BiblioVault - Books about Empire, 30 B.C.-476 A.D

Edward Gibbon and the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire

G. W. Bowersock

Harvard University Press, 1977

The End of the Past

Ancient Rome and the Modern West

Aldo Schiavone

Harvard University Press, 2000

This searching interpretation of past and present addresses fundamental questions about the fall of the Roman Empire. Why did ancient culture, once so strong and rich, come to an end? Was it destroyed by weaknesses inherent in its nature? Or were mistakes made that could have been avoided—was there a point at which Greco-Roman society took a wrong turn? And in what ways is modern society different?Western history is split into two discontinuous eras, Aldo Schiavone tells us: the ancient world was fundamentally different from the modern one. He locates the essential difference in a series of economic factors: a slave-based economy, relative lack of mechanization and technology, the dominance of agriculture over urban industry. Also crucial are aspects of the ancient mentality: disdain for manual work, a preference for transcending (rather than transforming) nature, a basic belief in the permanence of limits.Schiavone’s lively and provocative examination of the ancient world, “the eternal theater of history and power,” offers a stimulating opportunity to view modern society in light of the experience of antiquity.

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Ethnic Identity and Imperial Power

The Batavians in the Early Roman Empire

Nico Roymans

Amsterdam University Press, 2005

This probing case study examines the evolution of the ethnic identity of the Batavians, a lower Rhineland tribe in the western marches of the Roman Empire. Drawing on extensive historical and archaeological data, Nico Roymans examines how between 50 BCE and 70 CE, the Romans cultivated the Batavians as an ethnic "other" by intensively recruiting them to the Roman army while simultaneously carrying out extermination campaigns against other tribes in the region. Roymans also considers how the status of the Batavian settlement reveals intriguing insights into Roman definitions of "civilization" and "barbarism." Ethnic Identity and Imperial Power is a fascinating anthropological study on how ancient frontier peoples negotiated their self-image.

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Life, Death, and Entertainment in the Roman Empire

D. S. Potter and D. J. Mattingly, Editors

University of Michigan Press, 1999

Life, Death, and Entertainment gives those who have a general interest in Roman antiquity a starting point informed by the latest developments in scholarship for understanding the extraordinary range of Roman society. Family structure, gender identity, food supply, religion, and entertainment are all crucial to an understanding of the Roman world. As views of Roman history have broadened in recent decades to encompass a wider range of topics, the need has grown for a single volume that can offer a starting point for these diverse subjects, for readers of all backgrounds.

This collection fills such a need by uniting a series of general introductions on each of these topics for the non-specialist. Each essay brings readers into contact with broadly ranging evidence, as well as with a wide variety of approaches that are needed to study basic questions about the Roman world.

Essays explore the Roman family, gender definition, demography, Roman food supply, Roman religion, and the wide variety of public entertainments throughout the empire. The volume brings together an unparalleled range of methodologies and topics. It will enable the modern reader to understand the Roman world in all its complexity. The general reader will welcome this approachable and timely text.

Contributors to the volume include Greg Aldrete, Hazel Dodge, Bruce W. Frier, Maud Gleason, Ann Hanson, David Mattingly, and David Potter.

D. S. Potter is Arthur F. Thurnau Professor of Greek and Latin, University of Michigan.

D. J. Mattingly is Professor of Roman Archaeology, University of Leicester.

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Roman Arabia

G. W. Bowersock

Harvard University Press, 1983

The Roman province of Arabia occupied a crucial corner of the Mediterranean world, encompassing most of what is now Jordan, southern Syria, northwest Saudi Arabia, and the Negev. Mr. Bowersock's book is the first authoritative history of the region from the fourth century B.C. to the age of Constantine.The book opens with the arrival of the Nahataean Arabs in their magnificent capital at Petra and describes the growth of their hellenized culture based on trade in perfume and spices. It traces the transformation of the region from an Arab kingdom under Roman influence into an imperial province, one that played an increasingly important role in the Roman strategy for control of the Near East. While the primary emphasis is on the relations of the Arabs of the region with the Romans, their interactions with neighboring states, Jewish, Egyptian, and Syrian, are also stressed. The narrative concludes with the breakup of the Roman province at the start of the Byzantine age.

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Roman Coins and Public Life under the Empire

E. Togo Salmon Papers II

George M. Paul and Michael Ierardi, Editors

University of Michigan Press, 1999

Roman coins often shed light on Roman public life and society through the legends, portraits, and images they bear. The papers collected in this volume were originally presented at the Second E. Togo Salmon Conference on Roman Studies. The eight contributors are specialists in Roman coins or Roman history and in the relations between them.
Coins are a unique source of information about the Roman world. In the case of the Roman Empire they were issued by or with the approval of the ruling power. The representations and legends they show therefore present an official view of contemporary affairs. The coins themselves, minted for official purposes such as paying the army, when studied carefully can help reconstruct official policies. They can also occasionally reveal what monuments now lost may have looked like.
It is not infrequent to come across pleas that the ancient historian should make more frequent use of numismatic evidence. These essays make clear that efforts are being made both by numismatists and by historians to bring the two disciplines together. At the same time the papers reveal that the task is by no means a straightforward one. The survival of Roman coins is variable, and so attempts to reconstruct the size and distribution of issues calls for skilled and experienced analysis. This collection of papers provides evidence for the kind of deductions that the historian may make from Roman coins as well as the illustrations of the pitfalls that await the unwary.
Those interested in Roman history, amateur coin collectors, and professional numismatists will all find much here to widen their knowledge of the public context of Roman coins.
George Paul is Professor of Classics, McMaster University. Michael Ierardi is Lecturer in Classics, McMaster University.

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The Roman Near East

31 BC–AD 337

Fergus Millar

Harvard University Press, 1993

From Augustus to Constantine, the Roman Empire in the Near East expanded step by step, southward to the Red Sea and eastward across the Euphrates to the Tigris. In a remarkable work of interpretive history, Fergus Millar shows us this world as it was forged into the Roman provinces of Syria, Judaea, Arabia, and Mesopotamia. His book conveys the magnificent sweep of history as well as the rich diversity of peoples, religions, and languages that intermingle in the Roman Near East. Against this complex backdrop, Millar explores questions of cultural and religious identity and ethnicity—as aspects of daily life in the classical world and as part of the larger issues they raise.

As Millar traces the advance of Roman control, he gives a lucid picture of Rome’s policies and governance over its far-flung empire. He introduces us to major regions of the area and their contrasting communities, bringing out the different strands of culture, communal identity, language, and religious belief in each. The Roman Near East makes it possible to see rabbinic Judaism, early Christianity, and eventually the origins of Islam against the matrix of societies in which they were formed. Millar’s evidence permits us to assess whether the Near East is best seen as a regional variant of Graeco-Roman culture or as in some true sense oriental.

A masterful treatment of a complex period and world, distilling a vast amount of literary, documentary, artistic, and archaeological evidence—always reflecting new findings—this book is sure to become the standard source for anyone interested in the Roman Empire or the history of the Near East.

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Rome and the Arabs

A Prolegomenon to the Study of Byzantium and the Arabs

Irfan Shahîd

Harvard University Press, 1984

Soldiers, Cities, and Civilians in Roman Syria

Nigel Pollard

University of Michigan Press, 2000

When one mentions "empire," one place probably comes to mind: Rome. The Romans conquered an empire that covered almost the complete extent of their known world. With a territory that large, there was, of course, a huge cultural diversity between the different corners of the empire. How could the central authority in Rome bring together all the different cultures, religions and customs under one administrative umbrella? Soldiers, Cities and Civilians in Roman Syria explores some of the interactions between the imperial authority and the subjected peoples in the territory of Syria. It looks at how the imperial power controlled its subjects, how the agents of the imperial power (administrators, soldiers, etc.) interacted with those subjects, and what impact the imperial power had on the culture of ruled territories. The Roman empire had few civilian administrators, so soldiers were the representatives of imperial government to be encountered by many provincial civilians. Soldiers, Cities and Civilians in Roman Syria employs the evidence of Roman texts and documents and modern archaeological excavation as well as "alternative" sources, such as the literature of the subject peoples and informal texts such as graffiti, to examine the relationship between soldiers and civilians in the important frontier province of Syria.
Nigel Pollard is currently a Research Assistant at the Institute of Archaeology, University of Oxford.

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Trade and Taboo

Disreputable Professions in the Roman Mediterranean

Sarah E. Bond

University of Michigan Press, 2016

Trade and Taboo addresses the legal, literary, social, and institutional creation of disrepute in ancient Roman society. Tracking the shifting application of stigmas of disrepute between the Republic and Late Antiquity, it follows particular groups of professionals—funeral workers, criers, tanners, mint workers, and even bakers—asking how they coped with stigmatization.

In this book, Sarah E. Bond reveals the construction and motivations for these attitudes, and to show how they created inequalities, informed institutions, and changed over time. Additionally, she shows how political and cultural shifts mutated these taboos, reshaping economic markets and altering the status of professionals at work within these markets.

Bond investigates legal stigmas in the form of infamia and other marks of legal disrepute. She expands on anthropological theories of pollution, closely studying individuals who regularly came into contact with corpses and other polluting materials, and considering communication and network formation through the disrepute attached to town criers, or praecones. Ideas of disgust and the language of invective are brought forward looking at tanners. The book closes with an exploration of caste-like systems created in the later Roman Empire. Collectively, these professionals are eloquent about economies and changes experienced within Roman society between 45 BCE and 565 CE.

Trade and Taboo will interest those studying Roman society, issues of historiographical method, and the topic of taboo in preindustrial cultures.

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The Triumph of Empire

The Roman World from Hadrian to Constantine

Michael Kulikowski

Harvard University Press, 2016

“A genuinely bracing and innovative history of Rome.”
—Times Literary Supplement

The Triumph of Empire takes us into the political heart of imperial Rome and recounts the extraordinary challenges overcome by a flourishing empire. Roman politics could resemble a blood sport: rivals resorted to assassination as emperors rose and fell with bewildering speed, their reigns sometimes measured in weeks. Factionalism and intrigue sapped the empire from within, and imperial succession was never entirely assured.

Michael Kulikowski begins with the reign of Hadrian, who visited the farthest reaches of his domain and created a stable frontier, and takes us through the rules of Marcus Aurelius and Diocletian to Constantine, who overhauled the government, introduced a new state religion, and founded a second Rome. Despite Rome’s political volatility, imperial forces managed to defeat successive attacks from Goths, Germans, Persians, and Parthians.

“This is a wonderfully broad sweep of Roman history. It tells the fascinating story of imperial rule from the enigmatic Hadrian through the dozens of warlords and usurpers who fought for the throne in the third century AD to the Christian emperors of the fourth—after the biggest religious and cultural revolution the world has ever seen.”
—Mary Beard, author of SPQR

“This was an era of great change, and Kulikowski is an excellent and insightful guide.”
—Adrian Goldsworthy, Wall Street Journal

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