Cities of Dreams

2020 ◽  
pp. 103-124
Author(s):  
Peter Thonemann

The civic life of Greek poleis in the eastern Roman empire is very prominent in the Oneirocritica (particularly in Book 4). This chapter will discuss the absence of the Classical Greek polis from Artemidorus’ conception of the Greek city (an aspect in which he differs profoundly from other Greek authors of his day), and the rich and detailed picture that he gives us of Greek civic institutions and hierarchies in the Severan period. The role of civic elites and the social expectations placed upon them is a major theme of the chapter, as is the degree to which the Oneirocritica reflects the distinctive social and political conditions of his two native cities, Ephesus and Daldis.

Author(s):  
Eduardo Manzano Moreno

This chapter addresses a very simple question: is it possible to frame coinage in the Early Middle Ages? The answer will be certainly yes, but will also acknowledge that we lack considerable amounts of relevant data potentially available through state-of-the-art methodologies. One problem is, though, that many times we do not really know the relevant questions we can pose on coins; another is that we still have not figured out the social role of coinage in the aftermath of the Roman Empire. This chapter shows a number of things that could only be known thanks to the analysis of coins. And as its title suggests it will also include some reflections on greed and generosity.


2017 ◽  
Vol 9 (4) ◽  
pp. 106
Author(s):  
Dominik Dorosz

During 39th session of UNESCO General Conference which held on 7 November 2017 the date May 16th was proclaimed as International Day of Light (IDL). This decision was made after the success of the International Year of Light (IYL) celebrated in 2015. It confirmed that raising awareness of the social role of photonics is crucial for further development. Based on the rich experience of IYL 2015 ("more than 13,000 activities took place in 147 countries to reach an estimated 100 million people"), the most important goals are to be followed by the IDL, including: raising social awareness, education, showing the influence of photonics on culture and art, promoting foreign cooperation and the important role of conducting basic research. As a result, it will lead to the creation of new solutions based on photonic technology, which has resulted in increased energy efficiency and improved quality of our life.


Author(s):  
Laura Salah Nasrallah

The letters of the apostle Paul contain the earliest evidence we have of followers of Christ. Archaeology and the Letters of Paul is about these letters, and, even more, about the social, political, economic, and religious lives of those to whom and with whom Paul wrote. This book uses archaeological materials to consider specific, local contexts among the cities of the Roman Empire. It engages in the imaginative work of history, amassing details from archaeology to build cases of the rich, complicated, embroiled lives of those adelphoi, the brothers and sisters whom Paul addressed in his letters.


1961 ◽  
Vol 11 (3-4) ◽  
pp. 199-208 ◽  
Author(s):  
B. Baldwin

This paper owes its inspiration to a remark made by Professor M. Rostovtzeff; in a note in his Social and Economic History of the Roman Empire on the widespread social unrest of the first two centuries A.D., having cited other literary authorities such as Dio Chrysostom, Aelius Aristides, etc., he writes: ‘The social problem as such, the cleavage between the poor and the rich, occupies a prominent place in the dialogues of Lucian; he was fully aware of the importance of the problem.’ No one, as far as I know, has attempted to collect and discuss the main passages in Lucian on this topic, and the latest writer on this aspect of Lucian reaches a conclusion quite opposed to Rostovtzeff and one which I believe to be wholly misleading. The aim of this paper is to collect and discuss the main references in Lucian to the social problem interpreting them in the light of Lucian's life and background, and the social and economic conditions of his age. In particular I shall stress the importance of the Cynic tradition as it bears on Lucian's attitude, but shall endeavour to show that this tradition is firmly rooted in practical politics and actual participation in social revolutionary movements and goes far beyond the repetition of mere ethical cliches generally ascribed to it.


2016 ◽  
Vol 33 (2) ◽  
pp. 121-163
Author(s):  
Scott L. Edwards

In the multilingual environments of Central European cities and courts, Italian musicians found a receptive market for their music. There they confronted a range of linguistic abilities that encouraged innovative approaches to musical composition and publication. Recent rediscovery of the opening sheets of Giovanni Battista Pinello’s 1584 Primo libro dele neapolitane enables us to assess one Genoese composer’s experience of a multi-ethnic, Central European milieu during an unprecedented migrational wave. As chapelmaster at the electoral court in Dresden with ties to aristocratic circles in Prague, Pinello also issued a German version that can be sung, according to the composer, simultaneously with the napolitane. This study examines the Central European market for Italian music, the role of the Holy Roman Empire in facilitating Italian migration, and cultural challenges foreign musicians faced in their new homes. Nineteenth-century myths of nationhood depended on histories of folk-like immobility, but in fact migration was a basic condition of early modern European life. Music historians have long been aware of individual musicians’ travels from the Low Countries in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, along with a new trend, emerging around 1600, toward northward emigration by Italian musicians. Nonetheless, there is much more to say about the social underpinnings of such movements. Pinello’s fusion of languages, poetic forms, and registers invites us to reimagine the multi-ethnic complexion of Central European musical centers in the late sixteenth century.


2004 ◽  
Vol 60 (1/2) ◽  
Author(s):  
Dieter H. Reinstorf

This article explores the social and religious dynamics of parables of Jesus in which “rich” and “poor” are juxtaposed. It focuses on Luke 16:19-31 (the parable of the rich man and the poor beggar Lazarus) and on Luke 18:9-14 (the parable of the Pharisee and the tax collector). The core of the exploration relates to questions concerning “wealth” and “poverty” in a limited-good society such as first-century Palestine. The article aims to expose the legitimisation provided by the Israelite elite to ensure the collection of taxes placed on the peasant population by the Roman Empire.


Author(s):  
Sara Forsdyke

This article looks at the parallel evolution of civic institutions, all of which culminated in the polis, the ‘city-state’, as the backdrop to the rich cultural legacy of the fifth and fourth centuries. Historians have demonstrated that the formal institutions of the Greek city-state are best understood as emerging from, but still very much embedded within, a much broader range of collective practices and discourses. Nevertheless, it is the dynamic interplay between the institutional structures of the state and these broader practices and discourses that has been the focus of much of the most fruitful scholarship on the ancient Greek city-state over the past thirty years. The discussion then turns to some of the most interesting areas of investigation in current scholarship on the interaction between formal institutions and broader cultural activities and norms in the Greek city-state.


1960 ◽  
Vol 50 (1-2) ◽  
pp. 21-36 ◽  
Author(s):  
J. N. L. Myres

The circumstances in which Roman rule over Britain came to an end have always been something of a puzzle to historians. There is of course no contemporary record giving a continuous narrative of the relevant events, and the few brief notices in ancient sources about British affairs in the first two decades of the fifth century come from writers of various dates and degrees of authority, none of whom seems to have had any first-hand knowledge of what took place. It is, therefore, hardly surprising that what they say should be subject to wide differences of interpretation, differences all the wider because some of the interpreters have been viewing the events from the standpoint of later English history and without an intimate knowledge of the Roman Empire in the fifth century. And it must further be admitted that, among scholars familiar with the conditions of this age, there has been something of a gap between those concerned with matters of history, whether political, administrative, social, or economic, and those concerned with thought and opinion, and primarily, of course, as theologians with the development of Christian doctrine in the great age of Ambrose, Jerome, and Augustine. It is easy for theologians to forget that the immense creative achievement of these thinkers was carried out at a time when the foundations of the society they knew were collapsing under external pressure and internal strain, and it is easy for historians to forget that a society riddled with corruption and precariously held together by the barbarous methods of a repressive tyranny was yet the seed-bed for an extraordinary flowering of the human spirit. It is difficult for either to remember that the forms which that flowering took and the imagery within which it found expression inevitably reflected the social and political conditions, the legal and judicial practices, familiar to those who gave it birth.


2015 ◽  
Vol 39 (1) ◽  
pp. 53
Author(s):  
Damien Carraz

RESUMO: As ordens militares, como senhores eclesiásticos, exerceram a justiça temporal sobre populações das quais elas estavam encarregadas. A historiografia, se ele se interessou pelos conflitos de jurisdição que opuseram os poderes soberanos às comendadorias, subestimou, salvo exceções, as atividades judiciárias destas últimas. Os ricos arquivos das ordens do Hospital e do Templo, no Midi Francês, fornecem belas séries de atas da prática judiciária – clamores, inquéritos criminais, processos verbais de condenações... O caso dos dois senhorios templários de Lansac e de Montfrin e as comparações oferecidas pela importante jurisdição hospitalária de Manosque, recentemente e notavelmente estudada, autorizam uma contribuição sobre o papel dos irmãos guerreiros na difusão dos usos jurídicos e no controle social. O pessoal empregado no serviço destas pequenas justiças senhoriais, os procedimentos utilizados pela justiça criminal, a repressão da delinquência ordinária que assolava estes castra da Baixa Provença e, enfim, os limites opostos ao poder coercitivo do Templo pela organização das comunidades e pelo reforço do Estado foram sucessivamente evocados. O funcionamento, os ideais almejados, assim como a ação repressiva, pouco evidenciam a especificidade desta justiça da Igreja que não recusava o exercício do merum imperium e a aplicação das penas aflitivas. Centradas sobre o século XIII, período de transição na história do procedimento, estas primeiras observações desejariam ser prosseguidas para os dois séculos seguintes: a originalidade da justiça do Hospital, com a instauração de uma ordem moral, mais do que cívica, apareceria mais, tanto que seria necessário avaliar a resistência destes senhorios às reconquistas jurisdicionais do Estado principesco. ABSTRACT:The military orders, as ecclesiastical gentlemen, exercised the temporal justice over populations which they were in charge of. The historiography, if he got interested about the jurisdiction conflicts that have opposed the sovereign powers to the commanderies, underestimated, with some few exceptions, the judicial activities of these last ones. The rich archives from the orders of the hospital and the temple, at the French Midi, provide beautiful series of the judicial practices - clamors, criminal investigations, verbal processes of condemnations... The case of the two templary landlords of Lansac and of Montfrin and the comparisons offered by the important hospitaller jurisdiction of Manosque, recently and notably studied, authorize an contribution over the role of the warrior brothers on the difusion on the juridical uses and on the social control. The people who ar e employed on the service of those small stately justices, the procedures used by the criminal justice, the repression of the ordinary delinquency that plagued those castra of the Low Provence and, ultimately, the limits opposed to the coercive power of the temple for the organization of the communities and for the reinforcement of the state were successively evoked. The operation, the desired ideals, just like the repressive action, do not show at all the specificity of the church's justice which wouldn't refuse the exercise of merum imperium and the application of the afflictive feathers. Centered over the 13th century, period of transaction on the history of procedure, these first observations would desire to be pursued for the two following centuries: the originality of the hospital's justice, with the establishment of a moral order, more than civic, would appear so much more that it would be necessary to evaluate the resistance of tho se landlords to the court re-conquests of the princely State.


Author(s):  
Mireille Rebeiz

This article examines the gradual disintegration of Zahra, a girl from Lebanon. It studies the role of mothers in patriarchal societies and the impact of their conservative education on their daughters’ emotional and psychological growths. Raised to believe in her inferiority due to her femaleness, Zahra constantly tries to live up to the social expectations for the female gender. Each subsequent trial ends in failure. When the civil war breaks out in Lebanon, the resulting societal chaos temporarily relieves Zahra from the duties of her gender. Only this break is shortly lived as Zahra is killed.  


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