Search Results

A graffito discovered in the temple of Hercules Curinus at Sulmo allows us to explore the ritual logic of the Roman vow, undoubtedly one of the most characteristic rites in Roman religion, with its specific vocabulary and timing, unlike, for example, the Christian vow. In most cases, vows — whether they are modest such as the one from the temple at Sulmo, or grand such as those we find on offerings in metal or marble — recall one aspect or phase of the rite. The text from Sulmo is one of the rare votive texts that gives us the two principal phases of the vow, announcement and fulfilment.

The pagan drawing known as the graffito of Alexamenos illustrates the scandal of the worship of a “crucified God” in the Roman Hellenistic world. From Roman documents, an approximate idea of what the historical crucifixion of Jesus was like can be reconstructed. However, this historical event was soon translated into the spheres of religious myth and theology. The New Testament itself provides an early aesthetic mediation of the meaning of the cross. The Fathers of the Church, in particular Athanasius and Augustine, expand on New Testament concepts and images to understand the cross as the symbol of Christ’s divine victory, and produce a variety of conceptual explanations of its function in human salvation. Representations of the cross in this period, like the hymns of Venantius Fortunatus and the Byzantine liturgy, present it as the sign and instrument of Christ’s victory over sin and death.

This chapter looks at a unique instance of the survival on a large scale of a type of everyday writing usually lost in its entirety, or at best preserved only in isolated places: the informal inscription, or graffito. It reports a remarkable discovery made in the winter of 2003 of a body of writing that stood in a public place and, in a sense, was written on stone, but which has little in common with most monumental epigraphy. The chapter notes that this find is the graffiti of the basement level of the basilica in the agora of Smyrna, modern Izmir. It further reports that the ground level of the basilica and the east and west ends of the basement level were excavated before the Second World War by Selâhattin Kantar, then director of the Izmir Museum, and Fritz Milner of the German Archaeological Institute, and published by Kantar after the war in collaboration with the German archaeologist Rudolf Naumann.