edge of Alexandria's walls. Alexandria was a densely populated city of perhaps five hundred thousand filled with multistory houses and apartment buildings, but the Serapeum mount was visible in much of the city, and the tall temple perched atop it would have been a landmark. The senses of those who visited the site would have been altogether overwhelmed by the abundant and extravagant decorations of Serapis's temple and the other buildings around it. The site was crowded with statues and adorned with fine marbles, precious metals, rare woods, and (probably) jeweled objects. On most days, the indiscriminate rumblings of activity from worshippers and priests milling around the temple, scholars and students consulting the library, patrons and merchants doing business at the neighboring shops, and (on race days) the crowd of people filing into and out of the adjacent Hippodrome provided a wall of white noise that blocked out the regular cacophony of the city. The pleasant odors of incense and other offerings further set the complex apart from the filthy, smelly city that seethed below it.

The sense of physical and sensory separation that an urban monumental temple complex created for its visitors was, however, a luxury that few Romans enjoyed on a regular basis. This was not for lack of piety. Instead, it reflected a far more mundane reality. Massive temples like the Alexandrian Serapeum, the Roman Capitoline temple, or those on the Athenian Acropolis dominated the city's skyline, but their heights, locations, and many stairs made it inconvenient to access them regularly. The Serapeum, for example, was perhaps a thirty-minute walk from the center of the city, a walk that would force one to dodge traffic while enduring dust, smoke, and the stench of all sorts of dung and rot. Once one reached the temple, a climb up nearly a hundred stairs still remained. This could not be a regular part of most people's daily routine.

Fortunately, Alexandrians did not have to go far to encounter a temple. Neighborhood temples filled the city. They likely took many forms and ranged from imposing structures like the Serapeum to structures so modest that a distracted passerby would not notice their presence (see fig. 3). The diversity of Hindu temples one sees in cities in modern India can perhaps help one to imagine this type of environment. If one takes the city of Mathura in Uttar Pradesh as an example, a driver along the main highway to the west of the town will see massive temples like the Jai Gurudev mixed in with temples like the small one dedicated to Hanuman just four-tenths of a mile to its southeast (fig. 4) and another of similar size two miles to its north. Within the cities, one sees even greater diversity. The area around the center of Jaipur, for example, houses major temples like the Birla Mandir (fig. 5) and much smaller ones that are barely larger than a full-grown man (fig. 6). The bigger temples in India tend to have more visitors and dedicated attendants, while smaller temples attract less traffic and are not regularly staffed, but temples of all sizes play an active role in the larger religious life of Hindu communities.

One can see evidence that temples in the later Roman world functioned similarly. Rufinus's description of the Alexandrian Serapeum indicates the presence of a more or less permanent staff of priests and devotees of the god. In the neighboring city of Canopus, one hears about a philosopher who took up residence on the site of the large Serapis temple there and answered questions posed by visitors. Smaller temples, by contrast, were likely not staffed regularly. Priests and priestesses were summoned when their expertise was needed or a sacrifice required. Even without the constant presence of priests, however, these smaller temples could be used regularly. They often made cultic images visible to passers-by and permitted visitors to leave offerings in front of the building. This provided a more flexible way to approach and honor the divine that enabled devotees to worship when and where it was most convenient.

The Roman countryside housed an even greater array of sacred sites. These included large temple complexes, grottoes and other rustic sacred locations, and a large category of rural structures that served, in effect, as temples run by the household that controlled the land. Here too a focus on the size of the temple buildings can obscure their ubiquity. Houses across the empire had their own household shrines that ranged from wall niches to entire rooms that served as the focal point of domestic rituals. On estates, privately administered cult locations would be even larger and possibly designed to visually resemble temple-market complexes....

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: University of California Press
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2015
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 0520283708
• ISBN 13: 9780520283701
• Einband: Gebundene Ausgabe
• Anzahl der Seiten: 346
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Nicht verfügbar
• Verantwortliche Person: Nicht verfügbar