From the History of the Worship of Apollo at Actium

1959 ◽  
Vol 52 (4) ◽  
pp. 215-221
Author(s):  
F. Sokolowski

Until the last few years we had scanty information on the cult of Apollo at Actium, which, after the victory of Augustus won there in 31 B.C., became very popular in the Greek and Roman world. The games of Actium, reorganized and elevated to panhellenistic rank, flourished for a long time in the Roman empire. The lucky discovery of an inscription at Olympia, from the end of the third century B.C., has now brought us new light on the earlier history of this cult.

Nordlit ◽  
2014 ◽  
pp. 191
Author(s):  
Per-Bjarne Ravnå

<em>“What Have the Romans Ever Done for Us Here in North Norway?”: On Possible Connections Between the Roman Empire and Northernmost Norway. </em>This article argues that scholars studying the early history of northern Norway should pay more attention to Roman history. Even if the geographical distances were long, there are clear signs of connections between inhabitants of northern Norway and the Roman world during the Roman era. In order to understand these connections scholars also need to study Roman history in its own right. To make this point the article investigates the possible Roman connections of a well-known warrior grave from Steigen (Nordland County, North Norway), dated to the middle of the third century CE. The investigation yields no stunning new discoveries, but aims to contribute to a broader and more well-founded understanding of the buried man and the experiences he might have had, as well as a cautious and informed view of broader connections between the North and the Roman world.


Author(s):  
Andrew Wilson

This chapter summarizes the archaeological evidence currently known for Roman water-mills, tracing the development and spread of water-powered grain milling over time across the Roman Empire. Problems of quantification and evidence bias, both documentary and archaeological, are addressed. In particular, it is argued that large discoidal millstones, formerly thought to derive either from animal-powered or water-powered mills, must come from water-mills, and that the idea of Roman animal-driven mills with discoidal millstones is a myth. This dramatically increases the amount of evidence available for water-powered grain milling, although very unevenly spread across the empire, and heavily dependent on the intensity of research in particular regions—good for Britain, parts of France, and Switzerland; poor everywhere else. The chapter also summarizes the state of knowledge on other applications of water-power—for ore-crushing machines at hard-rock gold and silver mines (by the first century AD), trip-hammers, tanning and fulling mills, and marble sawing (by the third century AD). The picture is fast-changing and the body of evidence continues to grow with new archaeological discoveries. The chapter ends with some thoughts about the place of water-power in the overall economy of the Roman world, and on the transmission of water-powered technologies between the Roman and medieval periods.


2021 ◽  
pp. 55-68
Author(s):  
Phillip Sidney Horky

AbstractThis essay tracks a brief history of the concept of ‘co-breathing’ or ‘conspiration’ (συμπνοία), from its initial conception in Stoic cosmology in the third century BCE to its appropriation in Christian thought at the end of the second century CE. This study focuses on two related strands: first, how the term gets associated anachronistically with two paradigmatic philosopher-physicians, Hippocrates and Pythagoras, by intellectuals in the Early Roman Empire; and second, how the same term provides the early Church Fathers with a means to synthesize and explain discrete notions of ‘breath’ (πνεῦμα) through a repurposing of the pagan concept. Sources discussed include figures associated with Stoic, Pythagorean, and early Christian cosmologies.


1964 ◽  
Vol 10 ◽  
pp. 15-23 ◽  
Author(s):  
Albrecht Dihle

Going through the literature of late antiquity, of, say, the third and fourth centuries A.D., one is likely to discover very easily three different concepts of Indian geography.(1) In literary—not in scientific—texts which belong to the classical tradition, India is usually thought of as the country of two big rivers, namely the Indus and the Ganges. This India does not include the region south of the Vindhya mountains, in spite of the fact that the commercial relations between South India and the Roman empire had been particularly close during the first and second centuries A.D. India, according to this literary tradition, was accessible by land, by following the course of Alexander's campaign, whereas Indian trade in the Roman period actually followed the passage provided by the monsoon, which had been discovered in the late Hellenistic period. Many details of that classical or rather classicistic conception of India can be gathered from Philostratus' Life of Apollonius, written early in the third century A.D., as well as from the History of Alexander, falsely attributed to Callisthenes.


2001 ◽  
Vol 45 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-20 ◽  
Author(s):  
JOHN JORY

Abstract Pantomime, a form of masked mime, is known in the Hellenistic world from the third century BC. In a modified form it was the most popular type of performance on the stages of the Roman empire. The masks worn differed from the masks of drama in that they had closed mouths. The first part of the paper demonstrates that it is possible to classify types of pantomime mask in the same way that the masks of drama have been classified. The second part looks at the chronology and provenance of the surviving representations of pantomime masks and suggests reasons for the different dates at which they were incorporated into the theatrical iconography of various areas of the Roman world.


2017 ◽  
pp. 241-267 ◽  
Author(s):  
Eberhard W. Sauer ◽  
Jebrael Nokandeh ◽  
Konstantin Pitskhelauri ◽  
Hamid Omrani Rekavandi

The Roman Empire, and its eastern and western successor states, controlled the majority of Europe’s population for approximately half a millennium (first century BC to fifth century AD), holding dominant power status from the second century BC to the seventh century AD, longer than any other state in the western world in history, and it was also the only empire ever to rule over the entire Mediterranean. Its ability to integrate ethnic groups and its well-organised military apparatus were instrumental to this success. From the third century onwards, however, the balance increasingly shifted; the physical dimensions of fortresses and unit sizes tended to decrease markedly in the Roman world, and the tradition of constructing marching camps and training facilities seems to have been abandoned. By contrast, the Sasanian Empire increasingly became the motor of innovation. Already in the third century it matched Rome’s abilities to launch offensive operations, conduct siege warfare and produce military hardware and armour. Jointly with the Iberians and Albanians, the empire also made skilful use of natural barriers to protect its frontiers, notably by blocking the few viable routes across the Caucasus. By the fifth/sixth century, it pioneered heavily fortified, large, rectangular campaign bases, of much greater size than any military compounds in the late Roman world. These military tent cities, filled with rectangular enclosures in neat rows, are suggestive of a strong and well-disciplined army. Like these campaign bases, the contemporary c. 200km-long Gorgan Wall, protected by a string of barracks forts and of distinctly independent design, is not copied from prototypes elsewhere. The evidence emerging from recent joint projects between the Iranian Cultural Heritage, Handcraft and Tourism Organisation and the Universities of Edinburgh, Tbilisi and Durham suggests that in late antiquity the Sasanian army had gone into the lead in terms of organisational abilities, innovation and effective use of its resources.


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.


1979 ◽  
Vol 26 (2) ◽  
pp. 181-190 ◽  
Author(s):  
John Thorley

It may seem strange to link the Roman Empire with a Himalayan kingdom which hardly gets a mention in most standard works on Roman history, but in fact during the second and early third centuries A. D. these two powers enjoyed a cordial and mutually profitable relationship which was of considerable economic importance to both. From the end of the first century A. D. to the middle of the third century the Kushans controlled what is now Afghanistan, Pakistan, Kashmir, parts of Soviet and Chinese Central Asia, and much of the Ganges plain. Their history has proved difficult to reconstruct, since they left no historical writing, and even the chronology of their kings is still disputed, but enough is now known for us to begin to piece together, though still somewhat tentatively, the strange and exotic relationship between this distant state and the Roman world, and perhaps in the process to contribute from Roman history to the problems of Kushan dating.


2013 ◽  
Vol 26 (4) ◽  
pp. 587-593 ◽  
Author(s):  
Geoffrey Lloyd

My subject is the history of science in antiquity, where the convention I adopt for “antiquity” is that it covers everything from the earliest recorded Mesopotamian investigations in the third millennium BCE down to the end of the third century CE, by which time two particularly significant upheavals had taken place at either end of the Euro-Asia land mass. I refer to the Christianization of the Greco-Roman World and the rise of Buddhism in China. That study poses a number of distinctive problems, both substantive and methodological, which I shall go on immediately to identify. At the same time it is particularly worthwhile, in my view, for the light it can throw on very early efforts at understanding the physical world. Let me give a brief preliminary explanation of my main thesis.


1973 ◽  
Vol 42 (3) ◽  
pp. 309-319 ◽  
Author(s):  
William R. Schoedel

Sometime betweena.d.176 anda.d.180 Athenagoras, a Christian, an amateur philosopher and possibly an Athenian, wrote aPleaaddressed to the emperors Marcus Aurelius and Commodus. This document is marked by a carefully controlledapologeticaim unmarred by crude efforts to convert and is remarkable for the positive attitude it shows toward the Roman emperors and the administration of justice throughout their realm. Athenagoras' apology was lost sight of in antiquity, in all likelihood, because it contributed so little to theology; precisely for the same reason it is valuable to us in our assessment of the political and social awareness of a segment of Christians shortly before the empire plunged into the troubles of the third century. Athenagoras was obviously well trained in rhetoric; he had dabbled in philosophy; and he clearly felt himself culturally superior to the “common men, artisans, and old women” whom he praises for their simple, if unreasoned, display of Christian virtue (11.4). He is representative of a growing elite in Christian circles which was seeking to explain the new religion to the Graeco-Roman world.


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