Ramsay MacMullen – författare

"A vibrant account that puts flesh on the bare bones of early Roman history." ---Celia Schultz, University of Michigan   The ancient Romans'' story down to 264 B.C. can be made credible by stripping away their later myths and inventions to show how their national character shaped their destiny.

After many generations of scholarly study, consensus is clear: the account in writers like Livy is not to be trusted because their aims were different from ours in history-writing. They wanted their work to be both improving and diverting. It should grow out of the real past, yes, but if that reality couldn''t be recovered, or was uncertain, their art did not forbid invention. It more than tolerated dramatic incidents, passions, heroes, heroines, and villains. If, however, all this resulting ancient fiction and adornment are pruned away, a national character can be seen in the remaining bits and pieces of credible information, to explain the familiar story at least in its outlines.

To doubt the written sources has long been acceptable, but this or that detail or narrative section must always be left for salvage by special pleading. To press home the logic of doubt is new. To reach beyond the written sources for a better support in excavated evidence is no novelty; but it is a novelty, to find in archeology the principal substance of the narrative---which is the choice in this book. To use this in turn for the discovery of an ethnic personality, a Roman national character, is key and also novel.

What is repeatedly illustrated and emphasized here is the distance traveled by the art or craft of understanding the past---"history" in that sense---over the course of the last couple of centuries. The art cannot be learned, because it cannot be found, through studying Livy and Company. Readers who care about either of the two disciplines contrasted, Classics and History, may find this argument of interest.

"Like Thucydides of the hyperactive Athenians and de Tocqueville of the nation-building Americans, MacMullen here draws a character sketch of the early Romans---the men who built Rome, conquered Italy, and created an empire. Based on profound familiarity with history, evidence, and their better-known descendants, attention to what they did and failed to do, remarkable insight, empathy, constructive imagination, and not without humor, he reconstructs the homo Romanus and thus helps us imagine what he was like, and understand why he achieved what he did. This little book is informative, full of important ideas, and delightful to read." ---Kurt Raaflaub, Brown University

Jacket image: Marcus Fabius and Quintus Tannius. Fresco. Musei Capitolini, Rome, Italy. Courtesy of Scala / Art Resource, NY..

Written by one of the foremost historians of the Roman Empire, this collection of both new and previously published essays forms a colorful picture of daily life in the Mediterranean world between A.D. 50 and 450. Here, for example, the author applies statistical analysis to broad groups of people on matters ranging from justice through medicine to language. In so doing he is able to substantiate general statements about routines in ordinary people''s behavior and to detect within these routines the very changes that constitute history. Such analysis also shows how this era benefits from the same historiographical approaches that have so successfully elucidated sociocultural phenomena in other periods.Drawing from statistical analysis and many other historical approaches, these essays on popular mores in the Roman Empire cover such topics as language and art, acculturation, thought and religion, sex and gender, cruelty and slavery, and aspects of class and power relations. The author introduces the collection with several essays on historical method, as it pertains to the richness of documentation and variety to be found in the region and period chosen.Ramsay MacMullen is Dunham Professor of History and Classics at Yale University. The most recent of his many books include Corruption and the Decline of Rome and Christianizing the Roman Empire: A.D. 100-400, both published by Yale.Originally published in 1990.The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.

This study, first published in 1969, presents an astute and authoritative depiction of the cultural, religious and secular developments which shook the Roman world in the late 3rd and early 4th centuries AD, much of it under the auspices of the Emperor, Constantine the Great.

Constantine was at the heart of the transition from pagan antiquity to Christendom. Rejecting the collegiate imperial system of his recent predecessors, he reunited the two halves of the Empire; established Christianity as its formal religion; and shifted the capital of the Roman world definitively to the city which would survive the collapse of the West and persevere for another thousand years, Constantinople.

The general reader will enjoy Constantine as a lucidly composed and accessible synthesis of ancient sources and modern contributions to the study of this towering figure.

This study, first published in 1969, presents an astute and authoritative depiction of the cultural, religious and secular developments which shook the Roman world in the late 3rd and early 4th centuries AD, much of it under the auspices of the Emperor, Constantine the Great.

Constantine was at the heart of the transition from pagan antiquity to Christendom. Rejecting the collegiate imperial system of his recent predecessors, he reunited the two halves of the Empire; established Christianity as its formal religion; and shifted the capital of the Roman world definitively to the city which would survive the collapse of the West and persevere for another thousand years, Constantinople.

The general reader will enjoy Constantine as a lucidly composed and accessible synthesis of ancient sources and modern contributions to the study of this towering figure.