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Books > History > World history > BCE to 500 CE
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).
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