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Books > History > World history > BCE to 500 CE
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.
An Anthology on the Roman World: Republic to Empire provides
students with a collection of carefully selected, multidisciplinary
readings that illuminate the unique history of the Romans. The
anthology is organized into four chapters. Chapter 1 focuses on
society and government. The readings encourage students to consider
how the shape of a city influences its society, the significance of
Roman baths, features of Roman government that have permeated the
West, and more. Chapter 2 focuses on Roman women, with articles
about Livia, the wife of Augustus; graffiti from Pompeii created by
women; and the place of the woman in the Roman family structure. In
Chapter 3, students examine the structure and roles within Roman
families. The readings cover symbols of gender and status in the
Roman household, marriage and sexuality, and the role of healthcare
providers in the Roman household, including woman doctors and
midwives. The final section discusses early Roman religion and the
introduction and growth of Christianity in the first couple of
centuries after its founding. An Anthology on the Roman World is an
ideal supplementary resource for courses in world history,
especially those with concentration on Roman history.
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.
For two thousand years the real, physical metropolis lay buried
while another, ghostly city lived on through ideas as varied as the
legendary Hanging Gardens, the career of the biblical Daniel, and
even the Apocalypse. More recently, the site of Babylon has been
the centre of major excavation, yet the spectacular results of this
work have done little to displace the many other fascinating ways
in which the city has endured and reinvented itself in culture.
Saddam Hussein, for one, notoriously exploited the Babylonian myth
to associate himself and his regime with its glorious past. Why has
Babylon so creatively fired the human imagination, with results
both good and ill? Why has it been enthralling to so many, and for
so long?In exploring answers, Michael Seymour ranges extensively
over space and time and embraces art, archaeology, history and
literature. From Hammurabi and Nebuchadnezzar, via Strabo and
Diodorus, to the Book of Revelation, Bruegel, Rembrandt, Voltaire,
William Blake and modern interpreters like Umberto Eco, Italo
Calvino and Gore Vidal, the author brings to light a carnival of
disparate sources dominated by powerful and intoxicating ideas such
as the Tower of Babel and the city of sin. Babylon: Legend, History
and the Ancient City weighs idea against reality, fiction against
fact, conjuring the fascinating story of this ancient metropolis
and its legacy to brilliant life as never before.
This volume aims to revisit, further explore and tease out the
textual, but also non-textual sources in an attempt to reconstruct
a clearer picture of a particular aspect of sexuality, i.e. sexual
practices, in Greco-Roman antiquity. Sexual practices refers to a
part of the overarching notion of sexuality: specifically, the acts
of sexual intercourse, the erogenous capacities and genital
functions of male and female body, and any other physical or
biological actions that define one's sexual identity or
orientation. This volume aims to approach not simply the acts of
sexual intercourse themselves, but also their legal, social,
political, religious, medical, cultural/moral and interdisciplinary
(e.g. emotional, performative) perspectives, as manifested in a
range of both textual and non-textual evidence (i.e. architecture,
iconography, epigraphy, etc.). The insights taken from the
contributions to this volume would enable researchers across a
range of disciplines - e.g. sex/gender studies, comparative
literature, psychology and cognitive neuroscience - to use
theoretical perspectives, methodologies and conceptual tools to
frame the sprawling examination of aspects of sexuality in broad
terms, or sexual practices in particular.
Exploring the representations of the war dead in early Greek
mythology, particularly the Homeric poems and the Epic Cycle,
alongside iconographic images on black-figure pottery and the
evidence of funerary monuments adorning the graves of early
Athenian elites, this book provides much-needed insight into the
customs associated with the war dead in Archaic Athens. It is
demonstrated that this period had remarkably little in common with
the much-celebrated institutions of the Classical era, standing in
fact much closer to the hierarchical ideals enshrined in the epics
of Homer and early mythology. While the public burial of the war
dead in Classical Athens has traditionally been a subject of much
scholarly interest, and the origins of the procedures described by
Thucydides as patrios nomos are still a matter of some debate, far
less attention has been devoted to the Athenian war dead of the
preceding era. This book aims to redress the imbalance in modern
scholarship and put the spotlight on the Athenian war dead of the
Archaic period. In addition, the book deepens our understanding of
the processes which led to the establishment of first public
burials and the Classical customs of patrios nomos, shedding
significant light on the military, cultural and social history of
Archaic Athens. Challenging previous assumptions and bringing new
material to the table, the book proposes a number of new ways to
investigate a period where many 'ancestral customs' were thought to
have their roots.
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 book focus on Athenian art in the second half of the fifth
century, one of the most important periods of ancient art.
Including papers on architecture, sculpture, and vase painting the
volume offers new and before unpublished material as well as new
interpretations of famous monuments like the sculptures of the
Parthenon. The contributions go back to an international conference
at the American School of Classical Studies, Athens.
This volume aims to provide an interdisciplinary examination of
various facets of being alone in Greco-Roman antiquity. Its focus
is on solitude, social isolation and misanthropy, and the differing
perceptions and experiences of and varying meanings and
connotations attributed to them in the ancient world. Individual
chapters examine a range of ancient contexts in which problems of
solitude, loneliness, isolation and seclusion arose and were
discussed, and in doing so shed light on some of humankind's
fundamental needs, fears and values.
In the Flesh deeply engages postmodern and new materialist feminist
thought in close readings of three significant poets-Propertius,
Tibullus, and Ovid-writing in the early years of Rome's Augustan
Principate. In their poems, they represent the flesh-and-blood body
in both its integrity and vulnerability, as an index of social
position along intersecting axes of sex, gender, status, and class.
Erika Zimmermann Damer underscores the fluid, dynamic, and
contingent nature of identities in Roman elegy, in response to a
period of rapid legal, political, and social change. Recognizing
this power of material flesh to shape elegiac poetry, she asserts,
grants figures at the margins of this poetic discourse-mistresses,
rivals, enslaved characters, overlooked members of households-their
own identities, even when they do not speak. She demonstrates how
the three poets create a prominent aesthetic of corporeal abjection
and imperfection, associating the body as much with blood, wounds,
and corporeal disintegration as with elegance, refinement, and
sensuality.
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