This article is intended to be read in association with that of Schofield which follows. They share a common outlook—for we both believe that an understanding of the literary form of De Divinatione is integral to an understanding of its philosophical and historical point. But in detail our approaches are rather different. My own paper is the work of an historian and is concerned principally with the intellectual and cultural context of De Divinatione. My analysis of the text, highlighting its tensions and unresolved contradictions, follows from my analysis of that broader context. Schofield, by contrast, studies De Divinatione as an example of Hellenistic philosophical argumentation and explores the ways Cicero translates this not merely into Latin, but into a specifically Roman rhetorical mode. Other differences—in particular some disagreement as to how far it is possible to identify a ‘Ciceronian position’ on religion—are signalled in the text and notes of what follows.
The Vestal Virgins have often been the subject of close scrutiny by classical scholars. Indeed many articles have been devoted to a careful analysis of individual, apparently trivial, aspects of their legal rights, their privileges, their cult obligations and even their dress. In the same tradition I intend in this paper to consider just one element of their priestly position: their sexual status and its relationship to their sacred status. It is however an element which will be seen to have wider implications for their cult as a whole and for ancient religion in general.
Why do ancient writers tell us that sacred prostitutes massed on the citadel of ancient Corinth? What are we to make of Herodotus’ famous account of the ancient customs of Babylon? Beard and Henderson examine the formation of the discourse of sacred, or cultic, prostitution both in classical texts and modern scholarship. They take a sceptical position on the existence, in Greece and the Near East, of institutions traditionally envisaged as ‘sacred prostitution’ and explore the uses which have been, and are still, found for such myth‐making with the bodies of women, whether in the form of a ‘marriage‐market’ or of various kinds of ‘sacred prostitution’.
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