Religion in the Ancient Novel
Religion plays a central role in the plot of virtually every fictional narrative, influencing the lives, actions, mentality, practices, beliefs, and eventual fates of the characters (and narrators); the types, interventions, and motives of divinity or other uncanny forces; the use of mythological exemplars.
Pharaonic Egypt and the Ara Pacis in Augustan Rome
Pharaonic Egypt and the Ara Pacis in Augustan Rome Jennifer Trimble (Stanford University) Princeton/Stanford Working Papers in Classics: September (2007) Abstract This paper…
The comparative economics of slavery in the Greco-Roman world
This paper has two goals. The first one is to improve our understanding of the critical determinants of the large-scale use of slave labor in different sectors of historical economies.
Sex and empire: a Darwinian perspective
This paper draws on evolutionary psychology to elucidate ultimate causation in imperial state formation and predatory exploitation in antiquity and beyond. Differential access to the means of reproduction is shown to have been a key feature of early imperial systems.
Tiberiana 2: Tales of Brave Ulysses
The prime evidence for this was discovered fifty years ago in the numerous fragments of four massive sculptural groups in marble, found by chance in 1957 in a seaside cavern which was part of a large villa complex on the coast at Sperlonga, 65 miles south of Rome.
Tiberiana 3: Odysseus at Rome – a Problem
The choice of a name is contingent on a number of factors or combination of factors, from individual taste to cultural influences, from liking the sound of it (forwhatever reason), to honoring relatives and friends, to expressing admiration for public figures past and present, real, fictional, or divine. Roman patterns of naming were also influenced by the involvement not just of family members but of slave-owners as choosers of names…and by the blending of very different systems of nomenclature in the great tapestry of cultures woven in the capital city.
Narratives of Roman Syria: a historiography of Syria as a province of Rome
Existing scholarly accounts of Roman Syria revolve around three themes: hellenization,
similarity to Rome, and a profound difference with the western provinces of the Roman empire. In the following sections I argue that the overemphasis on these three themes by scholars has obscured the process of Syria’s incorporation into the Roman empire and the profound impact of this process on local communities.
Roman population size: the logic of the debate
Our ignorance of ancient population numbers is one of the biggest obstacles to our understanding of Roman history. After generations of prolific scholarship, we still do not know how many people inhabited Roman Italy and the Mediterranean at any given point in time.
Rule and Revenue in Egypt and Rome: Political Stability and Fiscal Institutions
This paper has more modest goals. It takes as its starting point Levi’s hy- pothesis that the transition from the Roman Republic to the Principate in the late first century BC brought political stability, which led to rationally calcu- lated fiscal reforms. It examines the effects of this transition in Egypt where there is abundant evidence due to the survival of administrative and tax docu- ments on papyrus and potsherds.
Counting Romans
I shall examine the assumptions underlying current interpretations of the Polybian army figures and the Republican census tallies in order to answer two important questions: can we consider the former as independent evidence corroborating the ‘low count’ interpretation of the census figures?…Second, in sections 6-10, I explore the possibility of an alternative reading that allows one to adopt an intermediate position between the current scenarios of small and large populations.