WORKSHOP

Speaking Religion:
Religious Discourse and Public Speaking in Classical Athens and Beyond
University of Cyprus, 19 June 2018

ABSTRACTS
Keynote address:
Religion and the Rule of Law
Edward M. Harris (University Durham & University of Edinburgh)

In modern liberal democracies, any attempt to invoke the will of God can be seen as an appeal to a
source of legitimacy outside the law and as an attempt to subvert the rule of law. In Ancient Greece,
citizens of the polis viewed the relationship between religion and the rule of law very differently. The
gods could be depicted as the authors of the laws of the community and used as a way of enhancing
respect for the law. The use of the language of pollution in trials of homicide was not an emotional
appeal designed at distracting the judges. The defendant who was guilty of murder was polluted and
the person who was innocent was ritually pure; the law and politics did not have different standards of
moral responsibility. When a litigant used the language of supplication, he was not using religious
language to make the judges forget their duty to uphold the law, but expressing his respect for the
judges’ duty to enforce the law. In enforcing the laws, the city state could use a combination of religious
penalties and secular penalties without causing any confusion. Priests did not enjoy a privileged position
as a result of their religious duties, but were accountable just like all other officials. And when Athenians
and other Greeks formed private religious associations, they adhered to the basic precepts of the rule
of law.

Abstracts:
Manus in actio and manus iniectio in Roman ritual: forensic discourse in Ovid’s Heroides
Stella Alekou (University of Cyprus)
I intend to examine the passages of ritualistic content in Ovid’s single and double Heroides which
present the manus as means of persuasion. This study will focus on the rituals of weddings, funerals,
suicides, engagements, offerings and sacrifices, and will put forward the claim that the Ovidian text
explores these rituals by “recontextualising” them within a Romanized lacing. The focalization on the
manus then becomes symptomatic of an innovative and polyphonic interaction between forensic
oratory and epistolary literature, pointing to a partial dissociation of the fictitious letters from their
intertextual foundations. By placing these texts in context, I would pay attention to a considerable
number of opposing pairs, such as the paradoxically echoed illustrations between wedding and funerary
ceremonies and the conflictual equivocalness between ritualistic (Greek) and legal (Roman) vocabulary.
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The image of the hand is thus disclosed as the means to convince, to legitimize, to claim, to reward and
to re-write the stories of the “writers” of these epistles. This intertextual reading will extend to the
performative interpretation of the gesture, as actio also lies within the scope of oratory and drama, but
also emerges in court speech and power discourse, elements that eventually overshadow the pseudo-
religious and ritualistic context in which the “heroines’’ writing process is situated, and by which they
are finally emancipated.

Excavating Lactantius’ Divine Institutes within the Religious Topography of Constantine’s Gaul
Elizabeth DePalma Digeser (University of California, Santa Barbara)
Ostensibly a treatise advocating a Christian Roman Empire, Lactantius’ Divine Institutes was also a finely
crafted piece of propaganda designed to engage not only Christians but also pagans in the early years
of the Emperor Constantine’s reign in Gaul. This paper will explore the ramifications of the oral delivery
of this treatise in Trier between 310 and 313.

Argument and Performance in the Creation of a Rhetorical Matrix in Paul’s Churches

Glenn S. Holland (Allegheny College)
The letters written by Paul of Tarsus provided the rhetorical matrix in which his ideas about Jesus and
the faith based on belief in Jesus as Lord were received and understood by the members of the Jesus
congregations Paul founded. His central metaphors, drawn from the law court, the arena, and the slave
market, shaped not only how those in his congregations thought and talked about in relation to their
faith, but what they thought and talked about.
But Paul’s influence was not limited to those congregations he founded. We find clear evidence that
Paul’s letters were re-performed for new audiences in both the content and the very existence of the
deutero-Pauline letters 2 Thessalonians, Colossians, and Ephesians. All three refer to Paul’s letters being
re-performed to audiences beyond their original recipient congregations. All three are also based on
the underlying fiction that they are letters written by Paul to “another” congregation and now “re-
performed” for new audiences – audiences that are not in Thessaloniki, Colossae, or Ephesus. Each
letter also builds on Paul’s use of specific terminology and rhetorical structure – sometimes by outright
imitation – to expand and develop Paul’s ideas to address the needs of a new, later audience and the
goals of its author. The performance and re-performance of the deutero-Pauline letters themselves
further solidifies Paul’s terminology, rhetorical strategies, and theological concepts – as well as their
later development by the deutero-Pauline authors – as a normative standard not only for congregations
founded by Paul, but for all Jesus congregations that recognize Paul’s authority.
Paul’s widely-spread influence in the second century is a product then not of the original performance
of Paul’s letters by his emissaries to the specific congregation each letter addresses, but of their
repeated re-performance by a variety of readers before innumerable congregations over a period of
decades. Paul’s influence in terms of his language and his conceptual world beyond the congregations
he founded is arguably entirely the result of the re-performance of his letters and later letters attributed
to him.

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Performing the Rhetoric of Magic in Ovid’s Epistulae Heroidum
Despina Keramida (University of Cyprus)
The rhetoric of Ovid’s Epistulae Heroidum has been a common topic of scholarly discussion, as the
epistolary form of the work and the narrative of each letters invite the external reader to question the
validity of the argumentation and its persuasive impact. However, the discussion has not underlined
sufficiently the importance of magical practices for the rhetoric of the Ovidian letter-writers. In this
paper, I explore how and why Ovid incorporates magical practices in the Epistulae Heroidum. The
discussion will focus on selected letters and specific magical practices, such as incantations (carmina)
and wax statues (simulacra). Carmen, in particular, is perceived as a central concept in the collection as
it highlights the different aspects of the heroines’ letter-writing and storytelling. The letter-writers
“write” poetic and magical carmina, which are meant to be “read” and to be “heard” by their readers
and their audience. What is of particular interest is that some of the letter-writers are connected with
magic already in their pre-Ovidian literary versions, whereas others are first associated with magical
practices in the Ovidian epistolary collection. As it is expected, love magic and curse magic are the two
manifestations that appear more frequently in the Epistulae Heroidum. When each letter-writer
addresses their beloved, their magical vox and rhetoric are placed in the center of attention. Ovid, the
external letter-writer, establishes that the inclusion of magical practices is central for both the internal
letter-writers’ rhetoric and the external readers’ perception of “written” rhetoric. As I will argue, these
letter-writers “speak” and “perform” magic in the epistolary collection, illustrating the functionality of
a “magical performance” within the boundaries of a “rhetorical performance”.

Civic Religion in Tenth-Century Constantinople

Leonora Neville (University of Wisconsin Madison)
Traditionally, the religion of the Byzantine Empire has been seen as Orthodoxy, and studies of religion
in Byzantium have been commensurate with studies of Medieval Greek orthodoxy. Indeed, Orthodox
religion has been among the main reasons why the Byzantine Empire is considered a separate entity
from the Roman Empire. Constantine's creation of a new capital in Constantinople has been understood
as the foundation of the new Christian Roman Empire whose fundamental difference from the classical
Roman Empire was religious. The tight association of the later Empire with Christianity enabled
Enlightenment scholars to imagine the medieval era as an Age of Faith, religiously distinct from
whatever had gone before.
While Early Modern modes of imagining ancient religion have been entirely overthrown by modern
scholarship, their legacy lives on in the presumption that the religion of the medieval Roman Empire
had nothing to do with the religion of the ancient Empire. Scholars of Byzantine religion routinely
perceive their field as beginning in the fourth century CE without considering previous modes of
religious engagement as relevant to their study.
In contrast, the current paper is part of a larger project that seeks to explore possible commonalities
between the civic religion of ancient Mediterranean and the religion visible in Byzantine government.
When examined in light of scholarship on ancient civic religion, the government of the 10th-century
Roman Empire was clearly a religious undertaking in which the community worked to maintain proper
relations between the polity and the divine. By the twelfth century, this civic religion disappeared and
government had become largely mundane.
Community proclamations of the emperors during tenth-century civic ceremonies show concerted
efforts to intertwine the emperors and officials with God and the heavenly host and urge them all to

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engage in the shared project of strengthening the polity. Records of these imperial ceremonies allow
us to read scripts for public statements about civic religion to be made by emperors, officials, priests,
cheerleaders, and crowds, offering us an outstanding opportunity to study medieval ways of speaking
religion.

The Discourse of Religious and Moral Decline in Horace, Odes 3.6: Beyond the Augustan Context
Michael Paschalis (University of Crete)
Horace, Odes 3.6, the last of the so-called Roman Odes, is a solemn public discourse addressed to the
“Romans”. Horace assumes here, as in the rest of the Roman Odes, the distant and authoritative role
of poet-prophet (vates), who chastises the citizens of Rome, reminds them of their moral
responsibilities and celebrates the noblest Roman virtues. The present Ode is shaped in a quasi-
argumentative form: The Romans will continue to suffer for the crimes of their ancestors, unless they
restore the crumbling temples and statues of the gods and cease neglecting the gods themselves; the
cause of civil wars and foreign threats to Roman dominion and Rome itself has been neglect of religious
obligations as well as female sexual license that has destroyed family values; Rome defeated Pyrrhus,
the Carthaginians, and Antiochus (282-188 BC), and hence rose to a world power, thanks to stalwart
rustics that lived an austere life; but later each generation has shown a decline from its predecessor,
and the next will be even worse than ours.

The discourse of moral decline and its dire consequences is widespread in late Republican and early
Augustan literature but the unmitigated pessimism in the conclusion of a literary piece composed after
the Battle of Actium (31 BC) is unparalleled. Unparalleled is also the prominence, and indeed the very
mention, of neglect of temples and gods as the cause for the internal and external ills Italy has suffered.
Unparalleled is finally the address Romane. It occurs in oracular pronouncements and indeed in Aeneid
6.581 Anchises employs it to address the “Romans” yet to appear and establish an empire a thousand
years later. I would therefore surmise that Horace’s envisaged audience involves not just his
contemporaries but posterity as well and probably not only the “next generation” mentioned in the
conclusion, where the formulation suggests a process of continuous deterioration. This may explain the
absence of any reference to Octavian and why the poet retained the overtly pessimistic conclusion
when he included Odes 3.6 in the collection of Books 1-3 published in 23 BC. Odes 3.6 may be read as a
discourse which was inspired by Augustus’ project to restore Roman temples (and possibly the
contemplated moral legislation?) but developed into an admonition and exhortation addressed to all
Romans in the years to come.

Latin panegyrical oratory in a century of religious change

Roger Rees (University of St Andrews)
In Late Antiquity, epideictic oratory found conditions in which it could thrive as never before; in fact,
most surviving Latin prose panegyric dates from the late third to the early sixth centuries CE, with a
particular concentration in the fourth century. This period also saw intense religious change, most
notably from the persecution of Christians (under Diocletian) to the toleration, adoption and imperial
patronage of that faith (in various stages). It has long been recognised that the surviving panegyrics
constitute unusually rich material for consideration of rhetorical response to and articulation of
contemporary religion; and various studies plot a general trajectory across the speeches towards a
vaguely expressed monotheism (which might accommodate a pagan or Christian understanding), but

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not necessarily to the exclusion of traditional pagan material, such as the Imperial Cult (e.g. Burdeau
1964, Beranger 1970, Liebeschuetz 1981, Saylor Rodgers 1986).
We know (since Turcan-Verkerk 2003) that the author of the latest speech in the XII Panegyrici Latini
collection, dated to 389 and addressed to the Christian emperor Theodosius, was himself a Christian.
The speech contains much unarguably pagan ideology. Cameron (2011) concluded from this that
generic tradition rather than religious identity was the main determinant of religious material in
panegyric. Against this background, I revisit the religious fabric of the speech of 389, and tentatively
identify some sympathetic Christian notices; I also trace some examples of redeployment of religious
terminology to consider the role and effect on the creation of generic tradition of the curating of
collections of literary panegyric in the fourth century.

Augustine’s De civitate Dei: a Mirror of Classical Rhetoric

Hanne Roer (University of Copenhagen)
The oeuvre of Augustine (354-430) can be seen as an epistemic break with the classical public discourses
such as philosophy, religion and rhetoric. As Fumaroli (L’Age de l’eloquence, 1980) has made clear,
rhetoric was the most important classical public discourse ensuring a continuity into the middle ages.
It is a commonplace that classical rhetoric was a secular discourse, allowing for critical scrutiny of all
arguments, and in the case of the sophists, for a deconstruction of philosophical truth claims. It is also
a commonplace that Christian rhetoric replaced this rhetoric of controversia with a rhetoric ruled by
dogmatics.
While this is true in many respects, Augustine’s De civitate Dei shows us a much more complicated
world. The fall of Rome in 410 led to a final contestation between defenders of classical religious polis-
culture and the Christians, the former arguing that the attack on Rome was due to the neglect of
classical rites. Augustine rejected this in the first part of De civitate Dei (one of the most important
sources for Roman religion), leading to his grandiose apology for Christianity in the second part.
In this paper, I present some religious aspects of classical rhetorical discourse, as revealed
(inadvertently) by Augustine. The techniques of rhetoric as an art of communication seem universal (as
argued by Augustine in De doctrina christiana) but the narratives legitimating them change. Some
narratives are used by classical rhetoricians and Christians alike, such as the narrative of decline. There
is also a major difference: while Classical rhetoric took place in the polis/urbs, Christian rhetoric was
split between the City of this world and the City of God. Some of the mystical aspects of ancient religion
thus became part of public discourse (also evident in Augustine’s Confessions).

Recording divine words: archiving and re-using oracles in classical Athens

Rebecca Van Hove (King’s College London)
This paper examines the origin of oracles discussed by orators in the law courts. Whilst the number of
oracles cited in the surviving speeches of the orators is relatively low, nonetheless the six speeches in
which litigants do quote an oracular pronouncement, as well as evidence from other sources (e.g. Thuc.
1.118, 2.17.1-2; Hdt. 7.139-143; Aristoph. Peace 1043-1120) demonstrate that the use of oracles in
public discourse could be a good starting point for the study of the role of religion in the public sphere
of fourth-century Athens. This paper goes beyond discussion of the quoted oracles in oratory
themselves, asking instead the crucial question of where these oracles come from. The origin of oracles
is a significant issue because it helps clarify the process by which orators come to make the decision to

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quote specific oracles in their orations: it elucidates both the nature of these religious pronouncements
further, as well as the authority which they are assigned in the rhetorical contexts of the Athenian law
courts. Scholarship dealing with the complex issues of literacy, orality, writing and record-keeping in
ancient Greece has given comparatively little consideration to the recording and archiving of oracles as
a genre of texts. This paper will therefore scrutinize evidence for such recording and archival practices,
in order to demonstrate the crucial role of writing in the application of oracles in the rhetorical setting
of the Athenian law courts.

Pollution as a rhetorical topos in ancient texts and cultures

James W. Watts (Syracuse University)
Aristotle famously focused his consideration of rhetoric on three settings for public speeches: the
political assembly, the legal trial, and the funeral. He omitted a public arena that was no less prominent
in Athens than in other ancient Mediterranean and Middle Eastern cultures, namely, the temple.
Temples continued to operate, even expand, in the Hellenistic and Roman periods, despite Greek
intellectual discomfort with some religious ideas and practices, as reflected in drama and philosophy.

Including the religious sphere within descriptions of ancient rhetoric introduces a range of religious
concepts employed for persuasion. Prominent among them in all ancient (and many contemporary)
cultures is the idea of purity and its opposite, pollution. Ancient temple rhetoric urgently exhorted
people to preserve the temple’s purity by engaging in a variety of purification procedures. Mandates to
preserve purity extended to a wider variety of settings (such as homes) and were more demanding for
some classes of people (such as priests). This paper explores the implications for rhetoric and religious
studies of treating purity and pollution as a topos in the Aristotelian sense.

The allure and the fear of performative religious rhetoric: comparing Plato and the orators
Hannah Willey (University of Cambridge)
In Plato’s Ion, Socrates offers up a description of poetic inspiration. The rhapsode, performing at a
festival or celebration, becomes caught up in the power of his recitation. Experiencing a vivid emotional
and physical response, he takes his audience along with him as the “god pulls people’s souls… wherever
he wants” (533d-536a). First and foremost, we see here a radical imagining of how the power of
ritualized speech, emanating from the gods, can affect an audience and effect a shared response. Yet,
alongside this, we find anxiety: this extended chain of unthinking and manipulated people is not
unproblematic. Elsewhere too Plato expresses anxiety about the psychological, ethical and civic effect
of religious performance on an audience. Strikingly, though, far from rejecting wholesale the use of
religious discourse in the construction of authority and engagement of an audience, Plato often appeals
to religious models such as oaths, inspiration, divination and initiation as persuasive and dialectical
tools. I will focus in particular on the Corybantes whom Plato’s Socrates uses both to distance himself
from the strategies of the sophists (Euthydemus) and, conversely, to identify himself and so render his
own position persuasive (Crito). Turning to the orators, I will examine how the same authors both
critique others for using religious performative speech and, in other contexts, help themselves to this
very same discourse. Deploying test cases, I will ask whether, in doing so, these orators play on an
ambivalence in their audience about the dangers and powers of performative religious discourse. The
juxtaposition between Plato and the orators – authors writing in different genres and for very different
audiences, but in a broadly similar time and place and with the goal of persuasion always in mind – will
give us an insight into the way that religious rhetoric was thought about, used and abused in different
contexts in fourth-century Athens.
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