Books in the Empire and After series

Ethnography After Antiquity explores the modes and motivations of Byzantine ethnographic writing, shedding new light on how Byzantines distinguished themselves from foreign cultures.

Drawing on over a hundred papyrus petitions, one of the only sources of personal narrative from the Roman world, Ari Z. Bryen investigates how people living in Roman Egypt negotiated their relationships to local communities and the Empire through legal stories.

Since the 1970s, John Scheid has been one of the most influential figures reshaping scholarly understanding of ancient Roman religion. The Gods, the State, and the Individual presents a translation of Scheid's work that chronicles the development of his field-changing scholarship.

Law, Language, and Empire in the Roman Tradition demonstrates how Roman civil law functioned as an instrument of empire by tracking its application to the challenges of governing diverse and distant people.

Aristocrats and Statehood in Western Iberia, 300-600 C.E. combines archaeological and literary sources to reconstruct the history of late antique Iberian aristocracies, facilitating the study of a social class that has proved elusive when approached through the lens of a single type of evidence.

Roman Emperor Constantine raised Christianity from a minority religion to imperial status, but his religious orientation was by no means unambiguous. In Constantine and the Cities, Noel Lenski demonstrates how the emperor and his subjects used the instruments of government in a struggle for authority over the religion of the empire.

In The Politics of Roman Memory, Marion Kruse explores the process by which the emperors, historians, jurists, antiquarians, and poets of the eastern Roman Empire employed both history and mythologized versions of the same to come to terms with the political realities of the late fifth and sixth centuries.

Bringing together a wide range of literary, historical, and political sources, Jesper Majbom Madsen examines how Pompey's cities in Roman Pontus were initially organized, how they developed over time, and how inhabitants in this part of the Roman Empire defined themselves culturally and politically.

Ancient States and Infrastructural Power examines how early states built their territorial, legal, and political powers before they had the capacity to enforce them. Contributors trace how state power first developed from the Andes to China, from Babylon to Rome.

The era of the Roman Empire was distinguished by an explosion of images and texts in a variety of media—metal, papyrus, mosaic, gemstone—all designed to protect, heal, or grant some abstract benefit to the persons who wore them on their bodies or placed them in their homes. In the past scholars have explained this proliferation of readily identifiable amulets by a sudden need for magic or by a precipitous rise in superstition or anxiety in this period, connected, perhaps, with the internal breakdown of Greek rationalism or the migration of superstitious peoples from the East.Christopher A. Faraone argues, instead, that these amulets were not invented in this period as a result of an alteration in the Roman worldview or a tidal wave of "oriental" influence, but rather that they only become visible to us in the archaeological record as a result of a number of technical innovations and transformations: the increased epigraphic habit of the Imperial period, the miniaturization of traditional domestic amulets, like the triple-faced Hecate, on durable gems, or the utilization of newly crafted Egyptianizing iconography. In short, it is only when explicitly protective or curative texts, or strange new images, are added to traditional Greek amulets, that modern observers realize that these objects were thought to have the power to protect or heal all along. The real question addressed by the book, then, is not why we can identify so many amulets in the Roman Imperial period but, rather, why we have failed to identify them in artifacts of the preceding centuries.Featuring more than 120 illustrations, The Transformation of Greek Amulets in Roman Imperial Times is not only a tremendous resource for those working in the fields of ancient magic and religion but also an essential reference for those interested in the religion, culture, and history of the ancient Mediterranean.