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11 books match the query 'Roman'

cover of Christian and Pagan in the Roman Empire

Christian and Pagan in the Roman Empire

Robert Sider

Catholic University of America Press, 2001

In this volume, Robert D. Sider undertakes a judicious pruning of the original texts and brings a fresh accessibility to the important writings of Tertullian.
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cover of Cosa: The Roman and Greek Amphoras

Cosa

The Roman and Greek Amphoras

Elizabeth Lyding Will and Kathleen Warner Slane

University of Michigan Press, 2019

This long-awaited volume presents the work of Elizabeth Lyding Will on the important group of transport amphoras found at Cosa. This town has been widely recognized as a prototypical colony of the later Roman Republic and a source for trade with Gaul and Spain, so this publication of its finds has important implications for archaeologists and historians of the ancient world. Will’s initial work was on Latin amphora-stamps in the eastern Mediterranean, and through the 1960s and 1970s she developed an amphora typology based on materials found in the region and at Cosa. What has not been appreciated is that this typology was not limited to stamped Republican amphoras but also included unstamped vessels, such as imperial Spanish, African, and eastern amphoras dating as late as the fifth century CE. This book shows that Will was far ahead of her time in documenting the Mediterranean trade in commodities carried in amphoras: her work not only provides a record of the amphoras found on the town-site of Cosa, but also includes a comparison between the finds from the port and the town.   

At the time of Will’s death, her manuscript consisted of a typed catalogue of the amphora stamps from Cosa and an equal number of unstamped vessels, but was missing important elements. On the basis of extensive notes and photographs, Kathleen Warner Slane has reviewed and updated the manuscript, adding type descriptions and footnotes to materials that have appeared since Will’s death as well as a framing introduction and conclusions. Appendices highlight an Augustan amphora dump on the Arx and add a catalogue of the Greek amphora stamps found at Cosa.

Cosa: The Roman and Greek Amphoras will be of interest to scholars and students of Rome and its system of colonies, and also to those interested in Greek and Roman archaeology and trade in the ancient world.
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cover of Dionysus, Christ, and the Death of God, Volume 1: The Great Mediations of the Classical World

Dionysus, Christ, and the Death of God, Volume 1

The Great Mediations of the Classical World

Giuseppe Fornari

Michigan State University Press, 2020

This magisterial reflection on the history and destiny of the West compares Greco-Roman civilization and the Judeo-Christian tradition in order to understand what both unites and divides them. Mediation, understood as a collective, symbolic experience, gives society unity and meaning, putting human beings in contact with a universal object known as the world or reality. But unity has a price: the very force that enables peaceful coexistence also makes us prone to conflict. As a result, in order to find a common point of convergence—of at-one-ment—someone must be sacrificed. Sacrifice, then, is the historical pillar of mediation. It was endorsed in a cosmic-religious sense in antiquity and rejected for ethical reasons in modernity, where the Judeo-Christian tradition plays an intermediate role in condemning sacrificial violence as such, while accepting sacrifice as a voluntary act offered to save other human beings. Today, as we face the collapse of all shared mediations, this intermediating solution offers a way out of our moral and cultural plight.
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cover of Dionysus, Christ, and the Death of God, Volume 2: Christianity and Modernity

Dionysus, Christ, and the Death of God, Volume 2

Christianity and Modernity

Giuseppe Fornari

Michigan State University Press, 2020

This magisterial reflection on the history and destiny of the West compares Greco-Roman civilization and the Judeo-Christian tradition in order to understand what both unites and divides them. Mediation, understood as a collective, symbolic experience, gives society unity and meaning, putting human beings in contact with a universal object known as the world or reality. But unity has a price: the very force that enables peaceful coexistence also makes us prone to conflict. As a result, in order to find a common point of convergence—of at-one-ment—someone must be sacrificed. Sacrifice, then, is the historical pillar of mediation. It was endorsed in a cosmic-religious sense in antiquity and rejected for ethical reasons in modernity, where the Judeo-Christian tradition plays an intermediate role in condemning sacrificial violence as such, while accepting sacrifice as a voluntary act offered to save other human beings. Today, as we face the collapse of all shared mediations, this intermediating solution offers a way out of our moral and cultural plight.
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cover of Drudgery Divine: On the Comparison of Early Christianities and the Religions of Late Antiquity

Drudgery Divine

On the Comparison of Early Christianities and the Religions of Late Antiquity

Jonathan Z. Smith

University of Chicago Press, 1990

In this major theoretical and methodological statement on the history of religions, Jonathan Z. Smith shows how convert apologetic agendas can dictate the course of comparative religious studies. As his example, Smith reviews four centuries of scholarship comparing early Christianities with religions of late Antiquity (especially the so-called mystery cults) and shows how this scholarship has been based upon an underlying Protestant-Catholic polemic. The result is a devastating critique of traditional New Testament scholarship, a redescription of early Christianities as religious traditions amenable to comparison, and a milestone in Smith's controversial approach to comparative religious studies.

"An important book, and certainly one of the most significant in the career of Jonathan Z. Smith, whom one may venture to call the greatest pathologist in the history of religions. As in many precedent cases, Smith follows a standard procedure: he carefully selects his victim, and then dissects with artistic finesse and unequaled acumen. The operation is always necessary, and a deconstructor of Smith's caliber is hard to find."—Ioan P. Coulianu, Journal of Religion
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cover of Gerulata: The Lamps: A Survey of Roman Lamps in Pannonia

Gerulata

The Lamps: A Survey of Roman Lamps in Pannonia

Robert Frecer

Karolinum Press, 2015

For the ancient Romans, lamps were more than just a way to be able to see in the dark—they were mythical muses, witnesses to secrets, and instruments of the supernatural. Far more familiar to the average Roman than the high art of mosaics, statues, or frescos, lamps created the atmosphere of day-to-day life in the homes, workshops, and public houses of Roman provincial towns.
            This catalog brings together for the first time the 210 ancient lamps excavated since 1949 in Bratislava-Rusovce, a suburb of the capital of Slovakia and the site of the ancient Roman settlement of Gerulata. What may appear at first glance as a standard panoply of Roman lamps is comprehensively examined to uncover signs of wear and use, unique personal inscriptions, and exceptional forms. This book reveals the stunning wealth of knowledge that can be gained from the study of lighting devices in this liminal settlement on the tough northern frontier of the Roman Empire.
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cover of Religious Competition in the Greco-Roman World

Religious Competition in the Greco-Roman World

Nathaniel P. DesRosiers

SBL Press, 2016

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
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cover of Roman and European Mythologies

Roman and European Mythologies

Edited by Yves Bonnefoy

University of Chicago Press, 1992

This volume begins with Roman myths and traces their influence in
early Christian and later European literature. Ninety-five entries
by leading scholars cover subjects such as sacrificial cults and rites
in pre-Roman Italy, Roman religion and its origins, the mythologies of
paganism, the survival of the ancient gods in the Middle Ages and the
Renaissance, gypsy myths and rituals, romanticism and myth in Blake,
Nerval, and Balzac, and myth in twentieth-century English literature.

Mythologies offers illuminating examples of the workings of
myth in the structure of societies past and present—how we create,
use, and are guided by systems of myth to answer fundamental questions
about ourselves and our world.

Many of the sections in Mythologies, originally published as a
two-volume cloth set, will soon be available in four paperback volumes
(two are announced here; two more are scheduled for 1993). These
volumes will reproduce the articles, introductory essays, and
illustrations as they appeared in the full Mythologies set.
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cover of The Hellenistic, Roman, and Medieval Glass from Cosa

The Hellenistic, Roman, and Medieval Glass from Cosa

David Frederick Grose (R. T. Scott, editor)

University of Michigan Press, 2017

The Hellenistic, Roman, and Medieval Glass from Cosa continues the exemplary record of publication by the American Academy in Rome on important classes of materials recovered in excavation from one of the principal archaeological sites of Roman Italy. Over 15,000 fragments of glass tableware, ranging in date from the mid-second century BCE to the early fifth century CE, were found at Cosa, a small town in Etruria (modern Tuscany). Cosa’s products were chiefly exported to North Africa and Europe, but its influence was felt throughout the Mediterranean world.

The research and analysis presented here are the work of the late David Frederick Grose, who began this project when no other city site excavations in Italy focused on ancient glass. He confirmed that the Roman glass industry began to emerge in the Julio-Claudian era, beginning in the principate of Augustus. His study traces the evolution of manufacturing techniques from core-formed vessels to free blown glass, and it documents changes in taste and style that were characteristic of the western glass industry throughout its long history.

At the time of Grose’s unexpected passing, his study was complete but not yet published. Nevertheless, the reputation of his work in this area has done much to establish the value and importance of excavating and researching Cosa’s glass. This volume, arranged and edited by R. T. Scott, makes Grose’s essential scholarship on the subject available for the first time.


 
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cover of The Power of Sacrifice: Roman and Christian Discourses in Conflict

The Power of Sacrifice

Roman and Christian Discourses in Conflict

George Heyman

Catholic University of America Press, 2007

In this work, George Heyman offers a fresh perspective on the similarities between pagan Roman and Christian thinking about the public role of sacrifice in the first two and a half centuries of the Christian era.
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cover of Treason in Roman and Germanic Law: Collected Papers

Treason in Roman and Germanic Law

Collected Papers

By Floyd Seyward Lear

University of Texas Press, 1965

"Treason" is a word with many connotations, a word applied to a host of varied offenses throughout the history of humanity. These essays by Floyd Seyward Lear analyze the development of the political theory of treason from its beginning in Roman Law to its transformation in the Germanic custom of the early Middle Ages.

The author has presented treason as a political idea, possessing historical continuity, though varying from age to age as it follows the evolution of political authority itself. These studies trace the shifting emphasis in crimes against the state from acts directed against a central absolutist authority to acts involving the personal relationship of a pledged troth and individual fealty. This is a shift from the concept of majesty in Roman law to the concept of fidelity in Germanic law with the corollary shift from allegiance as an act of deference to allegiance as a token of mutual fidelity.

These ideas are examined chronologically across an interval extending from archaic Roman law to incipiently feudal forms, from which modern theories of treason, allegiance, and sovereignty derive. Contemporary concepts in these political areas can hardly be understood apart from their historical origins. Broadly considered, this work is intended as a contribution to intellectual history.

Further, this collection represents the synthesis of material widely scattered in the primary sources and relevant secondary works. The two concluding bibliographical essays are intended as a general survey of the literature relevant to these studies in Roman and Germanic public law. Descriptive and interpretive works which deal with treason and its allied aspects of political and legal theory are not numerous in the English language.

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