Late Antique History and Religion – serie

A key figure in late antique Gaul, Sidonius Apollinaris - aristocrat, administrator, poet, letter-writer, and bishop - is still insufficiently understood. This study aims to contribute to an up-to-date appreciation, both by incorporating recent research and by breaking new ground. It is a philological and historical commentary with many of the qualities of a monograph. Focusing on eleven letters written by Sidonius to his fellow bishops, one of which contains the only surviving example of Sidonius' prose oratory, it fills an important gap in the critical coverage of his literary production. A lengthy introduction situates the letters within Sidonius' life and works, the politics of the last years of the Roman empire in the west, and the traditions of late antique epistolography. Use is made throughout of modern research in linguistics, and a fresh hypothesis on the rendering of 'you' and 'I' in Sidonius' correspondence is proposed. The book offers a reappraisal of late antique stylistic 'mannerism' as 'community art' which gives preference to the socially unifying function of art over its individual creative potential. This is a work which will be of interest to classicists and medievalists, to literary scholars and church historians, to those concerned with philological and historical intricacies and those interested in the broader development of literature and mentalities in Late Antiquity.

In recent years, exciting new discoveries of inscriptions and archaeological remains on the Arabian Peninsula have led to a re-evaluation of the peoples on the Arabian frontier, which through their extensive contacts with Rome and Persia are now seen as dynamic participants in the Late Antique world. The present volume contributes to this recent trend by focusing on the contrast between the 'outside' sources on the peoples of the frontier - the Roman view - and the 'inside' sources, that is, the precious material produced by the Arabs themselves, and by approaching these sources within an anthropological framework of how peripheral peoples face larger powers. For the first time, the situation on the Arabian frontier is also compared with that on the southern Egyptian frontier, where similar sources have been found of peoples such as the Blemmyes and Noubades. Thus, the volume offers a richly-documented examination of the frontier interactions in these two vibrant and critically-important areas of the Late Antique East. The book is of interest to anthropologists, archaeologists, historians, Egyptologists, Arabists, epigraphists and papyrologists and, in general, to all scholars working in the period of Late Antiquity.