Ways of Being Roman


Book Description

This book examines the question of identity in the Roman provinces of the western empire. It takes an innovative approach in looking at the wider discourses or ideologies through which an individual sense of self was learnt and expressed. This wide-ranging survey considers ethnic identity, status, gender and age. Rather than constructing a paradigm of the 'ideal' of any specific aspect of personal identity, it looks at some of the wider cultural ideas which were drawn upon in differentiating groups of people and the variability within this. It focusses on the daily and mundane practices of everyday life through which identities were internalised and communicated.







The Good Ancestor


Book Description

Now in paperback: A call to save ourselves and our planet that gets to the root of the current crisis—society’s extreme short-sightedness




Ancient Libraries


Book Description

The circulation of books was the motor of classical civilization. However, books were both expensive and rare, and so libraries - private and public, royal and civic - played key roles in articulating intellectual life. This collection, written by an international team of scholars, presents a fundamental reassessment of how ancient libraries came into being, how they were organized and how they were used. Drawing on papyrology and archaeology, and on accounts written by those who read and wrote in them, it presents new research on reading cultures, on book collecting and on the origins of monumental library buildings. Many of the traditional stories told about ancient libraries are challenged. Few were really enormous, none were designed as research centres, and occasional conflagrations do not explain the loss of most ancient texts. But the central place of libraries in Greco-Roman culture emerges more clearly than ever.




Empire and Political Cultures in the Roman World


Book Description

This book evaluates a hundred years of scholarship on how empire transformed the Roman world, and advances a new theory of how the empire worked and was experienced. It engages extensively with Rome's Republican empire as well as the 'Empire of the Caesars', examines a broad range of ancient evidence (material, documentary, and literary) that illuminates multiple perspectives, and emphasizes the much longer history of imperial rule within which the Roman Empire emerged. Steering a course between overemphasis on resistance and overemphasis on consensus, it highlights the political, social, religious and cultural consequences of an imperial system within which functions of state were substantially delegated to, or more often simply assumed by, local agencies and institutions. The book is accessible and of value to a wide range of undergraduate and graduate students as well as of interest to all scholars concerned with the rise and fall of the Roman Empire.




Becoming Roman


Book Description

Studies the 'Romanization' of Rome's Gallic provinces in the late Republic and early empire.




Dreams and Dreaming in the Roman Empire


Book Description

An investigation into dream reports in the history and literature of early Roman culture.




Walking in Roman Culture


Book Description

Walking served as an occasion for the display of power and status in ancient Rome, where great men paraded with their entourages through city streets and elite villa owners strolled with friends in private colonnades and gardens. In this book-length treatment of the culture of walking in ancient Rome, Timothy O'Sullivan explores the careful attention which Romans paid to the way they moved through their society. He employs a wide range of literary, artistic and architectural evidence to reveal the crucial role that walking played in the performance of social status, the discourse of the body and the representation of space. By examining how Roman authors depict walking, this book sheds new light on the Romans themselves - not only how they perceived themselves and their experience of the world, but also how they drew distinctions between work and play, mind and body, and Republic and Empire.




Roman in the Provinces


Book Description

"Roman in the Provinces: Art on the Periphery of Empire" accompanies an exhibition of the same name that will open at Yale University Art Gallery in August 2014 and will travel to the McMullen Museum of Art at Boston College in February 2015. With objects assembled primarily from Yale University Art Gallery s world-class Roman and Byzantine collection and including a few significant loans from other institutions, "Roman in the Provinces" explores the varied ways in which different individuals, groups, and regions across the empire reacted to being Roman. Drawing especially on materials from Yale University s excavations at Gerasa and Dura-Europos, the exhibit presents material chronologically and geographically distant from imperial Rome. This focus encourages better characterization and understanding of the local responses and multiple identities in the provinces as they were expressed through material culture. Contributors to this publication offer new scholarship on a wide range of subjects, including religious practices, military customs, and epigraphy, with the common aim of ascertaining what the Roman Empire was actually like and how scholars should approach its study today. "




Resurrecting the Granary of Rome


Book Description

Publisher description