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A Typological Overview
The paper attempts a typological survey of violent practices in late antiquity that were invested with religious significance, sometimes by their authors and sometimes by their victims, but usually in some relation to the context of empire. Defining violence in relatively narrow terms as the deployment of physical force in a manner that tends to convert subjects -- individual or collective, but in either case fully human actors -- into depersonalized objects, the author then calls attention to the following recurrent forms of sanctified (or sacralized) violence: 1) Conquest as divinely sanctioned; 2) Defeat as humiliation; 3) Millennarian revolt; 4) Mortification of the flesh; 5) Martyrdom.