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Books > Humanities > History > World history > BCE to 500 CE
War, the most profitable economic activity in the ancient world,
transferred wealth violently from the vanquished to the victor.
Invasions, massacres, confiscations, deportations, the sacking of
cities, and the selling of survivors into slavery all redistributed
property with epic consequences for kings and commoners alike. The
most notable example occurred in the late fourth century BC, when
Alexander the Great conquered the Persian Empire. For all of its
savagery, this invasion has generally been heralded as a positive
economic event for all concerned. Even those harshly critical of
the king today tend to praise his plundering of Persia as a means
of liberating the moribund resources of the East. To test that
popular interpretation, this book investigates the kinds and
quantities of treasure seized by the Macedonian king, from gold and
silver to land and slaves. It reveals what became of the king's
wealth, and what Alexander's redistribution of these vast resources
can tell us about his much-disputed policies and personality.
Although war made Alexander unbelievably wealthy, it distracted him
from managing his spoils competently. Much was wasted, embezzled,
deliberately destroyed, or idled again unprofitably. These facts
force us to reassess the notion, prevalent since the nineteenth
century, that Alexander the Great used the profits of war to
improve the ancient economies in the lands that he conquered.
Turkey's northern edge is a region of contrasts and diversity. From
the rugged peaks of the Pontic mountains and hidden inland valleys
to the plains and rocky alcoves of the Black Sea coast, this
landscape shaped and was shaped by its inhabitants' ways of life,
their local cultural traditions, and the ebbs and flows of
land-based and maritime networks of interaction. Between 2009 and
2011, an international team of specialists and students of the Cide
Archaeological Project (CAP) investigated the challenging
landscapes of the Cide and S enpazar districts of Kastamonu
province. CAP presents the first systematic archaeological survey
of the western Turkish Black Sea region. The information gathered
by the project extends its known human history by 10,000 years and
offers an unprecedented insight into the region's shifting
cultural, social and political ties with Anatolia and the
Circumpontic. This volume presents the project's approach and
methodologies, its results and their interpretation within
period-specific contexts and through a long-term landscape
perspective.
Situated within contemporary posthumanism, this volume offers
theoretical and practical approaches to materiality in Greek
tragedy. Established and emerging scholars explore how works of the
three major Greek tragedians problematize objects and affect,
providing fresh readings of some of the masterpieces of Aeschylus,
Sophocles, and Euripides. The so-called new materialisms have
complemented the study of objects as signifiers or symbols with an
interest in their agency and vitality, their sensuous force and
psychosomatic impact-and conversely their resistance and
irreducible aloofness. At the same time, emotion has been recast as
material "affect," an intense flow of energies between bodies,
animate and inanimate. Powerfully contributing to the current
critical debate on materiality, the essays collected here
destabilize established interpretations, suggesting alternative
approaches and pointing toward a newly robust sense of the
physicality of Greek tragedy.
A body of theory has developed about the role and function of
memory in creating and maintaining cultural identity. Yet there has
been no consideration of the rich Mediterranean and Near Eastern
traditions of laments for fallen cities in commemorating or
resolving communal trauma. This volume offers new insights into the
trope of the fallen city in folk-song and a variety of literary
genres. These commemorations reveal memories modified by diverse
agendas, and contains narrative structures and motifs that show the
meaning of memory-making about fallen cities. Opening a new avenue
of research into the Mediterranean genre of city lament, this book
examines references to, or re-workings of, otherwise lost texts or
ways of commemorating fallen cities in the extant texts, and with
greater emphasis than usual on the point of view of the victors.
A systematic and historical treatment of the civil and criminal
procedure of Cicero's time. At the same time, the author examines
the legal difficulties and contradictions found in Cicero's
writings on procedure. With a subject index and index to passages
found in Cicero's works. Of value to the student of Roman Law,
ciminal and military procedure and law, and the history of European
courts.
This edition of Thucylides epic chronicle, The History of the
Peloponnesian War, contains all eight books in the authoritative
English translation of Richard Crawley. Thucylides himself was an
Athenian general who personally witnessed the various skirmishes of
the war. Ordering all of the events chronologically - a first for
any work of history - he offers a straightforward account of the
conflict, straying little to personal opinions or permitting his
history to be influenced by the politics of the era. For this,
Thucylides' is lauded for his methodical telling of each battle,
which offers the reader insight into Greek and Spartan tactics and
cultures. Throughout the history, we are given transcripts of
various speeches. Although the inclusion of such lengthy quotations
of sources is unheard of in modern history books, the presence of
lengthy oratory in Thucylides' history is considered to be a
cultural trait: speech and rhetoric were prized in Greece as the
prime means of transferring knowledge.
Canidia is one of the most well-attested witches in Latin
literature. She appears in no fewer than six of Horace's poems,
three of which she has a prominent role in. Throughout Horace's
Epodes and Satires she perpetrates acts of grave desecration,
kidnapping, murder, magical torture and poisoning. She invades the
gardens of Horace's literary patron Maecenas, rips apart a lamb
with her teeth, starves a Roman child to death, and threatens to
unnaturally prolong Horace's life to keep him in a state of
perpetual torment. She can be seen as an anti-muse: Horace
repeatedly sets her in opposition to his literary patron, casts her
as the personification of his iambic poetry, and gives her the
surprising honor of concluding not only his Epodes but also his
second book of Satires. This volume is the first comprehensive
treatment of Canidia. It offers translations of each of the three
poems which feature Canidia as a main character as well as the
relevant portions from the other three poems in which Canidia plays
a minor role. These translations are accompanied by extensive
analysis of Canidia's part in each piece that takes into account
not only the poems' literary contexts but their magico-religious
details.
Biological literature of the Roman imperial period remains somehow
'underestimated'. It is even quite difficult to speak of biological
literature for this period at all: biology (apart from medicine)
did not represent, indeed, a specific 'subgenre' of scientific
literature. Nevertheless, writings as disparate as Philo of
Alexandria's Alexander, Plutarch's De sollertia animalium or Bruta
ratione uti, Aelian's De Natura Animalium, Oppian's Halieutika,
Pseudo-Oppian's Kynegetika, and Basil of Caeserea's Homilies on the
Creation engage with zoological, anatomic, or botanical questions.
Poikile Physis examines how such writings appropriate, adapt,
classify, re-elaborate and present biological knowledge which
originated within the previous, mainly Aristotelian, tradition. It
offers a holistic approach to these works by considering their
reception of scientific material, their literary as well as
rhetorical aspects, and their interaction with different
socio-cultural conditions. The result of an interdisciplinary
discussion among scholars of Greek studies, philosophy and history
of science, the volume provides an initial analysis of forms and
functions of biological literature in the imperial period.
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