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Tiberius Caesar
By David Shotter. 2004
Taking into account the latest research on the subject, David Shotter has updated this second edition of Tiberius Caesar throughout…
and provides a concise and accessible survey of the character and life of Tiberius Caesar, heir of Augustus Caesar and emperor of Rome from AD 14 to AD 37. Tiberius Caesar sheds light on many aspects of the reign of this enigmatic emperor, including the influential and often problematic relationships Tiberius maintained with the senate, his heir Germanicus and Sejanus. Other key topics discussed include: * Tiberius's rise to power* Tiberius's struggle to meet the demands of his role* how far Tiberius's policies differed from those of Augustus* why Tiberius retired from official duties in AD 26.Also included is a revised and expanded bibliography and a new index, all of which, added together, makes for an invaluable book in the study of Roman history.Pericles
By Thomas R. Martin. 2016
Pericles was the most famous leader of the most famous ancient Greek democracy - and also the most controversial in…
his own time and ever since. Was he a brutal imperialist ready to oppress other Greeks, or a clear-eyed defender of Athens' need for power to survive in a relentlessly hostile world? How did his intellectual training in ideas that many Athenians regarded as dangerous make him the most persuasive leader Athenian democracy ever knew? Why was his personal lifestyle so idiosyncratic? How should we evaluate his responsibility for the suffering and loss of the Peloponnesian War? Thomas R. Martin's unique emphasis on the effect on Pericles of his family's notorious history, his youthful experiences as a wartime refugee, and his unusual education reveals a brilliant politician whose hyper-rationality could not, in the end, protect him or his community from tragedy.The City in the Roman West, c.250 BC–c.AD 250
By Ray Laurence, Gareth Sears, Simon Esmonde Cleary. 2011
The city is widely regarded as the most characteristic expression of the social, cultural and economic formations of the Roman…
Empire. This was especially true in the Latin-speaking West, where urbanism was much less deeply ingrained than in the Greek-speaking East but where networks of cities grew up during the centuries following conquest and occupation. This up-to-date and well-illustrated synthesis provides students and specialists with an overview of the development of the city in Italy, Gaul, Britain, Germany, Spain and North Africa, whether their interests lie in ancient history, Roman archaeology or the wider history of urbanism. It accounts not only for the city's geographical and temporal spread and its associated monuments (such as amphitheatres and baths), but also for its importance to the rulers of the Empire as well as the provincials and locals.Spartan Warrior 735-331 BC
By Steve Noon, Duncan Campbell. 2012
Immortalized through their exploits at the battle of Thermopylae under the legendary Leonidas, as well as countless other victories throughout…
the classical period, the Spartans were some of the best trained, organized, most feared and lethal warriors of the ancient world. This small state, known to the Ancient Greeks as Lakedaimon, situated in the southern Argolid developed one of the most successful military forces of the Ancient World. Their unique society, where serfs (helots) and non-citizen labourers (perioikoi) left the pure-bred men of Sparta free to concentrate all their energies on warfare. Forbidden from engaging in any form of manual labour, these Spartan warriors were trained from an early age in a brutal regime that gave them the necessary discipline and endurance to withstand the pressures of phalanx warfare and endure all manner of hardships on campaign.This title will describe all aspect of the Spartan warriors life, from the earliest days of his training through his life in peace and war culminating in the battlefield experiences of these feared combatants. The Spartans saw widespread combat throughout the Peloponnese and beyond during the Greek and Persian and Peloponnesian wars, becoming the supreme Greek power following their eclipse of Athens until the battles of Leuctra and Mantineia saw their star wane.Acculturation and Its Discontents
By Geoffrey Symcox, Peter Reill, Massimo Ciavolella, David N. Myers. 2008
Exploring the fascinating cross-cultural influences between Jews and Christians in Italy from the Renaissance to the twentieth century, Acculturation and…
Its Discontents assembles essays by leading historians, literary scholars, and musicologists to present a well-rounded history of Italian Jewry.The contributors offer rich portraits of the many vibrant forms of cultural and artistic expression that Italian Jews contributed to, but this volume also pays close attention to the ways in which Italian Jews - both freely and under pressure - creatively adapted to the social, cultural, and legal norms of the surrounding society. Tracing both the triumphs and tragedies of Jewish communities within Italy over a broad span of time, Acculturation and Its Discontents challenges conventional assumptions about assimilation and state intervention and, in the process, charts the complex process of cultural exchange that left such a distinctive imprint not only on Italian Jewry, but also on Italian society itself.This collection of rigorous and thought-provoking essays makes a major contribution to both the history of Italian culture and the cultural influence and significance of European Jews.The Structure and Performance of Euripides' Helen
By C. W. Marshall. 2014
Using Euripides' play, Helen, as the main point of reference, C. W. Marshall's detailed study expands our understanding of Athenian…
tragedy and provides new interpretations of how Euripides created meaning in performance. Marshall focuses on dramatic structure to show how assumptions held by the ancient audience shaped meaning in Helen and to demonstrate how Euripides' play draws extensively on the satyr play Proteus, which was part of Aeschylus' Oresteia. Structure is presented not as a theoretical abstraction, but as a crucial component of the experience of performance, working with music, the chorus and the other plays in the tetralogy. Euripides' Andromeda in particular is shown to have resonances with Helen not previously described. Arguing that the role of the director is key, Marshall shows that the choices that a director can make about role doubling, gestures, blocking, humour, and masks play a crucial part in forming the meaning of Helen.An Oasis City (ISAW Monographs #6)
By Raffaella Cribiore, Roger S. Bagnall, Susanna Mcfadden, Nicola Aravecchia, Paola Davoli, Olaf E. Kaper. 2007
Scattered through the vast expanse of stone and sand that makes up Egypt's Western Desert are several oases. These islands…
of green in the midst of the Sahara owe their existence to springs and wells drawing on ancient aquifers. In antiquity, as today, they supported agricultural communities, going back to Neolithic times but expanding greatly in the millennium from the Saite pharaohs to the Roman emperors. New technologies of irrigation and transportation made the oases integral parts of an imperial economy. Amheida, ancient Trimithis, was one of those oasis communities. Located in the western part of the Dakhla Oasis, it was an important regional center, reaching a peak in the Roman period before being abandoned. Over the past decade, excavations at this well-preserved site have revealed its urban layout and brought to light houses, streets, a bath, a school, and a church. The only standing brick pyramid of the Roman period in Egypt has been restored. Wall-paintings, temple reliefs, pottery, and texts all contribute to give a lively sense of its political, religious, economic, and cultural life. This book presents these aspects of the city's existence and its close ties to the Nile valley, by way of long desert roads, in an accessible and richly illustrated fashion.Aeschines
By Chris Carey. 2000
This is the third volume in the Oratory of Classical Greece series. Planned for publication over several years, the series…
will present all of the surviving speeches from the late fifth and fourth centuries B.C. in new translations prepared by classical scholars who are at the forefront of the discipline. These translations are especially designed for the needs and interests of today's undergraduates, Greekless scholars in other disciplines, and the general public. Classical oratory is an invaluable resource for the study of ancient Greek life and culture. The speeches offer evidence on Greek moral views, social and economic conditions, political and social ideology, and other aspects of Athenian culture that have been largely ignored: women and family life, slavery, and religion, to name just a few. This volume contains the three surviving speeches of Aeschines (390-? B.C.). His speeches all revolve around political developments in Athens during the second half of the fourth century B.C. and reflect the internal political rivalries in an Athens overshadowed by the growing power of Macedonia in the north. The first speech was delivered when Aeschines successfully prosecuted Timarchus, a political opponent, for having allegedly prostituted himself as a young man. The other two speeches were delivered in the context of Aeschines' long-running political feud with Demosthenes. As a group, the speeches provide important information on Athenian law and politics, Demosthenes and his career, sexuality and social history, and the historical rivalry between Athens and Macedonia.The Forts of Judaea 168 BC-AD 73
By Adam Hook, Samuel Rocca. 2008
This book analyzes the fortifications of Hasmonaean and Herodian Judaea from the middle of the second century BC, when the…
Maccabees rebelled against their Seleucids overlords and established an independent state, until the end of the Jewish-Roman War in AD 73.Allegories of Farming from Greece and Rome
By Leah Kronenberg. 2009
In this book Professor Kronenberg shows that Xenophon's Oeconomicus, Varro's De Re Rustica and Virgil's Georgics are not simply works…
on farming but belong to a tradition of philosophical satire which uses allegory and irony to question the meaning of morality. These works metaphorically connect farming and its related arts to political life; but instead of presenting farming in its traditional guise as a positive symbol, they use it to model the deficiencies of the active life, which in turn is juxtaposed to a preferred contemplative way of life. Although these three texts are not usually treated together, this book convincingly connects them with an original and provocative interpretation of their allegorical use of farming. It also fills an important gap in our understanding of the literary influences on the Georgics by showing that it is shaped not just by its poetic predecessors but by philosophical dialogue.The Concept of Presocratic Philosophy: Its Origin, Development, and Significance
By Glenn W. Most, André Laks. 2018
When we talk about Presocratic philosophy, we are speaking about the origins of Greek philosophy and Western rationality itself. But…
what exactly does it mean to talk about “Presocratic philosophy” in the first place? How did early Greek thinkers come to be considered collectively as Presocratic philosophers? In this brief book, André Laks provides a history of the influential idea of Presocratic philosophy, tracing its historical and philosophical significance and consequences, from its ancient antecedents to its full crystallization in the modern period and its continuing effects today.Laks examines ancient Greek and Roman views about the birth of philosophy before turning to the eighteenth-century emergence of the term “Presocratics” and the debates about it that spanned the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. He analyzes the intellectual circumstances that led to the idea of Presocratic philosophy—and what was and is at stake in the construction of the notion. The book closes by comparing two models of the history of philosophy—the phenomenological, represented by Hans-Georg Gadamer, and the rationalist, represented by Ernst Cassirer—and their implications for Presocratic philosophy, as well as other categories of philosophical history. Other figures discussed include Plato, Aristotle, Cicero, Diogenes Laertius, Schleiermacher, Hegel, Nietzsche, Max Weber, and J.-P. Vernant.Challenging standard histories of Presocratic philosophy, the book calls for a reconsideration of the conventional story of early Greek philosophy and Western rationality.Valorizing the Barbarians
By Eric Adler. 2005
With the growth of postcolonial theory in recent decades, scholarly views of Roman imperialism and colonialism have been evolving and…
shifting. Much recent discussion of the topic has centered on the ways in which ancient Roman historians consciously or unconsciously denigrated non-Romans. Similarly, contemporary scholars have downplayed Roman elite anxiety about their empire’s expansion. In this groundbreaking new work, Eric Adler explores the degree to which ancient historians of Rome were capable of valorizing foreigners and presenting criticisms of their own society. By examining speeches put into the mouths of barbarian leaders by a variety of writers, he investigates how critical of the empire these historians could be. Adler examines pairs of speeches purportedly delivered by non-Roman leaders so that the contrast between them might elucidate each writer’s sense of imperialism. Analyses of Sallust’s and Trogus’s treatments of the Eastern ruler Mithradates, Polybius’s and Livy’s speeches from Carthage’s Hannibal, and Tacitus’s and Cassius Dio’s accounts of the oratory of the Celtic warrior queen Boudica form the core of this study. Adler supplements these with examinations of speeches from other characters, as well as contextual narrative from the historians. Throughout, Adler wrestles with broader issues of Roman imperialism and historiography, including administrative greed and corruption in the provinces, the treatment of gender and sexuality, and ethnic stereotyping.Magistracy and the Historiography of the Roman Republic
By Ayelet Haimson Lushkov. 2015
The study of Roman republican magistracy has traditionally been the preserve of historians posing constitutional and prosopographical questions. As a…
result, one fundamental aspect of our most detailed contemporary and near-contemporary sources about magistracy has remained largely neglected: their literariness. This book takes a new approach to the representation of magistrates and shows how the rhetorical and formal features of prose texts - principally Livy's history but also works by Cicero and Sallust - shape our understanding of magistracy. Applying to the texts an expanded concept of exemplarity, Haimson Lushkov shows how a rich body of anecdotes concerning the behaviour and speech of magistrates reflects on the values and tensions that defined the republic. A variety of contexts - familial, military, and electoral, among others - flesh out the experience of being, becoming, and encountering a Roman magistrate, and the political and ethical problems highlighted and negotiated in such circumstances.Aelian's On the Nature of Animals
By Gregory Mcnamee. 2011
Not much can be said with certainty about the life of Claudius Aelianus, known to us as Aelian. He was…
born sometime between A.D. 165 and 170 in the hill town of Praeneste, what is now Palestrina, about twenty-five miles from Rome, Italy. He grew up speaking that town's version of Latin, a dialect that other speakers of the language seem to have found curious, but-somewhat unusually for his generation, though not for Romans of earlier times-he preferred to communicate in Greek. Trained by a sophist named Pausanias of Caesarea, Aelian was known in his time for a work called Indictment of the Effeminate, an attack on the recently deceased emperor Marcus Aurelius Antoninus, who was nasty even by the standards of Imperial Rome. He was also fond of making almanac-like collections, only fragments of which survive, devoted to odd topics such as manifestations of the divine and the workings of the supernatural.His De Natura Animalium (On the Nature of Animals) has a similar patchwork quality, but it was esteemed enough in his time to survive more or less whole, and it is about all that we know of Aelian's work today. A mostly randomly ordered collection of stories that he found interesting enough to relate about animals-whether or not he believed them-Aelian's book constitutes an early encyclopedia of animal behavior, affording unparalleled insight into what ancient Romans knew about and thought about animals-and, of particular interest to modern scholars, about animal minds.If the science is sometimes sketchy, the facts often fanciful, and the history sometimes suspect, it is clear enough that Aelian had a fine time assembling the material, which can be said, in the most general terms, to support the notion of a kind of intelligence in nature and that extends human qualities, for good and bad, to animals. His stories, which extend across the known world of Aelian's time, tend to be brief and to the point, and many return to a trenchant question: If animals can respect their elders and live honorably within their own tribes, why must humans be so appallingly awful?Aelian is as brisk, as entertaining, and as scholarly a writer as Pliny, the much better known Roman natural historian. That he is not better known is simply an accident: he has not been widely translated into English, or indeed any European language. This selection from his work will introduce readers to a lively mind and a witty writer who has much to tell us.Popular Morality in the Early Roman Empire
By Teresa Morgan. 2007
Morality is one of the fundamental structures of any society, enabling complex groups to form, negotiate their internal differences and…
persist through time. In the first book-length study of Roman popular morality, Dr Morgan argues that we can recover much of the moral thinking of people across the Empire. Her study draws on proverbs, fables, exemplary stories and gnomic quotations, to explore how morality worked as a system for Roman society as a whole and in individual lives. She examines the range of ideas and practices and their relative importance, as well as questions of authority and the relationship with high philosophy and the ethical vocabulary of documents and inscriptions. The Roman Empire incorporated numerous overlapping groups, whose ideas varied according to social status, geography, gender and many other factors. Nevertheless it could and did hold together as an ethical community, which was a significant factor in its socio-political success.Parallel Lives - Vol. 2
By Plutarch. 2012
Ever since my fortunate--or shall I say unfortunate?--connection with that famous case of murder in Gramercy Park, I have had…
it intimated to me by many of my friends--and by some who were not my friends--that no woman who had met with such success as myself in detective work would ever be satisfied with a single display of her powers, and that sooner or later I would find myself again at work upon some other case of striking peculiarities. As vanity has never been my foible, and as, moreover, I never have forsaken and never am likely to forsake the plain path marked out for my sex, at any other call than that of duty, I invariably responded to these insinuations by an affable but incredulous smile, striving to excuse the presumption of my friends by remembering their ignorance of my nature and the very excellent reasons I had for my one notable interference in the police affairs of New York City. Besides, though I appeared to be resting quietly, if not in entire contentment, on my laurels, I was not so utterly removed from the old atmosphere of crime and its detection as the world in general considered me to be. Mr. Gryce still visited me; not on business, of course, but as a friend, for whom I had some regard; and naturally our conversation was not always confined to the weather or even to city politics, provocative as the latter subject is of wholesome controversy.Crisis Management during the Roman Republic
By Gregory K. Golden. 2013
'Crisis' is the defining word for our times and it likewise played a key role in defining the scope of…
government during the Roman Republic. This book is a comprehensive analysis of key incidents in the history of the Republic that can be characterized as crises, and the institutional response mechanisms that were employed by the governing apparatus to resolve them. Concentrating on military and other violent threats to the stability of the governing system, this book highlights both the strengths and weaknesses of the institutional framework that the Romans created. Looking at key historical moments, Gregory K. Golden considers how the Romans defined a crisis and what measures were taken to combat them, including declaring a state of emergency, suspending all non-war-related business, and instituting an emergency military draft, as well as resorting to rule by dictator in the early Republic.The Hills of Rome: Signature of an Eternal City
By Caroline Vout. 2012
Rome is 'the city of seven hills'. This book examines the need for the 'seven hills' cliché, its origins, development,…
impact and borrowing. It explores how the cliché relates to Rome's real volcanic terrain and how it is fundamental to how we define this. Its chronological remit is capacious: Varro, Virgil and Claudian at one end, on, through the work of Renaissance antiquarians, to embrace frescoes and nineteenth-century engravings. These artists and authors celebrated the hills and the views from these hills, in an attempt to capture Rome holistically. By studying their efforts, this book confronts the problems of encapsulating Rome and 'cityness' more broadly and indeed the artificiality of any representation, whether a painting, poem or map. In this sense, it is not a history of the city at any one moment in time, but a history of how the city has been, and has to be, perceived.History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire Vol 6
By Edward Gibbon. 2012
Gibbon offers an explanation for why the Roman Empire fell, a task made difficult by a lack of comprehensive written…
sources, though he was not the only historian to tackle the subject. Most of his ideas are directly taken from what few relevant records were available: those of the Roman moralists of the 4th and 5th centuries.History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire Vol 2
By Edward Gibbon. 2012
Gibbon offers an explanation for why the Roman Empire fell, a task made difficult by a lack of comprehensive written…
sources, though he was not the only historian to tackle the subject. Most of his ideas are directly taken from what few relevant records were available: those of the Roman moralists of the 4th and 5th centuries.