Dio, gli dei e il divino : religione e identità nei carmina del Nord Africa

Includes bibliographical references and index.

This book addresses the forms of public expression of religious life and the adherence to different belief systems through the medium of the verse inscriptions (carmina epigraphica) which stem from Roman North Africa and can be assigned to the timespan that begins with Commodus and ends with the departure from Carthage of the Vandal fleet sent by Genseric to sack Rome. Through the testimony of carmina, the book brings to light the wide range of eschatological views peculiar to the African provinces, the expression of the bond between deities and the faithful and that between society and religious groups, as well as the emergence of religious disputes and conflicts in the Auseinandersetzung between paganism and Christianity, between orthodoxy and heresy/schism (Arianism/Donatism).

A large space is also devoted to carmina which show no univocal, coherent and monolithic affiliation to a specific religion, but rather a factual juxtaposition of beliefs that are alien and even antithetical to each other. Also included are apotropaic inscriptions, in which ancestral forms of local religiosity re-emerge. Ultimately, all the carmina of the corpus are arranged in a final epigraphic catalogue which provides historical and archaeological details of the epigraphic supports, as well as the critical apparatus relevant to each carmen [Publisher's text].

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