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The Cambridge Companion to the Age of Constantine offers students a comprehensive one-volume survey of this pivotal emperor and his times. Richly illustrated and designed as a readable survey accessible to all audiences, it also achieves a level of scholarly sophistication and a freshness of interpretation that will be welcomed by the experts. The volume is divided into five sections that examine political history, religion, social and economic history, art, and foreign relations during the reign of Constantine, who steered the Roman Empire on a course parallel with his own personal development.
Roman Emperor Constantine raised Christianity from a minority religion to imperial status, but his religious orientation was by no means unambiguous. In Constantine and the Cities, Noel Lenski demonstrates how the emperor and his subjects used the instruments of government in a struggle for authority over the religion of the empire.
The practice of slavery has been common across a variety of cultures around the globe and throughout history. Despite the multiplicity of slavery's manifestations, many scholars have used a simple binary to categorize slave-holding groups as either 'genuine slave societies' or 'societies with slaves'. This dichotomy, as originally proposed by ancient historian Moses Finley, assumes that there were just five 'genuine slave societies' in all of human history: ancient Greece and Rome, and the colonial Caribbean, Brazil, and the American South. This book interrogates this bedrock of comparative slave studies and tests its worth. Assembling contributions from top specialists, it demonstrates that the catalogue of five must be expanded and that the model may need to be replaced with a more flexible system that emphasizes the notion of intensification. The issue is approached as a question, allowing for debate between the seventeen contributors about how best to conceptualize the comparative study of human bondage.
Revised edition of: A brief history of ancient Rome. New York: Oxford University Press, 2005.
This volume brings together some of the English-speaking world’s leading Constantinian scholars for an interdisciplinary study of the life and legacy of the first Christian emperor. Focusing on the questions that have for so long intrigued historians, classicists, and theologians, the papers collected in this volume prove once again that Constantine is not so much a figure from the remote past, but an individual whose legacy continues to shape our present.
In Books 26–31 Ammianus Marcellinus deals with the period of the emperors Valentinian and Valens. The representatives of the new dynasty differ greatly from their predecessor Julian, both personally and in their style of government. The Empire is divided between the two rulers, and suffers increasingly from barbarian invasions. Faced with these changes, Ammianus adapts his historical method. His treatment of the events becomes less detailed and more critical. The years following on the death of Julian are painted in dark colours, as the disaster at Hadrianople casts its shadow before. The papers in this volume, on History and Historiography, Literary Composition and Crisis of Empire, were presented during the conference "Ammianus after Julian" held in 2005.
The first reliable annotated English translation, with original texts, of one of the central sources of the Western legal tradition.
Late Antiquity witnessed a dramatic recalibration in the economy of power, and nowhere was this more pronounced than in the realm of religion. The transformations that occurred in this pivotal era moved the ancient world into the Middle Ages and forever changed the way that religion was practiced. The twenty eight studies in this volume explore this shift using evidence ranging from Latin poetic texts, to Syriac letter collections, to the iconography of Roman churches and Merowingian mortuary goods. They range in chronology from the late third through the early seventh centuries AD and apply varied theories and approaches. All converge around the notion that religion is fundamentally a disco...
"The Romans unfolds Rome's remarkable evolution from village to monarchy and then republic and finally to one-man rule by an emperor whose power at its peak stretched from Scotland to Iraq and the Nile Valley. Firmly grounded in ancient literary and material sources, the book captures and analyzes the outstanding political and military landmarks from the Punic Wars, to Caesar's conquest of Gaul and his crossing of the Rubicon, to the victory of Octavian over Mark Antony, to Constantine's adoption of Christianity. Here too are some of the most fascinating individuals ever to walk across the world stage, including Hannibal, Mithridates, Pompey, Cicero, Cleopatra, Augustus, Livia, Nero, Marcus Aurelius, and Shapur. The authors bring to life many aspects of Rome's cultural and social history, from the role of women, to literature, entertainments, town-planning, portraiture, and religion. The book incorporates more than 30 maps."--Jacket.
Replete now with its own scholarly traditions and controversies, Roman slavery as a field of study is no longer limited to the economic sphere, but is recognized as a fundamental social institution with multiple implications for Roman society and culture. The essays in this collection explore how material culture – namely, art, architecture, and inscriptions – can illustrate Roman attitudes towards the institution of slavery and towards slaves themselves in ways that significantly augment conventional textual accounts. Providing the first interdisciplinary approach to the study of Roman slavery, the volume brings together diverse specialists in history, art history, and archaeology. The contributors engage with questions concerning the slave trade, manumission, slave education, containment and movement, and the use of slaves in the Roman army.