Author: Claudia Moser File Type: pdf In this book, Claudia Moser offers a new understanding of Roman religion in the Republican era through an exploration of sacrifice, its principal ritual. Examining the long-term imprint of sacrificial practices on the material world, she focuses on monumental altars as the site for the act of sacrifice. Piecing together the fragments of the complex kaleidoscope of Roman religious practices, she shows how they fit together in ways that shed new light on the characteristic diversity of Roman religion. This study reorients the study of sacrificial practice in three principal ways first, by establishing the primacy of sacred architecture, rather than individual action, in determining religious authority second, by viewing religious activities as haptic, structured experiences in the material world rather than as expressions of doctrinal, belief-based mentalities and third, by considering Roman sacrifice as a local, site-specific ritual rather than as a single, monolithic practice. Book Description This study assembles the often fragmentary physical evidence (altar placement and orientation, votive and faunal remains, sanctuary architecture) in order to explore the site-specific character of communal animal sacrifice in Republican Rome and Latium over centuries of ritual performance. About the Author Claudia Moser is Assistant Professor of History of Art and Architecture at the University of California, Santa Barbara. A fellow of the American Academy in Rome, she is the co-director of an archaeological field school at Settecamini, Italy and co-editor of Locating the Sacred Theoretical Approaches to the Emplacement of Religion (2014) and Ritual Matters Material Remains and Ancient Religion (2017).

Author: David Ohana File Type: pdf The temptation to resort to violence runs like a thread through Albert Camus works, and can be viewed as an additional key to understanding his literary productions and philosophical writings. His short life and intellectual attitudes were almost all connected with brutality and cruel circumstance. At the age of one he lost his father, who was killed as a soldier of the French army at the outbreak of the First World War. He passed his childhood and youth in colonial Algeria, no doubt experiencing degrees of inhumanity during that difficult period. In his first years in conquered France, he was editor of an underground newspaper that opposed the Nazi occupation. In the years following the Liberation, he denounced the Bolshevist tyranny and was witness to the dirty war between the land of his birth and his country of living, France. Camus preoccupation with violence was expressed in all facets of his work-as a philosopher, as a political thinker, as an author, as a man of the theatre, as a journalist, as an intellectual, and especially as a man doomed to live in an absurd world of hangmen and victims, binders and bound, sacrificers and sacrificed, and crucifiers and crucified. Three main metaphors of western culture can assist in understanding Camus thinking about violence the bound Prometheus, a hero of Greek mythology the sacrifice of Isaac, one of the chief dramas of Jewish monotheism and the crucifixion of Jesus, the founding event of Christianity. The bound, the sacrificed, and the crucified represent three perspectives through which David Ohana examines the place of ideological violence and its limits in the works of Albert Camus. [Subject Philosophy, Albert Camus, Literary Criticism] **