The paganism of the Graeco-Roman world, with its cosmogonies, theogonies, and ‘official’ liturgies, incorporated a series of practices and attitudes of an augural, superstitious, and magical nature, which Christian thinkers placed at the centre of their polemic as much as the veneration of anthropomorphic deities, sacrifices, and the functioning of temples. Superstition and magic unfolded in a set of manifestations that were less organic and systematic than ‘temple’ religiosity, but nonetheless constituted an important aspect of the beliefs of the common man. The roundtable does not aim to investigate the process through which polytheistic paganism, between the fourth and fifth centuries, was marginalized in the religious sphere of the empire with the support of emperors and prohibited in its ceremonial expressions, both public and private. What is of interest is the continuity that practices derived from the pagan world had after the fifth century, such as divination, the worship of elements of nature, superstitious attitudes, syncretism in blessing and augury rites. Additionally, the Thematic Session also addresses the investigation of the memories of pagan religiosity in Byzantine authors, transmitted in narrative sources. With the adverb ‘beyond,’ it used to encapsulate what aspects of the pagan world endured in the Byzantine era, both as parallel religious practice alongside official worship and as a memory and perception of a religiously different belief from orthodoxy.
Non-Christian civic festivals, including theatrical performances, continued to play a central role in the social and cultural life of late antiquity, long after the official suppression of public paganism. Despite the Christianization of the Roman Empire, these events persisted as key sites of communal entertainment and civic identity. The participation of Christians in such festivities…
Tyche (‘Fortune’), conceived as an inscrutable force shaping human life beyond the reach of human agency, acquired in the Greek world the personified form of a divinity around the fourth century BCE. From this period onward, her cult was associated with those of other deities and she, as a pantheistic and cosmological goddess, became the…
L’attribuzione del Corpus Areopagitico a Damascio, ultimo scolarca dell’Accademia di Atene (515-529), avanzata da C.M. Mazzucchi sin dal 2006, ha avuto fra gli altri meriti quello di riproporre la questione del rapporto tra la politica di Giustiniano e l’elaborazione culturale del suo tempo. A una possibile “fronda” pagana e anticristiana (quanto meno agnostica), attiva nello…
It has long been recognised by scholars that accusations of participating in pagan sacrifices, as recorded in sources from the sixth and seventh centuries, were mainly used to denigrate high-ranking ecclesiastical and secular officials. Large-scale anti-pagan investigations such as Justinian’s purges of pagans and the so-called ‘pagan affair’ of 580 offered an opportunity to denounce…
During the twelfth century, two authors commented on canons of the early Byzantine period councils and provided elements of comparison with their own time. The first author is John Zonaras who was asked by Alexios Comnenos to comment on canon law, the second author is Theodore Balsamon who was born around the time Zonaras died….