This book is the first comprehensive treatment of the 'small politics' of rural communities in the Late Roman world. It places the diverse fates of those communities within a generalized model for ...exploring rural social systems. Fundamentally, social interactions in rural contexts in the period revolved around the desire of individual households to insure themselves against catastrophic subsistence failure and the need of the communities in which they lived to manage the attendant social tensions, inequalities and conflicts. A focus upon the politics of reputation in those communities provides a striking contrast to the picture painted by the legislation and the writings of Rome's literate elite: when viewed from the point of view of the peasantry, issues such as the Christianization of the countryside, the emergence of new types of patronage relations, and the effects of the new system of taxation upon rural social structures take on a different aspect.
ABSTRACT This paper explores the links between travel and power that the journeys of Hadrian in the Vita Hadriani reveal, and suggests that these links have broader implications for our ...interpretation of the Historia Augusta as a whole, and of its author's literary skill and political awareness. It offers a close reading of the contexts in which Hadrian is depicted traveling in the Vita Hadriani, and argues that they may be interpreted as part of an internal dialog over alternate strategies for expressing and legitimating imperial power. It suggests that it is the moments when Hadrian is in the act of traveling that provide the clearest clues as to our author's attitude towards appropriate behavior by an emperor.
RESUMO Este artigo explora as ligações entre as viagens e poder de Adriano na Vita Hadriani, e sugere que estas ligações têm implicações mais amplas para a nossa interpretação da Historia Augusta como um todo, e da habilidade literária e consciência política de Adriano. Oferecemos uma leitura atenta dos contextos em que Adriano é retratado em suas viagens por Vita Hadriani, e argumentamos que elas podem ser interpretadas como parte de um diálogo interno sobre estratégias alternativas para expressar e legitimar o poder imperial. Sugerimos que os momentos em que Adriano está no ato de viajar fornecem as pistas mais claras quanto ao comportamento adequado de um imperador para nós.
The projects of social history, disaster studies, and archaeology deliberately tend to eschew consideration of events, focusing instead on processes and structures that unfold gradually over time. ...The eruption of the Somma-Vesuvius volcano in Campania, Italy, in 472 presents tangible markers of a specific moment, although the absence of local textual evidence and the strong hints of rapid re-exploitation of the rich and fertile soils of the region suggest that the scale of the disaster that it precipitated was limited. A perspective on the eruption informed by the concepts of risk and vulnerability demonstrates that the population of the Campanian Plain had different experiences of the eruption according to factors such as their location, the nature and robustness of their social and economic resources, and their mechanisms for accessing and exploiting power relationships.
Celotno besedilo
Dostopno za:
DOBA, IZUM, KILJ, NUK, PILJ, PNG, SAZU, SIK, UILJ, UKNU, UL, UM, UPUK
Agrarian labor history of Greco-Roman antiquity—indeed, labor history of the period more broadly—does not look very much like the agrarian labor histories of other periods. Many explanations might be ...adduced for why this is so, including the very particular circumstances that led to the development of ancient history as a discipline separate from (yet intimately related to) the humanistic intellectual traditions of classical studies in the last decades of the nineteenth century. But arguably the most fundamental constraining factor is the nature of the available evidence. Simply put, the wealthy, leisured elites responsible for the overwhelming bulk of the written materials available to us from the ancient Mediterranean world were emphatically uninterested in the sector of the population whose labor underpinned and sustained their privileged position.
Ari Byren's Violence in Roman Egypt: A Study in Legal Interpretation (2013) effectively inserts itself into two complementary fields of inquiry and discussion within the field of classical studies. ...First, it offers a detailed treatment of the social history of small communities in Roman Egypt, providing an important contribution to the study of violence in antiquity—a topic that has gained interest in recent years. Second, it is an extended meditation on the place of violence within a society and law's role in defining and eliminating it.
Building on recent scholarship concerning the ‘colonate of the late Roman Empire’, and focusing in particular upon the vocabulary used in the legal sources, this paper offers three propositions. ...First, the colonatus of the legislation was not a legal shorthand for the ‘colonate’ of modern historiographical debate. Second, the coloni of the legislation were not a discrete group of individuals subjected to a definable, articulated set of restrictions. Finally, it is not colonatus but rather the origo and the link it created between individuals and the land which is the key to the tax system of the late Roman Empire.
Countryside Cam Grey
Late Ancient Knowing,
05/2015
Book Chapter
Among the papers found in the estate of the late Keith Hopkins is a curious text that bears many of the hallmarks of late antique literature. It reveals both classicizing tendencies and a ...self-conscious awareness of present Christian concerns. It defies easy categorization into one genre, sitting instead amid the epistolary, technical, hagiographical, and panegyrical forms. It demonstrates also a robust sense of the literary and cultural merit of its present, while at the same time seeking to consciously reconstruct and remodel its past.¹ Unfortunately, the names of both the addressee and the author are lost, and nothing further is
PDF
