General

Since we are globally more or less saved from a disease, if perhaps not quite yet from the threat of a global conflict (the transition from a pandemic to a large-scale war is never easy), I start with two books that deal with deliverance, the first one deliverance from danger, the second book with the deliverance from death.

A charming sympotic poem, a skolion attributed to Simonides, perhaps stemming from the fifth century bc, states the following (Simonides, Sider 109 S):

Σῶσος καὶ Σωσώι, σῶτερ, σοὶ τόνδ' ἀνέθηκαν⋅

Σῶσος μὲν σωθείς, Σωσώι δ ̓ ὅτι Σῶσος ἐσώθη.

Sosos and Soso, saviour, sanctified this to be yours:

Sosos since he was saved, Soso since Sosos was saved.

The poem does not tell us what kind of danger Sosos, that is ‘Salvatius’, was saved from, nor which divinity saved him and prompted Soso, that is ‘Salvatia’, to be grateful and dedicate a gift of gratitude to the divinity, but the text is illustrative of a wide-spread Greek belief in salvatory powers of divinities and certain humans in moments of extreme crisis such as those presented by diseases, wars, travel, or seafaring, to mention but a few. The evidence for the phenomenon of soteria (‘salvation, deliverance’) is exceptionally rich, varied in character, and ubiquitous in Greek material and textual sources from the Archaic period until the end of antiquity, as is the use of noun soter, be it as a divine epiclesis attached to an array of divinities, as a form of address to a divinity without necessarily representing a fixed epithet of that divinity, or as a title of powerful individuals who earned it through an act of deliverance. Theodora Suk Fong Jim's book¹ purports to provide a study of the multiplicity of saviour gods in Greek lived experience by drawing attention, on the one hand, to the Greek vocabulary of salvation, and on the other, relatedly, to the conceptualizations of salvation in Greek religious reality. In Jim's view, when applied to the Greek context, soteria is best translated as ‘deliverance’, ‘preservation’, ‘rescue’, or similar rather than salvation, since the term salvation is thought to carry Christian overtones relating distinctly Christian eschatological views. Jim is certainly correct in her repeated emphasis that Greek soteria differs from the Christian one in that the pagan usage is predominantly devoid of the eschatological connotations. This observation represents also one of the tenors of the book. There is not a lot of explicit contemplation regarding her own methodology in the introduction, but the topic, the sources, and the aims are laid out clearly. In the six chapters following introduction, Jim discusses the phenomenon of soteria from the Archaic until the Hellenistic period, with an occasional excurse into the later material. The principal aim is to throw light on the Greek lived religious experience and mentality, and thus much of the evidence considered is epigraphical rather than literary, although she does pay attention to some of the relevant literary passages and visual representations. I agree with Jim's observation that the plentifulness and heterogeneity of available evidence makes it difficult to provide a definitive account of the phenomenon, and Jim reasonably states that, for that reason, her discussion cannot be exhaustive either. So, the author tackles a variety of important issues in six chapters, often in broad brush strokes and covering much of the most relevant evidence. There is a chapter on the conceptualization of soteria, after which we are introduced to the most important saviour gods and evidence for individual salvation in two separate chapters. A further two chapters deal with the spread of the epithet soter among the divinities, and then also among Hellenistic kings, containing many useful maps and illustrations. The final chapter provides a syncrisis of the concepts in Greece and early Christianity. Then, after some 235 pages of discussion, readers are presented with four pages of conclusion, aporetic in tone: both the phenomenon of soteria and the saviour gods remain elusive and slippery, the evidence is often inconclusive, the saviour divinities are many and ubiquitous, Greek and non-Greek alike, certain heroes and humans included, and the lack of a standardized epithet soter for a divinity need not mean that a divinity did not possess power to provide soteria. Again, the this-worldliness of Greek soteria is placed in contrast to the later Christian eschatological association of the term. In a way, this echoes, and chimes well with, Franz Dornseiff's 1927 classical views regarding ‘Vergeistigung’, that is ‘spiritualization’, of soteria and its strong association with eschatological beliefs among the Christians and Jews (RE s.v. soter). Four appendices dealing, respectively, with decrees featuring formula ‘for the soteria of the polis’, the god Sozon, Hecate Soteira in epitaphs, and salus in Roman religion close the volume, together with a good set of indices.

Containing many noteworthy observations, this study will be useful also for novices to the field, since it is the synthesis of the material that is the book's strongest feature. While one might have qualms regarding the book's hesitation to venture much beyond well-trodden paths and dominant tropes of the relevant anglophone scholarship (anglophone scholarship is selectively considered, but for the most part covered well enough), one should be grateful for what one got. As the author intimated at the outset, the sheer abundance of the material allows for a plethora of approaches and there is plenty remaining to do with this material, perhaps also leading to broader and genuinely fresh conclusions. In this regard, Jim's circumspect and sober study provides a helpful stepping stone for those interested in the topic.

I continue with the topic of salvation, this time in the guise of a discussion of the search after life eternal in antiquity. Maria Liatsi's Earthly Immortality ² is a well-organized and thoughtful analysis of the ways the ancients conceived of possibilities of obtaining immortality in this world. One's own death, if understood in terms of an absolute end of the self and disappearance into nothingness, appears to most humans unnatural and absurd and hence we find our way out of this uncomfortable thought either by adopting eschatological beliefs or a belief that our accomplishments shall live on. Liatsi first zeroes in on the ways in which the ancients thought of biological and biographical immortality, by first looking at the discourse on metaphysical and biological immortality in Plato (esp. the idea of conception and generation as imperishable principles in perishable bodies) and Aristotle (esp. the fixity of species). To this she juxtaposes in the second chapter conceptions of immortality based on an individual's virtuous achievements that lead to acquisition of perpetual, or so one hopes, glory. Here the author considers Plato's Symposion with the tripartite hierarchy of earthly immortality (production of offspring, production of intellectual achievements, attainment of insight into the true form of Beauty), as well as Aristotelian interpretation of the emulation of the divine and the resonances of these concepts in later philosophy. In the next two chapters, Liatsi turns to the Judeo-Christian eschatology and the development of ideas or rebirth and eternal life as well as influence of pagan thought on Christological debates, outlining this development from the early Christian thought all the way down to the medieval debates. Finally, the epilogue makes a very broad case that the ideas of immortality represent a reflex of human will-to-live (‘Lebenswillen’), which in turn bequeathed to the posteriority inclination to develop power of belief. This was an interesting read, and the book will be helpful to scholars of religion and, especially, to those interested in philosophical trajectories of development of immortality concepts in Greco-Roman antiquity and Christianity.

Now on to two new edited volumes published in the excellent Kernos Supplément series, both of them beautifully produced, very reasonably priced, and characterized by the qualities I extolled in my reviews of other Kernos Supplément volumes in previous issues of G&R. Associations and Religion in Context ³ is a volume of proceedings from a conference organized at the Saxo Institute of the University of Copenhagen, one of the well-established international hubs for work on the topic of associations (noting that the conference was held in 2012 and published in 2022 made me feel somewhat better about my tardiness with various projects). There is currently a lot of work being done on associations – note Kostas Vlassopoulos’ review of a volume on associations in this issue, and in G&R 68.1 I drew attention to John Kloppenborg's volume Greco-Roman Associations III. Annelies Cazemier's and Stella Skaltsa's edited volume is in some ways complementary and overlapping with Kloppenborg's in terms of the material covered. The volume comprises a substantial introduction followed by thirteen papers, all of them informative and very well-researched (and many of them thoroughly updated to take account of scholarship published since 2012). Wijma's paper revolves around a case study and investigates Orgeones, the administrators in the cult of Bendis in Classical and Hellenistic Athens, Piraeus more precisely, and analyses the association in terms of its traditional and non-traditional and Athenian and Thracian features. Thomsen raises the interesting question of the relationship between honorific practices and religion in Athenian associations of the fourth century bc and reveals, in a Bourdieusian fashion, the ways in which associations could be instrumentalized as stages for display of and competition in honours. Paschidis takes the reader to Roman Macedonia and looks at the differences between the religious associations and non-associative cults, and highlights the role that formation of a strong local identity, channelled through powerful ritual and theological narratives, played in securing success of certain cults in face of competition that lacked equally developed narratives. Hasenohr's essay then turns to Italian associations (Italici) on late-Hellenistic Delos attested in some forty inscriptions. The author adopts the view that Hermaistai, Apolloniastai, Poseidoniastai, and Competalistai do not represent four distinct associations (of Hermes, Apollo, Poseidon, and Lares Compitales, respectively) but the board of representatives of the Italici, and then investigates the association's economic aims and religious profile. Still on Delos, Trümper reassesses associations’ clubhouses and their design and social and religious functions by arguing, against earlier views, that cultic facilities cannot help with identification of a building as a clubhouse, nor can they disclose the nature of an association: the only certain case of an association's clubhouse is that of the Poseidoniastai. Skaltsa's paper contextualizes in great detail the evidence for five associations attested on Ptolemaic Thera and highlights the social composition of individual groups. Maillot's essay zooms out to cast light on funerary activities of Hellenistic associations such as assistance in acquisition and protection of a burial plot and with the cost of burial, and points out sociopolitical and religious dimensions of associations’ funerary practices. We are back on our island-hoping adventure – after Delos and Thera, Carbon's lengthy essay takes us to Kos and paints the picture of the variegated nature of the island's associations, ranging from ad hoc groups to long-lived organizations, from groups consisting clearly of members from lower strata of the society to the relatively well-to-do. In some ways, Carbon continued Maillot's topic of funerary activities by looking at associational funerary complexes and burial plots on Kos, and with Venticinque's essay on associations and economical dimension of funerals in Egypt and the Roman world, we get a large-scheme consideration of the same topic, and, chronologically, a sequel to Maillot's essay. Paganini's piece centres on the landowners’ association from Psenamosis in Egypt and highlights the importance of the worship of the ruler cult in the assertion of common identity of the association and of the display of one's social status. In a wide ranging essay, Arnaoutoglou raises the interesting question of the relationship between occupational associations (as opposed to religious associations) and the sphere of religion to point out that occupational associations’ religious activities did not necessarily centre around divinities of particular importance for their trade, but rather mirrored the central religious discourses of their time, that is they were ‘firmly embedded in the dominant set of socio-religious relations, in the wider social context of ancient Greco-Roman religiosity’ (263). Next, Gibbs provides a piece on a complementary issue and analyses religious activities of trade associations in Roman Egypt, bringing to the fore the associations’ relationship with temples and the voluntary nature of religious activities which may have been modelled after the practice of public benefactions. Finally, Gawlikowski's essay takes us to Palmyra of the third century ad and the difficult evidence for the guilds of goldsmiths, silversmiths, and leather workers, and stresses the role of communality in Palmyrean associations. An index of sources and a very helpful index of associations (in English, Greek, and Latin) round off the volume. This carefully edited and genuinely stimulating volume was a rewarding read and I learned a great deal from it.

Equally interesting is the volume of proceedings arising from of a conference held at the ENS in Lyon in 2015 on performance and mimesis in Greek and Roman lyric cult poetry.⁴ Lyric poetry of Greek and Roman cults, and its influence, has not been the subject of scholarly investigation very often in recent years, and in this well-produced volume a star-studded cast covers an enormous amount of ground and a great chronological time span, from the Archaic period to the Imperial period. The volume consists of a clear and concise introduction by the editors and fourteen essays split over four sections. The first one is dedicated to cult songs in the theatre and comprises four essays. Calame draws on the hymnic material from Euripides’ Ion to discuss the place of the cult hymns within Attic tragedy and to posit that they on their own constitute a ritual sequence of the cult of Dionysus Eleuthereus. Furley's essay gifts the reader genuinely new and exciting material, a text, commentary, and an interpretation of a scary chorus for Kybele, from a recently published papyrus from the Red Sea, with six lyric dactyls and fifteen anapaestic dimeters and monometers surviving. Both Carey and Paré-Rey analyse Seneca's tragic hymns. In an insightful piece, Carey juxtaposes a choral section from Agamemnon, material from Anacreon and Pindar to Seneca's hymns and points out how little sense of live cult performance there is in Seneca's passages, while Paré-Rey highlights Seneca's models for mimesis and his aesthetic programme in the hymns. The four essays of the second section centre on two distinct divinities, Dionysus and Apollo: Clay on Horace's two hymns to Bacchus (2.29 and 3.25); Hunter on various incarnations of the Arion story from Herodotus, over melic fragments, down to Plutarch; Brillet-Dubois together with Bouchon on piety and hospitality in the Paean of Philodamos; and Rutherford on the elusive evidence for paean-agones, with a focus on the evidence from Roman Termessos. The third section with its three essays moves us to Rome and highlights the political dimension of mimesis and lyric: Schilling takes us again to Horace (4.6) to sound out Homeric and Pindaric echoes and to sketch Horace's distinctly Augustean Apollo; Pierre, likewise, looks for the reconfigurations of Pindar's Second Olympian ode in Horace's 1.12; Bowie analyses presentation of Rome and Roman emperors in the Greek cult songs, adducing some particularly intriguing epigraphic material. The final section deals, roughly, with innovative elements in melic tradition: Noel highlights the hymnic addresses to inanimate objects associated with gods, heroes, and men; Curtis zeroes in on Horace's Licymnia (2.12) as a metapoetic vehicle for Horace's exploration of lyric tradition and history (and more); and Delignon's focus on Catullus’ epithalamia (61 and 62) and their reception in Horace (4.1 and 4.6) allows him to raise questions of literary imitation and ritual mimesis. I enjoyed this volume very much and have greatly profited from all articles, but particularly so from those pieces that took me off the beaten path and explored the trajectories of individual lyric traditions, their intersections and confluences. Furley's papyrological material, like Rutherford's inscriptional evidence, made me puzzle over their texts for quite a while.

Speaking of inscriptions, there is now a really interesting anthology of premodern texts concerning the material property of stone, from stones’ natural qualities to the beliefs associated with them.⁵ It is, of course and by necessity, a highly selective anthology, but it nevertheless excerpts a lot of remarkable material from the texts ranging chronologically from the Old Testament to the seventeenth-century ad scholars and thinkers. Classicists will be particularly interested in (and many also familiar with) selections from Plato, Theophrastus, Poseidippus, Ovid, Pliny, Statius, and perhaps also Paul the Silentiary, but I did not know very much – that is to say, nothing – about the diamond lore from the Physiologus (second century ad) or about the crystals as discussed in Ps.-Orpheus (fourth/fifth century ad), or about Hrabanus Maurus’ work, I am ashamed to admit. The later material includes excerpts from the writings of real giants of the world's cultural history, among whom are figures such as Avicenna, Dante, Petrarch, Vasari, and on to Robert Boyle, to mention but a few. Each section presents the text in original, highly readable German translation, and a commentary in the form of an essay. It is probably not a book you will want to thumb through from cover to cover in a sitting or two, but reading a section or two per day with your morning coffee will be a fun experience (but know: if you have an amethyst in your house, Petrarch might judge you).

Back to religion and to another edited volume, Rhetoric and Religion in Ancient Greece and Rome.⁶ The volume is not entirely focused on, as I incorrectly assumed on the basis of the title, the religious argumentation in oratory, but on religious rhetoric across a wide variety of genres, from the Archaic period until the rise of Christianity. It is precisely the smorgasbord of genres that the editors single out as one of the volume's two distinctive qualities, with the second being mobilization of innovative theoretical approaches ‘beyond the confines of Classics’ (7). I am not sure that I found a whole lot of the latter, but there are rewarding papers in here. Filonik's piece deals with a small sample of Attic ‘cultic regulations’, by which he means ritual norms. It focuses on Greek terms for ‘denunciation’ and discusses relevant legal procedures. Furley, whom I mentioned above, makes an appearance in this volume as well with an elegant and balanced essay on religious argumentation in Antiphon Rhetor and the role of the divine apparatus in homicide cases. Keramida and Sarischouli both provide illuminating chapters on magic, the former on the rhetoric of magic in Ovid, the latter on religious traditions shaping PGM XII (even if rhetoric comes somewhat short here). Patzelt's essay on public rhetoric and public prayers in Rome addresses the topic head-on as it highlights the role of sound and vocality in public prayers in a genuinely interesting fashion (also rewarding is Degelmann on the rhetoric of grief in Roman funerary speeches). Holland's piece, perhaps the highlight of the volume for me, studies performance and re-performance of Paul's letters, and asks how Paul's epistolary rhetoric is mirrored in Deutero-Pauline letters, the letters later attributed to Paul but authored by others; he has particularly interesting things to say about the Colossians. The rhetoric of the rulers’ religion is the focus of Liotsakis’ piece on the narratives of Alexander the Great and the variations in his religious argumentation, as well as of Shannon-Henderson's fine contribution on Pliny's Panegyricus as an example of a rhetorical preparation of the ground for Trajan's later deification. In the penultimate chapter Mueller looks at the religious themes and rhetorical figures in Valerius Maximus’ religious self-presentation, and Melidis closes the volume with an insightful contribution on rhetorical techniques in Greek and Latin paraphrases of Psalm 136.

Editing conference proceedings is seldom an easy task, and the editors of this volume have done a nice job. Apart from one particularly querulent and uncharitable piece, this was a pleasant read. While various infelicities slipped through (e.g. Jan Bremmer became, once again, Jan Bremer; Gawlinski's excellent book on the Andanian mysteries referenced in a footnote of a paper, but missing from the paper's bibliography; various slips in Greek), the standard of the production is good. I learned a great deal from this volume, but that dyspeptic article also reminded me, with some urgency, just how very important it is to keep instilling in our students the principle of charity already in their undergraduate days.

One should take the high road, and it is taking us to a fabulous place: Jason König's cultural history of mountains in classical antiquity, The Folds of Olympus.⁷ I say a cultural history, but in reality, König's cultural (and literary, and military, and art) history of mountains is just a foil for this enchanting love letter, a sonorous ode to nature. Since I have the privilege of living at the foot of the stunning Blue Ridge Mountains, I was immediately drawn by this book's title and was richly rewarded. I really wish I had much more space than I do to do this book justice, but in brief: this thorough, meticulous, and excellently written book informs the reader on basically every aspect of Greek and Roman imagination and experience of mountains. In the first of the book's four parts, König discusses mountains as stages of religious experience, drawing on most relevant passages from Homer and Hesiod, over Pausanias to biblical mountains and the accounts of Egeria the pilgrim. Part two discusses the aesthetics of mountains, geological discourses, representation of mountains in art, and mountain symbolism. Then a section on the conquest of mountains, with wide ranging discussions of warfare, of ancient landscape narratives, and of the interaction between man and nature. The final section is dedicated to life in the mountains with all its beauty and challenges, and in the epilogue the author takes us on an introspective trip to Corrie Fee in the Scottish Highlands and there we ponder with the author on the ways in which ancient experience of mountains informs our own thinking about them, about ourselves, and about the world we live in. Kudos!