Richard Gordon read Classics at Jesus College Cambridge (1962-66), taking the ancient history Option in Part II. After a brief period as Research Fellow of Downing College (1969-70), he became an Interdisciplinary Lecturer, later Senior Lecturer, in the former School of European Studies at the University of East Anglia, Norwich (1970-1987). In 1987 he removed to Germany as a private scholar. Since 2007 he has been Honorary Professor of the Religions of Antiquity at the University of Erfurt, and since 2009, Associate Fellow of the Max-Weber-Centre there. Address: Max-Weber-Kolleg, Universität Erfurt,
Pf 900221,
D-99105 Erfurt, Germany
Page 1. BIACKWELL * ANCIENT * RELIGIONS m religion in the Roman Empire JAMES B. RIVES : ■■■&a... more Page 1. BIACKWELL * ANCIENT * RELIGIONS m religion in the Roman Empire JAMES B. RIVES : ■■■>t3S? ■.-- Page 2. Religion in the Roman Empire Page 3. Blackwell Ancient Religions ...
Abstract The theme of individuality and individualisation in religious contexts in the fairly rem... more Abstract The theme of individuality and individualisation in religious contexts in the fairly remote past is perhaps best viewed as a heuristic device whose main value, at least in the context of Graeco-Roman history, is to question the excessive dominance of a model of religious action as essentially collective, which is perhaps proximately Durkheimian but in the Classical field goes back ultimately to early scholarship on ancient Judaism. Terminology is a basic problem in this context. Religious individuality can be defined as the construction of personal religious achievement or the practice of mastery defined by sui generis rules. In the case of the Roman Empire, five types of such achievement have been suggested: pragmatic; moral; competitive; representative; or exemplary/ reflexive. All these distinguishable types of individuality are linked, at least indirectly, to the complex and highly differentiated social, political, economic and moral structures of the Empire. Specifically religious individuation emerges only with the development of religion as a distinctive field of (social) action and thus the possibility of specifically religious distinction. If sustained over the long term, any such achievement is to be seen as individualisation under ancient conditions. This article briefly explores three types of religious distinction based on a conviction and lived practice of such individualised competence: the figure of the Weberian mystagogue in his Mediterranean forms; the figure of the practitioner skilled in Graeco-Egyptian ‘magic’; and the idealised figure of Pythagoras as projected by Iamblichus’ On the Pythagorean life (c.300 CE).
... At Pons Aeni, a mithraeum at the important crossing of the Salzburg Augsburg road over the I... more ... At Pons Aeni, a mithraeum at the important crossing of the Salzburg Augsburg road over the Inn, one of the local potters, Ma[rt]inus or Ma[tern]inus, dedicated a sigillata vessel that he had carefully decorated with an image of Mithras in barbotine technique, expensive because ...
It is a commonplace that metaphors tend to cluster around core themes — a tendency rather grandly... more It is a commonplace that metaphors tend to cluster around core themes — a tendency rather grandly termed the ‘systematicity of metaphor’.1 We might well extend the point to other, still more routinised forms of linguistic expression: such as proverbs, sayings and catchphrases. In Graeco-Roman antiquity, where, depending on period, between 85 percent and 95 percent of the entire population lived on the land, such tendencies are particularly observable in relation to animals, both wild and domestic. A standard modern Graeco-Roman Bestiary, careful but by no means complete, contains entries for 181 mammalian species, Mediterranean and exotic, from the common-or-garden to the virtually mythical.2 Moreover, at any rate in Greek perspective, animals, above all mammals, were just part of a much broader continuum of animate beings, whose main constituents are gods, demi-gods and heroes, nymphs, mythical creatures such as centaurs and Sirens, humans (Greeks and others), beasts — and in some dispositifs, such as ‘magic’, even plants and stones, though they were otherwise not considered animate in the required sense.3 In other words, the classification system encompassed, not merely what we would call natural species, but also super- and para-natural entities of different degrees, so that quite as much interest focused on establishing the external relations of the different groups as on the definitions of individual species.4 Myths, ‘folk wisdom’ and catch-phrases are some of the media through which relations between the groups were represented. Ancient stories about transformation and metamorphosis derive their cultural legitimacy from this conception of a densely-populated continuum of animate beings.
This handsome, well-illustrated book is yet another exemplification of the current interest in th... more This handsome, well-illustrated book is yet another exemplification of the current interest in the everyday, instrumental use of religious resources for a range of different purposes, primarily the integrity of the subjectively significant unit, ranging from entire cities to the components of what social anthropologists term the “partible individual” — i.e., ego’s physical body, psychic health, plus the nuclear family, the social family and its productive resources, house, animals, land and crops.1 If linguistic pragmatics is the study of the practical aspects of language and thought in context, we might call this field “religious pragmatics”. Its study involves detailed engagement with tens of hundreds, if not thousands, of objects — mainly scattered in museums, a few newly excavated; some carefully catalogued, others hardly known — but also close familiarity with areas of ancient text-culture that generally fall outside the canon, such as the neo-Assyrian Utukkû Lemnûtu tablets, the remedies of Marcellus Empiricus or the Hippiatric corpus, the Greek Lithika, the Cyranides, parts of the Geoponica, the Testament of Solomon ... This is indeed the world of ‘lived’ religion, in which social facts are deemed less interesting than the body viewed as the material locus of human existence and experience,2 but also the world of arcane, even occultic, learning, cultural borrowing, (re-)appropriation, creative and not so creative misunderstanding, individual entrepreneurship, mass-production, routinization — a world, too, where good faith is not necessarily at a premium.
Analyse typologique, stylistique et philologique de steles decouvertes en Lydie et en Phrygie por... more Analyse typologique, stylistique et philologique de steles decouvertes en Lydie et en Phrygie portant une inscription considere comme une confession. Ces steles-confessions se trouvent majoritairement en relation avec des sanctuaires ruraux ou des temples de petites agglomerations, et sont des requetes pour l'intervention divine dans la vie humaine
Page 1. BIACKWELL * ANCIENT * RELIGIONS m religion in the Roman Empire JAMES B. RIVES : ■■■&a... more Page 1. BIACKWELL * ANCIENT * RELIGIONS m religion in the Roman Empire JAMES B. RIVES : ■■■>t3S? ■.-- Page 2. Religion in the Roman Empire Page 3. Blackwell Ancient Religions ...
Abstract The theme of individuality and individualisation in religious contexts in the fairly rem... more Abstract The theme of individuality and individualisation in religious contexts in the fairly remote past is perhaps best viewed as a heuristic device whose main value, at least in the context of Graeco-Roman history, is to question the excessive dominance of a model of religious action as essentially collective, which is perhaps proximately Durkheimian but in the Classical field goes back ultimately to early scholarship on ancient Judaism. Terminology is a basic problem in this context. Religious individuality can be defined as the construction of personal religious achievement or the practice of mastery defined by sui generis rules. In the case of the Roman Empire, five types of such achievement have been suggested: pragmatic; moral; competitive; representative; or exemplary/ reflexive. All these distinguishable types of individuality are linked, at least indirectly, to the complex and highly differentiated social, political, economic and moral structures of the Empire. Specifically religious individuation emerges only with the development of religion as a distinctive field of (social) action and thus the possibility of specifically religious distinction. If sustained over the long term, any such achievement is to be seen as individualisation under ancient conditions. This article briefly explores three types of religious distinction based on a conviction and lived practice of such individualised competence: the figure of the Weberian mystagogue in his Mediterranean forms; the figure of the practitioner skilled in Graeco-Egyptian ‘magic’; and the idealised figure of Pythagoras as projected by Iamblichus’ On the Pythagorean life (c.300 CE).
... At Pons Aeni, a mithraeum at the important crossing of the Salzburg Augsburg road over the I... more ... At Pons Aeni, a mithraeum at the important crossing of the Salzburg Augsburg road over the Inn, one of the local potters, Ma[rt]inus or Ma[tern]inus, dedicated a sigillata vessel that he had carefully decorated with an image of Mithras in barbotine technique, expensive because ...
It is a commonplace that metaphors tend to cluster around core themes — a tendency rather grandly... more It is a commonplace that metaphors tend to cluster around core themes — a tendency rather grandly termed the ‘systematicity of metaphor’.1 We might well extend the point to other, still more routinised forms of linguistic expression: such as proverbs, sayings and catchphrases. In Graeco-Roman antiquity, where, depending on period, between 85 percent and 95 percent of the entire population lived on the land, such tendencies are particularly observable in relation to animals, both wild and domestic. A standard modern Graeco-Roman Bestiary, careful but by no means complete, contains entries for 181 mammalian species, Mediterranean and exotic, from the common-or-garden to the virtually mythical.2 Moreover, at any rate in Greek perspective, animals, above all mammals, were just part of a much broader continuum of animate beings, whose main constituents are gods, demi-gods and heroes, nymphs, mythical creatures such as centaurs and Sirens, humans (Greeks and others), beasts — and in some dispositifs, such as ‘magic’, even plants and stones, though they were otherwise not considered animate in the required sense.3 In other words, the classification system encompassed, not merely what we would call natural species, but also super- and para-natural entities of different degrees, so that quite as much interest focused on establishing the external relations of the different groups as on the definitions of individual species.4 Myths, ‘folk wisdom’ and catch-phrases are some of the media through which relations between the groups were represented. Ancient stories about transformation and metamorphosis derive their cultural legitimacy from this conception of a densely-populated continuum of animate beings.
This handsome, well-illustrated book is yet another exemplification of the current interest in th... more This handsome, well-illustrated book is yet another exemplification of the current interest in the everyday, instrumental use of religious resources for a range of different purposes, primarily the integrity of the subjectively significant unit, ranging from entire cities to the components of what social anthropologists term the “partible individual” — i.e., ego’s physical body, psychic health, plus the nuclear family, the social family and its productive resources, house, animals, land and crops.1 If linguistic pragmatics is the study of the practical aspects of language and thought in context, we might call this field “religious pragmatics”. Its study involves detailed engagement with tens of hundreds, if not thousands, of objects — mainly scattered in museums, a few newly excavated; some carefully catalogued, others hardly known — but also close familiarity with areas of ancient text-culture that generally fall outside the canon, such as the neo-Assyrian Utukkû Lemnûtu tablets, the remedies of Marcellus Empiricus or the Hippiatric corpus, the Greek Lithika, the Cyranides, parts of the Geoponica, the Testament of Solomon ... This is indeed the world of ‘lived’ religion, in which social facts are deemed less interesting than the body viewed as the material locus of human existence and experience,2 but also the world of arcane, even occultic, learning, cultural borrowing, (re-)appropriation, creative and not so creative misunderstanding, individual entrepreneurship, mass-production, routinization — a world, too, where good faith is not necessarily at a premium.
Analyse typologique, stylistique et philologique de steles decouvertes en Lydie et en Phrygie por... more Analyse typologique, stylistique et philologique de steles decouvertes en Lydie et en Phrygie portant une inscription considere comme une confession. Ces steles-confessions se trouvent majoritairement en relation avec des sanctuaires ruraux ou des temples de petites agglomerations, et sont des requetes pour l'intervention divine dans la vie humaine
In Syria: Archéologie, art et histoire 93, 369–386, 2016
During the 2014 campaign of the Danish-German Northwest Quarter Project in Jerash a small metal c... more During the 2014 campaign of the Danish-German Northwest Quarter Project in Jerash a small metal capsule was found in a house destroyed by an earthquake in the mid-8th cent. ce. The capsule, which retained traces of textile fibres, was conserved and proved to contain a tightly-rolled strip of silver foil (lamella) which, on removal, turned out to be inscribed with letters of Semitic character. Since it could not be unfolded manually, it was submitted to computed tomography and ‘unfolded’ digitally by means of special software. This article presents the lamella and its capsule as well as the archaeological context, a private house sealed by an earthquake in the mid-8th cent. ce on the eastern terrace of the Northwest Quarter in Jerash. The lamella, which also contains a few charaktêres (magical signs), is interpreted as a magical amulet, which stands in a Semitic and Greco-Roman tradition but in this case surely stems from the Umayyad period.
For the past five years (2012–2017), the Max Weber Center of Erfurt University has hosted a proje... more For the past five years (2012–2017), the Max Weber Center of Erfurt University has hosted a project on ‘Lived Ancient Religion: Questioning “cults” and “polis religion”’, financed by the European Research Council and embedded in the research group on ‘Religious individualisation in historical perspective’ (see Fuchs and Rüpke. [2015. “Religious Individualisation in Historical Perspective.” Religion 45 (3): 323–329. doi:10.1080/0048721X.2015.1041795]). It was designed to supplement existing accounts of the religious history of the Mediterranean area at the time of the long Roman Empire, accounts traditionally centred upon public or civic institutions. The new model focuses on the interaction of individuals with a variety of religious specialists and traditions, taking the form of material culture, spaces and text. It emphasises religious experience, embodiment and ‘culture in interaction’. On the basis of research into the history of religion of the Roman Empire, this co-authored article sets out to offer new tools for research into religion by formulating three major perspectives, namely religious agency, instantiated religion and narrated religion. We have tried to illustrate their potential value by means of 13 short case studies deriving from different geographical areas of the central and eastern Mediterranean area, and almost all relating to the period 150 BCE to 300 CE. These short descriptions are summarising research pursued by the members of the team of authors, published or to be published in extended form elsewhere, as indicated by the references.
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