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A Feast in Carthage: Testing the Limits of ‘Secularity’ in Late Antiquity

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  15 October 2020

Mattias P. Gassman
Mattias P. Gassman*
Affiliation:
University of Oxford
*
[email protected]
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Abstract

A now conventional model, developed by Robert Markus, sees late Roman cities as fundamentally secular landscapes. Focusing on Augustine's sermon against a feast of the genius of Carthage (Sermo 62), this article argues that narratives of ‘secularity’ have neglected pagans’ own attitudes and the circumstances that drove ordinary Christians’ participation in civic rites. Behind Augustine's charges of ‘idolatry’ lay the religious convictions of the feast's non-Christian sponsors and behind their expectations of Christian attendance lay the recent destruction of a pagan shrine on church property. For Augustine's listeners to construe the feast as religiously irrelevant was an expression not of routine social solidarity, but of fear before powerful patrons. What was ‘secular’ was open to doubt and negotiation, both here and in empire-wide celebrations such as the Kalends of January; the boundary between the ‘pagan’ and the ‘secular’ can be located only with careful attention to the diversity of opinions about each particular rite.

Keywords

secularityRoman religionCarthageAugustinepaganismreligious conflictreligious identity
Type
Articles
Information
The Journal of Roman Studies , Volume 110 , November 2020 , pp. 199 - 219
Copyright
Copyright © The Author(s), 2020. Published by The Society for the Promotion of Roman Studies

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Footnotes

This paper derives from a British Academy Postdoctoral Fellowship. Drafts were presented at seminars in Oxford and Cambridge; I thank the participants, and especially Conrad Leyser, Neil McLynn, Catherine Conybeare and David Lambert, for their comments, David Riggs for discussion of the sermon's dating, and the Journal's Editor and anonymous readers for incisive suggestions.

References

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