Soon after Roman mint masters began issuing the silver denarius (traditional date 187 B.C.), they discovered that they could employ coinage as newspapers and PR by individualizing the imagery on each side of the coi...Soon after Roman mint masters began issuing the silver denarius (traditional date 187 B.C.), they discovered that they could employ coinage as newspapers and PR by individualizing the imagery on each side of the coin with references to their ancestry, current events, and/or their religious offices to increase their name recognition in order to win votes. It should come as no surprise that the Divine Julius ordered his mint masters to issue coinage that advertised all of the above features to circulate his good reputation in what our modern political scientists would call propaganda. After Julius' enemies began to attack his reputation, some of his partisans boasted of their closeness to him on coinage by recycling specific coin images. What is surprising is how these partisans adopted the exact imagery Julius had used to advertise his own religious résumé on their coinage, even though these religious images could not and did not apply to them specifically. Apparently, Julius' religious résumé no longer demonstrated a religious portfolio, but had transformed into a badge of partisanship, however thinly it applied, so that the religious symbols themselves retained only the function of an association with Julius without their original and intrinsic meaning.展开更多
This article aims to make a brief presentation on the elements of material culture in the ancient Palestinian region,mainly coins,which were removed from their production context and placed in funerary contexts(coins ...This article aims to make a brief presentation on the elements of material culture in the ancient Palestinian region,mainly coins,which were removed from their production context and placed in funerary contexts(coins were often buried in graves),thus converted in amulets,acquiring magical and apotropaic senses.We will use examples verified in different parts of the Roman Empire,as in Pithekússai(modest island,which is in the Italian Peninsula),on the banks of the Thames,in Celtic contexts,more specifically in the current city of Lezoux,France,in the ancient city of Aquincum,present day Budapest,also in Tel Maresha and Tiberias,present-day Israel,to demonstrate how these practices were recurrent throughout the Empire.It is also our intention to observe iconographic elements that bring apotropaic content in their formulations,because,in addition to the role that coins could play in connecting the worlds of men and gods,many people believed that they had the power to project magical and apotropaic strength through images powerful that they portrayed.展开更多
文摘Soon after Roman mint masters began issuing the silver denarius (traditional date 187 B.C.), they discovered that they could employ coinage as newspapers and PR by individualizing the imagery on each side of the coin with references to their ancestry, current events, and/or their religious offices to increase their name recognition in order to win votes. It should come as no surprise that the Divine Julius ordered his mint masters to issue coinage that advertised all of the above features to circulate his good reputation in what our modern political scientists would call propaganda. After Julius' enemies began to attack his reputation, some of his partisans boasted of their closeness to him on coinage by recycling specific coin images. What is surprising is how these partisans adopted the exact imagery Julius had used to advertise his own religious résumé on their coinage, even though these religious images could not and did not apply to them specifically. Apparently, Julius' religious résumé no longer demonstrated a religious portfolio, but had transformed into a badge of partisanship, however thinly it applied, so that the religious symbols themselves retained only the function of an association with Julius without their original and intrinsic meaning.
文摘This article aims to make a brief presentation on the elements of material culture in the ancient Palestinian region,mainly coins,which were removed from their production context and placed in funerary contexts(coins were often buried in graves),thus converted in amulets,acquiring magical and apotropaic senses.We will use examples verified in different parts of the Roman Empire,as in Pithekússai(modest island,which is in the Italian Peninsula),on the banks of the Thames,in Celtic contexts,more specifically in the current city of Lezoux,France,in the ancient city of Aquincum,present day Budapest,also in Tel Maresha and Tiberias,present-day Israel,to demonstrate how these practices were recurrent throughout the Empire.It is also our intention to observe iconographic elements that bring apotropaic content in their formulations,because,in addition to the role that coins could play in connecting the worlds of men and gods,many people believed that they had the power to project magical and apotropaic strength through images powerful that they portrayed.