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This book reveals how violent pasts were constructed by ancient Mediterranean societies, the ideologies they served, and the socio-political processes and institutions they facilitated. Combining case studies from Anatolia, Egypt, Greece, Israel/Judah, and Rome, it moves beyond essentialist dichotomies such as “victors” and “vanquished” to offer a new paradigm for studying representations of past violence across diverse media, from funerary texts to literary works, chronicles, monumental reliefs, and other material artefacts such as ruins. It thus paves the way for a new comparative approach to the study of collective violence in the ancient world.
The history of the Roman Republic was a military success story. Texts, monuments and rituals commemorated Rome's victories, and this emphasis on its own triumphs formed a basis for the Roman nobility's claim to leadership. However, the Romans also suffered numerous heavy defeats during the Republic. This study is the first to comprehensively examine how Rome's defeats at the hands of the Celts, Samnites, and Carthaginians were explained and interpreted in the historical culture of the Republic and early imperial period. What emerges is a specifically Roman culture of dealing with defeats, which helped the Romans to find meaning in the stories of their failures and to assign them a place in their own past.
The year of the four emperors in AD 193 shows the cosmopolitan interconnectedness of the Roman Empire, yet scholarship has long framed the Severan dynasty in a narrative of descent stressing their North African and in particular their Syrian origins. The contributions of this volume question this conventional approach and instead examine more closely actual Severan policy in the Near East to detect potential local connections that determined this policy as well as how local communities and elites reacted to it. The volume thus explores new beginnings and old connections in the Roman Near East.
Battle descriptions are usually seen as the raw material of the military historian, who uses them to explain why generals won or lost a given battle. This volume does not aim to contribute to this discussion; it rather approaches battle descriptions as literary texts that interact with the expectations of a given audience. Therefore literary traditions in structure, vocabulary and topics of battle descriptions should be explored. The transgression of genre-borders – also literary and fictional texts are included – and a broad comparative approach, combining evidence from the third millennium BC up to the 20th century AD, makes cultural specifics and differences more easily perceivable. C...
The volume presents a comparative perspective on victors and vanquished according to the categories of remembering victory and defeat, practices of celebrating victory and triumphs as well as the culture of dealing with the vanquished. Specifically, the representation of victory and defeat in Byzantine literature of the 10th–12th centuries is contrasted with commemorative practices in early Russia, and the reflection of military events in courtly music of the 15th century is examined. In addition, the practices of celebrating victories in England in the High and Late Middle Ages are explored, as is the treatment of the defeated and the subjugated in the Frankish Empire of the 9th century, in Norman southern Italy and in Byzantium.
In recent decades, scholars have argued that the Roman Republic's political culture was essentially democratic in nature, stressing the central role of the 'sovereign' people and their assemblies. Karl-J. Hölkeskamp challenges this view in Reconstructing the Roman Republic, warning that this scholarly trend threatens to become the new orthodoxy, and defending the position that the republic was in fact a uniquely Roman, dominantly oligarchic and aristocratic political form. Hölkeskamp offers a comprehensive, in-depth survey of the modern debate surrounding the Roman Republic. He looks at the ongoing controversy first triggered in the 1980s when the 'oligarchic orthodoxy' was called into que...
This volume presents a first comprehensive contribution to the exploration of the concept of the ‘home front’ in Greek and Roman Antiquity. It crosses borders between different areas of classical studies by investigating the various forms of impact that war had on the ancient home front. To this end, the book deploys a variety of methodological approaches that shed light on several aspects of the home front. These draw on advances made in the fields of psychology, literature, history, social sciences and religious studies. The volume discusses the impact of war on the civilian communities in terms of its effects above all on the level of the social and religious sphere.
Marcus Furius Camillus is the dominant figure in our traditional history of the Roman Republic in the early fourth century. He has been featured in histories of Rome since the Renaissance, but currently is viewed with great scepticism, some even questioning his very existence. What is notably absent, however, is any reference to a system of historical method: how one distinguishes fact from fiction. This is the first modern monograph on Camillus, and it grapples head-on with this problem. The results are unexpected.
Auf den Sklavenschiffen, die im 19. Jh. zwischen Afrika und Brasilien verkehrten, waren Köche für die Versorgung der Verschleppten und der Mannschaften zuständig. In den Häfen versorgten Verkäuferinnen sowohl die Versklavten als auch Arbeiterinnen und Arbeiter mit Nahrungsmitteln. Melina Teubner rückt in dieser kollektiven Biografie die Lebens- und Arbeitsbedingungen von Menschen in den Mittelpunkt, die sonst wenig im Fokus der Geschichtsschreibung stehen, ohne die die Logistik des Sklavenhandels jedoch nicht hätte organisiert werden können. Sie leistet damit einen wichtigen Beitrag zur Geschichte der »zweiten Sklaverei«, d.h. der Phase nach dem offiziellen Verbot des Sklavenhandels (1815/17 bzw. 1831 in Brasilien), sowie zu einer neueren Welt- und Globalgeschichte der Materialität von Schifffahrt, Ernährung und Arbeit.