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This volume offers an original and innovative analysis of Roman political culture in Italy from the first to the sixth century AD, drawing on seven case studies to argue against the prevailing view among historians that deliberative and participatory politics effectively ended with the institution of the Roman monarchy under Augustus.
While the importance of migration in contemporary society is universally acknowledged, historical analyses of migration put contemporary issues into perspective. Migration is a phenomenon of all times, but it can take many different forms. The Roman case is of real interest as it presents a situation in which the volume of migration was high, and the migrants in question formed a mixture of voluntary migrants, slaves, and soldiers. Moving Romans offers an analysis of Roman migration by applying general insights, models and theories from the field of migration history. It provides a coherent framework for the study of Roman migration on the basis of a detailed study of migration to the city o...
This volume analyses the position of the urban elites of third century Roman Egypt and shows how steep social and economic hierarchy could exist side by side with a dynamic pattern of elite renewal.
Travel and pilgrimage have become central research topics in recent years. Some archaeologists and historians have applied globalization theories to ancient intercultural connections. Classicists have rediscovered travel as a literary topic in Greek and Roman writing. Scholars of early Judaism, Christianity, and Islam have been rethinking long-familiar pilgrimage practices in new interdisciplinary contexts. This volume contributes to this flourishing field of study in two ways. First, the focus of its contributions is on experiences of travel. Our main question is: How did travelers in the ancient world experience and make sense of their journeys, real or imaginary, and of the places they visited? Second, by treating Jewish, Christian, and Islamic experiences together, this volume develops a longue durée perspective on the ways in which travel experiences across these three traditions resembled each other. By focusing on "experiences of travel," we hope to foster interaction between the study of ancient travel in the humanities and that of broader human experience in the social sciences.
This book investigates the long-term continuity of large-scale states and empires, and its effect on the Near East’s social fabric, including the fundamental changes that occurred to major social institutions. Its geographical coverage spans, from east to west, modern-day Libya and Egypt to Central Asia, and from north to south, Anatolia to southern Arabia, incorporating modern-day Oman and Yemen. Its temporal coverage spans from the late eighth century BCE to the seventh century CE during the rise of Islam and collapse of the Sasanian Empire. The authors argue that the persistence of large states and empires starting in the eighth/seventh centuries BCE, which continued for many centuries,...
The reign of Antoninus Pius is widely seen as the apogee of the Roman Empire yet, due to gaps in the historical sources, his reign has been overlooked by modern historians. He is considered one of the five good emperors of the Antonine dynasty under whom the pax Romana enabled the empire to prosper, trade to flourish and culture to thrive. His reign is considered a Golden Age but this was partly an image created by imperial propaganda. There were serious conflicts in North Africa and Dacia, as well as a major revolt in Britain. On his death the empire stood on the cusp of the catastrophic invasions and rebellions that marked the reign of his successor Marcus Aurelius. Antoninus Pius became e...
A comparative study of cities that fell into ruin through human involvement. We have been taught to think of ruins as historical artifacts, relegated to the past by a catastrophic event. Instead, Martin Devecka argues that we should see them as processes taking place over a long present. In Broken Cities, Devecka offers a wide-ranging comparative study of ruination, the process by which monuments, architectural sites, and urban centers decay into ruin over time. Weaving together four case studies—of classical Athens, late antique Rome, medieval Baghdad, and sixteenth-century Mexico City—Devecka shows that ruination is a complex social process largely contingent on changing imperial control rather than the result of immediate or natural events. Drawing on literature, legal texts, epigraphic evidence, and the narratives embodied in monuments and painting, Broken Cities is an expansive and nuanced study that holds great significance for the field of historiography.
Until recently migration did not occupy a prominent place on the agenda of students of Roman history. Various types of movement in the Roman world were studied, but not under the heading of migration and mobility. Migration and Mobility in the Early Roman Empire starts from the assumption that state-organised, forced and voluntary mobility and migration were intertwined and should be studied together. The papers assembled in the book tap into the remarkably large reservoir of archaeological and textual sources concerning various types of movement during the Roman Principate. The most important themes covered are rural-urban migration, labour mobility, relationships between forced and voluntary mobility, state-organised movements of military units, and familial and female mobility. Contributors are: Colin Adams, Seth G. Bernard, Christer Bruun, Paul Erdkamp, Lien Foubert, Peter Garnsey, Saskia Hin, Claire Holleran, Tatiana Ivleva, Luuk de Ligt, Elio Lo Cascio, Tracy L. Prowse, Saskia T. Roselaar, Laurens E. Tacoma, Rolf A. Tybout, Greg Woolf, and Andrea Zerbini.
'Moving Romans' provides a coherent framework for the study of Roman migration on the basis of a detailed study of migration to the city of Rome in the first two centuries A.D. It shows how migration influenced other aspects of Roman society, including social relations, the family, work, and cultural interaction.
Focusing on forms of interaction and methods of negotiation in multicultural, multi-ethnic and multilingual contexts during Antiquity and the Middle Ages, this volume examines questions of social and cultural interaction within and between diverse ethnic communities. Toleration and coexistence were essential in all late antique and medieval societies and their communities. However, power struggles and prejudices could give rise to suspicion, conflict and violence. All of these had a central influence on social dynamics, negotiations of collective or individual identity, definitions of ethnicity and the shaping of legal rules. What was the function of multicultural and multilingual interaction: did it create and increase conflicts, or was it rather a prerequisite for survival and prosperity? The focus of this book is society and the history of everyday life, examining gender, status and ethnicity and the various forms of interaction and negotiation.