This edited volume is the result of an international colloquium at the Academia Belgica in Rome in January 2013. The editors aim to address the question of discourse and dialogue between Greeks and Romans in view of their respective gods: how and in what manner were the bonds of kinship of their respective pantheons (both imagined and real) constructed by Greeks and Romans over the centuries? The focus is on the reception of this dialogue in literature and art.
The volume contains fifteen articles, nine of which are written in French, one in Italian and five in English. The contributions cover a variety of topics ranging from theoretical and linguistic approaches (M. Bettini, ‘Interpretatio Romana’) to archaeological observations (V. Huet on images of Mars on Roman reliefs). Owing to limitations of space I will only discuss a selection of articles, but will give an indication of the overall impression of the volume.
The opening article by Bettini is perhaps the most important contribution in the volume. Bettini critically discusses the concept of interpretatio Romana as coined by G. Wissowa and in particular associated with Tacitus’ Germania. Bettini argues that a relevant passage in which Tacitus describes the Alci, two brother-gods of the Naharvali (Tac. Ger. 43.4), has been blown out of proportion by modern scholars concerning Tacitus’ alleged interpretatio Romana and suggests a close re-reading of the passage. He explores the linguistic dimension of the passage, demonstrating that all Tacitus is stating here is that the two gods described resemble the Roman Castores but not more. Bettini then moves to the term interpretatio in ancient sources, comparing Tacitus to Plutarch and Dionysius of Halicarnassus who, he argues, try, just as Tacitus in Latin, to use familiar Greek gods to describe the unknown deities and ‘to establish a correspondence’ rather than a simple ‘translation’. Bettini manages to show via a few examples that one should think of interpretatio as a process of recognition and identification that can range from conjecture to total identification of a deity. (I was surprised that Bettini omitted G. Woolf's various contributions on the topic and specifically his recent discussion on this particular passage, ‘Ethnography and the Gods in Tacitus’ Germania’, in E. Almagor and J. Skinner [edd.], Ancient Ethnography: New Approaches [2013], pp. 133–52, at 144–5.)
N. Belayche tackles the issue of deities ‘imported’ to both Greece and Rome using the example of Magna Mater/Μῆτερ Θεῶν. The article starts with a discussion of the various naming practices and epithets in both Greek and Latin with the specific local epithets in Greek and the Hellenised world, concluding that the epithet ‘great’ was used mainly in a Roman context but is not attested in Pessinous or Anatolia (with the exception of Erythrai) despite the goddess’ alleged origin in this region. Belayche acknowledges that drawing a chronology of the various attestations of the goddess in the Roman world is near to impossible, as all literary sources are late. Yet she is able to show that the ‘greatness’ of mater was acknowledged right from the start by Latin sources. This, Belayche argues, must be seen as a Roman construction reflecting the greatness of the Roman Empire itself.
The epithet epikoos and its meanings, namely gods who listen but also gods who grant wishes and reply to worshippers, is, according to E. Stavrianopoulou, taken from Egyptian cult practice. It then spread in the Hellenistic period to become one of the most common epithets in personal dedications to deities. Stavrianopoulou argues that on the one hand the use of the epithet indicates a close personal relationship between worshipper and deity. On the other hand, and this is an important observation in particular with respect to our understanding of ruler worship, it signifies a general change in the discourse between human and divine, reflecting the direct relationship of the ruler who grants and the subject approaching him.
In his study of the assimilations of Dionysus and Liber, F. Massa focuses on material from the late Imperial period. He starts by looking at the many names attributed to ‘Dionysus’ in two epigrams by the fourth-century poet Ausonius which, he argues, unsurprisingly reflect the tendency of the late-Imperial elite to combine various divine names under one single divine power. Next Massa establishes the relation between Dionysus and Liber, arguing that while in literature the two deities are perhaps not always clearly separated or, rather, often seen as versions of one divine power, in ritual and calendar they are detached. Massa supports this argument by analysing the very interesting Imperial transformation of ‘Dionysus’ Indian triumph’ to a Roman military context with Liber as the triumphant. Second, he looks closely at Liber's companion Libera for whom there is clearly no Greek equivalent in ritual practice. Massa makes an important contribution here to the discussion of this complex topic but a clearer chronological focus would have allowed for a more thorough and specified analysis.
Huet looks at the question of iconography and if this can tell us anything about whether deities were perceived and worshipped as Greek and with Graeco ritu or as Roman, depending on the prominence of these elements in a statue's iconography. For this study, Huet chose to look at sacrifices of bulls to Mars, as depicted in Roman reliefs. These images confirm that the Roman iconography of Mars uses a variety of traditions ranging from archaising and classicising ‘Greek’ depictions to images of Mars as a Roman imperator and eclectic mixtures of all elements depending on context and utilitas. To what extent the use of Greek and/or Roman elements signifies that the sacrifice was held according to Graeco ritu remains unclear. These observations are perhaps not surprising, they do, however, show how diverse but also all-encompassing the practices of what we sometimes carelessly call interpretatio are.
The volume makes an important contribution to the current scholarly debate of ancient polytheism, continuing old debates in very fruitful ways (e.g. Bettini, Belayche) and equally opening new debates (e.g. C. Pisano, J. Scheid). Overall, the contributors stay true to the original theme of the volume as phrased by the editors, namely a dialogue across history and historiography with a focus on the category of interpretatio. Reading through the individual sections I noticed that this category, often defined linguistically by modern scholars (C. Ando, ‘Interpretatio Romana’, CPh 100 [2005], 41–51, at 41), is as manifold as Greek and Roman ‘interpretations’ of the divine themselves. Interpretatio in the widest sense, it seems, permeated all media and genres, as for example literature, epigraphy, iconography and even ritual practice, depending mostly on individual contexts. It left me wondering whether one can (and should) even attempt to categorise and make sense of an interpretatio of allegedly ‘foreign’ gods, considering for example, the Greeks’ struggle to make sense of their own polytheistic world (H. Versnel, Coping with Gods [2011], Chapters 1 and 3), which, after all, was itself a product of cross-cultural interactions. The dialogue between Greeks and Romans concerning their respective pantheons as discussed in great variety in this volume seems to have been as much an attempt to understand and position ‘other’ gods as it was a discourse of their own pantheons.
