Download or read book Severan Culture written by Simon Swain and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2007-10-04 with total page 50 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book surveys the Severan period's many developments in literature, philosophy, religion, art, archaeology and culture.
Download or read book The Ludi Saeculares of Septimius Severus written by Jussi Rantala and published by Taylor & Francis. This book was released on 2017-02-24 with total page 221 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Septimius Severus emerged victorious from the civil war of AD 193; he was not part of the traditional political elite, but instead a military commander from Africa, with a Syrian princess as his wife. To garner popular support and to legitimise his power Severus conducted an intensive propaganda campaign. This is the first monograph to examine the Secular Games (ludi saeculares), the magnificent festival which celebrated Septimius Severus as a bringer of peace and prosperity, and which also symbolised a new imperial ideology based on autocracy rather than the Antonine ideal of co-operation between ruler and Senate.
Download or read book Man and Animal in Severan Rome written by Steven D. Smith and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2014-07-24 with total page 321 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Roman sophist Claudius Aelianus, born in Praeneste in the late second century CE, spent his career cultivating a Greek literary persona. Aelian was a highly regarded writer during his own lifetime, and his literary compilations would be influential for a thousand years and more in the Roman world. This book argues that the De natura animalium, a miscellaneous treasury of animal lore and Aelian's greatest work, is a sophisticated literary critique of Severan Rome. Aelian's fascination with animals reflects the cultural issues of his day: philosophy, religion, the exoticism of Egypt and India, sex, gender, and imperial politics. This study also considers how Aelian's interests in the De natura animalium are echoed in his other works, the Rustic Letters and the Varia Historia. Himself a prominent figure of mainstream Roman Hellenism, Aelian refined his literary aesthetic to produce a reading of nature that is both moral and provocative.
Download or read book Under Divine Auspices written by Clare Rowan and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2012 with total page 321 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Exploration of the role played by deities in the negotiation of imperial power under the Severan dynasty (AD 193-235).
Download or read book The Eastern Roman Empire under the Severans written by Julia Hoffmann-Salz and published by Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht. This book was released on 2024-06-17 with total page 369 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The year of the four emperors in AD 193 shows the cosmopolitan interconnectedness of the Roman Empire, yet scholarship has long framed the Severan dynasty in a narrative of descent stressing their North African and in particular their Syrian origins. The contributions of this volume question this conventional approach and instead examine more closely actual Severan policy in the Near East to detect potential local connections that determined this policy as well as how local communities and elites reacted to it. The volume thus explores new beginnings and old connections in the Roman Near East.
Download or read book Greek Narratives of the Roman Empire under the Severans written by Adam M. Kemezis and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2014-10-23 with total page 353 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book explores how Greek authors who witnessed sudden political change reacted by re-imagining the larger narrative of the Roman past.
Download or read book Cultural Crossroads in the Ancient Novel written by Marília P. Futre Pinheiro and published by Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG. This book was released on 2017-12-04 with total page 407 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The protagonists of the ancient novels wandered or were carried off to distant lands, from Italy in the west to Persia in the east and Ethiopia in the south; the authors themselves came, or pretended to come, from remote places such as Aphrodisia and Phoenicia; and the novelistic form had antecedents in a host of classical genres. These intersections are explored in this volume. Papers in the first section discuss “mapping the world in the novels.” The second part looks at the dialogical imagination, and the conversation between fiction and history in the novels. Section 3 looks at the way ancient fiction has been transmitted and received. Space, as the locus of cultural interaction and exchange, is the topic of the fourth part. The fifth and final section is devoted to character and emotion, and how these are perceived or constructed in ancient fiction. Overall, a rich picture is offered of the many spatial and cultural dimensions in a variety of ancient fictional genres.
Download or read book Saints written by Françoise Meltzer and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2011-12 with total page 423 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: While the modern world has largely dismissed the figure of the saint as a throwback, we remain fascinated by excess, marginality, transgression, and porous subjectivity—categories that define the saint. In this collection, Françoise Meltzer and Jas Elsner bring together top scholars from across the humanities to reconsider our denial of saintliness and examine how modernity returns to the lure of saintly grace, energy, and charisma. Addressing such problems as how saints are made, the use of saints by political and secular orders, and how holiness is personified, Saints takes us on a photo tour of Graceland and the cult of Elvis and explores the changing political takes on Joan of Arc in France. It shows us the self-fashioning of culture through the reevaluation of saints in late-antique Judaism and Counter-Reformation Rome, and it questions the political intent of underlying claims to spiritual attainment of a Muslim sheikh in Morocco and of Sephardism in Israel. Populated with the likes of Francis of Assisi, Teresa of Avila, and Padre Pio, this book is a fascinating inquiry into the status of saints in the modern world.
Download or read book Fate Providence and Free Will Philosophy and Religion in Dialogue in the Early Imperial Age written by and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2020-08-31 with total page 343 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This volume offers a collection of papers about the notions of fate, providence, and free will, as developed and debated in philosophy and religion in the early Imperial age (ca. 31 BCE-250 CE).
Download or read book Political Autobiographies and Memoirs in Antiquity written by Gabriele Marasco and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2015-11-24 with total page 473 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Ancient autobiography has been the object of several studies and meetings. However, these have focused chiefly on the philosophical and literary aspects. This book aims to examine the development of political autobiography and memoirs in the Greek and Roman world, stressing, instead, the relation of a single work with the traditions of the genre and also the influence of the respective aims of the authors on the composition of autobiographies. At times these works were written as a means of propaganda in a political struggle, or to defend a past action, and often to furnish material to historians. Nonetheless, they still preserve the personal viewpoint and voice of the protagonists in all their vividness, even if distorted by the aim of defending their record. Political Autobiographies and Memoirs in Antiquity will be a highly valuable and useful reference tool for both scholars and students of Greek and Roman history and literature.
Download or read book Emperors and Usurpers written by Andrew G. Scott and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2018-04-24 with total page 217 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This historical commentary examines books 79(78)-80(80) of Cassius Dio's Roman History, which cover the period from the death of Caracalla in A. D. 217. to the reign of Severus Alexander and Cassius Dio's retirement from political life in 229. Cassius Dio, a Roman Senator, provides a valuable eyewitness account of this turbulent period, which was marked by the assassination of Caracalla, the rise of Macrinus, Rome's first equestrian emperor, and his subsequent overthrow, the tempestuous, and by all accounts peculiar, reign of Elagabalus, and the continuation of the Severan dynasty under the young Severus Alexander. In addition to elucidating important passages from these books, this study assesses Cassius Dio's political life and its relationship to his literary career; his call to history and time of composition; his historical method; and his attitude toward and subsequent presentation of the later Severan dynasty. In its investigation of books 79(78)-80(80), the work assesses an important stretch of Dio's actual text, which for other parts has been preserved largely in epitome and excerpts. Finally, the work aims to fill a gap in scholarship, as no commentary on these books of Cassius Dio's history has been produced since the nineteenth century, and its publication coincides with a renewed interest in the history and historiography of the Severan period.
Download or read book Maternal Megalomania written by Julie Langford and published by JHU Press. This book was released on 2013-07-24 with total page 231 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: She employs Julia Domna as a case study to explore the creation of ideology between the emperor and its subjects.
Download or read book The Roman Empire at Bay AD 180 395 written by David S. Potter and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2014-01-03 with total page 986 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Roman Empire at Bay is the only one volume history of the critical years 180-395 AD, which saw the transformation of the Roman Empire from a unitary state centred on Rome, into a new polity with two capitals and a new religion—Christianity. The book integrates social and intellectual history into the narrative, looking to explore the relationship between contingent events and deeper structure. It also covers an amazingly dramatic narrative from the civil wars after the death of Commodus through the conversion of Constantine to the arrival of the Goths in the Roman Empire, setting in motion the final collapse of the western empire. The new edition takes account of important new scholarship in questions of Roman identity, on economy and society as well as work on the age of Constantine, which has advanced significantly in the last decade, while recent archaeological and art historical work is more fully drawn into the narrative. At its core, the central question that drives The Roman Empire at Bay remains, what did it mean to be a Roman and how did that meaning change as the empire changed? Updated for a new generation of students, this book remains a crucial tool in the study of this period.
Download or read book A Companion to the City of Rome written by Claire Holleran and published by John Wiley & Sons. This book was released on 2018-07-10 with total page 772 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A Companion to the City of Rome presents a series of original essays from top experts that offer an authoritative and up-to-date overview of current research on the development of the city of Rome from its origins until circa AD 600. Offers a unique interdisciplinary, closely focused thematic approach and wide chronological scope making it an indispensible reference work on ancient Rome Includes several new developments on areas of research that are available in English for the first time Newly commissioned essays written by experts in a variety of related fields Original and up-to-date readings pertaining to the city of Rome on a wide variety of topics including Rome’s urban landscape, population, economy, civic life, and key events
Download or read book The Aesthetics of Hope in Late Greek Imperial Literature written by Dawn LaValle Norman and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2019-12-05 with total page 297 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book sheds light on a relatively dark period of literary history, the late third century CE, a period that falls between the Second Sophistic and Late Antiquity. It argues that more was being written during this time than past scholars have realized and takes as its prime example the understudied Christian writer Methodius of Olympus. Among his many works, this book focuses on his dialogic Symposium, a text which exposes an era's new concern to re-orient the gaze of a generation from the past onto the future. Dr LaValle Norman makes the further argument that scholarship on the Imperial period that does not include Christian writers within its purview misses the richness of this period, which was one of deepening interaction between Christian and non-Christian writers. Only through recovering this conversation can we understand the transitional period that led to the rise of Constantine.
Download or read book The Fate of Rome written by Kyle Harper and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2017-10-02 with total page 436 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: How devastating viruses, pandemics, and other natural catastrophes swept through the far-flung Roman Empire and helped to bring down one of the mightiest civilizations of the ancient world Here is the monumental retelling of one of the most consequential chapters of human history: the fall of the Roman Empire. The Fate of Rome is the first book to examine the catastrophic role that climate change and infectious diseases played in the collapse of Rome’s power—a story of nature’s triumph over human ambition. Interweaving a grand historical narrative with cutting-edge climate science and genetic discoveries, Kyle Harper traces how the fate of Rome was decided not just by emperors, soldiers, and barbarians but also by volcanic eruptions, solar cycles, climate instability, and devastating viruses and bacteria. He takes readers from Rome’s pinnacle in the second century, when the empire seemed an invincible superpower, to its unraveling by the seventh century, when Rome was politically fragmented and materially depleted. Harper describes how the Romans were resilient in the face of enormous environmental stress, until the besieged empire could no longer withstand the combined challenges of a “little ice age” and recurrent outbreaks of bubonic plague. A poignant reflection on humanity’s intimate relationship with the environment, The Fate of Rome provides a sweeping account of how one of history’s greatest civilizations encountered and endured, yet ultimately succumbed to the cumulative burden of nature’s violence. The example of Rome is a timely reminder that climate change and germ evolution have shaped the world we inhabit—in ways that are surprising and profound.
Download or read book Written Space in the Latin West 200 BC to AD 300 written by Peter Keegan and published by A&C Black. This book was released on 2013-09-12 with total page 306 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The evolution of the public display of writing in Roman cities.
