Skip to main content Accessibility help
×
  1. Home
  2. Browse subjects
  3. Classical Studies
  4. Classical studies (general)
  5. Content listing

Refine search

Refine search

Access:
Content type:
Publication date:
Apply   From and To filters
Subject: Show more
Journals Show more
Publishers: Show more
Societies Show more
Series: Show more
Collections: Show more

Actions for selected content:

Select all | Deselect all
  • View selected items
  • Export citations
  • Download PDF (zip)
  • Save to Kindle
  • Save to Dropbox
  • Save to Google Drive

Save Search

You can save your searches here and later view and run them again in "My saved searches".

Please provide a title, maximum of 40 characters.
Cancel
×

60619 results in Classical studies (general)

Page 56 of 3031

  • Chapter 4 - A Life for a Life

  • from Part II - Making and Breaking Constantine: Julian Augustus
  • Lea Niccolai, University of Cambridge
  • Book:
    Christianity, Philosophy, and Roman Power
    Published online:
    07 July 2023
    Print publication:
    01 June 2023, pp 166-206

  • Summary

    Chapter 4 concludes the analysis of Julian’s reckoning with Constantine’s propaganda. It focuses on Julian’s strategy to disavow the public persona of the first emperor who had promoted the association between Christian sovereignty and ideals of philosophical leadership. The first section considers the efforts of Constantine’s propaganda to use the events of his (Constantine’s) life to prove that Roman history was guided by Christian providence. The engagement with autobiography in Julian’s final writings appears in this light as the culmination of his response to Christianity’s claims of intellectual dominance over Greco-Roman culture. The second section reconstructs Julian’s joint attempts to project his life as the token of his superior understanding of providential history (Against Heraclius) and to mobilise past Roman history as a source of counter-exempla disproving Constantine’s claims (The Caesars). In the process, Julian repurposed a fundamental element of Constantine’s propaganda – imperial iconography – to his advantage (Caesars; Misopogon).

  • Conclusions

  • Lea Niccolai, University of Cambridge
  • Book:
    Christianity, Philosophy, and Roman Power
    Published online:
    07 July 2023
    Print publication:
    01 June 2023, pp 302-307

  • Summary

    My research began in 2016 with a seemingly simple question: how did the Christianisation of the Roman Empire affect the self-representation of Roman power? As I chased down self-referential statements in the writings of emperors and bishops, I became increasingly aware that how fourth-century leaders spoke of themselves was indissolubly tied to how they spoke of their culture. Negotiating the value of traditional Greco-Roman paideia and its literature(s) – attacked, upheld, manipulated, and fetishised – was an obsession in all the texts I was interrogating. Students of the fourth century often contemplate the puzzling fact that the cultures and practices cultivated for centuries across the Greco-Roman Mediterranean were willingly pushed aside in the space of a few decades. This book has addressed this issue through an analysis that is both culture- and power-centred and grounded on three statements, the first two of which might seem contradictory

Page 56 of 3031