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The last decade has seen a surge of scholarly interest in these
religious professionals and a good number of high quality
publications. Our volume, however, with its unique intercultural
character and its explicit focus on appropriation and contestation
of religious expertise in the Imperial Era is substantially
different. Unlike the rather narrow focus of earlier studies of
civic priests, the papers presented here examine a wider range of
religious professionals, their dynamic interaction with established
religious authorities and institutions, and their contributions to
religious innovation in the ancient Mediterranean world, from the
late Hellenistic period through to Late Antiquity, from the City of
Rome to mainland Greece, Asia Minor, Syria and Egypt, from Greek
civic practice to ancient Judaism. A further advantage of our
volume is the wide range of media of transmission taken into
account. Our contributors look at both old and new materials, which
derive not only from literary sources but also from papyri,
inscriptions, and material culture. Above all, this volume assesses
critically convenient terminological usage and offers a unique
insight into a rich gamut of ancient Mediterranean religious
specialists.
In ancient Greece, epiphanies were embedded in cultural production,
and employed by the socio-political elite in both perpetuating
pre-existing power-structures and constructing new ones. This
volume is the first comprehensive survey of the history of divine
epiphany as presented in the literary and epigraphic narratives of
the Greek-speaking world. It demonstrates that divine epiphanies
not only reveal what the Greeks thought about their gods; they tell
us just as much about the preoccupations, the preconceptions, and
the assumptions of ancient Greek religion and culture. In doing so,
it explores the deities who were prone to epiphany and the contexts
in which they manifested themselves, as well as the functions
(narratives and situational) they served, addressing the cultural
specificity of divine morphology and mortal-immortal interaction.
Divine Epiphany in Greek Literature and Culture re-establishes
epiphany as a crucial mode in Greek religious thought and practice,
underlines its centrality in Greek cultural production, and
foregrounds its impact on both the political and the societal
organization of the ancient Greeks.
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