Thomas J. Nelson – författare

This interdisciplinary volume provides the first comprehensive study of Rome's relationship with the kingdom and city of Pergamon. It surveys the rich and diverse interactions between these two cities from the late third century BCE to the fourth century CE, ranging across multiple cultural spheres (including art and architecture, history and politics, literature and poetry, philosophy and thought, scholarship and rhetoric). The book reassesses the nature, scope, and extent of Pergamon and Rome's so-called 'special relationship', shedding light on much-discussed problems, offering new evidence for their cultural interactions, and questioning long-established assumptions. One recurrent theme concerns the limitations of our knowledge: extant evidence is limited and often skewed by later Roman sources, and it is frequently very difficult to identify and define cultural features that are distinctively 'Pergamene'. Nevertheless, there was certainly an important relationship between these two cities, which this volume seeks to map out with greater nuance, precision, and breadth, setting it within a wider interconnected Hellenistic context. As a whole, the volume reflects on the scholarly reception of Pergamon, uncovering how and when a certain view of a cohesive 'Pergamene culture' took shape among modern scholarship and what factors, prejudices, and assumptions undergirded its creation. It also challenges and rethinks the frameworks that shape our view of cultural activity in the Hellenistic world, emphasizing the porousness of cultural movements across political boundaries. This book will be of interest not only to scholars of Roman culture, but also to those interested in the impact of Hellenistic culture on Rome more generally and to scholars engaged with theories and models of cultural influence.

Challenging many established narratives of literary history, this book investigates how the earliest known Greek poets (seventh to fifth centuries BCE) signposted their debts to their predecessors and prior traditions - placing markers in their works for audiences to recognise (much like the 'Easter eggs' of modern cinema). Within antiquity, such signposting has often been considered the preserve of later literary cultures, closely linked with the development of libraries, literacy and writing. In this wide-ranging new study, Thomas Nelson shows that these devices were already deeply ingrained in oral archaic Greek poetry, deconstructing the artificial boundary between a supposedly 'primal' archaic literature and a supposedly 'sophisticated' book culture of Hellenistic Alexandria and Rome. In three interlocking case studies, he highlights how poets from Homer to Pindar employed the language of hearsay, memory and time to index their allusive relationships, as they variously embraced, reworked and challenged their inherited tradition.