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[German Version] (116–27 bce). Life and work: Varro was a Roman official (praetor in 68), probably a quindecimvir (Cichorius), and a widely traveled polyhistor and poet. He was a conservative republican, an adherent of the (old) Academy, and the author of more than 70 works on all facets of Roman culture, in more than 500 volumes. His enormous oeuvre comprises works on philology and literary history (the theater, history of the alphabet, etc.), history, and antiquarian topics (calendar), further the artes libera…

[German Version] I. Religious Studies As with many animals, purification is a basic area of human behavior. Mutual purifying implies and generates expectations, trust, solidarity, and hierarchy. Religious actions (e.g. the purifying of statues and pictures of gods) go back to identical structures. Purifying is a fundamental element of ritual actions. Ritual objects, but also the actors themselves, are purified. This process is often self-referential: purification happens not with regard to something unclean, but for the ritual. Purifica…

[German Version] (c. 55 – after 116 ce). Life and works. Tacitus was praetor (88) and quindecimvir (?), suffect consul (97), and proconsul of the province of Asia (112/113). The biography of his father-in-law Gnaeus Julius Agricola (d. 93) combines the laudatio funebris (Dead, Cult of the: III) with an ethnography of Britain. The ethnography of the free, i.e. non-Roman (or not yet Roman) Germania (written around 100) draws a typecast and idealizing picture of an unspoiled primitive people and dangerous neighbor. His Dialogus de oratoribus (written around 105) discusses the relat…

[German Version] I. Greco-Roman Antiquity 1. The picture (imaginaire, myth, idea) that the Romans developed of themselves, their city, and their rule (Imperium Romanum) has an exemplary early period, with its founders – “pious father Aeneas” (Virgil, Aen.), Romulus, and Numa, founder of the city and founder of religion (Livy, Book I); its type – “the good old Roman” in a toga, beardless (Cicero, Cato maior), and its distinctions from its rivals in Greece (Athens). Might and right are contrasted with learning, art, and philosophy: excudent alii... / tu regere imperio populos, Romane; “o…

[German Version] The word “Caesar” has three senses: (a) a branch of the Julian clan ( gens Julia), which traced its genealogy through Aeneas back to Aphrodite; (b) a title (cf. Mark 12:13–17; Acts 25:11) and the office of supreme ruler (cf. OHG keisar, Russian Tsar); (c) the personification of a modern conception of antique greatness, drive, and genius, which can be interpreted as the antithesis of Christian humility, passivity, and “foolishness” (F. Nietzsche: “Caesar figure,” “Jesus figure”; Gundolf). The best-known representative of the gens Julia is C. Julius Caesar (100–44 bce).…

[German Version] I. Concept and Terminology – II. History – III. Ethics – IV. Constitutional and International Law – V. Education I. Concept and Terminology In the usage of international law and national constitutional states, human rights are rights possessed by every individual (Human beings) by virtue of his or her humanity, independent of cultures, nationalities, and periods (universality). Their guiding principle is that of human dignity (inviolable, indisposable, inalienable). Guarantees of human rights can a…

[German Version] I. Concept The French term “Renaissance,” which was also borrowed by German and English, belongs to the large group of organic metaphors applied to historical occurrences. Used from the 19th century in sole reference to animal/human life and understood in the sense of “rebirth,” it is assigned in recent research (since Jost Trier) more appropriately to the botanical sphere and explained as “renewed growth,” i.e. as a renewed sprouting of shoots ¶ from felled trees and bushes. Pre-Christian Latin already employed renasci (from nasci, “to be born, to become, to ar…

[German Version] I. General – II. Greek Views – III. Roman Views I. General Decay/decline (cf. decadence, degeneration; inclinatio; Ger. Verfall) refers to a process of gradual deterioration that ends in sudden catastrophe (Gk καταστροφή), destruction, disintegration, slow dissolution, or ruin (Gk φϑορά/ phthorá), unless it is averted by reform or renaissance. Decay/decline is the corresponding antonym of progress, an – often …

[German Version] I. Historiography of Philosophy The Pre-Socratics include all Greek thinkers prior to c. 400 bce who contributed something to what was later called philosophy, above all Thales, Anaximan­der, Anaximenes, Pythagoras and his school, Xenophanes of Colophon, Heraclitus, Parmenides, Zenon, Melissus, Empedocles, Anaxagoras, the atomists (Atomism: I) and other natural philosophers (Natural philosophy), and the Sophistic school. The term first appeared in the late 18th century and occupied an important place in the 19th-century histories of ¶ philosophy. It firs…

[German Version] I. Concept 1. The origin of the Latin word persona (“mask, role, status”) is unknown; it may be Etruscan. The philologist Gavius Bassus (1st cent. bce) traced the “origin” of the word to the function of the ancient theater mask, namely that of a megaphone which concentrated the voice and caused it to “sound through” ( per-sonare; cf. Gellius, Noctes Atticae V 7) in a more sonorous way. The corresponding Greek word is πρόσωπον/ prósōpon, “face, mask, front.” The word “persona” is employed in grammar, rhetoric, jurisprudence, and philosophy. What the mode…

[German Version] I. Concept – II. Antiquity as Epoch – III. Religion and Antique Culture I. Concept 1. English – Latin – French. a. The English word “antiquity”, like the German word Antike, borrowed from the French antique, denotes an epoch and a norm. “Classical” antiquity is the culture of the “ancient” Greeks and Romans; predecessors (Mycenaeans, Phoenicians, Lydians), neighbors (Celts, Thracians, Etruscans), and …

[German Version] I. Name and Image – II. Cult I. Name and Image 1. In the Roman pantheon (II), the name Jupiter denotes the “father of heaven” ( Diespiter, Jovis Pater; vocative: Ju-piter), the highest position, the power and the right (not war and violence), the principle of sovereignty and legitimacy in all spheres of life, the family, the state, history. He is the “grandest and best” ( optimus maximus), the “king,” the “father.” The name and the connection with the light of heaven (cf. dies, “day”) and to divination through the flight of birds ( auspicium) are common to Italian religion…

[German Version] I. The term cult authors refers to a group of authors who collected and explicated the primary documents of the cults of the Greeks and Romans (rituals, calendars, cultic laws, priestly regulations, protocols, etc.). The group, which cannot be easily differentiated from local historians, periegetes, antiquarians, and theologians, includes about 100 authors (5th cent. bce to the end of the 4th cent. ce). Their themes and titles are: a. On Days (Gk perí hēmerón), On Months, On Feasts; b. On Sacrifices (Gk perí thysión), On Mysteries, On Dedications, On Purification…

[German Version] I. Metaphor and Stereotype – II. History of Ancient Religion and Ideas I. Metaphor and Stereotype The image of the straight line and the circle is used to describe experiences and conceptions of time and history (History/Concepts of History) in a simple and graphic manner, though not necessarily clearly and correctly. In a “pre-philosophical” system of classification and valuation, thought patterns, artistic styles, and even entire cultures are labeled as linear or cyclical. The history of huma…

[German Version] (a post-classical coinage) is a genre of classical texts that recount wonders (Gk ϑαύματα/ tháumata; Lat. mirabilia) from the realm of nature and from history – extraordinary phenomena that are incredible and contrary to all expectations (Paradox). Paradoxography is a subdivision of natural history ( naturalis historia) and historiography. Its materials are considered empirical and historical; though unusual and hidden on the fringes of the known world, they are not myths from antiquity. In the Parallela minora of Pseudo-Plutarch, for example, “paradoxica…

[German Version] I. Religious Studies – II. History – III. Philosophy of Religion – IV. Fundamental Theology. – V. Missiology I. Religious Studies 1. The Concept and Its History Myth may be defined by either content or function. Defined by content, myth is a belief about something significant, such as the world or society. Defined by function, myth accomplishes something significant, such as explaining the world or supporting society. Most theories of myth are concerned with the function of myth, but many are also concerned with either the origin or the subject matter of myth. Myt…

[German Version] I. The Cliché – II. The Classical Paradigms I. The Cliché 1. The words Orient and Occident (“the rising/setting sun”; Lat. ortus/occasus, Gk ἀνατολή/ anatolē/ δύσις/ dýsis) denote either (a) an East (cf. Matt 2:1: “Magi from the East”; also Anatolia/Turkey) or West (cf. the Hesperides), always relative, or (b) a geographical fiction, a construct of “mythic geography,” an ideological stereotype. The administrative language of the Roman Empire was clearer. After the reorganization of the Empire by Diocletian, the praefectus praetorio per Orientem (there was no an…

[German Version] I. History of Religions – II. Greco-Roman Antiquity – III. Bible – IV. Church History – V. Systematic Theology – VI. Practical Theology – VII. Missiology – VIII. Judaism – IX. Islam I. History of Religions “Conversion” denotes the religiously interpreted process of total reorientation in which individuals or groups reinterpret their past lives, turn their backs on them, and reestablish and reshape their future lives in a new network of social relationships. The phenomenon was initially …

[German Version] (Oct 9, 1845, Hamburg – Jan 11, 1898, Heidelberg), taught classical philology in Kiel, Jena, Tübingen (1878–1886), Leipzig, and Heidelberg (prorector 1894/1895). Starting from novels and romance poetics of the modern period, Rohde, an antimodernist of refined sensitivity, researched the history of the novel in antiquity. Psyche (1890–1894, 9/101925; ET: Psyche: The Cult of Souls and the Belief in Immortality among the Greeks, 1925), his major contribution to the history of religion, offers a comprehensive presentation of the “development” of…

[German Version] I. Religious Studies 1. Cosmos a. There are various ways of expressing the concept of the “world” in Greek and Latin: as the world as a whole, with the bipolar hendiadys heaven and earth (e.g. Diodorus Siculus I 7.7); as the world of human beings, with Greek οἰκουμένη/ oikouménē (sc. γῆ/ gḗ, “earth”; e.g. Diodorus Siculus I 1.3; cf. Lat. orbis terrarum, “circle of the earth”; genus humanum, “human world”); with emphasis on the world’s order, beauty, and completeness, with κόσμος/ kósmos (Cosmology) and universum or πᾶν/ pán, ὅλον/ hólon; or with emphasis on its self-a…