World History: BCE to 500CE

This book examines the importance of the past, both real and imagined, in constructing contemporary culture in the period AD 500–1000. Such acts of construction might exclude ‘outsiders’ or set out ideal forms of behaviour for ‘insiders’. This investigation goes beyond ‘history-writing’ in a narrow sense to examine philosophy, theology, liturgy and jurisprudence as vehicles for tradition and the imagination of a past ‘golden age’. The papers straddle the Roman-Persian frontier and go well into the Islamic period: together, they push the boundaries of ‘late antiquity’ into the varied language traditions: Not just Greek, but also Syriac, Armenian, Coptic and Arabic

This book is a study of the origins and development of ethnographic thought, Greek identity and narrative history - commonly referred to as Great Historiography. An introductory chapter outlines the problem, namely that current thinking on the way in which Greek ethnography and identity came into being has yet to take full account of recent advances in ethnographic and cultural studies. This, together with an apparent obliviousness to the results of material culture-based analyses of the Ancient Mediterranean attesting to high levels interconnectivity, mobility and exchange, has placed significant limitations upon our ability to understand the social and intellectual milieu from which Great Historiography would eventually emerge. The introduction also examines how modern preconceptions and concerns have structured the way in which Greek ethnography and identity are both framed and conceptualised. This is further underlined in a follow-up section exploring the attitudes and opinions underpinning Felix Jacoby's Die Fragmente der Griechische Historiker: a monumental work that played a key role in defining ethnography as genre. Chapter II conducts a broad census of the ethnographic imaginaire prior to the Persian Wars in order to challenge the prevailing orthodoxy that ethnographic interests were hazy and insubstantial prior to Xerxes' invasion of Greece — invariably conceived as an unprecedented clash of civilisations and cultures. Chapter III builds on this argument, exploring the varied ways in which ethnographic interests became manifest and the manner in which knowledge and ideas relating to foreign lands and peoples was variously disseminated. Chapter IV shifts in focus to examine how these discourses of identity and difference might have played out in a series of case studies: Olbia and its environs, the southernmost tip of the Italian peninsular (S. Calabria) and the imagined centres of Delphi and Olympia. The implications thus posed for current understanding of the origins and nature of Great Historiography are then explored (Chapter V), leading to a number of tentative conclusions regarding the manner in which ethnography, identity and the writing of history constitute overlapping and mutually implicated processes.

This book presents a study dedicated to the thirty years after the death of Alexander the Great in 323 BC. It deals with the emergence of the successor monarchies and examines the factors which brought success and failure. Some of the central themes are the struggle for pre-eminence after Alexander's death, the fate of the Macedonian army of conquest, and the foundation of Seleucus' monarchy. The book also examines the statesman and historian Hieronymus of Cardia, concentrating on his treatment of widow burning in India and nomadism in Arabia. Another highlight is the first full analysis of the epic struggle between Antigonus and Eumenes (318-316), one of the most important and decisive campaigns of the ancient world.

Policing the Roman Empire studies how Roman officials attempted to maintain law and order, focusing especially on police duties of Roman soldiers during the empire's first three centuries. Emperors, governors, lesser officials, and ordinary provincial inhabitants all helped enforce the law; they also all shared the hope or expectation that the state would provide some modicum of security. This same broad range of people saw potential benefits in using soldiers as police, a practice which markedly increased in the second and third centuries AD. Roman soldiers who were detached from their legions and posted among civilians helped administer the Empire and police its provinces. They countered banditry, enforced laws (including measures against Christians), and furthered elite interests (arresting runaway slaves, for example). Roman policing also helped ordinary people, though corruption and abuse were a constant problem (and one which the early imperial state earnestly tried to correct). The resulting picture is rich and complex, drawn from a wide array of sources.

This book makes use of recently discovered archaeological and epigraphical evidence to give an account of the religious life of ancient Athens. The city's many festivals are discussed in detail, with attention to recent anthropological theory; so too, for instance, are the cults of households and of smaller groups, the role of religious practice and argumentation in public life, the authority of priests, the activities of religious professionals such as seers and priestesses, magic, and the place of theatrical representations of the gods within public attitudes to the divine. A final section considers the sphere of activity of the various gods, and takes Athens as a uniquely detailed test case for the structuralist approach to polytheism.

In Renaissance Rome, ancient ruins were preserved as often as they were mined for their materials. Although the question of what to preserve and how continued to be subject to debate, preservation acquired renewed force and urgency as the new papal capital rose upon the ruins of the ancient city. Preservation practices became more focused and effective in Renaissance Rome than ever before. This book offers a new interpretation of the ongoing life of ancient buildings within the expanding early modern city. While historians and archaeologists have long affirmed that early modern builders disregarded the protection of antiquity, this study provides the first systematic analysis of preservation problems as perceived by the Renaissance popes, the civic magistrates, and ordinary citizens. Drawing on new evidence, this compelling study explores how civic officials balanced the defense of specific sites against the pressing demands imposed by population growth, circulation, and notions of urban decorum. Above all, the preservation of antiquity remained an indispensable tool to advance competing political agendas in the papal capital. A broad range of preservation policies and practices are examined at the half-ruined Colosseum, the intact Pantheon, and the little-known but essential Renaissance bridge known as the Ponte Santa Maria. Rome has always incorporated change in light of its glorious past as well as in the more pragmatic context of contemporary development. This investigation not only reveals the complexity of preservation as a contested practice, but also challenges us to rethink the way people in the past understood history itself.

Greek civilization and identity crystallized not when Greeks were close together but when they came to be far apart. It emerged during the Archaic period, when Greeks founded coastal city-states and trading stations in ever-widening horizons from the Ukraine to Spain. No center directed their diffusion, and the settlements (“colonies”) originated from a multitude of mother cities. The “Greek center” was virtual, at sea, created as a back-ripple effect of cultural convergence following the physical divergence of independent settlements. “The shores of Greece are like hems stitched onto the lands of Barbarian peoples” (Cicero). Overall and regardless of distance, settlement practices became Greek in the making, and Greek communities far more resembled each other than any of their particular neighbors, such as the Etruscans, Iberians, Scythians, or Libyans. The contrast between “center and periphery” hardly mattered (all was peri-, “around), nor was a bipolar contrast with barbarians of much significance. Rather, not only did Greek civilization constitute a decentralized network, but it also emerged, so this book claims, owing to its network attributes. Following a section on networks and history, it demonstrates its approach through case studies involving Rhodes, Sicily, the Far West (Phokaians), and the Phoenicians. The book concludes that it was a network dynamics of small worlds that rapidly foreshortened connectivity and multiplied links and hubs, thus allowing the flows of civilizational content and self-aware notions of identity to overlap and proliferate. Drawing on Mediterranean studies, ancient history, archeology, and network theory (especially in physics and sociology), this book offers a novel approach to historical interpretation.

This book challenges readers to reconsider China’s relations with the rest of Eurasia. Investigating interstate competition and cooperation between the successive Sui and Tang dynasties and Turkic states of Mongolia from 580 to 800, this book upends the notion that inhabitants of China and Mongolia were irreconcilably different and hostile to each other. Rulers on both sides deployed strikingly similar diplomacy, warfare, ideologies of rulership, and patrimonial political networking to seek hegemony over each other and the peoples living in the pastoral borderlands between them. The book particularly disputes the supposed uniqueness of imperial China’s tributary diplomacy by demonstrating that similar customary norms of interstate relations existed in a wide sphere in Eurasia as far west as Byzantium, India, and Iran. These previously unrecognized cultural connections, therefore, were arguably as much the work of Turko-Mongol pastoral nomads traversing the Eurasian steppe as the more commonly recognized Silk Road monks and merchants.

The history of the Persian Empire in the west has been seen/presented largely in terms of Persian-Greek interactions. However, the fact that the Persians mounted ten campaigns against Egypt from the late sixth through the fourth century indicates that the subjugation of Egypt was Persia’s primary concern in the west. This was true in the sixth and fifth centuries, when Persia conquered and, despite chronic revolts led by Egyptian dynasts, held on to Egypt, and also in the fourth century, when after successful Egyptian revolt, Persian kings spent nearly seventy years in largely futile attempts to recover Egypt. Trouble in the West reconstructs the largely lost story of the Persian-Egyptian conflict and reinterprets sixth–fourth-century eastern Mediterranean history in general from the perspective of Persia’s continuous preoccupation with Egypt.

Constantinople was named New Rome or Second Rome very soon after its foundation on the site of Byzantium in AD 324; over the next two hundred years it replaced the original Rome as the greatest city of the Mediterranean. This integrated collection of essays by leading international scholars examines the changing roles and perceptions of Rome and Constantinople in Late Antiquity from a range of scholarly perspectives and disciplines. The seventeen chapters cover both the comparative development and the shifting status of the two cities. Developments in politics and urbanism are considered, along with the cities’ changing relationships with imperial power, the church, and each other, and their evolving representations in both texts and images. These studies present important revisionist arguments and new interpretations of significant texts and events. The comparative perspective allows the neglected subject of the relationship between the two Romes to come into clear focus and avoids the teleological distortions common in much past scholarship. An introductory section sets the cities, and their comparative development, in context. Section Two looks at topography, and includes the first English translation of the Notitia of Constantinople. The following section deals with politics proper, considering the role of emperors in the two Romes and how rulers interacted with their cities. Section Four considers the cities through the prism of literature, in particular through the distinctively late antique genre of panegyric. Section Five considers Christianization and the two cities’ role as Christian capitals. Finally a provocative epilogue looks at the enduring Roman identity of the post-Heraclian Byzantine state.