A Graeco-Roman Portrait of the Third Century A. D. and the Graeco-Asiatic Tradition in Imperial Portraiture from Gallienus to Diocletian

1961 ◽  
Vol 15 ◽  
pp. 1 ◽  
Author(s):  
Cornelius C. Vermeule III
1943 ◽  
Vol 33 (1-2) ◽  
pp. 65-70 ◽  
Author(s):  
Gervase Mathew

It is at least a tenable hypothesis that the acute phase of transition from classical to post-classic culture lies in the third century A.D. rather than in the fifth. The confused and tangled epoch between the accession of Septimius Severus and the accession of Diocletian seems either to foreshadow or to shape the future both for the Western Provinces and for the East. So much that had marked the civilisation of the Antonines, the sense of gravitas and the restraint of form, the tranquil acceptance of the interplay of individual privilege and obligation within a social structure conceived as effortlessly stable, the solid bourgeois standard of what was perhaps essentially a small-town culture, went down in the chaos of an economic collapse. The emergence of Neo-Platonism, the creation of the new conventions in Imperial portraiture and the triumph of the cult of Sol Invictus all seem to symbolise a change in the conception of the functions of personality and of the relationship of man with the Divine and of man with men.


Transfers ◽  
2017 ◽  
Vol 7 (2) ◽  
pp. 115-119 ◽  
Author(s):  
Susan E. Bell ◽  
Kathy Davis

Translocation – Transformation is an ambitious contribution to the subject of mobility. Materially, it interlinks seemingly disparate objects into a surprisingly unified exhibition on mobile histories and heritages: twelve bronze zodiac heads, silk and bamboo creatures, worn life vests, pressed Pu-erh tea, thousands of broken antique teapot spouts, and an ancestral wooden temple from the Ming dynasty (1368–1644) used by a tea-trading family. Historically and politically, the exhibition engages Chinese stories from the third century BCE, empires in eighteenth-century Austria and China, the Second Opium War in the nineteenth century, the Chinese Cultural Revolution of the mid-twentieth century, and today’s global refugee crisis.


Author(s):  
Barbara K. Gold

This chapter discusses the key issues surrounding Perpetua’s life and her narrative, the Passio Sanctarum Perpetuae et Felicitatis. It introduces the most perplexing circumstances around her life and times: the authorship of her Passio (which is written in at least three different hands); her life and family; the conditions of her martyrdom and of martyrdoms during the pre-Constantinian period; the status of martyrdom texts as personal, social, or historical documents; whether persecutions can be historically verified or were exaggerated by the Christians and others; and the afterlife of Perpetua and her text in writers from the third century to contemporary times. The introduction lays out the arguments for these thorny issues and tries to find a reasonable position on each one.


Author(s):  
Willy Clarysse

In this chapter, papyrus letters sent from superiors to their inferiors are studied on the basis of test cases ranging across the Graeco-Roman period in Egypt, from the third century BCE to the third century CE. This correspondence is drawn from four archival groups of texts: the archive of Zenon; the letters of L. Bellienus Gemellus and the letters of the sons of Patron; and the Heroninus archive. The letters are usually short, full of imperatives, and characterized by the absence of philophronetic formulae. Recurrent themes of the correspondence are urgency, rebukes, orders, and interdictions, and there is an almost total lack of polite phrases.


Author(s):  
Adrastos Omissi

This chapter begins by considering what made the late Roman state distinctive from the early Empire, exploring the political developments of the later third century, in particular the military, administrative, and economic reforms undertaken by the tetrarchs. It then explores the presentation of the war between the tetrarchy and the British Empire of Carausius and Allectus (286‒96), taking as its core sources Pan. Lat. X, XI, and VIII. These speeches are unique in the panegyrical corpus, in that two of them (X and XI) were delivered while the usurpation they describe was still under way, the third (VIII) after it was defeated. In this chapter, we see how the British Empire was ‘othered’ as piratical and barbarian, and how conflict with it helped to create the distinctive ideology of the tetrarchy.


Author(s):  
David S. Potter

This chapter offers an analysis of how inscriptions can complement the narratives of Roman history from the third century BCE to the third century CE provided in literary sources. They reveal certain historical events or details that would otherwise be unknown, and they supplement the information offered by the surviving Roman historians .


2021 ◽  
pp. 1-3
Author(s):  
Brent Arehart

Abstract On the basis of two neglected testimonia, this short note argues that the terminus ante quem for Philippos of Amphipolis (BNJ 280) should be moved forward to the third century or to the early fourth century c.e. if not earlier.


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