Romans, Barbarians, and the Transformation of the Roman World: Cultural Interaction and the Creation of Identity in Late Antiquity. Edited by Ralph W. Mathisen and Danuta Shanzer. (Farnham, England: Ashgate, 2011. Pp. xix, 378. $99.95.)

Historian ◽  
2013 ◽  
Vol 75 (1) ◽  
pp. 201-203
Author(s):  
Lawrence Okamura
Keyword(s):  
Late Antiquity ◽  
Cultural Interaction ◽  
Roman World ◽  
The Creation

IV The Orator's Education

2006 ◽  
Vol 36 ◽  
pp. 63-77
Author(s):  
Catherine Steel
Keyword(s):  
Actual Practice ◽  
Roman World ◽  
The Creation

The order of chapters in this book may seem paradoxical: the finished orator is considered before the processes by which he reached that state are examined. The order is indeed back-to-front from the perspective of an individual orator's trajectory, whose training must inevitably precede his activity. But in the wider context of an attempt to understand the nature of oratorical training in the Roman world it makes sense to move from the practising orator back to the embryonic form, since the expectations and norms imposed on the fully fledged orator are the foundations which support the system of oratorical education. This observation does not imply any necessary confidence that Roman oratorical education was designed for the creation of orators who met the criteria for and defused the anxieties about oratory which I discussed in the previous chapter. And even if the material which a modern audience can access did suggest that Roman oratorical education was indeed good at producing Roman orators, there is of course no guarantee that actual practice in classrooms across the Empire bore any relation to these writings or displayed any competence at its task. But an awareness of the practice of oratory can usefully inform analysis of how orators were trained.

BEYOND BUTRINT: THE ‘MURSI SURVEY’, 2008

2016 ◽  
Vol 111 ◽  
pp. 269-297
Author(s):  
Richard Hodges ◽  
Erika Carr ◽  
Alessandro Sebastiani ◽  
Emanuele Vaccaro
Keyword(s):  
Bronze Age ◽  
Late Antiquity ◽  
Short Report ◽  
Mediterranean Landscapes ◽  
Ancient City ◽  
History Of ◽  
Byzantine Period ◽  
The Creation ◽  
The Impact ◽  
The Town

This article provides a short report on a survey of the region to the east of the ancient city of Butrint, in south-west Albania. Centred on the modern villages of Mursi and Xarra, the field survey provides information on over 80 sites (including standing monuments). Previous surveys close to Butrint have brought to light the impact of Roman Imperial colonisation on its hinterland. This new survey confirms that the density of Imperial Roman sites extends well to the east of Butrint. As in the previous surveys, pre-Roman and post-Roman sites are remarkably scarce. As a result, taking the results of the Butrint Foundation's archaeological excavations in Butrint to show the urban history of the place from the Bronze Age to the Ottoman period, the authors challenge the central theme of urban continuity and impact upon Mediterranean landscapes posited by Horden and Purcell, inThe Corrupting Sea(2000). Instead, the hinterland of Butrint, on the evidence of this and previous field surveys, appears to have had intense engagement with the town in the Early Roman period following the creation of the Roman colony. Significant engagement with Butrint continued in Late Antiquity, but subsequently in the Byzantine period, as before the creation of the colony, the relationship between the town and its hinterland was limited and has left a modest impact upon the archaeological record.

Gender, Memory, and Identity in the Roman World

2019 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Roman Empire ◽  
Late Antiquity ◽  
Roman History ◽  
Public And Private ◽  
Imperial Rome ◽  
The Past ◽  
Roman World ◽  
Material Sources ◽  
Close Relationship

This volume approaches three key concepts in Roman history — gender, memory and identity — and demonstrates the significance of their interaction in all social levels and during all periods of Imperial Rome. When societies, as well as individuals, form their identities, remembrance and references to the past play a significant role. The aim of Gender, Memory, and Identity in the Roman World is to cast light on the constructing and the maintaining of both public and private identities in the Roman Empire through memory, and to highlight, in particular, the role of gender in that process. While approaching this subject, the contributors to this volume scrutinise both the literature and material sources, pointing out how widespread the close relationship between gender, memory and identity was. A major aim of Gender, Memory, and Identity in the Roman World as a whole is to point out the significance of the interaction between these three concepts in both the upper and lower levels of Roman society, and how it remained an important question through the period from Augustus right into Late Antiquity.

A Living Calf at Sinai?

2020 ◽  
pp. 318-379
Author(s):  
Michael E. Pregill
Keyword(s):  
Late Antiquity ◽  
Major Elements ◽  
Golden Calf ◽  
Literary Context ◽  
Western Scholarship ◽  
The Creation

This chapter re-evaluates major aspects of the Golden Calf story in the Qur’an, proposing a reading of the narrative that breaks with those of both traditional Muslim and Western scholarship and seeks to restore it to its proper historical, religious, and literary context in Late Antiquity. The qur’anic references to the image worshipped by the Israelites provided Muslim exegetes with a pretext for depicting the Calf as alive or at least possessing some semblance of life. However, the qur’anic Calf is better understood not as ? lowing image of a calf but rather an image of a lowing calf, a distinction of enormous significance for the exegesis of the story. In the absence of a conception of the Golden Calf as actually or seemingly animate, the Qur’an’s allusions to the creation of this entity must be reinterpreted as well. This chapter thus proposes alternative explanations of the major elements of the traditional portrayal of the narrative, especially the depiction of the “Samaritan” as an outside interloper who created and animated the Calf through supernatural means, with Moses subsequently imposing a sentence of exile on both him and his descendants, the Samaritan community, for all time. Instead, the major elements of the key passage in the Qur’an can be interpreted as allusions to various biblical subtexts; the qur’anic story originally posited, like its Jewish and Christian precursors, that it was Aaron—called by the unique epithet al-sāmirī here—who had made the Calf and led the Israelites into sin.

Plotinus (AD 204/5–70)

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
EyjÓlfur Kjalar Emilsson
Keyword(s):  
Late Antiquity ◽  
Human Beings ◽  
Human Soul ◽  
Roman World ◽  
Philosophical Movement ◽  
Ultimate Cause ◽  
The One

Plotinus was the founder of Neoplatonism, the dominant philosophical movement of the Graeco-Roman world in late antiquity, and the most significant thinker of the movement. He is sometimes described as the last great pagan philosopher.His writings, the so called Enneads, are preserved as whole. While an earnest follower of Plato, he reveals other philosophical influences as well, in particular those of Aristotle and Stoicism. Plotinus developed a metaphysics of intelligible causes of the sensible world and the human soul. The ultimate cause of everything is ‘the One’ or ‘the Good’. It is absolutely simple and cannot be grasped by thought or given any positive determination. The One has as its external act the universal mind or ‘Intellect’. The Intellect’s thoughts are the Platonic Forms, the eternal and unchanging paradigms of which sensible things are imperfect images. This thinking of the forms is Intellect’s internal activity. Its external act is a level of cosmic soul, which produces the sensible realm and gives life to the embodied organisms in it. Soul is thus the lowest intelligible cause that immediately is immediately in contact with the sensible realm. Plotinus, however, insists that the soul retains its intelligible character such as nonspatiality and unchangeability through its dealings with the sensible. Thus he is an ardent soul-body dualist. Human beings stand on the border between the realms: through their bodily life they belong to the sensible, but the human soul has its roots in the intelligible realm. Plotinus sees philosophy as the vehicle of the soul’s return to its intelligible roots. While standing firmly in the tradition of Greek rationalism and being a philosopher of unusual abilities himself, Plotinus shares some of the spirit of the religious salvation movements characteristic of his epoch.

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