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Few buildings have been as important to Western culture as the Mausoleum of Halicarnassus. One of the Seven Wonders of antiquity, it was destroyed during the Middle Ages, leading countless architects, antiquarians, painters and printmakers in Early Modern Europe to speculate upon its appearance. This book – the first on its subject – examines their works, from erudite publications to simple pen sketches, from elegant watercolours to complete buildings inspired by the monument. Spanning the period between the Italian Renaissance and the discovery and archaeological excavation of the Mausoleum's foundations in the 1850s, it covers the most important cultural contexts of Western Europe, without neglecting artworks from Peru, China and Japan. The monument's connexion with themes of widowhood and female political power are analysed, as are the manifold interactions between architecture, text and image in the afterlife of the Mausoleum. This title is also available as Open Access on Cambridge Core.
The Roman world was a rural world. Most of the Roman population lived in the countryside and had their immediate rural surroundings as their social and economic frame of reference. For much of the Roman period, rural property provided the basis for political power and urban development, and it was in rural areas that the agricultural crops that sustained an expanding empire were grown and many of the most important Roman industries were situated. Rural areas witnessed the presence of some of the most durable symbols of Roman imperial hegemony, such as aqueducts and paved roads. It was mainly here that native and Roman traditions collided and were negotiated. This volume, containing 30 chapters by leading scholars, leverages recent methodological advancements and new interpretative frameworks to provide a holistic view, with an empire-wide reach, of the importance of Roman rural areas in the success of ancient Rome.
For the Greeks and Romans, the world was full of gods, but this fundamental aspect of their experience poses major challenges to modern understanding. The concept of belief has been central to meeting those challenges but has itself been hotly debated, and has at times even been rejected as a supposedly Christianising anachronism. Others, meanwhile, have argued that a culture-neutral model of belief is both possible and essential, while the advent of the cognitive science of religion has offered new possibilities for understanding ancient religious worlds. The essays in this volume trace the historical development of the modern concept of belief, examine ancient debates about the nature of human knowledge of the divine, and draw on perspectives from anthropology, cognitive science and early modern history as well as classical studies to explore the nature and role of belief in Greek and Roman religion in ancient literature, society, experience and practice.
Literary and archaeological evidence suggests that the Roman world was profoundly unequal. What did this mean in material terms for people at the bottom of the social hierarchy? Astrid Van Oyen here investigates the lived experiences of non-elite people in the Roman world through qualitative analysis of archaeological data. Supported by theoretical insights from the material turn, development economics, and feminist studies, her study of precarity cuts across the experiences of workers, the enslaved, women, and conquered populations. Van Oyen considers how precarity shaped these people's relation to production, consumption, time, place, and community. Drawing on empirically rich archaeological data from Roman Italy, Britain, Gaul, and the Iberian Peninsula, Van Oyen challenges long-held assumptions and generates new insights into the lives of the non-elite population. Her novel approaches will inspire future studies, enabling archaeologists, historians, and anthropologists to retrieve the unheard voices of the past.
The ancient neighborhood of the Subura in Rome was held together by the shape of its terrain and the urban thoroughfares that connected the city's center and periphery. In this study, Margaret Andrews traces the Subura's urban development from the Iron Age through the Early Middle Ages. Using both written and material evidence, she argues that the valley was imbued with a social ideology that focused on the virtuous woman. This ideology was reconstituted and refocused over the centuries by Rome's most powerful leaders – senators, emperors, and bishops – and the Subura's residents themselves. The neighborhood's physical fabric was transformed in each period, as monumental and mundane structures were recombined in ways that blended past and present. Andrews demonstrates how the Subura serves as a compelling case study of urban evolution. She shows how socially constructed concepts are inscribed into urban environments and how the social processes through which these concepts were embedded evolved over time.
The Self in Premodern Thought reconfigures the historical study of the self, which has typically been treated in disciplinary silos. Bringing multiple disciplinary perspectives into conversation with each other, it broadens the discussion to include texts and forms of writing outside the standard philosophical/theological canon. A distinguished group of contributors, from philosophy, classics, theology, history, and comparative literature, explores a wide range of texts that greatly expand our understanding of how selfhood was conceived in the ancient, medieval, and early modern periods. The essays in this groundbreaking collection range from challenging new perspectives on well-known authors and texts, such as Plato and Augustine, to innovative explorations of forms of writing that have rarely been discussed in this context, such as drama, sermons, autobiographical writing, and liturgy.
Classical Athenian democracy is rightly famous but democracy flourished in other parts of the Greek world as well. In this clear and fascinating book, Matthew Simonton traces the emergence, growth, consolidation and decline of democratic city-states over the millennium down to the fifth century CE. He argues for the widespread and highly participatory nature of democratic constitutions across the Greek world, particularly in the fourth, third, and second centuries BCE. Readers will also learn to appreciate the characteristic ideological, institutional, and material-cultural features of democratic poleis. The evidence marshalled includes literary texts, inscriptions, coins, archaeological remains, and monumental art. The book does not shy away from the fact that ancient Greek democracies both empowered lower-class men but also rested on a series of exclusions (of women, enslaved people, and foreigners). Nevertheless, dēmokratia emerges as a major facet of ancient Greek culture and society.
Race as a concept has had a fraught role in the history of Classics, woven into its formation as an academic discipline. While the texts and artefacts of the ancient Mediterranean world provide complex understandings of what race might mean and how it might operate, they have also provided fodder for modern racial ideologies. This Companion offers a wide-ranging and groundbreaking overview of 'race' and 'racism' in ancient Mediterranean cultures and as well as in the formation of Classics as a discipline. Through twenty-four chapters written by a team of international scholars, it clarifies the terms and concepts that are central to contemporary theories of race and explores the extent to which they can be applied to the study of the ancient Mediterranean world, in and beyond Greece and Rome. It also showcases various concrete examples of how Classics has been shaped by the intertwined histories of race and colonialism.
Diodoros of Sicily (c.90–c.30 BC) spent thirty years producing an encyclopedic compendium of world history from its mythical beginnings to his own day. His is the only surviving, connected account of Greek affairs from 480/79 to 302/1. The books translated in this volume offer the best account of the career of Philip II of Macedon, his conquest of Greece and his assassination, as well as the earliest extant history of the career of Alexander the Great. Book 16 is also the main source for the Persian re-conquest of Egypt by Artaxerxes III (Okhos), the seizure of Delphi by the Phokians in the Third Sacred War, and Athens' defeat by a coalition of her allies in the Social War. The translation is supported by extensive notes, and the Introduction examines Diodoros' moral and educational purpose in writing, the plan of his work, his sources, and his qualities as a historian.
Many people read the Crito primarily as a companion piece to the Apology and as one of Plato's statements on the nature of politics and the citizen's relationship to the state. This book challenges both of those assumptions and shows, by close analysis of the characters, the argument and the dramatic features of the dialogue, that it is best read as an exploration of the nature and significance of Socratic moral reasoning. It shows that there is a single argument throughout the dialogue and that the 'Laws of Athens' are best understood as supporting Socrates' attempt to convince Crito that a commitment to the currently best rational argument justifies his submission to the death penalty, despite the injustice of his sentence. The importance of the Crito for later political and legal theory is great, but the reception of the dialogue should not blind us to its original intention and significance.
Although the unattested language of Proto-Indo-European has been studied for over 200 years, the greater part of this literature has focused on its phonology and morphology, with comparatively little known of its syntax. This book aims to redress the balance by reconstructing the syntax of relative clauses. It examines evidence from a wide range of archaic Indo-European languages, analysing them through the lens of generative linguistic theory. It also explains the methodological challenges of syntactic reconstruction and how they may be tackled. Ram-Prasad also alights on a wide range of points of comparative interest, including pronominal morphology, discourse movement and Wackernagel's Law. This book will appeal to classicists interested in understanding the Latin and Greek languages in their Indo-European context, as well as to trained comparative philologists and historical linguists with particular interests in syntax and reconstruction.
In Late Bronze Age Greece, Mycenaean authorities commissioned impressive funerary monuments, fortifications, and palatial complexes, reflecting their advanced engineering and architectural skills. Yet the degree of connectivity among Mycenaean administrative centers remains contested. In this book, Nicholas Blackwell explores craft relationships by analyzing artisan mobility and technological transfer across certain sites. These labor networks offer an underexplored perspective for interpreting the period's geopolitical dynamics. Focusing on iconic monuments like the Lion Gate relief, the refurbished Grave Circle A, and the Treasury of Atreus, Blackwell reconsiders the topographical and political evolution of Mycenae and the Argolid in the 14th-13th centuries BCE. Notable stone-working links between the Argolid and northern Boeotia also imply broader state-level relationships. His analysis contributes fresh ideas to ongoing research into the organization of the Mycenaean world.
What was fiction in the Roman world – and how did ancient readers learn to make sense of it? This book redefines ancient fiction not as a genre but as a sociocultural practice, governed by the institutions of Greco-Roman education. Drawing on modern fiction theory, it uncovers how fables, epic, and rhetorical training cultivated “fiction competence” in readers from childhood through advanced studies. But it also reveals how the ancient novels – including Greek romance, fictional biography, and the fragmentary novels – subverted the very rules of fiction pedagogy they inherited. Through incisive close readings of a wide array of canonical and paraliterary texts, this book reframes the classical curriculum as the engine of literary imagination in antiquity. For classicists, literary theorists, and anyone interested in ancient education, it offers a provocative reassessment of fiction's place in cultural history – and of how readers learned to believe, disbelieve, and decode narrative meaning.
Once considered a period of poverty and isolation, devoid of impressive material culture, the Iron Age is now regarded as a pivotal era. It witnessed how the ancient Greeks lost and regained literacy, created lifelike figural representations and monumental architecture, and eventually established new and complex civic polities. The Companion to the Greek Iron Age offers an up to date account of this critical epoch of Greek antiquity. Including archaeological surveys of different regions, it presents focused discussions of the Early Iron Age cultures and states with which Greek regions had contacts and which are integral for understanding cultural developments in this formative period. They include Cyprus, Syro-Anatolia, Italy, and Egypt, regions in which, as in Greece, the Early Iron Age is diverse and unevenly documented. Offering a synthesis of the key developments, The Companion to the Greek Iron Age also demonstrates how new archaeological and theoretical approaches have enlarged and clarified our understanding of this seminal period.
Aristotle's account of justice has inspired thinkers as diverse as Thomas Aquinas and Martha Nussbaum. Concepts such as distributive justice, equity, the common good, and the distinction between just and unjust political organizations find articulations in his writings. But although Aristotle's account of justice remains philosophically relevant, its intellectual, social, and political origins in the Mediterranean world of the fourth century BCE have often been overlooked. This book places Aristotle's account of justice in dialogue with his fourth-century intellectual colleagues such as Plato, Xenophon, and Isocrates, and allows it to be understood within the framework of fourth-century institutions as they were experienced by citizens of ancient Greek political communities. It thus provides the modern reader with the framework which Aristotle presupposed for his original work in antiquity, including the intellectual debates which formed its context.
Chicago's Columbian Exposition of 1893 celebrated the quadricentennial of Columbus's 'discovery” of the Americas by creating a fantastical white city composed of Roman triumphal arches and domes, Corinthian colonnades, and Egyptian obelisks. World's fairs were among the most important cultural, socio-economic, and political phenomena of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries: millions visited hoping to understand the modernity and progress of these cities and the nascent superpower of the United States. But what they found was often a representation of the past. From 1893 to 1915, ancient Greco-Roman and Egyptian architecture was deployed to create immersive environments at Chicago, Nashville, Omaha, St. Louis, and San Francisco. The seemingly endless adaptations of ancient architecture at these five fairs demonstrated that ancient architecture can symbolize and transmit the complex-and often paradoxical or contradictory-ideas that defined the United States at the turn of the twentieth century and still endure today.