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This two-volume study explores the life of the Muslim scholar Ibn A?tham al-Kufi and his historical work, the Kitab al-futu? (Book of Conquests). This study re-contextualises Ibn A?tham within the early fourth/tenth century, highlighting his contributions to Islamic historiography.
Volume 1 examines his biography, refines the timeline of his life and work, and traces its reception across the Muslim world. It provides codicological descriptions of the surviving Arabic manuscripts, analyses the narratives of the ridda ('apostasy') wars, and includes critical editions of the Kitab al-futu?'s collective isnads, accompanied by translations and analyses.
Diodoros' Bibliotheke Historike, written in the last half of the first century BC, is a major source for ancient history from earliest times to his own era. This is the first English translation of Books 21-40 (301-62 BC) in seventy years, and the first ever commentary on those portions of the text. Major topics include the history of Sicily, the career of Hannibal, the slave wars that plagued the era, and the increasing instability of the Roman Republic. Diodoros' insight into the events of these years is a major source for that era, but his account, which survives only in fragments excerpted and to some extent paraphrased by later Byzantine scholars, has long been neglected.
Modern accounts of the great war between the Athenians and the Spartans in the late fifth century BC have simply reanalysed the gripping analysis of military and political events given by Thucydides. But a great deal of other evidence survives from this best-known of all periods of Athenian history. This book exploits that evidence and our rich knowledge of ancient Greek society to reveal the Peloponnesian War as not just an event but an experience that reshaped Athenian society as it was happening. It looks again not merely at the causes of the war and its military and political narratives, but at how the war reshaped the world, for men, for women, and even for the gods. This book not only re-illuminates the most dramatic years of classical Athenian history, it reshapes what it is to write history.
The Bronze Age Aegean and Cyprus were home to a plethora of scripts, including Cretan Hieroglyphic, Linear A and Linear B, Cypro-Minoan and Cypro-Syllabic. This Element is dedicated to the conventionally named 'Minoan' Linear A script, used on Crete and the Aegean islands during the Middle and Late Bronze Age (ca. 1800–1450 BCE). Linear A is still undeciphered, and the language it encodes ('Minoan') thus remains elusive. Notwithstanding, scholars have been able to extract a good amount of information from Linear A inscriptions and their contexts of use. Current ongoing research, integrating the materiality of script with linguistic analysis, offers a cutting-edge approach with promising results. This Element considers Linear A within an investigative framework as well as narrative, shedding light on a number of burning questions in the field, often the subject of intense academic debate.
In this chapter, a particular form of intercession, namely snatching from the gallows, highlights how the existence of different moral codes could generate tension in society. An insistence on mercy, especially but not exclusively found in ecclesiastical discourse, conflicted with the logic of imperial law, which did foresee the death penalty for certain crimes. In recognition of this moral imperative, we see emperors recalling at the last moment from the scaffold individuals whom they had themselves condemned, whilst the people and especially monks also interrupted executions. The usually lenient way in which emperors dealt with such illegal actions shows how upholding the legal order stood in tension with the virtue that was expected of the emperor.
The final chapter demonstrates what the implications of the model developed are for one of the central figures of Late Antique society, the emperor, which plays a crucial role in current interpretations. Building on and nuancing the two current frameworks, constitutionalism and acceptance theory, the chapter argues that we can make sense of imperial power in Late Antiquity by seeing it as a virtue-based social role and tied into practices that both enabled the emperor to exercise power and constrained it. Whilst a long scholarly tradition considers that the Later Roman Empire is marked by the expansion of imperial power and an increased distance between emperor and subject, symbolized in the expansion of bureaucracy and ceremony, it is argued here that even in this period the role of the emperor was conceived of, and exercised, in interaction with other individuals and the people.
The introductory chapter details what is gained by using the concept of social role when studying power relations in Late Antiquity and how it ties in well with ancient ideas about why people act in the way they do. It shows how Late Antique thought and practice conceptualized social hierarchies in moral terms and argues that precisely the expectation that social and moral hierarchies coincide injects the dynamism in social interactions that this book chronicles. It also underscores that society was conceived of as held together by justice and shows how this was intertwined with hierarchical conceptions of society and the cosmos.
This chapter focuses on parrhesia, the ancient term for criticizing a superior, typically the emperor. This was a particularly tricky thing to do, not only given the power of the emperor, but also because the superior was supposed to be more virtuous than their inferior. Through a display of virtue, the inferior could temporarily overcome the social distance and speak out. Contrary to current views that parrhesia was only really possible in democratic societies and therefore in Late Antiquity the preserve of marginal figures of society, such as holy men, I show that parrhesia was a much more widespread practice that, however, demanded great skill and courage.
This chapter argues that petitions have hitherto been too narrowly studied as bureaucratic acts defined by Roman law and shifts attention to informal petitions, whereby any superior could be petitioned even when they did not have formal power, and to oral petitions, whereby immediate justice was demanded. Petitions then appear as reflecting a culture of entreaty characteristic for a hierarchical society.
This chapter argues that in the Late Antique notion of “the people,” a normative aspect is present: the people is not just a social designation, but also acquires a constitutional sense if a group of individuals puts itself in a relationship of justice with the emperor (or, for that matter, a bishop). Indeed, the notion of emperor and people are coconstitutive: the one cannot exist without the other. This helps us to understand the political role the people played in Late Antique society, in the absence of institutions such as voting assemblies through which it could express itself. Seen through this lens, riots are occasions when it was questioned if the ruler truly was just. If the relationship could not be mended, the people could favor someone else as ruler. Thus, although there were numerous riots in Late Antiquity, they never questioned the social system but only sought to establish a personal interaction that could ensure justice.
This is the first scholarly commentary on Cicero's Divinatio in Caecilium and the first new critical edition in over 100 years. The commentary demonstrates that the Divinatio was atypical of the genre. In both form and content, the speech is styled as a forensic prosecution rather than a pre-trial deliberation. It also functions as an effective piece of literary criticism and a pedagogical treatise to preface the Verrine corpus. Consequently scholars are encouraged to reconsider how published oratory in Rome functioned as teaching aid, personal propaganda, historical record, and literary production. The Divinatio touches on issues with strong resonance for contemporary society: the responsibility of the government to represent and defend marginalised communities, cultural identity and integration in a multi-ethnic society, the perils of persuasive speech, abuses of political and military power, due process of law, and changing notions of intellectual and cultural property.
In the Later Roman Empire (AD 300–650), power seems to manifest itself mostly through legislation, bureaucracy, and an increasingly distant emperor. This book focuses instead on personal interaction as crucial to the exercise of power. It studies four social practices (petitions, parrhesia, intercession, and collective action) to show how they are much more dynamic than often assumed. These practices were guided by strong expectations of justice, which constrained the actions of superiors. They therefore allowed the socially inferior to develop strategies of conduct that could force the hand of the superior and, in extreme cases, lead to overturning hierarchical relations. Building on the analysis of these specific forms of interaction, the book argues for an understanding of late antique power rooted in the character and virtue of those invested with it.