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Thanks to Olympias, a full-scale working model of an Athenian trieres (trireme or “three”) built by the Hellenic Navy during the 1980s, we better understand the physical properties of the trireme navies that defeated Xerxes at Salamis and helped build the Athenian Empire of the High Classical Age. The Age of Titans picks up the story of naval warfare and naval power after the Peloponnesian War, following it through the 4th and 3rd centuries BC when Alexander’s successors built huge oared galleys in what has been described as an ancient naval arms race. This book represents the fruits of more than thirty years of research into warships “of larger form” (as Livy calls them) that weighed hundreds of tons and were crewed by 600 to 1000 men and more. The book argues that concrete strategic objectives, more than simple displays of power, explain the naval arms race that developed among Alexander’s successors and drove the development of a new model of naval power we might call “Macedonian.” The model’s immense price tag was unsustainable, however, and during the third century the big ship phenomenon faded in importance, only to be revived unsuccessfully by Antony and Cleopatra in the 1st century BC.

No figure has had a more global impact than Alexander the Great, whose legends have encircled the globe and been translated into a dizzying multitude of languages, from Indo-European and Semitic to Turkic and Austronesian. This book examines parallel traditions of the Alexander Romance in Britain and Southeast Asia, demonstrating how rival Alexanders—one Christian, the other Islamic—became central figures in their respective literatures. In the early modern age of exploration, both Britain and Southeast Asia turned to literary imitations of Alexander to imagine their own empires and international relations, defining themselves as peripheries against the Ottoman Empire’s imperial center: this shared classical inheritance became part of an intensifying cross-cultural engagement in the encounter between the two, allowing a revealing examination of their cultural convergences and imperial rivalries and a remapping of the global literary networks of the early modern world. Rather than absolute alterity or strangeness, the narrative of these parallel traditions is one of contact—familiarity and proximity, unexpected affinity and intimate strangers.

This book collects together ten contributions by leading scholars in the field of Alexander studies that represent the most advanced scholarship in this area. They span the gamut between historical reconstruction and historiographical research and, viewed as a whole, represent a wide spectrum of methodology. This first English collection of essays on Alexander the Great of Macedon includes a comparison of the Spanish conquest of Mexico with the Macedonians in the east that examines the attitudes towards the subject peoples and the justification of conquest, an analysis of the attested conspiracies at the Macedonian and Persian courts, and studies of panhellenic ideology and the concept of kingship. There is a radical new interpretation of the hunting fresco from Tomb II at Vergina, and a new date for the pamphlet on Alexander's last days that ends the Alexander Romance, and a re-interpretation of the bizarre portents of his death. Three chapters on historiography address the problem of interpreting Alexander's attested behaviour, the indirect source tradition used by Polybius, and the resonances of contemporary politics in the extant histories.

Ancient emotions have only recently received scholarly analysis. Disgust has experienced relative neglect even now because of social and academic disinclination to study something in which humans take no pride—however essential to survival the primary emotion may be. Yet, the emotion, both a reflexive response to vile substances (“primary disgust”) and a powerful mechanism of social and moral exclusion (“moral disgust”), is salient in ancient literature and art. The study of ancient disgust is incorporated in a bourgeoning literature concerning slander, the aesthetics of ugliness, and the construction of social hierarchies or indeed the marginalization of social outcasts. Scholars from the United States and Europe have contributed fourteen essays here that range over diverse Greek historical and literary topics, such as disgust in the Hippocratic corpus, in classical Attic comedy, tragedy, and oratory, as well as Hellenistic learned poetry and Aesop. Roman historical and literary topics include the disgust root pig-, fastidium in Livy, witches, attitudes toward eunuch priests, theatrical professionals’ reputation, and disgust in the Latin novel. An introduction examines ancient concepts and images and modern political applications of this violent but necessary emotion. The book will interest scholars and students in history, literature, psychology, philosophy, anthropology, and sociology, and anyone attracted to emotion research, especially the so-called negative emotions.

Social scientists and political theorists have recently come to realize the potential importance of the classical Greek world and its legacy for testing social theories. Meanwhile, some Hellenists have mastered the techniques of contemporary social science. They have come to recognize the value of formal and quantitative methods as a complement to traditional qualitative approaches to Greek history and culture. Some of the most exciting new work in social science is now being done within interdisciplinary domains for which recent work on Greece provides apt case studies. This book features essays examining the role played by democratic political and legal institutions in economic development; the potential for inter-state cooperation and international institutions within a decentralized ecology of states; the relationship between state government and the social networks arising from voluntary associations; the interplay between political culture, informal politics, formal institutions and political change; and the relationship between empirical and formal methods of analysis and normative political theory. In sum, this book introduces readers to the emerging field of “social science ancient history.”

The endogenous rise of primary states constituted a major organizational revolution, for through emulation or coercion these states served as prototypes for all subsequent large-scale, politically organized societies that have replaced and encompassed all small-scale societies. Primary states emerged before sophisticated writing systems in six generally recognized regions: Mesopotamia, Egypt, the Indus Valley, China, Mesoamerica, and Andean South America. This book identifies Polynesia as the seventh such region by tracing the emergence of primary states in Hawai`i that, along with the Tongan state, were the only ones described by fully literate eyewitnesses. The Hawaiian state emergence model, constructed here from archaeological and historical evidence, employs comparisons with Tonga and five Polynesian nonstate societies to propose that the Hawaiian state emergence entailed a profound sociopolitical transformation in which leadership of each large Hawaiian island shifted from a relatively powerless symbolic chief to a warrior-king who exercised legitimate political power as head of a centralized government. The key management innovation was the ruler’s ability to assert control indirectly by delegating power among multiple tiers of a hierarchical bureaucracy. Modeled modifications of the old order also included the funding of government operations with taxes diverted from the goods once collected for distribution among commoners, the invention of conquest warfare, and the shift from dual ownership to chiefs’ assertion of property rights superior to those of commoners. According to the hard times hypothesis, a major impetus for the escalation of power politics may have been unrest among chiefs and commoners triggered by faltering agricultural productivity.

This book draws on theories of space in cultural geography and anthropology to study the representation of space in Apollonius of Rhodes’ epic poem, the Argonautika. In Apollonius’s narrative, the voyage of the Argo in quest of the Golden Fleece defines a space with mainland Greece as its center, and Greek culture provides the perspective through which the Argonauts’ experiences are principally portrayed. At the same time, the poem shows clearly the limits of Greek mastery of space. Some areas cannot be incorporated into Greek space, and in some episodes space is marked with signs that preserve narratives in which the perspectives of the non-Greek peoples whom the Argonauts encounter are preserved. Thus the poem both affirms the centrality of Hellenism and questions it at the same time; it implies the traditional Greek division of the world into themselves and “barbarians” and simultaneously destabilizes it through the Argonauts’ experiences of others as an interplay of similarity and difference. Ethnic boundaries and cultural identity are thus shown to be uncertain and open to negotiation. This sense of the blurring of boundaries speaks to the experiences of Greeks in the early Ptolemaic period in Alexandria, where they lived among and ruled Egyptians in a multicultural city at a time when the conquests of Alexander had expanded Greek cultural horizons. The poem uses the Argonautic myth to explore the anxieties about identity and the sense of new possibilities arising from this experience of cultural contact.

What factors already present in the society of the High Roman Empire developed and expanded into the world of Late Antiquity? What was distinct in this period from what went before? The answers to these questions embrace the fields of cultural history, politics, ideas, art, philosophy, pagan religion, Christian church, Greek and Latin literature, the army, the law, the provinces, settlement, and the economy. This book is an illustrated collection of fifteen essays on the later Roman world, and each study focuses on the two centuries from AD 200 to 400. The book challenges orthodoxies (for example, Honoré on law, Whitby on military life, Edwards on monotheism), gives coverage (Duncan-Jones on economy, Cameron on poetry, Elsner on art), and discusses the general issues and problems through major examples (McLynn on emperors in church, Papi on Italian towns, Adams on governing Egypt, Swain on Libanius, Garnsey on citizens, Dillon on philosophers, Walker on mummy portraits). The authors have set their contributions in the light of current approaches and bibliography, and the volume is a reference work in its own right.

The Late Assyrian Empire (c.900–612 BCE) was the first state to rule the major centres of the Middle East. The Assyrian court inhabited some of the most monumental palaces of its time. The Architecture of Late Assyrian Royal Palaces is the first book to provide an in-depth analysis of Late Assyrian palatial architecture; it offers a general introduction to all major royal palaces in the major centres of the empire: Assur, Kalḫu, Dur-Sharruken, and Nineveh. The book gives a comprehensive overview of all the relevant excavated materials, bringing together the architecture as currently understood within the broader framework of textual and art-historical sources, and providing new plans for all palaces. Research has often focused on a duality between public and private realms. This book redefines the architectural principles governing these palaces and proposes a new historical framework; it analyses the organization of access and movement, the spatial organization of the palace community, and the role of the king within the palaces. The book argues that architectural changes were guided by a need to accommodate ever-larger groups as the empire grew in size. The main reception suites became more monumental over time, but the general principles of Late Assyrian architecture remained. This included an architecture that focused on the interior of spaces, placed the king front and centre, and was primarily geared to state activity even in the more residential areas of the palaces.

This is a study that examines the sale of sex in classical Athens from a commercial (rather than from a cultural or moral) perspective. As a mercantile activity, however, prostitution was not untouched by elite Athenian antagonism toward business; as the “business of sex,” prostitution further evoked negativity from segments of Greek opinion uncomfortable with any form of carnality. Yet ancient sources also adumbrate another view, in which the sale of sex, lawful and indeed pervasive at Athens, is presented alluringly. The book explores the high compensation earned by female sexual entrepreneurs who often controlled prostitutional businesses that were perpetuated from generation to generation on a matrilineal basis, and that benefited from legislative restrictions on pimping. The author juxtaposes the widespread practice of “prostitution pursuant to written contract” with legislation targeting male prostitutes functioning as governmental leaders, and explores the seemingly contradictory phenomena of extensive sexual exploitation of slave prostitutes (male and female) coexisting with Athenian society’s pride in its legislative protection of slaves and minors against sexual outrage.

Among medieval Christian societies, Byzantium is unique in preserving an ecclesiastical ritual of adelphopoiesis, which pronounces two men as brothers. It has its origin as a spiritual blessing in the monastic world of Late Antiquity, becomes a popular social networking strategy among laypeople from the ninth century onwards, and still finds application in recent times. Located at the intersection of religious and social history, brother-making exemplifies how social practice can become ritualized and subsequently subjected to attempts of ecclesiastical and legal control. The purpose and application of adelphopoiesis can be studied within three large, and partially overlapping, contexts: within the context of male-male relations, as a way to formalize a partnership; within the context of ritual kinship strategies, as a way to expand one’s family circle; and within the context of Byzantine Christianity, as a way for the church to exercise influence and control.

Classical material was traditionally used to express colonial authority, but it was also appropriated by imperial subjects to become first a means of challenging colonialism, and then a rich field for creating cultural identities which blend the old and the new. Nobel prize winners such as Derek Walcott and Seamus Heaney have rewritten classical material in their own cultural idioms, while public sculpture in southern Africa draws on Greek and Roman motifs in order to represent histories of African resistance and liberation. These developments are explored in this collection of essays by scholars who debate the relationship between the culture of Greece and Rome, and the changes that have followed the end of colonial empires.

From 550 to 750 monastic culture became more firmly entrenched in Western Europe. The role of monasteries and their relationship to the social world around them was transformed during this period as monastic institutions became more integrated in social and political power networks. These collected essays focus on one of the central figures in this process, the Irish ascetic exile and monastic founder Columbanus (c. 550–615), his travels on the Continent, and the monastic network he and his Frankish disciples established in Merovingian Gaul and Lombard Italy. The post-Roman kingdoms through which Columbanus traveled and in which he established his monastic foundations were made up of many different peoples. As an outsider and immigrant, how did Columbanus and his communities interact with these peoples? How did they negotiate differences, and what emerged from these encounters? This volume aims to explore further the strands of this vibrant contact.

The empires of the ancient Near East and Mediterranean invented cosmopolitan politics. In the first millennia BCE and CE, a succession of territorially extensive states incorporated populations of unprecedented cultural diversity. This volume traces the development of cultural techniques through which empires managed difference in order to establish effective, enduring regimes of domination. It focuses on the relations of imperial elites with culturally distinct local elites, offering a comparative perspective on the varying depth and modalities of elite integration in five empires of the ancient Near East and Mediterranean. If cosmopolitanism has normally been studied apart from the imperial context, the essays gathered here show that theories and practices that enabled ruling elites to transcend cultural particularities were indispensable for the establishment and maintenance of trans-regional and transcultural political orders. The first cosmopolitans, imperial elites regarded ruling over culturally disparate populations as their vocation Their capacity to establish normative frameworks across cultural boundaries played a vital role in the consolidation of their power. Together with an introductory chapter which offers a theory and history of the relationship between empire and cosmopolitanism, the volume includes case studies of Assyrian, Seleucid, Ptolemaic, Roman, and Iranian empires that analyze encounters between ruling classes and their subordinates in the domains of language and literature, religion, and the social imaginary. The contributions combine to illustrate the dilemmas of difference that imperial elites confronted as well as their strategies for resolving the cultural contradictions that their regimes precipitated.

This unique study makes both a substantial contribution to our understanding of Roman political thought and a major contribution to the reception of Roman ideas about politics. The book reorients the discussion of the debt of early modern political thought from the familiar claims about republicanism and republican virtue to the rediscovery of a tradition of Roman constitutionalism. In the first part, we learn how a Roman concept of constitution emerged out of the crisis of the Republic. The emergency powers of the late Republic provoked Cicero and other contemporaries to turn an inchoate constitutionalism into explicit constitutional argument and constitutional theory. The crisis of the Republic thus brought about a powerful constitutionalism and convinced Cicero to articulate the norms and rights that would provide its substance; this typically Roman constitutional theory is described in the second part. Part three discusses the reception of Roman constitutional thought up to the late eighteenth century and the American Founding, which gave rise to a new constitutional republicanism. Special attention is paid to Jean Bodin, who emerges as a key thinker in a tradition leading up to Montesquieu and, eventually, the Federalist and John Adams. This tradition was characterized by a keen interest in the Roman Republic’s decline and fall and an insistence on the limits of virtue. The crisis of the Republic was interpreted as a constitutional crisis, and the only remedy to escape the Republic’s fate—military despotism—was thought to lie, not in republican virtue, but in Roman constitutionalism.

This book examines the history of the Aegean islands and the changing concepts of insularity in the late archaic and classical period, with particular emphasis on the 5th century and the period of Athenian imperial control over the Aegean world. The predominant presence of islands in the Aegean geographic landscape inevitably created a variety of different and sometimes even conflicting perceptions of insularity. Using the theoretical concept of network, the book examines the religious networks of the insular world of the Aegean (Calauria and Delos) and their later transformation into networks of imperial control for 5th-century Athens. Athenian control over the islands transformed the concept of insularity in Greek thought and even provided powerful imagery for Athenian self-representation, exemplified in the metaphor of the ‘island of Athens’. Imperial Athens may have strengthened some aspects of the concept of insularity, such as ‘weak island’ or ‘safe island’, but beyond imperial politics, there also lay a world of frequent interaction outside the sphere of mainstream political narrative. The book examines the cases of island-networking on a micro-political and economic level, as well the interaction between islands and their mainland dependencies, the peraiai.

Existing from the early third century BC to 63 BC, the Mithridatic kingdom of Pontos was one of the most powerful entities in the Mediterranean world. Under a series of vigorous kings and queens, it expanded from a fortress in the mountainous territory of northern Asia Minor to rule almost all the Black Sea perimeter. This is the first study in English of this kingdom in its entirety, from its origins under King Mithridates I around 280 BC until its last and greatest king, the erudite and cultured Mithridates VI the Great, fell victim to the expanding ambitions of the Roman Republic in 63 BC. Through a series of astute marriage alliances (one of which produced the ancestors of Cleopatra of Egypt), political acumen, and military ability, the Pontic rulers (most of whom were named Mithridates) dominated the culture and politics of the Black Sea region for over two hundred years. This book is a thorough exploration of the internal dynamics of the kingdom as well as its relations with the rest of the Mediterranean world, especially the ever-expanding Roman Republic.

This edited volume uses the prism of bad rule or tyranny to sharpen our understanding of political discourse from the ancient world to the Renaissance. Eleven chapters present case studies examining Hebrew, Greco-Roman, Byzantine, early, high, and late medieval, and Renaissance conceptions and representations of bad or tyrannical government. Since bad rule is always a perversion of the norm, its shifting conceptualizations shed light on historically specific assessments of what constitutes legitimate and acceptable political behavior. Meanwhile, political debate also reflects specific power structures, authors, and audiences. The book’s chapters, therefore, examine notions of bad rule within the ideological frameworks and societal patterns of the respective periods, thus painting a picture of historical and intellectual change. However, these often profound variations notwithstanding, the book also shows that it is meaningful to think of its subject as a ‘premodern Western tradition’, in the sense of an exchange of ideas. There are shared roots in Greek and biblical thought, and ongoing cross-fertilization spanning two millennia. Moreover, the rationale of both pro- and anti-monarchical discourse by and large derives from virtue ethics, in their Greek, Roman, and Christian incarnations. This reliance on morality as the foundation of political organization only declined in the sixteenth century, which therefore marks the end of the story of tyranny in premodern political thought told in this volume.

This study of the Roman reaction to foreign cults explores how religion contributed to the Romans’ need to reshape their community and their sense of what it meant to be Roman in the wake of Roman expansion from a single city to the dominant power in the Mediterranean basin. Roman religion is a particularly useful field within which to study Roman self-definition, for the Romans considered themselves to be the most religious of all peoples and ascribed their imperial success to their religiosity. The Romans were remarkably open to outside influences, installing foreign religious elements as part of their own religious system. However, the inclusion of so many foreign elements posed difficulties for maintaining a clear notion of what it meant to be Roman, and those difficulties became acute at the very moment when a territorial definition of Romanness was becoming obsolete. Using models drawn from anthropology, this book demonstrates that Roman religious activity beginning in the middle Republic (early third century b.c.e.) contributed to redrawing the boundaries of Romanness, allowing the Romans to maintain a clear sense of identity that could include the peoples they had conquered, especially the communities of Roman Italy. The book concludes with a brief look at the reforms of the first emperor Augustus, whose actions laid the foundation for further developments under the Empire.