Roman World Research Articles

Emperor Theodosius and the Roman World Restoration

The article examines a complex of various measures (military, political, diplomatic, economic, financial, social, and religious) of Emperor Theodosius undertaken by him in the first years of his reign and aimed at overcoming the consequences
 of the Adrianople catastrophe, which put the Roman Empire on the brink of survival. The author defines what exactly had to be restored and what the «Roman World»
 meant. The main attention is paid to the activities of Emperor Theodosius and his measures in various areas of domestic and foreign policy, as well as to the estimation
 of their effectiveness in the context of the history of the Late Roman Empire. The analysis of the sources does not allow us to call Theodosius in the full sense of the word «the restorer of the Roman world», and his contemporaries did
 not give him such a title. Nevertheless, these measures turned out to be effective for a certain period, and they can be recognized as quite logical and correspond-
 ing to the historical situation. Some of them had a long-term effect and significance that went far beyond the reign of their initiator; others were limited to the current moment or were intended for the near historical perspective

Desert-governess romance: Regency England meets exotic Arabia

In this article we discuss how two types of popular romances – the desert romance and the governess romance – have blended into what we refer to as the desert-governess romance. In the world of romance, the governess and the sheikh may be an odd couple but they do make good bedfellows. Etymologically speaking, the governess (“A woman who holds or exercises authority” (OED)) is the perfect love match for the tribal governor who rules with steely resolve. In this paper we direct our attention to genre blending in order to explore the binary of captivity and escape. We look at a number of texts identified as archetypical desert-governess romances. What emerges from this analysis is that the initially disparate genres of the governess romance and the desert romance share surprising commonalities, not least with regard to the dual forms of escape offered by the fusion of the historical backdrop (typically Regency) and the geographical space of the desert.

:Etruscan Literacy in Its Social Context

:<i>Etruscan Literacy in Its Social Context</i>

Exploring Roman picture lamp breakage rituals in light of mechanical experimentation

AbstractIntentionally broken “picture” lamps, orBildlampen, are relatively common at archaeological sites throughout the Roman world. Such lamps typically exhibit a missing central discus. The discus itself – called a lamp “medallion” – often survives, too, and represents further evidence for deliberate lamp breakage. This article explores picture lamps with missing discuses and lamp medallions as a distinct and identifiable artifact group. It also surveys the possible reasons behind their intentional breaking. The work additionally identifies selected findspots where the lighting vessels were broken in rituals, with a special focus on the Shrine of Apollo at Tyre, and examines whether lamp breakage reflects individual choice or collective behavior. In an effort to understand how Roman picture lamps were deliberately broken and the lamp medallions generated for rituals, breakage experiments – drop, impact, puncture, and hammerstone – were conducted on accurate museum-made replicas of Roman picture lamps.

J. E. Lendon, That Tyrant, Persuasion. How Rhetoric Shaped the Roman World. Woodstock, Princeton University Press (Oxford) 2022

Article J. E. Lendon, That Tyrant, Persuasion. How Rhetoric Shaped the Roman World. Woodstock, Princeton University Press (Oxford) 2022 was published on December 1, 2022 in the journal Historische Zeitschrift (volume 315, issue 3).

Translation Effects: Language, Time, and Community in Medieval England by Mary Kate Hurley

Reviewed by: Translation Effects: Language, Time, and Community in Medieval England by Mary Kate Hurley Stephen Harris mary kate hurley, Translation Effects: Language, Time, and Community in Medieval England. Interventions: New Studies in Medieval Culture. Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2021. Pp. 226. isbn: 978-0-8142-1471-8. $99.95. A challenge faced by any book on a broad theme like translation is to quarry a small number of texts for something widely applicable. The challenge is made more difficult if one's aim is to reveal 'community,' which has to be abstracted from dozens of familial, tribal, ethnic, legal, religious, and linguistic groupings across centuries, evinced (in Britain) in at least four languages, and encrypted within conventions of genre. The challenge seems to me insurmountable except as a thought-experiment, itself much complicated by addressing readers who entertain modern prejudices, expectations, and unfamiliarity with source material. In that view, Translation Effects is an instructive thought experiment. Mary Kate Hurley interprets a variety of medieval translations in order to propose their 'imagined political, cultural, and linguistic communities' (p. 1). These imagined communities are the 'translation effects' of her title. Hurley's first chapter discusses the Old English (OE) translation of Paulus Orosius' History Against the Pagans, written in Latin. Hurley focuses on a handful of instances when the OE translator writes, 'Orosius said.' This phrase, Hurley claims, 'constructs an audience located in two distinct times: the fifth-century Roman world … and the ninth-century Old English-speaking world' (p. 27). A subtle effect on a reader of the OE Orosius, this trans-temporal community exemplifies Hurley's 'translation effect.' The second chapter concerns the Catholic abbot Ælfric of Eynsham, who around the year 1000 recorded a set of saints' lives in OE. By translating some local lives from Latin, especially that of Saint Oswald, King of England, Ælfric creates a 'protonationalist' tradition around which an Anglo-Saxon community can form (p. 70). In Chapter Three, Hurley adopts a trope from Christine Schott: the 'community of the page,' which comprises readers, scribes, and glossators of a manuscript. The post-Conquest glossator known as the Tremulous Hand of Worcester returned often to a manuscript and therefore had a 'multitemporal relationship' to it (p. 98). In another manuscript, an illustrator has marked Latin phrases with red ink, while another marked OE sentences with red ink, thereby indicating 'the multilinguality of the text' (p. 102). Scribes are aware of translations and have methods to help future readers (p. 108). Thus, the manuscript invites readers who are multilingual and who can add information to what they find there. Chapter Four concerns the story of Constance as retold by Nicholas Trevet, John Gower, and Geoffrey Chaucer. The three authors are 'united by their temporally heterogeneous portrayals of an emerging sense of "Engelond"' (p. 128). My knowledge of these authors is too limited to be able to assess the success of Hurley's argument. The last chapter concerns Beowulf. In it, Hurley explores moments in the poem 'in which the process of community formation and dissolution is worked out through the telling and retelling of stories' (p. 154). It is a terrific meditation on how the poem portrays the vicissitudes of human community. This chapter reveals a critic who has thought deeply and well about this poem. [End Page 152] Hurley contributes to a scholarly conversation about English identity that focuses on idealized communities as a source of political and social aspiration. For decades scholars have tried to isolate sources of ethnic and national identity in the early medieval world and to weigh both their credibility and their effects. A common assumption in this conversation is that stories, especially historical ones, bore a 'kernel of identity' (in Herwig Wolfram's phrase) around which communities could—but not necessarily did—form. Readers can entertain ideas they never act on. And stories of identity are always provisional, a point Hurley illustrates extremely well in her final chapter. The contributing role of stories to a shared potential identity opened the door to literary critics. Critics, this reviewer among them, mined literary texts for ideals of community. I'm not sure that the effort yielded much that was useful to...

Спор Никеи и Никомидии на Халкидонском соборе за статус митрополии: гражданский аспект

Introduction. The subject of research in this paper refers to the imperial edict, conferring the title of metropolis on the city of Nicaea in 364 AD, and the imperial rescript of the same year, confirming the rights of Nicomedia to the same title and the status of the first city of the province. The documents were presented by bishops of Nicaea and Nicomedia in the course of litigation between them at the 4th Ecumenical Council in Chalcedon (451 AD). The objectives of this work are to present the translation of these documents and substantiate its correctness in comparison with other available translations into foreign languages. Further task is to identify and highlight through commenting those realities of the Roman world, which are reflected in the analyzed documents. Methods. The work is based on the application of the historical-critical method of analysing source data of the original texts, compiled in Greek. Analysis. The article deals with the dating of the documents, the peculiarities of the terms and expressions used in them, which regard to intercity relations in Roman times, the issue of city statuses and traditional elements of the provincial ceremonies associated with the imperial cult. In this context, special attention is given to the edict for Nicaea, which is dedicated to the metropolis status of Nicaea, and deals with peculiar ceremonial issues of “coronation”, “procession”, and the office of Bithyniarch. Results. The litigation between Nicaea and Nicomedia is a clear evidence of the preservation of ancient Hellenistic and Roman traditions in the era of the Christian empire. The fact that the bishop of Nicaea at the Ecumenical Council, in justifying the ecclesiastical and administrative rights of his city, resorted to arguments drawn from the sphere of intercity relations within the framework of the traditional provincial assemblies, speaks for the connection between the institutions of provincial assemblies and church councils. The author concludes that the traditional forms of urban life, intercity relations within the province and determination of the status of cities by traditional criteria were of key importance for the position of the city in the system of the provincial church hierarchy.

L’ARCHITECTURE DE LA PEINTURE DOMESTIQUE DU IIe STYLE POMPÉIEN – UNE LECTURE CONTEXTUELLE

During the last two centuries of the Roman Republic the public building projects of the aristocrats as well as their private architectural accomplishments mirror the profound process of cultural exchanges that characterize the metamorphosis of the Roman world. Following this process and against the background of the generalized crisis of the Roman republic, the redefined discourse on power appropriates the architecture concept as a tool of communication. The paper aims to explore this meaningful relation of the Romans with the act of construction at the sunset of the Republic considering the Pompeian second style of painting as one of the artistic expressions of the elites’ agency.

“Where do these terrible diseases and pestilences come from?”. Illness in the Roman World in Light of the Ecclesiastical History of Eusebius of Caesarea

Eusebius of Caesarea did not put diseases at the center of his introduction to Church History. He used them instrumentally to promote his theses. Therefore, he neither referred to the medical knowledge of that time nor did he conduct their scientific classification or description. Nevertheless, Eusebius’ account contains observations about the sick and their afflictions. The Bishop of Caesarea clearly distinguished between diseases suffered by individuals and those that plagued the masses. In addition, they can be divided into diseases of the body, diseases of the mind, and diseases of the soul. Eusebius treated disease as a tool in God’s hands, with the help of which He intervened in history for the benefit of Christians. For Eusebius, the best physician of the body and soul was Jesus Christ, who, with his miraculous power, healed all diseases, expelled unclean spirits and demons, and even raised the dead.

MAPS OF ROMAN DACIA. III. MAP 21 DACIA-MOESIA (1:1,000,000) IN THE BARRINGTON ATLAS OF THE GREEK AND ROMAN WORLD

We are continuing our series of studies regarding the maps of Roman Dacia with this short note regarding the representation of Dacia in the Barrington Atlas of the Greek and Roman world . Edited by Richard J.A. Talbert, this atlas was published in 2000 in a large format, containing 175 pages and 102 full-color maps. The work contains a Map-by-Map Directory, available online. This is in fact an index which provides information about each place (settlement, locality) recorded on the maps. We discuss the details of the Map 21 Dacia-Moesia in our study

J. E. Lendon That Tyrant, Persuasion: How Rhetoric Shaped the Roman World

J. E. Lendon That Tyrant, Persuasion: How Rhetoric Shaped the Roman World

Archaeology and History: A Late Antiquity for Britain

Archaeology and History: A Late Antiquity for Britain

Constituting New Modes of Thought and Life

Foucault’s work in the 1980s on the ancient Greek and Roman world, following a far-reaching analysis of the transformation and rearrangement of the economies of power between the beginning of the modern era and the 19th century, reoriented his thought from the analysis of powers towards an investigation into practices of subjectivation and the constitution of an ethics of the self in ancient thought. Through a new and unique method of writing and investigation, Foucault comes to insist on the centrality of life, displacing the relation between the self and logos from the order of discourse and reasoning to that of existence, a self-exposure that effectively transforms the manner in which one lives into a form of public risk-taking, a passage, expressed by the transition from the figure of Socrates to that of the Cynics within the final 1984 course at the Collège de France.

The Last Years of the Reign of the Bosporan King Fofors in the Context of the Internal Political Struggle in the Roman Empire during the Tetrarchy

The object of the study is the history of the ancient civilization of the Northern Black Sea region, as part of the Roman world during the early dominant period. The subject of the study is the history of the Bosporan Kingdom in the last years of the reign of King Fofors in 303/304–309/310, in the context of relations with the Roman Empire during the new system of government – tetrarchy. The author examines in detail such an aspect of the topic as the internal political struggle in the Roman Empire of that time and its impact on the events that took place on the Bosporus. Particular attention is paid to the political struggle of two opposing factions for supreme power in the Bosporan Kingdom at the specified time. The main conclusions of the study are related to the factors of the strengthening of the influence of the Roman Empire on the northern periphery of the ancient world in the last years of the Bosporan king Fofors. It is obvious that during this period, virtually any conflict in the internal life of the empire, to one degree or another, exerted its influence on the course of the history of the Bosporan state. Thus, the fall of the power of Fofors on the Bosporus became possible only after the Bosporan king lost Roman support, first Diocletian, and then Galerius. In 309/310, Fofors was replaced by a new tsar, Radamsad, who may have been a protege of Maximin II Daza, who was actively preparing a plot to seize supreme power in the empire just during these years. The main contribution of the author to the study of the topic is the first revealed pattern of the history of Bosporus during the reign of Fofors. The novelty of the research lies in the fact that for the first time in historiography, this tense moment of Bosporan history is viewed through the prism of the internal political struggle in the Roman Empire during the tetrarchy (293-313).

Destinations in Mind: Portraying Places on the Roman Empire’s Souvenirs By Kimberly Cassibry. Oxford: Oxford University Press 2021. Pp. xvii + 278. $99. ISBN 9780190921897 (cloth).

<i>Destinations in Mind: Portraying Places on the Roman Empire’s Souvenirs</i> By Kimberly Cassibry. Oxford: Oxford University Press 2021. Pp. xvii + 278. $99. ISBN 9780190921897 (cloth).

Introduction

Introduction Joseph A. Marchal (bio) One potential genealogy for this special section of the Journal of Feminist Studies in Religion (JFSR) begins with a special session of the 2021 annual meeting of the Society of Biblical Literature (SBL). Multiple program units (including the Archaeology of Religion in the Roman World section, the Gender, Sexuality, and the Bible section, and the LGBTI/Queer Hermeneutics section) and status committees (including the Committee on the Status of Women in the Profession and the recently established—if rather belatedly in comparison to other academic organizations—Committee for LGBTIQ+ Scholars and Scholarship) collaborated to recognize and reflect upon Bernadette J. Brooten's Love Between Women: Early Christian Responses to Female Homoeroticism, on the twenty-fifth anniversary of its publication (with the University of Chicago Press in 1996). The task required that many partners because of this work's immense influence and impact on the study of women, gender, sexuality, and enslavement, among other domains and topics in relation to both material and textual remains, history, and the ethics of interpretation. Given these themes and Dr. Brooten's innumerable contributions to both knowledge and community building, the session was critical and celebratory, lively and substantial in ways that strongly correspond with JFSR's historical interest in honoring influential feminist scholars and desire to think reflexively and prospectively about our scholarly pasts in relation to our presents and anticipated futures. Of course, in reflecting on such scholarly pasts, the contributors who have known Brooten the longest (Sheila Briggs and Angela Standhartinger, among them) explain how this project concretely, politically, and interpersonally began years, even decades, before the quarter-century publication date that partially inspired the session. Thus, the following contributions trace how Love [End Page 143] Between Women and Brooten's work within and beyond this book are part of longer histories of feminist, queer, and increasingly intersectional approaches to biblical, ancient Jewish, and emerging Christian materials. Yet to call Love Between Women just a book is a gross oversimplification. It was and is a phenomenon, likely because Love Between Women contains multitudes. As several of the contributors to this special section highlight, it is an incredible resource; its many different parts inspire and inform work in its wake. Its latter half is anchored by an indispensable commentary on Rom 1:18–32, in which Brooten meticulously examines the arguments in this notorious passage in light of the relevant interpretive frameworks and intertextual echoes. Just as importantly, though, Brooten also gathers, translates, and explains an unprecedented assemblage of ancient materials reflecting upon female homoeroticism in the ancient Roman world. In clearly and critically presenting a range of cultural sources, from erotic spells and astrological texts to medical treatments and manuals of dream interpretation, Brooten pressed beyond the "classical" (mostly elite, imperial, enslaving, and male) literary sources to provide multifaceted angles on these (still often depressingly kyriarchal) materials and the potential people behind them. Love Between Women, then, performs a massive mitzvah in providing essential context. It builds an archive and in doing so, gives generations of readers, "scholarly" and otherwise, a new, profound, and still unparalleled access to a matrix of sources on, about, and at times even from women in the ancient Mediterranean context. Yet the picture provided by this archive is far from rosy, and Brooten refuses to adopt either apologist or falsely idealizing approaches to the often disturbing materials within and beyond Paul's letters. Indeed, Love Between Women demonstrates how thoroughly Paul's letters and particularly the "bashing passage" of Rom 1:26–27 are conversant and concordant with most of the ancient kyriarchal ambiance that presumed and projected a fundamental asymmetry so that what counted as "natural" intercourse was only the penetrative use of a social and political subordinate by their superior. Brooten's work demonstrates, then, why and how histories of sexuality could, even should, also be feminist histories, attending to specifically gendered dynamics and differences. The broader project also cautions scholars of Greco-Roman antiquity against dismissing "religious" sources out of hand, particularly if one is at all concerned with the vast majority of people who lived distanced from the apex of kyriarchal power and privilege. For a great many...

Meaning in Millstones: Phallic Imagery on Romano-British Millstones

AbstractPhallic imagery occurred throughout the Roman world and is most commonly found on small portable items such as amulets and pendants, and on buildings and structures. This paper details three Romano-British instances of phallic carvings found on millstones and one on a rotary quern. It assesses the style and positioning of the carvings in relation to the functional operation of the stones, reviews their contexts of recovery geographically and chronologically and considers the likely symbolism and meaning of the carvings.

The Arch-I-Scan Project: Artificial Intelligence and 3D Simulation for Developing New Approaches to Roman Foodways

This article presents the aims, technical processes, and initial results of the Arch-I-Scan Project, which is using artificial intelligence and machine learning to enhance the collection of Roman ceramic data so that these data can contribute more effectively to improved understandings of Roman foodways. The project is developing a system for the automated identification of ceramic types (fabrics, forms and sizes), and potentially the automated collation of the resulting datasets, to facilitate more holistic recording of these big archaeological data, and avoiding the current time-consuming and costly specialist process for classifying these artefacts. The particular focus of the project is to develop datasets that are suitable for inter- and intra-site analyses of eating and drinking behaviours in the Roman world which require more comprehensive recording of these remains than the current sampling practices used to date sites or to investigate production and trade practices. The article includes a brief overview of approaches to material culture, particularly ceramics, for improving understandings of cultural patterns in past food-consumption practices. We then outline the project’s rationale and planned approaches to harnessing the potential of artificial intelligence and machine learning for artefact recording, specifically of Roman <em>terra sigillata</em> tablewares, and the processes used to develop a sufficiently large dataset to develop and test the AI system. The important aspect of this article is the changes made to these processes to mitigate the impact of the Covid pandemic on our ability to record large datasets of real ceramics. These changes involved the development of simulated datasets that substantially enhance our original real dataset and the accuracy of identification. Here we present our results to date, contextualised within the overall aims of the project and briefly discuss the steps we are taking to improve these.

Daily Life in the Limesgebiet: Archaeozoological Evidence on Animal Resource Exploitation in Lower Danubian Sites of 2nd–6th Centuries AD

Roman Limesgebiet was both a border between the Greco–Roman world and barbaricum, but also the contact area between these two parts of the ancient oicumene. In Moesia Inferior, this area was established after the Roman conquest in the 1st century AD, in order to defend the Danube border. This article analyses segments of the cultural landscape development in the Roman Danube limes: e.g., the animal resources of subsistence as a paleoeconomy component and reconstruction of the environmental context in the area. The settlements under archaeozoological study are: Sacidava, Capidava, Dinogetia, Noviodunum, Aegyssus, and Halmyris. The settlements have exploited a relatively large faunal spectrum, with taxa of 19 mammals being identified. Animal husbandry had a major importance in paleoeconomy and was focused on cattle, sheep/goat, and pig; other domestic species are horse, donkey, dog, and cat. The hunting is of small importance, according to the frequency of animal remains, and the forest species are dominant. Red deer and wild boar are present in all assemblages, and they are the dominant wild species in terms of frequency; roe deer, hare, wolf, aurochs, fox, beaver, badger, Eurasian otter, and pine marten have been also identified. Aquatic resources are represented by molluscs and fish.

Unequal housing in Pompeii: using house size to measure inequality

ABSTRACT House size is often used as a tool to calculate wealth in ancient societies, and thus it is also a potential source for the study of inequality. The site of Pompeii, on the Bay of Naples in southern Italy, was first inhabited about 800 years before the eruption of Mount Vesuvius buried it 79 CE. The city provides one of the largest data sets of private architecture in the Roman world, and it has been utilized to calculate the level of inequality in a Roman urban setting. Nonetheless, to understand the inequality of the entire society of the city, these calculations need to be developed. This article uses quantitative and statistical methods, such as Gini coefficients, Lorenz Curves, and also simpler graphs and their interpretation to advance establish methods for exploring inequality through house and building size. A method is proposed for identifying the top economic elite in this urban setting, and the article develops the calculation of inequality further, to encompass even individuals who did not own buildings. As a result, excavated Pompeii’s top economic elite is estimated to have comprised 50 to 100 households, with a high level of inequality evident in this ancient city during its final phase, the year 79 CE.