Fornromersk religion och mytologi

Silly,"" ""stupid,"" ""irrational,"" ""simple."" ""Wicked,"" ""hateful,"" ""obstinate,"" ""anti-social."" ""Extravagant,"" ""perverse."" The Roman world rendered harsh judgments upon early Christianity - including branding Christianity ""new."" Novelty was no Roman religious virtue.Nevertheless, as Larry W. Hurtado shows in Destroyer of the gods, Christianity thrived despite its new and distinctive features and opposition to them. Unlike nearly all other religious groups, Christianity utterly rejected the traditional gods of the Roman world. Christianity also offered a new and different kind of religious identity, one not based on ethnicity. Christianity was distinctively a ""bookish"" religion, with the production, copying, distribution, and reading of texts as central to its faith, even preferring a distinctive book-form, the codex. Christianity insisted that its adherents behave differently: unlike the simple ritual observances characteristic of the pagan religious environment, embracing Christian faith meant a behavioral transformation, with particular and novel ethical demands for men. Unquestionably, to the Roman world, Christianity was both new and different, and, to a good many, it threatened social and religious conventions of the day.In the rejection of the gods and in the centrality of texts, early Christianity obviously reflected commitments inherited from its Jewish origins. But these particular features were no longer identified with Jewish ethnicity and early Christianity quickly became aggressively trans-ethnic - a novel kind of religious movement. Its ethical teaching, too, bore some resemblance to the philosophers of the day, yet in contrast with these great teachers and their small circles of dedicated students, early Christianity laid its hard demands upon all adherents from the moment of conversion, producing a novel social project. Christianity's novelty was no badge of honor. Called atheists and suspected of political subversion, Christians earned Roman disdain and suspicion in equal amounts. Yet, as Destroyer of the gods demonstrates, in an irony of history the very features of early Christianity that rendered it distinctive and objectionable in Roman eyes have now become so commonplace in Western culture as to go unnoticed. Christianity helped destroy one world and create another.

The mythologies of the world are collective cultural dreams, and as such should be analyzed first from cultural perspectives. How do myths of the ancient Egyptians or Greeks, for instance, reflect the realities of the Egyptian and Greek cultures? When compared, however, mythologies reveal certain universal themes or motifs that point to larger trans-cultural issues such as the place of the human species in creation or the nature of deity as a concept. World Mythology: A Very Short Introduction is organized around the universal motifs. Creation, the Flood, the Hero Quest, the Trickster/Culture Hero, the Pantheons, the High God, the Great Goddess. Veteran mythology scholar David Leeming examines examples of each motif from a variety of cultures--Greek, Egyptian, Norse, American Indian, African, Polynesian, Jewish, Christian, Hindu--treating them as reflections of the cultures that "dreamed" them. He compares and analyzes them, exposing their universal significance and creating a "world mythology."

Classical sculptures, paintings and mosaics, ancient letters, records and artworks all help show how real people lived during one of the cultural peaks of world history. Detailed cross-sections and beautiful drawings of the Colosseum, the Pantheon and other World Heritage sites reveal Roman construction techniques and architectural styles. The poems of Virgil, Horace and Ovid, and prose writers such as Cicero, Seneca and Pliny are still read today. Daily life is explored in contemporary accounts of sports and games in the arenas, work and play at the baths, the theatre, the forum, and the woman's domain of the home.The world of ancient Rome is not only discovered in its grand art and architecture but also in the lives of its citizens, from emperor to slave. Find out more about the scandalous lives of such notorious emperors as Caligula and Nero, and the controversial histories of such leading citizens as Mark Antony, the great general and famous lover, and Pliny the Elder, who died at Pompeii. Slaves were an intrinsic part of many ancient societies but some Roman slaves were educated and promoted, and some were freed and granted citizenship. An empire open to many different cults and beliefs, laws and language, art and architecture, religion and philosophy created an incredible cultural fusion. With its wealth of photographs and illustrations, cross-sections and artworks, this informative and inspiring book will be a constantly illuminating reference in any library.How the Romans lived: an exploration of art, architecture, religion and customs, laws and literature, society and family, culture and lifestyle. Mosaics, paintings and sculpture; poems, plays and prose; amphitheatres, baths and temples; the many gods and goddesses of ancient Rome: all help tell the story of how people lived, worshipped and interacted during one of the cultural peaks of world history. Detailed cross-sections and drawings of the Colosseum, the Pantheon and other beautiful World Heritage buildings reveal Roman construction techniques and architectural styles. Find out about everyday lives and routines in the home for families, women, children and slaves as well as the sometimes shocking lives of notorious emperors as Caligula and Nero and the controversial histories of leading citizens, including Mark Antony and Ovid. An authoritative and accessible text is augmented with 450 photographs, illustrations, maps and diagrams.

Perhaps the single most revolutionary aspect of the Renaissance was the re-emergence of the gods and goddesses of antiquity. In the midst of Christian Europe, artists began to decorate luxury goods with scandalous stories from classical mythology, and rulers to identify themselves with the deities of ancient religion. The resulting fusion of erotic fantasy and political power changed the course of Western art and produced many of its most magical and subversive works.The first book ever to survey this extraordinary phenomenon in its entirety, The Mirror of the Gods takes the story from the Renaissance to the Baroque. Each chapter focuses on a particular god (Diana, Apollo, Hercules, Venus, Bacchus, Jupiter) and recounts the tales about that deity, not as they appear in classical literature but as they were re-created by artists such as Botticelli, Titian, Bernini and Rembrandt. And yet this is not a book simply about painting and sculpture. It is an attempt to re-imagine the entire designed world of the Renaissance, where the gods also appeared in carnival floats and in banquet displays, and entertained the public in the form of snow men and fireworks. This rich and original new portrait of the Renaissance will ensure that readers never see the period in quite the same way again.

Historians often regard the police as a modern development, and indeed, many pre-modern societies had no such institution. Most recent scholarship has claimed that Roman society relied on kinship networks or community self-regulation as a means of conflict resolution and social control. This model, according to Christopher Fuhrmann, fails to properly account for the imperial-era evidence, which argues in fact for an expansion of state-sponsored policing activities in the first three centuries of the Common Era. Drawing on a wide variety of source material--from art, archaeology, administrative documents, Egyptian papyri, laws, Jewish and Christian religious texts, and ancient narratives--Policing the Roman Empire provides a comprehensive overview of Roman imperial policing practices with chapters devoted to fugitive slave hunting, the pivotal role of Augustus, the expansion of policing under his successors, and communities lacking soldier-police that were forced to rely on self-help or civilian police. Rather than merely cataloguing references to police, this study sets policing in the broader context of Roman attitudes towards power, public order, and administration. Fuhrmann argues that a broad range of groups understood the potential value of police, from the emperors to the peasantry. Years of different police initiatives coalesced into an uneven patchwork of police institutions that were not always coordinated, effective, or upright. But the end result was a new means by which the Roman state--more ambitious than often supposed--could seek to control the lives of its subjects, as in the imperial persecutions of Christians.The first synoptic analysis of Roman policing in over a hundred years, and the first ever in English, Policing the Roman Empire will be of great interest to scholars and students of classics, history, law, and religion.

Rome's Capitoline Hill was the smallest of the Seven Hills of Rome. Yet in the long history of the Roman state it was the empire's holy mountain. The hill was the setting of many of Rome's most beloved stories, involving Aeneas, Romulus, Tarpeia, and Manlius. It also held significant monuments, including the Temple of Jupiter Optimus Maximus, a location that marked the spot where Jupiter made the hill his earthly home in the age before humanity. This is the first book that follows the history of the Capitoline Hill into late antiquity and the early middle ages, asking what happened to a holy mountain as the empire that deemed it thus became a Christian republic. This is not a history of the hill's tonnage of marble and gold bedecked monuments, but rather an investigation into how the hill was used, imagined, and known from the third to the seventh centuries CE. During this time, the imperial triumph and other processions to the top of the hill were no longer enacted. But the hill persisted as a densely populated urban zone and continued to supply a bridge to fragmented memories of an increasingly remote past through its toponyms. This book is also about a series of Christian engagements with the Capitoline Hill's different registers of memory, the transmission and dissection of anecdotes, and the invention of alternate understandings of the hill's role in Roman history. What lingered long after the state's disintegration in the fifth century were the hill's associations with the raw power of Rome's empire.

The Material Dynamics of Festivals in the Graeco-Roman East explores the various ways in which the experience of civic festivals in the Graeco-Roman East was created and framed by material culture. By the second and third centuries AD, Greek festivals were thriving across the eastern Mediterranean. Much of our knowledge of these festivals, and their associated processions, rituals, banquets, and competitions, comes from material culture-- inscriptions, coins, architecture, and art-works. Yet each of these pieces of material evidence was the result of a conscious act, of what to record, and where and how to record it, with varying patterns discernible across different areas, and in different media. This volume draws attention to the choices made in a variety of different forms of material culture relating to Greek festivals from the Hellenistic to Roman periods, and unpicks the ways in which they encode or forge particular social relationships and power structures, as well as creating senses of community or communication between different groups. These helped to fix ephemeral events into public memory, to present particular views of their significance for the wider community, and to frame the experience of their participants.

The Material Dynamics of Festivals in the Graeco-Roman East explores the various ways in which the experience of civic festivals in the Graeco-Roman East was created and framed by material culture. By the second and third centuries AD, Greek festivals were thriving across the eastern Mediterranean. Much of our knowledge of these festivals, and their associated processions, rituals, banquets, and competitions, comes from material culture-- inscriptions, coins, architecture, and art-works. Yet each of these pieces of material evidence was the result of a conscious act, of what to record, and where and how to record it, with varying patterns discernible across different areas, and in different media. This volume draws attention to the choices made in a variety of different forms of material culture relating to Greek festivals from the Hellenistic to Roman periods, and unpicks the ways in which they encode or forge particular social relationships and power structures, as well as creating senses of community or communication between different groups. These helped to fix ephemeral events into public memory, to present particular views of their significance for the wider community, and to frame the experience of their participants.

This is the first book-length study of the reception of Valerius Flaccus'' Argonautica in the epic poems of Silius Italicus (Punica), Statius (Thebaid, Achilleid), and Claudian (De Raptu Proserpinae). It sheds new light on the importance of Valerius'' poem and enhances our understanding of the intertextual richness of imperial Latin epic. The readings offered in this book provide new evidence to support the view that Valerius'' Argonautica predates the Punica and Thebaid, thus helping to clarify the literary history of the Flavian period (69-96 CE). Stover shows how Silius, Statius, and Claudian use programmatic allusion to the Argonautica to present themselves as Valerius'' epic successors. Silius, Statius, and Claudian rework Valerian material to achieve various effects; analysis of these effects is organized by the primary function of allusive interactions, such as ''reversal'', ''enrichment'', and ''contrast''.This study is essential for scholars of Latin epic poetry. Yet the Greek and Latin of its close readings are translated, making it accessible to all readers interested in intertextuality, comparative literature, and other related topics.

This is the first book-length study of the reception of Valerius Flaccus'' Argonautica in the epic poems of Silius Italicus (Punica), Statius (Thebaid, Achilleid), and Claudian (De Raptu Proserpinae). It sheds new light on the importance of Valerius'' poem and enhances our understanding of the intertextual richness of imperial Latin epic. The readings offered in this book provide new evidence to support the view that Valerius'' Argonautica predates the Punica and Thebaid, thus helping to clarify the literary history of the Flavian period (69-96 CE). Stover shows how Silius, Statius, and Claudian use programmatic allusion to the Argonautica to present themselves as Valerius'' epic successors. Silius, Statius, and Claudian rework Valerian material to achieve various effects; analysis of these effects is organized by the primary function of allusive interactions, such as ''reversal'', ''enrichment'', and ''contrast''.This study is essential for scholars of Latin epic poetry. Yet the Greek and Latin of its close readings are translated, making it accessible to all readers interested in intertextuality, comparative literature, and other related topics.

The Material Dynamics of Festivals in the Graeco-Roman East explores the various ways in which the experience of civic festivals in the Graeco-Roman East was created and framed by material culture. By the second and third centuries AD, Greek festivals were thriving across the eastern Mediterranean. Much of our knowledge of these festivals, and their associated processions, rituals, banquets, and competitions, comes from material culture-- inscriptions, coins, architecture, and art-works. Yet each of these pieces of material evidence was the result of a conscious act, of what to record, and where and how to record it, with varying patterns discernible across different areas, and in different media. This volume draws attention to the choices made in a variety of different forms of material culture relating to Greek festivals from the Hellenistic to Roman periods, and unpicks the ways in which they encode or forge particular social relationships and power structures, as well as creating senses of community or communication between different groups. These helped to fix ephemeral events into public memory, to present particular views of their significance for the wider community, and to frame the experience of their participants.

During the Roman Republic, any unnatural event occurring in nature--from a talking cow to a hermaphrodite to an earthquake--was deemed a prodigium. A prodigy signaled awareness of a rupture of order not only in nature but in politics and morality. As a result of its cosmic significance, any potential prodigy demanded authentication. Unsurprisingly, prodigies proliferate during political crises, such as the violent times of 56 BCE. What perhaps does occasion surprise is that in the process of expiating a prodigy, the Roman senate monitors each individual step. And yet, despite the hundreds of allusions to prodigies in ancient texts, only one source provides insight into the senatorial process of analysis, assessment, and resolution. That text is Cicero's speech before the senate, De haruspicum responsis ('On the Responses of the Haruspices').On this occasion the senators summon for assistance a group of Etruscan priests (haruspices). Herein lies an apparent paradox: the senate entrusts an elemental decision about divine attitudes to a group of foreign priests from the obscure culture of a long-conquered people. The haruspices duly produce from their books of Etruscan lore a cryptic response. This response--the only version of such a response surviving--became the subject of a speech delivered by Cicero's archnemesis Clodius, detailing how Cicero's return from exile prompted this disruption of the natural world. The next day, Cicero argues in De haruspicum responsis the opposite: in the presence of Clodius, he engages in a character assassination that corresponds with a close line-by-line reading of the response. Cicero teaches the senate how to read Clodius's guilt in the reaction of the natural world.In addition to explicating rhetorical and syntactic features, this commentary details the interplay of Etruscan and Roman religious traditions. During a period of gang violence, arson, and murder, the haruspical response achieves what Cicero, Clodius, and the Roman senate could not have effected unaided: introduce into senatorial deliberations a seemingly objective assessment of divine intention. Through rational political debate, a peaceful natural world is restored, one that rests upon the logical analysis and rhetorical prowess of a Cicero.

This is the first book-length study of the reception of Valerius Flaccus' Argonautica in the epic poems of Silius Italicus (Punica), Statius (Thebaid, Achilleid), and Claudian (De Raptu Proserpinae). It sheds new light on the importance of Valerius' poem and enhances our understanding of the intertextual richness of imperial Latin epic. The readings offered in this book provide new evidence to support the view that Valerius' Argonautica predates the Punica and Thebaid, thus helping to clarify the literary history of the Flavian period (69-96 CE). Stover shows how Silius, Statius, and Claudian use programmatic allusion to the Argonautica to present themselves as Valerius' epic successors. Silius, Statius, and Claudian rework Valerian material to achieve various effects; analysis of these effects is organized by the primary function of allusive interactions, such as 'reversal', 'enrichment', and 'contrast'.This study is essential for scholars of Latin epic poetry. Yet the Greek and Latin of its close readings are translated, making it accessible to all readers interested in intertextuality, comparative literature, and other related topics.

Perpetua was an early Christian martyr who died in Roman Carthage in 203 CE, along with several fellow martyrs, including one other woman, Felicitas. She has attracted great interest for two main reasons: she was one of the earliest martyrs, especially female martyrs, about whom we have any knowledge, and she left a narrative written in prison just before she went to her death in the amphitheater. Her narrative is embedded in a tripartite telling of the arrest and deaths of these martyrs, the Passio Sanctarum Perpetuae et Felicitatis. The other two parts of her tale were written by Saturus, a fellow martyr and probably her teacher, and a nameless editor or confessor, who introduces her circumstances and group and then tells of her death after she stops writing. Her story is steeped in mystery, and every aspect of her life and death has generated much controversy. Some do not believe that she herself could have written the narrative: the circumstances of her imprisonment and the limitations of her ability to write such a rhetorically complex tale are inconceivable. Some believe that her editor was none other then Tertullian, the famous 2nd-3rd century church father and Perpetua's fellow north African. Some, including Augustine, wonder why the feast day was named only for Perpetua and Felicitas and not for her fellow male martyrs. Some believe that these martyr tales were largely fabricated or constructed in order to generate publicity for the early Christians. This book will investigate and try to make sense of all aspects of Perpetua's life, death, and circumstances: her family and life in Carthage, Christians and Romans in Carthage and in the Roman empire in this period, the comparisons of martyrs to athletes, the influence of these martyr tales upon the Acts of the Apostles and the Greek novel, the reactions of later church fathers like Augustine to her story and her popularity, and the gendering of this text.

Rome's Capitoline Hill was the smallest of the Seven Hills of Rome. Yet in the long history of the Roman state it was the empire's holy mountain. The hill was the setting of many of Rome's most beloved stories, involving Aeneas, Romulus, Tarpeia, and Manlius. It also held significant monuments, including the Temple of Jupiter Optimus Maximus, a location that marked the spot where Jupiter made the hill his earthly home in the age before humanity. This is the first book that follows the history of the Capitoline Hill into late antiquity and the early middle ages, asking what happened to a holy mountain as the empire that deemed it thus became a Christian republic. This is not a history of the hill's tonnage of marble and gold bedecked monuments, but rather an investigation into how the hill was used, imagined, and known from the third to the seventh centuries CE. During this time, the imperial triumph and other processions to the top of the hill were no longer enacted. But the hill persisted as a densely populated urban zone and continued to supply a bridge to fragmented memories of an increasingly remote past through its toponyms. This book is also about a series of Christian engagements with the Capitoline Hill's different registers of memory, the transmission and dissection of anecdotes, and the invention of alternate understandings of the hill's role in Roman history. What lingered long after the state's disintegration in the fifth century were the hill's associations with the raw power of Rome's empire.

Building on the best-selling tradition of previous editions, Classical Mythology, Twelfth Edition, is the most comprehensive survey of classical mythology available--and the first full-color textbook of its kind. Featuring the authors' clear and extensive translations of original sources, it brings to life the myths and legends of Greece and Rome in a lucid and engaging style. The text contains a wide variety of faithfully translated passages from Greek and Latin sources, including Homer, Hesiod, all the Homeric Hymns, Pindar, Aeschylus, Sophocles, Euripides, Herodotus, Plato, Lucian, Lucretius, Vergil, Ovid, and Seneca.The acclaimed author team incorporates a dynamic combination of poetic narratives and enlightening commentary to make the myths come alive for students. Offering historical and cultural background, they also examine the enduring survival of classical mythology and its influence in the fields of art, literature, music, dance, and film.

Building on the best-selling tradition of previous editions, Classical Mythology, Twelfth Edition, is the most comprehensive survey of classical mythology available--and the first full-color textbook of its kind. Featuring the authors'' clear and extensive translations of original sources, it brings to life the myths and legends of Greece and Rome in a lucid and engaging style. The text contains a wide variety of faithfully translated passages from Greek and Latin sources, including Homer, Hesiod, all the Homeric Hymns, Pindar, Aeschylus, Sophocles, Euripides, Herodotus, Plato, Lucian, Lucretius, Vergil, Ovid, and Seneca.The acclaimed author team incorporates a dynamic combination of poetic narratives and enlightening commentary to make the myths come alive for students. Offering historical and cultural background, they also examine the enduring survival of classical mythology and its influence in the fields of art, literature, music, dance, and film.

This is a survey of the religious attitudes reflected in Latin literature from the late Republic to the time of Constantine. Its main theme is the development of the Roman public religion in that period. Within this theme the most pervasive issue is the relationship between Roman religion and morality. Though the link between the two is shown to be closer than is often supposed, it was also the case that the rise of such systems as Stoicism and Christianity contributed to a sense of morality more detached from traditional conceptions of the collective well-being of the Roman state. Nevertheless, the old religion continued to flourish and to contribute in numerous ways to the working of Roman society until it was fatally weakened by the political and social crisis of the third century. This crisis, and the tendency of the Roman Empire to depend upon and encourage new sources of support, prepared the way for the emergence of Christianity, first as the religion of the Emperor, and then, after a period in which Christians and pagans were able to co-operate by emphasizing their common beliefs, as the official religion of the Empire.

A recurring and significant theme in ancient Greek literature is that of returns and returning, chiefly - but by no means only - of mythical Greek heroes from Troy. One main, and certainly the most 'marked', ancient Greek word for 'return' is nostos (plural nostoi), from which is derived the English 'nostalgia'. Nostos-related traditions were important ingredients of colonial foundation myths and the theme runs through both ancient Greek prose and poetry from Homer's Odyssey to Lykophron's Alexandra, also leaving traces in the historical record through the archaeological and epigraphical commemoration of nostoi, which played a central part in defining Greek ethnicity and crystallizing personal and communal identities. This volume offers a truly interdisciplinary exploration of the concept of nostos in ancient Greek culture, which draws on its contributors' expertise in ancient Greek (and Roman) history, literature, archaeology, and religion. The chapters examine both literary and material evidence in order to achieve a better understanding of the nature of Greek settlement in the Mediterranean zone, and of sometimes equivocal Greek and Roman perceptions of home, displacement, and returning. The special problems and vocabulary of exile are explored in the long Introduction, which offers an incisive yet accessible overview of the volume's key themes and sets its range of contributions clearly in context: while two chapters are concerned in different ways with emotions and personal identity, making use of the theoretical tool of place-attachment, another demonstrates that failed nostoi can be more interesting than successful examples. Evidential absence can be as important and illuminating as presence, and mythical women, underrepresented in this regard, feature extensively in several chapters, which open up a range of new perspectives on nostos.

Roman Republican Augury: Freedom and Control proposes a new way of understanding augury, a form of Roman state divination designed to consult the god Jupiter. Previous scholarly studies of augury have tended to focus either upon its legal-constitutional effects or upon its role in maintaining and perpetuating Roman social and political structures. This volume makes a new contribution to the study of Roman religion, politics, and cultural history by focusing instead upon what augury can tell us about how Romans understood their relationship with their gods. Augury is often thought to have told Romans what they wanted to hear. This volume argues that augury left space for perceived expressions of divine will which contradicted human wishes, and that its rules and precepts did not permit human beings to create or ignore signs at will. This analysis allows the Jupiter whom Romans approached in augury to emerge as not simply a source of power to be channelled to human ends, but a person with his own interests and desires, which did not always overlap with those of his human enquirers. When human will and divine will clashed, it was the will of Jupiter which was supposed to prevail. In theory as in practice, it was the Romans, not their supreme god, who were bound by the auguries and auspices.

Style and Assemblage in Roman Archaeology proposes a rethinking of the way in which objects, styles, concepts, and people relate in archaeological interpretation, using Egyptian and Egyptian-styled objects from the houses of Roman Pompeii as a case study. Integrating anthropological theories, Mol has developed a critical new method termed relational perception to show how we can better incorporate the messy and intuitive processes of style perception and classification in the Roman past, as well as more generally in archaeological research.The houses of Pompeii yielded many objects that scholars nowadays would label as Egyptian or Egyptianized. They consist of imported and locally produced objects such as figurines, sculptures, furniture, jewellery, mosaics, or wall paintings. The interpretations regarding their presence and meaning have traditionally mostly been drawn without proper contextual analysis or theoretical underpinnings, and even more problematic: the collection and interpretation of artefacts were based on modern scholarly perceptions of what Egypt entails. Mol shows how this particular Western (and colonial) perception and art historical categorization has influenced our idea of Egypt in the Roman world, and how it still affects the interpretation of foreign objects in general. This book examines in detail how 'foreign' objects and styles were integrated in, and shaped, the Roman world and senses of personhood, and serves as an excellent example to illustrate the complexity that should be integral to the processes of archaeological classification and interpretation.

This book reconstructs the values, expectations and representations of priests and priesthoods in ancient Rome from the republic to the early empire. Challenging preconceived assumptions that Rome's priests were important primarily because of their political currency, Roman Priests from Republic to Empire proposes a more nuanced reading of our ancient evidence for these significant men and women. Considering priests from Rome's mythical and legendary past through to the early second century CE, this study demonstrates that the social and moral worth of priests was fundamental to Roman thinking in the late republic and into the early empire. It reasserts the importance of the category of priesthood in ancient Rome, above and beyond other civic or magisterial roles for Romans (for example, those of magistrate or senator), and proves that priests were expected to be of greater moral and social worth than others. Alex A. Antoniou reveals first that there was a Roman vocabulary of virtues which had a particular resonance for Roman priests, which described both the qualities that priests were expected to maintain and the modus operandi of priests within Roman society. Second, this study demonstrates that priests and priesthoods were fundamental to the ways in which Romans both conceptualised Rome's legendary and historical past, and negotiated the challenges and successes of their current circumstances. Ultimately, this study proves that perceptions of the moral worth and virtue of Rome's priests were embedded in Roman socio-ethical discourse.

This book reconstructs the values, expectations and representations of priests and priesthoods in ancient Rome from the republic to the early empire. Challenging preconceived assumptions that Rome's priests were important primarily because of their political currency, Roman Priests from Republic to Empire proposes a more nuanced reading of our ancient evidence for these significant men and women. Considering priests from Rome's mythical and legendary past through to the early second century CE, this study demonstrates that the social and moral worth of priests was fundamental to Roman thinking in the late republic and into the early empire. It reasserts the importance of the category of priesthood in ancient Rome, above and beyond other civic or magisterial roles for Romans (for example, those of magistrate or senator), and proves that priests were expected to be of greater moral and social worth than others. Alex A. Antoniou reveals first that there was a Roman vocabulary of virtues which had a particular resonance for Roman priests, which described both the qualities that priests were expected to maintain and the modus operandi of priests within Roman society. Second, this study demonstrates that priests and priesthoods were fundamental to the ways in which Romans both conceptualised Rome's legendary and historical past, and negotiated the challenges and successes of their current circumstances. Ultimately, this study proves that perceptions of the moral worth and virtue of Rome's priests were embedded in Roman socio-ethical discourse.

This book reconstructs the values, expectations and representations of priests and priesthoods in ancient Rome from the republic to the early empire. Challenging preconceived assumptions that Rome's priests were important primarily because of their political currency, Roman Priests from Republic to Empire proposes a more nuanced reading of our ancient evidence for these significant men and women. Considering priests from Rome's mythical and legendary past through to the early second century CE, this study demonstrates that the social and moral worth of priests was fundamental to Roman thinking in the late republic and into the early empire. It reasserts the importance of the category of priesthood in ancient Rome, above and beyond other civic or magisterial roles for Romans (for example, those of magistrate or senator), and proves that priests were expected to be of greater moral and social worth than others. Alex A. Antoniou reveals first that there was a Roman vocabulary of virtues which had a particular resonance for Roman priests, which described both the qualities that priests were expected to maintain and the modus operandi of priests within Roman society. Second, this study demonstrates that priests and priesthoods were fundamental to the ways in which Romans both conceptualised Rome's legendary and historical past, and negotiated the challenges and successes of their current circumstances. Ultimately, this study proves that perceptions of the moral worth and virtue of Rome's priests were embedded in Roman socio-ethical discourse.

Historians often regard the police as a modern development, and indeed, many pre-modern societies had no such institution. Most recent scholarship has claimed that Roman society relied on kinship networks or community self-regulation as a means of conflict resolution and social control. This model, according to Christopher Fuhrmann, fails to properly account for the imperial-era evidence, which argues in fact for an expansion of state-sponsored policing activities in the first three centuries of the Common Era. Drawing on a wide variety of source material--from art, archaeology, administrative documents, Egyptian papyri, laws, Jewish and Christian religious texts, and ancient narratives--Policing the Roman Empire provides a comprehensive overview of Roman imperial policing practices with chapters devoted to fugitive slave hunting, the pivotal role of Augustus, the expansion of policing under his successors, and communities lacking soldier-police that were forced to rely on self-help or civilian police. Rather than merely cataloguing references to police, this study sets policing in the broader context of Roman attitudes towards power, public order, and administration. Fuhrmann argues that a broad range of groups understood the potential value of police, from the emperors to the peasantry. Years of different police initiatives coalesced into an uneven patchwork of police institutions that were not always coordinated, effective, or upright. But the end result was a new means by which the Roman state--more ambitious than often supposed--could seek to control the lives of its subjects, as in the imperial persecutions of Christians.The first synoptic analysis of Roman policing in over a hundred years, and the first ever in English, Policing the Roman Empire will be of great interest to scholars and students of classics, history, law, and religion.

Sanctuaries were at the heart of Greek religious, social, political, and cultural life, however, we have a limited understanding of how sanctuary spaces, politics, and rituals intersected in the Greek cities of the Hellenistic and Republican periods. This edited collection focuses on the archaeological material of this era and how it can elucidate the complex relationship between the various forces operating on, and changing the physical space of, sanctuaries. Material such as archaeological remains, sculptures, and inscriptions provides us with concrete evidence of how sanctuaries functioned as locations of memory in a social environment dominated by the written word, and gives us insight into political choices and decisions. It also reveals changes unrecorded in surviving local or political histories. Each case study explored by this volume's contributors employs archaeology as the primary means of investigation: from art-historical approaches, to surveys and fieldwork, to re-evaluation of archival material. Hellenistic Sanctuaries represents a significant contribution to the existing bibliography on ancient Greek religion, history, and archaeology, and provides new ways of thinking about politics, rituals, and sanctuary spaces in Greece.

Tombs and burial customs are an exquisite source for social history, as their commemorative character inevitably expresses much of the contemporaneous ideology of a society. This book presents, for the first time, a holistic view of the funerary culture of Rome and its surroundings during the third century AD. While the third century is often largely ignored in social history, it was a transitional period, an era of major challenges - political, economic, and social - which inspired creativity and innovation, and paved the way for the new system of late antiquity.Barbara Borg argues that during this time there was, in many ways, a return to practices known from the Late Republic and early imperial period, with spectacular monuments for the rich, and a large-scale reappearance of collective burial spaces. Through a study of terraced tombs, élite monuments, the catacomb nuclei, sarcophagi, and painted image decoration, this volume explores how the third century was an exciting period of experimentation and creativity, a time when non-Christians and Christians shared fundamental ideas, needs, and desires as well as cemeteries, tombs, and hypogea. Ambition continued to be a driving force and a determining factor in all social classes, who found innovative solutions to the challenges they encountered.

Historians often regard the police as a modern development, and indeed, many pre-modern societies had no such institution. Most recent scholarship has claimed that Roman society relied on kinship networks or community self-regulation as a means of conflict resolution and social control. This model, according to Christopher Fuhrmann, fails to properly account for the imperial-era evidence, which argues in fact for an expansion of state-sponsored policing activities in the first three centuries of the Common Era. Drawing on a wide variety of source material-from art, archaeology, administrative documents, Egyptian papyri, laws, Jewish and Christian religious texts, and ancient narratives-Policing the Roman Empire provides a comprehensive overview of Roman imperial policing practices with chapters devoted to fugitive slave hunting, the pivotal role of Augustus, the expansion of policing under his successors, and communities lacking soldier-police that were forced to rely on self-help or civilian police. Rather than merely cataloguing references to police, this study sets policing in the broader context of Roman attitudes towards power, public order, and administration. Fuhrmann argues that a broad range of groups understood the potential value of police, from the emperors to the peasantry. Years of different police initiatives coalesced into an uneven patchwork of police institutions that were not always coordinated, effective, or upright. But the end result was a new means by which the Roman state-more ambitious than often supposed-could seek to control the lives of its subjects, as in the imperial persecutions of Christians.The first synoptic analysis of Roman policing in over a hundred years, and the first ever in English, Policing the Roman Empire will be of great interest to scholars and students of classics, history, law, and religion.