This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press's mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and ...impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1964.
How did the Romans build and maintain one of the most powerful and
stable empires in the history of the world? This illuminating book
draws on the literature, especially the historiography, composed ...by
the members of the elite who conducted Roman foreign affairs. From
this evidence, Susan P. Mattern reevaluates the roots, motivations,
and goals of Roman imperial foreign policy especially as that
policy related to warfare. In a major reinterpretation of the
sources, Rome and the Enemy shows that concepts of
national honor, fierce competition for status, and revenge drove
Roman foreign policy, and though different from the highly
rationalizing strategies often attributed to the Romans, dictated
patterns of response that remained consistent over centuries.
Mattern reconstructs the world view of the Roman decision-makers,
the emperors, and the elite from which they drew their advisers.
She discusses Roman conceptions of geography, strategy, economics,
and the influence of traditional Roman values on the conduct of
military campaigns. She shows that these leaders were more strongly
influenced by a traditional, stereotyped perception of the enemy
and a drive to avenge insults to their national honor than by
concepts of defensible borders. In fact, the desire to enforce an
image of Roman power was a major policy goal behind many of their
most brutal and aggressive campaigns. Rome and the Enemy
provides a fascinating look into the Roman mind in addition to a
compelling reexamination of Roman conceptions of warfare and
national honor. The resulting picture creates a new understanding
of Rome's long mastery of the Mediterranean world.
In this collection of sixteen literary and historical essays, Peter Green informs, entertains, and stimulates. He covers a wide range of subjects, from Greek attitudes toward death to the mysteries ...of the Delphic Oracle, from Tutankhamun and the gold of Egypt to sex in ancient literature, from the island of Lesbos (where he once lived) to the challenges of translating Ovid's wit and elegant eroticism into present-day English verse, from Victorian pederastic aesthetics to Marxism's losing battle with ancient history. This third volume of Green's essays (several previously unpublished) reveals throughout his serious concern that we are, in a very real sense, losing the legacy of antiquity through the corrosive methodologies of modern academic criticism.
Freed from the familial and social obligations incumbent on the
living, the Roman testator could craft his will to be a literal
"last judgment" on family, friends, and society. The Romans were
...fascinated by the contents of wills, believing the will to be a
mirror of the testator's true character and opinions. The wills
offer us a unique view of the individual Roman testator's world.
Just as classicists, ancient historians, and legal historians will
find a mine of information here, the general reader will be
fascinated by the book's lively recounting of last testaments. Who
were the testators and what were their motives? Why do family, kin,
servants, friends, and community all figure in the will, and how
are they treated? What sort of afterlife did the Romans anticipate?
By examining wills, the book sets several issues in a new light,
offering new interpretations of, or new insights into, subjects as
diverse as captatio (inheritance-seeking), the structure
of the Roman family, the manumission of slaves, public
philanthropy, the afterlife and the relation of subject to emperor.
Champlin's principal argument is that a strongly felt "duty of
testacy" informed and guided most Romans, a duty to reward or
punish all who were important to them, a duty which led them to
write their wills early in life and to revise them frequently.
