I actually /did/ read the e-mails. A pretty hefty chunk of them, at any rate. They're still on my computer.

There's some cattiness and frustration there, but I didn't see anything that indicated dishonesty.

You're not relying on the snippets that got put on television and in the newspapers, are you? You went and read the full e-mails, right?

Exactly.

But supposing the story is correct, and there are indeed fifty primate skulls... why would anyone think it has anything to do with animal sacrifice? Sounds more to me like it's connected with black market animal trafficking. I can't think any other way you could get that many exotic animal bones in one place.

I'd be more likely to conclude that it's inventory rather than an altar.

One does not become European simply by virtue of descending from the Indo-European peoples. By your logic, the people of India and Iran are also European; they, too, descended from IE speakers.

Of course, it was never "pure" and "uninfluenced by others." It is not the origin of the tradition that I am talking about, but how it developed and matured.

And there were, of course, continuing non-European influences on Roman paganism. We've already talked about the introduction of Cybele to Roman religion. One could also note the switch from a Capitoline triad of Jupiter, Mars, and Quirinus to Jupiter, Juno, and Minerva, or the way the adoption of the Dii Consentes was likewise influenced by Greek religion.

Nonetheless, I think one can identify Roman forms, values, and traditions which mark Roman paganism out from other forms of paganism, and which are primarily associated with the cultural ancestors of modern Europe. That is not to downplay the cosmopolitan aspects of Roman paganism, or of paganism as a whole, but to note that this particular tradition within paganism stands in a unique historical relationship with modern Europe.

That's all just fine. The Roman Empire was certainly quite cosmopolitan.

But in most cases, there was such a connection between Roman paganism and the city itself and the surrounding area that I cannot think of it as having, at least in the ancient world, an essential connection to Italy and the Latin peoples. For instance, very many Roman temples explicitly took their temple rules from the Temple of Diana in Rome itself.

The places where this connection seems to be somewhat attenuated are for the most part in modern Western Europe, in the syncretisms of the gods of Rome with the gods of Gaul or Britain.

To be clear, by "Roman paganism," I mean something like the traditional religion of Rome, as carried forward from the city's founding. I do not mean, necessarily, all pagan religion practiced in Rome. The cult of Cybele, for instance, was adopted by Rome, and her worship took on a Roman form there. But her worship was so far reaching throughout the ancient world already at that point that I do not know that I can think of her worship as uniquely and specifically Roman.

Of course, it is only after the fact, with the establishment of the geopolitical entity of Europe, that we can identify Roman religion as anything like European--it is a classification that serves mainly to highlight the historical relationship between elements of the modern world and the ancient world. It would have been meaningless to the Romans themselves.

It is not my goal to claim that Hellenism was not primarily created by the spread of Greek culture. Rather, I would assert that ancient Greek culture was not European.

In the first place, it is anachronistic to call it European. Europe as a distinct geo-political entity emerged after Hellenism, not before, and its formation was marked by the rejection of Hellenism. In Western Europe, this was through the decline in the number of people who spoke Greek and therefore involve themselves in Hellenic thought and culture. In Eastern Europe, this was through the outright rejection, repudiation, and suppression of Hellenism by the Orthodox Church. It's true that Hellenism was reintroduced into Western Europe during the Renaissance, but to point this out is not to say that Hellenism is European. Rather, it is to point out the profound degree to which Europe was Hellenized.

In the second place, Greek culture has never been limited to Europe. The first stirrings of Greek philosophy were in the city of Miletus, sixteen miles away from the oracle at Didyma. I mentioned the oracle at Claros, which was near Colophon. I mentioned Ephesus, as well. All of these were in Turkey. And the Greeks placed settlements wherever they could find them. The coasts and islands of Asia Minor and northern Africa were dotted by Greek settlements as much as the coasts of southern Europe--though expansion to the West, especially in Northern Africa, was limited by the Carthaginians. The pharaohs even allowed a Greek colony to exist right in the middle of Egypt. The spreading of Greek culture even further, seen to by Alexander, was a natural extension of this Greek tendency. And as it spread--and as your quotation recognizes--it was heavily influenced by non-European cultures. The Bactrian Greeks are an excellent example; they were the first ones to create statues of the Buddha in the style we usually associate with Japan, China, and India. Prior to the existence of Greco-Buddhism, there were no statues of Siddhartha Gautama.

For these and other reasons it is profoundly ahistorical to see the Greeks as preeminently European in any sense.

To claim that Roman Paganism was not primarily European is probably over-stretching it. It is not such a stretch for Greek Paganism. Even Greek colonies as far west as Sicily often looked back to their motherlands in Turkey or Africa for their cultural center.

Bollocks. The Neo-Platonists were all either from the Levant and the Near East or inspired by it. After Delphi, the most influential and popular oracles of Apollo were in Didyma and Claros--both in modern day Turkey. The oracle of Zeus Ammon in Egypt was consulted by Greeks for hundreds of years before Hellenism, and continued to be consulted after.

And for hundreds of years the best and most insightful interpreters of Aristotle spoke Arabic or Farsi. It was people who spoke Arabic who preserved the bulk of Aristotle's extant writings. And for hundreds of years the only Plato anyone in Europe knew about--and they knew very little indeed--was from Arabic translations.

And what about the Bactrian Greek kingdoms next door to India?

Indeed, one distinguishing characteristic of Europe is that until the Renaissance, hardly anyone in Europe could speak Greek or had access to the principal texts of Hellenism--not the Iliad, not the Odyssey, not Hesiod. Not Plato, nor Epictetus, nor Ptolemy nor Galen. The resources of Hellenism were lost to Europe, and it made Europe what it was.

The claim that Hellenism is "pre-eminently European" is impossible to support.

Is... this serious? I think it might be satire. I can't tell.

Not necessarily a surprise. The English word "idol" comes from the Greek word "eidolon," which was adopted by the early Christian church as a pejorative description of Greek sacred art. It literally means "image," but carries with it connotations of insubstantiality, as though the god portrayed is a mere fantasy.

It's not a word I like to use.