Rome in the depth-psychology and comparative-religion corpus occupies a remarkably polysemous position, functioning simultaneously as imperial power, mythological origin-site, ecclesiastical centre, and eschatological symbol. The most psychologically charged treatments appear in the context of the Book of Revelation, where Thielman reads Rome as the ‘great prostitute’ — a figure dense with biblical typology linking imperial corruption to the Jezebel archetype and prophetic adultery imagery. Nietzsche’s genealogical reading sharpens the tension: Rome represents the noble, strong, life-affirming pole in his master-morality schema, standing in irreducible conflict with the Judaic-Christian spirit of ressentiment. Campbell traces Rome’s mythological foundations through the Romulus legend, attending to the Roman concept of numen as immanent divine will, and situates the Augustan renewal within Sibylline cyclical cosmology. Eliade reads Rome’s imperial mythology as a response to anxiety about cosmic cycles — Augustus as the figure who arrests the iron age’s descent without ekpyrosis. For Campbell in ecclesiastical history, Rome represents hierarchical authority whose dissolution is prophesied by Joachimite and later heterodox movements. Dvornik’s treatment concerns the institutional Rome of papal primacy in the Photian Schism. The term thus gathers political theology, mythic founding, cyclical time, and the psychology of power into a single overdetermined node.
For the Romans were the strong and noble, and nobody stronger and nobler has yet existed on earth or even been dreamed of… Which of them has won for the present, Rome or Judea?
Nietzsche frames Rome as the supreme emblem of noble, life-affirming morality in its world-historical contest with the Judaic spirit of ressentiment, epitomised by the Apocalypse of John.
, On the Genealogy of Morals, 1887thesis
John’s description of Rome as a prostitute, therefore, also serves as an implicit warning to God’s newly constituted people not to succumb to her enticements as God’s ancient people had done.
Thielman demonstrates how John’s Revelation deploys the prostitute typology — rooted in Israelite prophetic tradition — to figure Rome as a site of idolatrous seduction analogous to Jezebel and Babylon.
, Theology of the New Testament: A Canonical and Synthetic Approach, 2005thesis
Rome’s blasphemous abuse of its military might leads to its own destruction by God’s design (17:17). For John, the returning Nero is also a symbol of Rome’s vicious, if sporadic, persecution of Christians.
Thielman analyses how John merges the returning-Nero myth with the Danielic beast to show Rome’s self-destructive wickedness as providentially ordained judgment.
, Theology of the New Testament: A Canonical and Synthetic Approach, 2005thesis
Reasoning either from calculation of the life of Rome or from the doctrine of cosmico-historical cycles, the Romans knew that, whatever else might happen, the city was fated to disappear before the beginning of a new aeon.
Eliade situates Rome’s imperial ideology within the anxiety of cyclical cosmic time, showing how the Augustan pax aeterna was mythologised as an escape from the expected ekpyrosis at the age of iron’s end.
, The Myth of the Eternal Return: Cosmos and History, 1954thesis
Will Rome, with its immense power, succeed in quashing the tiny, despised group of Christians — ‘a class loathed for their vices,’ as Tacitus called them — or will the prophets be vindicated?
Thielman frames the soteriological and political stakes of Revelation by contrasting Rome’s overwhelming institutional power against the vulnerability of early Christian communities.
, Theology of the New Testament: A Canonical and Synthetic Approach, 2005thesis
To many unbelievers both in Rome and abroad, the coming of the Flavian dynasty after the chaotic ‘year of the four emperors’ must have appeared to be divine confirmation that Rome’s claim to eternal rule over its subjects was valid.
Thielman shows how the Flavian restoration reinforced Rome’s ideological claim to divine sanction, which John’s apocalyptic counter-narrative was directly contesting.
, Theology of the New Testament: A Canonical and Synthetic Approach, 2005supporting
God will give to Rome and to those who support her oppressive authority ‘the cup filled with the wine of the fury of his wrath’ (16:19).
Thielman reads the Exodus plague imagery in Revelation as a theological argument that Rome, like Egypt, will receive divine retribution for its oppression of God’s people.
, Theology of the New Testament: A Canonical and Synthetic Approach, 2005supporting
The Romans employed two words to designate divine presences or powers, namely deus… and numen, for which we have no proper term… numen suggests, rather, the impulse of a will or force of no personal definition.
Campbell locates Rome’s distinctive religious psychology in the concept of numen — impersonal divine immanence — contrasting it with the personality-defined deus and linking it to cross-cultural analogues such as mana.
, Occidental Mythology: The Masks of God, Volume III, 1964supporting
the Age of the Holy Spirit, when the hierarchy of Rome would be dissolved and the whole world become, as it were, a monastery of souls in direct communion with God.
Campbell presents Joachim of Floris’s tripartite historical schema as an anti-papal vision in which Rome’s ecclesiastical hierarchy is destined for dissolution in the age of direct spiritual communion.
, Occidental Mythology: The Masks of God, Volume III, 1964supporting
the Fathers rightly granted privileges to the throne of Old Rome, because it was the imperial city… New Rome, justly judging that the city which is honored with the Sovereignty and the Senate… should in ecclesiastical matters also be magnified.
Campbell documents the Council of Chalcedon’s ecclesiastical reasoning whereby Constantinople appropriated Rome’s imperial prestige as the basis for claiming equal ecclesiastical rank.
, Occidental Mythology: The Masks of God, Volume III, 1964supporting
the patricians, as men that persuaded the people to believe ridiculous tales, when they themselves were the murderers of the king… Julius Proculus by name, presented himself in the forum… he had seen Romulus coming to meet him.
Campbell recounts Plutarch’s account of the deification of Romulus as a founding mythological act — the political fabrication of divine kingship — at Rome’s origin.
, Occidental Mythology: The Masks of God, Volume III, 1964supporting
the heroic city-founder is a foundling who has been turned adrift and is usually suckled by an animal foster-mother (like the Roman she-wolf); thus… he finds compensation in the city which he founds.
Rank’s psychoanalytic typology of the hero-founder places Romulus within a universal pattern in which premature maternal deprivation is compensated by the creative act of city-founding.
, Art and Artist: Creative Urge and Personality Development, 1932supporting
By the first century A.D., Rome had conquered a multitude of ethnic groups from Britain in the north to North Africa in the south… Rome in its imperial period provided many benefactions for its subject peoples.
Thielman establishes the geopolitical and benefaction-based ideology of the Roman Empire as the historical matrix within which Revelation’s theological polemic must be read.
, Theology of the New Testament: A Canonical and Synthetic Approach, 2005supporting
From the time of Augustus, cultic veneration of the emperor formed an important expression of the unity of the empire under Rome’s hegemony and benefactions.
Thielman details the imperial cult’s function as an ideological instrument of Roman unity, providing the concrete religious-political context for Revelation’s critique.
, Theology of the New Testament: A Canonical and Synthetic Approach, 2005supporting
It is an ancient legend told about one of the early kings of Rome… Tarquin and his wife [Tanaquil] are on their way to Rome: The pair had reached Janiculum… when an eagle dropped gently down and snatched off the cap.
Edinger invokes the Tarquin legend from Livy as an ancient Roman image of the Holy Ghost in distress, using Rome’s founding mythology as a vehicle for discussing the ego’s role in receiving divine numinosity.
, The New God-Image: A Study of Jung’s Key Letters Concerning the Evolution of the Western God-Image, 1996supporting
Now is come the last age of the Cumaean prophecy: the great cycle of periods is born anew. Now returns the Maid, returns the reign of Saturn: now from high heaven descends a new generation.
Campbell presents Virgil’s Fourth Eclogue as the culminating expression of Rome’s Sibylline cyclical mythology, a golden-age prophecy that was subsequently re-appropriated as a pagan prefiguration of Christ.
, Occidental Mythology: The Masks of God, Volume III, 1964supporting
Non sane relinquens incantatam sibi a parentibus terrenam viam, Romam praecesserat, ut ius disceret; et ibi gladiatorii spectaculi hiatu incredibili et incredibiliter abreptus est.
Auerbach cites Augustine’s account of Alypius being drawn against his will into Rome’s gladiatorial spectacle, using it as a case study in the seductive power of sensory experience over rational resolve.
, Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature, 1953aside
it had been slightly enlarged by Hadrian’s Chancellery, who, for the anathemas hurled at the heretics mentioned in the Regula, had substituted a long and vehement condemnation of Photius… with, naturally, additional emphasis on the primacy of the Roman See.
Dvornik documents how Rome’s papal chancellery instrumentalised the Libellus formula to assert Roman primacy over the Byzantine church in the Photian controversy.
, The Photian Schism: History and Legend, 1948aside
For Rome, see J. E. King, ‘Infant Burial,’ Classical Review 17 (1903) 83f; H. J. Rose, ‘Nocturnal Funerals in Rome,’ Classical Quarterly 17 (1923) 191–194.
Bremmer cites Roman funerary practice for infants as comparative evidence in his study of archaic Greek soul concepts, treating Rome as a bibliographic reference point rather than a substantive argument.
, The Early Greek Concept of the Soul, 1983aside