The Birth Of Rome

In this lively and detailed study, Beth Severy examines the relationship between the emergence of the Roman Empire and the status and role of this family in Roman society. The family is placed within the social and historical context of the transition from republic to empire, from Augustus' rise to sole power into the early reign of his successor Tiberius. Augustus and the Family at the Birth of the Roman Empire is an outstanding example of how, if we examine "private" issues such as those of family and gender, we gain a greater understanding of "public" concerns such as politics, religion and history. Discussing evidence from sculpture to cults and from monuments to military history, the book pursues the changing lines between public and private, family and state that gave shape to the Roman imperial system.

Empires and Barbarians presents a fresh, provocative look at how a recognizable Europe came into being in the first millennium AD. With sharp analytic insight, Peter Heather explores the dynamics of migration and social and economic interaction that changed two vastly different worlds--the undeveloped barbarian world and the sophisticated Roman Empire--into remarkably similar societies and states. The book's vivid narrative begins at the time of Christ, when the Mediterranean circle, newly united under the Romans, hosted a politically sophisticated, economically advanced, and culturally developed civilization--one with philosophy, banking, professional armies, literature, stunning architecture, even garbage collection. The rest of Europe, meanwhile, was home to subsistence farmers living in small groups, dominated largely by Germanic speakers. Although having some iron tools and weapons, these mostly illiterate peoples worked mainly in wood and never built in stone. The farther east one went, the simpler it became: fewer iron tools and ever less productive economies. And yet ten centuries later, from the Atlantic to the Urals, the European world had turned. Slavic speakers had largely superseded Germanic speakers in central and Eastern Europe, literacy was growing, Christianity had spread, and most fundamentally, Mediterranean supremacy was broken. Bringing the whole of first millennium European history together, and challenging current arguments that migration played but a tiny role in this unfolding narrative, Empires and Barbarians views the destruction of the ancient world order in light of modern migration and globalization patterns.

Rome's most important and controversial archaeologist shows why the myth of the city's founding isn't all myth Andrea Carandini's archaeological discoveries and controversial theories about ancient Rome have made international headlines over the past few decades. In this book, he presents his most important findings and ideas, including the argument that there really was a Romulus--a first king of Rome--who founded the city in the mid-eighth century BC, making it the world's first city-state, as well as its most influential. Rome: Day One makes a powerful and provocative case that Rome was established in a one-day ceremony, and that Rome's first day was also Western civilization's. Historians tell us that there is no more reason to believe that Rome was actually established by Romulus than there is to believe that he was suckled by a she-wolf. But Carandini, drawing on his own excavations as well as historical and literary sources, argues that the core of Rome's founding myth is not purely mythical. In this illustrated account, he makes the case that a king whose name might have been Romulus founded Rome one April 21st in the mid-eighth century BC, most likely in a ceremony in which a white bull and cow pulled a plow to trace the position of a wall marking the blessed soil of the new city. This ceremony establishing the Palatine Wall, which Carandini discovered, inaugurated the political life of a city that, through its later empire, would influence much of the world. Uncovering the birth of a city that gave birth to a world, Rome: Day One reveals as never before a truly epochal event.

At once a historical essay and a self-conscious meditation on the writing of history, The Foundation of Rome takes as its starting point a series of accounts of Rome's origins offered over the course of centuries. Alexandre Grandazzi places these accounts in their contemporary contexts and shows how the growing sophistication in methodology gradually changed the accepted views of the city's origins. He looks, for example, at the hypercritical philology of the nineteenth century which cast aside everything that could not be verified. He then explains how the increase in archaeological discoveries and changing archaeological techniques influenced the story of Rome's birth. Grandazzi produces a depiction of Rome's origins that is both up-to-date and provocative. His use of scientific parallels in describing changes in the ways texts were analyzed and his broad familiarity with comparative material make his synthesis particularly illuminating, and he writes with clarity, verve, and wit.

In this lively and detailed study, Beth Severy examines the relationship between the emergence of the Roman Empire and the status and role of this family in Roman society. The family is placed within the social and historical context of the transition from republic to empire, from Augustus' rise to sole power into the early reign of his successor Tiberius. Augustus and the Family at the Birth of the Roman Empire is an outstanding example of how, if we examine "private" issues such as those of family and gender, we gain a greater understanding of "public" concerns such as politics, religion and history. Discussing evidence from sculpture to cults and from monuments to military history, the book pursues the changing lines between public and private, family and state that gave shape to the Roman imperial system.

Describes what the work of archaeologists has revealed about the Roman armies and the "barbarians" from Northern Europe whom they fought in the period of approximately 150 B.C. to 150 A.D.