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Rome and Judaea explores the nature of Judaea’s first diplomatic mission to Rome during the Maccabean revolt: did it result in a sanctioned treaty or was it founded instead on amity? This book breaks new ground in this debate by bringing to light the "Roman-Jewish Friendship tablet," a newly discovered piece of evidence that challenges the theory Rome ratified an official treaty with Judaea. Incorporating interdisciplinary research and this new textual evidence, the book argues that Roman-Jewish relations during the Maccabean revolt were motivated by the Roman concept of diplomatic friendship, or amicitia.
Drawing on epigraphic, legal, literary, and numismatic sources, this book reveals how, in the Roman Republic, law and religion interacted to serve the same purpose, the continued growth and consolidation of Rome’s power.
The Plight of Rome in the Fifth Century AD argues that the fall of the western Roman Empire was rooted in a significant drop in war booty, agricultural productivity, and mineral resources. Drawing on literary and archaeological data, this volume establishes a correspondence between booty (in the form of slaves and precious metals) from foreign campaigns and public building programmes, and how this equilibrium was upset after the Empire reached its full expansion and began to contract in the third century. Merrony explores how Rome was weakened and divided, unable to pay its army, feed its people, or support the imperial bureaucracy - and how this contributed to its administrative collapse.
The volume represents the seventh in the series on Orality and Literacy in the Ancient Greek and Roman Worlds. It comprises a collection of essays on the significance and working of memory in ancient texts and visual documentation, from contexts both oral (or oral-derived) and literate. The authors discuss a variety of interpretations of ‘memory’ in Homeric epic, lyric poetry, tragedy, historical inscriptions, oratory, and philosophy, as well as in the replication of ancient artworks, and in Greek vase inscriptions. They present therefore a wide-ranging analysis of memory as a fundamental faculty underlying the production and reception of texts and material documentation in a society that gradually moved from an essentially oral to an essentially literate culture.
The volume offers a timely (re-)appraisal of Seleukid cultural dynamics. While the engagement of Seleukid kings with local populations and the issue of “Hellenization” are still debated, a movement away from the Greco-centric approach to the study of the sources has gained pace. Increasingly textual sources are read alongside archaeological and numismatic evidence, and relevant near-eastern records are consulted. Our study of Seleukid kingship adheres to two game-changing principles: 1. We are not interested in judging the Seleukids as “strong” or “weak” whether in their interactions with other Hellenistic kingdoms or with the populations they ruled. 2. While appreciating the val...
How encounters with the Roman Empire compelled the Jews of antiquity to rethink their conceptions of Israel and the Torah Throughout their history, Jews have lived under a succession of imperial powers, from Assyria and Babylonia to Persia and the Hellenistic kingdoms. Jews and Their Roman Rivals shows how the Roman Empire posed a unique challenge to Jewish thinkers such as Philo, Josephus, and the Palestinian rabbis, who both resisted and internalized Roman standards and imperial ideology. Katell Berthelot traces how, long before the empire became Christian, Jews came to perceive Israel and Rome as rivals competing for supremacy. Both considered their laws to be the most perfect ever writte...
This volume demonstrates the wide array of topics in ancient warfare currently studied by researchers around the world. Arranged chronologically in Greek and Roman history sections, the book takes readers through all manner of current research topics on ancient warfare, from traditional battle narratives or strategic analyses of campaigns, through the logistical considerations of armies in the field, to the ideology of women in war and mythology. The study of ancient war deals with a myriad of different topics and deals with themes in all types of history: social, cultural, economic, religious, literary, numismatical, epigraphical, ethnographical, topographical, prosopographical, and mythical, as well as the usual political and military. The study of ancient war is a field that is growing in popularity and continues to surprise us with many innovative new ideas, as shown in this collection of papers by established academics and current graduate students.
Sovereignty is the vital organizing principle of modern international law. This book examines the origins of that principle in the legal and political thought of its most influential theorist, Jean Bodin (1529/30-1596). As the author argues in this study, Bodin's most lasting theoretical contribution was his thesis that sovereignty must be conceptualized as an indivisible bundle of legal rights constitutive of statehood. While these uniform 'rights of sovereignty' licensed all states to exercise numerous exclusive powers, including the absolute power to 'absolve' and release its citizens from legal duties, they were ultimately derived from, and therefore limited by, the law of nations. The b...
This volume represents the sixth in the series on Orality and Literacy in the Ancient Greek and Roman Worlds. The present work comprises a collection of essays that explore the tensions and controversies that arise as a society moves from an oral to literate culture. Part 1 deals with both Homeric and other forms of epic; part 2 explores different ways in which texts and writing were manipulated for political ends. Part 3 and 4 deals with the controversies surrounding the adoption of writing as the accepted mode of communication; whereas some segments of society began to privilege writing over oral communication, others continued to maintain that the latter was superior. Part 4 looks at the oral elements of Athenian Law.
The study presents a critical examination of the political relations between Rome and Near Eastern kingdoms and principalities during the age of civil war from Caesar’s death in 44 until the Battle of Actium in 31 BC.