Valuing The Past In The Greco Roman World

The ‘classical tradition’ is no invention of modernity. Already in ancient Greece and Rome, the privileging of the ancient played a role in social and cultural discourses of every period. A collaboration between scholars in diverse areas of classical studies, this volume addresses literary and material evidence for ancient notions of valuing (or disvaluing) the deep past from approximately the fifth century BCE until the second century CE. It examines how specific communities used notions of antiquity to define themselves or others, which models from the past proved most desirable, what literary or exegetic modes they employed, and how temporal systems for ascribing value intersected with the organization of space, the production of narrative, or the application of aesthetic criteria.

In this volume, Dr Gordon examines the way in which images contributed to the creation of religious meanings in the Graeco-Roman world. Special attention is paid to Mithraism's notion of sacred space, its use of metaphors taken from the natural world, and its ideals of social action.

In this, the first comprehensive survey of the economies of classical antiquity, twenty-eight chapters summarise the current state of scholarship in their specialised fields and sketch new directions for research. They reflect a new interest in economic growth in antiquity and develop new methods for measuring economic development, often combining textual and archaeological data that have previously been treated separately.

How did ancient Greeks and Romans regard work? It has long been assumed that elite thinkers disparaged physical work, and that working people rarely commented on their own labors. The papers in this volume challenge these notions by investigating philosophical, literary and working people’s own ideas about what it meant to work. From Plato’s terminology of labor to Roman prostitutes’ self-proclaimed pride in their work, these chapters find ancient people assigning value to multiple different kinds of work, and many different concepts of labor.

Early in the third century, a small group of Greek Christians began to gain prominence and legitimacy as intellectuals in the Roman Empire. Examining the relationship that these thinkers had with the broader Roman intelligentsia, Jared Secord contends that the success of Christian intellectualism during this period had very little to do with Christianity itself. With the recognition that Christian authors were deeply engaged with the norms and realities of Roman intellectual culture, Secord examines the thought of a succession of Christian literati that includes Justin Martyr, Tatian, Julius Africanus, and Origen, comparing each to a diverse selection of his non-Christian contemporaries. Reassessing Justin’s apologetic works, Secord reveals Christian views on martyrdom to be less distinctive than previously believed. He shows that Tatian’s views on Greek culture informed his reception by Christians as a heretic. Finally, he suggests that the successes experienced by Africanus and Origen in the third century emerged as consequences not of any change in attitude toward Christianity by imperial authorities but of a larger shift in intellectual culture and imperial policies under the Severan dynasty. Original and erudite, this volume demonstrates how distorting the myopic focus on Christianity as a religion has been in previous attempts to explain the growth and success of the Christian movement. It will stimulate new research in the study of early Christianity, classical studies, and Roman history.

"Aulus Gellius and his sole surviving work, the Noctes Atticae (NA), have long stood on the periphery of Classical scholarship. This second century CE compilation, conventionally termed a miscellany, collects vast amounts of otherwise lost ancient literature, and the depictions of scholarly activity throughout the work have led some to see in Gellius a kindred spirit-a Classicist avant la lettre. Yet, the NA is a fascinating work of literature in its own right, depicting the intellectual and literary culture at the height of the Roman Empire and offering invaluable evidence for the evolution of Latin prose as a literary form in the Antonine period. In contrast to previous scholarship that looks past the randomness of the NA, this book argues that the conceit of disorder enabled Gellius to probe the nature of reading in the second century CE. Gellius' central preoccupation is articulating a distinct set of "ways of reading" that may be employed to navigate the web of literature in the Roman Empire. In turn, each of these ways of reading-through material framing devices, focal characters, recurrent citations in dialogue with one another, and allusive references to other near-contemporary works-can be used to examine Gellius' collection and appreciate its literary qualities. Incorporating inter- and intratextual analysis alongside narratology-informed approaches, this book investigates the strategies used by Gellius to innovate within the Latin literary tradition and provides a framework for interpreting his varietas on its own terms"--

Volume 14 2018 This is the fourteenth volume of the hard-copy edition of a journal that has been published online (www.jgrchj.net) since 2000. As they appear, the hard-copy editions replace the online materials. The scope of JGRChJ is the texts, language and cultures of the Greco-Roman world of early Christianity and Judaism. The papers published in JGRChJ are designed to pay special attention to the larger picture of politics, culture, religion and language, engaging as well with modern theoretical approaches.

Usages of the Past in Roman Historiography contains 11 articles on how the Ancient Roman historians used, and manipulated, the past. Key themes include the impact of autocracy, the nature of intertextuality, and the frontiers between history and other genres.

The economic success of the Roman Empire was unparalleled in the West until the early modern period. While favourable natural conditions, capital accumulation, technology and political stability all contributed to this, economic performance ultimately depended on the ability to mobilize, train and co-ordinate human work efforts. In Work, Labour, and Professions in the Roman World, the authors discuss new insights, ideas and interpretations on the role of labour and human resources in the Roman economy. They study the various ways in which work was mobilised and organised and how these processes were regulated. Work as a production factor, however, is not the exclusive focus of this volume. Throughout the chapters, the contributors also provide an analysis of work as a social and cultural phenomenon in Ancient Rome.

This volume focuses on the representation of the recent past in classical Athenian oratory and investigates the ability of the orators to interpret it according to their interests; the inability of the Athenians to make an objective assessment of it; and the unwillingness of the citizens to hear the truth, make self-criticism and take responsibility for bad results. Twenty-eight scholars have written chapters to this end, dealing with a wide range of themes, in terms both of contents and of chronology, from the fifth to the fourth century B.C. Each contributor has written a chapter that analyzes one or more historical events mentioned or alluded in the corpus of the Attic orators and covers the three species of Attic oratory. Chapters that treat other issues collectively are also included. The common feature of each contribution is an outline of the recent events that took place and influenced the citizens and/or the city of Athens and its juxtaposition with their rhetorical treatment by the orators either by comparing the rhetorical texts with the historical sources and/or by examining the rhetorical means through which the speakers model the recent past. This book aims at advanced students and professional scholars. This volume focuses on the representation of the recent past in classical Athenian oratory and investigates: the ability of the orators to interpret it according to their interests; the inability of the Athenians to make an objective assessment of persons and events of the recent past and their unwillingness to hear the truth, make self-criticism and take responsibility for bad results.