Offering a detailed analysis of the Roman provincial coinage of Bithynia and Pontus during the reign of Trajan (98-117), this book characterises individual mints, the rhythm of monetary production, iconography and legends, and considers the attribution and dating of individual issues.
In the ancient Graeco-Roman East different types of interaction between Greek and local cultures took place. The present book investigates them from different viewpoints in their different manifestations (education, language, literature, etc.), and in different geographical areas: Egypt, Syria, Pontus Cappadocia, Propontis, Bithynia, Phrygia, Pisidia or the whole of Asia Minor. Did the Greek paideia intermingle with local traditions in the education of the local ruling classes? Did that have an impact on their prestige? Did this affect social classes? What were the extent and consequences of the linguistic contact between Greek and the local languages? Where there phenomena of Greek-local cultural translations or adaptations? What was the degree of penetration of the Greek literary models or topoi? How was the interaction of Greek paideia and the ancestral (local or regional) religions? What was the role of the Greek paideia as a signpost of identity? How did Greek and Latin coexist in this context? To answer such questions, the different papers in the current volume study each of them from a particular point of view, paying attention to the evidence available.
What and how do people remember? Who controls the process of what we call cultural or social memory? What is forgotten and why? People's memories are not the same as history written in retrospect; they are malleable and an ongoing process of construction and reconstruction. Ancient Rome provided much of the cultural framework for early Christianity, and in both the role of memory was pervasive. Memory in Ancient Rome and Early Christianity presents perspectives from an international and interdisciplinary range of contributors on the literature, history, archaeology, and religion of a major world civilization, based on an informed engagement with important concepts and issues in memory studies. Moving beyond terms such as 'collective', 'social', and 'cultural memory' as standard tropes, the volume offers a selective exploration of the wealth of topics which comprise memory studies, and also features a contribution from a leading neuroscientist on the actual workings of the human memory. It is an importamt resource for anyone interested in Roman antiquity, the beginnings of Christianity, and the role of memory in history.
What did the ancient Greeks and Romans think of the peoples they referred to as barbari? Did they share the modern Western conception—popularized in modern fantasy literature and role-playing games—of "barbarians" as brutish, unwashed enemies of civilization? Or our related notion of "the noble savage?" Was the category fixed or fluid? How did it contrast with the Greeks and Romans' conception of their own cultural identity? Was it based on race? In accessible, jargon-free prose, Erik Jensen addresses these and other questions through a copiously illustrated introduction to the varied and evolving ways in which the ancient Greeks and Romans engaged with, and thought about, foreign peoples—and to the recent historical and archaeological scholarship that has overturned received understandings of the relationship of Classical civilization to its "others."
Sacrosanctum Concilium opened the door to all Christians to understand the contemporary challenge to their life and health, and it started with the reform of the liturgy. In the words of Paul VI the liturgy is the 'first source of life communicated to us, the first school of our spiritual life, the first gift we can give to Christian people by our believing and praying, and the first invitation to the world.' That is surely true for all of us.
This authoritative and original work sets the results of recent archaeological research in the context of classical scholarship, as it explores three main aspects of Romano-British buildings: * general characteristics of form and structure * the ways in which they were built and decorated * the range of activities for which they were designed. This evidence is then used to discuss the social practices and domestic arrangements that characterised Romano-British elite society. Fully illustrated, this volume is the essential guide to how houses were built, used and understood in Roman Britain.
Fashioning the Future in Roman Greece: Memory, Monuments, Texts uses literature, inscriptions, art, and architecture to explore the relationship of elite Greeks of the Roman imperial period to time. This wide-ranging work challenges conventional thinking about the temporal positioning of imperial Greece and the so-called 'Second Sophistic', which holds that it was obsessed above all with the Classical past. Instead, the volume establishes that imperial Greek temporality was far more complex than scholarship has previously allowed by detailing how contemporary cultural output used the past to position itself within tradition but was crafted to speak to the future. At the same time, the book emphasizes the value of interdisciplinary analysis in any explication of elite culture in Roman Greece, since abundant extant evidence reveals its purveyors were often responsible for the production of both literature and material culture. Strazdins shows how these two modes of cultural production in the hands of elites, such as Herodes Atticus, Arrian, Aelius Aristides, Lucian, Dio Chrysostom, Polemon, Pausanias, and Philostratus, exhibit a shared rhetoric oriented towards posterity and informed by a heightened awareness of the fragility of cultural and personal memory over large spans of time. The book thus provides a sophisticated analysis of the tensions, anxieties, and opportunities that attend the fashioning of commemorative strategies against the background of the 'Second Sophistic' and the Roman empire, and details the consequences of embroilment with futurity on our understanding of the cultural and political concerns of elite imperial Greeks.
L. Michael White, one of the world’s foremost scholars on the origins of Christianity, provides the complete, astonishing story of how Christianity grew from the personal vision of a humble Jewish peasant living in a remote province of the Roman Empire into the largest organized religion in the world. Rather than reading the New Testament straight through in its traditional, or “canonical” order, From Jesus to Christianity takes a historical approach. Looking at the individual books chronologically, in the sequence in which they were actually written, readers can see what they divulge about the disagreements, shared values, and unifying mission of the earliest Christian communities. White digs through layers of archaeological excavations, sifts through buried fragments of largely unknown texts, and examines historical sources to discover what we can know of Jesus.
This Advanced Introduction offers a fresh critical analysis of various dimensions of law and globalisation, drawing on historical, normative, theoretical, and linguistic methodologies. Its comprehensive and multidisciplinary approach spans the fields of global legal pluralism, comparative legal studies, and international law.