Plutarch’s Religious Landscapes
Rainer Hirsch-Luipold and Lautaro Roig Lanzillotta (eds.), Leyde : Brill, 2021
Description
A Platonist philosopher and priest of Apollo at Delphi, Plutarch (ca. 45-120 CE) covers in his vast oeuvre of miscellaneous writings and biographies of great men virtually every aspect of ancient religion, Greek, Roman, Jewish, Egyptian, Persian. This collection of essays takes the reader on a hike through Plutarch’s Religious Landscapes offering as a compass the philosopher’s considerations on issues of philosophical theology, cult, ethics, politics, natural sciences, hermeneutics, atheism, and life after death. Plutarch provides a unique vantage point to reconstruct and understand many of the interesting developments that were taking in the philosophical and religious world of the first centuries CE.
Table of contents
Introduction
Part 1 An Introductory Survey of Plutarch’s Religious Landscape
Chapter 1 Religions, Religion, and Theology in Plutarch
Part 2 Plutarch’s Theology, Notion of Religion, and Ethics
Chapter 2 Deaf to the Gods: Atheism in Plutarch’s De superstitione
Chapter 3 Plutarch on the Platonic Synthesis: A Synthesis
Chapter 4 Plutarch’s Monotheism and the God of Mathematics
Chapter 5 Plutarch’s Theonomous Ethics and Christianity: A Few Thoughts on a Much-Discussed Problem
Chapter 6 An End in Itself, or a Means to an End? The Role of Ethics in the Second Century: Plutarch’s Moralia and the Nag Hammadi Writings
Chapter 7 Reincarnation and Other Experiences of the Soul in Plutarch’s De facie: Two Case Studies
Chapter 8 The Conception of the Last Steps towards Salvation Revisited: The Telos of the Soul in Plutarch and Its Context
Chapter 9 Gods, Impiety and Pollution in the Life and Death of Phocion
Chapter 10 The Religiosity of (Greek and Roman) στρατηγοί
Chapter 11 La valeur de la tolma dans les Moralia de Plutarque
Part 3 Plutarch’s Testimony of Ancient Religion
Chapter 12 The Religious Landscape of Plutarch’s Quaestiones Graecae
Chapter 13 Human Sacrifices: Can They Be Justified?
Chapter 14 The Conception of the Goddess Hecate in Plutarch
Chapter 15 Plutarch and the Ambiguity of the God Dionysus
Chapter 16 Interpretations of Dionysus Ἰσοδαίτης in an Orphic Ritual (Plutarch, De E apud Delphos 389A)
Chapter 17 The Epiphany of Dionysus in Elis and the Miracle of the Wine (Plutarch, Quaestiones Graecae 299 B)
Chapter 18 Divination in Plutarch’s Life of Cicero
Part 4 Some Glimpses of the Reception of Plutarch’s Religion
Chapter 19 The Reception of Plutarch’s Universe
Chapter 20 Les daimons de Plutarque et leur réception dans la Renaissance française