Argues that thinking about sacred trees in Roman culture forces us to rethink how we understand Roman religion.

Sacred trees are easy to dismiss as a simplistic, weird phenomenon, but this book argues that in fact they prompted sophisticated theological thinking in the Roman world. Challenging major aspects of current scholarly constructions of Roman religion, Ailsa Hunt rethinks what sacrality means in Roman culture, proposing an organic model which defies the current legalistic approach. She approaches Roman religion as a 'thinking' religion (in contrast to the ingrained idea of Roman religion as orthopraxy) and warns against writing the environment out of our understanding of Roman religion, as has happened to date. In addition, the individual trees showcased in this book have much to tell us which enriches and thickens our portraits of Roman religion, be it about the subtleties of engaging in imperial cult, the meaning of numen, the interpretation of portents, or the way statues of the Divine communicate.

In Bible Prophecy the book of Daniel predicts a revived roman empire that will rule the world during the Tribulation and launch the Antichrist. The Revived Roman Empire: Europe In Bible Prophecy provides a historical overview of the Roman Empire to the present European Union. The European Union is the Revived Roman Empire foretold by the prophet Daniel and John in the Revelation that would reemerge in the latter days and launch the Antichrist. The Revived Roman Empire: Europe in Bible Prophecy shows the reader the institutions and structures of the European Union that are described in the prophetic books written two to three thousand years ago. It also reveals the Catholic Church’s influence of the evolving European Union and how the evidence proves that it fits the biblical description for the revived Roman Empire. In addition, the reader discovers the relationship between the ancient prophetic writings, the European Union and today's current affairs.

Provides an account of the religious history of Rome starting from its mythical origins.

This multi-disciplinary volume brings together the voices of biblical scholars, classicists, philosophers, theologians and political theorists to explore how ecology and theology intersected in ancient thinking, both pagan, Jewish and Christian. Ecological awareness is by no means purely a modern phenomenon. Of course, melting icecaps and plastic bag charges were of no concern in antiquity: frequently what made examining your relationship with the natural world urgent was the light this shed on human relationships with the divine. For, in the ancient world, to think about ecology was also to think about theology. This ancient eco-theological thinking - whilst in many ways worlds apart from our own environmental concerns - has also had a surprisingly rich impact on modern responses to our ecological crisis. As such, the voices gathered in this volume also reflect on whether and how these ancient ideas could inform modern responses to our environment and its pressing challenges. Through multi-disciplinary conversation this volume offers a new and dynamic exploration of the intersection of ecology and theology in ancient thinking, and its living legacy.

This academic research publication series seeks to examine the question of identity and its relation to society, promoting creative new approaches to thinking about identity as well as a combination of traditional academic methodologies.

Drawing on epigraphic, legal, literary, and numismatic sources, this book reveals how, in the Roman Republic, law and religion interacted to serve the same purpose, the continued growth and consolidation of Rome’s power.

A groundbreaking reinterpretation that draws on cognitive theory to show that belief wasn’t absent from—but rather was at the heart of—Roman religion Belief and Cult argues that belief isn’t uniquely Christian but was central to ancient Roman religion. Drawing on cognitive theory, Jacob Mackey shows that despite having nothing to do with salvation or faith, belief underlay every aspect of Roman religious practices—emotions, individual and collective cult action, ritual norms, social reality, and social power. In doing so, he also offers a thorough argument for the importance of belief to other non-Christian religions. At the individual level, the book argues, belief played an indispensable role in the genesis of cult action and religious emotion. However, belief also had a collective dimension. The cognitive theory of Shared Intentionality shows how beliefs may be shared among individuals, accounting for the existence of written, unwritten, or even unspoken ritual norms. Shared beliefs permitted the choreography of collective cult action and gave cult acts their social meanings. The book also elucidates the role of shared belief in creating and maintaining Roman social reality. Shared belief allowed the Romans to endow agents, actions, and artifacts with socio-religious status and power. In a deep sense, no man could count as an augur and no act of animal slaughter as a successful offering to the gods, unless Romans collectively shared appropriate beliefs about these things. Closely examining augury, prayer, the religious enculturation of children, and the Romans’ own theories of cognition and cult, Belief and Cult promises to revolutionize the understanding of Roman religion by demonstrating that none of its features makes sense without Roman belief.

Focusing on the transitional period of the late Republic to the early Principate, Trees in Ancient Rome offers a sustained examination of the deployment of trees in the ancient city, exploring not only the practicalities of their cultivation, but also their symbolic value. The Ruminal fig tree sheltered the she-wolf as she nursed Romulus and Remus and year's later Rome was founded between two groves. As the city grew, neighbourhoods bore the names of groves and hills were known by the trees which grew atop them. From the 1st century BCE, triumphs included trees among their spoils and Rome's green cityscape grew, as did the challenges of finding room for trees within the congested city. This volume begins with an examination of the role of trees as repositories of human memory, lasting for several generations. It goes on to untangle the import of trees, and their role in the triumphal procession, before closing with a discussion of how trees could be grown in Rome's urban spaces. Drawing on a combination of literary, visual and archaeological sources, it reveals the rich variety of trees in evidence, and explores how they impacted, and were used to impact, life in the ancient city.

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.