IMAGES OF EMPERORS - E. Manders Coining Images of Power. Patterns in the Representation of Roman Emperors on Imperial Coinage, a.d. 193–284. (Impact of Empire 15.) Pp. xviii + 363, figs, ills. Leiden and Boston: Brill, 2012. Cased, €119, US$163. ISBN: 978-90-04-18970-6.

Abstract

and, especially, religious hybridity. Mamre notoriously attracted Jews, Christians and pagans who worshipped side-by-side into the fifth century, despite the efforts of Constantine and his bishops. Bethesda at various times housed a Jewish healing site, a shrine of Asclepius and a Christian basilica, while dedications at the Fountain of Lamps evoke all three traditions without fitting securely into any. Again, the 'polysemous' flexibility of the word angelos seems to facilitate religious mobility. Increasingly, though, Christian authorities labour to wrest the sites and the wordaway from non-Christian users. Chapter 6, 'Angels of a Christian God', traces fourth-and fifth-century Church efforts to distinguish between right and wrong ways for Christians to venerate angels, and to channel veneration of angels into acceptable forms. The centrepiece is Canon 35 of the Synod of Laodicea (c. 360 C.E.), which forbids Christians to 'abandon the church. .. invoke angeloi, and hold meetings', practices labelled 'secret idolatry'. Since Theodoret of Cyrrhus, this has been interpreted as an attempt to suppress angelos veneration entirely. C. argues, however, that Laodicea's concern was specifically with extra-ecclesial gatherings that might undermine ecclesiastical authority or give rise to heterodox practices, whether 'Judaizing' (as in Colossians 2:18-19) or 'magic' (as in Laodicea Canon 36). On this reading, late-antique shrines of Michael are not signs of backsliding, but part of a process of harnessing the ritual power of angelos veneration in support of ecclesiastical authority. C. does a useful service in assembling the epigraphic evidence for Christian and non-Christian angels. Many readers will want more, however. Any book that combines Christian and non-Christian, literary and epigraphic material risks leaving specialists in each area unsatisfied. I often wished for more systematic discussion of the philosophical or theological issues at stake; a clear discussion of Platonist daimonology is a particular desideratum in the early chapters. The Christian context in which C. locates his inscriptions is heavily slanted toward the 'orthodox', despite C.'s interest in the heterodox potential of angeloi. The case-study approach also renders the argument as a whole somewhat disjointed. It is left to the reader to discern patterns across chapters, and it is not always clear whether C.'s examples are representative or exhaustive of their category. Finally, the writing is frequently stiff and repetitive, the proofreading poor. The definitive modern study of ancient Mediterranean angeloi has yet to be written.

ESTABLISHING A DYNASTY IN IDEOLOGY AND PRACTICE: THEAEDES VESTAEAUREI OF VESPASIAN

“…Clearly the complexity of Roman imperial coin types requires study at both the macro and micro scale (cf. Rowan, 2013: 551).…”

“… 67 Noreña, 2001; Rowan, 2012; Elkins, 2017 all deal at best cursorily with gold coinage. Manders, 2012, is able to give more weight to gold coinage, since she bases her quantification on RIC types, but this methodology has been heavily criticized, for example, by Rowan, 2013.…”