Merchants, Sailors and Pirates in the Roman World

Merchants, Sailors and Pirates in the Roman World

Author: Nicholas K. Rauh

Publisher:

Published: 2003

Total Pages: 244

ISBN-13:

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The author explores the interconnections between merchants, sailors and pirates in the Mediterranean during the first century B.C., which reveal crucial insights into the formation of the Roman world system.


Greek Prostitutes in the Ancient Mediterranean, 800 BCE–200 CE

Greek Prostitutes in the Ancient Mediterranean, 800 BCE–200 CE

Author: Allison Glazebrook

Publisher: Univ of Wisconsin Press

Published: 2011-01-06

Total Pages: 342

ISBN-13: 0299235637

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Greek Prostitutes in the Ancient Mediterranean, 800 BCE–200 CE challenges the often-romanticized view of the prostitute as an urbane and liberated courtesan by examining the social and economic realities of the sex industry in Greco-Roman culture. Departing from the conventional focus on elite society, these essays consider the Greek prostitute as displaced foreigner, slave, and member of an urban underclass. The contributors draw on a wide range of material and textual evidence to discuss portrayals of prostitutes on painted vases and in the literary tradition, their roles at symposia (Greek drinking parties), and their place in the everyday life of the polis. Reassessing many assumptions about the people who provided and purchased sexual services, this volume yields a new look at gender, sexuality, urbanism, and economy in the ancient Mediterranean world.


Persistent Piracy

Persistent Piracy

Author: S. Amirel

Publisher: Springer

Published: 2014-06-03

Total Pages: 193

ISBN-13: 1137352868

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Spanning from the Caribbean to East Asia and covering almost 3,000 years of history, from Classical Antiquity to the eve of the twenty-first century, Persistent Piracy is an important contribution to the history of the state formation as well as the history of violence at sea.


There and Back

There and Back

Author: Stewart Gordon

Publisher: Oxford University Press

Published: 2018-01-25

Total Pages: 345

ISBN-13: 0199093563

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Though travelling is lauded as a means of enriching our lives, the emphasis is generally on the destination rather than the journey. Yet, throughout human history, routes have ferried not just people but books, scrolls, and art, in addition to armies, ambassadorial entourages, slaves, brides, and pilgrims. The interaction of people on routes generated surprising innovations. Through myths, memoirs, and songs associated with twelve such great routes across five continents, historian Stewart Gordon shows how they captured the collective imagination and shaped the expectations of generations of would-be travellers.


The Great Sea

The Great Sea

Author: David Abulafia

Publisher: Oxford University Press

Published: 2011-06-01

Total Pages: 849

ISBN-13: 019971732X

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Connecting Europe, Asia, and Africa, the Mediterranean Sea has been for millennia the place where religions, economies, and political systems met, clashed, influenced and absorbed one another. In this brilliant and expansive book, David Abulafia offers a fresh perspective by focusing on the sea itself: its practical importance for transport and sustenance; its dynamic role in the rise and fall of empires; and the remarkable cast of characters-sailors, merchants, migrants, pirates, pilgrims-who have crossed and re-crossed it. Ranging from prehistory to the 21st century, The Great Sea is above all a history of human interaction. Interweaving major political and naval developments with the ebb and flow of trade, Abulafia explores how commercial competition in the Mediterranean created both rivalries and partnerships, with merchants acting as intermediaries between cultures, trading goods that were as exotic on one side of the sea as they were commonplace on the other. He stresses the remarkable ability of Mediterranean cultures to uphold the civilizing ideal of convivencia, "living together." Now available in paperback, The Great Sea is the definitive account of perhaps the most vibrant theater of human interaction in history.


Invisible Romans

Invisible Romans

Author: Robert Knapp

Publisher: Harvard University Press

Published: 2011-10-24

Total Pages: 394

ISBN-13: 0674063287

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What survives from the Roman Empire is largely the words and lives of the rich and powerful: emperors, philosophers, senators. Yet the privilege and decadence often associated with the Roman elite was underpinned by the toils and tribulations of the common citizens. Here, the eminent historian Robert Knapp brings those invisible inhabitants of Rome and its vast empire to light. He seeks out the ordinary folk—laboring men, housewives, prostitutes, freedmen, slaves, soldiers, and gladiators—who formed the backbone of the ancient Roman world, and the outlaws and pirates who lay beyond it. He finds their traces in the nooks and crannies of the histories, treatises, plays, and poetry created by the elite. Everyday people come alive through original sources as varied as graffiti, incantations, magical texts, proverbs, fables, astrological writings, and even the New Testament. Knapp offers a glimpse into a world far removed from our own, but one that resonates through history. Invisible Romans allows us to see how Romans sought on a daily basis to survive and thrive under the afflictions of disease, war, and violence, and to control their fates before powers that variously oppressed and ignored them.


Roman Seas

Roman Seas

Author: Justin Leidwanger

Publisher:

Published: 2020

Total Pages: 337

ISBN-13: 0190083654

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Drawing together maritime landscape studies and network analysis, this book offers an archaeological exploration of seaborne economy and connectivity across the Roman eastern Mediterranean, where the material record of shipwrecks and ports reveals multiple evolving regional and interregional systems of interaction.


Cultural Anatomies of the Heart in Aristotle, Augustine, Aquinas, Calvin, and Harvey

Cultural Anatomies of the Heart in Aristotle, Augustine, Aquinas, Calvin, and Harvey

Author: Marjorie O'Rourke Boyle

Publisher: Springer

Published: 2018-09-04

Total Pages: 197

ISBN-13: 3319936530

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This book probes beneath modern scientific and sentimental concepts of the heart to discover its past mysteries. Historical hearts evidenced essential aspects of human existence that still endure in modern thought and experience of political community, psychological mentality, and physical vitality. Marjorie O’Rourke Boyle revises ordinary assumptions about the heart with original interdisciplinary research on religious beliefs and theological and philosophical ideas. Her book uncovers the thought of Aristotle, William Harvey, Augustine, Thomas Aquinas, and John Calvinas it relates to the heart. It analyzes Augustine’s outlaw heart in cultural deviance from biblical law; Aquinas’s problematic argument for the permanence of the natural law in the heart; and Calvin’s advocacy for an affective heart re-created by the Spirit from its fallen nature. This book of cultural anatomies is the climax of her dozen years of publications on the heart.


Connected Histories of the Roman Civil Wars (88–30 BCE)

Connected Histories of the Roman Civil Wars (88–30 BCE)

Author: David García Domínguez

Publisher: Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG

Published: 2024-11-04

Total Pages: 381

ISBN-13: 3111432149

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This book offers a distinctive take on the civil wars that unfolded in the Late Roman Republic. It frames their discussion against the backdrop of the Mediterranean contexts in which they were fought, and sets out to bring to the centre of the debate the significance of provincial agency on a traumatic and complex process, which cannot be understood through an exclusive focus on Roman and Italian developments. The study of the late Republican civil wars can be productively read as an exercise of ‘connected history’, in which the fundamental interdependence of the Mediterranean world comes to the fore through a set of case studies that await to be understood through a properly integrative approach. Our project brings together an international and diverse lineup of scholars, who engage with a wide range of literary, documentary, and archaeological material, and make a collective contribution to the reframing of a problem that requires a collaborative and interdisciplinary outlook, and can yield invaluable insights to the understanding of the Roman imperial project.


The Straits from Troy to Constantinople

The Straits from Troy to Constantinople

Author: John D. Grainger

Publisher: Pen and Sword Military

Published: 2022-01-31

Total Pages: 303

ISBN-13: 1399013254

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In ancient times, the series of waterways now known as the Turkish Straits, comprising the Dardanelles (or Hellespont), Sea of Marmara and the Bosporus, formed both a divide and a bridge between Europe and Asia. Its western and eastern entrances were guarded, at different times, by two of the most fabled cities of all time: respectively Troy (in Asia) and Byzantion (or Byzantium, on the European coast). The narrow crossing points at the Hellespont and Bosporus were strategically important invasion routes while the waters themselves were vital routes of travel and commerce, particularly the supply of grain from the hinterland of the Black Sea to the Greek cities. This made them sought after prizes and sources of friction between successive empires, Persians, Macedonians and Romans among them, and ensured they were associated with some of the great names of history, from Odysseus to Xerxes, Alexander to Constantine the Great. John D Grainger relates the fascinating history of this pivotal region from the Trojan War to Byzantion’s refounding as the new capital of the Roman Empire. Renamed Constantinople it dominated the straits for a thousand years.