Seminar:

Catalog description

How did religious life in the capital and its port reflect or react to what was simultaneously occurring across the Roman Empire and at its frontiers? How and why were so many different deities integrated within Rome and Ostia during the high imperial period and Late Antiquity in various contexts and how did polytheists and monotheists coexist? In this seminar, we will engage in vibrant current debates about these questions, asking whether we are able to define categories such as “foreign,” “official,” “unofficial,” “elective” and “ancestral,” and evaluating their usefulness. We will delve into the complex archaeological, visual, epigraphic, and topographical evidence for religious choices and activities in Rome and Ostia at the local level during a period of intense change. The religious and cultural identities of the cities’ diverse residents will be considered, as well as the divine images they created, dedications they offered, and the buildings and spaces where they venerated gods and goddesses that represent myriad traditions. Examples include shrines for lares (household gods) in houses and at street corners, dedications to the woodland god Silvanus in Rome’s military camps, elaborate sanctuaries dedicated to Magna Mater, Isis, and Mithras, and the exceptionally well-preserved synagogue and Christian basilica at Ostia. Students will gain experience working with different types of archaeological, topographical, visual, and epigraphic evidence, and familiarity with excavation reports, topographical lexicons, epigraphic corpora, and seminal recent publications. Our study will also be contextualized within a broad framework as we draw careful comparisons to relevant material from sites across the Empire, east and west.