Columbia Studies in the Classical Tradition – serie

As one of the greatest cities of antiquity, Alexandria has always been a severe challenge to its historians, all the more so because the surviving evidence, material and textual, is so disparate. New archaeological and literary discoveries and the startling diversity of ancient Alexandria (so reminiscent of some modern cities) add to the interest. The present volume contains the papers given at a conference at Columbia University in 2002 which attempted to lay some of the foundations for a new history of Alexandria by considering, in particular, its position between the traditions and life of Egypt on the one hand, and on the other the immigrants who came there from Greece and elsewhere in the wake of the founder Alexander of Macedon.

The starting point generally acknowledged for the revival of Greek studies in the West is 1397, when the Byzantine Manuel Chrysoloras began to teach Greek in Florence. With his Erotemata, Chrysoloras gave to Westerners a tool to learn Greek; the search for the ideal Greek textbook, however, continued even after the publication of the best Byzantine-humanist grammars. The four Greek Donati edited in this book—“Latinate” Greek grammars, based on the Latin schoolbook entitled Ianua or Donatus—belong to the many pedagogical experiments documented in manuscripts. They attest to a tradition of Greek studies that probably originated in Venice and/or Crete: a tradition certainly inferior to the Florentine scholarship in quality and circulation, but still important in the cultural history of the Renaissance.

Wealthy, conceited, hypochondriac (or perhaps just an invalid), obsessively religious, the orator Aelius Aristides (117 to about 180) is not the most attractive figure of his age, but because he is one of the best-known -- and he is intimately known, thanks to his Sacred Tales -- his works are a vital source for the cultural and religious and political history of Greece under the Roman Empire. The papers gathered here, the fruit of a conference held at Columbia in 2007, form the most intense study of Aristides and his context to have been published since the classic work of Charles Behr forty years ago.

The collegia centonariorum were often seen as the municipal fire-brigades or status groups of sorts in the Roman cities. Through a close investigation of the chronological development and geographical distribution of the collegia centonariorum, their legal privileges, and the prosopographical data of members and patrons, this volume reveals a much more complex picture of their origins, characters and compositions in various regions from the first century BC to the fourth century AD. Intricately connected with the textile economy, the collegia centonariorum illustrate how elements as diverse as material demand from the military and the city of Rome, legal infrastructure, urban development, and organizations of urban-based craftsmen and tradesmen may have interfaced with each other in the Roman world.

This book investigates Hellenistic popular religion through an interdisciplinary study of terracotta figurines of Egyptian deities, mostly from domestic contexts, from the trading port of Delos. A comparison of the figurines’ iconography to parallels in Egyptian religious texts, temple reliefs, and ritual objects suggests that many figurines depict deities or rituals associated with Egyptian festivals. An analysis of the objects’ clay fabrics and manufacturing techniques indicates that most were made on Delos. Additionally, archival research on unpublished notes from early excavations reveals new data on many figurines’ archaeological contexts, illuminating their roles in both domestic and temple cults. The results offer a new perspective on Hellenistic reinterpretations of Egyptian religion, as well as the relationship between “popular” and “official” cults.

The historians, classicists and psychiatrists who have come together to produce Mental Disorders in the Classical World aim to explain how the Greeks and their Roman successors conceptualized, diagnosed and treated mental disorders. The Greeks initiated the secular understanding of mental illness, and have left us a large body of penetrating and thought-provoking writing on the subject, ranging in time from Homer to the sixth century AD. With the conceptual basis of modern psychiatry once again under intense debate, we need to learn from other rational approaches even when they lack modern scientific underpinnings. Meanwhile this volume adds a rich chapter to the cultural and medical history of antiquity. The contributors include a high proportion of the best-regarded scholars in this field, together with papers by some of its rising stars.

Scientists, historians and archaeologists are at last beginning to collaborate seriously on studies of the long-term history of the environment. The fruit of an international conference held in Rome in 2011, The Ancient Mediterranean Environment between Science and History brings together scientists and scholars who are interested in the interaction of their several disciplines as well as in specific problems such as the effects of climate change and other environmental factors on historical developments and events, the sources of the energy and fuel used in ancient civilizations, and the effects of humans on the lands around the Mediterranean. The collection balances broad Mediterranean-wide studies and tightly focused studies of particular regions in Italy and Jordan.

Across the Ocean contains nine essays, each dedicated to a key question in the history of the trade relations between the Mediterranean and the Indian Ocean from Antiquity to the Early Modern period: the role of the state in the Red Sea trade, Roman policy in the Red Sea, the function of Trajan’s Canal, the pepper trade, the pearl trade, the Nabataean middlemen, the use of gold in ancient India, the constant renewal of the Indian Ocean ports of trade, and the rise and demise of the VOC.

The essays in this volume explore the many aspects of the “political” in the plays of Greek comic dramatist Aristophanes (5th century BCE), posing a variety of questions and approaching them through diverse methodological lenses. They demonstrate that “politics” as reflected in Aristophanes’ plays remains a fertile, and even urgent, area of inquiry, as political developments in our own time distinctly color the ways in which we articulate questions about classical Athens. As this volume shows, the earlier scholarship on politics in (or “and”) Aristophanes, which tended to focus on determining Aristophanes’ “actual” political views, has by now given way to approaches far more sensitive to how comic literary texts work and more attentive to the complexities of Athenian political structures and social dynamics. All the studies in this volume grapple to varying degrees with such methodological tensions, and show, that the richer and more diverse our political readings of Aristophanes can become, the less stable and consistent, as befits a comic work, they appear to be.