This book offers a comprehensive assessment of the intersection between Roman politics, culture and divination in the late Republic. It discusses how the practice of divination changed at a time of ...great political and social change and explores the evidence for a critical reflection and debate on the limits of divination and prediction in the second and first centuries BC. Divination was a central feature in the workings of the Roman government and this book explores the ways in which it changed under the pressure of factors of socio-political complexity and disruption. It discusses the ways in which the problem of the prediction of the future is constructed in the literature of the period. Finally, it explores the impact that the emergence of the Augustan regime had on the place of divination in Rome and the role that divinatory themes had in shaping the ideology of the new regime.
In Migration and Mobility in the Early Roman Empire seventeen specialists in the fields of Roman social history, Roman demography and Roman economic history offer fresh perspectives on voluntary, ...state-organised and forced mobility during the first to early third centuries CE.
The quality of life for ordinary Roman citizens at the height of the Roman Empire probably was better than that of any other large group of people living before the Industrial Revolution.The Roman ...Market Economyuses the tools of modern economics to show how trade, markets, and the Pax Romana were critical to ancient Rome's prosperity.
Peter Temin, one of the world's foremost economic historians, argues that markets dominated the Roman economy. He traces how the Pax Romana encouraged trade around the Mediterranean, and how Roman law promoted commerce and banking. Temin shows that a reasonably vibrant market for wheat extended throughout the empire, and suggests that the Antonine Plague may have been responsible for turning the stable prices of the early empire into the persistent inflation of the late. He vividly describes how various markets operated in Roman times, from commodities and slaves to the buying and selling of land. Applying modern methods for evaluating economic growth to data culled from historical sources, Temin argues that Roman Italy in the second century was as prosperous as the Dutch Republic in its golden age of the seventeenth century.
The Roman Market Economyreveals how economics can help us understand how the Roman Empire could have ruled seventy million people and endured for centuries.
This book investigates how varying practices of gender shaped people's lives and experiences across the societies of ancient Greece and Rome. Exploring how gender was linked with other ...socio-political characteristics such as wealth, status, age and life-stage, as well as with individual choices, in the very different world of classical antiquity is fascinating in its own right. But later perceptions of ancient literature and art have profoundly influenced the development of gendered ideologies and hierarchies in the West, and influenced the study of gender itself. Questioning how best to untangle and interpret difficult sources is a key aim. This book exploits a wide range of archaeological, material cultural, visual, spatial, demographic, epigraphical and literary evidence to consider households, families, life-cycles and the engendering of time, legal and political institutions, beliefs about bodies, sex and sexuality, gender and space, the economic implications of engendered practices, and gender in religion and magic.
Spartacus Schiavone, Aldo; Carden, Jeremy
03/2013, Letnik:
19
eBook
The slave and gladiator Spartacus has been the subject of myth-making in his own time and of movie-making in ours. Aldo Schiavone brings him squarely into the arena of serious history. Spartacus ...emerges here as the commander of an army, whose aim was to incite Italy to revolt against Rome and to strike at the very heart of the imperial system.
This study in the language of Roman imperialism provides a provocative new perspective on the Roman imperial project. It highlights the prominence of the language of mastery and slavery in Roman ...descriptions of the conquest and subjection of the provinces. More broadly, it explores how Roman writers turn to paradigmatic modes of dependency familiar from everyday life - not just slavery but also clientage and childhood - in order to describe their authority over, and responsibilities to, the subject population of the provinces. It traces the relative importance of these different models for the imperial project across almost three centuries of Latin literature, from the middle of the first century BCE to the beginning of the third century CE.
Renovatio urbis Temple, Nicholas
2011, 20110425, 2011-04-25
eBook
Examining the urban and architectural developments in Rome during the Pontificate of Julius II (1503-13) this book focuses on the political, religious and artistic motives behind the changes. Each ...chapter focuses on a particular project, from the Palazzo dei Tribunali to the Stanza della Segnatura, and examines their topographical and symbolic contexts in relationship to the broader vision of Julian Rome.
This original work explores not just historical sources relating to buildings but also humanist/antiquarian texts, papal sermons/eulogies, inscriptions, frescoes and contemporary maps. An important contribution to current scholarship of early sixteenth century Rome, its urban design and architecture.
How religious ritual united a growing and diversifying Roman Republic Many narrative histories of Rome's transformation from an Italian city-state to a Mediterranean superpower focus on political and ...military conflicts as the primary agents of social change. Divine Institutions places religion at the heart of this transformation, showing how religious ritual and observance held the Roman Republic together during the fourth and third centuries BCE, a period when the Roman state significantly expanded and diversified.Blending the latest advances in archaeology with innovative sociological and anthropological methods, Dan-el Padilla Peralta takes readers from the capitulation of Rome's neighbor and adversary Veii in 398 BCE to the end of the Second Punic War in 202 BCE, demonstrating how the Roman state was redefined through the twin pillars of temple construction and pilgrimage. He sheds light on how the proliferation of temples together with changes to Rome's calendar created new civic rhythms of festival celebration, and how pilgrimage to the city surged with the increase in the number and frequency of festivals attached to Rome's temple structures. Divine Institutions overcomes many of the evidentiary hurdles that for so long have impeded research into this pivotal period in Rome's history. This book reconstructs the scale and social costs of these religious practices and reveals how religious observance emerged as an indispensable strategy for bringing Romans of many different backgrounds to the center, both physically and symbolically.
Augusto Fraschetti describes the legends surrounding the origins, foundation and early history of Rome, the significance the Romans attached to the legends of their origins, and the uses to which ...they put them.
Although numerous scholars have studied Late Republican humor, this is the first book to examine its social and political context. Anthony Corbeill maintains that political abuse exercised real ...powers of persuasion over Roman audiences and he demonstrates how public humor both creates and enforces a society's norms.
Previous scholarship has offered two explanations for why abusive language proliferated in Roman oratory. The first asserts that public rhetoric, filled with extravagant lies, was unconstrained by strictures of propriety. The second contends that invective represents an artifice borrowed from the Greeks. After a fresh reading of all extant literary works from the period, Corbeill concludes that the topics exploited in political invective arise from biases already present in Roman society. The author assesses evidence outside political discourse-from prayer ritual to philosophical speculation to physiognomic texts-in order to locate independently the biases in Roman society that enabled an orator's jokes to persuade. Within each instance of abusive humor-a name pun, for example, or the mockery of a physical deformity-resided values and preconceptions that were essential to the way a Roman citizen of the Late Republic defined himself in relation to his community.
Originally published in 1996.
ThePrinceton Legacy Libraryuses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These paperback editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.
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