I think much of this is very misleading. I refer you to my book “The Ancient Roman Afterlife: Di Manes, Belief, and the Cult of the Dead” (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2020). The problem with talking about “Greco-Roman” religion is that it creates a distortion in which Roman religious culture gets ignored in favor of treating pre-Roman Greek authors like Homer and Plato as normative for Roman thought. If you look at Roman religious practices, however, you will see that the main Roman ritual responses to death are not about that Greek material and are instead about the manes, who have no exact equivalent in Greek religion and thus are not going to be found in Greek texts. The Romans deified their dead as gods called manes and, contrary to what you can sometimes find in older scholarship, they worshipped individual people as manes and did so very inclusively of the whole population. So, the Roman Pagan alternative to the Christian afterlife was to become a god. The scholarship you are citing just ignores the manes, like Peter Bolt, to make it easier to claim that Christian ideas were attractive, but that again is a misrepresentation of the alternative.
Thank you for your comment, Charles. I was not aware of your book and this is based on a lecture I delivered before I would have been aware of it (I spent much of 2020 preparing for my comprehensive/qualifying exams or working on other projects). I will be sure to consult it for any future work I do on the subject. Your points are well taken, particularly as most of my work in the Roman world has been in Roman literature and I have not specifically interacted with the texts about the manes in any significant extent. This is a lacuna in what was an introductory piece of a lecture. And this is yet more variety to consider. I do want to clarify, though, that my citation of Bolt is simply about the summary on mortality, as this particular piece was something I read in preparation for my exams. I am not convinced by Bolt, Endsjo, or others who try to present Christian ideas as particularly attractive in that context, even if I did not necessarily take your own work into account.
I think much of this is very misleading. I refer you to my book “The Ancient Roman Afterlife: Di Manes, Belief, and the Cult of the Dead” (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2020). The problem with talking about “Greco-Roman” religion is that it creates a distortion in which Roman religious culture gets ignored in favor of treating pre-Roman Greek authors like Homer and Plato as normative for Roman thought. If you look at Roman religious practices, however, you will see that the main Roman ritual responses to death are not about that Greek material and are instead about the manes, who have no exact equivalent in Greek religion and thus are not going to be found in Greek texts. The Romans deified their dead as gods called manes and, contrary to what you can sometimes find in older scholarship, they worshipped individual people as manes and did so very inclusively of the whole population. So, the Roman Pagan alternative to the Christian afterlife was to become a god. The scholarship you are citing just ignores the manes, like Peter Bolt, to make it easier to claim that Christian ideas were attractive, but that again is a misrepresentation of the alternative.
Thank you for your comment, Charles. I was not aware of your book and this is based on a lecture I delivered before I would have been aware of it (I spent much of 2020 preparing for my comprehensive/qualifying exams or working on other projects). I will be sure to consult it for any future work I do on the subject. Your points are well taken, particularly as most of my work in the Roman world has been in Roman literature and I have not specifically interacted with the texts about the manes in any significant extent. This is a lacuna in what was an introductory piece of a lecture. And this is yet more variety to consider. I do want to clarify, though, that my citation of Bolt is simply about the summary on mortality, as this particular piece was something I read in preparation for my exams. I am not convinced by Bolt, Endsjo, or others who try to present Christian ideas as particularly attractive in that context, even if I did not necessarily take your own work into account.