Author: Woolf, Greg
Title: Foreign Gods in the Age of Cicero
Review/Collection: in : Claudia Beltrão da Rosa, Federico Santangelo, Cicero and Roman religion: eight studies. Potsdamer Alterumswissenschaftliche Beitrage, Band 72. Stuttgart: Franz Steiner Verlag, 2020, 154 p.
Place edition: Stuttgart
Editor: Franz Steiner Verlag
Year edition: 2020
Pages: 117-134
Keywords: Religion - Religione - Religion
Description: Greg Woolf’s article steps back from looking closely at Cicero himself to a much broader question: are the hardening of boundaries one sees in Roman religious thought (especially on the acceptability of foreign deities) over the course of the second and first centuries BCE, and the subsequent softening of those boundaries in the early Empire, tied to changes in Roman thought on the expansion of their hegemony? Woolf points out that the third century was a period of both rapid expansion and of acceptance of new gods. The two centuries that followed, however, saw a cessation in the importation of foreign deities, an increase in the policing of private religious behavior (e. g., the Bacchic crisis), and a growing intolerance of foreign religious groups like Jews and Chaldeans. The late Republic and the Augustan age in particular were marked by a religious chauvinism undergirt by a belief in a divine mandate for Roman expansion that is visible in the works of not only Cicero, but also Caesar, Varro, and Livy. When Rome was again accepting of foreign religious influence, in the mid-first century CE, emperors had largely lost interest in wars of expansion, but at the same time they continued to promote Roman dominion as an ideal. Bringing foreign gods to Rome became, once again, a way to assert Roman hegemony. [Celia Schultz, BMCR 2020.11.04]
Author initials: Woolf 2020
Title: Foreign Gods in the Age of Cicero
Review/Collection: in : Claudia Beltrão da Rosa, Federico Santangelo, Cicero and Roman religion: eight studies. Potsdamer Alterumswissenschaftliche Beitrage, Band 72. Stuttgart: Franz Steiner Verlag, 2020, 154 p.
Place edition: Stuttgart
Editor: Franz Steiner Verlag
Year edition: 2020
Pages: 117-134
Keywords: Religion - Religione - Religion
Description: Greg Woolf’s article steps back from looking closely at Cicero himself to a much broader question: are the hardening of boundaries one sees in Roman religious thought (especially on the acceptability of foreign deities) over the course of the second and first centuries BCE, and the subsequent softening of those boundaries in the early Empire, tied to changes in Roman thought on the expansion of their hegemony? Woolf points out that the third century was a period of both rapid expansion and of acceptance of new gods. The two centuries that followed, however, saw a cessation in the importation of foreign deities, an increase in the policing of private religious behavior (e. g., the Bacchic crisis), and a growing intolerance of foreign religious groups like Jews and Chaldeans. The late Republic and the Augustan age in particular were marked by a religious chauvinism undergirt by a belief in a divine mandate for Roman expansion that is visible in the works of not only Cicero, but also Caesar, Varro, and Livy. When Rome was again accepting of foreign religious influence, in the mid-first century CE, emperors had largely lost interest in wars of expansion, but at the same time they continued to promote Roman dominion as an ideal. Bringing foreign gods to Rome became, once again, a way to assert Roman hegemony. [Celia Schultz, BMCR 2020.11.04]
Author initials: Woolf 2020
