Karl Valentin once asked: "How can it be that only as much happens as fits into the newspaper the next day?" He focussed on the problem that information of the past has to be organised, arranged and above all: selected and put into form in order to be perceived as a whole. In this sense, the process of selection must be seen as the fundamental moment - the "Urszene" - of making History. This book shows selection as highly creative act. With the richness of early medieval material it can be demonstrated that creative selection was omnipresent and took place even in unexpected text genres. The book demonstrates the variety how premodern authors dealt with "unimportant", unpleasant or unwanted past. It provides a general overview for regions and text genres in early medieval Europe.

Caesar's Army in peace and war
Students of military history have long been fascinated by the history, armies and great commanders of ancient Rome; for within its organisation, strategy, tactics, weapons, campaigns and wars are to be found the origins of each of the military disciplines, demonstrated by often sophisticated methods and practices, developed millennia in the past and yet still able to provide valuable lessons to strategists and tacticians in the modern world. Rome had a long history and in keeping with all empires marched a Hard road to its zenith before commencing an equally long decline. We often look towards the period of Gaius Julius Caesar and his legions to appreciate the Roman military machine in some of its finest hours. This book is an invaluable guide for those interested in the Roman Army during Caesars time. It details army organisation, weapons and equipment. It examines the Legions and the cavalry in detail both on and off the field of battle. Tactics, fortifications and siege engines are fully described, as are methods of fighting afloat. Finally, the enemies of the Roman Empire, from the Gauls to the ancient Britons, are considered and their battle tactics and fortifications examined. In this Leonaur edition the illustrations from the original edition have been enlarged to assist the reader and maps of notable campaigns, battles, sieges and marches are also included.
Leonaur editions are newly typeset and are not facsimiles; each title is available in softcover and hardback with dustjacket; our hardbacks are cloth bound and feature gold foil lettering on their spines and fabric head and tail bands.

What was Roman political praise for and what could it achieve? Could it have literary merit? What do the surviving examples of Roman political praise-giving reveal about the circumstances and milieu in which they originated?
Latin Panegyric brings together sixteen essays focusing on praise in the Roman Empire and, in particular, on praise of the emperor. Spanning a century of scholarship, and constituting landmark studies on different aspects of the largest collection of classical Latin oratory to survive after Cicero--the Panegyrici Latini--this collection includes speeches addressed to the emperors Trajan, Maximian, Constantine, Julian, and Theodosius, and traces three centuries of oratorical praise-giving in the Roman world. These influential readings consider textual, rhetorical, literary, political, and religious matters, and together represent the evolving landscape of academic attitudes towards praise discourse, with its strengths and problems, and towards some of the best-known Roman emperors. With a full introduction by the editor, and with four essays translated into English for the first time, this valuable volume plots the narratives of Roman praise and gives students of classical literature, history, and rhetoric direct access to key scholarship.

This book brings together new and original work by forty two of the world's leading scholars of Indo-European comparative philology and linguistics from around the world. It shows the breadth and the continuing liveliness of enquiry in an area which over the last century and a half has opened many unique windows on the civilizations of the ancient world. The volume is a tribute to Anna Morpurgo Davies to mark her retirement as the Diebold Professor of Comparative Philology at the University of Oxford.
The book's six parts are concerned with the early history of Indo-European (Part I); language use, variation, and change in ancient Greece and Anatolia (Parts II and III); the Indo-European languages of Western Europe, including Latin, Welsh, and Anglo-Saxon (Part IV); the ancient Indo-Iranian and Tocharian languages (Part V); and the history of Indo-European linguistics (Part VI).
Indo-European Perspectives will interest scholars and students of Indo-European philology, historical linguistics, classics, and the history of the ancient world.

The purpose of this book is to illustrate that reading is a subjective process which results in multivalent interpretations. This is the case whether one looks at a text in its historical contexts (the diachronic approach) or its literary contexts (the synchronic approach). Three representative biblical texts are chosen: from the Law (Genesis 2-3), the Writings (Isaiah 23) and the Prophets (Amos 5), and each is read first by way of historical analysis and then by literary analysis. Each text provides a number of variant interpretations and raises the question, is any one interpretation superior? What criteria do we use to measure this? Or is there value in the complementary nature of many approaches and many results?

Key aspects of philhellenism - political self-determination, freedom, beauty, individual greatness - originate in antiquity and present a complex reception history. The force of European philhellenism derives from ancient Roman idealizations, which have been drawn on by European movements since the Enlightenment. How is philhellenism able to transcend national, cultural and epochal limits? The articles collected in this volume deal with (1) the ancient conceptualization of philhellenism, (2) the actualization and politicization of the term at the time of the European Restoration (1815-30), and (3) the transformation of philhellenism into a pan-European movement. During the Greek struggle for independence the different receptions of philhellenism regain a common focus; philhellenism becomes an inextricable element in the creation of a pan-European identity and a starting point for the regeneration and modernization of Greece. - It is easy to criticize the tradition of philhellenism as being simplistic, naive, and self-serving, but there is an irreducibly utopian element in later philhellenic idealizations of ancient Greece.

Rome's once independent Italian allies became communities of a new Roman territorial state after the Social War of 91-87 BC. Edward Bispham examines how the transition from independence to subordination was managed, and how, between the opposing tensions of local particularism, competing traditions and identities, aspirations for integration, cultural change, and indifference from Roman central authorities, something new and dynamic appeared in the jaded world of the late Republic. Bispham charts the successes and failures of the attempts to make a new political community (Roman Italy), and new Roman citizens scattered across the peninsula - a dramatic and important story in that, while Italy was being built, Rome was falling apart; and while the Roman Republic fell, the Italian municipal system endured, and made possible the government, and even the survival, of the Roman empire in the West.

This book affords new perspectives on urban disasters in the ancient Roman context, attending not just to the material and historical realities of such events, but also to the imaginary and literary possibilities offered by urban disaster as a figure of thought. Existential threats to the ancient city took many forms, including military invasions, natural disasters, public health crises, and gradual systemic collapses brought on by political or economic factors. In Roman cities, the memory of such events left lasting imprints on the city in psychological as well as in material terms. Individual chapters explore historical disasters and their commemoration, but others also consider of the effect of anticipated and imagined catastrophes. They analyze the destruction of cities both as a threat to be forestalled, and as a potentially regenerative agent of change, and the ways in which destroyed cities are revisited - and in a sense, rebuilt- in literary and social memory. The contributors to this volume seek to explore the Roman conception of disaster in terms that are not exclusively literary or historical. Instead, they explore the connections between and among various elements in the assemblage of experiences, texts, and traditions touching upon the theme of urban disasters in the Roman world.

A Brief History of Ancient Astrology explores the theory and practice of astrology from Babylon to Ancient Greece and Rome and its cultural and political impact on ancient societies. * Discusses the union between early astrology and astronomy, in contrast to the modern dichotomy between science and superstition. * Explains the ancient understanding of the zodiac and its twelve signs, the seven planets, and the fixed circle of 'places' against which the signs and planets revolve. * Demonstrates how to construct and interpret a horoscope in the ancient manner, using original ancient horoscopes and handbooks. * Considers the relevance of ancient astrology today.

A history of women in the Roman empire, including Livia, Octavia, Cleopatra, Livilla, Agrippina, and many others.

This study tackles pertinent questions about daily life and socio-economic interactions in the late Ptolemaic town of Pathyris (186-88 BCE) through an empirically grounded network analysis of 428 Greek and Demotic documents associated with 21 archives from the site. The author moves beyond traditional boundaries of Egyptological and Papyrological research by means of an innovative and interdisciplinary methodology - zigzagging back and forth between archaeological field survey, close reading of ancient texts, formal methods of Social Network Analysis (SNA) and explanatory theories and concepts borrowed from economics and other social sciences. This is volume 2 of a two-volume set.

The Impact of Justice on the Roman Empire discusses ways in which notions, practice and the ideology of justice impacted on the functioning of the Roman Empire. The papers assembled in this volume follow from the thirteenth workshop of the international network Impact of Empire. They focus on what was considered just in various groups of Roman subjects, how these views were legitimated, shifted over time, and how they affected policy making and political, administrative, and judicial practices. Linking all of the papers are three common themes: the emperor and justice, justice in a dispersed empire and differentiation of justice.

Brill's Companion to Aineias Tacticus is a collection of articles on the significance of the earliest Greek handbook on military tactics. Aineias' (Aeneas) wrote his Poliorketika in the mid-fourth century BC, offering a unique perspective on contemporary Greek city-states, warfare and intellectual trends. We offer an introduction to Aineias and his work, and then discuss the work's historical and intellectual context, his qualities as a writer, and aspects of his work as a historical source for the Greek polis of the fourth century BC. Several chapters discuss Aineias' approach to warfare, specifically light infantry, mercenaries, naval operations, fortifications and technology. Finally, we include a lengthy study of the reception of ancient military treatises, specifically Aineias' Poliorketika, in the Byzantine period.

When the Greek historian PLUTARCH (c. 46 A.D. 120 A.D.) set out to tell the tales of the famous figures from Greek and Roman history, he was more concerned with illuminating their characters than enumerating their deeds, more interested in exploring their moral failings and triumphs than in listing their conquests. The result: Plutarch s Lives. Though Plutarch is known to have taken some liberties with his Lives his comparisons of certain Greek and Roman figures are often more fanciful than strictly accurate his words are, in many instances, the only sources of information that have survived for some personages. And in the aggregate, his radical approach to biography exerted a profound influence on the literature to come, particularly throughout the Renaissance and Enlightenment. Shakespeare lifted some passages verbatim from the Lives, and other writers inspired by Plutarch range from James Boswell to Alexander Hamilton to Cotton Mather. Ralph Waldo Emerson called the Lives a bible for heroes. Across the five volumes, Plutarch explores the stories of such notables as: Romulus Pericles Coriolanus Pyrrhus Lysander Pompey Alexander Caesar Cicero Antony and others. Cosimo is proud to present these handsome new editions, based on the classic 17th-century translations by English poet and playwright JOHN DRYDEN (1631 1700), and revised and edited in the 19th century by Oxford scholar ARTHUR HUGH CLOUGH (1819 1861).

It is often claimed that the kind of love that is variously deemed 'romantic' or 'true' did not exist in antiquity. Yet, ancient literature abounds with stories that seem to adhere precisely to this kind of love. This volume focuses on such literature and the concepts of love it espouses. The volume differs from and challenges much existing classical scholarship which has traditionally privileged the theme of sex over love and prose-genres over those of poetry. By conversely focusing on love and poetry, the present volume freshly explores central poets in ancient literature, such Homer, Sappho, Terence, Catullus, Virgil, Horace and Ovid, alongside less canonized, such as the anonymous poet of The Lament for Bion, Philodemus and Sulpicia. The chapters, which are written by world-leading as well as younger scholars, reveal that Greek and Latin concepts of love seem interconnected, that such love is as relevant for hetero- as homoerotic couples, and that such ideas of love follow the mainstream of poetry throughout antiquity. In addition to the general reader interested in the history of love, this volume is relevant for students and scholars of the ancient world and the poetic tradition.

This volume provides a review of recent research in Philippi related to archaeology, demography, religion, the New Testament and early Christianity. Careful reading of texts, inscriptions, coins and other archaeological materials allow the reader to examine how religious practice in Philippi changed as the city moved from being a Hellenistic polis to a Roman colony to a center for Christian worship and pilgrimage. The essays raise questions about traditional understandings of material culture in Philippi, and come to conclusions that reflect more complicated and diverse views of the city and its inhabitants.

The story of humanity is the story of textiles-as old as civilization itself. Textiles created empires and powered invention. They established trade routes and drew nations' borders. Since the first thread was spun, fabric has driven technology, business, politics, and culture. In The Fabric of Civilization, Virginia Postrel traces this surprising history, exposing the hidden ways textiles have made our world. The origins of chemistry lie in the coloring and finishing of cloth. The beginning of binary code-and perhaps all of mathematics-is found in weaving. Selective breeding to produce fibers heralded the birth of agriculture. The belt drive came from silk production. So did microbiology. The textile business funded the Italian Renaissance and the Mughal Empire; it left us double-entry bookkeeping and letters of credit, the David and the Taj Mahal. From the Minoans who exported woolen cloth colored with precious purple dye to Egypt, to the Romans who wore wildly expensive Chinese silk, the trade and production of textiles paved the economic and cultural crossroads of the ancient world. As much as spices or gold, the quest for fabrics and dyes drew sailors across strange seas, creating an ever-more connected global economy. Synthesizing groundbreaking research from economics, archaeology, and anthropology, Postrel weaves a rich tapestry of human cultural development.