Roman History Research Articles

Alberto Basciani and Egidio Ivetic. Italia e Balcani. Storia di una prossimità

Alberto Basciani and Egidio Ivetic. <i>Italia e Balcani. Storia di una prossimità</i>

Ambrus Miskolczy. A román középkor időszerű kérdései. Régi-új viták és közelítések

Ambrus Miskolczy. <i>A román középkor időszerű kérdései. Régi-új viták és közelítések</i>

Τέρνοβος, ἐν ᾗ τὰ βασίλεια ἦν τῶν Βουλγάρων: the Role of the Bulgarian Capital City According to Ῥωμαϊκὴ ἱστορία by Nikephoros Gregoras

The paper is devoted to a detailed analysis of direct and indirect references to Tărnovo, the capital of the so-called Second Bulgarian Tsardom (12th–14th centuries) in Roman history of Nikephoros Gregoras, an outstanding Byzantine scholar of the first half of the fourteenth century. An analysis of the passages devoted to this city leads to a conclusion that the status of the city was fully obvious to the Byzantine historian – this was the main, capital city of the Bulgarian state, in which its rulers permanently resided, without holding which one could not be a fully legitimate tsar of the Bulgarians and exercise real power of the northern neighbours of Byzantium. Thus the conflicts over power in contemporary Bulgaria focused primarily on taking Tărnovo. The Bulgarian tsar departed with military expeditions most often from this city, having gathered in its vicinity armed forces, and to this city Byzantines and rulers of other neighbouring countries sent their envoys to meet with the Bulgarian autocrat.

Caesar’s First Consulship and Rome’s Democratic Decay

SummaryThis article argues for the usefulness of recent scholarship on democratic decay (especially in the disciplines of political science and constitutional law) for explaining the breakdown of Rome’sres publicaduring the 50s BCE, with a particular focus on Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt’s “How Democracies Die” (2018). Using “democracy” in the neo-republican sense of government free from domination, Levitsky and Ziblatt show how the actions and reactions of political actors can damage a political system without any intention to overthrow it. This article combines their insights with concepts from Christian Meier’s “Res Publica Amissa”(2nd edition 1980) to analyse Caesar’s first consulship in 59 BCE. After explaining how the theory can responsibly be applied, it closely examines the major events of the year, especially the contest over the agrarian law. Caesar’s actions throughout the year demonstrate Levitsky and Ziblatt’s warning signs for a potential authoritarian, as do those of the opposition. This analysis helps us more clearly understand just how the events of “the consulship of Julius and Caesar” (Suet. Iul. 20.2) contributed to Rome’s democratic decay in succeeding years. The article connects to much recent work on late-republican political institutions. It also helps make this dramatic period of Roman history comprehensible to political scientists by analysing it in their own theoretical terms.

Review: Religious Violence in the Ancient World: From Classical Athens to Late Antiquity, edited by Jitse H. F. Dijkstra and Christian R. Raschle

Review: <i>Religious Violence in the Ancient World: From Classical Athens to Late Antiquity</i>, edited by Jitse H. F. Dijkstra and Christian R. Raschle

Missionary Cosmopolitanism in Nineteenth-Century British Literature

Missionary Cosmopolitanism in Nineteenth-Century British Literature

Mapped in Blood: Civil War and the Israelite State in Abraham Cowley’s Davideis

Produced in the midst of the seventeenth-century British Civil Wars and French Fronde, Abraham Cowley’s two unfinished epics demonstrate an abiding interest in civil war as both a chronic problem and, more surprisingly and paradoxically, a flexible category of political analysis for charting the continuity of states across the contingencies of temporal history and combative relations among states. This interest may be precipitated by his historical moment but in his second epic, Davideis (1656), Cowley applies ideas of internal warfare begun in his first epic, The Civil War (1643), to the polity that early moderns saw as the archetype of nations: Israel. In relating the turbulent fortunes of Israel, Cowley mobilizes Roman and Augustinian theories of civil violence as the foundational political condition, while also situating that violence within a pragmatic, even realpolitik, realm of volatile and appetitive international relations. While Davideis is by no means only concerned with internal warfare, civil war and its overlap with other forms of organized violence play an influential role in Cowley’s depictions of the geography, history, psychology, and even genres of state formation. Indeed, creating what amounts to an epic romance of state, Davideis suggests that an errant and chronically conflicted Israel modeled ways to imagine the creation and survival of states across extreme mutations in political form and territorial reach. It also suggests that the Roman history recently analyzed by David Armitage was not the only example available to seventeenth-century writers invested in analyzing civil war’s paradoxically defining impact on polities.

,Lernen aus Niederlagen‘ und ,Schwächediskurse‘? Oder doch nur „aut vincere aut emori“? Bemerkungen zum komplexen Umgang Roms mit militärischen Niederlagen

This article examines defeats and losses as phenomena of an ‘expanded military history’ of Roman History from the Republic to the Principate. It adopts a cultural historical perspective of the military historical phenomenon. “Patterns”and “strategies”are defined, that appear in the sources when dealing with Roman defeats, losses and losers (in particular the commanders or even the emperor himself). Above, the historiography of the Roman imperial period is exemplary examined to see what reasons, interpretations or explanations are given there for suffering a defeat and whether and how these are part of narrative strategies. Sometimes military catastrophes simply were concealed, belittled or reinterpreted. How Rome dealt with defeat tells something about Rome’s society and especially the elite: “Roman culture”or “Rome’s political culture” shaped the way how the military phenomenon of defeat was dealt with. Defeats could also be seen as chances for future victories, they were good for learning and examples for withstanding with the help of morale and disciplina. In the end Rome’s strategies in dealing with such catastrophic events of ‘military history’overall seem to paint the picture of Rome as a resilient socio-political and military system!

Ethnogenesis and Stranger-Kings in Old Scandinavian Literature

Ethnogenesis and Stranger-Kings in Old Scandinavian Literature

The “Pure” Romanian: (Re)writing Romanian National Identity in Dan Puric’s Romanian Soul

This paper investigates Romania’s auto-image as described by Dan Puric in his book Suflet Românesc ( Romanian Soul ). By employing imagology, this article first shows how Romanian national identity is constructed in opposition to Western culture and modernity. And by drawing on imagology and Hayden White’s approach to historiography, I provide a discursive analysis of the Romanian auto-image provided in the text. I show that Puric’s writing of Romanian national identity is a Romantic one rendered in the anarchist mode. The author alleges that Romanians are born with a “Romanian soul,” which guarantees their adherence to a Christian Orthodox worldview, one to which Western culture and modernity are inimical. The dominant metaphor used to represent Romanianness is the folktale, whose main traits—being set in illo tempore , a focus on a stark moral antithesis between good and evil where the former prevails, and favouring intuition over reason—are allegedly shared by “pure” Romanians. After revealing the pillars of Romanianness in Puric’s view, I trace the intellectual and cultural continuities between his Romanian auto-image and Romania’s far-right views on nation and nationhood, as well as the national communist view on Romanianness. As far as the former is concerned, I highlight the structural similarities between Puric’s nationalism and anti-Semitic discourse. With respect to the latter, I draw attention to Puric’s reliance on two of the several national communist myths identified by Romanian historian Lucian Boia: the myth of continuity and the myth of conspiracy. Puric’s book dovetails with national communist discourse by postulating the alleged continuity between the peoples and cultures that have existed in Romania’s current geographic location across the centuries and retains its communist fears of foreign conspiracy.

Illustration in Fin-de-Siècle Transatlantic Romance Fiction by Kate Holterhoff

Reviewed by: Illustration in Fin-de-Siècle Transatlantic Romance Fiction by Kate Holterhoff Catherine J. Golden (bio) Kate Holterhoff, Illustration in Fin-de-Siècle Transatlantic Romance Fiction (London: Routledge, 2022), pp. xi + 198, $150 hardcover. In her study of illustration of inexpressible wonders accompanying fin de siècle romance fiction, Kate Holterhoff skillfully delves into the fiction of five transatlantic authors. These "popular romance fictions [that] facilitated how audiences experienced indescribable times, senses, desires, technologies, and feelings" appeared serially in leading periodicals on both sides of the Atlantic, such as the Strand Magazine, the Graphic, Pearson's Magazine, Harper's Weekly, and Cosmopolitan (12). To Holterhoff, romance is "a catchall to describe non-realistic fictions in a range of genres including historical romance, children's fiction, adventure fiction, scientific romance, and the gothic" (3). Readers will travel the high seas on Robert Louis Stevenson's adventures, meet Rudyard Kipling's talking beasts, journey into "Darkest Africa" through Rider Haggard's imperial romances, encounter H. G. Wells's futuristic machines, and confront James De Mille's civilized cannibals (1). Whether visualizing an unreachable past, fanciful speaking animals, or technologies far beyond the nineteenth century, illustrators of fin de siècle romance fiction (from 1885 to 1920) have a shared mission to depict what authors often left opaque by giving material form to "wonders thought to surpass or somehow thwart human description"—the leitmotif of this book (17). Illustration in Fin-de-Siècle Transatlantic Romance Fiction has an introduction and five body chapters, each on one major author. The introduction defines the Symbolist movement (which informed fin de siècle illustrators), word and image studies, developments in nineteenth-century illustration, and the field of illustration studies, and it also includes chapter summaries. Holterhoff aptly places her work in the context of pioneering collector-critics Gleeson White and Forrest Reid (who published from 1897 to 1927) as well as current illustration studies scholars, including Simon Cooke, Paul Goldman, Lorraine Janzen Kooistra, Mary Elizabeth Leighton, Lisa Surridge, Andrea Korda, Julia Thomas, and Catherine Golden. This ambitious introductory chapter begins with an engaging comparison of E. K. Johnson's and Charles Kerr's illustrations of narrator Horace Holley gazing on a dismembered, mummified foot of a once beautiful woman in Haggard's She (1887). Here Holterhoff demonstrates her skill as a reader of illustration and her background as an artist. Indeed, she opens each of the five chapters with a compelling reading of illustration and excels in comparative analysis of illustrators across nation and time. Chapter 1, "Picturing the Past in Robert Louis Stevenson's Historical Romances," presents leading artists, such as George Roux, Walter Paget, and N. C. Wyeth, who relied upon antiquities and reference books to visualize [End Page 462] Stevenson's narratives of bygone eras replete with pirates and historical personages. The second chapter, "From Visual Irony to Caricature," moves readers to a different marvel: animals gifted with speech (although humans can only understand the language of domesticated animals). Comparative readings of illustrations by, for example, Oliver Herford, Rudyard Kipling, and Joseph M. Gleeson demonstrate ways talking animals appear believable and entertaining. Chapter 3, "Desiring African Women in H. Rider Haggard's Adventure Fiction," offers a sensitive reading of illustrations of scantily clad native women whose charms defy description and captivated Haggard and his white male readers. This topic, racially charged today, could be politically incorrect in less judicious hands than Holterhoff's. Her analysis of Haggard's illustrators, including Maurice Greiffenhagen (who drew the arresting portrait on the cover) and Edmund Frederick, reveals her expertise as the originator of Visual Haggard (http://www.visualhaggard.org). The fourth chapter, "Picturing Machines in H. G. Wells's Scientific Romances," presents eminent illustrators, such as Warwick Goble and Alvin Corrêa, who envisioned Wells's wondrous technologies in an apocalyptic future. Chapter 5, "A Cannibal Vision," focuses on illustrators, including True Williams and Gilbert Gaul, of De Mille's A Strange Manuscript Found in a Copper Cylinder (1888), an imperial Gothic romance that confronts the "paradoxically unimaginable and yet profoundly embodied horror" of cannibalism (162). Holterhoff provocatively argues that in showing white and non-white cannibals, De Mille's illustrated romance...

Writing Canada’s antebellum Black history: the work of Fred Landon

White Canadian historian Fred Landon (1880-1969) was a pioneer in writing the history of Black freedom-seekers in mid-nineteenth-century Canada West and noteworthy for treating the publications of both Black and white writers and abolitionists as sources for the historical record and thus as equal contributors to historical knowledge of this period. He has been an important source for nineteenth-century Black history for both American and Canadian scholars, yet no analysis of his work exists. Landon’s selectivity in citing sources, his recurrent topics, and his tone and diction together generate a sense of the Black presence in Ontario as a historical romance more than a search for equality, a romance that came to an end, and a search that was perhaps perceived to be no longer necessary once American Emancipation was secured. His work, though ground-breaking and well intentioned, orients readers to a narrative in which early ‘Canada’ saves refugees from American cruelty, and thus may have contributed to the mythology of Canada’s benevolence on white-Black race relations, a key trait of Canada’s anti-American nationalism to this day.

Attack by a Turkey: Learning to Write History from Bernard Bailyn

Attack by a Turkey: Learning to Write History from Bernard Bailyn

Malalas’ Chronographia and Islamic Representations of Early Roman History

Situated chronologically within the transition from Late Antiquity to Islam, the article echoes certain facets of the Byzantine-Islamic intellectual dialogues. Geographically, it reflects scholarly activities within the Antiochene sphere of influence. The essay particularly considers the extent to which John Malalas’ Chronographia impacted early Islamic representations of early Roman history in terms of materials, themes, and narrative arrangement. At the centre of this inquiry is the foundation narrative of the city of Rome and the story of Romulus and Remus. An emphasis is placed here on the crucial role that Melkite Arab-Christian historians played in the transmission of these narratives. Syriac intermediaries serve here as essential links in the path of transmission form Malalas to Islamic historical writings. The study, which is a comparative textual analysis of relevant accounts, illuminates certain facets of the Byzantine-Islamic intellectual encounters regarding the conveyance of historical knowledge and the construction of historiographic worldview. The consideration of these transformations offers a distinctive viewpoint for understanding features of the transmission of knowledge beyond the Judeo-Christian or Greco-Syriac milieus.

TWO DESTINIES, ONE HISTORY, THAT OF THE ROMANIANS: IN MEMORY OF UNIVERSITY PROFESSORS GHEORGHE PALADE AND ION AGRIGOROAIEI

. University professors Gheorghe Palade and Ion Agrigoroaiei researched major problems of Romanian history in the contemporary era. Both university teachers, being born in Bessarabia, had the opportunity to carry out their research in their favourite field only after the fall of communism. Their scientific investigations were accompanied by a prodigious teaching activity, carried out in the most prestigious universities in Chisinau and Iasi. By cultivating the historical knowledge in young people on both sides of the Prut river, their university professors Gheorghe Palade and Ion Agrigoroaiei, were road openers and bridge builders who fortified the spiritual and cultural connection between Bessarabia and its historical homeland Romania. The legacy left by the two teachers is relevant through published books and studies, through formulated thoughts and ideas, through unique historiographical concepts, all being taken over by their many disciples who continue the noble mission of being historians.

엘리아데 소설 『뱀(Şarpele)』의 내러티브와 코인치덴찌아 오포지토룸(Coincidentia oppositorum) 연구

For Mircea Eliade, Romanian historian of religion fiction writer philosopher of the 20th century Coincidentia oppositorum is coexistence of opposite parts without contradiction and it is the desire to recover the unification by understanding complimentary elements of opposite parts. What Eliade is pursuing is that we need to open a new perspective in this era with a total insight rather then practicality for humans. It is generally believed that existence and non-existence, reality and fantasy, day and night, history and mythology sacred and profane have opposite properties. However Eliade says that these opposing concepts meet each other totally and become the key to a New Humanism. Eliade depicted our existential desire for the mysteries of totality that is revealed in various dimensions in the narrative of his fantasy novel the Snake. According to Eliade human being determines his existence of opposite things by experience in his life. But the disguised appearance of discrepancy of good and evil makes man transcend beyond opposition and the harmony of anima and animus symbolize the sacred marriage. At the point of cosmos marriage between heaven and earth is an act of creation and creation of life. Sacred marriage are connection of man and woman, melting of opposite things, interaction oneness and connection between man and God. In this novel main character Andronic and Dorina live in paradise of freedom and richness like Adam and Eve in the Bible. Coincidentia oppositorum makes it possible to recognize the makeup of the constant holiness in the ever changing world. And Eliade's interpretation about Coincidentia oppositorum are realization of comprehensive understanding about human beings unbiased regardless of ages and creating New Humanism which values human life instead of isolating it.

The Whiteness of the White

The Whiteness of the White

The Evasion of Literary History

The Evasion of Literary History

Sir Richard Morison: An Early Reader of Cassius Dio in Tudor England?

Scholars have suggested that Cassius Dio’s Roman History was among the Greek sources used by the 16th century polemicist Sir Richard Morison in two of his treatises from the 1530s. This short article shows that this is not the case. Rather, Morison can be seen to be borrowing from Seneca’s De Clementia and Politian’s Latin translation of Herodian’s History of the Empire after Marcus Aurelius. This conclusion may cast some further light on the provenance of the booklist contained in British Library Add. MS 40,676 (ff. 110r-116r), and its attribution to Morison.

Platformized Seriality: Chinese Time Travel Fantasy from Prime-time Television to Online Streaming

While seriality has long been associated with broadcast and cable television, the global rise of online streaming has brought development of what I call platformized seriality: assemblages of online platform infrastructure design, content regulation, generic convention, and experimentation. The notion of platformized seriality points to a complex refiguration of specific media content and genre forms that are usually overlooked in platform studies. This essay analyzes time-travel serials—now immensely popular in the context of China’s growing video-streaming industry, convergence culture, and the financial boom of digital platforms. Analyzing the trope of the female time traveler in historical romance, this essay examines how chuanyue, or the Chinese time-travel genre, subtly unsettles contemporary gender-related anxiety and the dominant discourse on development and progress, something that partly explains the pleasure it generates. The genre of chuanyue benefited from the rise of platform infrastructure designs such as bullet screens and pay-on-demand-in-advance services that direct new forms of audience engagement and new practices of binge-watching. Focusing on the fantasy genre and the mutability of the time traveler’s gender, sexuality, and class, I explore how the trope of traveling backward marks a reconfiguration of conceptions of time, space, and history and thus opens a space to negotiate with the neoliberal narratives of linear and progressivist temporality.