Roman Republican Augury: Freedom and Control proposes a new way of understanding augury, a form of Roman state divination designed to consult the god Jupiter. Previous scholarly studies of augury have tended to focus either upon its legal-constitutional effects or upon its role in maintaining and perpetuating Roman social and political structures. This volume makes a new contribution to the study of Roman religion, politics, and cultural history by focusing instead upon what augury can tell us about how Romans understood their relationship with their gods. Augury is often thought to have told Romans what they wanted to hear. This volume argues that augury left space for perceived expressions of divine will which contradicted human wishes, and that its rules and precepts did not permit human beings to create or ignore signs at will. This analysis allows the Jupiter whom Romans approached in augury to emerge as not simply a source of power to be channelled to human ends, but a person with his own interests and desires, which did not always overlap with those of his human enquirers. When human will and divine will clashed, it was the will of Jupiter which was supposed to prevail. In theory as in practice, it was the Romans, not their supreme god, who were bound by the auguries and auspices.

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.

This volume, which originated with a conference at the College de France, comprises contributions by many of the leading researchers in Babylonian and Assyrian medicine. A wealth of topics are studied, including medical lexicography, prosopography, and technology, economic aspects of healing, and Mesopotamian influence on Greece. First-time editions of cuneiform medical tablets are presented. The volume will interest scholars in many branches of Assyriology, and also historians of Greek medicine. Contributors: Barbara Boeck, Paul Demont, Jean-Marie Durand, Jeanette C. Fincke, Markham J. Geller, Nils. P. Heessel, Marten Stol, Martin Worthington

The fourth century is often referred to as the first Christian century, and for the Jews a period of decline and persecution. But was this change really so immediate and irreversible? What was the real impact of the Christianization of the Roman Empire on the Jews, especially in their own land?

Stemberger draws on all available sources, literary and archaeological, Christian as well as pagan and Jewish, to reconstruct the history of the different religious communities of Palestine in the fourth century.

This book demonstrates how lively, creative, and resourceful the Jewish communities remained.

Pliny the Elder's Natural History, from first-century Rome, is the most important surviving encyclopedia of the ancient world. As a guide to the cultural meanings of everyday things in ancient Rome it is unparalleled. Concentrating on Pliny's accounts of foreign lands and peoples, monsters, and barbarians, Trevor Murphy demonstrates the political significance of this reference book as a monument to the power of Roman imperial society.

This title offers new approaches to the understanding of the Roman family and its transformation in late antiquity. This volume seeks to explain developments within the structure of the family in antiquity, in particular in the later Roman Empire and late antiquity. Contributions extend the traditional chronological focus on the Roman family to include the transformation of familial structures in the newly formed kingdoms of late antiquity in Europe, thus allowing a greater historical perspective and establishing a new paradigm for the study of the Roman family. Drawing on the latest research by leading scholars in the field, this book includes new approaches to the life course and the family in the Byzantine empire, family relationships in the dynasty of Constantine the Great, death, burial and commemoration of newborn children in Roman Italy, and widows and familial networks in Roman Egypt. In short, this volume seeks to establish a new agenda for the understanding of the Roman family and its transformation in late antiquity.

Any reader of scholarship on the ancient and early medieval world will be familiar with the term 'Germanic', which is frequently used as a linguistic category, ethnonym, or descriptive identifier for a range of forms of cultural and literary material. But is the term meaningful, useful, or legitimate? The term, frequently applied to peoples, languages, and material culture found in non-Roman north-western and central Europe in classical antiquity, and to these phenomena in the western Roman Empire's successor states, is often treated as a legitimate, all-encompassing name for the culture of these regions. Its usage is sometimes intended to suggest a shared social identity or ethnic affinity among those who produce these phenomena. Yet, despite decades of critical commentary that have highlighted substantial problems, its dominance of scholarship appears not to have been challenged. This edited volume, which offers contributions ranging from literary and linguistic studies to archaeology, and which span from the first to the sixteenth centuries AD, examines why the term remains so pervasive despite its problems, offering a range of alternative interpretative perspectives on the late and post-Roman worlds.

Current scholarship on Roman imperial representation addresses both the ways in which individual rulers presented themselves to their subjects and how particular aspects of imperial representation developed over time. This book combines these two approaches. It examines the diachronic development of the representation of Roman imperial power as a whole in one medium over a longer period of time. Through a quantitative and qualitative analysis of coin types issued between A.D. 193 and 284, patterns in the representation of third-century Roman emperors on imperial coinage are made visible. The result is a new perspective on the development of imperial ideology in times of crisis.

This volume on Thucydides, the most important historian of the ancient world, comprises articles by thirty leading international scholars. The contributions cover a wide range of issues, including Thucydides' life, intellectual milieu and predecessors, Thucydides and the act of writing, his rhetoric, historical method and narrative techniques, narrative unity in the History, the speeches, Thucydides' reliability as a historian, and his legacy through the centuries. Other topics dealt with include warfare, religion, individuals, democracy and oligarchy, the invention of political science, Thucydides and Athens, Sparta, Macedonia/Thrace, Sicily/South Italy, Persia, and the Argives. The volume aims to provide a survey of current trends in Thucydidean studies which will be of interest to all students of ancient history. "Brill's Companion to Thucydides was awarded Choice Outstanding Academic Title 2007,"

In the Roman republic, only the People could pass laws, only the People could elect politicians to office, and the very word republica meant 'the People's business'. So why is it always assumed that the republic was an oligarchy? The main reason is that most of what we know about it we know from Cicero, a great man and a great writer, but also an active right-wing politician who took it for granted that what was good for a small minority of self-styled 'best people' (optimates) was good for the republic as a whole. T. P. Wiseman interprets the last century of the republic on the assumption that the People had a coherent political ideology of its own, and that the optimates, with their belief in justified murder, were responsible for the breakdown of the republic in civil war.

How do people respond to and evaluate their sensory experiences of the natural and man-made world? What does it mean to speak of the 'value' of aesthetic phenomena? And in evaluating human arts and artifacts, what are the criteria for success or failure? The sixth in a series exploring 'ancient values', this book investigates from a variety of perspectives aesthetic value in classical antiquity. The essays explore not only the evaluative concepts and terms applied to the arts, but also the social and cultural ideologies of aesthetic value itself. Seventeen chapters range from the 'life without the Muses' to 'the Sublime', and from philosophical views to middle-brow and popular aesthetics. Aesthetic value in classical antiquity should be of interest to classicists, cultural and art historians, and philosophers.

In response to being exiled to the Black Sea by the Roman emperor Augustus in 8 AD, Ovid began to compose the Tristia and Epistulae ex Ponto and to create for himself a place of intellectual refuge. From there he was able to reflect out loud on how and why his own art had been legally banned and left for dead on the margins of the empire. As the last of the Augustan poets, Ovid was in a unique position to take stock of his own standing and of the place of poetry itself in a culture deeply restructured during the lengthy rule of Rome's first emperor. This study considers exile in the Tristia and Epistulae ex Ponto as a place of genuine suffering and a metaphor for poetry's marginalization from the imperial city. It analyzes, in particular, Ovid's representation of himself and the emperor Augustus against the background of Roman religion, law, and poetry.

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.

Aksum and Nubia assembles and analyzes the textual and archaeological evidence of interaction between Nubia and the Ethiopian kingdom of Aksum, focusing primarily on the fourth century CE. Although ancient Nubia and Ethiopia have been the subject of a growing number of studies in recent years, little attention has been given to contact between these two regions. Hatke argues that ancient Northeast Africa cannot be treated as a unified area politically, economically, or culturally. Rather, Nubia and Ethiopia developed within very different regional spheres of interaction, as a result of which the Nubian kingdom of Kush came to focus its energies on the Nile Valley, relying on this as its main route of contact with the outside world, while Aksum was oriented towards the Red Sea and Arabia. In this way Aksum and Kush coexisted in peace for most of their history, and such contact as they maintained with each other was limited to small-scale commerce. Only in the fourth century CE did Aksum take up arms against Kush, and even then the conflict seems to have been related mainly to security issues on Aksum's western frontier. Although Aksum never managed to hold onto Kush for long, much less dealt the final death-blow to the Nubian kingdom, as is often believed, claims to Kush continued to play a role in Aksumite royal ideology as late as the sixth century. Aksum and Nubia critically examines the extent to which relations between two ancient African states were influenced by warfare, commerce, and political fictions. Online edition available as part of the NYU Library's Ancient World Digital Library and in partnership with the Institute for the Study of the Ancient World (ISAW).