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"A valuable book for scholars and students alike. Urbainczyk's views will be discussed extensively, and they will stir up the debate on a topic that has been neglected."--Constantina Katsari, University of Leicester
Authoritatively places the fifth-century bishop Theodoret and his work in the proper historical and literary context
The first detailed study of Socrates' history and the context in which he wrote
Timeless lessons from the military strategies of the ancient Greeks and Romans In this prequel to the now-classic Makers of Modern Strategy, Victor Davis Hanson, a leading scholar of ancient military history, gathers prominent thinkers to explore key facets of warfare, strategy, and foreign policy in the Greco-Roman world. From the Persian Wars to the final defense of the Roman Empire, Makers of Ancient Strategy demonstrates that the military thinking and policies of the ancient Greeks and Romans remain surprisingly relevant for understanding conflict in the modern world. The book reveals that much of the organized violence witnessed today—such as counterterrorism, urban fighting, insurgen...
The thirteen essays presented here shed new light on the role of panegyric in the western and eastern Roman Empire in the late antique world. The core of the volume deals with prose and verse panegyric under the Christian Roman Empire (4th-7th century): key themes addressed are social and political context, the 'hidden agenda', and the impact of Christianity on the pagan tradition of the panegyric, including the portrayal of patriarchs and holy men.
Niketas Choniates was in Constantinople when it was burnt and looted by the soldiers of the Fourth Crusade and he wrote a history which has always been the mainstay for anyone wishing to learn about the Comnene dynasty and the Byzantine Empire of the twelfth century. Yet it is a very difficult and puzzling text and, given its significance for the period, is understudied. The author says at the start that he wrote his work hoping that even workers and women would be able to profit from it, yet he wrote those words, and the rest of the history, in a highly convoluted, literary and at times opaque style and language. This examination is an introduction to the history of Niketas, and to the author’s views of why this period saw such catastrophe for the Byzantines. It looks at Niketas’ thoughts about history-writing, the emperors, and the Comnene dynasty in particular, about the presence of God in man’s affairs, and the historian’s attitudes to the women of the imperial family.
The 13 essays presented here shed new light on the role of panegyric in the western and eastern Roman Empire in the late antique world. Introductory chapters give an overview of panegyrical theory and practice, followed by studies of major writers of the early empire and the anonymous Panegyrici latini. The core of the volume deals with prose and verse panegyric under the Christian Roman Empire (4th-7th century): key themes addressed are social and political context, the 'hidden agenda', and the impact of Christianity on the pagan tradition of the panegyric, including the portrayal of patriarchs and holy men.
The School of Nisibis was the main intellectual center of the Church of the East in the sixth and early seventh centuries C.E. and an institution of learning unprecedented in antiquity. Fear of God and the Beginning of Wisdom provides a history both of the School and of the scholastic culture of the Church of the East more generally in the late antique and early Islamic periods. Adam H. Becker examines the ideological and intellectual backgrounds of the school movement and reassesses the evidence for the supposed predecessor of the School of Nisibis, the famed School of the Persians of Edessa. Furthermore, he argues that the East-Syrian ("Nestorian") school movement is better understood as a...
Classifying Christians investigates late antique Christian heresiologies as ethnographies that catalogued and detailed the origins, rituals, doctrines, and customs of the heretics in explicitly polemical and theological terms. Oscillating between ancient ethnographic evidence and contemporary ethnographic writing, Todd S. Berzon argues that late antique heresiology shares an underlying logic with classical ethnography in the ancient Mediterranean world. By providing an account of heresiological writing from the second to fifth century, Classifying Christians embeds heresiology within the historical development of imperial forms of knowledge that have shaped western culture from antiquity to the present.
This volume looks at 'visions of community' in a comparative perspective, from Late Antiquity to the dawning of the age of crusades. It addresses the question of why and how distinctive new political cultures developed after the disintegration of the Roman World, and to what degree their differences had already emerged in the first post-Roman centuries. The Latin West, Orthodox Byzantium and its Slavic periphery, and the Islamic world each retained different parts of the Graeco-Roman heritage, while introducing new elements. For instance, ethnicity became a legitimizing element of rulership in the West, remained a structural element of the imperial periphery in Byzantium, and contributed to ...