Theories and Facts: the Early Gothic Migrations

1982 ◽  
Vol 9 ◽  
pp. 1-20
Author(s):  
Thomas S. Burns
Keyword(s):  
Roman History ◽  
First Century ◽  
Contact Zones ◽  
Narrow Channels ◽  
The Past ◽  
Roman World ◽  
Greco Roman ◽  
Roman Frontiers ◽  
The Impact

The most salient fact about the Gothic migrations is that they forcefully underscore how old theories never die. They linger to play upon the intellect for generations until they seem to constitute facts themselves. The study of the migrations tempts the unwary with marvelous sagas and apparently straightforward accounts of trusted ancient authors. Even if we follow Odysseus' lead, and with our ears carefully plugged with scientific beeswax, rivet our eyes to the narrow channels of fact, the old theories still beckon; after all, Roman history is in part a series of thrusts and counterthrusts along the northern peripheries of the Greco-Roman world, in need of explanation then as now. The origins of the migrants and invaders of the Roman frontiers was a question appropriate to Tacitus in the late first century A.D. and to countless others across the centuries. All too often the questioners were far removed from the contact zones and looked down upon a simple battlefield of “we and they.” Such self-proclaimed Valkyries chose sides for their own reasons, usually preconditioned and often totally unrelated to the struggles below. This essay traces the evolution of the theoretical and factual elements of the early Gothic migrations and concludes with a personal sketch drawn in light of recent studies of the Roman frontier and insights from other areas, especially comparative anthropology.The historiography of the early Gothic migrations is a classic example of the impact of contemporary attitudes, problems, and methodologies on the study of the past. So meager is the evidence that is likens to a broken kaleidoscope in which the few remaining pieces can be jostled easily from place to place.

Gender, Memory, and Identity in the Roman World

2019 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Roman Empire ◽  
Late Antiquity ◽  
Roman History ◽  
Public And Private ◽  
Imperial Rome ◽  
The Past ◽  
Roman World ◽  
Material Sources ◽  
Close Relationship

This volume approaches three key concepts in Roman history — gender, memory and identity — and demonstrates the significance of their interaction in all social levels and during all periods of Imperial Rome. When societies, as well as individuals, form their identities, remembrance and references to the past play a significant role. The aim of Gender, Memory, and Identity in the Roman World is to cast light on the constructing and the maintaining of both public and private identities in the Roman Empire through memory, and to highlight, in particular, the role of gender in that process. While approaching this subject, the contributors to this volume scrutinise both the literature and material sources, pointing out how widespread the close relationship between gender, memory and identity was. A major aim of Gender, Memory, and Identity in the Roman World as a whole is to point out the significance of the interaction between these three concepts in both the upper and lower levels of Roman society, and how it remained an important question through the period from Augustus right into Late Antiquity.

Sustaining Vernacular Architecture - Antiochia as a Sample

2005 ◽  
Vol 30 (3) ◽  
pp. 83-93
Author(s):  
Meltem Yýlmaz
Keyword(s):  
Vernacular Architecture ◽  
Building Design ◽  
First Century ◽  
Rapid Urbanization ◽  
Climate History ◽  
The Past ◽  
Rural Economies ◽  
The World ◽  
Current Century ◽  
The Impact

Much of the world, is currently experiencing intense growth, especially in and around cities. Most conventional practitioners of modern design and construction find it easier to make buildings as if nature and place did not exist. Cars and factories might be thought as the most obvious enemies of the environment, but buildings consume more than half the energy used worldwide. Attempts to destroy building traditions have been associated in some countries with a drive to modernize. Beyond the traditional aspects of dwelling, the impact of globalization and its effect on rural economies, environmental problems, rapid urbanization and the unprecedented scale of housing problems which confront the peoples of the world in the twenty-first century, bring a new urgency to the study of the vernacular architecture in a sustaining sense. In this work, the concept of “sustainability” will be taken into consideration especially within the building scale. Vernacular architecture in the past produced a built environment which met people's needs without deteriorating the environment. This paper discusses the concept of sustainability in building design and connects it to the vernacular architecture with the search of the vernacular Antiochia houses as a sample; focusing on its architectural properties in detail. The study concludes that what is expected of architects in the current century is, wherever they work, they are to understand and digest the nature of climate, history and culture, that is to say, to obtain inspiration from the essence of place and to contribute to the creation of relevant architecture and city for a sustainable future.

Lead pollution and the Roman economy

2020 ◽  
Vol 33 ◽  
pp. 354-364
Author(s):  
Damian Pavlyshyn ◽  
Iain Johnstone ◽  
Richard Saller
Keyword(s):  
Roman Empire ◽  
Economic History ◽  
Roman Economy ◽  
Roman World ◽  
Greco Roman ◽  
Institutional Frameworks ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Impact ◽  
Industrial Societies ◽  
Somatic Energy

More than a decade ago, the Oxford Roman Economy Project (OXREP)1 and the Cambridge economic history of the Greco-Roman world put the question of the performance of the Roman economy at the center of historical debate, prompting a flood of books and articles attempting to assess the degree of growth in the economy.2 The issue is of sufficient importance that it has figured in the narratives of economists analyzing the impact of institutional frameworks on the potential for growth.3 As the debate has continued, there has been some convergence: most historians would agree that there was some Smithian growth as evidenced by urbanization and trade, while acknowledging that production remained predominantly agricultural and based primarily on somatic energy (i.e., human and animal).4 This is, of course, a very broad framework that does not differentiate the Roman empire from other complex pre-industrial societies. The challenge is to refine the analysis in order to put content into the broad description of “modest though significant growth”5 and to offer a deeper understanding of the dynamics of the economy.

Historiography

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sulo Asirvatham
Keyword(s):  
Cultural Politics ◽  
Roman History ◽  
Second Sophistic ◽  
The Past ◽  
Hybrid Nature ◽  
Greco Roman ◽  
Large Bulk ◽  
Greek Historiography ◽  
Definition Of

The historiographical writings of Arrian, Appian, Herodian, and Cassius Dio pose interesting challenges to how we characterize Second Sophistic literature. With its ostensible goal of telling the truth about the past, imperial Greek historiography seems incompatible with the large bulk of imperial Greek writing that is more obviously inspired by declamation and whose main goal is the virtuosic display of erudition, or paideia. Furthermore, inasmuch as this historiography focuses primarily on Roman history, it hardly fulfills the stereotype of Second Sophistic literature as thematically Hellenocentric, even if it is similarly characterized by linguistic Atticism. This chapter therefore argues for an expanded definition of the Second Sophistic that can meaningfully accommodate the peculiarly hybrid nature of historiography on the levels of both genre and cultural politics—as “earnest” history somewhat dominated by rhetoric, and as work better described as “Greco-Roman” than as essentially “Greek.”

Sin in the New Testament

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jeffrey Siker
Keyword(s):  
New Testament ◽  
Early Christianity ◽  
First Century ◽  
Religious Movement ◽  
Jerusalem Temple ◽  
Early Christian ◽  
Roman World ◽  
Greco Roman ◽  
The New Testament ◽  
Christian Message

This book examines what the different New Testament writings have to say about sin within the broader historical and theological contexts of first-century Christianity. These contexts include both the immediate world of Judaism out of which early Christianity emerged, as well as the larger Greco-Roman world into which Christianity quickly spread as an increasingly Gentile religious movement. The Jewish sacrificial system associated with the Jerusalem Temple was important for dealing with human sin, and early Christians appropriated the language and imagery of sacrifice in describing the salvific importance of the death and resurrection of Jesus. Greco-Roman understandings of sin as error or ignorance played an important role in the spreading of the Christian message to the Gentile world. The book details the distinctive portraits of sin in each of the canonical Gospels in relation to the life and ministry of Jesus. Beyond the Gospels the book develops how the letters of Paul and other early Christian writers address the reality of sin, again primarily in relation to the revelatory ministry of Jesus.

Touching Figures

2019 ◽  
pp. 16-29
Author(s):  
Joseph A. Marchal
Keyword(s):  
Gender And Sexuality ◽  
Third Way ◽  
The Past ◽  
Roman World ◽  
Greco Roman

Chapter 1 further situates queer approaches to history and temporality as a way forward and out of persistent debates about whether and how the past is different from the present. These debates have been of particular interest in the study of gender and sexuality in the ancient Greco-Roman world. This project charts and performs a third way of approaching figures from the past, presenting options beyond a stress on identity or alterity, as positioned by scholars of ancient materials like Bernadette Brooten and David Halperin. Queer thinkers focused on other premodern periods provide insights for this approach, particularly Carolyn Dinshaw’s conceptualization of “touches across time.” Inspired by this approach, each of the following chapters is structured by a specific anachronistic juxtaposition that provides an alternative angle on those who have been marginalized and vilified in both the past and the present.

Discovering the Characteristics of Collegia—Collegia Sodalicia and Collegia Tenuiorum in 1 Corinthians 8, 10 and 15

2010 ◽  
Vol 32 (2) ◽  
pp. 166-182 ◽  
Author(s):  
Oh-Young Kwon
Keyword(s):  
First Century ◽  
1 Corinthians ◽  
Christian Community ◽  
Roman World ◽  
Greco Roman ◽  
The Dead

AbstractIn 1 Corinthians 8, 10 and 15 Paul appears to argue against some of the Corinthian Christians who would have regarded their Christian community as analogous to a sort of voluntary collegia in the first century Greco-Roman world. Some characteristics of the collegia are exhibited in these chapters. Especially 8:1-13 and 10:1-22 contains the characteristics of collegia sodalicia, while 15:29 comprises those of collegia tenuiorum. This finding provides an alternative to the current scholarly interpretation of the Pauline description of the Corinthians’ eating food sacrificed to idols (1 Cor 8:1-13 and 10:1-22) and of their engagement in baptism for (or on behalf of) the dead (1 Cor 15:29).

scholarly journals “… the ruins of Europe in back of me.” Jan Klata’s Shakespeare and the European condition

2015 ◽  
Vol 50 (4) ◽  
pp. 67-77
Author(s):  
Magdalena Cieślak
Keyword(s):  
First Century ◽  
Titus Andronicus ◽  
The Past ◽  
Liberal Attitude ◽  
History Of ◽  
Heiner Müller ◽  
The Impact ◽  
Identity Problems ◽  
Contemporary Context ◽  
The Eu

Abstract Jan Klata’s Shakespearean productions are famous for his liberal attitude to the text, innovative sets and locations, and a strong contemporary context. His 2004 H., a Teatr Wybrzeże production performed in the Gdańsk Shipyard, reaches to the Polish history of the eighties (the importance of Solidarity and the fall of communism) to comment on the state of the democratic Poland twenty years later. The 2012 Titus Andronicus, a coproduction of Teatr Polski in Wrocław and Staatsschauspiel Dresden, explores the impact of historical traumas on national prejudice and relations within the new Europe. The 2013 Hamlet with Schauspielhaus Bochum again tries to diagnose the contemporary condition and is again deeply rooted in a specific geopolitical context. Discussing both Titus Andronicus and Hamlet, I would like to explore Klata’s formula of working with Shakespeare. Primarily, he takes advantage of the fact that Shakespeare’s texts are not simply source texts but hypertexts with multiple layers of meanings accumulated over the centuries of circulation, production and adaptation. Perhaps similarly to Heiner Müller, whose plays he willingly incorporates in his productions, Klata anatomizes the plays and then radically reconstructs them using other texts, literary and paraliterary. What Klata eventually puts on stage is a hybrid that is rooted in the Shakespearean hypertexts but also heavily draws from historical, cultural and political contexts, and that is relevant to him as the director and to the particular specificities of the venues, theatres and companies he works with. The hybridized and contextualized Shakespeare becomes for Klata a way to comment on current issues that he sees as vital, like dealing with the burden of the past, confronting the reality of the present, or understanding and expressing national identity, problems that are at once universal and specific for a person living in the EU in the twenty first century.

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