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  3. Greek Culture in the Roman World

Greek Culture in the Roman World offers a rich field for study. Extraordinary insights can be gained into processes of multicultural contact and exchange, political and ideological conflict, and the creativity of a polyglot, changing empire. This was also a period when many fundamental elements of Western society were being set in place: from the rise of Christianity, to an influential system of education, to long-lived artistic canons. This series is the first to focus on the response of Greek culture to its Roman imperial setting as a significant phenomenon in its own right. To that end, it will publish original and innovative research in the art, archaeology, epigraphy, history, philosophy, religion and literature of the Empire, with an emphasis on Greek material.

  • General Editors: Jaś Elsner, Corpus Christi College, Oxford, Simon Goldhill, University of Cambridge, Constanze Güthenke, University of Oxford, Michael Squire, University of Cambridge

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41 results in Greek Culture in the Roman World

Page 1 of 3

Aelius Aristides and the Poetics of Lyric in Imperial Greek Culture
  • Francesca Modini
  • Coming soon
  • Expected online publication date:
    May 2025
    Print publication:
    31 May 2025
  • This book is the first study of the persistence and significance of ancient lyric in imperial Greek culture. Redefining lyric reception as a phenomenon ranging from textual engagement with ancient poems to the appropriation of song traditions, Francesca Modini reconsiders the view of imperial culture (paideia) as dominated by Homer and fifth-century Attic literature. She argues that textual knowledge of lyric allowed imperial writers to show a more sophisticated level of paideia, and her analysis further reveals how lyric traditions mobilised distinctive discourses of self-fashioning, local identity, community-making and power crucial for Greeks under Rome. This is most evident in the works of Aelius Aristides, who reconfigured ancient lyric to shape his rhetorical persona and enhance his speeches to imperial communities. Exploring Aristides' lyric poetics also changes how we interpret his reconstruction of the classical tradition and his involvement in the complex politics of the Empire.

Roman Identity and Lived Religion
  • Baptismal Art in Late Antiquity
  • Stefanie Lenk
  • Coming soon
  • Expected online publication date:
    February 2025
    Print publication:
    28 February 2025
  • Christianity is often considered prevalent when it comes to defining the key values of late antique society, whereas 'feeling connected to the Roman past' is commonly regarded as an add-on for cultivated elites. This book demonstrates the significant impact of popular Roman culture on the religious identity of common Christians from the fifth to the seventh century in the Mediterranean world. Baptism is central to the formation of Christian identity. The decoration of baptisteries reveals that traditional Roman culture persisted as an integral component of Christian identity in various communities. In their baptisteries, Christians visually and spatially evoked their links to Roman and, at times, even pagan traditions. A close examination of visual and material sources in North Africa, the Iberian Peninsula, and Italy shows that baptisteries served roles beyond mere conduits to Christian orthodoxy.

Christianity, Philosophy, and Roman Power
  • Constantine, Julian, and the Bishops on Exegesis and Empire
  • Lea Niccolai
  • Published online:
    07 July 2023
    Print publication:
    01 June 2023
  • This book rethinks the Christianisation of the late Roman empire as a crisis of knowledge, pointing to competitive cultural re-assessment as a major driving force in the making of the Constantinian and post-Constantinian state. Emperor Julian's writings are re-assessed as key to accessing the rise and consolidation of a Christian politics of interpretation that relied on exegesis as a self-legitimising device to secure control over Roman history via claims to Christianity's control of paideia. This reconstruction infuses Julian's reaction with contextual significance. His literary and political project emerges as a response to contemporary reconfigurations of Christian hermeneutics as controlling the meaning of Rome's culture and history. At the same time, understanding Julian as a participant in a larger debate re-qualifies all fourth-century political and episcopal discourse as a long knock-on effect reacting to the imperial mobilisation of Christian debates over the link between power and culture.

Greek Declamation and the Roman Empire
  • William Guast
  • Published online:
    22 June 2023
    Print publication:
    06 July 2023
  • A Greek declamation was an 'imaginary speech': a fictitious speech composed for a rhetorical scenario set in Classical Greece. Although such speeches began as rhetorical exercises, under the high Roman empire they developed into a full-blown prestigious genre in their own right. This first monograph on Greek declamation for nearly forty years re-evaluates a genre that was central to Greek imperial literature and to ancient and modern notions of the 'Second Sophistic'. Rejecting traditional conceptions of the genre as 'nostalgic', this book considers the significance of Greek declamation's re-enactment of classical history for its own times, and integrates the genre into the wider history of the period. It shows through extended readings how the genre came to constitute a powerful and subtle instrument of identity formation and social interaction, and a site for free thinking on issues of major contemporary importance such as imperialism and inter-polis relations.

The Death of Myth on Roman Sarcophagi
  • Allegory and Visual Narrative in the Late Empire
  • Mont Allen
  • Published online:
    13 January 2023
    Print publication:
    29 December 2022
  • A strange thing happened to Roman sarcophagi in the third century:  their Greek mythic imagery vanished. Since the beginning of their production a century earlier, these beautifully carved coffins had featured bold mythological scenes. How do we make sense of this imagery's own death on later sarcophagi, when mythological narratives were truncated, gods and heroes were excised, and genres featuring no mythic content whatsoever came to the fore? What is the significance of such a profound tectonic shift in the Roman funerary imagination for our understanding of Roman history and culture, for the development of its arts, for the passage from the High to the Late Empire and the coming of Christianity, but above all, for the individual Roman women and men who chose this imagery, and who took it with them to the grave? In this book, Mont Allen offers the clues that aid in resolving this mystery.

The Lives of Ancient Villages
  • Rural Society in Roman Anatolia
  • Peter Thonemann
  • Published online:
    28 October 2022
    Print publication:
    17 November 2022
  • Our conception of the culture and values of the ancient Greco-Roman world is largely based on texts and material evidence left behind by a small and atypical group of city-dwellers. The people of the deep Mediterranean countryside seldom appear in the historical record from antiquity, and almost never as historical actors. This book is the first extended historical ethnography of an ancient village society, based on an extraordinarily rich body of funerary and propitiatory inscriptions from a remote upland region of Roman Asia Minor. Rural kinship structures and household forms are analysed in detail, as are the region's demography, religious life, gender relations, class structure, normative standards and values. Roman north-east Lydia is perhaps the only non-urban society in the Greco-Roman world whose culture can be described at so fine-grained a level of detail: a world of tight-knit families, egalitarian values, hard agricultural labour, village solidarity, honour, piety and love.

Roman Ionia
  • Constructions of Cultural Identity in Western Asia Minor
  • Martin Hallmannsecker
  • Published online:
    05 May 2022
    Print publication:
    19 May 2022
  • How did the cities of Ionia construct and express a distinct sense of Ionian identity under Roman rule? With the creation of the Roman province of Asia and the ever-growing incorporation of the Greeks into the Roman Empire, issues of identity gained new relevance and urgency for the Greek provincials. The Ionian cities are a special case as they, unlike many other cities in Asia Minor, were all old Greek poleis and could look back on a glorious tradition of great antiquity. Martin Hallmannsecker provides answers to this question using studies of the extant literary sources complemented with analyses of the rich epigraphic and numismatic material from the cities of Ionia. In doing so, he draws a more holistic and nuanced picture of the region and furthers understanding of Greek culture under the Roman Empire.

Late Hellenistic Greek Literature in Dialogue
  • Edited by Jason König, Nicolas Wiater
  • Published online:
    21 April 2022
    Print publication:
    05 May 2022
  • Late Hellenistic Greek literature, both prose and poetry, stands out for its richness and diversity. Recent work has tended to take an author-by-author approach that underestimates the interconnectedness of the literary culture of the period. The chapters assembled here set out to change that by offering new readings of a wide range of late Hellenistic texts and genres, including historiography, geography, rhetoric and philosophy, together with many verse texts and inscriptions. In the process, they offer new insights into the various ways in which late Hellenistic literature engaged with its social, cultural and political contexts, while interrogating and revising some of the standard narratives of the relationship between late Hellenistic and imperial Greek literary culture, which are too often studied in isolation from each other. As a whole the book prompts us to rethink the place of late Hellenistic literature within the wider landscape of Greek and Roman literary history.

The Christian Invention of Time
  • Temporality and the Literature of Late Antiquity
  • Simon Goldhill
  • Published online:
    13 January 2022
    Print publication:
    03 February 2022
  • Time is integral to human culture. Over the last two centuries people's relationship with time has been transformed through industrialisation, trade and technology. But the first such life-changing transformation – under Christianity's influence – happened in late antiquity. It was then that time began to be conceptualised in new ways, with discussion of eternity, life after death and the end of days. Individuals also began to experience time differently: from the seven-day week to the order of daily prayer and the festal calendar of Christmas and Easter. With trademark flair and versatility, world-renowned classicist Simon Goldhill uncovers this change in thinking. He explores how it took shape in the literary writing of late antiquity and how it resonates even today. His bold new cultural history will appeal to scholars and students of classics, cultural history, literary studies, and early Christianity alike.

The Moon in the Greek and Roman Imagination
  • Myth, Literature, Science and Philosophy
  • Karen ní Mheallaigh
  • Published online:
    09 October 2020
    Print publication:
    22 October 2020
  • The Moon exerted a powerful influence on ancient intellectual history, as a playground for the scientific imagination. This book explores the history of the Moon in the Greco-Roman imaginary from Homer to Lucian, with special focus on those accounts of the Moon, its attributes, and its 'inhabitants' given by ancient philosophers, natural scientists and imaginative writers including Pythagoreans, Plato and the Old Academy, Varro, Plutarch and Lucian. ní Mheallaigh shows how the Moon's enigmatic presence made it a key site for thinking about the gaze (erotic, philosophical and scientific) and the relation between appearance and reality. It was also a site for hoax in antiquity as well as today. Central issues explored include the view from elsewhere (selēnoskopia), the relation of science and fiction, the interaction between the beginnings of science in the classical polis and the imperial period, and the limits of knowledge itself.

Oppian's Halieutica
  • Charting a Didactic Epic
  • Emily Kneebone
  • Published online:
    24 September 2020
    Print publication:
    08 October 2020
  • Oppian's Halieutica is a dazzling five-book Greek didactic poem about the sea and its wily, chaotic inhabitants. This book offers the first sustained reading of the poem as a didactic epic that meditates on the place of human beings within the cosmos at large, and on the lessons we can learn from fish. Using a combination of close reading and wider interpretative lenses, this book examines the literary texture and cultural relevance of the Halieutica by analysing its sophisticated refraction of earlier literary-critical theories and hexameter traditions, its commentary on human-animal relations, and its contribution to imperial Greek literary, political, and cultural debates. The book demonstrates the importance and cultural centrality of this understudied Greek didactic epic; it is written for students and scholars of imperial Greek literature and culture (including the ancient novel), ancient heroic and didactic epics, and those interested in human-animal relations in the ancient world.

The Resurrection of Homer in Imperial Greek Epic
  • Quintus Smyrnaeus' Posthomerica and the Poetics of Impersonation
  • Emma Greensmith
  • Published online:
    23 September 2020
    Print publication:
    01 October 2020
  • This book offers a radically new reading of Quintus' Posthomerica, the first account to combine a literary and cultural-historical understanding of what is the most important Greek epic written at the height of the Roman Empire. In Emma Greensmith's ground-breaking analysis, Quintus emerges as a key poet in the history of epic and of Homeric reception. Writing as if he is Homer himself, and occupying the space between the Iliad and the Odyssey, Quintus constructs a new 'poetics of the interval'. At all levels, from its philology to its plotting, the Posthomerica manipulates the language of affiliation, succession and repetition not just to articulate its own position within the inherited epic tradition but also to contribute to the literary and identity politics of imperial society. This book changes how we understand the role of epic and Homer in Greco-Roman culture - and completely re-evaluates Quintus' status as a poet.

Preposterous Poetics
  • The Politics and Aesthetics of Form in Late Antiquity
  • Simon Goldhill
  • Published online:
    27 August 2020
    Print publication:
    17 September 2020
  • How does literary form change as Christianity and rabbinic Judaism take shape? What is the impact of literary tradition and the new pressures of religious thinking? Tracing a journey over the first millennium that includes works in Latin, Greek, Hebrew and Aramaic, this book changes our understanding of late antiquity and how its literary productions make a significant contribution to the cultural changes that have shaped western Europe.

The Aesthetics of Hope in Late Greek Imperial Literature
  • Methodius of Olympus' Symposium and the Crisis of the Third Century
  • Dawn LaValle Norman
  • Published online:
    15 November 2019
    Print publication:
    05 December 2019
  • This book sheds light on a relatively dark period of literary history, the late third century CE, a period that falls between the Second Sophistic and Late Antiquity. It argues that more was being written during this time than past scholars have realized and takes as its prime example the understudied Christian writer Methodius of Olympus. Among his many works, this book focuses on his dialogic Symposium, a text which exposes an era's new concern to re-orient the gaze of a generation from the past onto the future. Dr LaValle Norman makes the further argument that scholarship on the Imperial period that does not include Christian writers within its purview misses the richness of this period, which was one of deepening interaction between Christian and non-Christian writers. Only through recovering this conversation can we understand the transitional period that led to the rise of Constantine.

Greek Epigram and Byzantine Culture
  • Gender, Desire, and Denial in the Age of Justinian
  • Steven D. Smith
  • Published online:
    10 May 2019
    Print publication:
    16 May 2019
  • Sexy, scintillating, and sometimes scandalous, Greek epigrams from the age of the Emperor Justinian commemorate the survival of the sensual in a world transformed by Christianity. Around 567 CE, the poet and historian Agathias of Myrina published his Cycle, an anthology of epigrams by contemporary poets who wrote about what mattered to elite men in sixth-century Constantinople: harlots and dancing girls, chariot races in the hippodrome, and the luxuries of the Roman bath. But amid this banquet of worldly delights, ascetic Christianity - pervasive in early Byzantine thought - made sensual pleasure both more complicated and more compelling. In this book, Steven D. Smith explores how this miniature classical genre gave expression to lurid fantasies of domination and submission, constraint and release, and the relationship between masculine and feminine. The volume will appeal to literary scholars and historians interested in Greek poetry, Late Antiquity, Byzantine studies, Early Christianity, gender, and sexuality.

Painting, Ethics, and Aesthetics in Rome
  • Nathaniel B. Jones
  • Published online:
    28 January 2019
    Print publication:
    24 January 2019
  • In the first centuries BCE and CE, Roman wall painters frequently placed representations of works of art, especially panel paintings, within their own mural compositions. Nathaniel B. Jones argues that the depiction of panel painting within mural ensembles functioned as a meta-pictorial reflection on the practice and status of painting itself. This phenomenon provides crucial visual evidence for both the reception of Greek culture and the interconnected ethical and aesthetic values of art in the Roman world. Roman meta-pictures, this book reveals, not only navigated social debates on the production and consumption of art, but also created space on the Roman wall for new modes of expression relating to pictorial genres, the role of medium in artistic practice, and the history of painting. Richly illustrated, the volume will be important for anyone interested in the social, ethical, and aesthetic dimensions of artworks, in the ancient Mediterranean and beyond.

Dionysius of Halicarnassus and Augustan Rome
  • Rhetoric, Criticism and Historiography
  • Edited by Richard Hunter, Casper C. de Jonge
  • Published online:
    12 October 2018
    Print publication:
    01 November 2018
  • The Greek author Dionysius of Halicarnassus came to Rome in 30/29 BC. He learnt Latin, developed a network of students, patrons and colleagues, and started to teach rhetoric. He published a history of early Rome (Roman Antiquities), and essays on rhetoric and literary criticism, including On the Ancient Orators, On Composition, and several letters. This volume examines how Dionysius' critical and rhetorical works are connected with his history of Rome, and the complex ways in which both components of this dual project - rhetorical criticism and historiography - fit into the social, intellectual, literary, cultural and political world of Rome under Augustus. How does Dionysius' interpretation of the earliest Romans resonate with the political reality of the Principate? And how do his views relate to those of Cicero, Livy and Horace? This volume casts new light on ancient rhetoric, literary criticism, historiography and the literary culture of Augustan Rome.

Author and Audience in Vitruvius' De architectura
  • Marden Fitzpatrick Nichols
  • Published online:
    16 November 2017
    Print publication:
    26 October 2017
  • Vitruvius' De architectura is the only extant classical text on architecture, and its impact on Renaissance masters including Leonardo da Vinci is well-known. But what was the text's purpose in its own time (ca. 20s BCE)? In this book, Marden Fitzpatrick Nichols reveals how Vitruvius pitched the Greek discipline of architecture to his Roman readers, most of whom were undoubtedly laymen. The inaccuracy of Vitruvius' architectural rules, when compared with surviving ancient buildings, has knocked Vitruvius off his pedestal. Nichols argues that the author never intended to provide an accurate view of contemporary buildings. Instead, Vitruvius crafted his authorial persona and remarks on architecture to appeal to elites (and would-be elites) eager to secure their positions within an expanding empire. In this major new analysis of De architectura from archaeological and literary perspectives, Vitruvius emerges as a knowing critic of a social landscape in which the house made the man.

Visual Style and Constructing Identity in the Hellenistic World
  • Nemrud Dağ and Commagene under Antiochos I
  • Miguel John Versluys
  • Published online:
    17 June 2017
    Print publication:
    29 June 2017
  • Located in the small kingdom of Commagene at the upper Euphrates, the late Hellenistic monument of Nemrud Dağ (c.50 BC) has been undeservedly neglected by scholars. Qualified as a Greco-Persian hybrid instigated by a lunatic king, this fascinating project of bricolage has been written out of history. This volume redresses that imbalance, interpreting Nemrud Dağ as an attempt at canon building by Antiochos I in order to construct a dynastic ideology and social order, and proving the monument's importance for our understanding of a crucial transitional phase from Hellenistic to Roman. Hellenistic Commagene therefore holds a profound significance for a number of discussions, such as the functioning of the Hellenistic koine and the genesis of Roman 'art', Hellenism and Persianism in antiquity, dynastic propaganda and the power of images, Romanisation in the East, the contextualising of the Augustan cultural revolution, and the role of Greek culture in the Roman world.

Greek Myths in Roman Art and Culture
  • Imagery, Values and Identity in Italy, 50 BC–AD 250
  • Zahra Newby
  • Published online:
    05 August 2016
    Print publication:
    15 September 2016
  • Images of episodes from Greek mythology are widespread in Roman art, appearing in sculptural groups, mosaics, paintings and reliefs. They attest to Rome's enduring fascination with Greek culture, and its desire to absorb and reframe that culture for new ends. This book provides a comprehensive account of the meanings of Greek myth across the spectrum of Roman art, including public, domestic and funerary contexts. It argues that myths, in addition to functioning as signifiers of a patron's education or paideia, played an important role as rhetorical and didactic exempla. The changing use of mythological imagery in domestic and funerary art in particular reveals an important shift in Roman values and senses of identity across the period of the first two centuries AD, and in the ways that Greek culture was turned to serve Roman values.

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