Fellows seminar - From Cretan cults to the pagan critique of Christian empresses
Image - Phaistos Disc - User Asb on de.wikipedia, CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons
In this joint social sciences and humanities seminar, two USIAS projects will be presented.
Phaistos and the archaeology of cult in the Late Bronze Age Crete
By Nicola Cucuzza, University of Genoa, Italy (2024 Fellow)
The archaeology of cult is a specific and quite recent field of research, aiming to identify and reconstruct cult practices, thanks to the study of material remains. This approach is obviously simplified when literary or epigraphic sources allow us to identify a place of worship. Conversely, the research becomes more complicated when it references chronological periods in which written sources are not available or do not provide direct information on cult practices. This is the case of the Bronze Age of Crete: the written documents of the period merely name some deities and some types of goods offered (e.g. honey).
However, the rich iconographic sources of the Late Bronze Age and the large amount of archaeological data for this period allow us to undertake research on ritual practices in Crete. The focus is mostly on Phaistos, a site continuously inhabited from the Neolithic to 150 BCE, which has been extensively explored since 1900. The aim is to follow the development of cult practices over a long chronological period, with a bottom-up approach, not looking for predecessors of cults known in historical times during the Bronze Age, but following the development of rituals performed over time, from the most ancient periods to the historical ones.
Nicola Cucuzza's USIAS project is entitled Cults and ritual practices at Phaistos (Crete) in the Bronze Age and Early Iron Age: an archaeological perspective.
Pagan authors mock a Christian empress
By Massimiliano Vitiello, University of Missouri-Kansas City, USA (2024 Fellow)
As Roman paganism was suppressed by Christian power, pagan authors found subversive ways to critique political authority and blame Christian empresses for the fracturing of the empire. In the political power exercised by Christian empresses, they saw a perversion of a pagan ideal of feminine virtue, which allowed no more than supporting political roles to women in power. This piece explores attitudes toward ruling Christian women by two 5th-century pagan authors, one an historian, the other, a Neoplatonic intellectual.
Chastity was the most important virtue for a woman in both the pagan and the Christian worlds. Christian authors attributed this virtue to the late Roman empresses but the last pagan intellectuals, who were hostile to the child emperors, launched veiled critiques of the empresses’ chastity by playing with historical parallels. One author mocks the daughter of the 1st-century Emperor Augustus by attributing to her jokes about chastity. These jokes have been interpreted as allusions to the contemporary 5th-century Empress Galla Placidia, the mother-regent for Valentinian III. These pagan authors acknowledged virility in the empresses who influenced their children, but this in turn was also a subtle critique of the emperor: masculinity and strength could not justify the rule of a woman, because these intellectuals believed that only the weakness of bad emperors could cause a woman to rise to power. The legacy of Galla Placidia remained disputed between pagans and Christians, compromised by the crumbling of the Empire.
Massimiliano Vitiello collaborates with Agnès Molinier Arbo from the Center for Analysis of Religious Rhetorics of Antiquity (CARRA) of the University of Strasbourg in the framework of their USIAS project The last Pagan women of Rome.
