[
    {
        "id": 210532,
        "series_id": 26,
        "series_slug": "histsyn-rashkb-journal-engine",
        "series_title": "RASHKB Journal 皇家亞洲學會香港分會學刊",
        "series_use_hku_proxy": false,
        "document_key": "RAS-1985",
        "page_number": 139,
        "title": "RAS-1985",
        "content_text": "120 \n\nJOHN KARL EVANS \n\nThe lettering suggests that this inscription should be dated to the second century A.D. This was, however, a century of notorious religiosity. In the course of his sixth satire, a prolonged diatribe against married women published in or shortly after A.D. 116, Juvenal vividly describes how penitent followers of the goddess Isis atoned for their transgressions by plunging into the freezing waters of the Tiber and then crawling across Rome on blood-stained knees (Juv. 6.522-541). Some fifty years later, in A.D. 177, there occurred at Lyons one of the most terrible of the Christian persecutions, recounted at length by Eusebius in his Historia Ecclesiastica. One brief excerpt will serve to give a sense of the whole:\n\n7 \n\nThen Maturus, Sanctus, Blandina, and Attalus were brought forth to face the beasts brought forth for a public exhibition of the inhumanity of the heathen, since the day for combat with wild animals had been specially set aside for our people. There in the amphitheatre, Maturus and Sanctus once again passed through every conceivable torture just as if they had suffered nothing at all before, or rather as if, having already overcome their opponent in the several preliminary bouts, they were now competing for the victor's crown. Once more they ran the gauntlet of the whips, in accordance with the local custom; once more they were mauled by the beasts; once more they suffered everything which the maddened populace, seated on one side or the other, howled for and cheered on, culminating with the iron chair that roasted their bodies and suffocated them with the stench. Even at this point their tormentors did not cease, but became more and more frenzied in their desire to overcome their resistance. Nevertheless, they heard nothing from Sanctus beyond the confession of faith that he had been accustomed to make from the outset (5.1.37-39).\n\nA large body of comparable evidence for the heterogeneous religious attitudes to be found within the Roman Empire could be amassed without difficulty, but it would be pointless to do so. These few examples should serve to demonstrate just how wide the parameters of belief really were. Whether in Rome or a",
        "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1985.txt",
        "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/gt54s866x",
        "rank": 0
    },
    {
        "id": 210557,
        "series_id": 26,
        "series_slug": "histsyn-rashkb-journal-engine",
        "series_title": "RASHKB Journal 皇家亞洲學會香港分會學刊",
        "series_use_hku_proxy": false,
        "document_key": "RAS-1985",
        "page_number": 164,
        "title": "RAS-1985",
        "content_text": "145\n\n5 For an introduction to the religious life of the empire during the Principate, see J. Ferguson, The Religions of the Roman Empire (London, 1970), together with the criticisms of this work advanced in the review of M.J. Boyd, JRS, 62 (1972), 197-198; or the more synthetic effort of R. MacMullen, Paganism in the Roman Empire (New Haven, 1981).\n\n* For the date of composition, see G. Highet, Juvenal the Satirist (Oxford, 1954), 12-13. Isis was one of the redemptive oriental divinities; standard treatments include L. Vidman, Isis und Sarapis bei den Griechen und Römern (Berlin, 1970); R.E. Witt, Isis in the Graeco-Roman World (London, 1971); and F. Dunand, Le culte d'Isis dans le bassin oriental de la Méditerranée, 3 vols. (Leiden, 1973). As the title itself suggests, S.K. Heyob, The Cult of Isis among Women in the Graeco-Roman World (Leiden, 1975), focuses on the characteristics of Isis that made her attractive to women in the classical world, and on their role in her cult. The last two items are vols. 26 and 51 respectively in a general series edited by M.J. Vermaseren, Etudes préliminaires aux religions orientales dans l'Empire romain (Leiden, 1961-), which contains several more specialized monographs on Isis, and on which I shall have more to say below. Other salvationist deities worthy of note include Mithras and Cybele. The classic study of the Mithraic cult is that of F. Cumont, Les mystères de Mithra, 2nd ed. (Paris, 1902); on Cybele, cf. H. Graillot, Le culte de Cybèle, mère des dieux, à Rome et dans l'empire (Paris, 1912); and M.J. Vermaseren, Attis and Cybele: the Myth and the Cult, trans. A.M.H. Lemmers (London, 1977).\n\n7 The literature on the persecution at Lyons, as on the persecution of Christians in general, is predictably vast. One may profitably begin with S.R. Frend, Martyrdom and Persecution in the Early Church (Oxford, 1965), of which pp. 1-30 are devoted to the events at Lyons.\n\n8 The persecution at Lyons was preceded by a ban on Christians entering private homes, the public baths, or the forum (Euseb. Hist. Eccl. 5.1.5-6) - a useful reminder that people of very different beliefs routinely mingled in public and private. The tensions that could arise between a Christian and his or her pagan spouse were addressed by Paul circa A.D. 56 (1 Cor. 7: 12-16); we can follow them in greater detail in some of the aristocratic households of the fourth century; cf. A. Chastagnol, “Le sénateur Volusien et la conversion d'une famille de l'aristocratie Romaine au bas-empire”, REA, 58 (1956), 241-253; and P.R.L. Brown, \"Aspects of the Christianization of the Roman Aristocracy”, JRS, 51 (1961), 1-11. But Christianity itself was not a monolith; the decision to embrace the ascetic life could generate strong opposition from more orthodox Christian family members, as has been demonstrated by A. Yarbrough, “The Christianization of Rome: the Example of Roman Women\", Ch. Hist., 45 (1976), 149-165.\n\n9 One frequently encounters the argument, for example, that the ecstatic cult of Dionysus was especially attractive to women because it offered an outlet for the pent-up frustration and anger that resulted from their extremely low social status; cf. recently R. Kraemer, \"Ecstasy and Possession: the Attraction of Women to the Cult of Dionysus”, HThR, 72 (1979), 55-80; and E.C. Keuls, The Reign of the Phallus. Sexual Politics in Ancient Athens (New York, 1985), 360 et passim.\n\n10 The extraordinary cultural diversity of the empire is brought out well in the brief survey of F. Millar (ed.), The Roman Empire and Its Neighbours (London, 1967).\n\nHence the resort to notional dates, as in Ogilvie (1969), who admits at the",
        "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1985.txt",
        "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/gt54s866x",
        "rank": 0
    }
]