"Istae contra omnium religiones": Characterizing Northern Barbarian Religiosity in the Graeco-Roman Literary Tradition from Hellenism to the Later Empire

Doctoral dissertation. In this thesis, I examine the tradition and relationships of references to the religiosity and morality of northern peoples in Greek and Latin literary sources, from the pre-Hellenistic period until the end of the fourth century CE. I will argue that in ancient literature, recurring stock motifs and topoi constitute the most prevalent manifestation of a culturally shared and stereotypical set of associations about the religious culture and the moral character of the 'northern barbarians', a rather hazily differentiated assemblage of variously named groups to the north of the Mediterranean basin. In short, when the ancient educated elite thought about the religiosity of the northerners, it was through a certain limited set of tropes that they related to the subject. As such, these motifs not only conditioned how the 'reality' of those groups was perceived and written about in antiquity, but as a whole, have formed a serious obstacle to all subsequent search for 'factual' information on northern barbarian religions.