Download or read book Rethinking Roman History written by J. P. Toner and published by The Oleander Press. This book was released on 2002 with total page 148 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: What is the study of Roman history all about? What are its aims? What is its place within the discipline of Classics? These and many other questions are asked by Jerry Toner who has seen many changes in the field of Roman history since he first emerged from Cambridge as a budding Roman historian. This short book looks at the transformations that have taken place in research methodology and in the nature of the discipline in recent times. One for the undergraduate.
Download or read book Belief and Cult written by Jacob L. Mackey and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2022-08-02 with total page 496 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A groundbreaking reinterpretation that draws on cognitive theory to show that belief wasn’t absent from—but rather was at the heart of—Roman religion Belief and Cult argues that belief isn’t uniquely Christian but was central to ancient Roman religion. Drawing on cognitive theory, Jacob Mackey shows that despite having nothing to do with salvation or faith, belief underlay every aspect of Roman religious practices—emotions, individual and collective cult action, ritual norms, social reality, and social power. In doing so, he also offers a thorough argument for the importance of belief to other non-Christian religions. At the individual level, the book argues, belief played an indispensable role in the genesis of cult action and religious emotion. However, belief also had a collective dimension. The cognitive theory of Shared Intentionality shows how beliefs may be shared among individuals, accounting for the existence of written, unwritten, or even unspoken ritual norms. Shared beliefs permitted the choreography of collective cult action and gave cult acts their social meanings. The book also elucidates the role of shared belief in creating and maintaining Roman social reality. Shared belief allowed the Romans to endow agents, actions, and artifacts with socio-religious status and power. In a deep sense, no man could count as an augur and no act of animal slaughter as a successful offering to the gods, unless Romans collectively shared appropriate beliefs about these things. Closely examining augury, prayer, the religious enculturation of children, and the Romans’ own theories of cognition and cult, Belief and Cult promises to revolutionize the understanding of Roman religion by demonstrating that none of its features makes sense without Roman belief.
Download or read book Theodosius II written by Christopher Kelly and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2013-08-08 with total page 341 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Theodosius II (AD 408–450) was the longest reigning Roman emperor. Ever since Edward Gibbon, he has been dismissed as mediocre and ineffectual. Yet Theodosius ruled an empire which retained its integrity while the West was broken up by barbarian invasions. This book explores Theodosius' challenges and successes. Ten essays by leading scholars of late antiquity provide important new insights into the court at Constantinople, the literary and cultural vitality of the reign, and the presentation of imperial piety and power. Much attention has been directed towards the changes promoted by Constantine at the beginning of the fourth century; much less to their crystallisation under Theodosius II. This volume explores the working out of new conceptions of the Roman Empire - its history, its rulers and its God. A substantial introduction offers a new framework for thinking afresh about the long transition from the classical world to Byzantium.
Download or read book Roman Religion written by Valerie M. Warrior and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2006-10-16 with total page 251 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Examining sites that are familiar to many modern tourists, Valerie Warrior avoids imposing a modern perspective on the topic by using the testimony of the ancient Romans to describe traditional Roman religion. The ancient testimony recreates the social and historical contexts in which Roman religion was practised. It shows, for example, how, when confronted with a foreign cult, official traditional religion accepted the new cult with suitable modifications. Basic difficulties, however, arose with regard to the monotheism of the Jews and Christianity. Carefully integrated with the text are visual representations of divination, prayer, and sacrifice as depicted on monuments, coins, and inscriptions from public buildings and homes throughout the Roman world. Also included are epitaphs and humble votive offerings that illustrate the piety of individuals, and that reveal the prevalence of magic and the occult in the spiritual lives of the ancient Romans.
Download or read book Rethinking the Roman City written by Dunia Filippi and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2022-03-30 with total page 272 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The spatial turn has brought forward new analytical imperatives about the importance of space in the relationship between physical and social networks of meaning. This volume explores this in relation to approaches and methodologies in the study of urban space in Roman Italy. As a consequence of these new imperatives, sociological studies on ancient Roman cities are flourishing, demonstrating a new set of approaches that have developed separately from "traditional" historical and topographical analyses. Rethinking the Roman City represents a convergence of these different approaches to propose a new interpretive model, looking at the Roman city and one of its key elements: the forum. After an introductory discussion of methodological issues, internationally-know specialists consider three key sites of the Roman world – Rome, Ostia and Pompeii. Chapters focus on physical space and/or the use of those spaces to inter-relate these different approaches. The focus then moves to the Forum Romanum, considering the possible analytical trajectories available (historical, topographical, literary, comparative and sociological), and the diversity of possible perspectives within each of these, moving towards an innovative understanding of the role of the forum within the Roman city. This volume will be of great value to scholars of ancient cities across the Roman world, well as historians of urban society and development throughout the ancient world.
Download or read book Rethinking the Other in Antiquity written by Erich S. Gruen and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2012-09-16 with total page 432 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Prevalent among classicists today is the notion that Greeks, Romans, and Jews enhanced their own self-perception by contrasting themselves with the so-called Other--Egyptians, Phoenicians, Ethiopians, Gauls, and other foreigners--frequently through hostile stereotypes, distortions, and caricature. In this provocative book, Erich Gruen demonstrates how the ancients found connections rather than contrasts, how they expressed admiration for the achievements and principles of other societies, and how they discerned--and even invented--kinship relations and shared roots with diverse peoples. Gruen shows how the ancients incorporated the traditions of foreign nations, and imagined blood ties and associations with distant cultures through myth, legend, and fictive histories. He looks at a host of creative tales, including those describing the founding of Thebes by the Phoenician Cadmus, Rome's embrace of Trojan and Arcadian origins, and Abraham as ancestor to the Spartans. Gruen gives in-depth readings of major texts by Aeschylus, Herodotus, Xenophon, Plutarch, Julius Caesar, Tacitus, and others, in addition to portions of the Hebrew Bible, revealing how they offer richly nuanced portraits of the alien that go well beyond stereotypes and caricature. Providing extraordinary insight into the ancient world, this controversial book explores how ancient attitudes toward the Other often expressed mutuality and connection, and not simply contrast and alienation.
Download or read book Rethinking Revolutions Through Ancient Greece written by Simon Goldhill and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2006-09-28 with total page 275 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Publisher description
Download or read book Rethinking Roman Alliance written by Bill Gladhill and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2016-05-31 with total page 227 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this book, Bill Gladhill studies one of the most versatile concepts in Roman society, the ritual event that concluded an alliance, a foedus (ritual alliance). Foedus signifies the bonds between nations, men, men and women, friends, humans and gods, gods and goddesses, and the mass of matter that gives shape to the universe. From private and civic life to cosmology, Roman authors, time and time again, utilized the idea of ritual alliance to construct their narratives about Rome. To put it succinctly, Roman civilization in its broadest terms was conditioned on ritual alliance. Yet, lurking behind every Roman relationship, in the shadows of Roman social and international relations, in the dark recesses of cosmic law, were the breakdown and violation of ritual alliance and the release of social pollution. Rethinking Roman Alliance investigates Roman culture and society through the lens of foedus and its consequences.
Download or read book Rethinking Classical Indo Roman Trade written by Rajan Gurukkal and published by Oxford University Press, USA. This book was released on 2016 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This volume is a rethinking of the classical eastern Mediterranean overseas exchange relations with the Indian sub-continent. Characterizing the nature of exchanges in detail against extant sources and theories, the book maintains that the expression, 'Indo-Roman trade' is a misnomer in historiography. It argues that the chieftains and merchants in the sub-continent had neither institutional nor technological means to indulge in contemporary overseas trade, a heavily document based enterprise. It was not necessary either.
Download or read book Rethinking the Ancient Druids written by Miranda Aldhouse-Green and published by University of Wales Press. This book was released on 2021-09-15 with total page 210 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Ancient Classical authors have painted the Druids in a bad light, defining them as a barbaric priesthood, who 2,000 years ago perpetrated savage and blood rites in ancient Britain and Gaul in the name of their gods. Archaeology tells a different and more complicated story of this enigmatic priesthood, a theocracy with immense political and sacred power. This book explores the tangible ‘footprint’ the Druids have left behind: in sacred spaces, art, ritual equipment, images of the gods, strange burial rites and human sacrifice. Their material culture indicates how close was the relationship between Druids and the spirit-world, which evidence suggests they accessed through drug-induced trance.
Download or read book Rethinking American History in a Global Age written by Thomas Bender and published by Univ of California Press. This book was released on 2002-05-14 with total page 437 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In rethinking and reframing the American national narrative in a wider context, the contributors to this volume ask questions about both nationalism and the discipline of history itself. The essays offer fresh ways of thinking about the traditional themes and periods of American history. By locating the study of American history in a transnational context, they examine the history of nation-making and the relation of the United States to other nations and to transnational developments. What is now called globalization is here placed in a historical context. A cast of distinguished historians from the United States and abroad examines the historiographical implications of such a reframing and offers alternative interpretations of large questions of American history ranging from the era of European contact to democracy and reform, from environmental and economic development and migration experiences to issues of nationalism and identity. But the largest issue explored is basic to all histories: How does one understand, teach, and write a national history even as one recognizes that the territorial boundaries do not fully contain that history and that within that bounded territory the society is highly differentiated, marked by multiple solidarities and identities? Rethinking American History in a Global Age advances an emerging but important conversation marked by divergent voices, many of which are represented here. The various essays explore big concepts and offer historical narratives that enrich the content and context of American history. The aim is to provide a history that more accurately reflects the dimensions of American experience and better connects the past with contemporary concerns for American identity, structures of power, and world presence.
Download or read book Cicero s Law written by Paul J. du Plessis and published by Edinburgh University Press. This book was released on 2016-08-30 with total page 256 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This volume brings together an international team of scholars to debate Cicero's role in the narrative of Roman law in the late Republic - a role that has been minimised or overlooked in previous scholarship. This reflects current research that opens a larger and more complex debate about the nature of law and of the legal profession in the last century of the Roman Republic.
Download or read book Rethinking Greek Religion written by Julia Kindt and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2012-08-02 with total page 251 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Explores 'polis religion' - a leading paradigm in current studies on ancient Greek religion - and shows ways of moving beyond it.
Download or read book The Hellenistic West written by Jonathan R. W. Prag and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2013-10-24 with total page 502 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Pathbreaking essays challenging the traditional focus on the eastern Mediterranean in the Hellenistic period and on Rome in the West.
Download or read book Rethinking the Gods written by Peter van Nuffelen and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2011-12-01 with total page 283 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Ancient philosophers had always been fascinated by religion. From the first century BC onwards the traditionally hostile attitude of Greek and Roman philosophy was abandoned in favour of the view that religion was a source of philosophical knowledge. This book studies that change, not from the usual perspective of the history of religion, but as part of the wider tendency of Post-Hellenistic philosophy to open up to external, non-philosophical sources of knowledge and authority. It situates two key themes, ancient wisdom and cosmic hierarchy, in the context of Post-Hellenistic philosophy and traces their reconfigurations in contemporary literature and in the polemic between Jews, Christians and pagans. Overall, Post-Hellenistic philosophy displayed a relatively high degree of unity in its ideas on religion, which should not be reduced to a preparation for Neoplatonism.
Download or read book The Matter of the Gods written by Clifford Ando and published by Univ of California Press. This book was released on 2009-03-10 with total page 266 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: What did the Romans know about their gods? Why did they perform the rituals of their religion, & what motivated them to change those rituals? Clifford Ando explores the answers to these questions, pursuing a variety of themes essential to the study of religion in history.
Download or read book Culture and National Identity in Republican Rome written by Erich S. Gruen and published by Cornell University Press. This book was released on 1992 with total page 372 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A compelling account of the assimilation and adaptation of Greek culture by the Romans during the middle and later Republic.
