Download or read book Sacred Britannia written by Miranda Aldhouse-green and published by National Geographic Books. This book was released on 2018-08-07 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A compelling new account of religion in Roman Britain, weaving together the latest archaeological research and a new analysis of ancient literature to illuminate parallels between past and present Two thousand years ago, the Romans sought to absorb into their empire what they regarded as a remote, almost mythical island on the very edge of the known world—Britain. The expeditions of Julius Caesar and the Claudian invasion of 43 CE, up to the traditional end of Roman Britain in the fifth century CE, brought fundamental and lasting changes to the island. Not least among these was a pantheon of new classical deities and religious systems, along with a clutch of exotic eastern cults, including Christianity. But what homegrown deities, cults, and cosmologies did the Romans encounter in Britain, and how did the British react to the changes? Under Roman rule, the old gods and their adherents were challenged, adopted, adapted, absorbed, and reconfigured. Miranda Aldhouse- Green balances literary, archaeological, and iconographic evidence (and scrutinizes the shortcomings of each) to illuminate the complexity of religion and belief in Roman Britain. She examines the two-way traffic of cultural exchange and the interplay between imported and indigenous factions to reveal how this period on the cusp between prehistory and history knew many of the same tensions, ideologies, and issues of identity still relevant today.
Download or read book Roman Britain written by Timothy W. Potter and published by Univ of California Press. This book was released on 1992-01-01 with total page 260 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Pieces together archaeological evidence with fragmentary writings of Caesar, Tacitus, and others to give a picture of Roman Britain
Download or read book Roman Gods Goddesses written by Britannica Educational Publishing and published by Britannica Educational Publishing. This book was released on 2014-01-01 with total page 175 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: While the ancient Roman pantheon in many ways resembles that of ancient Greece, there is much that sets apart Roman mythology. Romans also borrowed from the religions of ancient Egypt, Asia Minor, and the Middle East, and legendary figures such as Romulus and Remus, tied closely to the history of Rome, feature prominently in ancient stories. The major and lesser figures of Roman mythology are presented in this vibrant volume with sidebars spotlighting related facts and concepts about Roman mythology and religion.
Download or read book Gods Heroes Kings written by Christopher R. Fee and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2004-03-18 with total page 260 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The islands of Britain have been a crossroads of gods, heroes, and kings-those of flesh as well as those of myth-for thousands of years. Successive waves of invasion brought distinctive legends, rites, and beliefs. The ancient Celts displaced earlier indigenous peoples, only to find themselves displaced in turn by the Romans, who then abandoned the islands to Germanic tribes, a people themselves nearly overcome in time by an influx of Scandinavians. With each wave of invaders came a battle for the mythic mind of the Isles as the newcomer's belief system met with the existing systems of gods, legends, and myths. In Gods, Heroes, and Kings, medievalist Christopher Fee and veteran myth scholar David Leeming unearth the layers of the British Isles' unique folkloric tradition to discover how this body of seemingly disparate tales developed. The authors find a virtual battlefield of myths in which pagan and Judeo-Christian beliefs fought for dominance, and classical, Anglo-Saxon, Germanic, and Celtic narrative threads became tangled together. The resulting body of legends became a strange but coherent hybrid, so that by the time Chaucer wrote "The Wife of Bath's Tale" in the fourteenth century, a Christian theme of redemption fought for prominence with a tripartite Celtic goddess and the Arthurian legends of Sir Gawain-itself a hybrid mythology. Without a guide, the corpus of British mythology can seem impenetrable. Taking advantage of the latest research, Fee and Leeming employ a unique comparative approach to map the origins and development of one of the richest folkloric traditions. Copiously illustrated with excerpts in translation from the original sources,Gods, Heroes, and Kings provides a fascinating and accessible new perspective on the history of British mythology.
Download or read book Roman Britain and Classical Deities written by Angela Morelli and published by British Archaeological Reports Limited. This book was released on 2009 with total page 75 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This study uses examples from Britain to examine concepts of gender in Roman art. Specifically Morelli looks at representations of gods and goddesses, discussing Venus, Mars, Diana, Apollo, Minerva and Hercules in turn, and analysing the differing feminities and masculinities which they display through their poses, clothing and so forth.
Download or read book Religion in Roman Britain written by Mr Martin Henig and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2003-09-02 with total page 294 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Apart from Christianity and the Oriental Cults, religion in Roman Britain is often discussed as though it remained basically Celtic in belief and practice, under a thin veneer of Roman influence. Using a wide range of archaeological evidence, Dr Henig shows that the Roman element in religion was of much greater significance and that the natural Roman veneration for the gods found meaningful expression even in the formal rituals practised in the public temples of Britain.
Download or read book Greek and Roman Religions written by Rebecca I. Denova and published by John Wiley & Sons. This book was released on 2019-01-14 with total page 341 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Offers an introduction to the basic beliefs, practices, and major deities of Greek and Roman religions A volume in the Blackwell Ancient Religions, Greek and Roman Religions offers an authoritative overview of the region’s ancient religious practices. The author—a noted expert in the field—explores the presence of divinity in all aspects of ancient life and highlights the origins of myth, religious authority, institutions, beliefs, rituals, sacred texts, and ethics. Comprehensive in scope, the text focuses on myriad aspects that constitute Greco-Roman culture such as economic class, honor and shame, and slavery as well as the religious role of each member of the family. The integration of ethnic and community identity with divine elements are highlighted in descriptions of religious festivals. Greek and Roman Religions presents the evolution of ideas concerning death and the afterlife and the relation of death to concepts of ultimate justice. The author also offers insight into the elements of ancient religions that remain important in our contemporary quest for meaning. This vital text: Offers a comprehensive review of ancient Greek and Roman religions and their institutions, beliefs, rituals, and more Examines how the Roman culture and religions borrowed from the Greek traditions Explores the ancient civilizations of the Mediterranean Basin Contains suggestions at the end of each chapter for further reading that include both traditional studies and more recent examinations of topical issues Written for students of ancient religions and religious studies, this important resource provides an overview of the ancient culture and history of the general region as well as the basic background of Greek and Roman civilizations.
Download or read book Roman Britain written by David Shotter and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2012-10-12 with total page 145 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This revised edition of the classic text of the period provides both the student and the specialist with an informative account of post-Roman English society.
Download or read book The Oxford Handbook of Roman Britain written by Martin Millett and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2016-09-01 with total page 1064 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book provides a twenty-first century perspective on Roman Britain, combining current approaches with the wealth of archaeological material from the province. This volume introduces the history of research into the province and the cultural changes at the beginning and end of the Roman period. The majority of the chapters are thematic, dealing with issues relating to the people of the province, their identities and ways of life. Further chapters consider the characteristics of the province they lived in, such as the economy, and settlement patterns. This Handbook reflects the new approaches being developed in Roman archaeology, and demonstrates why the study of Roman Britain has become one of the most dynamic areas of archaeology. The book will be useful for academics and students interested in Roman Britain.
Download or read book Battling the Gods written by Tim Whitmarsh and published by Vintage. This book was released on 2015-11-10 with total page 306 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: How new is atheism? Although adherents and opponents alike today present it as an invention of the European Enlightenment, when the forces of science and secularism broadly challenged those of faith, disbelief in the gods, in fact, originated in a far more remote past. In Battling the Gods, Tim Whitmarsh journeys into the ancient Mediterranean, a world almost unimaginably different from our own, to recover the stories and voices of those who first refused the divinities. Homer’s epic poems of human striving, journeying, and passion were ancient Greece’s only “sacred texts,” but no ancient Greek thought twice about questioning or mocking his stories of the gods. Priests were functionaries rather than sources of moral or cosmological wisdom. The absence of centralized religious authority made for an extraordinary variety of perspectives on sacred matters, from the devotional to the atheos, or “godless.” Whitmarsh explores this kaleidoscopic range of ideas about the gods, focusing on the colorful individuals who challenged their existence. Among these were some of the greatest ancient poets and philosophers and writers, as well as the less well known: Diagoras of Melos, perhaps the first self-professed atheist; Democritus, the first materialist; Socrates, executed for rejecting the gods of the Athenian state; Epicurus and his followers, who thought gods could not intervene in human affairs; the brilliantly mischievous satirist Lucian of Samosata. Before the revolutions of late antiquity, which saw the scriptural religions of Christianity and Islam enforced by imperial might, there were few constraints on belief. Everything changed, however, in the millennium between the appearance of the Homeric poems and Christianity’s establishment as Rome’s state religion in the fourth century AD. As successive Greco-Roman empires grew in size and complexity, and power was increasingly concentrated in central capitals, states sought to impose collective religious adherence, first to cults devoted to individual rulers, and ultimately to monotheism. In this new world, there was no room for outright disbelief: the label “atheist” was used now to demonize anyone who merely disagreed with the orthodoxy—and so it would remain for centuries. As the twenty-first century shapes up into a time of mass information, but also, paradoxically, of collective amnesia concerning the tangled histories of religions, Whitmarsh provides a bracing antidote to our assumptions about the roots of freethinking. By shining a light on atheism’s first thousand years, Battling the Gods offers a timely reminder that nonbelief has a wealth of tradition of its own, and, indeed, its own heroes.
Download or read book The Greek and Roman Myths A Guide to the Classical Stories Myths written by Philip Matyszak and published by Thames & Hudson. This book was released on 2010-11-15 with total page 324 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Full of intriguing facts and diverting stories—the ideal introduction to the myths and tales that lie at the heart of Western culture. Who was Pandora and what was in her famous box? How did Achilles get his Achilles heel? What exactly is a Titan? And why is one computer virus known as a Trojan horse? The myths of ancient Greece and Rome can seem bewilderingly complex, yet they are so much a part of modern life and discourse that most of us know fragments of them. This comprehensive companion takes these fragments and weaves them into an accessible and enjoyable narrative, guiding the reader through the basic stories of classical myth. Philip Matyszak explains the sequences of events and introduces the major plots and characters, from the origins of the world and the labors of Hercules to the Trojan War and the voyages of Odysseus and Aeneas. He brings to life an exotic cast of heroes and monsters, wronged women and frighteningly arbitrary yet powerful gods. He also shows how the stories have survived and greatly influenced later art and culture, from Renaissance painting and sculpture to modern opera, literature, movies, and everyday products.
Download or read book Community and Identity at the Edges of the Classical World written by Aaron W. Irvin and published by John Wiley & Sons. This book was released on 2020-10-13 with total page 288 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A timely and academically-significant contribution to scholarship on community, identity, and globalization in the Roman and Hellenistic worlds Community and Identity at the Edges of the Classical World examines the construction of personal and communal identities in the ancient world, exploring how globalism, multi-culturalism, and other macro events influenced micro identities throughout the Hellenistic and Roman empires. This innovative volume discusses where contact and the sharing of ideas was occurring in the time period, and applies modern theories based on networks and communication to historical and archaeological data. A new generation of international scholars challenge traditional views of Classical history and offer original perspectives on the impact globalizing trends had on localized areas—insights that resonate with similar issues today. This singular resource presents a broad, multi-national view rarely found in western collected volumes, including Serbian, Macedonian, and Russian scholarship on the Roman Empire, as well as on Roman and Hellenistic archaeological sites in Eastern Europe. Topics include Egyptian identity in the Hellenistic world, cultural identity in Roman Greece, Romanization in Slovenia, Balkan Latin, the provincial organization of cults in Roman Britain, and Soviet studies of Roman Empire and imperialism. Serving as a synthesis of contemporary scholarship on the wider topic of identity and community, this volume: Provides an expansive materialist approach to the topic of globalization in the Roman world Examines ethnicity in the Roman empire from the viewpoint of minority populations Offers several views of metascholarship, a growing sub-discipline that compares ancient material to modern scholarship Covers a range of themes, time periods, and geographic areas not included in most western publications Community and Identity at the Edges of the Classical World is a valuable resource for academics, researchers, and graduate students examining identity and ethnicity in the ancient world, as well as for those working in multiple fields of study, from Classical, Hellenistic, and Roman historians, to the study of ethnicity, identity, and globalizing trends in time.
Download or read book Ancient Goddesses written by Lucy Goodison and published by . This book was released on 1998 with total page 232 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The nurturing Earth Goddess, the Great Mother worshipped at the dawn of civilization—historical fact or consoling fiction? While Goddess mythologies proliferate and the public devours books by artists, psychotherapists, and enthusiastic amateurs, it is remarkable that those in the field of prehistory have remained largely silent. Did Goddess worship really exist? What actually remains from the earliest cultures, and what can it tell us? What can we learn about the early stages of human religion from the study of prehistoric carvings, pictures, pottery, figurines, and temples? In Ancient Goddesses, historians and archaeologists write accessibly about this intriguing and controversial topic for the first time. Considering a number of significant early civilizations—Predynastic and Early Dynastic Egypt; “Old Europe;” Early North West Europe; “Celtic” civilization; the Prehistoric Aegean; Malta; the Ancient Near East; Old Testament Israel; Çatalhöyük; and Archaic Greece—these experts review the most recent evidence so that readers can make up their own minds. Contributors include Ruth Tringham and Margaret Conkey, University of California, Berkeley; Lynn Meskell, New College, Oxford; Fekri Hassan, University College, London; Karel van der Toorn, University of Amsterdam; Joan Westenholz, Bible Lands Museum, Jerusalem; Elizabeth Shee Twohig, University College, Cork; Caroline Malone, New Hall, Cambridge; Mary Voyatzis, University of Arizona; and Miranda Green, University of Wales College.
Download or read book A Companion to Roman Britain written by Malcolm Todd and published by John Wiley & Sons. This book was released on 2008-04-15 with total page 528 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This major survey of the history and culture of Roman Britain spans the period from the first century BC to the fifth century AD. Major survey of the history and culture of Roman Britain Brings together specialists to provide an overview of recent debates about this period Exceptionally broad coverage, embracing political, economic, cultural and religious life Focuses on changes in Roman Britain from the first century BC to the fifth century AD Includes pioneering studies of the human population and animal resources of the island.
Download or read book The British Celts and Their Gods Under Rome written by Graham Webster and published by . This book was released on 1986 with total page 232 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Boudica written by Caitlin C. Gillespie and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2018 with total page 217 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Boudica introduces readers to the life and literary importance of Boudica through juxtaposing her literary characterizations in Tacitus and Cassius Dio with those of other women and rebel leaders. Literary comparisons assist in the understanding of Boudica as a barbarian, queen, mother, commander in war, and leader of revolt.
Download or read book The Oxford Handbook of Greek and Roman Art and Architecture written by Clemente Marconi and published by Oxford Handbooks. This book was released on 2015 with total page 729 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This handbook explores key aspects of art and architecture in ancient Greece and Rome. Drawing on the perspectives of scholars of various generations, nationalities, and backgrounds, it discusses Greek and Roman ideas about art and architecture, as expressed in both texts and images, along with the production of art and architecture in the Greek and Roman world.
