Books on the topic 'Canned shrimps'

This chapter deals with oracles, a paradigmatic type of religious communication that cannot be said to accomplish any of the typical aims that otherwise may be taken for granted—such as transmitting information, influencing recipients or observers, or fostering relationships. As Kindt shows, some Greek oracular shrines encouraged misinterpretation by adopting an enigmatic style of expression that mixed ambiguity with vagueness, opacity, and a countervailing impression of divine infallibility; she focuses on this “enigmatic voice” at Delphi, the most famous ancient oracle. She seeks to explain why this voice characterizes some oracles but not others; how it complicates the interpretation of oracular messages; and how oracles confirm, but adjust, the Greeks’ notion of a barely bridgeable gap between human and divine participants in their polytheistic religion.

The Roman Martyrs contains translations of forty Latin passiones of saints who were martyred in Rome or its near environs, during the period before the ‘peace of the Church’ (c. 312). Some of these Roman martyrs are universally known — SS. Agnes, Sebastian or Laurence, for example — but others are scarcely known outside the ecclesiastical landscape of Rome itself. Each of the translated passiones, which vary in length from a few paragraphs to over ninety, is accompanied by an individual introduction and commentary; the translations are preceded by an Introduction which describes the principal features of this little-known genre of Christian literature. The Roman passiones martyrum have never previously been collected together, and have never been translated into a modern language. They were mostly composed during the period 425 x 675, by anonymous authors who who were presumably clerics of the Roman churches or cemeteries which housed the martyrs’ remains. It is clear that they were composed in response to the huge explosion of pilgrim traffic to martyrial shrines from the late fourth century onwards, at a time when authentic records (protocols) of their trials and executions had long since vanished, and the authors of the passiones were obliged to imagine the circumstances in which martyrs were tried and executed. The passiones are works of pure fiction; and because they abound in ludicrous errors of chronology, they have been largely ignored by historians of the early Church. But although they cannot be used as evidence for the original martyrdoms, they nevertheless allow a fascinating glimpse of the concerns which animated Christians during the period in question: for example, the preservation of virginity, or the ever-present threat posed by pagan practices. And because certain aspects of Roman life will have changed little between (say) the second century and the fifth, the passiones throw valuable light on many aspects of Roman society, not least the nature of a trial before an urban prefect, and the horrendous tortures which were a central feature of such trials. Above all, perhaps, the passiones are an indispensable resource for understanding the topography of late antique Rome and its environs, since they characteristically contain detailed reference to the places where the martyrs were tried, executed, and buried. The book contains five Appendices containing translations of texts relevant to the study of Roman martyrs: the Depositio martyrum of A.D. 354 (Appendix I); the epigrammata of Pope Damasus d. 384) which pertain to Roman martyrs treated in the passiones (II); entries pertaining to Roman martyrs in the Martyrologium Hieronymianum (III); entries in seventh-century pilgrim itineraries pertaining to shrines of Roman martyrs in suburban cemeteries (IV); and entries commemorating these martyrs in early Roman liturgical books (V).