Changes in the nature and conception of philosophy reflect changes in the modes in which philosophy was pursued during the first thousand years of the formation and influence of Aristotle’s philosophy. In the Hellenic period, philosophy consisted of inquiry and discussion, oral or written, in expositions or dialogues. Recording other positions, past or present, that is, history, was part of both modes of philosophizing. In the Hellenistic period, philosophy moved into schools and libraries and became scholastic and scholarly. The schools (...) interpreted doctrines and methods, and the libraries edited books and classified the branches of knowledge and letters. The history of philosophy became records of the opinions of philosophers and the successions of schools, or histories of sciences and arts. Aristotelianism was formed among the Hellenistic schools of philosophy, and members of the Peripatetic school wrote the first histories of science. Aristotle’s works were not needed in either enterprise. His books were preserved, lost, forgotten, and emended, and editors determined their authenticity, contents, structure, and order. In the period of the Roman Empire, philosophy was rejoined to rhetoric, dialectic, and sophistic. It was the period of the Second Sophistic, during which political and forensic rhetoric declined, the Platonic dialectic of dialogues and Ideas was transformed into the Neoplatonic dialectic of hierarchies and the One, and Sophistic assumed therapeutic functions in conjunction with medicine, and theatrical and mass-educational functions as epideictic rhetoric. The works of Aristotle were epitomized and interpreted, and Aristotelian words and ideas entered into the formation of a new organization of the liberal arts, a new transcendental theology, and new forms of literature and literary criticism. (shrink)

Language Change in the Wake of Empire: Syriac in Its Greco-Roman Context. By Aaron Michael Butts. Linguistic Studies in Ancient West Semitic, vol. 11. Winona Lake, IN: Eisenbrauns, 2016. Pp. xvii + 292. $59.50.

The Assyrian presence in Palestine from the ninth through the seventh century B.C.E. represents a case of intercultural contact against the background of an expansionist imperial process. The “Assyrianization” of Israel and Judah, as well as that of the whole Levant, has often been posited. This term, which evokes “Romanization,” would indicate enforced cultural adaptation to Assyrian values and customs within the framework of a process of assimilation. An alleged “Assyrianization” of Ancient Israel would be congruent with that interpretation of (...) Assyrian imperialism postulating programmatic measures to impose the Assyrian way of life upon the whole empire. However, a study of the cuneiform and archaeological sources leads to an alternative interpretation of Assyrian imperial policy in the West. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Iambic Poetics in the Roman Empire by Tom HawkinsGideon NisbetTom Hawkins. Iambic Poetics in the Roman Empire. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014. xi + 334 pp. Cloth, $99.This stimulating and highly readable book explores the ancient afterlife of three famous literary bully-boys: Archilochus, Semonides, and Hipponax, the unholy Trinity of archaic Greek iambus. Tom Hawkins sets out to examine their reception, not among the (...) classical and Hellenistic Greek poets to whom they were living forebears (although the Callimachean intertext is a lively presence, e.g., 40–51, 146–49), or in the literary flourishing that they in turn inspired in late Republican and “golden” Augustan Rome, but amid authors of the Empire and Late Antiquity, extending into a recognizably Christian age. Only one of the six authors chosen (Babrius) adopts an iambic meter, and three—Dio, Lucian, and Julian—do not even compose verse (or not here). Hawkins’ choices are piquant. He has sought out the kinds of text that classicists generally skip: odd, minor works by the less reputable pagans, and by the type of early churchman we tend [End Page 180] gratefully to surrender to our colleagues in theology. Indeed, some are scarcely read at all (qua texts) but merely dipped into as a source of corroborating factoids, at least until now (142, on Gregory Nazianzen). Hawkins contends that an “iambic tradition” of sorts remains culturally alive and vital throughout these early centuries c.e.: a tradition not so much of metrical continuation or even necessarily of working closely with the archaic texts, but nevertheless retaining a definite sense of the constituent elements (e.g., animal-fable, a scruffy narrator) that, variously combined, let the reader or audience know they are in dialogue with an “iambic mode” (terms are defined in the introduction’s first footnote, 2).Authors and readerships of these centuries had at their command much more of the text of the archaic iambicists than is available to us moderns, provided they cared to read it and could understand what they read (28–29 suggests it was often otherwise). Today, Archilochus et al. are mere tattered ghosts, pieced together by editorial ingenuity out of citations and mentions, and latterly read in papyrus fragments gleaned from ancient rubbish heaps (the heroes of this scholarly epic of reconstruction include the late Professor Martin West, news of whose death came shortly before this review went to press). Some of the Imperial poets and prose authors studied by Hawkins envisage an ideal reader to whom archaic iambus is an open book, but the true constant is the ancient biographical tradition about Archilochus in particular (the stories told about the others are often recognizable knock-offs, but all three are names to conjure with; there are grounds for thinking that Archilochus had become literally proverbial for invective abuse even among non-readers, 27). Hawkins is very good at showing how these interwoven life-stories took on a life of their own and continued to grow in the telling (9), all the more so perhaps as actual familiarity with the texts waned. Over several centuries and numerous genres, the malleable myth of iambus—the slighted outsider, embracing abjection to shock a complacent Establishment and shame his nemeses—proved endlessly useful as a temporary vantage point when authors felt like taking a walk on the wild side.The iambic tradition tracked by Hawkins thus has “more to do with the sediment of cultural memory about iambic poets and their poetry than with historical realities, but once we get beyond a fascination with origins, such sediment becomes the only reality worth talking about” (8). In Hawkins’ readings of his chosen texts, this textual-biographical muck is fertile stuff. Iteration and generic migration turn the iambic life-story into a potent and versatile literary trope which usefully combines ironic distance (to be, or even make like Archilochus is an obvious non-starter in such a belated and grown-up age), and thus self-evident deniability, with the implicit threat that traces of iambus’ murderous power may yet remain. For Hawkins, the hint is if anything strengthened by repeated, name-checking recusationes that keep the iambic biopic in the... (shrink)

Contextualizing the fall of the Roman Empire in the West in 476, and the unprecedented crisis in all respects, the barbarian invasions, the different civilizations and confrontation between Romans and barbarians, dominated and rulers. In this setting, the actions of Bishops graduates of the monasteries, culminating in the role of the monks in the evangelization of Medieval Europe. Exercise a reflection about this historical fact and its importance in Evangelization today.

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Buddhist-Christian Studies 23 (2003) 170-174 [Access article in PDF] A Buddhist History of the West: Studies In Lack. By David R. Loy. Albany: State University of New York Press, 2002. 244 pp. The religious and philosophical situation of our time seems polarized between resurgent fundamentalisms and a cosmopolitan awareness bridging heretofore separated traditions. Even a few decades ago the notion of a dialogue between East and West (...) was a novelty in which demarcated traditions and cultures (say the Buddhist East and the Christian West) experimented with attempts to find a common language to speakacross the boundaries between their respective identities. In such a context,"Western Buddhists" were those pilgrims of the counterculture who "went East" in search of some civilizational and spiritual other; the West, abjected to the realm of soulless scientism or outdated religious authoritarianism, was left behind. The situation is different at the beginning of the twenty-first Christian century. The dialectical complexities, both inwardly in the soul or mind of seekers, and outwardly in the strange twists of contemporary history, emerge to forbid any simple assessments of what can be left behind or indeed what the use can be of what seekers have found in the "non-West." People of Western background begin to realize and consciously address the [End Page 170] karmic-historical presuppositions of their search, which continue to constitute a kind of historical unconscious to the formulation of any possible "Western Buddhisms." Meanwhile, while fundamentalists of many backgrounds posit "clashes of civilizations" that assume an absoluteness of traditional distinctions, cosmopolitans realize that, for all the particularity of their respective starting points, the global situation is inextricably a shared one. In such a context, what canWestern Buddhist intellectuals, cognizant of their own starting points but having learned some things along the Way that are perhaps of universal relevance, speak to our common condition?The "Buddhist History of the West" that David Loy provides is less a historical narrative of the events constitutive of the societies descending from Greco-Roman civilization through European epochs and American empire into the age of globalization than a form of psychoanalytic anamnesis of those societies' cultural constructions of reality. Loy's psychoanalytic interpretive frame is composed of Buddhist insight into the human mind's deep-seated grasping for solidity and certainty in the face of a reality fundamentally characterized by impermanence and ungroundedness (the "Lack" of the subtitle, our simultaneous awareness of death, impermanence, andontological emptiness and the ego's wish for eternal selfhood in an endless but impossibly fulfilling world). Loy's Buddhism is combined with the existential psychology of Ernest Becker and the revisionist Freudianism of Norman O. Brown called on as Western resources for the spiritual therapeutics "the West" seems to need as it enters the third Christian millennium both triumphant and in despair of any meaning to accompany its economic and pop-cultural hegemony.Seven anamnestic chapters take us through twenty-five hundred years of Western cultural constructions, from the Greek and Roman philosophical inquiries into Freedom, a kind of origin-tale of Humanism seen as a "religious" (religion for Loy being the way humans attempt to answer the problem of Lack as if to ground our groundlessness) vision of meaning as the development of human capacities for rational thought, through the intertwining of classical and Christian constructions in medieval and Renaissance periods, through the Protestant Reformation into the political and ideological space of modernity, culminating in a vision of the globalizing West as purveying a "Religion of the Market," an ironically meaningless (centered on the symbolic code for Value—Money—as a displacement of Value itself) system of meaning. This last, our contemporary situation, would perhaps be simply a problem of aesthetic tastelessness (American pop culture performing the dissolution of all surviving traditional sacred orders following the description of capitalism by Marx as causing "all that is sacred" to "melt into air") were it not for the massive social injustice and environmental devastation it structurally produces. Loy's therapeutic vision, following the Buddhist deconstruction of the demarcated "self" and Becker and Brown's cultural-historical or collective... (shrink)

On the back-cover of the book one reads that the author “suggests that the Roman Empire, in its surviving Eastern Roman (‘Byzantine’) form, maintained a continual and sustained part in shaping the life of the West until at least the seventh century …”, and “Byzantine objects found in the West – whether they arrived through trade, diplomacy or the travels of individuals – force us to reconsider the extent and the purpose of the Eastern (...) class='Hi'>Roman Empire's intervention in the West, including Britain. In conclusion Dr Harris explores the idea of a ‘Late Antique Commonwealth’, extending from Britain to the Mediterranean”. From this résumé, in which the words ‘intervention’ and ‘shaping the life of the West’ figure prominently, one may conclude that the author is convinced that the Byzantine Empire in the East played an active role in the history of Western Europe. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:The Athenian Agora: Results of Excavations Conducted by the American School of Classical Studies at AthensWilliam C. WestA. Geoffrey Woodhead. The Athenian Agora: Results of Excavations Conducted by the American School of Classical Studies at Athens. Vol. XVI, Inscriptions: The Decrees. Princeton: American School of Classical Studies at Athens, 1997. xx 1 531 pp. 1 plan. 32 pls. Cloth, $100.A. G. Woodhead characterizes his work as “a still (...) photograph, extracted from a process of discovery, discussion, and reevaluation constantly in motion... a representation of the status rerum... at the end of 1991” (viii). Nonetheless, this is a remarkable book. It reprints and discusses up-to-date texts of Athenian decrees from the Agora and classifies them in five sections: (1) to the fall of Athens in 404 B.C.; (2) from one restoration of democracy to another, 403/2-307/6 B.C.; (3) the “Macedonian Century,” 307/6-201/200 B.C.; (4) Athens and the Roman Republic, 200–86 B.C.; and (5) Athens in the Roman Empire, 86 B.C.-A.D. 203 (xi). The reader is thereby helped to an appreciation of Athenian diplomacy and bureaucracy within the framework of recognized historical periods. [End Page 458]A total of 342 inscriptions are presented: 28 in section 1; 78 in section 2; 149 in section 3; 76 in section 4; and 10 in section 5. Two phases of Agora excavation are represented: 1931–45 and 1946–67. After each section an appendix on material discovered after 1967 lists new discoveries with appropriate references. New studies and new texts are assimilated in the presentation of each item up to the end of 1991. Decrees of the Athenian state form the bulk of the collection, but decrees of other bodies, such as demes, gene, orgeones, etc., are also included. Excluded by intention (vii) are the decrees on councilors and their officers (Agora XV) and the decrees honoring ephebes.For each item Woodhead gives an extensive lemma, with brief description of the stone, dimensions of the letters, and bibliography of previous texts and works contributing to their understanding. Each text is followed by a commentary. He frequently comments on the lettering and style of engraving before entering upon discussion of individual lines.For section 1, the fifth century, the texts of IG I3 (1981) are printed, but for the others, in sections 2–5, the best available text is chosen. Where a new fragment of an old text has been discovered in the Agora, the full text of the entire inscription is given. As many decrees were set up on the Acropolis, it is clear that some material was “thrown or brought down from the citadel for reuse” (3). In the case of the Brea decree (no. 7), the contribution of the Agora fragment is slight, but in that of the treaty between Athens and Argos of 417/6 (no. 19) it is significant, providing the length of the line, 76 letters.When an archon is cited in the prescript of an Agora decree, Woodhead supplies a full discussion of the archonship, seeking to show how opinion was formed concerning the date of the office and the calendar. The earliest to be discussed is Polyzelos, 367/6 B.C. (section 2); the latest, Flavius Macrinus, A.D. 116/17 (section 5).In section 2, the fourth century to 307/6, Woodhead calls attention (41) to the spread of Athenian bureaucracy in the increased detail in the prescripts of decrees, the appearance of new formulae, such as that indicating hortatory intent (cf. A. S. Henry, ZPE 112 [1996] 105–19), and stock phrases enumerating the merits of laudandi in honorary decrees. The inevitable restoration of in the prescript of no. 101 brings in this formula for the first time in Agora decrees, although it is known from elsewhere “as early as 334/3” (154). The Agora contributes very significant decrees on the nomothesia (nos. 73, 75, 106C) and Athens’ regulation of the Eleusinian Mysteries (nos. 56, 57).The next section, 307/6 to 201/200, represents for Athens “the high-water mark of its bureaucracy” (167). The texts classified here attest the variety of documents... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Sidonius Apollinaris and the Fall of Rome, A.D. 407–485F. E. RomerJill Harries. Sidonius Apollinaris and the Fall of Rome, A.D. 407–485. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1994. xiv + 292 pp.“It is a truth almost universally acknowledged that the Roman Empire in the West collapsed without a sound in the fifth century, but that nobody understood that the catastrophe had occurred before Byzantine chroniclers woke up belatedly (...) to the fact in the sixth century.” Thus, Jill Harries sets out to prove that the Roman Empire was not a tree in the forest with no one to hear its fall, but that the aristocratic Sidonius Apollinaris heard it. Conversely, Sidonius’ own ambitions, attitudes, and sense of compromise “illustrate the wider political failure [End Page 663] of Rome in Gaul” (v). From the beginning we see her characteristic method of synthesis and analysis, as she proceeds both topically and chronologically to map the history of Sidonius’ Gallic world against his life and his concerns.Like “the death of Socrates,” however, “the fall of Rome” means different things. Harries defines the Roman Empire “purely in terms of a status system based on the ‘gradus dignitatum’ available to the aristocracy and [on] expertise in classical literature” (17). This definition is based on “the single most significant remark made by any contemporary western author on the end of Roman rule: ‘with the removal of the ranks of office, the only means by which the best men can be distinguished from their inferiors, hereafter the only mark of nobility will be knowledge of letters’” (16–17, translating Sid., Ep. 8.2.2). The view here is distinctly from Gaul, and mainly from Clermont: “Rome” is only an idea. Harries avoids the pitfall of writing a history of fifth-century Gaul as a whole, while also avoiding anachronism by adopting Sidonius’ viewpoint. This “fall” is, of course, a process, momentous but not instantaneous. We get a glimpse of a theoretical moment only, for the same process—with or without local awareness—repeated itself all over Gaul and the Western empire.The other terms in the title need clarification, too. The period A.D. 407–485 includes Sidonius’ lifetime (431[432?]-ca. 485) and ends, roughly, at his death, but it begins a generation earlier, the day after tens of thousands of non-Roman peoples crossed the Rhine into the empire on 31 December 406. There is an air of inevitability at first: the Rhine crossing, the political fragmentation of Gaul and Spain, dissensions between Romans and various Gothic leaders, the sack of Rome in 410, and the imposition of the Gothic emperor Attalus, “all had combined to undermine the credibility of Roman rule, and of Roman law, in the West” (66). The eleven chapters proceed chronologically, each weaving in the author’s main themes: the expanding effects of the Gothic arrival, the Gallic experience of Rome’s fall, and Sidonius’ perception of it.Even Sidonius requires definition, since he eludes us in his writings and is, often, an intellectual poseur, wrapped in the literary classicism of his age and social class: “his art mirrored life, but it could also distort it” (11). When he describes his beloved villa Avitacum, for example, we cannot tell what is real or unreal, so much does he echo the younger Pliny’s language. Then, in the 470s, Sidonius stopped classicizing and adopted a simpler, more preacherly style; yet, in the 480s, he changed back as a consolation for the fall of Rome. For these reasons, and because the often hard-to-read Sidonius has not yet found his literary expositor, Harries’ Introduction guides the historian to “what may be termed the political aspects of his technique” (3).The book’s argument is divided into two sections. Part I, “Lyon and Rome,” begins with the family history of the Apollinares and the Aviti, and ends with Sidonius in the urban prefecture at Rome, a scantily attested period, about which Harries writes provocatively. Herein are five chapters discussing (a) Sidonius [End Page 664] at Lyon and Arles, A.D. 430–455, (b) Avitus and the Goths, (c) Majorian, (d) Sidonius as Christian layman, A.D. 461–467... (shrink)

Responding to the complicated conditions produced by both the Constantinian Revolution and the collapse of the Roman Empire in the West, Augustine concerned himself not so much with “earthly transitions” as with the only transition that he believed had final significance: the transition of Christ from death to life.

This article begins with discussions of rationalist, a priori and empiricist, a posteriori thinking in philosophy. It then argues that classically, sociology is rationalist or a priori. Sociology — Weber, Simmel, Durkheim and Marx — moves from Kant's epistemological a priori to the social a priori. It moves from the question of how knowledge is possible to the question of how society is possible. This question of the possibility of society becomes quickly one of social control and social order in (...) functionalism and Parsons. The article argues instead for an aposteriorist, de facto empiricist sociology that breaks with this ultimately normative question. This aposteriorist sociology would instead investigate social processes in their very factuality, their open-endedness, complexity, and path dependency. A priorism in sociology, I would argue, is dominant in both positivism and phenomenology. The article opposes to phenomenology's transcendentaI rationalism a `transcendental empiricism' that is illustrated with Edmund Burke's English and aposteriori aesthetics of the sublime. Sociology today needs to be relevant to study of `emerging' nations like China. The article argues for an aposteriorist, empiricist sociology here, and looks at debates on property law in today's China. Here we look at rationalist and a priori notions of clear, distinct and divisible property in Continental reception of Roman law. We counterpose to this English, empiricist (a posteriori) Common Law notions of property as a bundle of rights, in which property is not clear and distinct but vague like a boundary object. We look at how this is instantiated in China. With François Jullien, we contrast a Chinese, effectively empiricist, aposteriorist notion of the universal to Western rationalist and a priori universalism. We look at the implications for international geopolitics and a possible Chinese route to democracy. With Jullien, we counterpose an aposteriorist Chinese notion of `activity' to the Western a priori notions of `action' found in Weber and Parsons. The Chinese `activity' is more processual, more relational, less goal-oriented, more path-dependent than our Western notion of `action'. The article argues that in the twenty-first century when national social control is partly displaced by global uncertainty, and when the ascendancy of the West is coming increasingly under question, that such an empiricist, aposteriorist sociology is suitable. (shrink)

Religions of the Constantinian Empire provides a synoptic review of Constantine's relation to all the cultic and theological traditions of the Empire during the period from his seizure of power in the west in 306 ᴄᴇ to the end of his reign as autocrat of both east and west in 337 ᴄᴇ. Divided into three parts, the first considers the efforts of Christians to construct their own philosophy, and their own patterns of the philosophic life, in (...) opposition to Platonism. The second assembles evidence of survival, variation or decay in religious practices which were never compulsory under Roman law. The "religious plurality" of the second section includes those cults which are represented as demonic burlesques of the sacraments by Firmicus Maternus. The third reviews the changes, both within the church and in the public sphere, which were undeniably prompted by the accession of a Christian monarch. In this section on "Christian polyphony", Mark Edwards expertly moves on from this deliberate petrifaction of Judaism to the profound shift in relations between the church and the civic cult that followed the Emperor's choice of a new divine protector. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Kennedy Institute of Ethics Journal 15.2 (2005) 211-218 [Access article in PDF] Bioethics, Biolaw, and Western Legal Heritage Susan Cartier Poland Bioethics and biolaw are two philosophical approaches that address social tension and conflict caused by emerging bioscientific and biomedical research and application. Both reflect their respective, yet different, heritages in Western law. Bioethics can be defined as "the research and practice, generally interdisciplinary in nature, which aims to (...) clarify or resolve ethical questions raised by the advances and application of biomedical and biological sciences" (II, Miller 2000, p. 246). Biolaw, on the other hand, is a legal philosophical concept that can be defined as "the taking of agreed upon principles and practices of bioethics into law with the sanctions that law engenders" (p. 246). Some see biolaw as hierarchical, either evolving from or devolving into bioethics (p. 245), while others think of bioethics and biolaw as a continuum or gradation (p. 246). Whichever view one takes, bioethics and biolaw are, at the least, intertwined (II, Loureiro 2000, p. 71).Although bioethics came out of the U.S. in the 1970s, the field is now considered Anglo-American (II, Kemp 2000a, p. 67). Biolaw emerged in the 1990s from the French biodroit and has become associated with continental Europe (p. 68). These distinctions, however, are based on geopolitical entities. Another way to distinguish bioethics from biolaw is to look at their legal heritage and understand the differences between the common law and the civil law.Bioethics and biolaw share a Western legal heritage, specifically roots in Roman law. When the Roman empire in the West fell to Germanic tribes in 476 A.D., the Romans had developed a sophisticated system of law that included flexible standards and abstract, rather than concrete, modes of thought. In 528, Justinian, emperor of the surviving Roman empire in the East at Constantinople, ordered a compilation and consolidation of Roman law. Despite the rise of seventh century Islam, the split of the Christian church into eastern and western branches in 1054, and the Norman conquest of England in 1066, Roman law survived through the courts of canon law and was revived later in the twelfth century at the University of Bologna in Italy. By 1500, what would later become France and Germany had [End Page 211] "received" or recognized Roman law, albeit in varying degrees. Not a single event, the Reception, or "direct acceptance of Roman law as a principal source of law," is the definitive turning point in Western legal history that eventually produced the common law and civil law strands (I, Von Mehren 1957, p. 10).England, however, did not participate in the Reception, although its influence was felt at Oxford University, where Vacarious taught its precepts in 1151, and in the courts of canon law (I, Von Mehren 1957, p. 10). William the Conqueror already essentially had established the common law tradition when he merged Anglo-Saxon law with Norman law and created a centralized system of justice administration for the single fiefdom known as England.Aside from historical development, the common law and the civil law differ from other legal families in terms of their modes of thought, institutions, sources, and ideology (I, Zweigert and Kotz 1977, p. 62). In the common law, Roman legal concepts were shaped by Christian ethics through the canon law courts. In the civil law, Roman law became the basis for a legal science centered in the universities and interpreted by various schools, such as the commentators, the glossators, and the humanists. The civil law uses a central text as the starting point for legal reasoning and analysis. The common law develops over time through case law, that is, by judges applying principles from preceding cases to resolve the issue at hand. One writer describes the common law as "anything that is not prohibited is permitted" and the civil law as "anything that is not permitted is prohibited" (I, Karambelas 2005, p. 28).The common law and the civil law are only two of the three traditions in Western law. The third is socialist law. All three are... (shrink)

The article intends to argue that the roots of religious freedom in the West can be found many centuries before the time of the Reformation, namely in the writings of Christian apologists who wrote in defense of the right to practice the Christian faith in the Roman Empire, in the political context of the time, which was otherwise tolerant of the religious pluralism present in its space. Moreover, we talk about Quintus Septimius Florens Tertullianus, known as Tertullian (...) (160-225): "the first theologian of the West" and "the first political theologian." In last, we will argue that religious freedom is a natural right according to the philosophical and political developments over the centuries. (shrink)

Romanmagistriandgrammaticitaught their students a wide range of subjects, primarily through the medium of Latin and Greek literary texts. A well-educated Roman in the Imperial era was expected to have a good knowledge of the literary language of Cicero and Virgil, as well as a competent command of Greek. By the late fourth and early fifth centuries, this knowledge had to be taught actively, as everyday Latin usage had changed during the intervening four centuries. After the reign of Theodosius the (...) division between the Eastern and the Western Empires meant that knowledge of Greek was no longer as common as it had once been in the West. At the same time, by Late Antiquity, migration increased and foreigners as well as provincials moved within the empire, for example, in search of military promotion. There is evidence that recruitment to official or public careers was based less on birth than on education. These ambitious newcomers sent their children to Roman schools, which would facilitate their access to public office. Receipt of this education provided a means by which men from less privileged backgrounds could achieve promotion to such office and become prominent and influential individuals. At the same time a late Roman education also produced a high level of cultural homogeneity among those who had experienced it. So what might we learn about how language was taught—and what kinds of language were valued—in a late-antique Roman school? How might this contribute to our understanding of late-antique Roman elite society? (shrink)

The work synthesises in 26 monographic chapters the results of a six-years long (2012 – 2018) interdisciplinary international project whose aim was to present the state of knowledge on today’s Poland during the Migration Period, and to compare the evolution of its settlement with that of its neighbours. One of its main results – the accordance between the palynological evidence of the change of environment (extensive reforestation and drastic reduction of anthropogenic indicators) and the archaeological reconstruction of the change of (...) settlement (disappearance of the Przeworsk, Wielbark and other cultures of the Roman Period by the mid-fifth century) – conclusively confirms the often questioned verdict of a sudden severe depopulation of the lands between the Vistula and the Oder, similar to that revealed in the rest of Central/eastern Europe (disappearance of the Elbe and Chernyakhiv-Sântana de Mureş cultures). An entirely new perspective opened by the project is the survival of enclaves with contacts all round the compass (the Eastern Empire, the Merovingian West, the Danubian lands, Scandinavia, the Western Balts). None of them yielded Slavonic material, even the longest-lived one recently discovered at Gąski-Wierzbiczany in Kujawy, evidently one of the main centres of the European Barbaricum and in the third and fourth century the Roman army’s recruiting station, which continued till the early seventh century; this evidence (or lack of it) is the death-blow to the theory of a supposed continuity of settlement – and so of ethnicity, necessarily Slavonic – from the Bronze Age to the Middle Ages. Through these enclaves, southern cultural influences reached Scandinavia during the Younger Germanic Iron Age; the one at the mouth of the Vistula seems to have been the earliest and greatest recipient of the Imperial solidi in the Baltic zone, from which they were redistributed to the Nordic lands. A sample of other topics: tracing the extent (quite limited) of the Hunnic presence north of the Carpathians; evidence on fugitives from Hermanaric’s realm, including what appears to be the earliest known assemblage of the Dančeny-Brangstrup horizon; the Migration Period among the Western Balts, neighbours and cultural cousins, who did not take part in the Völkerwanderung. In the end, two leitmotifs of the work, one pessimistic, the other optimistic: short-sightedness and harmfulness of the official persecutive policy, in Poland and the majority of other European countries, with regard to amateur metal detecting, which only makes priceless potential evidence disappear without a trace; material remains and relative written sources (in this case Iordanes and Procopius) reflect the same historical reality and can legitimately be used to support one another. (shrink)

Morality is one of the fundamental structures of any society, enabling complex groups to form, negotiate their internal differences and persist through time. In the first book-length study of Roman popular morality, Dr Morgan argues that we can recover much of the moral thinking of people across the Empire. Her study draws on proverbs, fables, exemplary stories and gnomic quotations, to explore how morality worked as a system for Roman society as a whole and in individual lives. (...) She examines the range of ideas and practices and their relative importance, as well as questions of authority and the relationship with high philosophy and the ethical vocabulary of documents and inscriptions. The Roman Empire incorporated numerous overlapping groups, whose ideas varied according to social status, geography, gender and many other factors. Nevertheless it could and did hold together as an ethical community, which was a significant factor in its socio-political success. (shrink)

The description Ausonius has given us of his family and of the teachers and professors of Bordeaux in the mid-fourth century is exceptional among our sources because of its detail and completeness. There is no reason to suppose that the picture he gives is untypical of life in the provinces and it makes a welcome change from the histories of aristocratic politics at Rome or Constantinople. It provides an excellent opportunity for a pilot study in which we may see how (...) the conflicting elements of social status were in practice reconciled and applied. In the traditional, and still prevalent view, the society of the Later Roman Empire was ‘crushed … in the iron clamp of castes separated from one another by barriers which could not be passed’. The evidence of Ausonius suggests that this judgement should be qualified. The society of the fourth century may have been stable. It was not static. (shrink)

In this article we follow the reception made by Augustine of Hippo of the Manichean myth; in this we see his visceral reaction against the doctrine of Mani, since –in addition to the apologetic elements properly– there is a clear attempt to take psychological distance from a religious experience that marked it in depth, in every way. In this controversial context we can also discern central aspects of a text that had liturgical value and which, as such, was of capital (...) importance to the Manichaean communities. This Augustinian reading has as horizon the near collapse of the Roman Empire of the West and the ever-increasing confrontation of Constantinople with Persian Empire, the mobility of its borders and the partly political and partly religious persecutions that Manichaeism underwent. (shrink)

The ancient history of flamenco is pure hypothesis, partly owing to the “ Dark Ages “ which shrouded the folk expression of a large portion of Andalusia from soon after the victory of the Catholic Kings at Granada in 1492 until the emancipation laws of Charles III in 1783. Although flamenco as such is a product of the nineteenth century, the hypothesis may be taken right back to pre-Iberian days when there was a flourishing civilization in the south of Spain, (...) with its capital, Tartessos, more or less where Seville—or Cadiz—is now, perhaps the first Empire in the West. The Iberians inhabited the north and the east but the towns along the Andalusian coast were founded by Phoenicians from Tyre (Cadiz) and Phocaeans from Asia Minor (Málaga). During the Celtic invasions the south was held by Carthage until Andalusia finally became Roman as a result of the Punic wars. (shrink)