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This study explores the development of ancient festival culture in the Greek East of the Roman Empire, paying particular attention to the fundamental religious changes that occurred. After analysing how Greek city festivals developed in the first two Imperial centuries, it concentrates on the major Roman festivals that were adopted in the Eastern cities and traces their history up to the time of Justinian and beyond. It addresses several key questions for the religious history of later antiquity: who were the actors behind these adoptions? How did the closed religious communities, Jews and pre-Constantinian Christians, articulate their resistance? How did these festivals change when the empire converted to Christianity? Why did emperors not yield to the long-standing pressure of the Church to abolish them? And finally, how did these very popular festivals - despite their pagan tradition - influence the form of the newly developed Christian liturgy?
A naval officer from a generation that could spend an average of between 250 and 300 days a year at sea, Sir Cyprian Bridge (1839–1924) used this extensive experience and the knowledge he gained from wide reading to become a highly respected commander, firm in his beliefs and unafraid to voice them. In retirement he became a vocal critic of the drive to build bigger ships, believing that hardware should be subordinate to tactics. A regular contributor to newspapers, he wrote articles on naval history, tactics and strategy. This collection of articles was published in 1910, and includes his well-known paper, first delivered in 1902, setting out the difficulties in maintaining supplies and communications with a fleet based far from home. This work remains relevant to naval historians, and to those interested in how Britain maintained her maritime supremacy into the twentieth century.
The antiquary Sir William Gell (1777–1836) was most famous for his two books on the archaeological discoveries at Pompeii (also reissued in this series) but his interest in the topography of classical sites is also reflected in this work, first published in 1823. Gell describes his experiences of many visits to the Peloponnese over a period of twenty years, during which the Greek movement for independence from the Ottoman Empire was gathering momentum and widespread support in Europe. Written partly in response to a request to 'give us anything but your dull maps and measures', the book does not discuss archaeological sites in detail but rather records impressions of the lives of the Greek and Turkish inhabitants in the period immediately before the outbreak of war. Gell's own conclusions about the prospects for 'Grecian liberty' are gloomy: he holds it to be 'quite unattainable at the present day'.
Karl Wilhelm Ludwig Müller (1813–94), who wrote in Latin under the name Carolus Müllerus, was a German classicist whose monumental five-volume Fragmenta historicorum graecorum (also reissued in the Cambridge Library Collection) remains an important resource today. Between 1855 and 1861, he also produced this valuable two-volume collection of the works of lesser-known Greek geographers. Volume 2 (1861) contains texts from the Roman imperial period, including Dionysius of Byzantium's Anaplus Bospori ('Voyage through the Bosphorus') and the work of Dionysius Periegetes, which is accompanied by Latin paraphrases from antiquity by Rufus Festus Avienus and Priscian, as well as the commentary on it by Eustathius of Thessalonica. The surviving Greek texts have parallel Latin translations, and Müller's extensive prolegomena (also in Latin) discusses what is known about the authors, their works and the manuscript sources.