Did scribes intentionally change the text of the New Testament? This book argues they did not and disputes the claims that variant readings are theologically motivated. Using evidence gathered from some of the earliest surviving biblical manuscripts these essays reconstruct the copying habits of scribes and explore the contexts in which they worked. Alongside these are studies of selected early Christian writings, which illustrate attitudes to and examples of textual change.

Rome's wars delivered great wealth to the conquerors, but how did this affect politics and society on the home front? In Power and Public Finance at Rome, James Tan offers the first examination of the Roman Republic from the perspective of fiscal sociology and makes the case that no understanding of Roman history is complete without an appreciation of the role of economics in defining political interactions. Examining how imperial profits were distributed, Tan explores how imperial riches turned Roman public life on its head. Rome's lofty aristocrats had traditionally been constrained by their dependence on taxpayer money. They relied on the state to fund wars, and the state in turn relied on citizens' taxes to fuel the war machine. This fiscal chain bound the elite to taxpayer consent, but as the spoils of Empire flooded into Rome, leaders found that they could fund any policy they chose without relying on the support of the citizens who funded them. The influx of wealth meant that taxation at home was ended and citizens promptly lost what bargaining power they had enjoyed as a result of the state's reliance on their fiscal contributions. With their dependence on the taxpayers loosened, Rome's aristocratic leaders were free to craft a fiscal system which prioritized the enrichment of their own private estates and which devoted precious few resources to the provision of public goods. In six chapters on the nature of Rome's imperialist enrichment, on politics during the Punic Wars and on the all-important tribunates of the Gracchi, Tan offers new conceptions of Roman state creation, fiscal history, civic participation, aristocratic pre-eminence, and the eventual transition to autocracy.

Scipio Africanus (236-183 B. C.) was one of the most exciting and dynamic leaders in history. As commander, he never lost a battle. Yet it is his adversary, Hannibal, who has lived on in public memory. As B. H. Liddell Hart writes, "Scipio's battles are richer in stratagems and ruses--many still feasible today--than those of any other commander in history." Any military enthusiast or historian will find this to be an absorbing, gripping portrait.

The extent of Roman influence on English common law, long a keenly debated topic, was subjected to careful scrutiny during the establishment of modern English legal historiography in the late 1800s. Scrutton's revisionist essay, a path-breaking work that won Cambridge University's prestigious Yorke Prize, evaluates and mostly discredits the work of his predecessors, most notably Finlason, Coote and Seebohm. In its place he offers a history from the Saxon period to his day guided by a close reading of sources. Scrutton believed that Roman law was a minor influence until it was introduced to Oxford by Vacarius. It became considerable after that watershed event, an argument he advances through a close reading of Glanville and a book-by-book demonstration of Azo's influence on Bracton. Reprint of the sole edition. " Scrutton] has written what we believe to be the best essay on this subject.... It will be a useful guide to the authorities for any who are investigating the history of our law, while the author's own opinions are for the most part sound and sober, and are clearly and modestly stated." Law Quarterly Review 2 (1886) 96 Thomas Edward Scrutton 1856-1934] was an English jurist and writer. After a career in commercial law he became a judge of the King's Bench Division and of the Court of Appeal. He wrote the still standard The Contract of Affreightment as Expressed in Charterparties and Bills of Lading (1886) and an important treatise on English copyright law, The Law of Copyright (1883). CONTENTS INTRODUCTION PART I. ROMAN INFLUENCES OF ENGLISH LAW BEFORE THE COMING OF VACARIUS CHAPTER I. The Sources of the Roman Law CHAPTER II. The Claims of the Roman Law CHAPTER III. Roman Law in the Early Land Law Mr Seebohm's Manorial Theory CHAPTER IV. Roman Law in the Early Family Law CHAPTER V. Roman Law in Early Procedure CHAPTER VI. Roman Law in the Early Constitution Part I. Shires and Hundreds Part II. Towns and Gilds CHAPTER VII. Roman Law and the Norman Conquest CHAPTER VIII. Summary PART II. ROMAN INFLUENCES IN ENGLISH LAW AFTER THE COMING OF VACARIUS CHAPTER I. The Introduction of the Roman Law CHAPTER II. Roman Law in Glanvil CHAPTER III. Roman Law in Bracton Bracton's First Book: on Persons Bracton's Second Book: on Property Bracton's Third Book: on Contracts and Actions Criminal Law Remainder of Bracton Results CHAPTER IV. Roman Law in Britton and Fleta CHAPTER V. Roman Law from Fleta to Coke. CHAPTER VI. Roman Law in Coke CHAPTER VII. Authority of Bracton since Coke CHAPTER VIII. Roman Law; its authority in Hale and Blackstone CHAPTER IX. Roman Law in Blackstone CHAPTER X. Summary of Roman Law in Text-writers CHAPTER XI. Roman Law in the Chancery CHAPTER XII. Roman Law in the Ecclesiastical Courts CHAPTER XIII. Roman Law in the Admiralty CHAPTER XIV. Roman Law in the Law Merchant CHAPTER XV. Roman Law in the Common Law Conclusion Index

Jon D. Mikalson examines how Socrates, Plato, Aristotle, and other Greek philosophers described, interpreted, criticized, and utilized the components and concepts of the religion of the people of their time - practices such as sacrifice, prayer, dedications, and divination. The chief concepts involved are those of piety and impiety, and after a thorough analysis of the philosophical texts Mikalson offers a refined definition of Greek piety, dividing it into its two constituent elements of proper respect' for the gods and religious correctness'. He concludes with a demonstration of the benevolence of the gods in the philosophical tradition, linking it to the expectation of that benevolence evinced by popular religion.

The Bronze Age of Europe is a crucial formative period that underlay the civilisations of Greece and Rome, fundamental to our own modern civilisation. A systematic description of it appeared in 2013, but this work offers a series of personal studies of aspects of the period by one of its best known practitioners. The book is based on the idea that different aspects of the Bronze Age can be studied as a series of "lives": the life of people and peoples, of objects, of places, and of societies. Each of these is taken in turn and a range of aspects presented that offer interesting insights into the period. These are based on recent research (for instance on the genetic history of the Old World) as well as on fundamental earlier studies. In addition, there is a consideration of the history of Bronze Age studies, the "life of the Bronze Age". The book provides a novel approach to the Bronze Age based on the personal interests of a well-known Bronze Age scholar. It offers insights into a period that students of other aspects of the ancient world, as well as Bronze Age specialists and general readers, will find interesting and stimulating.

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 informative and enjoyable book surveys many aspects of the personal and emotional lives and belief systems of the ancient Greeks, focusing on such issues as familial life, religious piety, and ethnic identity. This work explores various aspects of ancient Greek personal and emotional lives, beginning with their understandings of their own bodies, individual and personal relationships, and ending with their feelings about religion and the afterlife. It covers ancient Greek culture from the early Archaic period in the 8th century BCE through the Late Classical period in the 4th century BCE. Readers will be fascinated to learn what the Greeks thought about the gods, physical deformity, citizenship, nymphs, goats, hospitality, and sexual relations that would be considered incest by modern standards. The content of the book provides an intimate sense of what the ancient Greeks were actually like, connecting ancient experiences to present-day culture. The chapters span a wide range of topics, including the human body, family and societal relationships, city life, the world as they knew it, and religious belief. The author draws extensively on primary sources to allow the reader to "hear" the Greeks speak for themselves and presents evidence from literature, art, and architecture in order to depict the ancient Greeks as living, breathing, thinking, and feeling people. Provides an unprecedented survey of ancient Greeks that describes the full scope of the personal and emotional lives of the actual people who gave rise to Greek laws, literature, and culture Reconstructs the everyday, emotional experiences of individuals in the ancient world and depicts the ways in which details of private life affected the individual's world view Covers all regions inhabited by the Greeks from the Archaic through the Classical periods, including the Greek mainland and islands, western Turkey, the Black Sea, North Africa, Sicily, and southern Italy

The standard view in scholarship is that disease in Lucretius' De rerum natura is mainly a problem to be solved and then dispensed with. However, a closer reading suggests that things are more layered and complex than they appear at first sight: just as morbus causes a radical rearrangement of atoms in the body and makes the patient engage with alternative and up to that point unknown dimensions of the sensible world, so does disease as a theme generate a multiplicity of meanings in the text. The present book argues for a reconsideration of morbus in De rerum natura along those lines: it invites the reader to revisit the topic of disease and reflect on the various, and often contrasting, discourses that unfold around it. More specifically, it illustrates how, apart from calling for therapy, disease, due to its dominant presence in the narrative, transforms at the same time into a concept that is integral both to the poem's philosophical agenda but also to its wider aesthetic concerns as a literary product. The book thus sheds new light on De rerum natura's intense preoccupation with morbus by showing how disease is not exclusively conceived by Lucretius as a blind, obliterating force but is crucially linked to life and meaning-both inside and outside the text.

The awe with which Plato regarded the character of 'the great' Parmenides has extended to the dialogue which he calls by his name. None of the writings of Plato have been more copiously illustrated, both in ancient and modern times, and in none of them have the interpreters been more at variance with one another. Nor is this surprising. For the Parmenides is more fragmentary and isolated than any other dialogue, and the design of the writer is not expressly stated. The date is uncertain; the relation to the other writings of Plato is also uncertain; the connexion between the two parts is at first sight extremely obscure; and in the latter of the two we are left in doubt as to whether Plato is speaking his own sentiments by the lips of Parmenides, and overthrowing him out of his own mouth, or whether he is propounding consequences which would have been admitted by Zeno and Parmenides themselves. The contradictions which follow from the hypotheses of the one and many have been regarded by some as transcendental mysteries; by others as a mere illustration, taken at random, of a new method. They seem to have been inspired by a sort of dialectical frenzy, such as may be supposed to have prevailed in the Megarian School (compare Cratylus, etc.). The criticism on his own doctrine of Ideas has also been considered, not as a real criticism, but as an exuberance of the metaphysical imagination which enabled Plato to go beyond himself.

In ancient Egypt, one of the primary roles of the king was to maintain order and destroy chaos. Since the beginning of Egyptian history, images of foreigners were used as symbols of chaos and thus shown as captives being bound and trampled under the king's feet. The early 18th dynasty (1550-1372 BCE) was the height of international trade, diplomacy and Egyptian imperial expansion. During this time new images of foreigners bearing tribute became popular in the tombs of the necropolis at Thebes, the burial place of the Egyptian elite. This volume analyses the new presentation of foreigners in these tombs. Far from being chaotic, they are shown in an orderly fashion, carrying tribute that underscores the wealth and prestige of the tomb owner. This orderliness reflects the ability of the Egyptian state to impose order on foreign lands, but also crucially symbolises the tomb owner's ability to overcome the chaos of death and achieve a successful afterlife. Illustrated with colour plates and black-and-white images, this new volume is an important and original study of the significance of these images for the tomb owner and the functioning of the funerary cult.

This innovative study illuminates the role of polemical literature in the political life of the Roman empire by examining the earliest surviving invectives directed against a living emperor. Written by three bishops (Athanasius of Alexandria, Hilary of Poitiers, Lucifer of Cagliari), these texts attacked Constantius II (337-61) for his vicious and tyrannical behaviour, as well as his heretical religious beliefs. This book explores the strategies employed by these authors to present themselves as fearless champions of liberty and guardians of faith, as they sought to bolster their authority at a time when they were out of step with the prevailing imperial view of Christian orthodoxy. Furthermore, by analysing this unique collection of writings alongside late antique panegyrics and ceremonial, it also rehabilitates anti-imperial polemic as a serious political activity and explores the ways in which it functioned within the complex web of presentations and perceptions that underpinned late Roman power relationships.

The crisis of the Roman Republic and its transformation into an Empire have fascinated generations of scholars. It has long been assumed that a dramatic demographic decline of the rural free peasantry (which was supplanted by slaves) triggered the series of social and economic developments which eventually led to Rome's political crisis during the first century BC. This book contributes to a lively debate by exploring both the textual and the archaeological evidence, and by tracing and reassessing the actual fate of the Italian rural free population between the Late Republic and the Early Empire. Data derived from a comparative analysis of twenty-seven archaeological surveys - and about five thousand sites - allow Dr Launaro to outline a radically new picture according to which episodes of local decline are placed within a much more generalised pattern of demographic growth.

This study, by author Allen Wright, offers an entertaining, informative, and fresh interpretation of the Bible's first books, Genesis through Kings II.

Part One compares two of the Bible's most familiar tales--Noah and the flood and David versus Goliath--with a much earlier ancient Mesopotamian text originally written in cuneiform long before the biblical writers sat down to their work.

Part Two analyzes each book of Genesis through Kings II coupled with the historical backdrop of the times. Learning how the biblical writers set about their business can help you stir up healthy and entertaining discussions among believers and nonbelievers alike; learn about ancient times and the conditions under which the first books of the Bible were written; And discover the true intention of the Bible, as well as its original intended audience.

The Book recounts how the early writers of the Bible went about saving their own civilization against overwhelming odds. See the Bible through a new lens, and return to modern life with a more enlightened understanding of the Bible's first books with The Book: Why the First Books of the Bible Were Written and Who They Were Written For.

In several of the dialogues of Plato, doubts have arisen among his interpreters as to which of the various subjects discussed in them is the main thesis. The speakers have the freedom of conversation; no severe rules of art restrict them, and sometimes we are inclined to think, with one of the dramatis personae in the Theaetetus, that the digressions have the greater interest. Yet in the most irregular of the dialogues there is also a certain natural growth or unity; the beginning is not forgotten at the end, and numerous allusions and references are interspersed, which form the loose connecting links of the whole. We must not neglect this unity, but neither must we attempt to confine the Platonic dialogue on the Procrustean bed of a single idea. (Compare Introduction to the Phaedrus.) Two tendencies seem to have beset the interpreters of Plato in this matter. First, they have endeavoured to hang the dia-logues upon one another by the slightest threads; and have thus been led to opposite and contradictory assertions respec-ting their order and sequence. The mantle of Schleiermacher has descended upon his successors, who have applied his method with the most various results.

The Acta Alexandrinorum are a fascinating collection of texts, dealing with relations between the Alexandrians and the Roman emperors in the first century AD. This was a turbulent time in the life of the capital city of the new province of Egypt, not least because of tensions between the Greek and Jewish sections of the population. Dr Harker has written the first in-depth study of these texts since their first edition half a century ago, and examines them in the context of other similar contemporary literary forms, both from Roman Egypt and the wider Roman Empire. This study of the Acta Alexandrinorum, which was genuinely popular in Roman Egypt, offers a more complex perspective on provincial mentalities towards imperial Rome than that offered in the mainstream elite literature. It will be of interest to classicists and ancient historians, but also to those interested in Jewish and New Testament studies.

This book tells the fascinating story of Roman Britain, beginning with the late pre-Roman Iron Age and ending with the province's independence from Roman rule in AD 409. Incorporating for the first time the most recent archaeological discoveries from Hadrian's Wall, London and other sites across the country, and richly illustrated throughout with photographs and maps, this reliable and up-to-date new account is essential reading for students, non-specialists and general readers alike. Writing in a clear, readable and lively style (with a satirical eye to strange features of past times), Rupert Jackson draws on current research and new findings to deepen our understanding of the role played by Britain in the Roman Empire, deftly integrating the ancient texts with new archaeological material. A key theme of the book is that Rome's annexation of Britain was an imprudent venture, motivated more by political prestige than economic gain, such that Britain became a 'trophy province' unable to pay its own way. However, the impact that Rome and its provinces had on this distant island was nevertheless profound: huge infrastructure projects transformed the countryside and means of travel, capital and principal cities emerged, and the Roman way of life was inseparably absorbed into local traditions. Many of those transformations continue to resonate to this day, as we encounter their traces in both physical remains and in civic life.

The second volume of the Handbook describes different extractive economies in the world regions that have been outlined in the first volume. A wide range of economic actors - from kings and armies to cities and producers - are discussed within different imperial settings as well as the tools, which enabled and constrained economic outcomes. A central focus are nodes of consumption that are visible in the archaeological and textual records of royal capitals, cities, religious centers, and armies that were stationed, in some cases permanently, in imperial frontier zones. Complementary to the multipolar concentrations of consumption are the fiscal-tributary structures of the empires vis-a-vis other institutions that had the capacity to extract, mobilize, and concentrate resources and wealth. Larger volumes of state-issued coinage in various metals show the new role of coinage in taxation, local economic activities, and social practices, even where textual evidence is absent. Given the overwhelming importance of agriculture, the volume also analyses forms of agrarian development, especially around cities and in imperial frontier zones. Special consideration is given to road- and water-management systems for which there is now sufficient archaeological and documentary evidence to enable cross-disciplinary comparative research.