Berkeley Undergraduate Journal of Classics

Abstract

The recent destruction of Palmyra sent shockwaves across the globe, as the days of religious fanaticism and outbursts of iconoclasm had largely been forgotten by the collective memory. Yet, such acts of destruction have long been a point of discussion (and contention) among scholars. In the centuries following the conversion from paganism to Christianity the fate of the pagan statuary was left in the hands of a newly Christian society, and to the processes of Christianization. Processes which acted either to assimilate the statue into the newly Christian cultural milieu or destroy the statue for its pagan nature. This paper will present an overview of the various attitudes, and responses, towards pagan statuary in late antiquity, and the ways in which recent scholarship has interpreted the processes of Christianization with renewed enthusiasm. Using the Hearst Herakles as a case study for the practice of Christianization, this paper will first examine the processes of Christianization as a means of assimilation, in which the pagan statue was deliberately altered in order to remove its pagan character and make certain of its ability to function in Christian society; then examine the processes of Christianization in which the statue was destroyed for its pagan nature.