Ben Oglesby 

Rives’ explanation of the category divine in the roman context shows just how broad a concept the idea of the divine was in that time and place. From inside the idea of divinity he unpacked a huge amount of spiritual diversity in both belief and practice. What is most different from the monotheistic faiths seemed to be the large number of things that have a divine element, from the gods all the way down to the numen/genius/etc of everyday people and things. What Rives says about Roman religious practices intersects with our initial discussion of Roman belief in a significant, but semi superficial way as we lacked the depth of knowledge that he has. It seems that we did manage to cover all three parts of the tripartite Roman faith in our initial discussion as we covered the cultic practices, the myths surrounding the pantheon, and briefly we mentioned philosophy and its relation to Roman faith. We definitely need to fine tune our initial ideas, but it seems like we were not too off base as a group. We should talk more about the diversity of divine beings as I don’t think the idea of daimons or spirits came up in our discussion.