Robert C. Knapp – författare

Robert Knapp seeks out the ordinary people who formed the fabric of everyday life in ancient Rome and the outlaws and pirates who lay beyond it. They are the housewives, prostitutes, freedmen, slaves, soldiers, and gladiators who lived commonplace lives and left almost no trace in history - until now. But their words are preserved in literature, letters, inscriptions and graffiti and their traces can be found in the histories, treatises, plays and poetry created by the elite. A world lost from view for two millennia is recreated through these, and other, tell-tale bits of evidence cast off by the visible mass of Roman history and culture. Invisible Romans reveals how everyday Romans sought to survive and thrive under the afflictions of disease, war, and violence, and to control their fates under powers that both oppressed and ignored them. Their lives - both familiar and foreign to ours today - are shown against the tumult of a great empire that shaped their worlds as it forged the wider world around them.

Latin Inscriptions from Central Spain by Robert C. Knapp brings together, translates, and analyzes an extensive body of epigraphic material that illuminates the history and society of Hispania Tarraconensis and Lusitania. Drawing on inscriptions from cities, towns, and rural areas, Knapp reconstructs the lives of communities that flourished under Roman rule. The volume includes funerary epitaphs, honorific dedications, milestones, and religious texts, each annotated and contextualized to reveal the intertwining of local traditions with the broader imperial system. By systematically cataloging this evidence, Knapp opens a window onto the daily lives, beliefs, and identities of provincial populations, while also tracing patterns of Romanization in central Spain. The work is both a reference tool and a historical narrative. It demonstrates how inscriptions preserve voices often absent from literary texts—soldiers, freedmen, women, and local elites—who together contributed to the dynamic cultural blend of the Roman provinces. Combining philological precision with historical interpretation, Knapp highlights the inscriptions’ linguistic features, their legal and social dimensions, and their role as public expressions of status and community. This volume thus serves as an essential resource for classicists, historians, archaeologists, and epigraphers, while also underscoring the vitality of epigraphy in reconstructing the complexity of life in the Roman West.

Since 1974 the University of California at Berkeley has been sponsoring extensive excavations at the Panhellenic athletic festival center of ancient Nemea in the modern Greek province of Korinthia. With its well-documented excavation and clear historical context, the site offers an excellent opportunity for investigation and analysis. This volume, the third in a series of publications on Nemea, is a detailed presentation of the more than three thousand legible coins from all over the ancient world that have been unearthed there. The coins, which are mostly bronze but show an unusually high proportion of silver, reflect the periods of greatest activity at the site—the late Archaic and Early Classical, the Early Hellenistic, the Early Christian, and the Byzantine. More than a compendium of data, the study breaks new ground with its analysis and contextualization of numismatic evidence in an archaeological setting.

Exploring the origins of Christianity, this book looks at why it was that people first in Judea and then in the Roman and Greek Mediterranean world became susceptible to the new religion. Robert Knapp looks for answers in a wide-ranging exploration of religion and everyday life from 200 BC to the end of the first century.Survival, honour and wellbeing were the chief preoccupations of Jews and polytheists alike. In both cases, the author shows, people turned first to supernatural powers. According to need, season and place polytheists consulted and placated vast constellations of gods, while the Jews worshipped and contended with one almighty and jealous deity.Professor Knapp considers why any Jew or polytheist would voluntarily dispense with a well-tried way of dealing with the supernatural and trade it in for a new model. What was it about the new religion that led people to change beliefs they had held for millennia and which in turn, within four centuries of the birth of its messiah, led it to transform the western world? His conclusions are as convincing as they are sometimes surprising.

Exploring the origins of Christianity, this book looks at why it was that people first in Judea and then in the Roman and Greek Mediterranean world became susceptible to the new religion. Robert Knapp looks for answers in a wide-ranging exploration of religion and everyday life from 200 BC to the end of the first century.Survival, honour and wellbeing were the chief preoccupations of Jews and polytheists alike. In both cases, the author shows, people turned first to supernatural powers. According to need, season and place polytheists consulted and placated vast constellations of gods, while the Jews worshipped and contended with one almighty and jealous deity.Professor Knapp considers why any Jew or polytheist would voluntarily dispense with a well-tried way of dealing with the supernatural and trade it in for a new model. What was it about the new religion that led people to change beliefs they had held for millennia and which in turn, within four centuries of the birth of its messiah, led it to transform the western world? His conclusions are as convincing as they are sometimes surprising.