Polytheism impossible; or, the empty gods

Reasons behind a void in the history of roman religion

Datos Bibliográficos

ID21079088
AutoresJohn Scheid (0000-0003-4992-8371, École Pratique des Hautes Études, autor de correspondencia)
Año1987
Volumen3
Número1
Páginas303-325
Fecha de publicación1987-03-01
Peer ReviewedSí
Open AccessNo
TipoARTICLE
RevistaHistory and Anthropology (JOURNAL)
Identificadores de la revistaISSN: 0275-7206 • E-ISSN: 1477-2612
EditorialInforma UK Limited (PUBLISHER • GB)
DOI10.1080/02757206.1987.9960788
OpenAlexW1984325196
IdiomaEN
Citas recibidas10
Referencias citadas10

From the first decades of the nineteenth century, the gods of Rome have suffered discredit with respect to both the influence of Greek polytheism and the fervor of pre‐Christian and Christian monotheism. This attitude, not yet espoused by Gibbon and Herder, goes back to Hegel, whose system proclaimed the distressing emptiness of the mechanical gods of a religion already dead at the end of the third century B.C. This way of looking at Roman polytheism, propounded by a series of specialized studies published throughout the first half of the nineteenth century, gained even more ground with the appearance, in 1854, of Theodore Mommsen's History of Rome. The influence of the book as well as the personality of this unchallenged master of the German Universities were such that the theory of the death and the incoherence of the Roman gods spread throughout the universities of Europe, and continues even today to be determining in an important number of studies

Archaeology · Emptiness · Epistemology · German · Hegelianism · Islam · Monotheism · Roman Empire · Theology · Classical Antiquity Studies · Classics · Historical and Religious Studies of Rome · Historical, Religious, and Philosophical Studies · History · Philosophy