Recherche par auteur > Sofia Bianchi Mancini

Although research has long emphasised appropriation processes in the transition from paganism to Christianity or in the conversion of former religious spaces into churches or mosques, archaeological and epigraphic material shows that appropriation was a phenomenon that had been taking place in the Roman Empire since the first century CE. Alien to the Greek praxis, appropriation occurred, roughly put, whenever a social actor imposed a change in the religious message of a previously consecrated space that altered its divine hierarchy or the puissance divine associated with the site. This transformation, which was not simply an adaptation or ‘actualisation' of the space to the stylistic fashions of a given moment, was often manifested in the material arrangement of a sanctuary or temple. Nevertheless, the modifications that a site experienced consisted of major or minor architectural adjustments – be they structural reconfigurations, restorations or additions of statues and cultic inscriptions – that changed the consecration of the place, thus transforming its life and leading individuals to experience and interpret both change and discontinuity in specific ways.

In other words, in the Roman Empire, appropriation can be seen as a religious discontinuity that was implemented through various material means that seem to have emerged gradually in some religious spaces of the Aegean world, initially in the context of the imperial cult, when they underwent a rededication or witnessed the imposition of new divine cohabitations. This strategy was eventually applied to other sacred spaces between the first and third centuries CE and became part of the available repertoire within the religious dialogue of the late Roman Empire. The aim of this paper is therefore to study the origins of such a dynamic, which affected the religious experience of temples and sanctuaries, by tracing its relevant characteristics and evolution through examples such as the sanctuary of Nemesis in Rhamnous (Attica), when its reconsecration to Livia was imposed by the local elites at a time of redefinition of the sacred landscape of the region.