The aim of the course is to study the workings and concepts of Greek and Roman religions, including relevant aspects of Judaism and Christianity and other elective cults, between around 31 BC and AD 312. You will be encouraged to be familiar with the relevant literary, epigraphic and archaeological evidence. The texts prescribed for study in translation are included in the bibliography on WebLearn.

During the Roman imperial period, notions of the divine and the human and the relationship between them, and of the framework of those relationships, changed dramatically in many different ways. As Greek and Roman cultures altered, as the Roman empire promoted contact, mobility and social change, as attitudes to time and space, history, ethics and community shifted, an extraordinary variety of new ways of religious thinking and behaving came into being. These changes include profound transformations in thinking about the divine in philosophy and literature; the role of religion in displaced and diaspora communities, and especially in Jewish ones; the religious order of the Roman state; the formation of new religious allegiances out of old; and new types of religious competition, conflict and self-definition. The evidence for these changes in literature, art, papyri, inscriptions and material culture is rich, diverse and fascinating, and the issues among the most important in ancient history. How do we model cultural change? What part does psychology play in history? Does the social anthropology of religion offer important insights to the historian? How can the historian use visual representations, artefacts, and the study of space? How do we link the history of ideas to other forms of historical narrative? Mithraic cave, curse-tablet, synagogue, and sacred spring – who used them and why? Isis, Jesus, Jupiter and Taranis – who worshipped them and how? The subject takes you from Augustus praying to the Greek Fates at the Secular Games, and Ovid on Anna Perenna, through the fall of the Second Temple and the martyrdom of Felicity and Perpetua, to Aurelian’s temple of the Unconquered Sun and Constantine’s vision at the Milvian Bridge. The examination will consist of one picture question and three essay questions.