City, Countryside, and the Spatial Organization of Value in Classical Antiquity
City, Countryside, and the Spatial Organization of Value in Classical Antiquity

Author: Ralph Rosen

Publisher: BRILL

Published: 2017-07-31

Total Pages: 397

ISBN-13: 9047409183

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The third in a series that explores cultural and ethical values in Classical antiquity, this volume examines the dichotomy between 'city' and 'country' in ancient Greek and Roman cultures. Fourteen papers address a variety of topics on this theme, and include a variety of methodological approaches—archaeological, iconographic, literary and philosophical. The book demonstrates that, despite a common rhetoric of polarity in antiquity that tended to construct city and countryside as very distinct, oppositional categories, there was far less consistency (and far more nuance) about the ideologies felt to inhere in each.

Valuing Landscape in Classical Antiquity
Valuing Landscape in Classical Antiquity

Author:

Publisher: BRILL

Published: 2016-05-18

Total Pages: 511

ISBN-13: 9004319719

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‘Where am I?’. Our physical orientation in place is one of the defining characteristics of our embodied existence. However, while there is no human life, culture, or action without a specific location functioning as its setting, people go much further than this bare fact in attributing meaning and value to their physical environment. 'Landscape’ denotes this symbolic conception and use of terrain. It is a creation of human culture. In Valuing Landscape we explore different ways in which physical environments impacted on the cultural imagination of Greco-Roman Antiquity. In seventeen chapters with different disciplinary perspectives, we demonstrate the values attached to mountains, the underworld, sacred landscapes, and battlefields, and the evaluations of locale connected with migration, exile, and travel.

Valuing Others in Classical Antiquity
Valuing Others in Classical Antiquity

Author: Ralph Rosen

Publisher: BRILL

Published: 2010-09-10

Total Pages: 477

ISBN-13: 9004192336

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How does a discourse of ‘valuing others’ help to make a group a group? The fifth in a series exploring ‘ancient values’, this book investigates what value terms and evaluative concepts were used in Greece and Rome to articulate the idea that people ‘belong together’, as a family, a group, a polis, a community, or just as fellow human beings. Human communities thrive on prosocial behavior. In eighteen chapters, ranging from Greek tragedy to the Roman gladiators and from house architecture to the concept of friendship, this book demonstrates how such behavior is anchored and promoted by culturally specific expressions of evaluative discourse. Valuing others in classical antiquity should be of interest to linguists, literary scholars, historians, and philosophers alike.

Prudentius and the Landscapes of Late Antiquity
Prudentius and the Landscapes of Late Antiquity

Author: Cillian O'Hogan

Publisher: Oxford University Press

Published: 2016-09-22

Total Pages: 228

ISBN-13: 0191086878

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Prudentius and the Landscapes of Late Antiquity offers a thematic analysis of the poetry of the late Latin poet Prudentius, focusing in particular on his descriptions of the geographical and cultural landscapes of late antiquity. Cillian O'Hogan sets Prudentius in the context of other late antique authors, including Lactantius, Jerome, Augustine, and Endelechius, and argues that the poet makes use of allusion to Augustan and early imperial Latin authors to present the late Roman landscape as one markedly altered by the arrival of Christianity, though retaining the grandeur of the pagan past. This volume examines his conception of the world as a text, his use of intertextuality to describe literary journeys, his view of the civic function of Christian martyrdom, his conception of heaven, and his attitude towards art and architecture, combining philological and intertextual criticism with approaches drawn from the fields of book history, cultural geography, and theology to paint a fuller and richer picture of the greatest of the Christian Latin poets.

Religion and Society in Ancient Thessaly
Religion and Society in Ancient Thessaly

Author: Maria Mili

Publisher: Oxford Classical Monographs

Published: 2015

Total Pages: 445

ISBN-13: 0198718012

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The fertile plains of the ancient Greek region of Thessaly stretch south from the shadow of Mount Olympus. Thessaly's numerous small cities were home to some of the richest men in Greece, their fabulous wealth counted in innumerable flocks and slaves. It had a strict oligarchic government and a reputation for indulgence and witchcraft, but also a dominant position between Olympus and Delphi, and a claim to some of the greatest Greek heroes, such as Achilles himself. It can be viewed as both the cradle of many aspects of Greek civilization and as a challenge to the dominant image of ancient Greece as moderate, rational, and democratic. Religion and Society in Ancient Thessaly explores the issues of regionalism in ancient Greek religion and the relationship between religion and society, as well as the problem of thinking about these matters through particular bodies of evidence. It discusses in depth the importance of citizenship and of other group-identities in Thessaly, and the relationship between cult activity and political and social organization. The volume investigates the Thessalian particularities of the evidence and the role of religion in giving the inhabitants of this land a sense of their identity and place in the wider Greek world, as well as the role of Thessaly in the ancients' and moderns' understanding of Greekness.

On the Agora
On the Agora

Author: Christopher P. Dickenson

Publisher: BRILL

Published: 2017-01-23

Total Pages: 498

ISBN-13: 9004334750

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On the Agora traces the evolution of the main public square of the Greek polis for the six centuries from the death of Alexander the Great in 323 BC to the height of the Roman Empire and the Herulian invasion of Greece in 267 AD. Drawing on literary, epigraphic and, especially, archaeological evidence, the book takes a comparative approach to consider how the layout and function of agoras in cities throughout Greece changed during centuries that witnessed far reaching transformations in culture, society and political life. The book challenges the popular view of the post-Classical agora as characterised by decline, makes important arguments about how we use evidence to understand ancient public spaces and proposes many new interpretations of individual sites.

A Companion to Greek Democracy and the Roman Republic
A Companion to Greek Democracy and the Roman Republic

Author: Dean Hammer

Publisher: John Wiley & Sons

Published: 2014-11-17

Total Pages: 565

ISBN-13: 1444336010

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A Companion to Greek Democracy and the Roman Republic offers a comparative approach to examining ancient Greek and Roman participatory communities. Explores various aspects of participatory communities through pairs of chapters—one Greek, one Roman—to highlight comparisons between cultures Examines the types of relationships that sustained participatory communities, the challenges they faced, and how they responded Sheds new light on participatory contexts using diverse methodological approaches Brings an international array of scholars into dialogue with each other

Space in Ancient Greek Literature
Space in Ancient Greek Literature

Author: I.J.F. de Jong

Publisher: BRILL

Published: 2012-03-20

Total Pages: 624

ISBN-13: 9004224386

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This is the third volume in the series Studies in Ancient Greek narrative. It deals with the narratological category of space: how is space, including objects which function as 'props', presented in Greek narrative texts and what are its functions (thematic, symbolic, psychologising, or characterising)?How are longer descriptions organised and integrated into the story? Long deemed a mere ancilla narrationis, especially in narratives which precede the age of the realist novel, space turns out to play an important and multifaceted role in Greek literature.

Ancient Roman Literary Gardens
Ancient Roman Literary Gardens

Author: K. Sara Myers

Publisher: Oxford University Press

Published: 2024

Total Pages: 313

ISBN-13: 0197773206

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"Beginning with Cicero and Varro and ending with Statius and Pliny the Younger, this chapter offers a chronological investigation of the ways in which real and literary gardens developed from the first century BCE to the first century CE as a means of elite masculine self-representation and the reactions of elite Roman men to the increased social and cultural power of villa and horti estates and their grounds. Gardens served as powerful symbols of wealth and as creative displays of the cultural aspirations of their owners in ways that challenged traditional definitions of gardens and of Roman manliness. Since these large-scale 'gardens' are primarily associated with leisure (otium), authors are concerned with describing and justifying their activities in these sites as befitting Roman masculine ideals. We can trace a change in attitude towards leisure and the private display of wealth, and consequently gardens, largely attributed to changes in the socio-political circumstances of the Roman elite, in the works of Statius and his contemporary Pliny the Younger, who use laudatory descriptions of extensive villas and grounds as a means of expressing social and literary power"--