Porphyry, Sacrifice, and the Orderly Cosmos

Dans L’Antre des Nymphes, Porphyre répartit en trois groupes les dieux et les lieux des sacrifices qui leur sont offerts. Une telle division est connue des chercheurs qui s’intéressent à la manière dont les Grecs pourraient avoir organisé le monde divin et ses interventions. Mais on a méconnu d’autres affirmations que Porphyre produit à ce sujet dans le traité Sur la philosophie tirée des oracles. Dans les fr. 314 et 315, Porphyre cite de longs extraits d’oracles dans lesquels Apollon répartit les dieux et leurs sacrifices en trois groupes. Il restructure lui-même et justifie ces divisions. Même si Apollon propose plus de catégories que celles auxquelles nous sommes habitués, son approche suggère que la tendance à la catégorisation était plus commune dans la pensée des Anciens que ne l’a prétendu la recherche récente. On voit aussi que Porphyre fait en sorte de ramener les catégories d’Apollon à trois seulement. En conclusion, de telles observations peuvent nous aider à mieux saisir nos pratiques en tant qu’historiens des religions.Porphyry’s statement from On the Cave of the Nymphs, in which he divides gods and their places of sacrifice into three groups, is familiar to scholars interested in how the Greeks may have categorized the divine world and its workings. But we have overlooked other important statements on these topics that Porphyry made in On the Philosophy from Oracles. Here I focus on fr. 314 and 315, where Porphyry quotes extensive portions of oracles in which Apollo divides the gods and their proper sacrifices into groups; Porphyry himself then streamlines and justifies those divisions. Although Apollo presents us with many more categories than we are accustomed to look for, his approach suggests that the drive to categorize was more common in ancient thought than recent scholarship has allowed. I also show that Porphyry works to collapse Apollo’s categories into only three. I end with comments about how these observations may help us better understand our practices as scholars of religion

Restless dead: encounters between the living and the dead in ancient Greece

During the archaic and classical periods, Greek ideas about the dead evolved in response to changing social and cultural conditions - most notably changes associated with the development of the polis, such as funerary legislation, and changes due to increased contacts with cultures of the ancient Near East. In Restless Dead , Sarah Iles Johnston presents and interprets these changes, using them to build a complex picture of the way in which the society of the dead reflected that of the living, expressing and defusing its tensions, reiterating its values and eventually becoming a source of significant power for those who knew how to control it. She draws on both well-known sources, such as Athenian tragedies, and newer texts, such as the Derveni Papyrus and a recently published lex sacra from Selinous.Topics of focus include the origin of the goes (the ritual practitioner who made interaction with the dead his specialty), the threat to the living presented by the ghosts of those who died dishonorably or prematurely, the development of Hecate into a mistress of ghosts and its connection to female rites of transition, and the complex nature of the Erinyes. Restless Dead culminates with a new reading of Aeschylus' Oresteia that emphasizes how Athenian myth and cult manipulated ideas about the dead to serve political and social ends

Entretien avec Fritz Graf et Sarah Iles Johnston

Barbu Daniel, Meylan Nicolas, Schwab Aurore, Graf Fritz, Johnston Sarah Iles. Entretien avec Fritz Graf et Sarah Iles Johnston. In: ASDIWAL. Revue genevoise d'anthropologie et d'histoire des religions, n°7, 2012. pp. 21-40