Life Death And Entertainment In The Roman Empire

"Life, Death, and Entertainment in the Roman Empire gives those who have a general interest in Roman antiquity a starting point informed by the latest developments in scholarship for understanding the extraordinary range of Roman society. Family structure, gender identity, food supply, religion, and entertainment are all crucial to an understanding of the Roman world. As views of Roman history have broadened in recent decades to encompass a wider range of topics, the need has grown for a single volume that can offer a starting point for all these diverse subjects, for readers of all backgrounds."--Page 4 of cover.

The elaborate and inventive slaughter of humans and animals in the arena fed an insatiable desire for violent spectacle among the Roman people. Donald G. Kyle combines the words of ancient authors with current scholarly research and cross-cultural perspectives, as he explores * the origins and historical development of the games * who the victims were and why they were chosen * how the Romans disposed of the thousands of resulting corpses * the complex religious and ritual aspects of institutionalised violence * the particularly savage treatment given to defiant Christians. This lively and original work provides compelling, sometimes controversial, perspectives on the bloody entertainments of ancient Rome, which continue to fascinate us to this day.

A Companion to the Roman Empire provides readers with aguide both to Roman imperial history and to the field of Romanstudies, taking account of the most recent discoveries. This Companion brings together thirty original essays guidingreaders through Roman imperial history and the field of Romanstudies Shows that Roman imperial history is a compelling and vibrantsubject Includes significant new contributions to various areas of Romanimperial history Covers the social, intellectual, economic and cultural historyof the Roman Empire Contains an extensive bibliography

Despite the fact that the majority of the inhabitants of the Roman Empire lived an agricultural existence and thus resided outside of urban centers, there is no denying the fact that the core of Roman civilization—its essential culture and politics—was based in cities. Even at the furthest boundaries of the Empire, Roman cities shared a remarkable and consistent similarity in terms of architecture, art, infrastructure, and organization which was modeled after the greatest city of all, Rome itself. In Gregory Aldrete's exhaustive account, readers will have the opportunity to peer into the inner workings of daily life in ancient Rome, to witness the full range of glory, cruelty, sophistication, and deprivation that characterized Roman cities, and will perhaps even gain new insight into the nature and history of urban existence in America today. Included are accounts of Rome's history, infrastructure, government, and inhabitants, as well as chapters on life and death, the dangers and pleasures of urban living, entertainment, religion, the emperors, and the economy. Additional sections explore two other important Roman cities: Ostia, an industrial port town, and Pompeii, the doomed playground of the rich. This volume is ideal for high school and college students, as well as for anyone interested in examining the realities of life in ancient Rome. A chronology of the time period, maps, illustrations, a bibliography, and an index are also included.

Roman Lives, a new edition to the Focus Classical Sources library, is a sourcebook that explores ancient life in all strata of Roman society by examining the epitaphs and other inscriptions in Latin. For departments of Classics at the high school or college level which offer Roman Civilization, Epigraphy, or Roman culture courses.

Our taste for blood sport stops short at the bruising clash of football players or the gloved blows of boxers, and the suicide of a politician is no more than a personal tragedy. What, then, are we to make of the ancient Romans, for whom the meaning of sport and politics often depended on death? In this provocative, thoughtful book, Paul Plass shows how the deadly violence of arena sport and political suicide served a social purpose in ancient Rome. His work offers a reminder of the complex uses to which institutionalized violence can be put. Violence, Plass observes, is a universal part of human life, and so must be integrated into social order. Grounding his study in evidence from Roman history and drawing on ideas from contemporary sociology and anthropology, he first discusses gladiatorial combat in ancient Rome. Massive bloodshed in the arena, Plass argues, embodied the element of danger for a society frequently engaged in war, with outsiders--whether slaves, criminals, or prisoners of war--sacrificed for a sense of public security

The Roman Empire at Bay is the only one volume history of the critical years 180-395 AD, which saw the transformation of the Roman Empire from a unitary state centred on Rome, into a new polity with two capitals and a new religion—Christianity. The book integrates social and intellectual history into the narrative, looking to explore the relationship between contingent events and deeper structure. It also covers an amazingly dramatic narrative from the civil wars after the death of Commodus through the conversion of Constantine to the arrival of the Goths in the Roman Empire, setting in motion the final collapse of the western empire. The new edition takes account of important new scholarship in questions of Roman identity, on economy and society as well as work on the age of Constantine, which has advanced significantly in the last decade, while recent archaeological and art historical work is more fully drawn into the narrative. At its core, the central question that drives The Roman Empire at Bay remains, what did it mean to be a Roman and how did that meaning change as the empire changed? Updated for a new generation of students, this book remains a crucial tool in the study of this period.

On its initial publication, The Roman Community at Table during the Principate broke new ground with its approach to the integral place of feasting in ancient Roman culture and the unique power of food to unite and to separate its recipients along class lines throughout the Empire. John F. Donahue’s comprehensive examination of areas such as festal terminology, the social roles of benefactors and beneficiaries, the kinds of foods offered at feasts, and the role of public venues in community banquets draws on over three hundred Latin honorary inscriptions to recreate the ancient Roman feast. Illustrations depicting these inscriptions, as well as the food supply trades and various festal venues, bring important evidence to the study of this vital and enduring social practice. A touchstone for scholars, the work remains fresh and relevant. This expanded edition of Donahue’s work includes significant new material on current trends in food studies, including the archaeology and bioarchaeology of ancient food and drink; an additional collection of inscriptions on public banquets from the Roman West; and an extensive bibliography of scholarship produced in the last ten years. It will be of interest not only to classicists and historians of the ancient world, but also to anthropologists and sociologists interested in food and social group dynamics.