What did ancient Christians find appealing about the book of Revelation, a story about the end of the world? To be sure, this text, also known as the Apocalypse, includes some of the Western world’s most enduring images. In its visions clash the “gods and monsters” of Christianity: the four riders on horseback who visit famine and disaster upon a dying world; the final battle between a multiheaded beast and the armies of heaven; and the great day of cosmic judgment that gives way to the blinding glory of a “new heaven and a new earth” (Rev. 21:1). The poetical...

Gazing upon the Ara Pacis Augustae, reconstructed and isolated, Benito Mussolini realized something was missing. So upon this “altar to peace” the Italian premier commissioned the engraving of the Res Gestae Divi Augusti, a chronicle of achievements Mussolini deemed to be unparalleled in the history of ancient Rome. The inscription, composed by an elderly Augustus in his seventy-sixth year, is the Roman emperor’s own account of his conquests, his munificent gestures, and his pietas—that is, his devotion to the gods and to the state.² Though produced well after Octavian’s victory at Actium in 31 B.C.E., this document marks the...

In his singular biography of Abraham the “sage,” the Jewish philosopher Philo embarks on a digression about the physical senses. Invoking a traditional, Aristotelian hierarchy of the senses, he explains that “a special precedence must be given to sight, for God has made it the queen (βασιλίδα) of the other senses.”¹ Not all members of the sensorium are created equal. In support, Philo draws on the link between the eyes and the soul. The eyes reflect the “phases” (τροπαι̑ς) of the Ψνχή, so that “when the soul feels grief, the eyes are full of anxiety and depression; but when it...

The critical and commercial success of the 2000 film Gladiator indicates that the ancient Roman combatants continue to intrigue modern Americans. Appealing to this interest seems to have been the goal of a recent United States Marine Corps television advertisement, which features a kind of gladiatorial contest. Fast and furious, the ad tells its tale in less than thirty seconds. At first, a gigantic arena, filled with cheering spectators, looms on the horizon. Then we see a young man in a t-shirt and jeans against a dark, animated background of thunderclouds and whirring machinery, a scene from some science-fictional, post-apocalyptic...

A remarkable ecphrasis surfaces in the middle of the Greek romance Leukippe and Kleitophon, one of the “purple passages” for which the genre is famous.¹ After a shipwreck, the novel’s two leading characters float to shore in Pelousion, where they enter the temple of Zeus Kasios. There Leukippe and Kleitophon view a painting, evidently a diptych, in the rear of the temple.² It depicts the myths of Andromeda and Prometheus, which, suggests the narrator Kleitophon, contain several parallels. Both Andromeda and Prometheus are chained to rocks; both are pursued by wild beasts; and both are rescued by Argive heroes. Turning...

A Christian Bishop, Polycarp of Smyrna, was executed in the year 155 C.E. in full view of an angry mob. The account of this execution, the Martyrdom of Polycarp, not only contains important evidence of the pagan persecution of Christians; it, like the book of Revelation, bears witness also to the workings of the early Christian imagination. But the nascent Christian mentality of Revelation seems quite dissimilar to that of the Martyrdom of Polycarp.¹ The Martyrdom of Polycarp pushes the abuse heaped upon Christians to the fore, while Revelation, as we have seen, invests its spectacular energies in the careful...