The fin-de-siècle aesthetes, of course, react against the moral project expressed in realist novels like Eliot’s and Ward’s. Indeed, Oscar Wilde uses liturgy to attack what he sees as realism’s stunted imagination. But, as this chapter and the next show, aestheticism too is deeply suspicious of how excarnation separates the material and the spiritual. Again, if modernity typically sunders these realms, liturgy joins them. It therefore offers the perfect channel for aestheticism’s veneration of material reality – of beautiful bodies, lovely objects, and stimulating experiences. Such devotion pervades Walter Pater’s novel Marius the Epicurean (1885) – itself a kind of liturgical and aesthetic bildungsroman. Set in second-century Italy, the novel follows the pious Marius, who cherishes the pagan rituals of his boyhood and finds their fulfillment in the early Christian Mass. For Marius, the Eucharist not only sacralizes material objects but also defends matter – specifically the body – against the ritual violence of imperial Rome. Just as Wordsworth depicts industrialism as a liturgy of desecration, Pater sees Roman imperial power in similar terms.

In this treatise, Bartolus of Sassoferrato explores the phenomenon of factionalism in the fourteenth-century Italian city republics. He gives an account of the local nomenclature of Guelfs and Ghibellines, relating these labels historically to the papal and imperial camps in the contested region of northern Italy. He explains that, nowadays, such labels have only local relevance, not ideological significance. He then analyses the legality of joining such parties, concluding that if the reason for doing so is to uphold the common good, it is lawful.

Chapter 3 begins the conceptual history of the nation where our current vocabulary originates, in classical Greece and Rome. It examines the conception of cultural-linguistic communities in the context of the two principal alternatives to the nation-state – city-state and empire. The chapter moves from Greek conceptions of ethnicity as depicted in Herodotus’ Histories to Cicero’s reflections on the relationship between national and political communities in the Roman Empire and concludes with an examination of the idea of the nation in the Vulgate, the late fourth-century translation of the Bible. The analysis shows that ethnos, gens, and natio referred to communities defined by descent, language, and geographical homeland but were not understood in a political sense. Moreover, Roman thinkers were not only acutely aware of the twofold loyalties to nation and polity; they also sought practical arrangements for accommodating diverse national groups within a single political order. The chapter discusses Roman ideas on citizenship, administrative subsidiarity, and legal pluralism.

Follows the American consuls as they begin to become cultural brokers linking Americans to remnants of the great Mediterranean empires as America begins to consider an imperialistic turn in the wake of the Monroe Doctrine.

A graph superimposes the growth–decline curves of major Early Rider Empires, from 600 BCE to 600 CE. Compared to running messengers, the Achaemenid empire sharply boosted message speed by using horse relay stations. A major rise in empire area resulted, also helped by split delegation of provincial power. The Xiongnu steppe empire broke the Achaemenid size record hugely but briefly, while Han did so longer but minimally. Rome fell short in size but lasted longer. By population size Han mostly was top, but Maurya and Rome at times surpassed it. Most of these empires profited from religious tolerance, compared to previous theocracies; Sassanids were an exception. The Qin-Han rule established a harsh centralized bureaucracy, while Rome limited it, allowing for local autonomy. Han official contact with Hellenic Bactria in 127 BCE marks the first indirect linkage of states from the Pacific to the Atlantic.

Chapter 2 considers the so-called cradle of Christian martyrdom: Second-century Asia Minor. Beginning with an analysis of the economic, political, and social relationships between Christian, Jewish, and Greek social structures in the face of the Roman Empire’s centralization of power, I outline the circumstances of Christian martyrs during the first centuries following Jesus’ death. Using legal statutes alongside letters between Pliny the Younger and the emperor Trajan, I analyze the contours and relative scope and depth of Roman persecution. Through an analysis of the language used by Christian theologians and the period’s popular Acta Martyrum, I consider the way martyrdom was performed in recognition of a separate pax Deorum—agreement with God—that challenged that of the Roman state. I proceed to show how martyrs were interpreted as imitators of Christ’s sacrifice, and the meaning that designation brought to martyrs and their audience. Finally, I highlight the parrhēsia—bold, free speech—demonstrated in martyrdom to articulate the centrality of truth-telling to Christian martyrs, a theme to which I return throughout the book.

This book explores the shifting discourses of prophethood and prophecy in the late antique Near East. It rejects the “Cessation of Prophecy” metanarrative that frames prophecy as perpetually in decline, and charts instead a novel trajectory for understanding prophethood and prophecy as discourse. It does so by working through a number of texts from the late antique Near East, including Manichaean literature, the classical rabbinic corpus, early Jewish mystical literature, the Pseudo-Clementine Homilies, and Neoplatonic literature. It argues that we should read these communities’ developing notions of prophethood and revelation alongside and against one another, on the one hand, and within broader developments in the late antique Near East, on the other.

Roman law persists after the fall of Rome, not only governing private/business-relations, but also as the basis for the Western European legal order. When it comes down to the law the Roman Empire lived on as a virtual empire (of the imagination) more than a millennium after the actual fall of the physical empire in the West. Roman law was studied, codified and used as if the Empire was still there.

Very few Christians rejected the Roman Empire in principle; rather, many saw it as a prerequisite for their mission because of the peace that the Empire created. Nevertheless, conflicts arose: Few understood why Christians, who worshipped only one God, did not want to sacrifice. In the eyes of contemporaries, this could provoke the gods and endanger social peace, and was a reason for persecution in many places. Many Christians made sacrifices under pressure, but some also became martyrs who gained great prestige. Meanwhile, some Christians entered the service of the state and held public office or became soldiers. They often made compromises that strict Christians criticised. Some seemingly enjoyed the glamour of public duties. That Christians would dominate the empire was by no means a foregone conclusion even at the end of the third century, at the time of Constantine the Great.

Magnus Ryan reverses the standard story of the development of Roman Law: that a law declared universal and eternal by the Emperor Justinian, and accepted as such by the medieval lawyers, was finally ‘historicized’ in the sixteenth century by the French historical school of Humanist jurists. On the contrary, Ryan argues, the understanding of Roman Law held by medieval jurists down to Bartolus was strictly historical, premised on the assumption that the kingdoms and cities of medieval Europe were continuous with the Roman Empire, their authority derived from the same ‘lex regia’ by which the emperors had been granted their authority by the Roman people. The first breach in this assumption of historical continuity appears to be made in the fifteenth century, when similar transfers of authority were identified as taking place independently; and in the sixteenth century Protestant resistance theorists began to claim that original popular authority was a universal principle, exemplified severally in the original, ‘ancient’ constitutions of individual kingdoms (such as France). It was by abandoning the premise of historical continuity with Rome, in other words, that Roman Law was made ‘universal’.

This chapter focuses on the series of conflicts between the Roman government and the Jewish population of the Roman empire during the first and second centuries CE. Modern theories on this relationship are as elaborate and convoluted as the corpus of primary sources available for it. Both will be analyzed here through the scope of genocide, in an attempt to determine whether there ever existed a Roman intent to destroy the Jewish group or parts of it, and the extent to which actual destruction ultimately occurred.

Beginning in 302 CE, the four emperors of the Roman tetrarchy collectively issued a series of edicts that decreed severe penalties against the Empire’s Manichaean and Christian subjects. These decrees constituted the most widespread and systematic religious persecutions in imperial history. In this chapter, I explore these edicts and their consequences in the context of a global history of genocide. I argue that, while these persecutions may not satisfy modern juristic definitions of genocide, which tend to emphasize physical violence, they nonetheless suggest that the emperors aimed to eliminate alternative systems of knowledge, to remove particular religio-cultural populations from the civic collective, and to prevent these groups’ social reproduction. I suggest the tetrarchy’s edicts comprise something akin to a “cultural genocide” by the Roman government. I conclude with some brief reflections on the use of cultural genocide as an interpretive tool for understanding ancient acts of community violence.