Books in the Greek Culture in the Roman World series

Romance was the dominant Greek literary genre of the Roman Empire. This book explores its distinctive qualities and the reasons for its popularity. Using cultural and narrative theory, it argues that the romance was simultaneously primal and malleable enough to capture the tensions in Greek identity during this era.

Greek traditions of writing about food and the symposium had a long and rich afterlife in the first to fifth centuries CE, in both Greco-Roman and early Christian culture. This book provides an account of the history of the table-talk tradition, derived from Plato's Symposium and other classical texts, focusing among other writers on Plutarch, Athenaeus, Methodius and Macrobius. It also deals with the representation of transgressive, degraded, eccentric types of eating and drinking in Greco-Roman and early Christian prose narrative texts, focusing especially on the Letters of Alciphron, the Greek and Roman novels, especially Apuleius, the Apocryphal Acts of the Apostles and the early saints' lives. It argues that writing about consumption and conversation continued to matter: these works communicated distinctive ideas about how to talk and how to think, distinctive models of the relationship between past and present, distinctive and often destabilising visions of identity and holiness.

In the first two centuries AD, the eastern Roman provinces experienced a proliferation of elite public generosity (gifts of buildings, festivals, distributions in exchange for public honours) unmatched in their previous or later history. This is a study of the motivations behind those public benefactions.

From the first century BC onwards religion was embraced as a source of philosophical knowledge. This book shows how that approach increased the authority of religion and how it further developed in Christianity, thus contributing to current debates about the origins of modern ideas about religion.

The first volume of its kind to be devoted to the works of Philostratus, the great essayist, biographer and historian of Greek culture in the Roman world. The papers contained cover his remarkable range, from hagiographic fiction to historical dialogue, and from prescriptions for gymnastics to the lives of the Sophists.

This exciting 2010 collection of essays offers a reappraisal of current ideas about Greek identity under the Roman empire. Drawing on extensive discussions of sources and modern theories of the tension between global and local identities, the authors argue that regional identities were both produced and challenged by Roman imperialism.

This multidisciplinary collection of essays transforms our understanding of ancient inner Anatolia, one of the most fascinating and understudied regions of the Roman empire. With essays on law, religion, architecture and art history, this book will be essential reading for all social and cultural historians of the Roman world.

The Augustan Age was the Golden Age of Latin literature. This book explores how a Greek author of Augustan Rome bridged the gap between Greece and Rome, and between historiography and rhetoric. Indispensable for scholars of Augustan Rome and for students of Greek and Latin literature.

The demise of the ancient Olympics has commonly been blamed on a ban imposed by the Christian emperor Theodosius I. Sofie Remijsen challenges this conventional view, and traces instead the collapse of the entire professional circuit of Greek athletics under the pressure of changing institutions and perceptions in late antiquity.

This book argues that Aelian's important work on animals, the De natura animalium, represents a sophisticated literary critique of Severan Rome. His fascination with animals reflects the cultural issues of his day: philosophy, religion, the exoticism of Egypt and India, sex, gender, and imperial politics.

The Tabulae Iliacae are stone plaques created for Imperial Rome that retell Homer's Iliad and the Troy saga through carved images and text. New photographs and translations of key texts will make this study accessible to all readers interested in Greek epic and how it is adapted to new contexts.

Vision was a powerful sense in the ancient world. How did the rabbis living in Roman Palestine and Persian Mesopotamia understand and seek to discipline and cultivate it? This book offers a new perspective on the significance of sight for the rabbis, of interest to a wide range of scholars.

Drawing upon the issues raised by postcolonial and performance theory, this book evaluates how Syrians redefined Greekness and negotiated the pressures of Greek colonialism and Roman imperialism. Of interest to ancient historians, archaeologists and classicists generally and for those studying the Near East in particular.

The first volume of its kind to be devoted to the works of Philostratus, the great essayist, biographer and historian of Greek culture in the Roman world. The papers contained cover his remarkable range, from hagiographic fiction to historical dialogue, and from prescriptions for gymnastics to the lives of the Sophists.

This book examines the impact of the Roman cultural revolution under Augustus on the Roman province of Greece and argues that the transformation of Roman Greece into a classicising 'museum' was a specific response of the provincial Greek elites to the cultural politics of the Roman imperial monarchy.

This book explores the representations of Greek myths in Roman art, including public, domestic and funerary contexts. It shows the crucial role Greek culture played in forming Roman identity, and how this changed over time. The book is aimed at scholars and students of Roman art and of Roman social and cultural history.

Roman portrait statues, famed for their individuality, repeatedly employed the same body forms. This book examines the 'Large Herculaneum Woman' statue type, a draped female body common in the second century CE and surviving in about two hundred examples, to demonstrate how sameness helped to communicate a woman's social identity.

Galen is the most important medical writer in Graeco-Roman antiquity. This volume locates him firmly in the intellectual life of his period of the second century AD, and tries to explain the medical and philosophical 'world of knowledge' that he tries to create.

This exciting 2010 collection of essays offers a reappraisal of current ideas about Greek identity under the Roman empire. Drawing on extensive discussions of sources and modern theories of the tension between global and local identities, the authors argue that regional identities were both produced and challenged by Roman imperialism.

Examines four texts of the Imperial period by Strabo, Dio of Prusa, Lucian, and Philostratus in order to elucidate how each author formulates very different conceptions of Homer, his motivations, and his poetic methods in constructing his imaginative and innovative treatment of Homer's relation to heroic history.

Pausanias' Description of Greece is the most important non-fictional travel work in ancient Greek literature. It is here explored against contemporary literary currents and the archaeological remains of those places described. Pausanias emerges as a unique witness to what it meant to be a Greek subject of the Roman Empire.

This text was first book to examine the transformation in the meaning of Hellenism in late antiquity and Byzantium, when Greek identity and the classical legacy were profoundly re-evaluated. Its discussion of the sources will appeal to classicists and students of modern Greece.

Offers an approach to understanding religious interaction in the fourth century AD. The text tackles the fundamental question of attitudes to religious identity by exploring how the Christian preacher John Chrysostom and the Graeco-Roman orator Libanius wrote about and understood issues of religious allegiance.

India fascinated the ancient Romans. Drawing on literary and archaeological sources, this book sketches the contours of that India - as much the source of luxury goods and the marker of the end of world empire for both polytheists and Christians as the home of holy men and their special knowledge.

This book looks at the architecture and decoration of early Christian churches of the Mediterranean, revealing how the buildings functioned as social spaces in which local communities defined a sense of group identity and communicated with the divine through prayer and ritual.

This book is a study of the long-term historical geography of Asia Minor, from the fourth century BC to the thirteenth century AD. Using an astonishing breadth of sources, ranging from Byzantine monastic archives to Latin poetic texts, ancient land records to hagiographic biographies, Peter Thonemann reveals the complex and fascinating interplay between the natural environment and human activities in the Maeander valley. Both a large-scale regional history and a profound meditation on the role played by geography in human history, this book is an essential contribution to the history of the Eastern Mediterranean in Graeco-Roman antiquity and the Byzantine Middle Ages.

Galen is the most important medical writer in Graeco-Roman antiquity. This volume locates him firmly in the intellectual life of his period of the second century AD, and tries to explain the medical and philosophical 'world of knowledge' that he tries to create.

Greek athletics flourished more in the Roman Empire than it ever had before. This book offers an exciting cultural history of the athletics of that period, setting out neglected evidence for athletic festivals and athletic education. It offers readings of a wide range of Greek and Latin authors.

This multidisciplinary collection of essays transforms our understanding of ancient inner Anatolia, one of the most fascinating and understudied regions of the Roman empire. With essays on law, religion, architecture and art history, this book will be essential reading for all social and cultural historians of the Roman world.