Empire and Political Cultures in the Roman World

Empire and Political Cultures in the Roman World
Author: Emma Dench
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Total Pages: 447
Release: 2018-08-09
Genre: History
ISBN: 1108696007

This book evaluates a hundred years of scholarship on how empire transformed the Roman world, and advances a new theory of how the empire worked and was experienced. It engages extensively with Rome's Republican empire as well as the 'Empire of the Caesars', examines a broad range of ancient evidence (material, documentary, and literary) that illuminates multiple perspectives, and emphasizes the much longer history of imperial rule within which the Roman Empire emerged. Steering a course between overemphasis on resistance and overemphasis on consensus, it highlights the political, social, religious and cultural consequences of an imperial system within which functions of state were substantially delegated to, or more often simply assumed by, local agencies and institutions. The book is accessible and of value to a wide range of undergraduate and graduate students as well as of interest to all scholars concerned with the rise and fall of the Roman Empire.

Popular Culture in the Ancient World

Popular Culture in the Ancient World
Author: Lucy Grig
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Total Pages: 381
Release: 2017
Genre: History
ISBN: 1107074894

This book adopts a new approach to the classical world by focusing on ancient popular culture.

Princes and Political Cultures

Princes and Political Cultures
Author: Greg Rowe
Publisher: University of Michigan Press
Total Pages: 208
Release: 2002
Genre: Foreign Language Study
ISBN: 9780472112302

Texts, translations, and discussions of the major inscriptions of the period - both Greek and Latin - are provided."--Jacket.

Rome, Empire of Plunder

Rome, Empire of Plunder
Author: Matthew Loar
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Total Pages: 339
Release: 2018
Genre: History
ISBN: 1108418422

An interdisciplinary exploration of Roman cultural appropriation, offering new insights into the processes through which Rome made and remade itself.

Readers and Reading Culture in the High Roman Empire

Readers and Reading Culture in the High Roman Empire
Author: William A. Johnson
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Total Pages: 238
Release: 2010-06-03
Genre: History
ISBN: 019972105X

In Readers and Reading Culture in the High Roman Empire, William Johnson examines the system and culture of reading among the elite in second-century Rome. The investigation proceeds in case-study fashion using the principal surviving witnesses, beginning with the communities of Pliny and Tacitus (with a look at Pliny's teacher, Quintilian) from the time of the emperor Trajan. Johnson then moves on to explore elite reading during the era of the Antonines, including the medical community around Galen, the philological community around Gellius and Fronto (with a look at the curious reading habits of Fronto's pupil Marcus Aurelius), and the intellectual communities lampooned by the satirist Lucian. Along the way, evidence from the papyri is deployed to help to understand better and more concretely both the mechanics of reading, and the social interactions that surrounded the ancient book. The result is a rich cultural history of individual reading communities that differentiate themselves in interesting ways even while in aggregate showing a coherent reading culture with fascinating similarities and contrasts to the reading culture of today.

Romans, Barbarians, and the Transformation of the Roman World

Romans, Barbarians, and the Transformation of the Roman World
Author: Professor Danuta Shanzer
Publisher: Ashgate Publishing, Ltd.
Total Pages: 408
Release: 2013-07-28
Genre: History
ISBN: 140948209X

One of the most significant transformations of the Roman world in Late Antiquity was the integration of barbarian peoples into the social, cultural, religious, and political milieu of the Mediterranean world. The nature of these transformations was considered at the sixth biennial Shifting Frontiers in Late Antiquity Conference, at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in March of 2005, and this volume presents an updated selection of the papers given on that occasion, complemented with a few others,. These 25 studies do much to break down old stereotypes about the cultural and social segregation of Roman and barbarian populations, and demonstrate that, contrary to the past orthodoxy, Romans and barbarians interacted in a multitude of ways, and it was not just barbarians who experienced "ethnogenesis" or cultural assimilation. The same Romans who disparaged barbarian behavior also adopted aspects of it in their everyday lives, providing graphic examples of the ambiguity and negotiation that characterized the integration of Romans and barbarians, a process that altered the concepts of identity of both populations. The resultant late antique polyethnic cultural world, with cultural frontiers between Romans and barbarians that became increasingly permeable in both directions, does much to help explain how the barbarian settlement of the west was accomplished with much less disruption than there might have been, and how barbarian populations were integrated seamlessly into the old Roman world.

Universal Empire

Universal Empire
Author: Peter Fibiger Bang
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Total Pages: 399
Release: 2012-08-16
Genre: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN: 1107022673

This book explores the aspiration to universal, imperial rule across Eurasian history from antiquity to the eighteenth century.

Rome, the Greek World, and the East

Rome, the Greek World, and the East
Author: Fergus Millar
Publisher: Univ of North Carolina Press
Total Pages: 414
Release: 2003-01-14
Genre: History
ISBN: 0807875082

Fergus Millar is one of the most influential contemporary historians of the ancient world. His essays and books, including The Emperor in the Roman World and The Roman Near East, have enriched our understanding of the Greco-Roman world in fundamental ways. In his writings Millar has made the inhabitants of the Roman Empire central to our conception of how the empire functioned. He also has shown how and why Rabbinic Judaism, Christianity, and Islam evolved from within the wider cultural context of the Greco-Roman world. Opening this collection of sixteen essays is a new contribution by Millar in which he defends the continuing significance of the study of Classics and argues for expanding the definition of what constitutes that field. In this volume he also questions the dominant scholarly interpretation of politics in the Roman Republic, arguing that the Roman people, not the Senate, were the sovereign power in Republican Rome. In so doing he sheds new light on the establishment of a new regime by the first Roman emperor, Caesar Augustus.