University of Toronto
Andreas Bendlin is Associate Professor of Classics at the Departments of Historical Studies and of Classics at the University of Toronto. He is working on ancient Mediterranean migration, Roman associations, and Graeco-Roman cultural history more generally, but the main focus of his research is religion in the Roman Mediterranean, from the city of Rome and Italy to the Imperial Greek East, and from the archaic period to Roman religion’s Nachleben in the modern world. Current research includes a large-scale project on demography, migration, and urbanism, and their impact on religious pluralism in the city of Rome.
Research related to commentary
I am currently working on a translation with essays of Marcus Tullius Cicero’s De Legibus (“On Laws”), a philosophical dialogue from the late 50s BCE, in which the author proposes a set of laws and adds his own lemmatized commentary on each lex, meat to explicate his “law-code” and legitimize the author as a law-giver. I am interested in the grammatical, legal, philosophical, or theological commentary (and glossary) tradition that informs both Cicero’s endeavour and the Greek and Roman commentaries of his predecessors and contemporaries.
Publications related to commentary
“Wer braucht‚ Heilige Schriften’? Die Textbezogenheit der Religionsgeschichte und das ‚Reden über die Götter’ in der griechisch-römischen Antike,” in: C. Bultmann & al. (eds), Heilige Schriften: Ursprung, Geltung und Gebrauch (Münster, 2005), 205–28. 251–54.
Ed., with J. Rüpke, Römische Religion im historischen Wandel: Diskursentwicklung von Plautus bis Ovid (Stuttgart, 2009).
Other publications
“Religion, Violence and the Diasporic Experience: The Jewish Diaspora in Flavian Rome and Puteoli,” in: J.H.F. Dijkstra & C.R. Raschle (eds.), Religious Violence in the Ancient World (Cambridge & New York, 2020), 133–76.
“‘Sodalician Associations’? Dig. 47.22.1 pr. and Imperial Government,” in: W. E. Arnal et al. (eds.), Scribal Practices and Social Structures among Jesus Adherents: Essays in Honour of John S. Kloppenborg (Leuven, 2016), Vol. 2, 435–64.
“Associations, Funerals, Sociality, and Roman Law: The Collegium of Diana and Antinous in Lanuvium (CIL 14.2112) Reconsidered, in: M. Öhler (ed.), Aposteldekret und antikes Vereinswesen: Gemeinschaft und ihre Ordnung (Tübingen, 2011), 207–96.
“On the Uses and Disadvantages of Divination: Oracles and their Literary Representations in the Time of the Second Sophistic,” in: J. A. North, S. R. F. Price (eds), The Religious History of the Roman Empire: Pagans, Jews, and Christians (Oxford & New York, 2011), 175–250.