Theology as a Historiographic Tool in Dionysius of Halicarnassus

Religious Studies and Greek and Roman Religions: A Work‐in‐Progress

“…In recent years, however, scholars working on ancient Greek and Roman religious traditions have slowly produced a number of works that bring back these topics in the study of Greek and Roman religions (while also going beyond previous standard works on these issues, such as Jaeger 1947 or the works of the French School), opening thereby the terrain for even more in‐depth studies on ancient theology and divine beings that should also include discourses and theories from Religious Studies. Hence, the traditional and virtually normative view of Roman religion as a ritualistic one has been interestingly reexamined from the perspective of a religious worldview that takes god‐talk, or theology (and thus belief in a religious system), as central in a number of recent works (Rüpke 2012; Driediger‐Murphy 2014; Morgan 2015; MacRae 2016; Latham 2016; King 2020), whereas the Roman deities and belief have attracted a renewed interest that goes beyond the mere descriptive mode (Phillips III 2000; Bendlin 2001; Miano 2018; Rüpke 2018; Driediger‐Murphy 2019; Bispham and Miano 2020; Hejduk 2020; Gartrell 2021; Buszard 2023).…”