This chapter interrogates how local memory was mobilized and militarized by the viceroyalty to legitimize its authority in the face of growing popular resistance. It centers on the reuse of the Norman imperial palace, the Palazzo Reale, at mid-century and its protracted modernization, which, in turn, paved the way for the rebuilding of the Porta d’Africa and the Porta Nuova, two centuries-old city gates closely associated with contemporary Habsburg campaigns in North Africa. In Palermo, appropriation laid the foundations of a new architecture of power: one built on an emergent ideology of empire that balanced the rhetoric of triumphalism with the recognition of local mythography. Looking to local political discourse that claimed the city’s historical autonomy, the chapter contrasts these projects with contemporary acts of colonial foundation in the Crown’s American viceroyalties. In doing so, it situates Palermo within a newly global Habsburg imperial imaginary.

This chapter traces a set of reading strategies developed in imperial Greek and early Christian appropriations of classical Greek literature, focusing on Plutarch’s On Reading the Poets and Basil’s On the Value of Greek Literature. The metaphors, tropes and lines of argument developed in these two texts conform to different philosophical and theological agendas and reveal different parameters and affordances of paideia. Despite the different commitments undergirding these texts, however, both models of appropriation converge in the way that they encourage practices of selection and excerpting typical of the anthologising ethos of the post-classical period. In addition to appropriating paideia in creative and tactical ways, it is argued, Plutarch and Basil also participate in top-down processes of canonisation that foreclose alternative practices of reading and interpretation.

Throughout his brief career as an emperor, Julian appropriated aspects of Christian letter writing in his attempt to reinforce what he called ‘Hellenic religion’, and especially the cult of the Great Mother Cybele. Michel de Certeau’s theory of appropriation can help us understand Julian’s religious and cultural agenda of reshaping traditional Hellenism and religious identity for a post-Constantinian age. As well as issuing several edicts on the subject of religion, Julian wrote friendship letters to priests, priestesses, governors, Christians and Jews. Julian’s letters reveal that in his attempts to (re)form religious identity he also employed tactics by which he appropriated elements of the very dominant culture, Christianity, that he sought to undermine.

Within the classical Roman religious system, the lived experiences of venerating ancestors and cultivating household gods were sources of tension between individuals and the social structures they inhabited, which drew sharp lines between slave and free, kin and non-kin, in household cults. De Certeau’s theoretical model of strategies and tactics of appropriation offers an illuminating prism through which to view this tension as the crucible in which the enduring forms of domestic worship of the ‘great gods’ of domestic cult – the Lares, Penates, Di Manes and Genius – were forged.

This chapter examines the ways in which competing Church leaders inconsistently appropriated the powerful mantle of the early martyrs for their colleagues who died in the doctrinal violence that followed the Council of Chalcedon (451 CE), and the shifting power dynamics of their claims as the two sides fell in and out of imperial favour. Ironically, as anti-Chalcedonian Christians settled into the more permanent position of being ‘heretics’ in the sixth-century Roman empire, their appropriation of the rhetoric of Christian martyrdom provided them with an increasingly defensible claim to the very Christian orthodoxy that the imperial structures denied them.

Appropriation, ‘making something one’s own’, is a modern way of thinking about social practices. This volume highlights the potential of this critical concept for the investigation of everyday religious practice – and more generally, everyday social practice – in Antiquity. Appropriation foregrounds the agency of the social actors against the strictures imposed by the dominant culture’s social order, whose ideas and practices they make their own, altering them in multiple, often subtle ways. How does appropriation transform pre-existing, traditional practices? What are the dominant structures against which the actors operate? Which tactics do they use? These are only some of the questions this volume seeks to address. The critical term ‘appropriation’ has yet to be fully discovered by Classicists; the case studies in this volume, ranging from classical Greece to Late Antique Egypt, endeavour to demonstrate its pertinence to the study of religion in Antiquity.

The rabbis’ encounter with the Roman empire and Roman culture was characterised by a deep ambivalence. In rabbinic texts, Rome is the ‘evil kingdom’ and Jews are encouraged to distance themselves from its idolatrous practices. Nevertheless, rabbinic literature also testifies to the appropriation of many Roman cultural motifs by at least some of the rabbis. This chapter explores three examples of this dynamic. It will focus successively on the topics of public baths, mythical narratives about the origins of Rome and the Roman legal fiction of adoption. These examples show how the rabbis’ responses to Roman social practices and cultural discourses reveal tactics of appropriation that ultimately served the rabbis’ project of safeguarding Israel’s distinctiveness within the Roman world.

Written from Constantine’s court, Lactantius’ Divine Institutes promoted Rome’s transformation into a Christian monarchy. It targeted Christian teachers living along the major Gallic routes to Trier, the caesar’s capital, as one of Constantine’s key constituencies. Deploying the concept of ‘appropriation’ introduced by Michel de Certeau, this chapter argues that the figure of Mercurius/Hermes Trismegistus helped Lactantius achieve his goal, navigating between his home North African culture and that of his Gallic audience. Embracing Trismegistus as an ancient Graeco-African prophetic sage whose wisdom harmonised with Christian doctrine, Lactantius equated him to Mercury, the god of rhetoric, ubiquitous in Gaul and in the classroom. His writing thus encouraged Christian teachers to appropriate Mercurius for themselves, transforming a member of the pantheon into a Christian-friendly herald of Constantine’s rise. In this way, Lactantius hoped to gain the support of Gaul’s Christian professors and Christianise the Roman government through their students, Gaul’s future administrators.

In this chapter I apply the ideas of De Certeau on appropriation, combined with his views on religion and believing, to Orphism in fifth-century Athens. This approach enables us to see what the Athenians selected from the general ideas and practices of Orphism, but also what they did not appropriate and, perhaps, why not. We also pay attention to the possible circulation of ideas, and ask whether Athenians selected ideas which challenged the dominant culture or whether the dominant culture appropriated ideas from Orphism. I begin with some observations on Orphism in general, then look at its discourses and practices in Athens, and conclude with some more general considerations on Orphism and the possible use of the term appropriation.

This chapter endeavours to unfold the religious ambitions of P. Clodius Pulcher that can be detected ‘behind the scenes’ of our various reports of the so-called Bona Dea scandal. It then seeks to embed this scandal within the context of Clodius’ other religious performances and his broader ambitions. The concept of (religious) appropriation is deployed to identify reason and order where the sources present madness or chaos. Simply put, the concept of appropriation helps to identify and rationalise Clodius’ unique religious performance, which was remarkable not only for its cross-dressing and frenzy but also for its taking place among women and slaves, a group of people who worshipped in a religious ‘place’ from which Clodius should have been excluded.

The changing sacred landscape, from one dominated by temples to one where churches and monasteries were omnipresent, is a main feature of Late Antiquity. In this chapter, we will use the concept of ‘appropriation’ to gain an impression of the diverse ways in which Christians responded to, and interacted with, the former sacred built environment. In order to grasp the full complexity of these responses and interactions the focus is on a local case study, Abydos, a site that functioned continuously as a necropolis and cult centre of Osiris up until the Graeco-Roman period. Based on recent fieldwork, the various ways in which Christians, and especially monks, used and reused the abandoned necropolis are discussed.

The purpose of this chapter is to examine how Theodoret of Cyrrhus appropriated discourses of Roman masculinity in his Historia religiosa (ca. 440–444 CE), with the purpose of making the monks more acceptable, more marketable, to his would-be readers. Masculinity was a tactical appropriation that signified social worth. The study analyses four discourses related to masculinity in the Historia religiosa, all functioning with the purpose of showcasing the interior struggle between the soul and body of the monk. These discourses are warfare, athletics, slavery and medical discourse (health and illness). All function to show the superiority of the souls of the monks. By proving that the souls of the monks have universally dominated their bodies, they are also qualified to exercise external social, political and religious control. Hence, because of their total inner domination, Theodoret’s masculine monks can show dominance against foreign armies and raiders, generals and governors, and even an emperor. As literary characters, they become quite marketable to more reserved and conservative would-be readers.

It is now generally accepted in scholarship that ancient magical texts provide us with unique insights into how ordinary people ‘lived’ religion in their day-to-day lives. It is also well known that practitioners in the Graeco-Roman period and Late Antiquity would use all the elements at their disposal to create their own magical texts and objects and make them as efficacious as possible. By focusing on Greek and Coptic magical manuscripts produced in Late Antique Egypt, this chapter provides revealing examples of how people, as agents, reacted and adapted to their changing cultural and religious contexts, by appropriating practices and elements from the different religious traditions with which they were in contact.

Greek Japan. Placed side by side, these two words give the impression of something very strange, a sort of chimera – half-Apollo, half-samurai; half-Venus, half-geisha – set on a ground that is at once white and blue like the Cyclades, dark green and vermillion like Shintō shrines. How could two countries so distant from each other be joined together to form a coherent image, to give birth to a meaningful concept?

Carter examines the use that some pragmatists have made of the black intellectual tradition (BIT), “the body of belles-lettres, polemical essays, pamphlets, speeches, books, slave narratives, poetry, articles, fiction, and sermons that articulate the experiences in the Americas of African-descendant peoples.” He describes assumptions underlying attempts to connect the BIT to classical pragmatism, e.g., that elements of the BIT illuminate works of pragmatists, that the BIT complements pragmatism, and that pragmatist ideas can be used to correct aspects of the BIT. He examines strategies pragmatists have used to make that connection, from simply assuming that there is such a connection, to arguing from the fact that a black philosopher was taught by a pragmatist to the conclusion that the philosopher’s work is pragmatist in nature, to showing that the ideas of a black philosopher are similar to or compatible with those of a classical pragmatist. Criticizing the tendency to appropriate the BIT in an effort to improve pragmatism without acknowledging that the BIT is itself philiosophical, Carter argues for a more intentional examination of these integrative efforts.