Books on the topic 'First century Roman social situation'

Poussin’s Women: Sex and Gender in the Artist’s Works examines the paintings and drawings of the well-known seventeenth-century French painter Nicolas Poussin (1594-1665) from a gender studies perspective, focusing on a critical analysis of his representations of women. The book’s thematic chapters investigate Poussin’s women in their roles as predators, as lustful or the objects of lust, as lovers, killers, victims, heroines, or models of virtue. Poussin’s paintings reflect issues of gender within his social situation as he consciously or unconsciously articulated its conflicts and assumptions. A gender studies approach brings to light new critical insights that illuminate how the artist represented women, both positively and negatively, within the framework in his seventeenth-century culture. This book covers the artist’s works from Classical mythology, Roman history, Tasso, and the Bible. It serves as a good overview of Poussin as an artist, discussing the latest research and including new interpretations of his major works.

The impact of the Hellenization in the Ancient Near East resulted in a notable presence of Greek koiné language and culture and in the interaction between Greek and Nabataean that conducted inhabitants to engrave inscriptions in public spaces using one of the two languages or both. In this questionably ‘diglossic’ situation, a significant number of Nabataean-Greek inscriptions emerged, showing that the koinŽ was employed by the Nabataeans as a sign of Hellenistic cultural affinity. This book offers a linguistic and philological analysis of fifty-one Nabataean-Greek epigraphic evidences existing in northern Arabia, Near East and Aegean Sea, dating from the first century BCE to the third-fourth century CE. This collection is an analysis of the linguistic contact between Nabataean and Greek in the light of the modalities of social, religious and linguistic exchanges. In addition, the investigation of onomastics (mainly the Nabataean names transcribed in Greek script) might allow us to know more about the Nabataean phonological system.

This book offers an analysis of Roman political culture in Italy from the first to the sixth century AD on the basis of seven case studies. Its main contention is that, during the period in which Italy was subject to single rule, Italy’s political culture had a specific form. It was the product of the continued existence of two traditional political institutions: the senate in the city of Rome and the local city councils in the rest of Italy. Under single rule, the position of both institutions was increasingly weakened and they became part of a much wider institutional landscape. Nevertheless, they continued functioning until the end of the sixth century AD. Their longevity must imply that they retained meaning for their members, even when society was undergoing significant changes. As their powers and prerogatives shrank considerably, their significance became social rather than political: they allowed elites to enact and negotiate their own position in society. The tension between the fact that the institutions were at heart participatory in nature, but that their power was restricted, generated complex social dynamics. On the one hand, participants became locked in mutual expectations about each other’s behaviour and were enacting social roles, while on the other hand they retained a degree of agency. They were encapsulated in an honorific language and in a set of conventions that regulated their behaviour, but that at the same time offered them some room for manoeuvre.

During the centuries between the date of the mythical founding of Rome and the first decades of the sixth century AD when Justinian’s Corpus Iuris Civilis was enacted, the legal condition of women underwent substantial transformation. To understand this process it is necessary to recall that during the first centuries of its history Rome was a patriarchal society, where only patres familias enjoyed full civil and political rights. Other members of the family enjoyed only certain rights, and some did not enjoy any at all. Over the centuries paternal authority underwent important changes, which in different ways limited it. Rome had grown from a small village of peasants and shepherds to a metropolis that ruled the world. Political, social, economic conditions (not to say mentalities and religious beliefs and practices) changed the way of thinking of the Romans, their way of life and their attitude and behaviour towards women.

This chapter introduces the first of the three “retail revolutions” that significantly impacted the number and types of retail outlets in most Roman cities. To be sure, while the first retail revolution can be tied to the second century BCE, still shops had long been present in Roman cities. After briefly charting the early history of the Roman shop, the focus of this chapter turns to connecting the sharp rise in their number to broader social, economic, and urban factors. The chapter illustrates how the en masse arrival of shops in the second century BCE both contributed and responded to contemporary developments in the Roman city. A particular characteristic of the retail outlets of this period is their productive capacity; they operate as workshops.

'Experiencing the Frontier and the Frontier of Experience' deals with the Roman Empire’s responses to the threats which were caused by the new geostrategic situation brought on by the crisis of the 3rd century AD, induced by the ‘barbarians’ who – often already part of Roman military structures as mercenaries and auxiliaries – became a veritable menace for the Empire. Rome adopted different strategies: they oscillated between inclusion, warfare and other means of exerting influence. The contributions to this volume explore the archaeological evidence for Roman practice and especially the varying strategies of power and influence in the central regions on the one hand, and the south-eastern parts of the European ‘Barbaricum’ on the other. They show how ‘Divide et impera’ functioned as practical policy based on alliances, as well as consequent warfare, and diplomatic initiatives, which are traceable by prestige-goods and subsidia treasures found in the Barbaricum. The comparison of Roman imports in different parts of Iron-Age Europe can help understand better a complex process of shifting power and influence in an emerging new Europe, which transformed the Empire towards medieval ‘Herrschaft’ and social structure.

Nationalism: Past as Prologue began as a single volume being compiled by Ad Akande, a scholar from South Africa, who proposed it to me as co-author about two years ago. The original idea was to examine how the damaging roots of nationalism have been corroding political systems around the world, and creating dangerous obstacles for necessary international cooperation. Since I (Bruce E. Johansen) has written profusely about climate change (global warming, a.k.a. infrared forcing), I suggested a concerted effort in that direction. This is a worldwide existential threat that affects every living thing on Earth. It often compounds upon itself, so delays in reducing emissions of fossil fuels are shortening the amount of time remaining to eliminate the use of fossil fuels to preserve a livable planet. Nationalism often impedes solutions to this problem (among many others), as nations place their singular needs above the common good. Our initial proposal got around, and abstracts on many subjects arrived. Within a few weeks, we had enough good material for a 100,000-word book. The book then fattened to two moderate volumes and then to four two very hefty tomes. We tried several different titles as good submissions swelled. We also discovered that our best contributors were experts in their fields, which ranged the world. We settled on three stand-alone books:” 1/ nationalism and racial justice. Our first volume grew as the growth of Black Lives Matter following the brutal killing of George Floyd ignited protests over police brutality and other issues during 2020, following the police assassination of Floyd in Minneapolis. It is estimated that more people took part in protests of police brutality during the summer of 2020 than any other series of marches in United States history. This includes upheavals during the 1960s over racial issues and against the war in Southeast Asia (notably Vietnam). We choose a volume on racism because it is one of nationalism’s main motive forces. This volume provides a worldwide array of work on nationalism’s growth in various countries, usually by authors residing in them, or in the United States with ethnic ties to the nation being examined, often recent immigrants to the United States from them. Our roster of contributors comprises a small United Nations of insightful, well-written research and commentary from Indonesia, New Zealand, Australia, China, India, South Africa, France, Portugal, Estonia, Hungary, Russia, Poland, Kazakhstan, Georgia, and the United States. Volume 2 (this one) describes and analyzes nationalism, by country, around the world, except for the United States; and 3/material directly related to President Donald Trump, and the United States. The first volume is under consideration at the Texas A & M University Press. The other two are under contract to Nova Science Publishers (which includes social sciences). These three volumes may be used individually or as a set. Environmental material is taken up in appropriate places in each of the three books. * * * * * What became the United States of America has been strongly nationalist since the English of present-day Massachusetts and Jamestown first hit North America’s eastern shores. The country propelled itself across North America with the self-serving ideology of “manifest destiny” for four centuries before Donald Trump came along. Anyone who believes that a Trumpian affection for deportation of “illegals” is a new thing ought to take a look at immigration and deportation statistics in Adam Goodman’s The Deportation Machine: America’s Long History of Deporting Immigrants (Princeton University Press, 2020). Between 1920 and 2018, the United States deported 56.3 million people, compared with 51.7 million who were granted legal immigration status during the same dates. Nearly nine of ten deportees were Mexican (Nolan, 2020, 83). This kind of nationalism, has become an assassin of democracy as well as an impediment to solving global problems. Paul Krugman wrote in the New York Times (2019:A-25): that “In their 2018 book, How Democracies Die, the political scientists Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt documented how this process has played out in many countries, from Vladimir Putin’s Russia, to Recep Erdogan’s Turkey, to Viktor Orban’s Hungary. Add to these India’s Narendra Modi, China’s Xi Jinping, and the United States’ Donald Trump, among others. Bit by bit, the guardrails of democracy have been torn down, as institutions meant to serve the public became tools of ruling parties and self-serving ideologies, weaponized to punish and intimidate opposition parties’ opponents. On paper, these countries are still democracies; in practice, they have become one-party regimes….And it’s happening here [the United States] as we speak. If you are not worried about the future of American democracy, you aren’t paying attention” (Krugmam, 2019, A-25). We are reminded continuously that the late Carl Sagan, one of our most insightful scientific public intellectuals, had an interesting theory about highly developed civilizations. Given the number of stars and planets that must exist in the vast reaches of the universe, he said, there must be other highly developed and organized forms of life. Distance may keep us from making physical contact, but Sagan said that another reason we may never be on speaking terms with another intelligent race is (judging from our own example) could be their penchant for destroying themselves in relatively short order after reaching technological complexity. This book’s chapters, introduction, and conclusion examine the worldwide rise of partisan nationalism and the damage it has wrought on the worldwide pursuit of solutions for issues requiring worldwide scope, such scientific co-operation public health and others, mixing analysis of both. We use both historical description and analysis. This analysis concludes with a description of why we must avoid the isolating nature of nationalism that isolates people and encourages separation if we are to deal with issues of world-wide concern, and to maintain a sustainable, survivable Earth, placing the dominant political movement of our time against the Earth’s existential crises. Our contributors, all experts in their fields, each have assumed responsibility for a country, or two if they are related. This work entwines themes of worldwide concern with the political growth of nationalism because leaders with such a worldview are disinclined to co-operate internationally at a time when nations must find ways to solve common problems, such as the climate crisis. Inability to cooperate at this stage may doom everyone, eventually, to an overheated, stormy future plagued by droughts and deluges portending shortages of food and other essential commodities, meanwhile destroying large coastal urban areas because of rising sea levels. Future historians may look back at our time and wonder why as well as how our world succumbed to isolating nationalism at a time when time was so short for cooperative intervention which is crucial for survival of a sustainable earth. Pride in language and culture is salubrious to individuals’ sense of history and identity. Excess nationalism that prevents international co-operation on harmful worldwide maladies is quite another. As Pope Francis has pointed out: For all of our connectivity due to expansion of social media, ability to communicate can breed contempt as well as mutual trust. “For all our hyper-connectivity,” said Francis, “We witnessed a fragmentation that made it more difficult to resolve problems that affect us all” (Horowitz, 2020, A-12). The pope’s encyclical, titled “Brothers All,” also said: “The forces of myopic, extremist, resentful, and aggressive nationalism are on the rise.” The pope’s document also advocates support for migrants, as well as resistance to nationalist and tribal populism. Francis broadened his critique to the role of market capitalism, as well as nationalism has failed the peoples of the world when they need co-operation and solidarity in the face of the world-wide corona virus pandemic. Humankind needs to unite into “a new sense of the human family [Fratelli Tutti, “Brothers All”], that rejects war at all costs” (Pope, 2020, 6-A). Our journey takes us first to Russia, with the able eye and honed expertise of Richard D. Anderson, Jr. who teaches as UCLA and publishes on the subject of his chapter: “Putin, Russian identity, and Russia’s conduct at home and abroad.” Readers should find Dr. Anderson’s analysis fascinating because Vladimir Putin, the singular leader of Russian foreign and domestic policy these days (and perhaps for the rest of his life, given how malleable Russia’s Constitution has become) may be a short man physically, but has high ambitions. One of these involves restoring the old Russian (and Soviet) empire, which would involve re-subjugating a number of nations that broke off as the old order dissolved about 30 years ago. President (shall we say czar?) Putin also has international ambitions, notably by destabilizing the United States, where election meddling has become a specialty. The sight of Putin and U.S. president Donald Trump, two very rich men (Putin $70-$200 billion; Trump $2.5 billion), nuzzling in friendship would probably set Thomas Jefferson and Vladimir Lenin spinning in their graves. The road of history can take some unanticipated twists and turns. Consider Poland, from which we have an expert native analysis in chapter 2, Bartosz Hlebowicz, who is a Polish anthropologist and journalist. His piece is titled “Lawless and Unjust: How to Quickly Make Your Own Country a Puppet State Run by a Group of Hoodlums – the Hopeless Case of Poland (2015–2020).” When I visited Poland to teach and lecture twice between 2006 and 2008, most people seemed to be walking on air induced by freedom to conduct their own affairs to an unusual degree for a state usually squeezed between nationalists in Germany and Russia. What did the Poles then do in a couple of decades? Read Hlebowicz’ chapter and decide. It certainly isn’t soft-bellied liberalism. In Chapter 3, with Bruce E. Johansen, we visit China’s western provinces, the lands of Tibet as well as the Uighurs and other Muslims in the Xinjiang region, who would most assuredly resent being characterized as being possessed by the Chinese of the Han to the east. As a student of Native American history, I had never before thought of the Tibetans and Uighurs as Native peoples struggling against the Independence-minded peoples of a land that is called an adjunct of China on most of our maps. The random act of sitting next to a young woman on an Air India flight out of Hyderabad, bound for New Delhi taught me that the Tibetans had something to share with the Lakota, the Iroquois, and hundreds of other Native American states and nations in North America. Active resistance to Chinese rule lasted into the mid-nineteenth century, and continues today in a subversive manner, even in song, as I learned in 2018 when I acted as a foreign adjudicator on a Ph.D. dissertation by a Tibetan student at the University of Madras (in what is now in a city called Chennai), in southwestern India on resistance in song during Tibet’s recent history. Tibet is one of very few places on Earth where a young dissident can get shot to death for singing a song that troubles China’s Quest for Lebensraum. The situation in Xinjiang region, where close to a million Muslims have been interned in “reeducation” camps surrounded with brick walls and barbed wire. They sing, too. Come with us and hear the music. Back to Europe now, in Chapter 4, to Portugal and Spain, we find a break in the general pattern of nationalism. Portugal has been more progressive governmentally than most. Spain varies from a liberal majority to military coups, a pattern which has been exported to Latin America. A situation such as this can make use of the term “populism” problematic, because general usage in our time usually ties the word into a right-wing connotative straightjacket. “Populism” can be used to describe progressive (left-wing) insurgencies as well. José Pinto, who is native to Portugal and also researches and writes in Spanish as well as English, in “Populism in Portugal and Spain: a Real Neighbourhood?” provides insight into these historical paradoxes. Hungary shares some historical inclinations with Poland (above). Both emerged from Soviet dominance in an air of developing freedom and multicultural diversity after the Berlin Wall fell and the Soviet Union collapsed. Then, gradually at first, right wing-forces began to tighten up, stripping structures supporting popular freedom, from the courts, mass media, and other institutions. In Chapter 5, Bernard Tamas, in “From Youth Movement to Right-Liberal Wing Authoritarianism: The Rise of Fidesz and the Decline of Hungarian Democracy” puts the renewed growth of political and social repression into a context of worldwide nationalism. Tamas, an associate professor of political science at Valdosta State University, has been a postdoctoral fellow at Harvard University and a Fulbright scholar at the Central European University in Budapest, Hungary. His books include From Dissident to Party Politics: The Struggle for Democracy in Post-Communist Hungary (2007). Bear in mind that not everyone shares Orbán’s vision of what will make this nation great, again. On graffiti-covered walls in Budapest, Runes (traditional Hungarian script) has been found that read “Orbán is a motherfucker” (Mikanowski, 2019, 58). Also in Europe, in Chapter 6, Professor Ronan Le Coadic, of the University of Rennes, Rennes, France, in “Is There a Revival of French Nationalism?” Stating this title in the form of a question is quite appropriate because France’s nationalistic shift has built and ebbed several times during the last few decades. For a time after 2000, it came close to assuming the role of a substantial minority, only to ebb after that. In 2017, the candidate of the National Front reached the second round of the French presidential election. This was the second time this nationalist party reached the second round of the presidential election in the history of the Fifth Republic. In 2002, however, Jean-Marie Le Pen had only obtained 17.79% of the votes, while fifteen years later his daughter, Marine Le Pen, almost doubled her father's record, reaching 33.90% of the votes cast. Moreover, in the 2019 European elections, re-named Rassemblement National obtained the largest number of votes of all French political formations and can therefore boast of being "the leading party in France.” The brutality of oppressive nationalism may be expressed in personal relationships, such as child abuse. While Indonesia and Aotearoa [the Maoris’ name for New Zealand] hold very different ranks in the United Nations Human Development Programme assessments, where Indonesia is classified as a medium development country and Aotearoa New Zealand as a very high development country. In Chapter 7, “Domestic Violence Against Women in Indonesia and Aotearoa New Zealand: Making Sense of Differences and Similarities” co-authors, in Chapter 8, Mandy Morgan and Dr. Elli N. Hayati, from New Zealand and Indonesia respectively, found that despite their socio-economic differences, one in three women in each country experience physical or sexual intimate partner violence over their lifetime. In this chapter ther authors aim to deepen understandings of domestic violence through discussion of the socio-economic and demographic characteristics of theit countries to address domestic violence alongside studies of women’s attitudes to gender norms and experiences of intimate partner violence. One of the most surprising and upsetting scholarly journeys that a North American student may take involves Adolf Hitler’s comments on oppression of American Indians and Blacks as he imagined the construction of the Nazi state, a genesis of nationalism that is all but unknown in the United States of America, traced in this volume (Chapter 8) by co-editor Johansen. Beginning in Mein Kampf, during the 1920s, Hitler explicitly used the westward expansion of the United States across North America as a model and justification for Nazi conquest and anticipated colonization by Germans of what the Nazis called the “wild East” – the Slavic nations of Poland, the Baltic states, Ukraine, and Russia, most of which were under control of the Soviet Union. The Volga River (in Russia) was styled by Hitler as the Germans’ Mississippi, and covered wagons were readied for the German “manifest destiny” of imprisoning, eradicating, and replacing peoples the Nazis deemed inferior, all with direct references to events in North America during the previous century. At the same time, with no sense of contradiction, the Nazis partook of a long-standing German romanticism of Native Americans. One of Goebbels’ less propitious schemes was to confer honorary Aryan status on Native American tribes, in the hope that they would rise up against their oppressors. U.S. racial attitudes were “evidence [to the Nazis] that America was evolving in the right direction, despite its specious rhetoric about equality.” Ming Xie, originally from Beijing, in the People’s Republic of China, in Chapter 9, “News Coverage and Public Perceptions of the Social Credit System in China,” writes that The State Council of China in 2014 announced “that a nationwide social credit system would be established” in China. “Under this system, individuals, private companies, social organizations, and governmental agencies are assigned a score which will be calculated based on their trustworthiness and daily actions such as transaction history, professional conduct, obedience to law, corruption, tax evasion, and academic plagiarism.” The “nationalism” in this case is that of the state over the individual. China has 1.4 billion people; this system takes their measure for the purpose of state control. Once fully operational, control will be more subtle. People who are subject to it, through modern technology (most often smart phones) will prompt many people to self-censor. Orwell, modernized, might write: “Your smart phone is watching you.” Ming Xie holds two Ph.Ds, one in Public Administration from University of Nebraska at Omaha and another in Cultural Anthropology from the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, Beijing, where she also worked for more than 10 years at a national think tank in the same institution. While there she summarized news from non-Chinese sources for senior members of the Chinese Communist Party. Ming is presently an assistant professor at the Department of Political Science and Criminal Justice, West Texas A&M University. In Chapter 10, analyzing native peoples and nationhood, Barbara Alice Mann, Professor of Honours at the University of Toledo, in “Divide, et Impera: The Self-Genocide Game” details ways in which European-American invaders deprive the conquered of their sense of nationhood as part of a subjugation system that amounts to genocide, rubbing out their languages and cultures -- and ultimately forcing the native peoples to assimilate on their own, for survival in a culture that is foreign to them. Mann is one of Native American Studies’ most acute critics of conquests’ contradictions, and an author who retrieves Native history with a powerful sense of voice and purpose, having authored roughly a dozen books and numerous book chapters, among many other works, who has traveled around the world lecturing and publishing on many subjects. Nalanda Roy and S. Mae Pedron in Chapter 11, “Understanding the Face of Humanity: The Rohingya Genocide.” describe one of the largest forced migrations in the history of the human race, the removal of 700,000 to 800,000 Muslims from Buddhist Myanmar to Bangladesh, which itself is already one of the most crowded and impoverished nations on Earth. With about 150 million people packed into an area the size of Nebraska and Iowa (population less than a tenth that of Bangladesh, a country that is losing land steadily to rising sea levels and erosion of the Ganges river delta. The Rohingyas’ refugee camp has been squeezed onto a gigantic, eroding, muddy slope that contains nearly no vegetation. However, Bangladesh is majority Muslim, so while the Rohingya may starve, they won’t be shot to death by marauding armies. Both authors of this exquisite (and excruciating) account teach at Georgia Southern University in Savannah, Georgia, Roy as an associate professor of International Studies and Asian politics, and Pedron as a graduate student; Roy originally hails from very eastern India, close to both Myanmar and Bangladesh, so he has special insight into the context of one of the most brutal genocides of our time, or any other. This is our case describing the problems that nationalism has and will pose for the sustainability of the Earth as our little blue-and-green orb becomes more crowded over time. The old ways, in which national arguments often end in devastating wars, are obsolete, given that the Earth and all the people, plants, and other animals that it sustains are faced with the existential threat of a climate crisis that within two centuries, more or less, will flood large parts of coastal cities, and endanger many species of plants and animals. To survive, we must listen to the Earth, and observe her travails, because they are increasingly our own.

South Arabian kingdoms based their wealth and power on agriculture and the export of incense and other aromatics so much appreciated in the ancient world. After Aelius Gallus’ campaign against Arabia Felix in 25–24 BC, Roman trade by sea with the region greatly increased compared to the overland caravan routes. This chapter summarizes the political situation in Arabia Felix in those times through the analysis of archaeological, historical, and numismatic evidence and focuses on the harbours and mooring places along the Yemenite and Omani coasts. Italian underwater research at Qanaʾ discovered the ancient anchorage, with ceramics dating between the first and the end of the sixth century AD, with a higher percentage before the fourth century AD. Typological and petrological study suggests the close involvement of the Arabian Peninsula in the web of trade routes that connected the Roman world via the Red Sea with India, and the Persian Gulf.

This chapter opens with the discussion of the meanings of the terms esoteric, secret, and mystery. First, recent definitions of esotericism by Faivre, von Stuckrad, Tiryakian, and Hanegraaf are examined and found wanting in the discussion of a Hellenistic–Roman esotericism. The discussion moves on to the Qumran terminology raz = mystery and how, in particular, Samuel Thomas’s attempts at definition and distinction do not yield ultimately adequate results. The conclusion is that the meaning of “esoteric” is given by social situation and function. A. de Jonge’s and Georg Simmel’s theories are discussed. Power is believed to be an outcome of the cultivation of secrecy. Secrecy, which is crucial to esotericism, is socially transmitted. Heavenly knowledge, esoteric tradition, and the place of religious experience in the acquisition of secrets are also discussed.

This book is a regional history of Lesbos and the Troad from the seventh century BC to the first century AD which examines the extent to which this geographical region became politically, economically, and culturally integrated over this extended timeframe. The case studies in each chapter examine the various human and geographical factors which promoted regional integration, but also consider the political and identity-based considerations which limited integration and curtailed co-operation in particular areas. It is argued that this produced a situation in which an economically well-integrated region nevertheless remained politically fragmented and was only capable of unified action at moments of crisis. The book is split into two halves, with the first examining both the human and geographical factors which contributed to regional integration in the Troad and the politics of this process and the second examining the insular identity of Lesbos, the extent to which it was integrated into the mainland, and the consequences of this integration for the internal dynamic of the island. Cross-cutting these regional dynamics are the various imperial systems (Persian, Athenian, Macedonian, Attalid, Roman) which ruled this region and shaped its internal dynamics both through direct interventions in regional politics and through the pressures and incentives which these imperial systems created for local communities.

This chapter describes how Raymond Bellour in the twenty-first century enters into the on-going debates about the end of cinema that commenced in France in the late 1980s. The chapter underlines how he focuses largely on the changing shape and nature of the dispositif (or viewing situation, including the assumptions that a spectator brings to the viewing experience) in response to new technologies, with an emphasis on moving-image installation art shown in the museum or gallery. Whereas some scholars, such as Francesco Casetti, among others, have claimed that digital technologies and the proliferation of diverse viewing platforms mark a further development, a continuation of what was once cinema (and perhaps even the nineteenth century novel, the photo-roman, the comic book. etc.), Bellour sees these changes as constituting a fundamental break, an ontological shift in the nature of the medium. For Bellour, the dispositif – the apparatus, or physical setting and its technological and psychic potentiality for interaction, as well as the codes that inform this interaction, within which the viewer confronts and makes meaning out of a narrative, visual or otherwise – is fundamental to the experience of cinema and the ideas that it generates. This section offers an exploration Bellour’s understanding of these crucial changes, the implications of which animate discussions about contemporary media across the disciplines.

This handbook aims to provide an overview of knowledge about age and ageing in ‘Western’ societies at the beginning of the 21st century, which is intended to be equally suitable for research and practice. It focuses on relevant contributions from the social and behavioural sciences and their access to selected aspects of age and ageing. Its main topics can be described as quintessential core subjects, e.g. theories of ageing, socio-economic situation and inequalities, mental and physical health, social networks and social participation. These are supplemented by contributions on often marginalised topics and ‘emerging topics’ such as very old age, experiences of violence and delinquency, sexuality, and the spirituality and ethics of ageing. Finally, a series of topics relevant to everyday life and research practice (e.g. age and technology and data collection among the elderly) form a third central component of the book. With contributions by Heike Baranzke | Hermann Brandenburg | Susanne Brose | Josef Ehmer | Yvonne Eisenmann | Lea Ellwardt | Marcel Erlinghagen | Uwe Fachinger | Luise Geithner | Thomas Görgen | Bernadette Groebe | Helen Güther | Hans Gutzmann | Karsten Hank | Peter Häussermann | Rolf G. Heinze | Kira Hower | Anna Janhsen | Roman Kaspar | Daniela Klaus | Lars-Oliver Klotz | Franziska Kunz | Lisa Luft | Katharina Mahne | Michael Neise | Frank Oswald | Johannes Pantel | Susanne Penger | Holger Pfaff | M. Christina Polidori | Christian Rietz | Charlotte Şahin | Anna Schlomann | Holger Schmidt | Laura Schmidt | Wiebke Schmitz | Katrin Schneiders | Frank Schulz-Nieswandt | Andreas Simm | Julia Simonson | Anja Steinbach | Stephanie Stock | Julia Strupp | Clemens Tesch-Römer | Claudia Vogel | Raymond Voltz | Michael Wagner | Hans-Werner Wahl | Inka Wilhelm | Christiane Woopen | Susanne Zank

At the beginning of the thirteenth century, two new actors made their appearance in the political life of the communes: the factions and the Societas Populi. This chapter focuses on the political language and culture of these two elements, highlighting the tendency of various social actors to consistently represent the unity of the political body. This was the supreme value which neither the factions nor the Popolo would renounce, even when they were alone in power: on the contrary, in fact, it was very much in that kind of situation that the parties tended to represent themselves as ‘the whole’. The chapter then goes on to examine the role that both the factions and the Societas Populi played in fostering the first experiences of lordly government in the city.

Portugal's vibrant comics scene originated as early as the 19th century, bringing forth brilliant individual artists, but has remained mostly unknown beyond Portugal’s borders to this day. Now a new generation employs this medium to put into question hegemonic views on the economy, politics, and society. Following the experience of the financial crisis of the past decades and its impact on social policies, access to and rules of public discourse, and civil strife, comics have questioned what constitutes a traumatogenic situation and what can act as a creative response. By looking at established graphic novels by Marco Mendes and Miguel Rocha, fanzine-level, and even experimental productions, Visualising Small Traumas is the first English-language book that addresses Portuguese contemporary comics and investigates how trauma studies can both shed a light on comics making and be informed by that very same practice.

Wives and Daughters, Elizabeth Gaskell’s last novel, is regarded by many as her masterpiece. Molly Gibson is the daughter of the doctor in the small provincial town of Hollingford. Her widowed father marries a second time to give Molly the woman’s presence he feels she lacks, but until the arrival of Cynthia, her dazzling step-sister, Molly finds her situation hard to accept. Intertwined with the story of the Gibsons is that of Squire Hamley and his two sons; as Molly grows up and falls in love she learns to judge people for what they are, not what they seem. Through Molly’s observations the hierarchies, social values, and social changes of early nineteenth-century English life are made vivid in a novel that is timeless in its representation of human relationships. This edition, the first to be based in the original Cornhill Magazine serialization of 1864–6, draws on a full collation of the manuscript to present the most accurate text so far available.

Lucretius, Vergil, and Ovid developed important conventions of the Western plague narrative as a response to the breakdown of the Roman res publica in the mid-first century CE and the reconstitution of stabilized government under the Augustan Principate (31 BCE–14 CE). Relying on the metaphoric relationship between the human body and the body politic, these authors use largely fictive representations of epidemic disease to address the collapse of the social order and suggest remedies for its recovery. Plague as such functions frequently in Roman texts to enact a drama in which the concerns of the individual must be weighed against those of the collective. In order to understand the figurative potential of plague, this book evaluates the reality of epidemic disease in Rome, in light of twentieth-century theories of plague discourse, those of Artaud, Foucault, Sontag, and Girard, in particular. Pestilence and the Body Politic in Latin Literature identifies consistent features of the outbreaks described by Roman epic poets, charting the emergence of Golden-Age imagery, emphasis on bodily dissolution, and poignant accounts of broken familial bonds. Such features are expressed through Roman idioms that provocatively recall the discourse of civil strife that characterized the last century of the Roman Republic. The final chapters examine key moments in the resurgence of Roman plague topoi, beginning with early imperial poets (Lucan, Seneca, and Silius Italicus), and concluding with discussion of late antique Christian poetry, paintings of the late Italian Renaissance, and Anglo-American novels and films.

The first cases of a new coronavirus (SARS-CoV-2) were identified toward the end of 2019 in Wuhan, China. Over the following months, this virus spread to everywhere in the world. By now no country has been spared the devastation from the loss of lives from the disease (Covid-19) and the economic and social impacts of responses to mitigate the impact of the virus. Our lives in South Africa have been turned upside down as we try to make the best of this bad situation. The 2020 school year was disrupted with closure and then reopening in a phased approach, as stipulated by the Department of Education. This booklet is a collective effort by academics who are Members of the Academy of Science of South Africa (ASSAf) and other invited scholars to help you appreciate some of the basic scientific facts that you need to know in order to understand the present crisis and the various options available to respond to it. We emphasise that the threat of infectious diseases is not an entirely new phenomenon that has sprung onto the stage out of nowhere. Infectious diseases and pandemics have been with us for centuries, in fact much longer. Scientists have warned us for years of the need to prepare for the next pandemic. Progress in medicine in the course of the 20th century has been formidable. Childhood mortality has greatly decreased almost everywhere in the world, thanks mainly, but not only, to the many vaccines that have been developed. Effective drugs now exist for many deadly diseases for which there were once no cures. For many of us, this progress has generated a false sense of security. It has caused us to believe that the likes of the 1918 ‘Spanish flu’ pandemic, which caused some 50 million deaths around the world within a span of a few months, could not be repeated in some form in today’s modern world. The Covid-19 pandemic reminds us that as new cures for old diseases are discovered, new diseases come along for which we are unprepared. And every hundred or so years one of these diseases wreaks havoc on the world and interferes severely with our usual ways of going about our lives. Today’s world has become increasingly interconnected and interdependent, through trade, migrations, and rapid air travel. This globalisation makes it easier for epidemics to spread, somewhat offsetting the power of modern medicine. In this booklet we have endeavoured to provide an historical perspective, and to enrich your knowledge with some of the basics of medicine, viruses, and epidemiology. Beyond the immediate Covid-19 crisis, South Africa faces a number of other major health challenges: highly unequal access to quality healthcare, widespread tuberculosis, HIV infection causing AIDS, a high prevalence of mental illness, and a low life expectancy, compared to what is possible with today’s medicine. It is essential that you, as young people, also learn about the nature of these new challenges, so that you may contribute to finding future solutions.

Britain’s place in the Roman Empire cannot be seen in isolation. The province’s close links to Gaul and Germany stemmed from earlier interaction in the late Iron Age, and these connections have been seen as highly significant in explaining the changes in burial, dress, and settlement that took place in Britain from the first century BC to the fifth century AD. Exploring evidence from changes in diet, architecture, and burial rites, this chapter will assess the nature and extent of cultural interactions between these provinces. In particular, it will examine whether these links can be used to argue for a ‘Gallicization’ of Britain, rather than a ‘Romanization’. It will question whether such terms are helpful in reconceptualizing the processes of cultural change before and after the Roman Conquest or whether they present their own set of problems for understanding cultural interactions and social change.

This book is the first monograph in English about Demades, an influential Athenian politician from the fourth century B.C. An orator whose fame outlived him for hundreds of years, he was an acquaintance of and a collaborator with many political and military leaders of classical Greece, including the Macedonian king Philip II, his son and successor Alexander III (the Great), and the orator Demosthenes. However, an overwhelming portion of the available evidence on Demades dates to at least three centuries after his death and, often, much later. Contextualizing the sources within their historical and cultural framework, The Orator Demades delineates how later rhetorical practices and social norms transformed his image to better reflect the educational needs and political realities of the Roman imperial and Byzantine periods. Using the specific example of Demades as a rhetorical construct that eventually replaced its historical prototype for later generations, the book raises a general question about the problematic foundations of our knowledge of classical Greece. The evolving image of Demades illustrates the role played by rhetoric, as the basis of education and edification during the Roman and Byzantine Empires, in creating an alternate, inauthentic vision of the classical past—a vision that continues to dominate modern scholarship and popular culture.

Through case studies of archaeological materials from local contexts, Archaeology and the Letters of Paul illuminates the social, political, economic, and religious lives of those whom the apostle Paul addressed. Roman Ephesos, a likely setting for the household of Philemon, provides evidence of the slave trade. An inscription from Galatia seeks to restrain traveling Roman officials, illuminating how the travels of Paul, Cephas, and others may have disrupted communities. At Philippi, a donation list from a Silvanus cult provides evidence of abundant giving amid economic limitations, paralleling practices of local Christ followers. In Corinth, a landscape of grief includes monuments and bones, a context that illumines Corinthian practices of baptism on behalf of the dead and the provocative idea that one could live “as if not” mourning. Rome and the Letter to the Romans are the grounds to investigate ideas of time and race not only in the first century, when we find an Egyptian obelisk inserted as a timepiece into Augustus’s mausoleum complex, but also of Mussolini’s new Rome. Thessalonikē demonstrates how letters, legend, and cult are invented out of a love for Paul, after his death. The book articulates a method for bringing together biblical texts with archaeological remains in order to reconstruct the lives of the many adelphoi—brothers and sisters—whom Paul and his co-writers address. It is informed by feminist historiography and gains inspiration from thinkers like Claudia Rankine, Judith Butler, Giorgio Agamben, Wendy Brown, and Katie Lofton.

A colossal statue, originally built to honor an ancient pharaoh, still stands in Egyptian Thebes. Damaged by an earthquake, and re-identified as the Homeric hero Memnon, it was believed to “speak” regularly at daybreak. By the middle of the first century CE, the colossus had become a popular site for sacred tourism; visitors flocked to hear the miraculous sound, leaving behind over one hundred Greek and Latin inscriptions. These inscriptions are varied and diverse: brief acknowledgments of having heard Memnon’s voice; longer lists by Roman administrators including details of personal accomplishments; and elaborate elegiac poems by both amateurs and professionals. The inscribed names reveal the presence of emperors and soldiers, provincial governors and businessmen, elite women and military wives, and families with children. This study is the first complete assessment of all the inscriptions considered in their social, cultural, and historical context. The Memnon colossus functioned as a powerful site of engagement with the Greek past for a broad segment of society. The inscriptions shed light on attitudes toward sacred tourism, the role of Egypt in the Greco-Roman imagination, and Homer’s cultural legacy in the imperial era. Visitors sought a “close encounter” with this ghost from the Homeric past anchored in the Egyptian present. Their inscriptions idealize Greece by echoing archaic literature at the same time as they reflect their own historical horizon. While Memnon’s voice falls silent by the end of the second century CE, the statue finds new worshippers among Romantic poets in nineteenth-century Europe.

Slaves were ubiquitous in the first- and second-century CE Roman Empire, and early Christian texts reflect this fact. This book argues that enslaved persons engaged in leadership roles in civic and religious activities. Such roles created tension within religious groups, including second-century communities connected with Paul’s legacy. Archaeological materials, epigraphy, and literature from Ephesos and environs illustrate these power struggles with clarity. Enslaved persons were religious specialists, priests, and leaders in cultic groups, including early Christian groups. Thus, the book paints a complex picture of enslaved life in Asia Minor to illustrate how enslaved persons enacted roles of religious and civic significance that potentially upended social hierarchies which privileged wealthy, slaveholding men. Yet even as the enslaved engaged in such authoritative roles, Roman slavery was not a benign institution nor were early Christians kinder and more egalitarian toward slaves. Both early Christian texts (such as Philemon, 1 Timothy, and Ignatius’s letters) and archaeological finds from Ephesos defend, construct, and clarify the hierarchies that kept enslaved persons under the control of their masters. This book brings together archaeological materials and literary texts using feminist rhetorical criticism. In doing so, it shows how archaeological materials attempt to persuade viewers, readers, and inhabitants of the city. Early Christian texts similarly attempt to persuade readers that slaves should not hold leadership positions. Thus the book illustrates a historical world in which control of slaves must continually be asserted. It demonstrates that master-slave hierarchies were unclear, disjointed, and even subverted in everyday religious activities.

Children’s representations appear early in the Greek visual material culture: first they appear in the large funerary vases of the geometric period, while in the archaic period they appear in funerary reliefs and vases. To the representations in vase painting, those in terracotta statuettes can be added in the fifth century, but it is in the fourth century bc that children become a noteworthy subject of representation, appearing both in small- and large-scale objects in different media. This chapter considers the relationship between changing imagery of children in ancient Greece and social and religious developments from the geometric period, through the Hellenistic period and into the Roman period in Greece.

This chapter analyzes the social and economic effects of the single largest construction project of pre-Imperial Rome, the circuit of walls built in the first half of the fourth century BCE. I employ an “energetics” approach (Abrams 1994), quantifying the labor-cost of the walls’ construction by means of comparative data and close study of the monument’s remains. The resulting model provides a better idea not only of the walls’ total cost, but of the workforce’s composition, the balance of skilled and unskilled labor, and the schedule of construction. The costs are then input into a general model of the Roman economy in order to assess the broader impact of the walls’ costs. Archaeological and textual evidence indicate the walls were built with compulsory labor. This further underscores the likelihood that the project widened economic inequality and worsened existing socioeconomic tensions.

Later Roman Britain is viewed in a wide context to identify which developments are expressions of wider trends and which are more insular. Four major factors are considered. First, the withdrawal of the imperial presence from northern Gaul and Germany, in particular as it affected the society and economy of these regions, which had become increasingly militarized. Second, the disintegration of the economic formations of the wider West following the removal of the imperial system, especially the economic nexus promoted by the fiscal requirements of the state. Third, the continuing vitality of ‘traditional’ urbanism derived from imperial and senatorial models, expressive of a common aristocratic culture and very visible in southern Britain. Fourth, the changes to settlement and funerary archaeology in the fifth century as expressions of social and economic restructuring. Britain is considered in relation to all these developments, to try to combat over-insular perspectives.

Among the intellectual and literary elites of Roman Italy in the late first century CE, Christianity had yet to make significant inroads. The Stoicism of Panaetius and Seneca dominated ethical discourse in the imperial capital, whereas in the Hellenic center of Neapolis (Naples) and surrounding Campania, elites maintained the genteel Epicureanism of Philodemus. This chapter explores the innovative regional poetics and philosophy of the Bay of Naples through the architectural poems of Statius’s Silvae. Statius’s remarkable poetic innovation engages a new rhetorical approach to displays of material wealth and their social significance. In creating a new genre of “real estate” poetry imitated through late antiquity into sixteenth-century Rome and seventeenth-century England, Statius transforms earlier condemnations of lavish architecture and its tropes in philosophical and poetic discourses into ethical panegyrics to wealth. This chapter identifies Statius’s architectural poetics as a catalyst in philosophical and literary approaches to class, wealth, and social identity.

At least four writing systems—in addition to the Phoenician, Greek, and Latin ones—were used between the fifth century BCE and the first century CE to write the indigenous languages of the Iberian peninsula (the so-called Palaeohispanic languages): Tartessian, Iberian, Celtiberian, and Lusitanian. In total over three thousand inscriptions are preserved in what is certainly the largest corpus of epigraphic expression in the western Mediterranean world with the exception of the Italian peninsula. The aim of this book is to present a state of the question that includes the latest cutting-edge scholarship on these epigraphies and the languages that they transmit. To do so, the editors have put together a volume that from a multidisciplinary perspective brings together linguistic, philological, epigraphic, numismatic, historical, and archaeological aspects of the surviving inscriptions. The study of these languages is essential to achieve a better understanding of the social, economic, and cultural history of Hispania and the ancient western Mediterranean. They are also the key to our understanding of colonial Phoenician and Greek literacy, which lies at the root of the spread of these languages and also of the diffusion of Roman literacy, which played an important role in the final expansion of the so-called Palaeohispanic languages.

The City of God, written in the aftermath of the Gothic sack of Rome in AD 410, is the most influential of Augustine’s works. It has played a decisive role in the formation of the culture of the Christian West. Gerard O’Daly’s book remains the most comprehensive modern guide to it in any language. The City of God has a wide scope, including cosmology, psychology, political thought, anti-pagan polemic, Christian apologetic, theory of history, biblical interpretation, and apocalyptic themes. This book, therefore, is about a single literary masterpiece, yet at the same time it surveys Augustine’s developing views through the whole range of his thought. It provides a running commentary on each part of the work. Further chapters elucidate the early fifth-century political, social, historical, and literary background, the works’s sources, and its place in Augustine’s writings. This new and extensively revised edition takes into account the abundant work, in Augustine studies and in research on late antiquity generally, in the twenty years since its first publication, while retaining the book’s focus on Augustine as writer and thinker in the Latin tradition, active at a time of rapid Christianization in a radically changing Roman Empire. It includes chapter-by-chapter suggestions for further reading, an extensive summary of the work’s contents, and a brief bibliographical guide to research on its reception. All Greek and Latin texts are translated. The book is aimed at readers of Augustine, and at the same time at a wider readership among students of late antiquity, theologians, philosophers, medievalists, Renaissance scholars, and historians of art and iconography.

The Second Pedagogical Notebook is a continuation of the first ‘notebook’, dedicated to the Urban Planning Research course. The course and the notebook were created by Prof. Ivana Šverko, with the aim of offering students of architecture in Split the basics of urban planning research in a Mediterranean context. The idea behind the pedagogical notebook is to contribute to the recognition of the research phase as an essential starting point in the entire, complicated process of urban planning and design, as well as an understanding of research methodologies in specific spatial and social conditions. One of the ideal real-world templates for realising this goal is Zrinsko- Frankopanska Street, which developed along one of the Split peninsula’s Roman centuriation lines. This street connects the historical southern city harbour with the newer, northern one. Zrinsko-Frankopanska is an exceptionally important city street, and along its length there are a range of buildings dating from the ancient period to the 21st century, with almost every historical period represented. It is here that the most diverse range of public facilities can be found. The students mapped, studied, and analysed this city street, using historical and morphological analysis of spatial connections, greenery, the relationship between the public and the private, the accessible and inaccessible spaces, purpose, urban equipment, and so on. In doing so, they also noted relevant everyday human activities such as disposing of rubbish, as well as things such as the position and content of graffiti. They also included morphography – the description of forms without reference to their sources and development process – in their analytical approach. After the research phase, the students were instructed to target the problems they detected by proposing improvements to the existing elements, or by redesigning them. They were also required to open up the possibility of alternate uses for the space, up to the point in the design process when an architect or designer would usually take over. By presenting the study of a specific segment in this book, we wish to help students consider the complexity of the urban tissue, define the basic urban elements, research development processes, the typological and morphological characteristics of constriction and, ultimately, to identify everything that constitutes the “urban space as a whole”. We wish to guide them so that with their unique knowledge and tools, and their inclusion of all the other relevant professions in the processes of urban planning, they can become architects with sound professional and ethical principles, and develop into a new generation of responsible city-builders.