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"How were space and movement in Roman cities affected by economic life? What can the study of Roman urban landscapes tell us about the nature of the Roman economy? These are the central questions addressed in this volume. While there exist many studies of Roman urban space and of the Roman economy, rarely have the two topics been investigated together in a sustained fashion. In this volume, an international team of archaeologists and historians focuses explicitly on the economics of space and mobility in Roman imperial cities, in both Italy and the provinces, east and west. Employing many kinds of material and written evidence and a wide range of methodologies, the contributors cast new light both on well-known and less-explored sites. With their direct focus on the everyday economic uses of urban spaces and the movements through them, the contributors offer a fresh and innovative perspective on the workings of Roman urban economies and on the debates concerning space in the Roman world. This volume will be of interest to archaeologists and historians, both those studying the Greco-Roman world and those focusing on urban economic space in other periods and places, as well as to other scholars studying pre-modern urbanism and urban economies"--

1. Between Greece and Rome : forging a primordial identity for an imperial aristocracy / Andreas Hartmann -- 2. Rituals of killing : public punishment, munera and the dissemination of Roman values and ideology in the Imperium Romanum / Johannes Hahn -- 3. The war cry : ritualized behaviour and Roman identity in ancient warfare, 200 BCE-400 CE / Conor Whately -- 4. Uniting the army : the use of rituals commemorating Germanicus to create an imperial identity / Gwynaeth McIntyre -- 5. Joining the empire : the imperial cult as a marker of a shared imperial identity / Jesper Majbom Madsen -- 6. Promoting family, creating identity : Septimius Severus and the imperial family in the rituals of the ludi saeculares / Jussi Rantala -- 7. Constructing a religious landscape : Terminalia, Fortuna Muliebris and the Augustan ager Romanus / Claudia Beltrao da Rosa -- 8. The monument of Roma and Augustus on the Athenian Acropolis : imperial identities and local traditions / Fabio Augusto Morales -- 9. Herodes Atticus, Memnon of Ethiopia and the Athenian ephebeia / Joel Allen -- 10. Roman influence on rituals of identification in Egypt / Mark Depauw -- 11. The imperial identity of senatorial rituals in late antiquity / Luise Marion Frenkel.

Historians generally study elite public gift-giving in ancient Greek cities as a phenomenon that gained prominence only in the Hellenistic and Roman imperial periods. The contributors to this volume challenge this perspective by offering analyses of various manifestations of elite public giving in the Greek cities from Homeric times until Late Antiquity, highlighting this as a structural feature of polis society from its origins in the early Archaic age to the world of the Christian Greek city in the early Byzantine period. They discuss existing interpretations, offer novel ideas and arguments, and stress continuities and changes over time. Bracketed by a substantial Introduction and Conclusion, the volume is accessible both to ancient historians and to scholars studying gift-giving in other times and places.

"Greece and Rome were quintessentially urban societies. Ancient culture, politics and society arose and developed in the context of the polis and the civitas. In modern scholarship, the ancient city has been the subject of intense debates due to the strong association in Western thought between urbanism, capitalism and modernity. In this book, Arjan Zuiderhoek provides a survey of the main issues at stake in these debates, as well as a sketch of the chief characteristics of Greek and Roman cities. He argues that the ancient Greco-Roman city was indeed a highly specific form of urbanism, but that this does not imply that the ancient city was somehow 'superior' or 'inferior' to forms of urbanism in other societies, just (interestingly) different. The book is aimed primarily at students of ancient history and general readers, but also at scholars working on urbanism in other periods and places"--

Investment in capital and innovation in its uses are often considered the linchpin of modern economic growth, but has this always been so? This volume aims to shed new light on the ancient Roman economy in this book-length contribution focusing on the allocation and uses of capital and credit and the role of innovation in the Roman world.

"Explanation of the success and failure of the Roman economy is one of the most important problems in economic history. As an economic system capable of sustaining high production and consumption levels, it was unparalleled until the early modern period. This volume focuses on how the institutional structure of the Roman Empire affected economic performance both positively and negatively. An international range of contributors offers a variety of approaches that together enhance our understanding of how different ownership rights and various modes of organization and exploitation facilitated or prevented the use of land and natural resources in the production process. Relying on a large array of resources -- literary, legal, epigraphic, papyrological, numismatic, and archaeological -- chapters address key questions regarding the foundations of the Roman Empire's economic system. Questions of growth, concentration and legal status of property (private, public, or imperial), the role of the state, content and limitations of rights of ownership, water rights and management, exploitation of indigenous populations, and many more receive new and original analyses"--Jacket