by Horatius Piscinus on Tue Jul 06, 2004 12:55 pm
Salvete
THE Germanicus in question was the apparent heir to Tiberius, by the will of Augustus, beloved by the army and people alike for his victories in Germania and because they thought that with him would return the benevelent rule of Augustus after Tiberius. His story is told by Tacitus in Annales 2.69-73. The assault on the temples given at 2.82.
As for your subject, Varro Antiquitates Rerum Divinarum fr. 2-22: no cult statues as they reduce respect for the Gods and introduce error. "Gods do not want sacrifice; their statues want it even less." "The Romans worshipped the Gods without images for a hundred and seventy years years. Had that custom been retained, the worship of the Gods would be more reverently performed." In contrast early portraits of Jesus show him with a magic wand when he raise Lazarus, cured the sick and so on. Christians employed all sorts of magical items, believed to hold powers. See Marvin Meyer and Richard Smith, "Ancient Christian Magic" or even Wallis Budge's "Amulets and Superstitions." Your definition of idolatry may be a little too broad. A better idea may come if you read from the Corpus Hermetic by Walter Scott, "Asclepius III.37 on Egyptian practice where "they invented the art of making gods out of some material substance suited for the purpose, and to this invention they added a supernatural force whereby the images might have power to work good or harm, and combined it with the material substance; that is to say, being able to make souls, they invoked the souls of daemones and implanted them in the statues by means of certain holy and sacred rites." The Romans and Christians alike believed that the Gods instilled powers into certain articles, rather than as the Egyptians or Greek magicians believed that men could command or capture supernatural powers. Thus Christians went about looking for religious articles like the cross, or the Shroud of Turin, because such articles were thought to hold magical powers in the same way as the Spear of Mars had been instilled with divine powers. Augustinus cited Varro in an argument against idolatry, but Varro was not the only Roman thinker who spoke on the subject. Mostly the discussion was over Vesta who was not represented by any man-made image but by a living fire. This was an ideal of the Stoics, Pythagoreans and Neoplatonists alike, who saw living fire as an emblem of the rational mind that governs the universe, and argued that only a fire should be used to represent the Gods. Augustinus borrowed such philosophical ideas, placing them into the Christian tradition, and the argument has gone back and forth since. But if you are speaking about early Christianity there was more idolotry and magical charms with them, than there was with the Religio Romana or the Greek philosophical schools in the first four centuries of the common era, and it is Christian reliance on magical charms that was used as one argument against them. To the Romans Jesus was a magician and his followers were no more than superstitious idolaters.
M Horatius Piscinus
Sapere aude!