Suchergebnisse

The whole story -- Empires of the mind -- Rulers of Italy -- Imperial ecology -- Mediterranean hegemony -- Slavery and empire -- Crisis -- At heaven's command? -- The generals -- The enjoyment of empire -- Emperors -- Resourcing empire -- War -- Imperial identities -- Recovery and collapse -- A Christian empire -- Things fall apart -- The Roman past and the Roman future

The opening pages of James C. Scott's The Art of Not Being Governed offer a global account of the political economy and ecology of early states. The first states, for Scott, were miniscule authoritarian regimes nestled on arable plains and plateaux and surrounded by vast ungoverned peripheries of mountain, marshland, swamp, steppe and desert. Around them peripheral populations were both natural trading partners – because the ecologies of their respective homes were so different – and a constant threat. Peripheral populations posed a double threat in fact since they not only periodically raided the plains, but also represented an alternative, freer way of life, an object lesson in "the art of not being governed".

Neither the concept of "imperial policy" nor of "religion" are easily applied to antiq­uity. Yet the activities of Roman emperors often did have consequences for religious activity, and their behaviour was not neces­sarily chaotic or random. Hadrian provides a good case for examining how religious activity was incorporated into ancient biog­raphy and historical writing, and how it was related to other fields of imperial conduct. A good deal is recorded about Hadrian's conduct of religious offices, his building projects and his engagement with older tradition, Roman and foreign. The dossier of testimonia does reveals some consist­encies in his behaviour but these seem to derive less from policy than from habits of thought and action. Many of his actions can be interpreted as conventional, even if sometimes performed on an unconvention­al scale. Hadrian certainly exercised agency, and he had particular dispositions as a rul­er. But religious policy seems an anachro­nistic term to apply to his conduct. ; Ni el concepto "política imperial" ni el de "religión" son fácilmente aplicables a la Anti­güedad. A pesar de ello, la labor de los empe­radores romanos tuvo, frecuentemente, un notable impacto sobre la actividad religiosa, y su comportamiento no fue, necesariamen­te, caótico o aleatorio. Adriano proporciona un buen caso para examinar cómo la activi­dad religiosa del emperador fue incorpora­da a las biografías antiguas y a la narración histórica, y cómo estaba relacionada con otros ámbitos de la acción imperial. Nos ha llegado mucha información sobre la activi­dad adrianea relativa a cargos religiosos, a sus proyectos edilicios y a su vinculación con la tradición anterior, romana y extranjera. El elenco de testimonia revela una cierta con­sistencia en su comportamiento, pero parece derivar menos de la política que de hábitos de pensamiento y acción. Muchas de sus ac­ciones pueden ser interpretadas como con­vencionales, incluso si algunas veces se lleva­ron a cabo a una escala inusual. Ciertamente, Adriano ejerció su voluntad, y tuvo una dis­posición particular como gobernante. Pero el término "política religiosa" parece un ana­cronismo al aplicarlo sobre su conducta.

"For more than fifty years the standard debates about Roman Imperialism were written more or less entirely in terms of male agency, male competition, and male participation. Not only have women been marginalized in these narratives as just so much collateral damage but there has been little engagement with gender history more widely, with the linkages between masculinity and warfare, with the representation of relations of power in terms of gender differentials, with the ways social reproduction entangled the production of gender and the production of empire. This volume explores how we might gender Roman Imperialism"--

Warum zieht es den Menschen in die Stadt, weshalb sind Städte überhaupt entstanden und warum gehören sie zum Menschsein dazu? Greg Woolf geht diesen Fragen nach und erzählt vom Aufstieg und Fall antiker Städte. Seine Geschichte der Stadt ist zugleich eine grosse Darstellung des Mittelmeerraumes, die zudem ein Verständnis dafür schafft, wie sich unsere Städte in Zukunft entwickeln werden.Unsere Vorfahren haben häufig verstreut in Dörfern gelebt IBM bis zum Ende dieses Jahrhunderts jedoch werden wir fast alle in Städten leben. Dieses Buch erzählt vom Aufstieg und Fall antiker Städte vom Ende der Bronzezeit bis zum Beginn des Mittelalters. Es ist eine Geschichte von Krieg und Politik, Pest und Hungersnot, Triumph und Tragödie und präsentiert sich in ihrer einzigartigen Ambivalenz: mal grossartig und erfolgreich, mal schäbig und fruchtlos. Doch wie kam es dazu, dass Städte überhaupt entstanden und wie konnten sie sich in offensichtlich wenig verheissungsvollen Umgebungen halten, wachsen und gedeihen? Wie mochte es gewesen sein, solche urbanen Welten zu bewohnen, die so anders sind als die unseren IBM Städte, die jede Nacht in der Dunkelheit versinken, Städte, über denen sich die Tempel der Götter auftürmten, Bauernstädte, Sklavenstädte, Soldatenstädte? Die wechselvolle Geschichte der antiken Städte umgreift zugleich die Geschichte von Generationen von Menschen, die sie erbaut und bewohnt haben, und die uns Monumente hinterlassen haben, deren Ruinen nüchterne Mahnmale für das 21. Jahrhundert sind

How did ancient scientific and knowledge-ordering writers make their work authoritative? This book answers that question for a wide range of ancient disciplines, from mathematics, medicine, architecture and agriculture, through to law, historiography and philosophy - focusing mainly, but not exclusively, on the literature of the Roman Empire. It draws attention to habits that these different fields had in common, while also showing how individual texts and authors manipulated standard techniques of self-authorisation in distinctive ways. It stresses the importance of competitive and assertive styles of self-presentation, and also examines some of the pressures that pulled in the opposite direction by looking at authors who chose to acknowledge the limitations of their own knowledge or resisted close identification with narrow versions of expert identity. A final chapter by Sir Geoffrey Lloyd offers a comparative account of scientific authority and expertise in ancient Chinese, Indian and Mesopotamian culture.