Browsing by Subject "Divinity"

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Altars and Empire : studies in Roman altars and divine kingship (c.300 B.C.- A.D. 96)
(2013-12) Cline, Lea Kimberly; Clarke, John R., 1945-; Davies, Penelope J. E., 1964-
In the concluding remarks to her 1913 dissertation, Helen Bowerman notes that “[a]lthough the sacrificial altars [sic] form a group of comparatively unimportant monuments.” This study is an attempt to both refute Bowerman’s conclusion and to replace altars into the dialogue about Roman architecture and political propaganda during the late Republic and early Empire. While I challenge the standard, scholarly categorical definition of Roman altars set forth in the early 20th century, the primary aim of my study is to explore the complex environments in which altars, of all sizes, appear in the Imperial period and the ways in which these altars performed in their political and urban contexts. Furthermore, with an eye to topographical relationships in Rome itself, I trace the use and manipulation of altars by emperors, a type of analysis that has long benefitted our understanding of other manifestations of state, honorific monuments. As monuments, altars were unique in their stylistic and contextual adaptability while simultaneously remaining essentially uniform in their function, the place of ritual sacrifice. Congruently, I explore the role that altars played in the negotiation between an emperor’s position as a man and his potential as a divinity. That is, I examine the means by which the emperor—or dictator in the case of Caesar—used the altar form to at once avoid direct assimilation with the gods while simultaneously establishing the veneration of divine powers unequivocally associated with him. In this discussion, I seek to define how the altar form, its imagery, and the honorific system in which it operated conceptualized the new office of the princeps, reconceived the traditional institutions of power, and transformed the role of altar monuments in the early Empire.
Divinity and humanity in Aristotle's ethics
(2016-08) Green, Jerry, Jr. Dwayne; White, Stephen A. (Stephen Augustus); Dancy, Jonathan; Evans, Mathew; Hankinson, Robert J; Woodruff, Paul; Moss, Jessica
Aristotle wrote two major ethical works, the Nicomachean Ethics (NE) and Eudemian Ethics (EE), and the relationship between the two has long been a matter of scholarly controversy. To further complicate things, three chapters are printed verbatim in the middle of both works: NE V-VII = EE IV-VI. Without knowing where these so-called ‘Common Books’ properly belong, we cannot know even what constitutes the text of the NE or EE, let alone the relationships between them. The nearly universal consensus is that the Common Books were written as part of the early EE, then revised or replaced for the later NE, at which point the later version supplanted the EE originals even in the EE manuscripts. I argue here that this is likely incorrect: the Common Books do not belong in the NE at all. The NE defends a view where persons are identified with a single part of the soul that (i) is the seat of both theoretical and practical wisdom, and (ii) is divine in a way that makes human happiness the same kind of activity as the gods’ activity. The Common Books reject both these positions, as does the EE. This suggests that the Common Books are philosophically inconsistent with the NE; it is therefore probable the Common Books were neither written as a part of the NE nor revised for inclusion in it. I conclude by defending the results and methodology of this project from various objections, and show how the undisputed NE can still form a complete treatise even without the Common Books.