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Roman Life
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Values and Perspectives
Values
Pietas was the Roman religious personification of a respectful and faithful attachment to gods, country, and relatives, especially parents. It was often represented on coins as a female figure carrying a palm branch and a sceptre or as a matron casting incense upon an altar, sometimes accompanied by a stork, which is the symbol of filial piety.
Gravitas was the Roman virtue translated variously as weight, seriousness and dignity. It also represented importance, and connotes a certain substance or depth of personality.
Prophets
Prophets
The Delphic oracle was used by Appolo to give prophecies. She sat in a seat next to a chasm in the earth that gave off fumes, which most likely caused her to hallucinate; she thought she saw the future.
Philosophies
Epicureanism is a system of philosophy based upon the teachings of the ancient Greek philosopher Epicurus.
Of all of the sibyls, the Cumaean Sibyl in Italy is the most famous and was immortalized in Virgil's Aeneid. The sibyl, a prophetess usually associated with Rome and Cumae, spoke from various localities and was known as early as the Greek philosopher Heraclitus (c. 540–c. 480 B.C.E.). At first she was a lone female prophet, but later her name, Sibylla, was made plural (Sibylle), and she flourished in various parts of the world
Philosophies
Stoicism is a school of Hellenistic philosophy founded in Athens by Zeno of Citium in the early 3rd century BC. The Stoics taught that destructive emotions resulted from errors in judgment, and the active relationship between cosmic determinism and human freedom. They also resulted from the belief that it is virtuous to maintain a will (called prohairesis) that is in accord with nature.
In ancient Greece and Rome oracles abounded. The primary meaning of the word oracle is "the response of a god to a question asked of him by a worshipper." The word also indicates the college of priests who manage an oracular shrine or the shrine itself. Since there were many gods in the Greco-Roman world, there were many shrines, several of which were widely known.
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