My Research Interests
Academically, I would describe myself as a cultural historian of ancient Greek and Roman religion with a particular interest in the ways knowledge and authority were produced, transmitted, and negotiated. So far, my research has centred on religious poetry, especially religious pseudepigraphy—that is, texts that derived a particular form of authority from their attribution to mythical figures. Rather than focusing on the philological reconstruction of these texts, however, I am primarily interested in the ways their borrowed authority operated within ancient discourses. More generally, I explore how religious ideas were communicated through different media, how competing claims to authority were established and contested, and how these processes shaped ancient society, culture, and politics.
Central to my research are therefore questions such as: Who produced these texts? How did political and cultural authorities engage with them? What roles did they play within their communities? How did they relate to broader religious and cultural practices? And how did they contribute to processes of political, cultural, and social change?
My Research So Far
In 2021, I completed my PhD on the role of the Sibylline Oracles and the god Apollo during the crisis of the Late Roman Republic and the early years of the Augustan Principate. In my thesis, I challenge the widely held view that Apollo was Augustus’s personal patron deity. Instead, I argue that Apollo maintained a close and long-standing relationship with one of Rome’s most powerful priestly colleges, the quindecimviri sacris faciundis, which was responsible for the famous Sibylline Books. These books contained oracles whose messages could carry considerable political significance and had the potential to circulate widely among the Roman population.
During the Republican period, these priests exercised firm control over the oracles. However, as a result of the political struggles of the Late Republic, the priesthood gradually lost that control, and the authority invested in the oracles was repeatedly appropriated by competing political factions. Augustus reasserted control by reuniting the priesthood and transferring the books to a small library within the newly built Temple of Apollo on the Palatine, located directly adjacent to his private residence and specifically designed to house them.
In sum, my thesis offers a comprehensive reassessment not only of the significance of Sibylline oracles in Late Republican and Augustan Rome, but also of Apollo’s relationship with Rome’s first emperor and the broader mechanisms through which religious authority was managed and negotiated during a period of profound political change.
The monograph was published in 2022 in the well-respected series Studien zur Alten Geschichte by the established German publishing house Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht (Verlag Antike), which is now part of Brill. Closely related to my PhD project, I have also worked on the role of the sanctuary of Delphi for the Roman Republic, as well as on the relationship between the pagan Sibylline Oracles and their Judeo-Christian counterparts, the Oracula Sibyllina.
My Current Research
Following the publication of my PhD thesis, I turned my attention to the role of pseudepigraphic oracles and their disseminators in the Greek world of the sixth to fourth centuries BCE. This line of research explores how religious authority was created, negotiated, and communicated through texts attributed to legendary figures, and how such texts operated within broader intellectual, political, and religious discourses.
Building on the findings of my PhD thesis while considerably expanding its scope, this research investigates how pseudepigraphic oracles and other forms of religious poetry attributed to mythical authors such as Orpheus, Musaios, Bakis, the Sibyl, Epimenides, Abaris, and Aristeas were embedded in Greek, and particularly Athenian, society between the sixth and fourth centuries BCE, and how they both reflected and shaped contemporary developments.
Chronologically, my research focuses on the emergence of the Athenian democracy and its first major crisis, the Peloponnesian War. By examining the media, discourses, and forms of authority that shaped these developments, I aim to shed new light on the culture and politics of what remains the first, and arguably one of the most influential, democracies in human history.
Outlook
In the future, I hope to broaden the scope of my research further by engaging more closely with neighbouring fields such as Religious Studies, the History of Science, Sociology, and Media Studies. In particular, I am interested in exploring the ways authority, expertise, and competing claims to truth were negotiated across different forms of discourse, as well as the role played by media and materiality in these processes. More broadly, I hope to investigate these questions from a cross-cultural and diachronic perspective.
Jens Fischer 