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  3. Key Themes in Ancient History

Key Themes In Ancient History aims to provide readable, informed and original studies of various basic topics, designed in the first instance for students and teachers of Classics and Ancient History, but also for those engaged in related disciplines. Each volume is devoted to a general theme in Greek, Roman, or where appropriate, Graeco-Roman history, or to some salient aspect or aspects of it. Besides indicating the state of current research in the relevant area, authors seek to show how the theme is significant for our own as well as ancient culture and society. By providing books for courses that are oriented around themes, it is hoped to encourage and stimulate promising new developments in teaching and research in ancient history.

  • General Editors: P. A. Cartledge, University of Cambridge, G. D. Woolf, Institute for the Study of the Ancient World, New York

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30 results in Key Themes in Ancient History

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Christianity and Roman Society
  • Gillian Clark
  • Published online:
    05 June 2012
    Print publication:
    13 December 2004
  • Early Christianity in the context of Roman society raises important questions for historians, sociologists of religion and theologians alike. This work explores the differing perspectives arising from a changing social and academic culture. Key issues concerning early Christianity are addressed, such as how early Christian accounts of pagans, Jews and heretics can be challenged and the degree to which Christian groups offered support to their members and to those in need. The work examines how non-Christians reacted to the spectacle of martyrdom and to Christian reverence for relics. Questions are also raised about why some Christians encouraged others to abandon wealth, status and gender-roles for extreme ascetic lifestyles and about whether Christian preachers trained in classical culture offered moral education to all or only to the social elite. The interdisciplinary and thematic approach offers the student of early Christianity a comprehensive treatment of its role and influence in Roman society.

Geography in Classical Antiquity
  • Daniela Dueck
  • With contributions by Kai Brodersen
  • Published online:
    05 June 2012
    Print publication:
    26 April 2012
  • What were the limits of knowledge of the physical world in Greek and Roman antiquity? How far did travellers get and what did they know about far-away regions? How did they describe foreign countries and peoples? How did they measure the earth, and distances and heights on it? Ideas about the physical and cultural world are a key aspect of ancient history, but until now there has been no up-to-date modern overview of the subject. This book explores the beginnings and development of geographical ideas in Classical antiquity and demonstrates technical methods for describing landscape, topographies and ethnographies. The survey relies on a variety of sources: philosophical and scientific texts but also poems and travelogues; papyrological remains and visual monuments.

Law and Crime in the Roman World
  • Jill Harries
  • Published online:
    05 June 2012
    Print publication:
    15 November 2007
  • What was crime in ancient Rome? Was it defined by law or social attitudes? How did damage to the individual differ from offences against the community as a whole? This book explores competing legal and extra-legal discourses in a number of areas, including theft, official malpractice, treason, sexual misconduct, crimes of violence, homicide, magic and perceptions of deviance. It argues that court practice was responsive to social change, despite the ingrained conservatism of the legal tradition, and that judges and litigants were in part responsible for the harsher operation of justice in Late Antiquity. Consideration is also given to how attitudes to crime were shaped not only by legal experts but also by the rhetorical education and practices of advocates, and by popular and even elite indifference to the finer points of law.

Asceticism in the Graeco-Roman World
  • Richard Finn
  • Published online:
    22 January 2010
    Print publication:
    02 July 2009
  • Asceticism deploys abstention, self-control, and self-denial, to order oneself or a community in relation to the divine. Both its practices and the cultural ideals they expressed were important to pagans, Jews, Christians of different kinds, and Manichees. Richard Finn presents for the first time a combined study of the major ascetic traditions, which have been previously misunderstood by being studied separately. He examines how people abstained from food, drink, sexual relations, sleep, and wealth; what they meant by their behaviour; and how they influenced others in the Graeco-Roman world. Against this background, the book charts the rise of monasticism in Egypt, Asia Minor, Syria, and North Africa, assessing the crucial role played by the third-century exegete, Origen, and asks why monasticism developed so variously in different regions.

Literacy and Orality in Ancient Greece
  • Rosalind Thomas
  • Published online:
    18 January 2010
    Print publication:
    25 September 1992
  • This book explores the role of written and oral communication in Greece and is the first systematic and sustained treatment at this level. It examines the recent theoretical debates about literacy and orality and explores the uses of writing and oral communication, and their interaction, in ancient Greece. It is concerned to set the significance of written and oral communication as much as possible in their social and historical context, and to stress the specifically Greek characteristics in their use, arguing that the functions of literacy and orality are often fluid and culturally determined. It draws together the results of recent studies and suggests further avenues of enquiry. Individual chapters deal with (among other things) the role of writing in archaic Greece, oral poetry, the visual and monumental impact of writing, the performance and oral transmission even of written texts, and the use of writing by the city-states; there is an epilogue on Rome. All ancient evidence is translated.

Friendship in the Classical World
  • David Konstan
  • Published online:
    14 January 2010
    Print publication:
    06 February 1997
  • This book – the only history of friendship in classical antiquity that exists in English – examines the nature of friendship in Greece and Rome from Homer to the Christian Roman Empire of the fourth century AD. Friendship is conceived of as a voluntary and loving relationship, but there are major shifts in emphasis from the bonding among warriors in epic poetry, to the egalitarian ties characteristic of the Athenian democracy, the status-conscious connections in Rome and the Hellenistic kingdoms, and the commitment to a universal love among Christian writers. Friendship is also examined in relation to erotic love and comradeship, for its role in politics and economic life, in philosophical and religious communities, in connection with patronage and the private counsellors of kings, and in respect to women. Its relation to modern friendship is also fully discussed.

Law, Violence, and Community in Classical Athens
  • David Cohen
  • Published online:
    06 January 2010
    Print publication:
    05 October 1995
  • The theme of this book is the legal regulation of violence and the role of litigation in Athenian society. Using comparative anthropological and historical perspectives, David Cohen challenges traditional evolutionary and functionalist accounts of the development of legal process. Examining Athenian theories of social conflict and the rule of law, as well as actual litigation involving the regulation of violence, he emphasises the way in which the judicial process operates in an agonistic social field. This perspective illuminates the social dimensions of litigation and the legal regulation of violence, and helps to explain otherwise puzzling features of Athenian litigation.

Public Order in Ancient Rome
  • Wilfried Nippel
  • Published online:
    24 December 2009
    Print publication:
    21 September 1995
  • The absence of a professional police force in the city of Rome in classical times is often identified as a major cause of the collapse of the Republic. But this alleged 'structural weakness' was not removed by the Emperor Augustus and his successors, and was in fact shared with other pre-modern states: a specialised police force is a modern invention. In this critical study of the system of law and order in ancient Rome in both Republican and Imperial periods, Wilfried Nippel identifies the mechanisms of self-regulation which operated as a stabilising force within Roman society. This case-study of ancient Rome has a comparative dimension and will interest legal historians of other pre-modern societies as well as ancient historians, anthropologists, sociologists and political scientists.

Trade in Classical Antiquity
  • Neville Morley
  • Published online:
    23 December 2009
    Print publication:
    19 April 2007
  • Historians have long argued about the place of trade in classical antiquity: was it the life-blood of a complex, Mediterranean-wide economic system, or a thin veneer on the surface of an underdeveloped agrarian society? Trade underpinned the growth of Athenian and Roman power, helping to supply armies and cities. It furnished the goods that ancient elites needed to maintain their dominance - and yet, those same elites generally regarded trade and traders as a threat to social order. Trade, like the patterns of consumption that determined its development, was implicated in wider debates about politics, morality and the state of society, just as the expansion of trade in the modern world is presented both as the answer to global poverty and as an instrument of exploitation and cultural imperialism. This 2007 book explores the nature and importance of ancient trade, considering its ecological and cultural significance as well as its economic aspects.

Death-Ritual and Social Structure in Classical Antiquity
  • Ian Morris
  • Published online:
    02 December 2009
    Print publication:
    22 October 1992
  • In this innovative book Dr Morris seeks to show the many ways in which the excavated remains of burials can and should be a major source of evidence for social historians of the ancient Graeco-Roman world. Burials have a far wider geographical and social range than the surviving literary texts, which were mainly written for a small elite. They provide us with unique insights into how Greeks and Romans constituted and interpreted their own communities. In particular, burials enable the historian to study social change. Ian Morris illustrates the great potential of the material in these respects with examples drawn from societies as diverse in time, space and political context as archaic Rhodes, classical Athens, early imperial Rome and the last days of the western Roman empire.

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