Explaining the Cosmos analyzes the writings of three thinkers associated with Gaza: Aeneas, Zacharias and Procopius. Together, they offer a case study for the appropriation, adaptation, and transformation of classical philosophy in late antiquity, and for cultural transitions more generally in Gaza. Aeneas claimed that the "Academy and Lyceum" had been transferred to Gaza. This book asks what the cultural and intellectual characteristics of the Gazan "Academies" were, and how members of the schools mixed with local cultures of Christians, philosophers, rhetoricians and monks from the local monasteries.
Aeneas, Zacharias and Procopius each contributed to debates about the creation and eternity of the world, which ran from the Neoplatonist Proclus into the sixth-century disputes between Philoponus, Simplicius and Cosmas Indicopleustes. The Gazan contribution is significant in its own right, highlighting distinctive aspects of late-antique Christianity, and it throws the later philosophical debates into sharper relief. Focusing on the creation debates also allows for exploration of the local cultures that constituted Gazan society in the late-fifth and early-sixth centuries. Explainingthe Cosmos further explores cultural dynamics in the Gazan schools and monasteries and the wider cultural history of the city. The Gazans adapt and transform aspects of Classical and Neoplatonic culture while rejecting Neoplatonic religious claims. The study also analyses the Gazans' intellectual contributions in the context of Neoplatonism and early Christianity. The Gaza which emerges from this study is a set of cultures in transition, mutually constituting and transforming each other through a fugal pattern of exchange, adaptation, conflict and collaboration.

In this provocative challenge to prevailing views of New Testament sources, Dennis MacDonald argues that the origins of passages in the book of "Acts" are to be found not in early Christian legends but in the epics of Homer. MacDonald focuses on four passages in the book of "Acts", examines their potential parallels in the "Iliad" and concludes that the author of "Acts" composed them using famous scenes in Homer's work as a model. Tracing the influence of passages from the "Iliad" on subsequent ancient literature, MacDonald shows how the story generated a vibrant, mimetic literary tradition long before Luke composed the "Acts". Luke could have expected educated readers to recognize his transformation of these tales and to see that the Christian God and heroes were superior to Homeric gods and heroes. Building upon and extending the analytic methods of his earlier book, "The Homeric Epics and the Gospel of Mark", MacDonald opens an original and promising appreciation not only of "Acts" but also of the composition of early Christian narrative in general.

Libertas and Res Publica in the Roman Republic offers some essential ideas for an understanding of Roman politics during the Republican period by analysing two key concepts: libertas (liberty) and res publica (public matter, republic). Exploring these concepts through a variety of different aspects - legal, religious, literary, political, and cultural - this book aims to explain the profound relationship between the two. Through the examination of a rich array of sources ranging from classical authors to coins, from legal texts to works of art, Balmaceda and her co-authors propose new readings that elucidate the complex meanings and inter-related functions of libertas and res publica, in a thought-provoking, deep, but very readable study of Roman political culture and identity.

This is a thorough academic tutorial of the Syriac language beginning with its history and ending with the learning of the language itself.

This book will be the second volume in the American Classical Studies series. The subject is Sextus Empiricus, one of the chief sources of information on ancient philosophy and one of the most influential authors in the history of skepticism. Sextus' works have had an extraordinary influence on western philosophy, and this book provides the first exhaustive and detailed study of their recovery, transmission, and intellectual influence through Late Antiquity, the Middle Ages, and the Renaissance. This study deals with Sextus' biography, as well as the history of the availability and reception of his works. It also contains an extensive bibliographical section, including editions, translations, and commentaries.

The Roman historian Livy saw the past as a storehouse of lessons. Jane Chaplin examines how his historical figures manipulate the shifting meaning of the past and reveals Livy's acute sensitivity to contemporary problems. Special emphasis is placed on Romans versus foreigners as students of the past, the competing claims of near and remote events, and history's relevance for current dilemmas.

Jon Lendon offers a bold new analysis of how Roman government worked in the first four centuries AD. A despotism rooted in force and fear enjoyed widespread support among the ruling classes of the provinces on the basis of an aristocratic culture of honour shared by rulers and ruled.

The book covers Egyptian history from the Predynastic to the late Roman Period. It also introduces early contemporary literary references to ancient Egypt and uses a number of theoretical approaches to interrogate the archaeological and textual data.

Gothic literature imagines the return of ghosts from the past. But what about the ghosts of the classical past? Spectres of Antiquity is the first full-length study to describe the relationship between Greek and Roman culture and the Gothic novels, poetry, and drama of the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Rather than simply representing the opposite of classical aesthetics and ideas, the Gothic emerged from an awareness of the lingering power of antiquity. The Gothic reflects a new and darker vision of the ancient world: no longer inspiring modernity through its examples, antiquity has become a ghost, haunting contemporary minds rather than guiding them. Through readings of works by authors including Horace Walpole, Ann Radcliffe, Matthew Lewis, Charles Brockden Brown, and Mary Shelley, Spectres of Antiquity argues that these authors' plots and ideas preserve the remembered traces of Greece and Rome. James Uden provides evidence for many allusions to ancient texts that have never previously been noted in scholarship, and he offers an accessible guide both to the Gothic genre and to the classical world to which it responds. In fascinating and compelling detail, Spectres of Antiquity rewrites the history of the Gothic, demonstrating that the genre was haunted by a far deeper sense of history than has previously been assumed.

Egyptologist Gerald Massey challenged readers in A Book of the Beginnings to consider the argument that Egypt was the birthplace of civilization and that the widespread monotheistic vision of man and the metaphysical was, in fact, based on ancient Egyptian mythos. In The Natural Genesis, Massey delivers a sequel, delving deeper into his compelling polemic. Volume II provides detailed discourse on the Egyptian origin of the delicate components of the monotheistic creed. With his agile prose, Massey leads an adventurous examination of the epistemology of astronomy, time, and Christology-and what it all means for human culture. British author GERALD MASSEY (1828-1907) published works of poetry, spiritualism, Shakespearean criticism, and theology, but his best-known works are in the realm of Egyptology, including A Book of the Beginnings and Ancient Egypt: The Light of the World.

This book demonstrates how the Romans constructed garden boundaries specifically in order to open up or undermine the division between a number of oppositions, such as inside/outside, sacred/profane, art/nature, and real/imagined. Using case studies from across literature and material and visual culture, Victoria Austen explores the perception of individual garden sites in response to their limits, and showcases how the Romans delighted in playing with concepts of boundedness and separation. Transculturally, the garden is understood as a marked-off and cultivated space. Distinct from their surroundings, gardens are material and symbolic spaces that constitute both universal and culturally specific ways of accommodating the natural world and expressing human attitudes and values. Although we define these spaces explicitly through the notions of separation and division, in many cases we are unable to make sense of the most basic distinction between 'garden' and 'not-garden'. In response to this ambiguity, Austen interrogates the notion of the 'boundary' as an essential characteristic of the Roman garden.

Here is a blueprint for a new interdisciplinary approach that decompartmentalizes disciplines for the study of this district of the Achaemenid Empire including Syria, Phoenicia, Palestine and Cyprus. Remarkable cultural evolutions and changes in this area need closer study: the introduction of coinage and the coin economy, the sources of tension over problems of power and identity, the emergence of city-states similar to the Greek city type, the development of mercenary armies, the opening up of the Western fringe of the Persian Empire to the Greek world. Completely new research initiatives can extensively modify the vision that classical and oriental specialists have traditionally formed of the history of the Persian Empire.>

The world's first known empires took shape in Mesopotamia between the eastern shores of the Mediterranean Sea and the Persian Gulf, beginning around 2350 BCE. The next 2,500 years witnessed sustained imperial growth, bringing a growing share of humanity under the control of ever-fewer states. Two thousand years ago, just four major powers--the Roman, Parthian, Kushan, and Han empires--ruled perhaps two-thirds of the earth's entire population. Yet despite empires' prominence in the early history of civilization, there have been surprisingly few attempts to study the dynamics of ancient empires in the western Old World comparatively. Such grand comparisons were popular in the eighteenth century, but scholars then had only Greek and Latin literature and the Hebrew Bible as evidence, and necessarily framed the problem in different, more limited, terms. Near Eastern texts, and knowledge of their languages, only appeared in large amounts in the later nineteenth century. Neither Karl Marx nor Max Weber could make much use of this material, and not until the 1920s were there enough archaeological data to make syntheses of early European and west Asian history possible. But one consequence of the increase in empirical knowledge was that twentieth-century scholars generally defined the disciplinary and geographical boundaries of their specialties more narrowly than their Enlightenment predecessors had done, shying away from large questions and cross-cultural comparisons. As a result, Greek and Roman empires have largely been studied in isolation from those of the Near East. This volume is designed to address these deficits and encourage dialogue across disciplinary boundaries by examining thefundamental features of the successive and partly overlapping imperial states that dominated much of the Near East and the Mediterranean in the first millennia BCE and CE.
A substantial introductory discussion of recent thought on the mechanisms of imperial state formation prefaces the five newly commissioned case studies of the Neo-Assyrian, Achaemenid Persian, Athenian, Roman, and Byzantine empires. A final chapter draws on the findings of evolutionary psychology to improve our understanding of ultimate causation in imperial predation and exploitation in a wide range of historical systems from all over the globe. Contributors include John Haldon, Jack Goldstein, Peter Bedford, Josef Wiesehofer, Ian Morris, Walter Scheidel, and Keith Hopkins, whose essay on Roman political economy was completed just before his death in 2004.

In the first centuries AD, although much of the Near East was ruled by Rome, the main local language was Aramaic, and the people who lived inside or on the fringes of the area controlled by the Romans frequently wrote their inscriptions and legal documents in their own local dialects of this language. This book introduces these fascinating early texts to a wider audience, by presenting a representative sample, comprising eighty inscriptions and documents in the following dialects: Nabataean, Jewish, Palmyrene, Syriac, and Hatran. Detailed commentaries on the texts are preceded by chapters on history and culture and on epigraphy and language. The linguistic commentaries will help readers who have a knowledge of Hebrew or Arabic or one of the Aramaic dialects to understand the difficulties involved in interpreting such materials. The translations and more general comments will be of great interest to classicists and ancient historians.

This sourcebook includes a rich and accessible selection of Roman original sources in translation ranging from the Regal Period through Republican and Imperial Rome to the late Empire and the coming of Christianity. From Roman goddesses to mortal women, imperial women to slaves and prostitutes, the volume brings new perspectives to the study of Roman women's lives. Literary sources comprise works by Livy, Catullus, Ovid, Juvenal and many others. Suggestions for further reading, a general bibliography, and an index of ancient authors and works are also included.

It has often been argued that Zerubbabel, the Jewish governor of Yehud at the time of the rebuilding of the temple (late 6th century BCE), was viewed by the prophets Haggai and Zechariah as the new king in the line of David. In this new study, Rose offers a contrary proposal for the interpretation of the oracles in Haggai 2 and Zechariah 3 and 6. He traces their background in the pre-exilic prophets, pays special attention to often neglected details of semantics and metaphor, and concludes that neither Haggai nor Zechariah designated Zerubbabel as the new king in Jerusalem. Instead, the oracles in Zechariah 3 and 6 should be seen as fully messianic.>

In a new interpretation of Parmenides philosophical poem On Nature, Vishwa Adluri considers Parmenides as a thinker of mortal singularity, a thinker who is concerned with the fate of irreducibly unique individuals. Adluri argues that the tripartite division of Parmenides poem allows the thinker to brilliantly hold together the paradox of speaking about being in time and articulates a tragic knowing: mortals may aspire to the transcendence of metaphysics, but are inescapably returned to their mortal condition.Parmenides.