This volume addresses the fundamental importance of the army, warfare, and military service to the development of both the Roman Republic and wider Italic society in the second half of the first ...millennium BC. It brings together emerging and established scholars in the area of Roman military studies to engage with subjects such as the relationship between warfare and economic and demographic regimes; the interplay of war, aristocratic politics, and state formation; and the complex role the military played in the integration of Italy. The book demonstrates the centrality of war to Rome’s internal and external relationships during the Republic, as well as to the Romans’ sense of identity and history. It also illustrates the changing scholarly view of warfare as a social and cultural construct in antiquity, and how much work remains to be done in what is often thought of as a ""traditional"" area of research. Romans at War will be of interest to students and scholars of the Roman army and ancient warfare, and of Roman society more broadly.
Staying Roman Conant, Jonathan
04/2012, Letnik:
v.Series Number 82
eBook
What did it mean to be Roman once the Roman Empire had collapsed in the West? Staying Roman examines Roman identities in the region of modern Tunisia and Algeria between the fifth-century Vandal ...conquest and the seventh-century Islamic invasions. Using historical, archaeological and epigraphic evidence, this study argues that the fracturing of the empire's political unity also led to a fracturing of Roman identity along political, cultural and religious lines, as individuals who continued to feel 'Roman' but who were no longer living under imperial rule sought to redefine what it was that connected them to their fellow Romans elsewhere. The resulting definitions of Romanness could overlap, but were not always mutually reinforcing. Significantly, in late antiquity Romanness had a practical value, and could be used in remarkably flexible ways to foster a sense of similarity or difference over space, time and ethnicity, in a wide variety of circumstances.
Available for the first time in paperback, with a new introduction that reviews related scholarship of the past twenty years, Erich Gruen's classic study of the late Republic examines institutions as ...well as personalities, social tensions as well as politics, the plebs and the army as well as the aristocracy.
This book examines how Pompeian peristyle gardens were utilized to represent the socioeconomic status of Roman homeowners, introducing fresh perspectives on how these spaces were designed, used, and ...perceived. Pompeian Peristyle Gardens provides a novel understanding of how the domus was planned, utilized, and experienced through a critical examination of all Pompeian peristyles – not just by selecting a few well-known examples. This study critiques common scholarly assumptions of ancient domestic space, such as the top-down movement of ideas and the relationship between wealth and socio-political power, though these possibilities are not excluded. In addition, this book provides a welcome contribution to exploring the largely unexamined middle class, an integral part of ancient Roman society. Pompeian Peristyle Gardens is of interest to students and scholars in art history, classics, archaeology, social history, and other related fields.
Charlemagne is often claimed as the greatest ruler in Europe before Napoleon. This magisterial study re-examines Charlemagne the ruler and his reputation. It analyses the narrative representations of ...Charlemagne produced after his death, and thereafter focuses on the evidence from Charlemagne's lifetime concerning the creation of the Carolingian dynasty and the growth of the kingdom, the court and the royal household, communications and identities in the Frankish realm in the context of government, and Charlemagne's religious and cultural strategies. The book offers a critical examination of the contemporary sources and in so doing transforms our understanding of the development of the Carolingian empire, the formation of Carolingian political identity, and the astonishing changes effected throughout Charlemagne's forty-six year period of rule. This is a major contribution to Carolingian history which will be essential reading for anyone interested in the medieval past. Rosamond McKitterick has also received the 2010 Dr A. H. Heineken Prize for History for her research into the Carolingians.
For many years, scholars struggled to write the history of the constitution and political structure of the Holy Roman Empire. This book argues that this was because the political and social order ...could not be understood without considering the rituals and symbols that held the Empire together. What determined the rules (and whether they were followed) depended on complex symbolic-ritual actions.By examining key moments in the political history of the Empire, the author shows that it was a vocabulary of symbols, not the actual written laws, that formed a political language indispensable in maintaining the common order.
The Romans depicted the civil law as a body of rules crafted through communal deliberation for the purpose of self-government. Yet, as Clifford Ando demonstrates inLaw, Language, and Empire in the ...Roman Tradition, the civil law was also an instrument of empire: many of its most characteristic features developed in response to the challenges posed when the legal system of Rome was deployed to embrace, incorporate, and govern people and cultures far afield.
Ando studies the processes through which lawyers at Rome grappled with the legal pluralism resulting from imperial conquests. He focuses primarily on the tools-most prominently analogy and fiction-used to extend the system and enable it to regulate the lives of persons far from the minds of the original legislators, and he traces the central place that philosophy of language came to occupy in Roman legal thought.
In the second part of the book Ando examines the relationship between civil, public, and international law. Despite the prominence accorded public and international law in legal theory, it was civil law that provided conceptual resources to those other fields in the Roman tradition. Ultimately it was the civil law's implication in systems of domination outside its own narrow sphere that opened the door to its own subversion. When political turmoil at Rome upended the institutions of political and legislative authority and effectively ended Roman democracy, the concepts and language that the civil law supplied to the project of Republican empire saw their meanings transformed. As a result, forms of domination once exercised by Romans over others were inscribed in the workings of law at Rome, henceforth to be exercised by the Romans over themselves.
This exciting new study draws on objects excavated or discovered in the late nineteenth or early twentieth century at three Mediterranean sites. Through the three case studies,Materia ...Magicaidentifies specific forms of magic that may be otherwise unknown. It isolates the practitioners of magic and examines whether magic could be used as a form of countercultural resistance. Andrew T. Wilburn discovers magic in the objects of ancient daily life, suggesting that individuals frequently turned to magic, particularly in crises. Local forms of magic may have differed, and Wilburn proposes that the only way we can find small-town sorcerers is through careful examination of the archaeological evidence.
Studying the remains of spells enacted by practitioners, Wilburn's work unites the analysis of the words written on artifacts and the physical form of these objects. He situates these items within their contexts, to study how and why they were used.Materia Magicaapproaches magic as a material endeavor, in which spoken spells, ritual actions, and physical objects all played vital roles in the performance of a rite.
Materia Magicadevelops a new method for identifying and interpreting the material remains of magical practice by assessing artifacts within their archaeological contexts. Wilburn suggests that excavations undertaken in recent centuries can yield important lessons about the past, and he articulates the ways in which we can approach problematic data.
Was there ever such a thing as Byzantium? Certainly no emperor ever called himself Byzantine. While the identities of eastern minorities were clear, that of the ruling majority remains obscured ...behind a name made up by later generations. Anthony Kaldellis says it is time for the Romanness of these so-called Byzantines to be taken seriously.
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