Sistema Regional de Información
en línea para Revistas Científicas de América Latina,
el Caribe, España y Portugal

La aristeía de Diomedes en los cantos IV y V de la Ilíada parece tener la entidad suficiente como para revelar algún tipo de epopeya propia inscrita en los poemas monumentales en el largo proceso de elaboración. El personaje tiene entidad comparable a Odiseo e incluso a Aquiles, apoyados por Atenea. Sin embargo, los estudios del poema completo permiten hablar de un proceso de integración unitaria bien encajado en la totalidad.

In the Acts of the Martyrs (“Acta Matyrum” in latin) recounts the death of the Christians during the period of the persecutions. In fact, the most frequent stories are the ones in which the leadership is represented by Christians in isolation or in small groups, whereas it is outstanding the death of Christians in multitudes. In two texts, which are drawn from the work of Eusebius of Cesarea (Ecclesiastic Church), describes the aggressive attack to a whole community. This fight is starred in uncontrolled groups, chronologically and geographically located in two key periods in the history of anti-Christian persecutions of the Roman Empire. Moreover, all these events are analyzed in this paper, paying attention not only to the social-religious context, but also the hypothetical impact of these or others may have reached in the Christian literature, mainly in the apocalyptic and eschatological thinking of the eyewitness. However, it is obvious a factor that may have influenced the Christian’s minds who lived between one episode and another (177-249 A.D.). For this chronological section have been dated the earliest texts of Nero Redivivus legend placement in a designated eschatological plane from authors like Tertullian or Melito of Sardes as the first pursuer emperor, linked to Antichrist from century III.

Roman prodigy keeps its importance till the end of Imperium as a religious phenomenon, although in these last centuries its meaning experimented a deep transformation in order to adapt to changing circumstances. With the growth of Christianism, the previous long dialogue about discerning real and fictitious divine signs changed into a religious conflict of political legitimacy, an ideological dispute to recognize the own and the alien belief.

This paper presents a review about the link between the Devotio Iberica and the beginning of the imperial cult in Hispania. This relationship was set up by R. Étienne in his dissertation Le culte impérial dans la Péninsule Ibérique. D’Auguste à Dioclétien which allows him to explain the early establishment of the imperial cult in the Iberian Peninsula. In this paper, at first, I present the sources which inform us about the Devotio Iberica and later I analyse the argumentation of R. Étienne which puts in relation both practices (in this part it is analyzed the social structure of the Hispania’s communities, the warlike mentality of this communities and their worship to the foreign chiefs). In this way, it is questioned the suppose originality of the Hispanic devotio and the importance of this practice as a revitalizing agent of the imperial cult in Hispania, a theory that D. Fishwick and L. A. Curchin support nowadays.

In the Shinto tradition, the problem of moral and ritual infraction is deeply related to specific notions about evil and the realm of the dead, that is pollution. Not being possible to withdraw from the ancient texts and practices enough elements to construe a cohesive theory of sin, in this essay the several trends of interpretation are treated from a historical, genealogical and holistic point of view. Key texts are provided for analysis, and the result points to an understanding of the problem wherein there is no room for the metaphysical, or the meta-historical, or else the transcendent. The problem of moral and ritual infraction remains being societal, juridical and relational.

The Dacian Wars of Trajan in the years 101-102 and 105-106 AD, which culminated with the conquest of Dacia by Roman arms and its incorporation into the Empire, are a good example of the conceptions about the presence and role played by the gods in that specific field of war. But they are also a paradigmatic case of frontal religious conflict between the Roman religious system of imperial age and Dacian religion. The last disappeared without a trace as a result of the conquest, a specificity that we intend to highlight in this study.

La tradizione relativa alle battaglie tra l’esercito romano guidato da Mario e i Cimbri e i Teutoni è estremamente interesante dal punto di vista del legame tra divinità e guerra nel mondo romano. In particolare, la vulgata tramandata dagli antichi attesta una stretta connessione tra queste campagne belliche, la carriera di Mario e l’uso propagandistico dei culti operato dal generale in quella circostanza. Questo culto è stato promosso in chiave ellenistica, probabilmente per evocare la ideología pergamena della lotta contro il barbaro, particolarmente opportuna in previsione dello conflitto con il filobarbaro Mitridate.

The aim of this essay is to highlight the pacifist dimension of Dio of Prusa’s Olympic (XIIth) speech, given presumably during the Olympic games of the year 105 a.C.; Dio’s reserve against the Dacian Trajanic war is underlined, which is considered as an expression of aggressive imperialism on the part of the Romans. From this point of view, the Olympic is naturally paralleled by the Trojan (XIth) speech, through which Dio aims at deconstructing the myth of the Trojan war, the original ideological foundation of the contrast between Greeks and barbarians.

From the debate about the pacifist or armed character of the Jesus’ movement, the author studies the position about the violence of the primitive Jewish-Christianism and the heretic Jewish-Christianism against the opinion of the ancient Great Church of the Antiquity, noting that the Judeo-Christian tendencies survived outside the Great Church until the arrival of Islam.

On the magical gems appear different iconographies of armed deities or characters. These include the anguipede with the roosters’ head, Solomon on horseback and others. The presence of iconography by military significance is explained with the apotropaic use of such amulets, which serve to defend against demons and diseases.