LOEB FOUNDATION AWARDS BMC PROFESSORS FELLOWSHIPS

For the second year in a row, a young Bryn Mawr classicist has won Harvard University's competitive Loeb Classical Library Foundation Fellowship. During the 2005-06 academic year, the grant will help to fund Assistant Professor of Latin Catherine Conybeare's research in Rome for an international scholarly collaboration that will produce a new commentary on St. Augustine's City of God. At the same time, Assistant Professor of Greek Radcliffe G. Edmonds III will be returning from a Loeb-funded year spent researching a book that takes a fresh look at a set of ancient Greek religious practices that were construed as proto-Christian by 19th-century scholars.

Conybeare: Making a Key Text Accessible

Conybeare's commentary on Book I of Augustine's 22-book opus will initiate a major project organized by Professor Gillian Clark of Bristol University in England. City of God, Conybeare explains, was written after Rome was sacked by Vandals. Augustine, the bishop of Carthage, was already emerging as one of the Christian Church's most important thinkers. City of God began as Augustine's response to a disgruntled Roman aristocrat's complaint that the Roman Empire's conversion to Christianity about a century before had done little to protect it from its enemies.

"City of God is a foundational text for scholars of many disciplines — not only theologians and classicists, but also philosophers, political scientists and historians. It outlines an early Christian theory of the state and of just war; it also preserves large sections of classical texts that would otherwise have been lost."

The last commentary on City of God as a whole was a slim volume published by J.E.C. Welldon in 1924. "Welldon's book is a wonderful resource," Conybeare says, "but he was a single scholar confronting a huge text. As the dean of Durham Cathedral, his interest skewed toward the minutiae of church doctrine, and he assumed that his readers would be thoroughly educated in Greek and Latin — an assumption we can no longer make. So there is quite an urgent need to produce a commentary that is thoroughly indexed and accessible, especially to people who will not read all 22 volumes."

Oxford University Press has undertaken to publish the entire commentary, both in print and on a fully searchable Web site. According to Conybeare, 14 scholars have agreed to participate in the project so far; she and Clark will be the first to devote a full year to it.

In Rome, Conybeare will have access to the library of the Augustinianum, the academic center of the Augustinian order, as well as the Vatican Library. She hopes while she is there to begin research on a separate volume, a monograph on laughter in antiquity.

Edmonds: A Label, Not a Movement

Some 1,500 years after Augustine began to codify the principles and practices of the Christian Church into coherent doctrines, says Edmonds, Western scholars expected religions to display doctrinal coherence — and where they didn't find it, they invented it.

Edmonds' Loeb project focuses on Orphism, which was taken by 19th-century scholars to be an ancient Greek religious tradition, a minority practice, with a doctrine of original sin and a focus on practices of purification to expiate it. Orphism has commonly been said to rest on a central founding myth in which the Titans dismember and devour the god Zagreus (another name for Dionysus). A furious Zeus revives Zagreus and incinerates the Titans with a thunderbolt. Humankind springs from their ashes, endowed with the divinity of Dionysus and burdened with the guilt of the Titans.

According to Edmonds, countless texts attributed to Orpheus have been interpreted in light of this central myth. The problem, he argues, is that the myth is the fabrication of 19th-century scholars who were looking for the origins of Christianity in classical antiquity.

"There are four essential elements of the myth," Edmonds says: "the dismemberment of Zagreus, the punishment of the Titans, the generation of humans from their remains and the guilt they inherit. All four of these elements can be found in any number of places in the Greek tradition — but there is no one place in the primary literature where they all come together."

"In short, 'Orphism' is more complicated than it once looked," Edmonds concludes. "There are certainly references in Greek literature — often insulting ones — to followers of Orpheus. But there's no evidence that they hewed to a single tradition with a canonical set of stories or doctrines. We can't understand ancient Greek religion using modern Christian models; we can only make sense of the evidence within the dynamics of ancient polytheism. To the extent that 'Orphism' existed, it was a name given to a variety of religious practices that deliberately departed from the norm, elaborating on and altering traditional myths and rituals in innovative ways, while appealing to the authority of tradition by invoking the name of Orpheus, the greatest of poets."

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