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The Colosseum was Imperial Rome's monument to warfare. Like a
cathedral of death it towered over the city and invited its
citizens, 50,000 at a time, to watch murderous gladiatorial games.
It is now visited by two million visitors a year (Hitler was among
them). Award winning classicist, Mary Beard with Keith Hopkins,
tell the story of Rome's greatest arena: how it was built; the
gladiatorial and other games that were held there; the training of
the gladiators; the audiences who revelled in the games, the
emperors who staged them and the critics. And the strange after
story - the Colosseum has been fort, store, church, and glue
factory.
Keith Hopkins was a sociologist and Professor of Ancient History at
Cambridge from 1985 to 2001. He is widely recognised as one of the
most radical, innovative and influential Roman historians of his
generation. This volume presents fourteen of Hopkins' essays on an
impressive range of subjects: contraception, demography, economic
history, slavery, literacy, imperial power, Roman religion, Early
Christianity, and the social and political structures of the
ancient world. The papers have been re-edited and revised with
accompanying essays by Hopkins' colleagues, friends and former
students. This volume brings Hopkins' work up to date. It sets his
distinctive and pioneering use of sociological approaches in a
wider intellectual context and explores his lasting impact on the
ways that ancient history is now written. This volume will interest
all those fascinated by Rome and its empire, and particularly those
eager to experience challenging and controversial ways of
understanding the past.
In this provocative, irresistibly entertaining book, Keith Hopkins takes readers back in time to explore the roots of Christianity in ancient Rome. Combining exacting scholarship with dazzling invention, Hopkins challenges our perceptions about religion, the historical Jesus, and the way history is written. He puts us in touch with what he calls "empathetic wonder"-imagining what Romans, pagans, Jews, and Christians thought, felt, experienced, and believed-by employing a series of engaging literary devices. These include a TV drama about the Dead Sea Scrolls; the first-person testimony of a pair of time-travelers to Pompeii; a meditation on Jesus' apocryphal twin brother; and an unusual letter on God, demons, and angels.
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The Colosseum (Paperback)
Keith Hopkins, Mary Beard
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R570
R467
Discovery Miles 4 670
Save R103 (18%)
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Ships in 10 - 15 working days
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Byron and Hitler were equally entranced by Rome's most famous
monument, the Colosseum. Mid-Victorians admired the hundreds of
varieties of flowers in its crannies and occasionally shuddered at
its reputation for contagion, danger, and sexual temptation. Today
it is the highlight of a tour of Italy for more than three million
visitors a year, a concert arena for the likes of Paul McCartney,
and a national symbol of opposition to the death penalty. Its
ancient history is chock full of romantic but erroneous myths.
There is no evidence that any gladiator ever said "Hail Caesar,
those about to die..." and we know of not one single Christian
martyr who met his finish here. Yet the reality is much stranger
than the legend as the authors, two prominent classical historians,
explain in this absorbing account. We learn the details of how the
arena was built and at what cost; we are introduced to the emperors
who sometimes fought in gladiatorial games staged at the Colosseum;
and we take measure of the audience who reveled in, or opposed,
these games. The authors also trace the strange afterlife of the
monument-as fortress, shrine of martyrs, church, and glue factory.
Why are we so fascinated with this arena of death?
Keith Hopkins was a sociologist and Professor of Ancient History at
Cambridge from 1985 to 2001. He is widely recognised as one of the
most radical, innovative and influential Roman historians of his
generation. This volume presents fourteen of Hopkins' essays on an
impressive range of subjects: contraception, demography, economic
history, slavery, literacy, imperial power, Roman religion, Early
Christianity, and the social and political structures of the
ancient world. The papers have been re-edited and revised with
accompanying essays by Hopkins' colleagues, friends and former
students. This volume brings Hopkins' work up to date. It sets his
distinctive and pioneering use of sociological approaches in a
wider intellectual context and explores his lasting impact on the
ways that ancient history is now written. This volume will interest
all those fascinated by Rome and its empire, and particularly those
eager to experience challenging and controversial ways of
understanding the past.
This is a volume of studies concerned with death and its impact on
the social order. The first topic considered is gladiatorial
combat; not merely popular entertainment, it was also an important
element in Roman politics. The book then investigates the
composition of the political elite in the late Republic and
Principate (249 BC - AD 235), showing that ideals of hereditary
succession disguised high rates of social mobility. The final
chapter ranges over aristocratic death rituals and tombs, funerals
and ghost stories, to the search for immortality and the power of
the Roman dead in distributing property by written wills.
The enormous size of the Roman empire and the length of time it
endured call for an understanding of the institutions which
sustained it. In this book, Keith Hopkins, who is both classicist
and sociologist, uses various sociological concepts and methods to
gain new insights into how traditional Roman institutions changed
as the Romans acquired their empire. He examines the chain
reactions resulting from increased wealth; various aspects of
slavery, especially manumission and the cost of freedom; the
curious phenomenon of the political power wielded by eunuchs at
court; and in the final chapter he discusses the Roman emperor's
divinity and the circulation of untrue stories, which were a
currency of the political system. Professor Hopkins has developed
an exciting approach to social questions in antiquity and his book
should be of interest to all students of ancient history and of
historical sociology.
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