Unwelcome Dedications: Public Law and Private Religion in Hellenistic Laodicea by the Sea

“…Although there is plenty of epigraphic evidence, the subject has not been studied in a monograph yet. See, however, Sosin 2005 andLombardi 2009. 10 Although bibliographically not up-to-date, especially with respect to German scholarship, the most recent study on space is Scott 2013.…”

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Commemorating Pious Service: Images in Honour of Male and Female Priestly Officers in Asia Minor and the Eastern Aegean in Hellenistic and Roman Times

Mylonopoulos¹

2013

Cities and Priests

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The paper addresses questions associated with images erected in honour of priestly officials in the Greek cities of the eastern Aegean and Asia Minor in the Hellenistic and Roman Imperial times. More concretely, it deals with the agents responsible for this specific type of tribute, the reasons behind the erection of priestly imagery, and its placement in public civic spaces and sanctuaries. Although there can be no doubt about the importance of priestly officers in Greek antiquity, an analysis of the honours, especially of those in the form of sculpted or painted images, that priests and priestesses received will lead to a necessary re-evaluation of the ways in which we understand their exact status within the social, political, and religious hierarchy of any given city. Compared to successful athletes, international mediators, or wealthy benefactors, Greek priests and priestesses were not as highly celebrated as we have always presupposed them to be.In the past fifty years, archaeological and historical scholarship on cult personnel has demonstrated a noticeable bias for priestesses, which reflects to a certain extent the imbalance in the preserved evidence. Both J.A. Turner's doctoral dissertation at the University of California, Santa Barbara and J.B. Connelly's recent monograph, for example, deal exclusively with imagery and social as well as religious functions of female priestly officers. 1 R. van Bremen's book, on the other hand, examines female civic participation. 2 U. Kron's influential arti-|| * I am very grateful to Marietta Horster and Anja Klöckner for inviting me to such an intellectually stimulating and productive conference at the University of Mainz. The present paper owes a great deal to all the colleagues and friends with whom I enjoyed an intensive exchange of ideas during the conference, but I would specifically like to thank Jochen Griesbach, Uta Kron, Stéphanie Paul, Oliver Pilz, Vinciane Pirenne-Delforge, and Eftychia Stavrianopoulou for their time and constructive criticism. I am deeply thankful to Irina Oryshkevich for improving my English. All mistakes -linguistic and otherwise -remain mine.

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Private Associations in the Ancient Greek World

2021

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Private associations abounded in the ancient Greek world and beyond, and this volume provides the first large-scale study of the strategies of governance which they employed. Emphasis is placed on the values fostered by the regulations of associations, the complexities of the private-public divide (and that divide's impact on polis institutions) and the dynamics of regional and global networks and group identity. The attested links between rules and religious sanctions also illuminate the relationship between legal history and religion. Moreover, possible links between ancient associations and the early Christian churches will prove particularly valuable for scholars of the New Testament. The book concludes by using the regulations of associations to explore a novel and revealing aspect of the interaction between the Mediterranean world, India and China.

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Unwelcome Dedications: Public Law and Private Religion in Hellenistic Laodicea by the Sea

Cited by 20 publications

References 1 publication

Toward a Typology of Greek Regulations about Religious Matters

Toward a Typology of Greek Regulations about Religious Matters

Commemorating Pious Service: Images in Honour of Male and Female Priestly Officers in Asia Minor and the Eastern Aegean in Hellenistic and Roman Times

Private Associations in the Ancient Greek World

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