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A collection of 25 international papers dedicated to Eric Birley, on the subject of his principal interest, the Roman army. The essays focus on hierarchy and rank within the army and its position within the social and political structure of the empire. The book begins with a discussion of the valued contribution of seasoned volunteers and middle ranking officers and an assessment of the possibilities for reward and social position on retirement. Other subjects include inexperienced officers, senator generals, military service and Principilaires. The book finally assesses the contribution of the Roman army to the societies of Rome, Spain, Gaul, Germania, Dalmatia, Moesia Superior and Egypt. The meticulously detailed essays vary from broad discussions of the army as a whole to specific studies of individuals drawn from all ranks. Contributors include Lukas de Blois, David J Breeze, Anthony R Birley, Michael Redd�, Yann le Bohec, John J Wilkes, Michael P Speidel and Fritz Mitthof. English, German, French, Italian text.
There is a long tradition in classical scholarship of reducing the Hellenistic period to the spreading of Greek language and culture far beyond the borders of the Mediterranean. More than anything else this perception has hindered an appreciation of the manifold consequences triggered by the creation of new spaces of connectivity linking different cultures and societies in parts of Europe, Asia and Africa. In adopting a new approach this volume explores the effects of the continuous adaptations of ideas and practices to new contexts of meaning on the social imaginaries of the parties participating in these intercultural encounters. The essays show that the seemingly static end-products of the interaction between Greek and non-Greek groups, such as texts, images, and objects, were embedded in long-term discourses, and thus subject to continuously shifting processes.
A collection of sixteen papers focusing on the economic activities of prehistoric, Classical, Hellenistic and Roman Crete. The wide-ranging papers discuss the economy of prehistoric Crete, social development, production and symbolism in the pre-Palatial and Palatial periods, economic activities and social development in the Classical and Hellenistic periods, coinage and minting and relationships with other polities of the Aegean and east Mediterranean.
The main thrust of the contributions in this volume run counter to the notion of a universally applicable theory of sacrifice, and rather aimed at investigating transformations in sacrificial practices from cross-cultural and transhistorical perspectives. Exploring a broad spectrum of texts, case studies and social practices from Greco-Roman antiquity as well as the Ancient Near East and Egypt to the modern Middle East, the Indian subcontinent and Indonesia diverging cultural perceptions and definitions of the topic "sacrifice" are examined and thereby new insights into the processes of modification and transformation of sacrificial rituals are gained.
The De aquis of Sextus Julius Frontinus is usually interpreted as either an administrative guide for the curator aquarum, or as a work of praise. It can be demonstrated, however, that Frontinus had another goal in writing. The book is more likely what we would call a political pamphlet, explaining a particular administrative reform, and encouraging those affected by that reform to cooperate with it. Frontinus wants to be sure that all concessions of aqueduct water to private individuals be made as proper grants by the emperor. In short, this curator aquarum is interested in regulating the flow of a particular beneficium, namely, aqueduct water, from the emperor to his elite subjects.
The first volume of Roman Questions appeared in 1995 and was received very positively by the scholarly community. The present collection contains 71 papers written mostly in English (with one paper in German and one in Latin) and predominantly published in the last 20 years in various leading journals in Europe and America. They are all reset, and supplied with addenda. There are also 5 inedita, and addenda to the previous volume. They deal with Roman republican and imperial history and constitutional law, prosopography, epigraphy, Latin philology, Roman religion, and the history of classical scholarship. They ask questions, try to answer them, and do not avoid polemic. They uphold the unity of Altertumswissenschaft: history cannot be understood without philology, and philology is blind without history; and history, law and literature are infused with ideology and religion. And the tool to knowledge is the painstaking linguistic dissection of texts.