Impact of Imperial Rome on Religions, Ritual and Religious Life in the Roman Empire

This volume presents the proceedings of the fifth workshop of the international thematic network ‚Impact of Empire’, which concentrates on the history of the Roman Empire, c. 200 B.C. - A.D. 476, and, under the chairmanship of Lukas de Blois and Olivier Hekster (University of Nijmegen, The Netherlands), brings together ancient historians, archaeologists, classicists and specialists on Roman law from some 28 European and North American universities. The fifth volume focuses on the impact of imperial Rome on religions, ritual and religious life in the Roman Empire. The following topics are treated: connections between Roman expansion and religion, the imperial impact on local cults, cultic personnel (priests, priestesses and bishops), and the divinity of Roman Emperors.

Lukas de Blois is Professor of Ancient History at the Radboud University Nijmegen in The Netherlands. He has published books and articles on the history of the Roman Empire in the third century A.D., the history of the Late Roman Republic, ancient historiography (Sallust, Tacitus, Cassius Dio), Plutarch’s biographies, and Greek Sicily in the fourth century B.C. He has also published a manual (L. de Blois & R.J. van der Spek, Introduction to the Ancient World, 1997).