In this book, third in a series which includes Jacques Le Goff's "Medieval Characters" and Eugenio Garin's "Renaissance Portraits," leading scholars search for the character of the ancient Romans through portraits of Rome's most typical personages. Essays on the politician, the soldier, the priest, the farmer, the slave, the merchant, and others together create a fresco of Roman society as it spanned 1300 years.
Synthesizing a wealth of current research, "The Romans" surveys the most complex society ever to exist prior to the Industrial Age. Searching out the identity of the ancient Roman, the contributors describe an urbane figure at odds with his rustic peers, known for his warlike nature and his love of virtue, his magnanimity to foreigners and his predilection for cutting off his enemies' heads. Most important, perhaps, of the themes explored throughout this volume are those of freedom and slavery, of citizenship and "humanitas,"
What results from the depictions Roman society through time and across its many constituent cultures is the variety of Roman identity in all its richness and depth. These masterful essays will engage the general reader as well as the specialist in history and culture.

The papers in this volume are based on a 2006 Princeton University symposium in honor of Glen W. Bowersock on the occasion of his retirement from the faculty of the Institute for Advanced Study. Here a distinguished international group of ancient historians explores the classical antiquity that Bowersock has given us over a scholarly career of almost fifty years.

The topics offered in "East and West" range throughout the ancient world from the second century bce to late antiquity, from Hellenistic Greece and Republican Rome to Egypt and Arabia, from the Second Sophistic to Roman imperial discourse, from Sulla s self-presentation in his memoirs to charitable giving among the Manichaeans in Egypt.

This collection of essays represents the first attempt to take in Glen Bowersock s well-developed scholarly interests as a whole. The contributors open up new avenues that often run well beyond the conventional geographical and temporal boundaries of the Greco-Roman Mediterranean, leading to a host of fresh insights into antique thought and life.