Treaties true and false: The error of Philinus of Agrigentum

1985 ◽  
Vol 35 (1) ◽  
pp. 92-109 ◽  
Author(s):  
B. D. Hoyos

Rome and Carthage had established peaceful diplomatic relations before 300 b.c. — as early as the close of the sixth century according to Polybius, whose dating there no longer seems good cause to doubt. A second treaty was struck probably in 348. Both dealt essentially with traders' and travellers' obligations and entitlements, so any military or political terms sprang from that context. In both, the Carthaginians agreed to hand over any independent town they captured in Latium. In the first treaty they were not to establish a fort in Latium either; in the second, the Romans were not to found a city in Carthaginian Africa, Spain or Sardinia.But independent military considerations are the stuff of a third treaty concluded during Rome's war with Pyrrhus. Rome and Carthage now pledged each other military aid in certain circumstances, as we shall see. And ‘geopolitical’ concerns of a very broad kind imbued a treaty which was reported by the third-century historian Philinus of Agrigentum. By this, he stated, ‘the Romans must keep out of the whole of Sicily, the Carthaginians out of Italy’ (ἔδει Ῥωμαίους μ⋯ν ⋯πέχεσθαι Σικελίας ⋯πάσης, Καρχηδονίους δ' Ἰταλίας). This is Polybius' citation of Philinus' allegation; Polybius himself then roundly rejects the very existence of such a pact and declares himself at a loss to understand how his predecessor could record it, but modern scholarship is no longer all that ready to accept his view. A strong majority of historians prefer to follow the Agrigentine, and many see 306 b.c. as the likely year for the agreement because Livy records a ‘renewal’ then of a foedus with Carthage (without giving details).

Author(s):  
Andrew Chittick

Chapter 10, “The Buddhist Repertoire, Part 1: The Era of Pluralist Patronage,” is the first half of the third study of various repertoires of political legitimation. This chapter focuses on the development of Buddhist institutions and historiography in the fifth century, a period of pluralist patronage under the banner of Sinitic universalism. The Buddhist repertoire in maritime diplomatic relations with South Seas regimes proved an important staging ground for the ruler’s performance as a cakravartin, or Buddhist universal ruler, as well as a conduit for Buddhist expertise. By the end of the fifth century, Jiankang elites had developed Buddhist legends and practices that asserted that the Jiankang regime’s legitimacy derived, not from the Han Empire, but from its direct inheritance of legitimacy from the cakravartin Asoka, who had ruled in northern India in the third century BCE. This set the stage for the striking developments of the sixth century.


2021 ◽  
pp. 362-372
Author(s):  
Stavros I. Arvanitopoulos

The Byzantine state inherited a large number of defensive structures, on its borders and in the hinterland where ancient cities were refortified in response to barbarian raids, primarily during the third century. The fundamental characteristics of fortification architecture developed during the sixth century. Nevertheless, criteria for the selection of the location, dimensions, and certain construction and morphological features of the forts, towers, and city/barrier walls, were continually adapted to changes in society and state until the end of the empire. Systematic study of the defensive architectural remains including excavation, creation of synthetic works, and reliable maps will allow researchers to date, compare, and understand the evolution of fortification architecture as well as aspects of daily life in the empire.


1998 ◽  
Vol 45 (1) ◽  
pp. 19-26 ◽  
Author(s):  
T. P. Wiseman

The Romans knew that they had once been ruled by kings, and they believed, perhaps rightly, that the fall of the monarchy had taken place at what we would call the end of the sixth century B.C. The texts that tell us this – Livy, Dionysius, Plutarch, etc. – all depend on a historical tradition that can be traced back as far as the second half of the third century B.C., when the Roman literary genres of historical drama, historical epic, and prose historiography began. Before that, we do not know how the Romans conceived or recorded the memory of their own past.


Author(s):  
Angelos Chaniotis

Greek and Latin inscriptions—epitaphs, dedications, manumission records, lists of members of voluntary associations, laws, treaties, decrees, cult regulations, stamps on bricks and pottery, graffiti, and honorary inscriptions for masters and patrons—provide evidence concerning the terminology of unfree labour, attitudes towards slavery, and the origins, life, feelings, occupations, price, and legal conditions of slaves especially in urban areas from roughly the sixth century BC (Greece) and the third century BC (Italy) to Late Antiquity. Certain conventions—for example, regarding indicators of an individual’s status—mean that the use of epigraphic material for studying the complexities of slavery requires careful consideration of contexts: time, space, local traditions, addressees, language, and epigraphic habits.


Author(s):  
Jason Moralee

Chapter 2 surveys the evidence for the maintenance of the Capitoline Hill’s temples, statues, festivals, and administrative uses into the sixth century. While imperial rites celebrated at the Capitol faded in significance by the end of the third century, the hill was at the heart of the social and administrative worlds of late antique Rome. The chapter thus turns to the ways in which the hill was embedded in multiple late Roman neighborhoods and used for administrative purposes. Even as Rome’s urban environment was undergoing serious transformations in the use of public spaces, archaeology, epigraphy, and literary sources demonstrate that the Capitoline Hill was surrounded by neighborhoods displaying a high degree of sociability and commerce throughout this period.


1897 ◽  
Vol 3 ◽  
pp. 89-105
Author(s):  
Pieter Rodeck

The excavations of the British School at Athens, in the winters of 1896 and 1897, had the result of determining that the site, on which they were carried on, had been a burial ground previous to the sixth century B.C. and again after the third century, and that, in the meantime, it must have been covered by the Greek building, of which we laid bare the foundations. The plan of this building resembles that of a large gymnasium; the period of its existence coincides with that during which we know the gymnasium of Kynosarges to have existed, and the position of the site is such as the various mentions of Kynosarges by classic authors leads us to expect.


Author(s):  
M. WHITTOW

The story of Nicopolis ad Istrum and its citizens exemplifies much that is common to the urban history of the whole Roman Empire. This chapter reviews the history of Nicopolis and its transition into the small fortified site of the fifth to seventh centuries and compares it with the evidence from the Near East and Asia Minor. It argues that Nicopolis may not have experienced a cataclysm as has been suggested, and that, as in the fifth and sixth century west, where landowning elites showed a striking ability to adapt and survive, there was an important element of continuity on the lower Danube, which in turn may account for the distinctive ‘Roman’ element in the early medieval Bulgar state. It also suggests that the term ‘transition to Late Antiquity’ should be applied to what happened at Nicopolis in the third century: what happened there in the fifth was the transition to the middle ages. This chapter also describes late antique urbanism in the Balkans by focusing on the Justiniana Prima site.


2021 ◽  
pp. 366-377
Author(s):  
Paul Cartledge

Spartan public education was notably physical in focus, and internalized Spartan core values. Athletic nudity and anointing athletes with oil may have arisen from the culture of olive-oil-rich Sparta. Spartan athletic fervour possibly prompted Tyrtaeus’ critique of athletics. Sparta was an early and avid supporter of the Olympics (see the Lycurgus legend) and its citizens accrued forty-five of the known Olympic victories in the first two centuries of the festival, followed by a precipitous drop-off of athletic victors for a couple centuries thereafter. In equestrian events, they garnered seventeen or eighteen victories from 548 to about 368, capped by the first Olympic victory by a woman, Cynisca, in 396. Olympia was the Spartan venue of choice: there are oddly no known Spartan victors at the other major Panhellenic festivals. The site of their most avid participation was Lacedaemon itself, evidenced primarily by the ‘stele of Damonon’ (c.400– c.375), recording numerous victories at nine local festivals. A Leonidaea commemorating Leonidas was instituted from the third century bce to the second century ce. Physical education for Spartan girls is alluded to by Xenophon and Aristophanes, and evidenced by bronze figurines of the sixth century bce.


1980 ◽  
Vol 75 ◽  
pp. 269-283 ◽  
Author(s):  
Livingston Vance Watrous

John Pendlebury excavated a number of ancient sites in the upland Plain of Lasithi in central Crete (Fig. 1) during the years 1936 – 1938. The prehistoric sites which he excavated were published in this annual before his death in World War II. This article describes the results of his excavations at three Iron Age settlements and their cemeteries in Lasithi.The three sites – Agios Georgios Papoura, Donadhes, and Kolonna – are located along the northern edge of the Lasithi plain (Fig. 2). The finds from each excavation can be summarized as follows: I. Agios Georgios Papoura: Protogeometric to Archaic pottery from the settlement, and a nearby tomb of the Geometric period; II. Donadhes: a sixth century B.C. pottery deposit from an incompletely preserved building; III. Kolonna: two buildings, the first Archaic in date, and the second a weaving and dyeing establishment of the third century B.C., and a nearby tomb of the Archaic and Hellenistic periods.


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