Visual Representations of Children and Ritual in the Early Roman Empire
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This paper takes the position that the best way to identify figures of children participating in scenes of early Christian ritual is through a comparison of child figures in Roman art and ritual. For the purpose of this comparison we refer to Roman scenes showing children in processions, offerings/sacrifices and banquets. Early Christian scenes of offerings which continued the representation of children but omitted the priest and musicians may have aided the identification of the scene as a gift or donation rather than a Roman sacrifice. While there is no ambiguity as to the figures in many of the early Christian baptism scenes being children, there is a long standing debate whether the child figures symbolically represent Jesus’ immersion in the Jordan river or actual baptizands. Possible similarities between Roman purification rituals by immersion in water and early Christian baptism, especially with regard to the visual representation of these rituals, remain a fruitful area for future research. Cet article propose que la meilleure façon d’identifier les images d’enfants qui participaient aux scènes d’anciens rituels chrétiens est par une comparaison des images d’enfants représentés dans l’art et le rituel romains. Aux fins de cette comparaison nous nous référons à des scènes montrant des enfants romains dans les processions, les offrandes/sacrifices et les banquets. Les anciennes scènes chrétiennes de l’offrande qui ont inclus la représentation des enfants, mais qui ne représentent ni le prêtre ni les musiciens, ont pu avoir aidé à l’identification de la scène comme un cadeau ou un don chrétien plutôt que d’un sacrifice romain. Bien qu’il n’y ait aucune ambiguïté que les images dans la plupart des scènes d’ancien baptême chrétien sont des enfants, il y a un débat de longue date de savoir si les images d’enfants représentent symboliquement l’immersion de Jésus dans le fleuve Jourdain ou bien de baptisés réels. Il est possible qu’il y ait des similarités entre les rituels de purification romain par immersion dans l’eau et l’ancien baptême chrétien, en particulier à l’égard de la représentation visuelle de ces rituels, ce qui mérite davantage de recherche.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.005 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".