Roman Geographies of the Nile
Roman Geographies of the Nile

Author: Andy Merrills

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Published: 2017-01-05

Total Pages: 594

ISBN-13: 1316828662

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The River Nile fascinated the Romans and appeared in maps, written descriptions, texts, poems and paintings of the developing empire. Tantalised by the unique status of the river, explorers were sent to find the sources of the Nile, while natural philosophers meditated on its deeper metaphysical significance. Andy Merrills' book, Roman Geographies of the Nile, examines the very different images of the river that emerged from these descriptions - from anthropomorphic figures, brought repeatedly into Rome in military triumphs, through the frequently whimsical landscape vignettes from the houses of Pompeii, to the limitless river that spilled through the pages of Lucan's Civil War, and symbolised a conflict - and an empire - without end. Considering cultural and political contexts alongside the other Niles that flowed through the Roman world in this period, this book provides a wholly original interpretation of the deeper significance of geographical knowledge during the later Roman Republic and early Principate.

Roman Geographies of the Nile
Roman Geographies of the Nile

Author: Andrew H. Merrills

Publisher:

Published: 2017

Total Pages: 338

ISBN-13: 9781316831632

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"The River Nile fascinated the Romans and appeared in maps, written descriptions, texts, poems and paintings of the developing empire. Tantalised by the unique status of the river, explorers were sent to find the sources of the Nile, while natural philosophers meditated on its deeper metaphysical significance. Andy Merrills' book, Roman Geographies of the Nile, examines the very different images of the river that emerged from these descriptions - from anthropomorphic figures, brought repeatedly into Rome in military triumphs, through the frequently whimsical landscape vignettes from the houses of Pompeii, to the limitless river that spilled through the pages of Lucan's Civil War, and symbolised a conflict - and an empire - without end. Considering cultural and political contexts alongside the other Niles that flowed through the Roman world in this period, this book provides a wholly original interpretation of the deeper significance of geographical knowledge during the later Roman Republic and early Principate."--Provided by publisher.

Illiterate Geography in Classical Athens and Rome
Illiterate Geography in Classical Athens and Rome

Author: Daniela Dueck

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2020-11-26

Total Pages: 266

ISBN-13: 100022502X

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This study is devoted to the channels through which geographic knowledge circulated in classical societies outside of textual transmission. It explores understanding of geography among the non-elites, as opposed to scholarly and scientific geography solely in written form which was the province of a very small number of learned people. It deals with non-literary knowledge of geography, geography not derived from texts, as it was available to people, educated or not, who did not read geographic works. This main issue is composed of two central questions: how, if at all, was geographic data available outside of textual transmission and in contexts in which there was no need to write or read? And what could the public know of geography? In general, three groups of sources are relevant to this quest: oral communications preserved in writing; public non-textual performances; and visual artefacts and monuments. All of these are examined as potential sources for the aural and visual geographic knowledge of Greco-Roman publics. This volume will be of interest to anyone working on geography in the ancient world and to those studying non-elite culture.

A Map of the Body, a Map of the Mind: Visualising Geographical Knowledge in the Roman World
A Map of the Body, a Map of the Mind: Visualising Geographical Knowledge in the Roman World

Author: Iain Ferris

Publisher: Archaeopress Publishing Ltd

Published: 2024-06-20

Total Pages: 338

ISBN-13: 1803277823

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This study considers the relationship between geography and power in the Roman world, most particularly the visualisation of geographical knowledge in myriad forms of geography products: geographical treatises, histories, poems, personifications, landscape representations, images of barbarian peoples, maps, itineraries, and imported foodstuffs.

Geographers of the Ancient Greek World: Volume 1
Geographers of the Ancient Greek World: Volume 1

Author: D. Graham J. Shipley

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Published: 2024-04-18

Total Pages: 666

ISBN-13: 1009239864

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Ancient Greek geographical writing is represented not just by the surviving works of the well-known authors Strabo, Pausanias, and Ptolemy, but also by many other texts dating from the Archaic to the Late Antique period. Most of these texts are, however, hard for non-specialists to find, and many have never been translated into English. This volume, the work of an international team of experts, presents the most important thirty-six texts in new, accurate translations. In addition, there are explanatory notes and authoritative introductions to each text, which offer a new understanding of the individual writings and demonstrate their importance: no longer marginal, but in the mainstream of Greek literature and science. The book includes twenty-eight newly drawn maps, images of the medieval manuscripts in which most of these works survive, and a full Introduction providing a comprehensive survey of the field of Greek and Roman geography.

A Guide to the Geography of Pliny the Elder
A Guide to the Geography of Pliny the Elder

Author: Duane W. Roller

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Published: 2022-07-28

Total Pages: 633

ISBN-13: 1108595928

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This is the first thorough English commentary on the geographical books of Pliny the Elder, written in the AD 70s. Pliny's account is the longest in Latin, and represents the geographical knowledge of that era, when the Roman Empire was the dominant force in the Mediterranean world. The work serves both cultural and ideological functions: much of it is topographical, but it also demonstrates the political need to express a geographical basis for the importance of the Roman state. In five books, Pliny covers the entire world as it was known in his era and includes some of the first information on the extremities of the inhabited region, including Scandinavia and the Baltic, eastern Asia, and sub-Saharan Africa. The commentary provides a detailed analysis of all the points Pliny raises: his sources, toponyms, and understanding of the place of the earth in the cosmos.

Shaping Roman Landscape
Shaping Roman Landscape

Author: Mantha Zarmakoupi

Publisher: Getty Publications

Published: 2023-08-08

Total Pages: 212

ISBN-13: 1606068482

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A groundbreaking ecocritical study that examines how ideas about the natural and built environment informed architectural and decorative trends of the Roman Late Republican and Early Imperial periods. Landscape emerged as a significant theme in the Roman Late Republican and Early Imperial periods. Writers described landscape in texts and treatises, its qualities were praised and sought out in everyday life, and contemporary perceptions of the natural and built environment, as well as ideas about nature and art, were intertwined with architectural and decorative trends. This illustrated volume examines how representations of real and depicted landscapes, and the merging of both in visual space, contributed to the creation of novel languages of art and architecture. Drawing on a diverse body of archaeological, art historical, and literary evidence, this study applies an ecocritical lens that moves beyond the limits of traditional iconography. Chapters consider, for example, how garden designs and paintings appropriated the cultures and ecosystems brought under Roman control and the ways miniature landscape paintings chronicled the transformation of the Italian shoreline with colonnaded villas, pointing to the changing relationship of humans with nature. Making a timely and original contribution to current discourses on ecology and art and architectural history, Shaping Roman Landscape reveals how Roman ideas of landscape, and the decorative strategies at imperial domus and villa complexes that gave these ideas shape, were richly embedded with meanings of nature, culture, and labor.

Roman Love Elegy and the Eros of Empire
Roman Love Elegy and the Eros of Empire

Author: Phebe Lowell Bowditch

Publisher: Springer Nature

Published: 2023-05-22

Total Pages: 341

ISBN-13: 3031148002

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This book explores Roman love elegy from postcolonial perspectives, arguing that the tropes, conventions, and discourses of the Augustan genre serve to reinforce the imperial identity of its elite, metropolitan audience. Love elegy presents the phenomena and discourses of Roman imperialism—in terms of visual spectacle (the military triumph), literary genre (epic in relation to elegy), material culture (art and luxury goods), and geographic space—as intersecting with ancient norms of gender and sexuality in a way that reinforces Rome’s dominance in the Mediterranean. The introductory chapter lays out the postcolonial frame, drawing from the work of Edward Said among other theorists, and situates love elegy in relation to Roman Hellenism and the varied Roman responses to Greece and its cultural influences. Four of the six subsequent chapters focus on the rhetorical ambivalence that characterizes love elegy’s treatment of Greek influence: the representation of the domina or mistress as simultaneously a figure for ‘captive Greece’ and a trope for Roman imperialism; the motif of the elegiac triumph, with varying figures playing the triumphator, as suggestive of Greco-Roman cultural rivalry; Rome’s competing visions of an Attic and an Asiatic Hellenism. The second and the final chapter focus on the figures of Osiris and Isis, respectively, as emblematic of Rome’s colonialist and ambivalent representation of Egypt, with the conclusion offering a deconstructive reading of elegy’s rhetoric of orientalism.

The Triumph and Trade of Egyptian Objects in Rome
The Triumph and Trade of Egyptian Objects in Rome

Author: Stephanie Pearson

Publisher: Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG

Published: 2021-04-06

Total Pages: 272

ISBN-13: 3110700891

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From gleaming hardstone statues to bright frescoes, the unexpected and often spectacular Egyptian objects discovered in Roman Italy have long presented an interpretive challenge. How they shaped and were shaped by religion, politics, and identity formation has now been well researched. But one crucial function of these objects remains to be explored: their role as precious goods in a collector’s economy. The Romans imported and recreated Egyptian goods in the most opulent materials available – gold, gems, expensive wood, ivory, luxurious textiles – and displayed them like true treasures. This is due in part to the way Romans encountered these items, as argued in this book: first as dazzling spolia from the war against Cleopatra, then as costly wares exchanged over the expanding Roman trade routes. In this respect, Romans treated Egyptian art surprisingly similarly to Greek art. By examining the concrete mechanisms through which Egyptian objects were acquired and displayed in Rome, this book offers a new understanding of this impressive material at the crossroads of Hellenistic, Roman, and Egyptian culture.

Art, Science, and the Natural World in the Ancient Mediterranean, 300 BC to AD 100
Art, Science, and the Natural World in the Ancient Mediterranean, 300 BC to AD 100

Author: Joshua J. Thomas

Publisher: Oxford University Press

Published: 2021-12-22

Total Pages: 391

ISBN-13: 0192659391

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The Hellenistic Period witnessed striking new developments in art, literature and science. This volume addresses a particularly vibrant area of innovation: the study of animals and the natural world. While Aristotle and his followers had revolutionized fields such as zoology and botany during the fourth century BC, these disciplines took on exciting new directions during Hellenistic times. Kings imported exotic species into their royal capitals from faraway lands. Travel writers described unusual creatures that they had never previously encountered. And buyers from a range of social levels chose works of art featuring animals and plants to decorate their palaces, houses and tombs. While textual sources shed some light on these developments, the central premise of Art, Science and the Natural World in the Ancient Mediterranean is that our surviving artistic evidence permits a fuller understanding. Accordingly, the study brings together a rich body of visual material that invites new observations on how and why knowledge of the natural world became so important during this period. It is suggested that this cultural phenomenon affected many different groups in society: from kings in Alexandria and Pergamon to provincial aristocrats in the Levant, and from the Julio-Claudian imperial family to prosperous homeowners in Pompeii. By analysing the works of art produced for these individuals, a vivid picture emerges of this remarkable aspect of ancient culture.