Pantheon: A New History of Roman Religion

German scholar Rüpke (From Jupiter to Christ) takes on too much in his attempt to create a comprehensive view of Roman religion from the Iron Age through the development of Christianity. Rüpke synthesizes multiple fields of study in his chronological analysis of how religion intertwined with societal, political, and economic forces during a period of more than 1,000 years. While his command of the material is clear, the scholarship competes with the narrative, and his points are often lost in dense, obscure blocks of text. The translation can be clunky, but his efforts were presumably hampered by Rüpke’s voluble style, which frequently produces impenetrable sentences. For instance, when Rüpke discusses the interests of prominent third-century C.E. theologian Hippolytus: “Exegetical strategies developed by Hellenistic philologists in Pergamum and Alexandria, Stoic techniques for creating etymologies and discovering analogies, and the awareness that spiritual messages might be hidden between the lines of a text (e.g., in Plato): all of these were grist to his mill.” Given over 200 pages of footnotes, Rüpke’s tome will find most use as a reference guide for scholars. (Feb.)