Unbound From Rome

An expansive look at ancient art and architecture over four centuries highlighting the diversity of makers and viewers within and beyond Rome's ever-changing political boundaries Roman art and architecture is typically understood as being bound in some ways to a political event or as a series of aesthetic choices and experiences stemming from a center in Rome itself. Moving beyond the misleading catchall label "Roman," John North Hopkins aims to untangle the many peoples whose diverse cultures and traditions contributed to Rome's visual culture over a four-hundred-year time span across the first millennium BCE. Hopkins carefully reconsiders some of the period's most iconic works by way of the many practices and peoples bound up with them. Some of these include the extraordinary and complex effort to build the Temple of Jupiter; the creative actions and diverse encounters tied to luxury objects like the Ficoroni Cista; and the important meanings held by sacred temple sculpture and votive offerings through their making and subsequent practices of devotion. A key purpose of this book is to question an idea of Rome that has focused on elite production and the textual record; Hopkins instead calls attention to the lesser-known--often silenced--actors who were integral players. The result is a deep understanding of a diverse and historically rich Italic and Mediterranean world, as well as the myriad cultures, communities, and individuals who would have made and experienced art within and around the changing political boundaries of Rome.

This groundbreaking study traces the development of Roman architecture and its sculpture from the earliest days to the middle of the 5th century BCE. Existing narratives cast the Greeks as the progenitors of classical art and architecture or rely on historical sources dating centuries after the fact to establish the Roman context. Author John North Hopkins, however, allows the material and visual record to play the primary role in telling the story of Rome’s origins, synthesizing important new evidence from recent excavations. Hopkins’s detailed account of urban growth and artistic, political, and social exchange establishes strong parallels with communities across the Mediterranean. From the late 7th century, Romans looked to increasingly distant lands for shifts in artistic production. By the end of the archaic period they were building temples that would outstrip the monumentality of even those on the Greek mainland. The book’s extensive illustrations feature new reconstructions, allowing readers a rare visual exploration of this fragmentary evidence.

In this richly varied selection of Tony Harrison's provocative prose of the last fifty years, the great poet of page, stage and screen presents a lifetime's thinking about art and politics, creativity and mortality. In so doing, he takes us on an extraordinary journey through languages and across continents and millennia, from his Nigerian Lysistrata to the British Raj of his version of Racine's Phèdre, to post-Communist Europe for the film Prometheus to a one-off performance of The Kaisers of Carnuntum at the Roman amphitheatre in Austria on the Danube, to the peace camp at Greenham Common, and from a Leeds street bonfire celebrating the defeat of Japan by the new atomic bomb to wines made from the vines on volcanoes.A collection of work filled with passion and humour that educates as it dazzles.'More than Yeats, Eliot or Auden, more than anyone writing in English this century, and perhaps the two before that as well, Harrison has demonstrated that verse drama remains a living artistic possibility.' Observer

"As long as there are readers of Paul, there will be always be other perspectives." The essays in this second edition of Paul Unbound: Other Perspectives on the Apostle provide introductions to Paul's relationship to and views on the Roman Empire, first-century economic stratification, his opponents, ethnicity, the law, Judaism, women, and Greco-Roman rhetoric. Contributors Warren Carter, Charles H. Cosgrove, A. Andrew Das, Steven J. Friesen, Mark D. Given, Deborah Krause, Mark D. Nanos, and Jerry L. Sumney have added addendums to their original essays and updated the bibliography to take into account scholarship produced in the decade since the publication of the first edition. The collection provides essential background and sets out new directions for study useful to students of the New Testament and Paul's letters.

Staging the World is an illustrated study of the Roman triumphal procession in its capacity as spectacle and performance. Ida Ostenberg analyses how Rome presented and perceived the defeated on parade. Spoils, captives, and representations are the objects, and the basic questions to be asked concern both contents and context: What was displayed? How was it paraded? What was the response? The triumph was a crowded civic celebration, when spectators met with coins from Spain and Asia, Jewish temple treasures, silver plate and furniture from opulent royal feasts, trees from eastern gardens, Punic elephants appearing as in battle, kings, long known by name only, and ferocious barbarians dressed in outlandish costumes. Ostenberg aims to show what stories the Roman triumph told about the defeated and what ideas it transmitted about Rome itself.

Layers / by Heather Hyde Minor -- Lost and found / by Carolyn Yerkes -- Pages / by Carolyn Yerkes -- Dedicated and sent / by Heather Hyde Minor -- Bound / by Heather Hyde Minor -- Sold / by Carolyn Yerkes.

"The oldest and strongest emotion of mankind is fear, and the oldest and strongest kind of fear is fear of the unknown." --H. P. LOVECRAFT, "Supernatural Horror in Literature" Howard Phillips Lovecraft forever changed the face of horror, fantasy, and science fiction with a remarkable series of stories as influential as the works of Poe, Tolkien, and Edgar Rice Burroughs. His chilling mythology established a gateway between the known universe and an ancient dimension of otherworldly terror, whose unspeakable denizens and monstrous landscapes--dread Cthulhu, Yog-Sothoth, the Plateau of Leng, the Mountains of Madness--have earned him a permanent place in the history of the macabre. In Tales of the Cthulhu Mythos, a pantheon of horror and fantasy's finest authors pay tribute to the master of the macabre with a collection of original stories set in the fearsome Lovecraft tradition: ¸ The Call of Cthulhu by H. P. Lovecraft: The slumbering monster-gods return to the world of mortals. ¸ Notebook Found in a Deserted House by Robert Bloch: A lone farmboy chronicles his last stand against a hungering backwoods evil. ¸ Cold Print by Ramsey Campbell: An avid reader of forbidden books finds a treasure trove of deadly volumes--available for a bloodcurdling price. ¸ The Freshman by Philip José Farmer: A student of the black arts receives an education in horror at notorious Miskatonic University. PLUS EIGHTEEN MORE SPINE-TINGLING TALES!