Contenu du sommaire

Protagoras and the Tourian pantheon There is a profound analogy between the gods worshipped at the ancient Greek cities of Teos and Abdera, its metropolis, and the gods after which the Thourioi's avenues were named. As Protagoras the Sophist was born in Abdera and he established the laws of Thourioi, we may thus think of our Sophist as the mentor of the Thourian pantheon. This would imply a cooperative action between Protagoras and some intellectuals such as the Delphic seer Lampon and the urbanist Hippodamos, both also present at the foundation of Thourioi. Finally, it seems very likely that the links among de pantheons of the above cited cities were well known, and so we could conclude that Protagoras' action at Thourioi should be considered in the studies on the religious thought of this Sophist.

Pluridimensional Aetiologies : observations on Ovid's "Fasti" The analysis of Ovid's "Fasti" reveals the variety and diversity of aetiologies (labelled « vertical, horizontal, diagonal ») that occur in this work and at the same time the plurality of perspectives according to which the poet comments on religious practices. These reflections lead to the conclusion that the Ovidian aetiology never consists in an explication of all the different gestures that form the ritual sequences, but rather that Ovid considers aetiology as a commentary illustrating how the religious practices are an integral part of the cultural tradition of the city of Rome.

About some Pythagorean cosmological stereotypes in the systems of Muslim thinkers at the Middle Ages Among the Pythagorean stereotypes that made their way to Muslim thinkers, two topics are of special note. The first has to do with the subtle nature of the celestial bodies and their intelligence, the second with the postulate of the pre-existence of souls and a number of its direct consequences, such as the fall, metempsychosis, the return to celestial origine and apocatastasis. These questions, arise with philosophers such as al-Kindî, al-Râzî and al-Farâbî (first part of this article) as well as with mystics (second part of this article). Whereas the philosophers had access to translations of the Greek texts, however, the mystics encountered these thought processes through intermediary teachings, inspired mainly by the works of Origen and Evagre.

"Marranism" has been the subject of a great number of studies but they all focus on the manifestations of this phenomenon in the Iberian peninsula or in the "marrano diaspora". Sicily of the late fifteenth century is the only place outside the Iberian peninsula that had witnessed the independent formation of a large population of New Christians that led to inquisitorial persecution. The present article proposes to rely on a detailed first hand description of an Auto de Fe performed in Palermo for examining the practices and religious attitudes of Sicilian conversos. The reliance in this case on an eyewitness's account has the advantage of introducing a new factor in the debate concerning the veracity of inquisitorial sources.