Julia Hoffmann-Salz – författare

The year of the four emperors in AD 193 shows the cosmopolitan interconnectedness of the Roman Empire, yet scholarship has long framed the Severan dynasty in a narrative of descent stressing their North African and in particular their Syrian origins. The contributions of this volume question this conventional approach and instead examine more closely actual Severan policy in the Near East to detect potential local connections that determined this policy as well as how local communities and elites reacted to it. The volume thus explores new beginnings and old connections in the Roman Near East.

The ancient world was a world where blood flowed freely – from often large-scale public animal sacrifices, to violence in the arena, to menstruation in cramped living conditions and many other occasions. But despite this ubiquity of blood in everyday lives, sources for the Greek and Roman world only mention blood in specific circumstances and with specific meanings. With our contributions on blood in medicine, popular culture, religion, historiography, family and community identity as well as conflict and othering narratives the volume for the first time offers a comprehensive insight into the many contexts in which blood was a topic in Greek and Roman discourse. The contributions by renowned international experts show that blood was considered to be a substance charged with meaning where attitudes towards blood from different contexts interacted to give it a particular power for the ancient world.

The year of the four emperors in AD 193 shows the cosmopolitan interconnectedness of the Roman Empire, yet scholarship has long framed the Severan dynasty in a narrative of descent stressing their North African and in particular their Syrian origins. The contributions of this volume question this conventional approach and instead examine more closely actual Severan policy in the Near East to detect potential local connections that determined this policy as well as how local communities and elites reacted to it. The volume thus explores new beginnings and old connections in the Roman Near East.