Books in the Classics and Contemporary Thought series

The Roman empire remains unique. Although Rome claimed to rule the world, it did not. Rather, its uniqueness stems from the culture it created and the loyalty it inspired across an area that stretched from the Tyne to the Euphrates. Moreover, the empire created this culture with a bureaucracy smaller than that of a typical late-twentieth-century research university. In approaching this problem, Clifford Ando does not ask the ever-fashionable question, Why did the Roman empire fall? Rather, he asks, Why did the empire last so long? Imperial Ideology and Provincial Loyalty in the Roman Empire argues that the longevity of the empire rested not on Roman military power but on a gradually realized consensus that Roman rule was justified. This consensus was itself the product of a complex conversation between the central government and its far-flung peripheries. Ando investigates the mechanisms that sustained this conversation, explores its contribution to the legitimation of Roman power, and reveals as its product the provincial absorption of the forms and content of Roman political and legal discourse. Throughout, his sophisticated and subtle reading is informed by current thinking on social formation by theorists such as Max Weber, Jurgen Habermas, and Pierre Bourdieu.

This text argues that Catullus challenges us to think about the nature of lyric in new ways. It shows how Catullus's poetry reflects the conditions of its own consumption as it explores the terms and possibilities of the poet's license.

This volume considers Sappho's poetry as a powerful, influential voice in the western cultural tradition. Contributors focus on literary history, mythic traditions, cultural studies, performance studies, recent work in feminist theory, and more.

This study explores odes and epistles by the late-first-century poet Horace in the light of modern anthropological and literary theory. The author examines, in particular, how the relationship between Horace and his patron Maecenas is reflected in these poems' themes and rhetorical figures.

Studying the economic and cultural upheaval that shook mainland Greece and the Aegean area in the eighth century, this work also looks at the role that poetry played in this upheaval.

A study traces the tendentiousness of Greek representations by introducing comparative Egyptian material, thus interrogating the Greek texts and authors from a cross-cultural perspective.