Roman problems. Concluding remarks

In the course of this year, I wanted to close, often after a long period of latency, questions to which answers had been given, but which had left me with doubts. In the course of the year, we went through the various stages of my research, which gradually brought me into contact with the study of the religions of Rome, through the exploration of a place of worship in Rome, the study of an exceptional collection of archives transcribed by a priestly college on marble, and the discovery of the ritualism of the Romans, in their temples, their homes and their necropolises. Completing part of my research on the theologies of the ancients, studied here two years ago, I have added data concerning the provinces, taking the example of the north-eastern provinces of the empire. The last lectures dealt with comparatism, which I had discovered during my doctoral studies at the École Pratique des Hautes Études. I gave the first elements of new comparative investigations that I intend to carry out with sinologist colleagues from the École Pratique and a joint UMR of the Collège on sacrificial rites under the Han and later. On the other hand, I have extended the research on myths, which had been developed during the seminars of my first years at the Collège, by comparing a Roman rite, the driving of a nail into one of the walls of the temple of Jupiter at the Capitol, with a famous short story by the moralist writer Jeremias Gotthelf, pastor in Appenzell, Die schwarze Spinne (The Black Spider), to highlight the otherness of apparently similar myths and rituals in the Roman tradition and in the Swiss moralist's work. And so we have come to the conclusion of this journey, and to one of the facts that I have gradually discovered in the course of my years of research into the late Republic and early Empire: the otherness of Roman religions.