Temple of Apollo At Didyma, Turkey
I’m a graduate student of religious sudies. My area of specialization is religions in the Roman Empire. That means I spend most of my day reading, thinking and writing about stuff that people did on the other side of the Atlantic about 2000 years ago, based on written and archaeological materials which were largely written and built by the extremely wealthy 10-20% of the inhabitants of the Empire. How accurate a picture can we get for what daily life was like for the normal family? Their religious practice and belief?
Who cares anyway and why?
I care. I’m fascinated by the way people lived in the past, what they thought what they did. No, I don’t think that my interpretations of the ancient religion is going to change the way the masses think about religion or politics or change the way they behave. I’m not that naïve. But I quite seriously believe that the development of ideas, lifestyles, religious and political thought in the Roman Empire had an enormous impact on the social, political and religious ideologies of today – at least in the areas that used to be the Roman Empire and those areas which are influenced by Christianity, Judaism and Islam. No, the average person isn’t aware of the ways that ancient ideas about religion changed with the rise of Christian emphasis on personal belief and choice or how different an emphasis on orthopraxy really is from an emphasis on orthodoxy and maybe the average person doesn’t care. But I do believe that scholars can influence the ways that people think about these things. Every once in a while, a discovery, a book, or a movie comes along and piques the interest of the average person, leading them to hit the library or the internet to get more information. In my fantasy, this person reads and thinks about the history of religion and is exposed to the varieties of ways people were religious – there were many ways of being Pagan (traditional Roman, Greek & other religions), Christian and Jewish in antiquity.
I care about the ways that people have been human and given meaning to their lives. In the introduction to Twice Neokoros Steve Friesen paraphrases a great scholar (David Mitten) as saying, “The humane task of the archaeologist is the recovery of human voices that were nearly lost from the record of our species’ search for meaning.” This is not only the task of an archaeologist, but of all scholars of antiquity. Historians, classicists, linguists and scholars of ancient religion should all consider themselves charged to recover the lost voices, lost meanings and lost human expression and experience. This is why it matters. This why I study religions of the Roman Empire. This is why the lives, deaths, literature, and ruins of people and cultures who lived 2000 years ago matter.
So sure, I’m willing to consider that some of my interests are so specialized as to be perceived as “masturbatory” – that I’m carrying out research for my own interest and self-satisfaction. I don’t’ work in a vacuum, however, and my work will never be PURELY masturbatory because it is part of the larger scholarly conversation and will have ramifications I can’t even foresee. My research contributes to a larger body of scholarship that does have an effect on the way people who are not professional scholars perceive history and religion. Perhaps this larger body of scholarship will even allow people to question their assumptions and think about why they think and believe what they do. I think everyone should question their presuppositions, assumptions and faith so that they can really understand themselves.
In the end, I guess it is masturbatory in the sense that I enjoy my research very much and I do it for myself; but that doesn’t make it any less important for the scholarly conversation and the effect all scholars hope their work will have on the way people think about humanity and themselves. Rome does matter, even now.
Posted by liviaaugusta 
