Isiaca: Approaching Ancient Religion

The Italian traders of Thessaloniki demonstrated, with individual and collective dedications, their preference for the Egyptian cults in the sanctuary of the Egyptian cults of the city in the Late Hellenistic and Roman periods. Focusing on this phenomenon and problematizing it allows us to ask some interesting questions about religious mobility and the trading networks in the North Aegean of that period and, then, to follow the development of specific ritual traditions within the Egyptian cults. By integrating these questions and themes into a broader interdisciplinary problématique about the religious change in various sociological and political contexts, we aspire to reconsider the entire religious, economic, social, and political history of the Mediterranean in Hellenistic and Roman times.

Paraskevi Martzavou was born and raised in Thessaloniki where she attended Aristole Univeristy. She also studied in Hungary (Janus Pannonius University, Pécs, Jozsef Attila University, Szeged, and Debrecen University) and worked as an archaeologist for the Greek Archaeological Service. For her graduate studies, she went to Paris for a DEA and doctorate in epigraphy, Greek Institutions, and ancient history (École Pratique des Hautes Études, IVème Section). She was an Oxford post-doc (The construction of Emotions in Greek Antiquity) and since 2015 has lectured in the Classics Department at Columbia University where she teaches Greek literature, history, and culture from Homer to the present.

Host or Publisher Institute for Ideas and Imagination