For the Love of the Gods The Rhetoric and Reality of Religious Authority in Late Antiquity

Date of Award

2010

Document Type

Thesis

Degree Name

Bachelors

Department

Humanities

First Advisor

Rohrbacher, David

Keywords

Classics, Late Antiquity, Paganism

Area of Concentration

Classics

Abstract

The following paper addresses the issues of late antique understandings of religious authority through an analysis of ancient conceptions and representations of authority in religious literature. This examination entails the comparison and juxtaposition of several polytheistic and Christian texts from different authors, focusing on literary and rhetorical constructions of religious authority. Each chapter is dedicated to a religious subject, the holy man, the sacred text, and ritual, which together form a loose conceptual basis of religion and provide a rich understanding of religious identity in late antiquity. The research suggests that on the whole polytheists and Christians had fairly analogous understandings of their own religions in each of these three areas. However, the divergences between their formulations of religious authority emphasize their different approaches to religion. The historical victory of the Christian church ensured that these Christians conceptions of religions were the ones which continued into the medieval and modern periods.

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