James B Rives
Biographic Data
| ID | 3875191 |
|---|---|
| NAME | James B Rives |
| GIVEN NAMES | James B |
| FAMILY NAME | Rives |
| SIGNATURE | RIVES J B |
| AFFILIATIONS | University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill |
| VERIFIED | No |
| TOTAL WORKS | 32 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 116 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 32 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1993 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2025 |
| H-INDEX | 4 |
In Search of Suetonius’ illustrious men
In this paper I argue that the accepted reconstruction of Suetonius’ De viris illustribus has been shaped by unexamined assumptions that have been allowed to take on the appearance of fact. I begin by surveying the scholarly reconstruction of this work from the fifteenth century until today. I then examine two key underlying assumptions: that Suetonius planned and published his series of literary lives as a single compendious work and that it exc…
Animal Sacrifice and the Roman Persecution of Christians (Second to Third Century)
When is violence religious? Or, to put it more accurately, under what conditions can we appropriately characterise violence as religious? This is never an easy question to answer, as the chapters in this volume amply demonstrate. What qualifies as ‘violence’, although a question that is apparently straightforward enough, becomes more difficult to pin down the more closely one considers it, and several contributors to this volume are careful to di…
Frankfurter, David (2018), Christianizing Egypt
Who makes history? For many years, the answer to that question was assumed to be obvious: the great rulers, generals, prelates, and thinkers who determined the course of human events. This "Great Man" view of history (and most of those identified as 'great' tended by definition to be men) began to fall out of favor in the mid-20 th century, as historians began to attach more weight to large-scale environmental, economic, and social factors. The t…
Sacrifice and 'Religion
In this paper I present a model for describing the change in religion that took place during the Roman imperial period, a model that is built around a contrast between orthopraxy and orthodoxy. I begin with a brief survey of the most important earlier models of religious change in the Roman empire, followed by an initial sketch of my own proposed model. In the third and fourth sections I elaborate on this model in more detail by developing it thr…
Anna Collar. Religious Networks in the Roman Empire
Religion in the Roman Provinces
Without inscriptions, the study of religion in the Roman provinces would scarcely exist. Much can be learned from the rich material remains about sanctuaries, iconography, and even cult practices, but apart from a few scattered references in literary sources, we would know almost nothing of the names of the deities worshipped, very little of religious organization and cult personnel, and far less about key issues such as the interaction of local …
Société et identité dans l'Empire romain
Dans ces conférences, j'ai étudié la pratique du sacrifice animal dans le cadre de la transformation de la religion dans le monde gréco-romain durant la période impériale. Les deux premières conférences se sont intéressées aux fonctions sociales et culturelles de cette pratique. La troisième conférence a esquissé le développement d'une théorie du rituel du sacrifice, et, dans la dernière, j'ai soutenu que la transformation du rôle social et cultu…
Women and Animal Sacrifice in Public Life
In evaluating the scarcity of evidence for the participation of women in animal sacrifice, we need to take into account our more general lack of information about the details of sacrificial practice in the western Roman empire. This chapter first reviews the evidence for three categories of people who are likely to have presided over animal sacrifices: magistrates, priests, and benefactors. It then discusses the likelihood of women serving in the…
Atheism, Greece and Rome
Although the word “atheism” derives from the Greek adjective atheos , “godless,” the two word groups have rather different connotations. In modern English, “atheist” denotes someone who asserts that there is no deity. The ancient Greeks, in contrast, described as atheos anyone whose actions or statements implied a lack of proper respect for the gods; they could thus apply the word to people like the Christians who were certainly not atheists in t…
Religious deviance and persecution
The notion of religious deviance necessarily implies a religious standard from which to deviate, but it is difficult to identify such a standard in the Greek and Roman religious traditions: there was no foundational text like the Torah or the Bible, no explicitly formulated doctrine, and no hierarchy of religious authorities who could define or enforce adherence to a doctrine.
Superstition
In the context of Greco‐Roman antiquity, the notion of “superstition” (from Latin superstitio ) covers religious practices and beliefs that the social and cultural elite regarded as inappropriate or socially subversive. Given the absence of any clearly defined and universally acknowledged standard of correct practice and belief, the range of behaviors that could be characterized as “superstition” varied considerably.
Roman Translation
Diplomacy And Identity Among Jews And Christians
Sometime around the year 177CE, a man named Athenagoras composed a defence of Christianity that he addressed to Roman emperors. In his Embassy for Christians , the persona that Athenagoras constructs for himself in the text is quite clearly meant to be that of an ambassador. In many respects the Jews were typical of groups that had diplomatic relations with the emperor. The Judaeans, like other peoples drawn gradually into the ambit of Rome, regu…
Magic in the Ancient Greek World (review)
Reviewed by: Magic in the Ancient Greek World J.B. Rives Derek Collins. Magic in the Ancient Greek World. Maldon, MA/Oxford/Victoria: Blackwell Publishing, 2008. Pp. xiv + 207. US $99.95. ISBN 978-1-4051-3238-1 (hb). It is difficult to get a handle on magic, a problem that Derek Collins openly acknowledges in his lively new book. And if one’s brief is to write a book that could serve as a general introduction to the topic, which is the premise be…
Religion in the Roman Empire
This book provides a systematic introduction to religion in the Roman Empire. It explores mainstream Graeco-Roman religion, as well as the diverse regional religions within the empire, from the millennia-old traditions of Egypt to the Celtic traditions of Western Europe." "The author describes the distinctive features of religion in the Roman world and examines the shared assumptions and underlying dynamics that characterized religious life as a …
Flavius Josephus and Flavian Rome
Structure and History in the Germania of Tacitus
Magic in the XII Tables revisited
An abstract is not available for this content so a preview has been provided. Please use the Get access link above for information on how to access this content
Tacitus Germany
A Prefect’s Edict Mentioning Sacrifice
Rebellion and Reconstruction
The Decree of Decius and the Religion of Empire
In A.D. 249 the emperor Trajan Decius issued an edict requiring the inhabitants of the Roman Empire to sacrifice to the gods. With this decree, he also inaugurated the first empire-wide persecution of Christians. Previously, persecutions of Christians had always been local affairs determined by local conditions. Thereafter, persecutions were largely instigated by emperors and took place on an imperial scale. It has consequently become common to d…
Religion and Authority in Roman Carthage from Augustus to Constantine
Roman Religion Revived
Religion and Authority in Roman Carthage from Augustus to Constantine
This book examines the organization of religion in the Roman empire from Augustus to Constantine. Although there have been illuminating particular studies of the relationship between religious activity and socio-political authority in the empire, there has been no large-scale attempt to assess it as a whole. Taking as his focus the situation in Carthage, the greatest city of the western provinces, J.B. Rives argues that the traditional religion, …
Religion and Authority in Roman Carthage from Augustus to Constantine
This book examines the organization of religion in the Roman empire from Augustus to Constantine. Although there have been illuminating particular studies of the relationship between religious activity and socio-political authority in the empire, there has been no large-scale attempt to assess it as a whole. Taking as his focus the situation in Carthage, the greatest city of the western provinces, J.B. Rives argues that the traditional religion, …
Human Sacrifice among Pagans and Christians
In Minucius Felix' dialogue on the value of Christianity, written in the late second or early third century C.E., the character Caecilius, who presents the anti-Christian arguments, recounts a story about their initiations, ‘a story as loathsome as it is well known’: after the initiate has struck a baby concealed under a covering of flour, those present drink the blood from its wounds and so seal their union ( Oct. 9.5). Later in the dialogue, Oc…
Magic in the XII Tables revisited
An abstract is not available for this content so a preview has been provided. Please use the Get access link above for information on how to access this content
Venus Genetrix outside Rome
W HEN CAESAR ESTABLISHED in Rome a cult in honor of Venus Genetrix, he added a new dimension to Roman public religion. New cults had often been established in the past, but none had the personal associations that this one did. Although the epithet Genetrix had been used of Venus in poetry for over a century, it was as an ancestral goddess of the Roman people in general. Caesar's family, the Iulii, however, claimed direct descent from Venus throug…
The Decree of Decius and the Religion of Empire
In A.D. 249 the emperor Trajan Decius issued an edict requiring the inhabitants of the Roman Empire to sacrifice to the gods. With this decree, he also inaugurated the first empire-wide persecution of Christians. Previously, persecutions of Christians had always been local affairs determined by local conditions. Thereafter, persecutions were largely instigated by emperors and took place on an imperial scale. It has consequently become common to d…
Magic in the Ancient Greek World (review)
Reviewed by: Magic in the Ancient Greek World J.B. Rives Derek Collins. Magic in the Ancient Greek World. Maldon, MA/Oxford/Victoria: Blackwell Publishing, 2008. Pp. xiv + 207. US $99.95. ISBN 978-1-4051-3238-1 (hb). It is difficult to get a handle on magic, a problem that Derek Collins openly acknowledges in his lively new book. And if one’s brief is to write a book that could serve as a general introduction to the topic, which is the premise be…
Religion in the Roman Provinces
Without inscriptions, the study of religion in the Roman provinces would scarcely exist. Much can be learned from the rich material remains about sanctuaries, iconography, and even cult practices, but apart from a few scattered references in literary sources, we would know almost nothing of the names of the deities worshipped, very little of religious organization and cult personnel, and far less about key issues such as the interaction of local …
Marcellus and the Syracusans
Marcellus and the Syracusans
Venus Genetrix outside Rome
W HEN CAESAR ESTABLISHED in Rome a cult in honor of Venus Genetrix, he added a new dimension to Roman public religion. New cults had often been established in the past, but none had the personal associations that this one did. Although the epithet Genetrix had been used of Venus in poetry for over a century, it was as an ancestral goddess of the Roman people in general. Caesar's family, the Iulii, however, claimed direct descent from Venus throug…
Public Religion in Roman Carthage
When Phoenician traders began to arrive on the coast of North Africa, they found the area already inhabited by a people whom we may call Libyans, whose language and culture survived into the Roman period. The Phoenicians themselves, one of the great commercial peoples of the ancient world, were at this time developing regular trade routes to the western Mediterranean.
The Agenda of the Local Élite
Discussions of local élites in the Roman empire often focus on their complicity with the ruling powers, and for a very good reason. The decentralized type of administration favoured by the Roman rulers was only made possible by the willingness of the local é seen, the Carthaginian lites to assume much of the job of government. Their collaboration was basic to the success of the empire. As I argued in Chapter I, this was just as true in matters of…
Religious Authority and the Roman State
In Chapter II I traced the development of a Romano-African elite in Carthage and its territory, people who considered themselves simultaneously Roman and African. By the end of the second century CE, their African heritage was no longer seen, by themselves or others, as incompatible with their Roman identity. No one would have had to insist on the Romanitas of the emperor Septimius Severus as a century previously Statius had felt obliged to insis…
Human Sacrifice among Pagans and Christians
In Minucius Felix' dialogue on the value of Christianity, written in the late second or early third century C.E., the character Caecilius, who presents the anti-Christian arguments, recounts a story about their initiations, ‘a story as loathsome as it is well known’: after the initiate has struck a baby concealed under a covering of flour, those present drink the blood from its wounds and so seal their union ( Oct. 9.5). Later in the dialogue, Oc…
The Blood Libel against the Montanists
Il est difficile de prouver que la diffamation contre les montanistes trouve son origine dans les travaux apologetiques d'Apollinaris de Hierapolis ou dans un texte du II e siecle. Cette diffamation pourrait apparaitre de maniere spontanee au IV e siecle. On peut avec quelque certitude croire qu'au IV e siecle, des groupes chretiens eclates comme les montanistes etaient percus avec hostilite et suspicion. Ce reveil de l'hostilite est sans aucun d…
Religion and Authority in Roman Carthage from Augustus to Constantine
This book examines the organization of religion in the Roman empire from Augustus to Constantine. Although there have been illuminating particular studies of the relationship between religious activity and socio-political authority in the empire, there has been no large-scale attempt to assess it as a whole. Taking as his focus the situation in Carthage, the greatest city of the western provinces, J.B. Rives argues that the traditional religion, …
Religion and Authority in Roman Carthage from Augustus to Constantine
Roman Religion Revived
The Decree of Decius and the Religion of Empire
In A.D. 249 the emperor Trajan Decius issued an edict requiring the inhabitants of the Roman Empire to sacrifice to the gods. With this decree, he also inaugurated the first empire-wide persecution of Christians. Previously, persecutions of Christians had always been local affairs determined by local conditions. Thereafter, persecutions were largely instigated by emperors and took place on an imperial scale. It has consequently become common to d…
A Prefect’s Edict Mentioning Sacrifice
Rebellion and Reconstruction
Tacitus Germany
Structure and History in the Germania of Tacitus
Magic in the XII Tables revisited
An abstract is not available for this content so a preview has been provided. Please use the Get access link above for information on how to access this content
Flavius Josephus and Flavian Rome
Religion in the Roman Empire
This book provides a systematic introduction to religion in the Roman Empire. It explores mainstream Graeco-Roman religion, as well as the diverse regional religions within the empire, from the millennia-old traditions of Egypt to the Celtic traditions of Western Europe." "The author describes the distinctive features of religion in the Roman world and examines the shared assumptions and underlying dynamics that characterized religious life as a …
Diplomacy And Identity Among Jews And Christians
Sometime around the year 177CE, a man named Athenagoras composed a defence of Christianity that he addressed to Roman emperors. In his Embassy for Christians , the persona that Athenagoras constructs for himself in the text is quite clearly meant to be that of an ambassador. In many respects the Jews were typical of groups that had diplomatic relations with the emperor. The Judaeans, like other peoples drawn gradually into the ambit of Rome, regu…
Magic in the Ancient Greek World (review)
Reviewed by: Magic in the Ancient Greek World J.B. Rives Derek Collins. Magic in the Ancient Greek World. Maldon, MA/Oxford/Victoria: Blackwell Publishing, 2008. Pp. xiv + 207. US $99.95. ISBN 978-1-4051-3238-1 (hb). It is difficult to get a handle on magic, a problem that Derek Collins openly acknowledges in his lively new book. And if one’s brief is to write a book that could serve as a general introduction to the topic, which is the premise be…
Roman Translation
Atheism, Greece and Rome
Although the word “atheism” derives from the Greek adjective atheos , “godless,” the two word groups have rather different connotations. In modern English, “atheist” denotes someone who asserts that there is no deity. The ancient Greeks, in contrast, described as atheos anyone whose actions or statements implied a lack of proper respect for the gods; they could thus apply the word to people like the Christians who were certainly not atheists in t…
Religious deviance and persecution
The notion of religious deviance necessarily implies a religious standard from which to deviate, but it is difficult to identify such a standard in the Greek and Roman religious traditions: there was no foundational text like the Torah or the Bible, no explicitly formulated doctrine, and no hierarchy of religious authorities who could define or enforce adherence to a doctrine.
Superstition
In the context of Greco‐Roman antiquity, the notion of “superstition” (from Latin superstitio ) covers religious practices and beliefs that the social and cultural elite regarded as inappropriate or socially subversive. Given the absence of any clearly defined and universally acknowledged standard of correct practice and belief, the range of behaviors that could be characterized as “superstition” varied considerably.
Women and Animal Sacrifice in Public Life
In evaluating the scarcity of evidence for the participation of women in animal sacrifice, we need to take into account our more general lack of information about the details of sacrificial practice in the western Roman empire. This chapter first reviews the evidence for three categories of people who are likely to have presided over animal sacrifices: magistrates, priests, and benefactors. It then discusses the likelihood of women serving in the…
History (25 works) · Classical Antiquity Studies (24 works) · Art (20 works) · Philosophy (19 works) · Political science (14 works) · Ancient history (13 works) · Law (13 works) · Archaeology (12 works) · History (11 works) · Classics (8 works)