Articles

• Hieroglyphs in Greek Magical Texts?

  7-12.

  György Németh

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  406

  The paper examines hieroglyphs and magic signs resembling hieroglyphs attested in Greek and demotic magical texts.

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  972

• Jungfrauen in Waffen: Camilla Virgo, Iuturna Virago

  13-36.

  Thomas Köves-Zulauf

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  376

  The paper starts with the analysis of the ambiguous figure of the “Italic Amazon” Camilla in the Aeneis. Two main factors are analysed, the role of the spear in the life of this “armed virgin” and her relations with natural surroundings, especially with rivers like the Amasenus and with lakes and marshes generally. Both prove to be fateful. The second factor is also noticeable with the other armed virgin of the Aeneis, Iuturna, who emerges as an upgraded and contrasting parallel to Camilla. Iuturna virago shows similarities with another famous virago of Latin literature, the Paluda virago of Ennius, and this gives an opportunity to evoke other women of the Roman tradition in connection with rivers and marshes, a phenomenon which proves to be a suitable topic for future exanimation.

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  504

• The Ambiguous Arms of Aeneas

  37-42.

  Lee Fratantuono

  Views:

  301

  Virgil subtly connects the scene of Dido’s discussion with her sister Anna about the new Trojan arrival Aeneas, and the later first arrival of the Trojans in Latium. By a careful corre-spondence between the two passages, Virgil portends the dark amatory rationale behind the sub-sequent outbreak of war in Italy

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  387

• Henrik Finály and Roman Dacia: The Contributions of a 19th Century Hungarian Po-Lymath to the Development of Roman Provincial Archaeology in Transylvania

  43-62.

  Dávid Petruţ

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  300

  By any standards Henrik Finály was a true polymath, his overarching interests ranging from mathematics to classical studies, modern linguistics and literature, economics, medieval studies and archaeology. Although he was among the first Hungarian antiquarians to pursue systematic scholarly investigations of Roman Dacia, his contribution in this field has been unfairly downgraded in the intervening years, and his name almost erased from the research history of the province. The main goal of the paper is to provide a comprehensive insight into, and a critical overview of the early stages of Roman Dacia studies through the work of Henrik Finály in the social, political and cultural context of 19th century Transylvania.

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  410

• Die Beschreibung von „Scythia” und die Ungarischen Chroniken

  63–76.

  Jenő Darkó

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  1

  In the Hungarian chronicles „Scythia” is the ancient land of the Hungarians. The description of Scythia in the chronicles clearly has literary precursors. The information about Scythia and the Scythians recorded by Anonymus and the Hungarian chronicles can ultimately be traced back to Herodotus and the periplus literature about Ionia. Franz Rühl (1880) claimed that the source for Anonymus’s description was Justinus, who epitomized the texts by the Augustan historian Pompeius Trogus. Later Péter Váczy asserted that the source used by Anonymus was not Regino, but a lesser known epitome titled Exordia Scythica (Scythian Beginnings) linked to the history of the Goths. According to Péter Váczy an intermediate source must connect the Hungarian chronicles and its sources, as the correspondence between the descriptions of Scythia in Hungarian chronicles is only possible if Exordia was used by the author of the Gesta Ungarorum (11th century), the common source for Hungarian chronicles. 

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• The Armaac Project

  79–82.

  Francisco Marco Simón

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  1

  No abstract is available for this article, published in Acta Classica Universitatis Scientiarum Debreceniensis, Issue LIII (2017). Please consult the full text for further details.

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  0

• Other People’s Gods: Atheism, Demonisation, and Interpretatio from Strabo to Bernardino De Sahagún

  83–107.

  Francisco Marco Simón

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  1

  This paper aims to compare the different strategies used by the colonizers to conceptualize the gods of the vanquished peoples in the interreligious contacts that took place in Hellenistico-Roman Antiquity and in Mesoamerica, from the negation of the alien’s religious system (a feature of extreme barbarism sometimes described in terms of “atheism”) to the more common demonisation of the foreign divinities in terms of idolatry, to the different levels of assimilating them to one’s own religious cosmology through the diverse mechanisms of interpretatio.

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• La religión greco-romana como modelo comparativo en la década primera de Pedro Mártir de Anglería

  109–123.

  Antón Alvar Nuño

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  1

  Even though Lafitau is generally considered the forefather of comparative ethnography, the first Chroniclers of Indies (Cronistas de Indias) frequently resorted to Graeco-Roman religion in order to describe the polytheisms of the New World. The first Chronicler who interpreted the New World as the empirical proof of the revival of the Classical World was Pedro Mártir de Anglería. This paper analyses Pedro Mártir’s frequent comparisons with Roman religion in his description of taíno religion and the intellectual background that allowed for the first step towards the formalisation of a theory of polytheism.

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• La eucarística en la evangelización agustina y la portada de Yuriria, México

  125–162.

  María Celia Fontana Calvo

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  1

  The New Spain Augustinians of the province of the Most Holy Name of Jesus developed in several of their churches eucharistic doors. Acolman was the first in the present State of Mexico, and a paradigmatic case. Later Yuriria was constructed in Guanajuato, at that time frontier with the fearsome Chichimeca’s Indians. This article deals with the theological and doctrinal factors that give rise to this type of portal, its variants and its enormous importance. The Augustinians were the only ones among the first evangelizers of ancient Mesoamerica who gave communion to the natives. By means of this salvation instrument, the friars gave themselves an extraordinary opportunity to compensate the souls lost by Luther in Europe and, on the other hand, to offer to the neophytes earthly benefits and the future life that only communion, according to Dogma, could provide. The Eucharist was used as an important strategy in evangelization, adaptable to very concrete situations, as shown by the portal of the church of Yuriria. 

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• Demonios, guerreros y engaños entre el mundo antiguo y la América colonial

  163–177.

  Paolo Taviani

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  1

  When Christopher Columbus arrives in the New World he is surprised to see that the natives are not familiar with weapons made of metal. Watching them touch the metal blades unaware of the risk of accidentally hurting themselves, Columbus convinces himself that Europeans could get these people to do anything. Columbus informs the Spanish monarchs of his opinion. Then, within a short period of time things change drastically in America, and in Europe images of Indios as cannibals begin to circulate. However, it seems as if there is a desire to somehow maintain that wonderful first impression. The image of the Indios fighting Europeans offers a very specific vision of this enemy. It was an image that had its roots in stereotypes of the past. But it had been reshaped into a new and original version. It was an image that did not have to hinder the expansion of European traffic and conquest.

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• The Three Souls of the Otomi

  179–195.

  David Charles Wright-Carr

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  1

  The study of documental sources from New Spain (today Mexico) provides a window into the beliefs of the Otomi people regarding what is called ‘soul’ in Western culture. To begin, I shall explain who these people were and how they interacted with their Nahua neighbors in central Mexico. Then, I analyze the words, in the Nahuatl and Otomi languages, belonging to semantic fields that relate to the Christian concept of the soul. We find many calques, or semantic loans, revealing that these two language groups shared beliefs in multiple animic essences that could survive the death of the body. Finally, I present evidence from colonial period documental sources, showing how the beliefs of the Otomi were affected by the teachings of Christian priests. In these texts, one may observe the resistance of the Otomi people as a reaction to the efforts of the missionaries to impose Catholic doctrine and ritual on the native population.

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• Conocer y representar al otro en América, siglo xvi. La actualización del pasado en el nuevo mundo

  197–214.

  Fernando López Meraz

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  1

  Tracing the history of how West has described the Other would take us very far in time and space. There are, however, some fundamental actions and intentions, as well as guidelines in that discourse. Here is a review of some that allowed the writing of the American by sixteenth-century friars, mainly Franciscans, as inheritors of that tradition. Particular attention is paid to how actions/mechanisms used prior to America, such as interpretatio, euhemerism and inquisitio, were essential when writing about Mesoamerican natives.

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• ‘We Know What You Remember’. Notes on the Ecclesiastical Discourse about Religious Acculturation and Subaltern Memories in Late Antique and Early Medieval Gaul

  215–239.

  Anti Johannes Lampinen

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  1

  The article studies the literary representation of subaltern religiosities in the context of Late Roman and Early Merovingian ecclesiastical writing in Gaul, and its relationship with Late Antique ideas about the characteristics of rural societies. By projecting an image of an atavistic rustic mass of religiously substandard commoners, who moreover were unable to participate constructively in most kinds of religious acculturation, the episcopal hierarchy of Gaul was able to tap into a powerful source of legitimacy for their privileges. These chains of utterances, examined through the acta of church councils and synods and compared with hagiographical writing, gained plausibility from their very participation in a literary tradition of ethnographicising expositions of subaltern religiosities. By studying techniques of vicarious memory ascription, knowledge ordering, and both intra- and inter-generic enrichment of ecclesiastical texts, I hope to provide some new angles into the Gallo-Roman and Merovingian ecclesiastical writing on lower-class religiosity, which is too often read as a straightforward reflection of conversion processes among the general population. It is suggested that in some historical contexts, socially unequal memory-ascriptions made within conversion narratives can usefully be examined through comparisons with colonial subaltern studies. 

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