Ancient Empires is a relatively brief yet comprehensive and even-handed overview of the ancient Near East, the Mediterranean, and Europe, including the Greco-Roman world, Late Antiquity, and the early Muslim period. Taking a focused and thematic approach, it aims to provoke a discussion of an explicit set of themes supplemented by the reading of ancient sources. By focusing on empires and imperialism as well as modes of response and resistance, it is relevant to current discussions about order, justice, and freedom. The book concludes that some of the ancient world's most enduring ideas, value systems, and institutions were formulated by peoples who were resisting the great empires. It analyzes the central, if problematic, connection between political and ideological power in both empire formation and resistance. The intricate interrelations among ideological, economic, military, and political power are explored for every empire and resisting group.

Ancient Empires is a relatively brief yet comprehensive and even-handed overview of the ancient Near East, the Mediterranean, and Europe, including the Greco-Roman world, Late Antiquity, and the early Muslim period. Taking a focused and thematic approach, it aims to provoke a discussion of an explicit set of themes supplemented by the reading of ancient sources. By focusing on empires and imperialism as well as modes of response and resistance, it is relevant to current discussions about order, justice, and freedom. The book concludes that some of the ancient world's most enduring ideas, value systems, and institutions were formulated by peoples who were resisting the great empires. It analyzes the central, if problematic, connection between political and ideological power in both empire formation and resistance. The intricate interrelations among ideological, economic, military, and political power are explored for every empire and resisting group.

Prior to the third century A.D., two broad Roman conceptions of frontiers proliferated and competed: an imperial ideology of rule without limit coexisted with very real and pragmatic attempts to define and defend imperial frontiers. But from about A.D. 250-500, there was a basic shift in mentality, as news from and about frontiers began to portray a more defined Roman world--a world with limits--allowing a new understanding of frontiers as territorial and not just as divisions of people. This concept, previously unknown in the ancient world, brought with it a new consciousness, which soon spread to cosmology, geography, myth, sacred texts, and prophecy. The "frontier consciousness" produced a unified sense of Roman identity that transcended local identities and social boundaries throughout the later Empire.
Approaching Roman frontiers with the aid of media studies as well as anthropological and sociological methodologies, Mark W. Graham chronicles and documents this significant transition in ancient thought, which coincided with, but was not necessarily dependent on, the Christianization of the Roman world.
Mark W. Graham is Assistant Professor of History at Grove City College.