This book is about the multiplicity of gods and religions that
characterized the Roman world before Constantine. It was not the
noble gods such as Jove, Apollo and Diana, who were crucial to the
lives of the common people in the empire, but gods of an altogether
more earthly, earthy level, whose rituals and observances may now
seem bizarre.
The book opens with an account of the nature of popular religion
and the way in which the gods and myths of subject peoples were
taken up by the Roman colonizers and spread throughout the empire.
Successive chapters are devoted to the Great Mother, Isis, the
cults of Syria, Mithras, The Horsemen, Dionysus, and to practices
related to the performance of magic. It was above all with these
popular religions that the early Christians fought for supremacy.
In the concluding part of the book Professor Turcan describes this
contest and its eventual outcome in the triumph of Christianity
throughout the Roman world.
The author assumes little background or specialist knowledge.
Each chapter is fully referenced and where appropriate illustrated
with photographs and diagrams. The book includes a guide for
further reading specifically for English-speaking students.
As well as being of wide general interest, this book will appeal
to students of the Roman Empire and of the history of religion.
General
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