How to Build Belief with Blocks: The Religious Affordance of Greco-Roman Funerary Inscriptions

How to Build Belief with Blocks: The Religious Affordance of Greco-Roman Funerary Inscriptions

Kron, Colleen

Doctor of Philosophy, The Ohio State University, 2024, Greek and Latin

This dissertation investigates how ancient Roman people came to believe that stories are true. It focuses on Roman funerary inscriptions in Greek and Latin that make extraordinary eschatological claims about ordinary people. It uses the idea of religious affordances to build an ecological model for understanding funerary inscriptions in context. It adapts the environmental model of visual perception for understanding inscribed epitaphs as a network of three interdependent spheres: the locational, temporal, acculturative, and linguistic affordances of the medium, the material affordances of the substance, and the visual and verbal affordances of the inscribed surface. It takes the ‘Cave of the Vipers,' a late 1st or early 2nd century CE tomb for a Roman woman named Atilia Pomptilla (CIL X 7563–7578), as an extended case study to develop and demonstrate the efficacy of this ecological model. Above all, this dissertation argues for the relevance of belief as a valid analytical concept in the broader study of Greco-Roman religion.

Less

Committee: Fritz Graf (Advisor); K.A. Rask (Committee Member); Gaia Gianni (Committee Member)