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Essays that broaden the historical scope and sharpen the parameters of competitive discourses

Scholars in the fields of late antique Christianity, neoplatonism, New Testament, art history, and rabbinics examine issues related to authority, identity, and change in religious and philosophical traditions of late antiquity. The specific focus of the volume is the examination of cultural producers and their particular viewpoints and agendas in an attempt to shed new light on the religious thinkers, texts, and material remains of late antiquity. The essays explore the major creative movements of the era, examining the strategies used to develop and designate orthodoxies and orthopraxies. This collection of essays reinterprets dialogues between individuals and groups, illuminating the mutual competition and influence among these ancient thinkers and communities.

Features:

• Essays feature competitive discourse as the central organizing theme
• Articles present unique theoretical models that are adaptable to different contexts and highly applicable to religious discourses before and after the Late Antique Period
• Scholars cover a much wider range of traditions including Judaism, Christianity, paganism, and philosophy in order to provide the most complete portrait of the religious landscape

To be a Christian is to be a convert. The word “convert” applies in a real sense both to cradle-born Catholics and to those, traditionally regarded as converts, who become Catholics as adults. The Catholic Church is the divinely established framework of the program of a conversion, which Christ presented as a thorough change of mind and heart (metanoia). While for a cradle-born Catholic the implementation of that program is usually a gradual process, for converts it contains a momentous act as they vote, so to speak, with their feet, on behalf of Truth, by joining the Church as the One True Fold, the Sole Ark of Salvation, to recall hallowed phrases dear to John Henry Newman, easily the greatest convert during the nineteenth century.
  The aim of this book is to summarize the lives of notable converts from Britain and Ireland and explain (by reference to quotations from their writings) why they entered the Catholic Church. These reasons were many. Some looked chiefly at history and saw the apostolic Church in their day to be residing in the Catholic communion. Others, though appreciating the fact of the gift of faith, saw reason as the chief support of the step they were taking. To yet others it was the endurance of both the Church and that remarkable office of the papacy that proved the necessary stimulus. Many were inspired by the witness of some unsung saint in their neighbourhood. Some were eminent even before their “move to Rome,” others almost completely unknown. Some found fame on their conversion, others suffered greatly for their zeal for the one true fold of Christ. Some came into the Church relatively early in life, others entered at the final hour, even while on their death bed.
 Taken altogether these accounts provide a profound and moving witness to the operation of divine grace in human souls.

Skin-clad barbarians ransacking Rome remains a popular image of the "decline and fall" of the Roman Empire, but why, when, and how the Empire actually fell are still matters of debate among students of classical history. In this pioneering study, Ralph W. Mathisen examines the "fall" in one part of the western Empire, Gaul, to better understand the shift from Roman to Germanic power that occurred in the region during the fifth century AD.

Mathisen uncovers two apparently contradictory trends. First, he finds that barbarian settlement did provoke significant changes in Gaul, including the disappearance of most secular offices under the Roman imperial administration, the appropriation of land and social influence by the barbarians, and a rise in the overall level of violence. Yet he also shows that the Roman aristocrats proved remarkably adept at retaining their rank and status. How did the aristocracy hold on?

Mathisen rejects traditional explanations and demonstrates that rather than simply opposing the barbarians, or passively accepting them, the Roman aristocrats directly responded to them in various ways. Some left Gaul. Others tried to ignore the changes wrought by the newcomers. Still others directly collaborated with the barbarians, looking to them as patrons and holding office in barbarian governments. Most significantly, however, many were willing to change the criteria that determined membership in the aristocracy. Two new characteristics of the Roman aristocracy in fifth-century Gaul were careers in the church and greater emphasis on classical literary culture.

These findings shed new light on an age in transition. Mathisen's theory that barbarian integration into Roman society was a collaborative process rather than a conquest is sure to provoke much thought and debate. All historians who study the process of power transfer from native to alien elites will want to consult this work.

Fanny Dolansky’s Roman Family Festivals explores the vital role religious ritual played in domestic life for Roman families from 200 BCE to 200 CE. Seven festivals, from the Parentalia in February to the Saturnalia in December, are reconstructed and analyzed from varied perspectives, including those of men, women, and children who were free, enslaved, or formerly enslaved. The festivals addressed key concerns for families such as relations between freeborn and enslaved members of the household, spouses, adults and children, and the living and the dead, and played an important role in the ongoing processes of socialization and enculturation of  Roman identity. Integrating literary, epigraphic, papyrological, archaeological, and art historical sources, the study pays careful attention to the critical categories of age, gender, and juridical status to understand better who celebrated the festivals and how, and what their participation meant to them individually and to the collective. Roman Family Festivals demonstrates the longevity of family festivals and their continued relevance in late antiquity, despite a rapidly changing religious and cultural landscape.

Rome was the law-giver for much of the modern world. She was also the greatest military power of antiquity, operating her military organization with remarkable efficiency and effectiveness throughout most of the then-known world. In view of the importance of both the legal and military aspects of the Roman Empire, an account of their combination in a system of disciplinary control for the Roman armies is of considerable significance to historians in both fields—and, in fact, to scholars in general. In Roman Military Law, C. E. Brand describes this system of control.

Since a characterization of such a system can be made most meaningful only against a background of Roman constitutional government and in the light of ideologies current at the time, Brand follows his initial “Note on Sources” with a sketch of the contemporary Roman scene. This first section includes a discussion of the Roman constitution and an examination of Roman criminal law.

The history of Rome, as a republic, principate, and empire, extended over a period of a thousand years, so any attempt to represent a generalized picture must be essentially a matter of extraction and condensation from the voluminous literature of the whole era. Nevertheless, from the fantastic evolution that is the history of Rome, Brand has been able to construct a more or less static historical mosaic that may be considered typically “Roman.” This comes into sharpest focus during the period of the Punic Wars, when the city and its people were most intensely Roman. The picture of the Roman armies is set into this basic framework, in chapters dealing with military organization, disciplinary organization, religion and discipline, and offenses and punishments.

The final section of the book considers briefly the vast changes in Roman institutions that came about under the armies of the Empire, and then concludes with the Latin text and an English translation of the only known code of Roman military justice, promulgated sometime during the later Empire, preserved in Byzantine literature, and handed down to medieval times in Latin translations of Byzantine Greek law, which it has heretofore been confused.

Roman siege warfare had its own structure and customs, and expectations both by the besieged and by the attacking army. Sieges are typically sorted by the techniques and technologies that attackers used, but the more fruitful approach offered in Roman Siege Warfare examines the way a siege follows or diverges from typical narrative and operational plotlines. Author Josh Levithan emphasizes the human elements—morale and motivation—rather than the engineering, and he recaptures the sense of a siege as an event in progress that offers numerous attitudes, methods, and outcomes. Sieges involved a concentration of violent effort in space and the practical challenge posed by a high wall: unlike field battles they were sharply defined in time, in space, and in operational terms.

Chapters examine motivation and behavior during a siege and focus on examples from both the Roman Republic and the Empire: Polybius, Livy, Julius Caesar, Flavius Josephus, and Ammianus Marcellinus. Levithan examines the “gadgetary turn,” during which writers began to lavish attention on artillery and wall-damaging techniques, fetishizing technology and obscuring the centrality of the assault and of human behavior.

This volume speaks to classicists and historians of all stripes. All passages are translated, and references are accessible to nonspecialists. Military historians will also find much of interest in the volume, in its treatment both of Roman military conduct and of wider military practice.

Roman tragedies were written for over three hundred years, but only fragments remain of plays that predate the works of Seneca in the mid-first century C.E., making it difficult to define the role of tragedy in ancient Roman culture. Nevertheless, in this pioneering book, Mario Erasmo draws on all the available evidence to trace the evolution of Roman tragedy from the earliest tragedians to the dramatist Seneca and to explore the role played by Roman culture in shaping the perception of theatricality on and off the stage.

Performing a philological analysis of texts informed by semiotic theory and audience reception, Erasmo pursues two main questions in this study: how does Roman tragedy become metatragedy, and how did off-stage theatricality come to compete with the theatre? Working chronologically, he looks at how plays began to incorporate a rhetoricized reality on stage, thus pointing to their own theatricality. And he shows how this theatricality, in turn, came to permeate society, so that real events such as the assassination of Julius Caesar took on theatrical overtones, while Pompey's theatre opening and the lavish spectacles of the emperor Nero deliberately blurred the lines between reality and theatre. Tragedy eventually declined as a force in Roman culture, Erasmo suggests, because off-stage reality became so theatrical that on-stage tragedy could no longer compete.