Juan Manuel Cortés Copete – författare

Since Republican times, Rome has fostered ideological constructs aimed at justifying its conquest and domination of the Mediterranean. This process gathered steam in the imperial age, as the contributions of the conquered regions gradually assimilated into the empire.Words and rituals represented the empire not as the Roman domination of conquered nations, but as a community capable of integrating the provincials. This was not merely an ideological construct: the new community was indeed a result of the integration of different peoples and their political, cultural and religious traditions.This idea of empire was present at very different levels: documents directly emanating from the emperors and all kinds of literature. Rites also contributed to shaping imperial discourse, laying firm ideological foundations for the symbolic construction of the community and disseminating the imperial discourse among its members.Words and rituals contributed to creating new mindsets that progressively supplemented the old political and social mores and customs with a new ‘narrative of empire’, and vice versa: narratives contributed to shaping the very idea of empire.

Since Republican times, Rome has fostered ideological constructs aimed at justifying its conquest and domination of the Mediterranean. This process gathered steam in the imperial age, as the contributions of the conquered regions gradually assimilated into the empire.Words and rituals represented the empire not as the Roman domination of conquered nations, but as a community capable of integrating the provincials. This was not merely an ideological construct: the new community was indeed a result of the integration of different peoples and their political, cultural and religious traditions.This idea of empire was present at very different levels: documents directly emanating from the emperors and all kinds of literature. Rites also contributed to shaping imperial discourse, laying firm ideological foundations for the symbolic construction of the community and disseminating the imperial discourse among its members.Words and rituals contributed to creating new mindsets that progressively supplemented the old political and social mores and customs with a new 'narrative of empire', and vice versa: narratives contributed to shaping the very idea of empire.

Since Republican times, Rome has fostered ideological constructs aimed at justifying its conquest and domination of the Mediterranean. This process gathered steam in the imperial age, as the contributions of the conquered regions gradually assimilated into the empire.Words and rituals represented the empire not as the Roman domination of conquered nations, but as a community capable of integrating the provincials. This was not merely an ideological construct: the new community was indeed a result of the integration of different peoples and their political, cultural and religious traditions.This idea of empire was present at very different levels: documents directly emanating from the emperors and all kinds of literature. Rites also contributed to shaping imperial discourse, laying firm ideological foundations for the symbolic construction of the community and disseminating the imperial discourse among its members.Words and rituals contributed to creating new mindsets that progressively supplemented the old political and social mores and customs with a new 'narrative of empire', and vice versa: narratives contributed to shaping the very idea of empire.

This e-book analyses the procedures, ideas and realities that allowed the people from the Greek East to become a part of the Roman Empire, while both preserving and redeveloping their cultural identity. The volume assesses this complex process both in the traditional Greek cities of the provinces of Achaea and Asia as well as in other areas that had been deeply hellenised for centuries, as the Near East. A common point of departure of the different essays is the notion that granting the Greeks a privileged position within the Roman Empire as a tribute to their civilisation was as possible an option as that of "e;barbarisation"e;, i.e. the substitution of Greek cultural identity by the Roman one. Between the respect and conservation of political and cultural structures, and their total annihilation and substitution by new realities of undeniable Roman stamp, there existed a wide spectrum of political possibilities with strong cultural and religious undertones. In creating those new options, which Rome either opted for, refused, or transformed, the political and cultural activity of the Greeks themselves, and in particular the oligarchs who ruled the cities in the Mediterranean East, played an important role. This volume attempts to analyse all those new possibilities.