The Archaeology of Roman Portugal contributes to the wider debate on Roman imperialism and expansionism, by bringing to the fore a much-underrepresented area of the Roman empire, at least in English-language scholarship: its westernmost edge in modern day Portugal. Highlighting the perspective from Roman Portugal contributes to our understanding of the Roman empire, through presenting both an extraordinary landscape in the sense of economic opportunities (ocean resources, marble and metal mining), and also settlement history. The volume presents new data and insights from both archaeology and ancient history, discussing their significance for our understanding of Roman expansion and imperialism. A key goal of the volume is to discuss how the Portuguese panorama compares to other areas of the Iberian peninsula, and to better integrate Portuguese scholarship in the academic debate on the Mediterranean Roman world, and to contextualise it firmly within the wider Iberian and Western Mediterranean. The volume brings together an internationally diverse team of scholars in archaeology and ancient history from Portugal, Spain, Germany, the UK, the US, the Netherlands, Belgium and Italy. It explicitly discusses different national and disciplinary research traditions and historical frameworks in order to assess the potential of integrating best practices in archaeological approaches and methodology.

The first contacts between Greece, the Aegean and India are thought to have occurred at the beginning of the sixth century BC. There is now evidence of much earlier indirect connections, starting in the middle of the third millennium BC, but greatly diminishing after 1800 BC. These were initially between India with its Indus Civilisation (Meluḫḫa) and the Near East and then finally with the societies of the Early and Middle Bronze Age Aegean, with their slowly emerging palace-based economies and complex social structures. These connections point to a form of indirect or what might be called ‘trickle-down’ contact between the Aegean and India through objects, iconography and commodities, such as tin and lapis lazuli, that formed this contact. This book views the Aegean as part of a greater trade network, that includes commodities as well as more recently discovered objects, which accumulated added value as they fi rst built up a distinguished pedigree of ownership in the Near East and Syro-Palestine. It was the natural extension of trade between the Near East and India. In the Early to Late Bronze Ages, India was an important resource for valuable and indispensable commodities destined for the elites and developing technologies of much of the Old World. Finally, the period after the end of the Bronze Age to the time of Alexander the Great is examined and particularly after the sixth century, when Greeks were beginning to know about India. Within 200 years, India would be known to scholar and non-scholar alike, including those who witnessed the Persian invasions of Greece or who later became Macedonian and Greek foot soldiers marching east.

The Danubian provinces represent one of the largest macro-units within the Roman Empire, with a large and rich heritage of Roman material evidence. Although the notion itself is a modern 18th-century creation, this region represents a unique area, where the dominant, pre-Roman cultures (Celtic, Illyrian, Hellenistic, Thracian) are interconnected within the new administrative, economic and cultural units of Roman cities, provinces and extra-provincial networks. This book presents the material evidence of Roman religion in the Danubian provinces through a new, paradigmatic methodology, focusing not only on the traditional urban and provincial units of the Roman Empire, but on a new space taxonomy. Roman religion and its sacralised places are presented in macro-, meso- and micro-spaces of a dynamic empire, which shaped Roman religion in the 1st-3rd centuries AD and created a large number of religious glocalizations and appropriations in Raetia, Noricum, Pannonia Superior, Pannonia Inferior, Moesia Superior, Moesia Inferior and Dacia. Combining the methodological approaches of Roman provincial archaeology and religious studies, this work intends to provoke a dialogue between disciplines rarely used together in central-east Europe and beyond. The material evidence of Roman religion is interpreted here as a dynamic agent in religious communication, shaped by macro-spaces, extra-provincial routes, commercial networks, but also by the formation and constant dynamics of small group religions interconnected within this region through human and material mobilities. The book also presents for the first time a comprehensive list of sacralised spaces and divinities in the Danubian provinces.

According to one narrative that received almost canonical status a century ago with Francis Haverfield, the orthogonal grid was the most important development of ancient town planning, embodying values of civilisation in contrast to barbarism, diffused in particular by hundreds of Roman colonial foundations. Its main legacy to subsequent urban development was the model of the grid city, spread across the New World in new colonial cities. This book explores the shortcomings of that all too colonialist narrative and offers new perspectives. It explores the ideals articulated both by ancient city founders and their modern successors; looks at new evidence for Roman colonial foundations to reassess their aims; and considers the many ways post-Roman urbanism looked back to the Roman model with a constant re-appropriation of the idea of the Roman.

This monograph uses the life and work of ground-breaking female classicist, Wilmer Cave Wright, to examine several questions about the rise of women in that discipline. First, what went into the creation of a classics scholar under circumstances that would seem to preclude that? Second, why was it arguably Wright’s time in Chicago that was her formative experience and period? Third, why did Wright want so desperately to leave Bryn Mawr, and then stay and pour herself into her students? Fourth, through what lens did she approach the evidence of classical literature, and did it make a difference? Fifth, how did Wright survive the Thomas years at Bryn Mawr? Sixth, why did she abruptly abandon her long-term project on Libanius of Antioch? Seventh, what led her to suddenly switch from classical Greek literature to translating medieval Latin medical texts? Wright's journey from Mason College to Girton College, Cambridge, the University of Chicago, and Bryn Mawr College is placed into historical context. Throughout, the significance of Wright’s work, particularly on the life of the Emperor Julian, is assessed. The author is a research fellow at the University of St Andrews, and the author of Julian and Christianity (Cornell) as well as numerous articles in Harvard Studies in Classical Philology, Classical Quarterly, and Classical Philology.

The Greco-Roman world is identified in the modern mind by its cities. This includes both specific places such as Athens and Rome, but also an instantly recognisable style of urbanism wrought in marble and lived in by teeming tunic-clad crowds. Selective and misleading this vision may be, but it speaks to the continuing importance these ancient cities have had in the centuries that followed and the extent to which they define the period in subsequent memory. Although there is much that is mysterious about them, the cities of the Roman Mediterranean are, for the most part, historically known. That the names and pasts of these cities remain known to us is the product of an extraordinary process of remembering and forgetting stretching back to antiquity that took place throughout the former Roman world. This volume tackles this subject of the survival and transformation of the ancient city through memory, drawing upon the methodological and theoretical lenses of memory studies and resilience theory to view the way the Greco-Roman city lived and vanished for the generations that separate the present from antiquity. This book analyses the different ways in which urban communities of the post-Antique world have tried to understand and relate to the ancient city on their own terms, examining it as a process of forgetting as well as remembering. Many aspects of the ancient city were let go as time passed, but those elements that survived, that were actively remembered, have shaped the many understandings of what it was. The volume assembles specialists in multiple fields to bring their perspectives to bear on the subject through eleven case studies that range from late Antiquity to the mid-20th century, and from the Iberian Peninsula to Iran. Through the examination of archaeological remains, changing urban layouts and chronicles, travel guides and pamphlets, they track how the ancient city was made useful or consigned to oblivion.

This book shows how a military colony became a large, impressive and prosperous city. Legendary for its walls and port, it was able to play a basic role in the great strategy of ancient Rome between the Po and the Danube, spanning the centuries from its foundation (181 BC) to the fateful days of blood and violence of its fall (AD 452). Based on a study of ancient sources, contemporary literature and the latest archaeological research, and written in a fast-paced and accessible style, the book provides a portrait of Aquileia in a diachronic key, under various aspects; it sets the city in the complex societal and political system of the time, gives a thorough account of the great events of which it was a protagonist or victim and offers detailed portraits of key figures, whether famous or less well-known, and analyses of epic battles. Combining academic scholarship with storytelling, biographies of important personalities and stories of political intrigue, assassinations and full-scale warfare which narrate the evocative epic of the rise, decline and disappearance of ancient cities, the volume highlights a significant topic in Roman political, social, economic, religious and military history, but one which has been inexplicably neglected in the Anglo-Saxon world until now.

The present volume describes the rich and complex world in which Ausonius (c. 310-395) lived and worked, from his humble beginnings as a schoolteacher in Bordeaux, to the heights of his influence as quaestor to the Emperor Gratian, at a time of unsettling social and religious change. As a teacher and poet Ausonius adhered to the traditions of classical paideia, standing in contrast to the Fathers of the Church, e. g., Jerome, Augustine, and Paulinus of Nola, who were emboldened by the legalization, then the imposition, of Christianity in the course of the fourth century. For this position he was labeled by the 20th-century scholar Henri-Irénée Marrou a symbol of decadence. Guided by Marrou’s critical insights to both his own time and place and that of Ausonius, this book proposes a hermeneutic for reading Ausonius as both a fourth-century poet and a fascinating mirror for his 20th-century counterparts.

In the First Millennium BC present-day Italy was inhabited by many different ethnic groups, most of which spoke a language affiliated with Latin. Sardinia, a large island to the West of the Italian mainland, had a culture characterized by nuraghs, a kind of massive stone tower, presumably for defense purposes. Many finds of bronze statuettes of warriors show the concern of the population to protect themselves from aggressors, also with divine support secured by impressive priestesses. However, Rome’s closest neighbours to the North were the Etruscans, who spoke a language quite different from any other people in Italy. For a long period Etruscan kings ruled the Romans who, however, liberated themselves from the foreigners and, in reverse, started to conquer their territory. Gradually, from about the Sixth Century BC to about 100 BC, the Romans came to dominate the Etruscans as well as the ethnic groups we call the Italics. But, apart from the military conflict, from which the Romans emerged victorious they were in many ways influenced by the Etruscans, whose prevalence in the field of religion and art they admired. Actually, they welcomed cultural exchange. A striking example is that the Romans invited a famous Etruscan artist to decorate their most important temple, dedicated to Jupiter, on the Capitol Hill. The Etruscan excellence in bronze casting has left a rich heritage of bronze sculpture. Statues and statuettes were used as gifts for the gods in sanctuaries both in Etruria and Rome, as well as in many other parts of Italy.

The book is a synoptic catalogue of a large class of Greek manuscripts: it describes all pre-seventeenth century copies of the Greek New Testament in which the biblical text is accompanied by commentary. Manuscripts where this commentary consists of combined excerpts (catena) from the works of various authors are described in particular detail. Those that have similar content are grouped together, so that the potential relatives of any given manuscript can be easily identified. Several previously unknown types of catenae are distinguished and a number of previously unstudied codices are brought to light for the first time. To ensure its longer shelf-life, the volume systematically references on-line electronic databases (which are regularly updated). It will be of use to anyone interested in Byzantine book culture and in biblical exegesis.

Despite the flourishing of epichoric studies on the Archaic Greek scripts in the 1960s, embodied by archaeologists Lilian Hamilton Jeffery and Margherita Guarducci, most scholarship on early alphabetic writing in Greece has focused on questions around the origin of ‘the Greek alphabet’ instead of acknowledging the diversity of alphabetic systems that emerged in Geometric and Archaic times. The present book proposes to bring back the epichoric approach by focusing on the different ways in which the earliest epigraphic evidence represents the spoken Greek dialects. However, instead of continuing the palaeographic methodology of previous studies, this analysis follows the latest trends in grapholinguistics, more specifically the methodology of comparative graphematics. By examining the grapheme-phoneme relationships across Greek-speaking regions, it is possible to recognise that diversity and to draw connections with neighbouring contemporaneous alphabets, such as those for Phrygian, Eteocretan and Etruscan. This work, carried out within the Contexts of and Relations between Early Writing Systems (CREWS) project, aims to contribute towards the conceptualisation of the so-called epichoric scripts as independent alphabets, as well as their framing within the ecology of ancient Mediterranean writing systems. Contexts of and Relations between Early Writing Systems (CREWS) is a project funded by the European Research Council under the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme (grant agreement No. 677758), and based in the Faculty of Classics, University of Cambridge.

The Crownthorpe hoard was discovered in 1982 during a metal detector search of a Roman temple site. It consists of seven bronze vessels: native copies of two Roman silver wine cups and a spouted strainer bowl, together with an imported Roman saucepan, patera and a pair of dishes. The cups are copies of plain silver vessels of form Eggers 170, and may well have been made in a workshop in Norfolk. They are the only complete examples of insular copies of Roman wine cups from Britain. Copies of Roman wine cups were made in the east of England from before c. 25 BC. Some of these local imitations were inspired by imported cups that have not survived in the archaeological record. Bearing in mind that no imported silver plate is known from late Iron Age Britain after c. 10 BC, insular copies of wine cups show that more silver plate reached Iron Age Britain than we have hitherto realised. Confirmation comes from images of Roman silver cups on Iron Age coins. The spouted strainer bowl was made in a workshop to the south of Crownthorpe, somewhere in the counties north of the lower Thames. Such vessels are an insular type that owed nothing significant to the Roman world. They were used primarily for flavouring local drinks. A corpus of thirty-one such copper-alloy vessels is provided here, including three examples that reached the mainland of Europe. The Roman saucepan in the hoard is an Eggers 151 saucepan of Trau-Kasserolle type. They are rare finds: Crownthorpe is only the fourth example from Britain, and the only complete one. It came from a workshop along the Rhine or Danube frontiers. The patera is Italian and part of a set of hand-washing vessels; the jug that would have been used in conjunction with it was not present in the hoard. The two dishes have tinned inner surfaces and represent a long-lived Roman vessel type. The hoard was assembled at Crownthorpe c. AD 40-75. Relating the hoard to the local context suggests that the date can be narrowed down to c. AD 45-60/61. It was buried by a Briton, a member of the local Icenian elite. The set of vessels at Crownthorpe was used for preparing and serving local ale or mead flavoured with fruit or vegetable additives, and drunk from the cups. Wine amphoras are seldom found in late Iron Age and early Roman Norfolk, and that precludes the use of the Crownthorpe cups for the drink. As there are two cups, we should envisage their use for the host and a guest. The Eggers 151 saucepan was used to ladle the drink into the strainer bowl for its flavouring. Snacks to accompany the drink were served in the two dishes. Hand-washing in the course of these revelries was facilitated by the patera. Burial of the hoard near the site of a later Romano-Celtic temple with no trace of an organic container to facilitate recovery suggests it was votive. Other base-metal utensil hoards from Roman Britain cannot be satisfactorily accounted for as the temporary concealment of portable wealth with the intention of recovery, and strengthen the case for Crownthorpe being votive. No comparable hoards are known from late Iron Age Britain because few copper-alloy utensils were in use then, but we know that the practice of burying such hoards had its roots in a native tradition because single copper-alloy vessels have been recovered from watery contexts in the late Iron Age. Components of the Crownthorpe hoard had been dismantled when it was buried, but it should not be seen as a hoard of scrap metal intended for recycling. It is proposed instead that the termination of the useful working life of the hoard vessels represents an act of renunciation, in this case a repudiation of Icenian dealings with the Roman world that culminated in the calamity of the Boudican Revolt of AD 60-61.

After a long period in which the late Republican and Augustan poets were the main focus of scholarship in Latin poetry, more attention is now being given to earlier Republican literature, and even more to the poets of what used to be called disparagingly the ‘Silver Age’. The present volume reflects this changing perspective. Five of its contributors offer papers devoted to Augustan poets (Horace, Propertius, the Ovid of the Metamorphoses); there are two papers on early and later Republican epic; and five examine aspects of later Julio-Claudian and Flavian authors: Seneca the Younger, Silius Italicus, Martial, and Statius.

Bathing culture was one of the pillars of Roman society and bathhouses are one of the largest categories of a particular type of construction excavated in the Roman world. The large number of surviving remains and their regional variety make bathhouses vital for the study of the local societies in the Roman-Byzantine period. This book presents the archaeological evidence of close to 200 Roman-style bathhouses from the region of Iudaea/Syria-Palaestina and Provincia Arabia, part of the provinces of the Roman East, constructed from the reign of Herod the Great (second half of the 1st century BCE) to the end of the Umayyad rule (mid-8th century CE). The bathing complexes of the Roman, Byzantine, and the Early Islamic periods, ranging from large public thermae to small bathing suites, are for the first time analysed as unified data with an unprecedented amount of detail, considering a variety of parameters - from dating and setting, through building techniques and materials, to plans and decorations. Typologies of the bathhouses and their components are supplemented by exploration of the socio-cultural insight provided by this particular type of construction. The historical narrative of the regional bathing facilities is updated in the light of new information. The full raw data used for the study is provided in the expandable open-access online database.

The Journal of Roman Pottery Studies continues to present a range of important new research in the field by both established and early career scholars. Volume XVIII has a strong theme on pottery production with papers on kiln sites, mortaria and late Roman pottery production in East Anglia and at a small town in Belgium. A major new third century assemblage from civitas Cananefatium in South Holland is presented. The second part of an important gazetteer of less common samian ware fabrics and types in northern and western Britain covers fabrics from Central and East Gaul.

The canon of classical Greek and Latin poetry is built around big names, with Homer and Virgil at the centre, but many ancient poems survive without a firm ascription to a known author. This negative category, anonymity, ties together texts as different as, for instance, the orally derived Homeric Hymns and the learned interpolation that is the Helen episode in Aeneid 2, but they all have in common that they have been maltreated in various ways, consciously or through neglect, by generations of readers and scholars, ancient as well as modern. These accumulated layers of obliteration, which can manifest, for instance, in textual distortions or aesthetic condemnation, make it all but impossible to access anonymous poems in their pristine shape and context. The essays collected in this volume attempt, each in its own way, to disentangle the bundles of historically accreted uncertainties and misconceptions that affect individual anonymous texts, including pseudepigrapha ascribed to Homer, Manetho, Virgil and Tibullus, literary and inscribed epigrams, and unattributed fragments. Poems without Poets will be of interest to students and scholars working on any anonymous ancient texts, but also to readers seeking an introduction to classical poetry beyond the limits of the established canon.