Themes In Roman Society And Culture

Focused on the period 200 BCE to 300 CE, this contributed volume provides a thematic introduction to the social aspects of ancient Rome - its composition, institutions, structures, and cultural products - and challenges students to consider Roman society as more than a series of chronologicalevents.

Covering the Bronze Age, as well as the Archaic, Classical, and early Hellenistic periods, Themes in Greek Society and Culture introduces students to central aspects of ancient Greek society. The volume brings together 19 expert contributors who explore the institutions, structures,activities, and cultural output that formed the experience of living in ancient Greece.

Publisher Description

"One really must admire Harvey’s achievement in this sourcebook. With just 350 passages (more than half of them consisting of Latin inscriptions, from all over Rome’s empire), Harvey manages to give his readers a real sense of Roman private values and behaviors. His translations of the original texts are superb—both accurate and elegant. And he contextualizes his chosen passages with a series of remarkably economical but solidly reliable introductions. In a word, Harvey’s sourcebook strikes me as the best now available for a single-semester undergraduate course." —T. Corey Brennan, Rutgers University–New Brunswick

This book, first published in 1994, is concerned with discovering what it was like to be a slave in the classical Roman world.

This article seeks to define ‘water culture’ in Roman society by examining literary, epigraphic, and archaeological evidence, while understanding modern trends in scholarship related to the study of Roman water.

This book evaluates a hundred years of scholarship on how empire transformed the Roman world, and advances a new theory of how the empire worked and was experienced. It engages extensively with Rome's Republican empire as well as the 'Empire of the Caesars', examines a broad range of ancient evidence (material, documentary, and literary) that illuminates multiple perspectives, and emphasizes the much longer history of imperial rule within which the Roman Empire emerged. Steering a course between overemphasis on resistance and overemphasis on consensus, it highlights the political, social, religious and cultural consequences of an imperial system within which functions of state were substantially delegated to, or more often simply assumed by, local agencies and institutions. The book is accessible and of value to a wide range of undergraduate and graduate students as well as of interest to all scholars concerned with the rise and fall of the Roman Empire.

This study examines rivers as a literary phenomenon, particularly in the poetry of Vergil. It first considers the Greco-Roman understanding of the river in its primary symbolic roles, cosmological, ritual and ethnographical, and then analyzes the river as a literary device, arguing that descriptions of rivers in Roman poetry are, in many cases, a form of authorial comment on the progress or structure of a narrative.