In The Early Martyr Narratives, Rebillard considers only accounts of Christian martyrs supposed to have been executed before 260, and only those whose existence is attested in sources that can be dated to before 300. The resulting small corpus contains no texts in the form of legal protocols, traditionally viewed as the earliest, most official and authentic records, nor does it include any that can be dated to a period during which persecution of Christians is known to have taken place.
In a pre-industrial world, storage could make or break farmers and empires alike. How did it shape the Roman Empire? The Socio-Economics of Roman Storage cuts across the scales of farmer and state to trace the practical and moral reverberations of storage from villas in Italy to silos in Gaul, and from houses in Pompeii to warehouses in Ostia. Following on from the material turn, an abstract notion of “surplus” makes way for an emphasis on storage’s material transformations (e.g.
Is there an art to drinking alcohol? Can drinking ever be a virtue? The Renaissance humanist and neoclassical poet Vincent Obsopoeus (ca. 1498–1539) thought so. In the winelands of sixteenth-century Germany, he witnessed the birth of a poisonous new culture of bingeing, hazing, peer pressure, and competitive drinking. Alarmed, and inspired by the Roman poet Ovid’s Art of Love, he wrote The Art of Drinking (De Arte Bibendi) (1536), a how-to manual for drinking with pleasure and discrimination.
The scholarly tendency has too often weakened the conspicuous novelty and originality that characterizes Zeus in the Iliad. This book remedies that tendency and depicts the extraordinary figure of Zeus: lord (or impersonation) of lightning and thunders, exclusive master of human destiny --and therefore of human history—and chief of Olympus.
In this provocative book, Pietro Pucci explores what he sees as Euripides's revolutionary literary art. While scholars have long pointed to subversive elements in Euripides’s plays, Pucci goes a step further in identifying a Euripidean program of enlightened thought enacted through carefully wrought textual strategies. The driving force behind this program is Euripides’s desire to subvert the traditional anthropomorphic view of the Greek gods—a belief system that in his view strips human beings of their independence and ability to act wisely and justly.
The exciting, dramatic story of one of history’s most famous events—the death of Julius Caesar—now placed in full context of Rome’s civil wars by eminent historian Barry Strauss.
Thanks to William Shakespeare, the death of Julius Caesar is the most famous assassination in history. But what actually happened on March 15, 44 BC is even more gripping than Shakespeare’s play. In this thrilling new book, Barry Strauss tells the real story.
Barry Strauss’s Ten Caesars is the story of the Roman Empire from rise to reinvention, from Augustus, who founded the empire, to Constantine, who made it Christian and moved the capital east to Constantinople.
In the rapidly changing world of the early Middle Ages, depictions of the cosmos represented a consistent point of reference across the three dominant states—the Frankish, Byzantine, and Islamic Empires. As these empires diverged from their Greco-Roman roots between 700 and 1000 A.D. and established distinctive medieval artistic traditions, cosmic imagery created a web of visual continuity, though local meanings of these images varied greatly.
The second edition of Outline of the Historical and Comparative Grammar of Latin updates and expands by 60 pages the first edition of 2009, now the standard reference for the history of the Latin language. This book details the development of Latin from its Proto-Indo-European roots down to its modern forms, the Romance languages.
Domesticating Empire is the first contextually-oriented monograph on Egyptian imagery in Roman households. Caitlín Barrett draws on case studies from Flavian Pompeii to investigate the close association between representations of Egypt and a particular type of Roman household space: the domestic garden. Through paintings and mosaics portraying the Nile, canals that turned the garden itself into a miniature "Nilescape," and statuary depicting Egyptian themes, many gardens in Pompeii offered ancient visitors evocations of a Roman vision of Egypt.
The frames of classical art are often seen as marginal to the images that they surround. Traditional art history has tended to view framing devices as supplementary 'ornaments'. Likewise, classical archaeologists have often treated them as tools for taxonomic analysis. This book not only argues for the integral role of framing within Graeco-Roman art, but also explores the relationship between the frames of classical antiquity and those of more modern art and aesthetics.
Greek and Latin Narratives about the Ancient Martyrs provides a collection, with facing-page translations, of Greek and Latin Christian martyr narratives. While Herbert Musurillo's authoritative collection The Acts of the Christian Martyrs (1972) aimed to gather the most 'authentic' and 'reliable' accounts of early Christian martyrdom, this extensive volume provides a textual basis for the study of martyr narratives without making assumptions about their date of composition or their authenticity. It focuses on the 'ancient martyrs', i.e.
Bright red terra sigillata pots dating to the first three centuries CE can be found throughout the Western Roman provinces. The pots' widespread distribution and recognisability make them key evidence in the effort to reconstruct the Roman Empire's economy and society. Drawing on recent ideas in material culture, this book asks a radically new question: what was it about the pots themselves that allowed them to travel so widely and be integrated so quickly into a range of contexts and practices?
Ekphrasis is familiar as a rhetorical tool for inducing enargeia, the vivid sense that a reader or listener is actually in the presence of the objects described. This book focuses on the ekphrastic techniques used in ancient Greek and Roman literature to describe technological artifacts. Since the literary discourse on technology extended beyond technical texts, this book explores 'technical ekphrasis' in a wide range of genres, including history, poetry, and philosophy as well as mechanical, scientific, and mathematical works.
Books and bodies, women and books, and the malleable word and flesh lie thematically at the center of The Gendered Palimpsest, which explores the roles that women played in the production, reproduction, and dissemination of early Christian books, and how the representation of female characters was contested through the medium of writing and copying. The book is organized in two sections, the first of which treats historical questions: To what extent were women authors, scribes, book-lenders, and patrons of early Christian literature?
To understand the past, we necessarily group people together and, consequently, frequently assume that all of its members share the same attributes. In this ground-breaking volume, Eric Rebillard and J?rg R?pke bring renowned scholars together to challenge this norm by seeking to rediscover the individual and to explore the dynamics between individuals and the groups to which they belong.
The eruption of the Thera (Santorini) volcano in the Aegean Sea in the mid-second millennium BC was a clearly defined, specific moment in Aegean and east Mediterranean prehistory that impacted on all the major cultures of the region. The effects of the eruption have been linked with the destruction of the Minoan palace civilisation of Crete, the legend of Atlantis, and even events described in the Biblical account of the Exodus.
In this volume, Heroicus and Gymnasticus, two works of equal creativity and sophistication, together with two brief Discourses (Dialexeis), complete the Loeb Classical Library edition of Philostratus's writings. Jeffrey Rusten proposes a new translation of the Heroicus, a conversation in a vineyard amid ruins of the Protesilaus shrine (opposite Troy on the Hellespont), between a wise and devout vinedresser and an initially skeptical Phoenician sailor, about the beauty, continuing powers, and worship of the Homeric heroes.
Joannes Burmeister of L?neburg (1576-1638) was among the greatest Neo-Latin poets of the German Baroque. His masterpieces, now mostly lost, are Christian ?inversions? of the classical Roman comedies of Plautus. With only minimal changes in language and none in meter, each transforms Plautus? pagan plays into comedies based on biblical themes. Singular Renaissance curiosities in their day, they have since been entirely forgotten.
The Oxford Handbook of Greek and Roman Comedy marks the first comprehensive introduction to and reference work for the unified study of ancient comedy. From the birth of comedy in Greece to its end in Rome, from the Hellenistic diffusion of performances after the death of Menander to its artistic, scholarly, and literary receptions in the later Roman Empire, no topic is neglected.
In this translation of Religion et S?pulture: L'Eglise, les vivants et les morts dans l'Antiquit? tardive, Rebillard fundamentally changes our understanding of early Christianity. The Care of the Dead in Late Antiquity will force scholars of the period to rethink their assumptions about early Christians as separate from their pagan contemporaries in daily life and ritual practice.
This third volume on the Etrusco-Roman city of Musarna, located at about 100 km to the north-west of Rome, is the publication of a group of about 200 tombs from the second and third century CE. All evidence related to these burials are integrated in a single report with a fully illustrated catalog. Thematic essays address topics such as the layout and development of the cemetery, burial practice and the dead.
This collection of essays is designed to accompany, instruct, and stimulate readers of Thucydides by making accessible some classic and influential studies that are frequently cited but not always easy to access. An introductory chapter surveys the chronology and thematic controversies among Thucydides' readings from antiquity to the present.
This rich collection of papers by an international authorship, deriving from a conference held at Cornell University in honor of Peter Kuniholm, provides wide-ranging and up-to-date discussions and assessments on a number of key topics concerning the chronology and environment of the central to east Mediterranean and Near East and the field of dendrochronology.
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