Imagining the Roman Emperor

Imagining the Roman Emperor PDF Author: Panayiotis Christoforou
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1009362518
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 291

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Book Description
How was the Roman emperor viewed by his subjects? How strongly did their perception of his role shape his behaviour? Adopting a fresh approach, Panayiotis Christoforou focuses on the emperor from the perspective of his subjects across the Roman Empire. Stress lies on the imagination: the emperor was who he seemed, or was imagined, to be. Through various vignettes employing a wide range of sources, he analyses the emperor through the concerns and expectations of his subjects, which range from intercessory justice to fears of the monstrosities associated with absolute power. The book posits that mythical and fictional stories about the Roman emperor form the substance of what people thought about him, which underlines their importance for the historical and political discourse that formed around him as a figure. The emperor emerges as an ambiguous figure. Loved and hated, feared and revered, he was an object of contradiction and curiosity.

Imagining the Roman Emperor

Imagining the Roman Emperor PDF Author: Panayiotis Christoforou
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1009362518
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 291

Get Book

Book Description
How was the Roman emperor viewed by his subjects? How strongly did their perception of his role shape his behaviour? Adopting a fresh approach, Panayiotis Christoforou focuses on the emperor from the perspective of his subjects across the Roman Empire. Stress lies on the imagination: the emperor was who he seemed, or was imagined, to be. Through various vignettes employing a wide range of sources, he analyses the emperor through the concerns and expectations of his subjects, which range from intercessory justice to fears of the monstrosities associated with absolute power. The book posits that mythical and fictional stories about the Roman emperor form the substance of what people thought about him, which underlines their importance for the historical and political discourse that formed around him as a figure. The emperor emerges as an ambiguous figure. Loved and hated, feared and revered, he was an object of contradiction and curiosity.

Imagining the Roman Emperor

Imagining the Roman Emperor PDF Author: Panayiotis Christoforou
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1009362496
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 291

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Book Description
Explores how Roman emperors were perceived by their subjects in the first two centuries after Augustus.

Imagining Emperors in the Later Roman Empire

Imagining Emperors in the Later Roman Empire PDF Author:
Publisher: BRILL
ISBN: 9004370927
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 365

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Book Description
Imagining Emperors in the Later Roman Empire offers new critical analysis of the textual depictions of a series of emperors in the fourth century within overlapping historical, religious and literary contexts.

Nero

Nero PDF Author: J. F. Drinkwater
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1108472648
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 469

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Book Description
Nero was negligent, not tyrannical. This allowed others to rule, remarkably well, in his name until his negligence became insupportable.

Imagining Roman Britain

Imagining Roman Britain PDF Author: Virginia Hoselitz
Publisher: Boydell & Brewer Ltd
ISBN: 0861933354
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 227

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Book Description
An examination of how the Roman past was perceived, and used, by Victorian Britain.

The Collective Imagination

The Collective Imagination PDF Author: Peter Murphy
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1317037847
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 264

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Book Description
The Collective Imagination explores the social foundations of the human imagination. In a lucid and wide-ranging discussion, Peter Murphy looks at the collective expression of the imagination in our economies, universities, cities, and political systems, providing a tour-de-force account of the power of the imagination to unite opposites and find similarities among things that we ordinarily think of as different. It is not only individuals who possess the power to imagine; societies do as well. A compelling journey through various peak moments of creation, this book examines the cities and nations, institutions and individuals who ply the paraphernalia of paradoxes and dialogues, wry dramaturgy and witty expression that set the act of creation in motion. Whilst exploring the manner in which, through the media of pattern, figure, and shape, and the miracles of metaphor, things come into being, Murphy recognises that creative periods never last: creative forms invariably tire; inventive centres inevitably fade. The Collective Imagination explores the contemporary dilemmas and historic pathos caused by this-as cities and societies, periods and generations slip behind in the race for economic and social discovery. Left bewildered and bothered, and struggling to catch up, they substitute empty bombast, faded glory, chronic dullness or stolid glumness for initiative, irony, and inventiveness. A comprehensive audit of the creativity claims of the post-modern age - that finds them badly wanting and looks to the future - The Collective Imagination will appeal to sociologists and philosophers concerned with cultural theory, cultural and media studies and aesthetics.

Animating Empire

Animating Empire PDF Author: Jessica Keating
Publisher: Penn State Press
ISBN: 027108149X
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 426

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Book Description
In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, German clockwork automata were collected, displayed, and given as gifts throughout the Holy Roman, Ottoman, and Mughal Empires. In Animating Empire, Jessica Keating recounts the lost history of six such objects and reveals the religious, social, and political meaning they held. The intricate gilt, silver, enameled, and bejeweled clockwork automata, almost exclusively crafted in the city of Augsburg, represented a variety of subjects in motion, from religious figures to animals. Their movements were driven by gears, wheels, and springs painstakingly assembled by clockmakers. Typically wound up and activated by someone in a position of power, these objects and the theological and political arguments they made were highly valued by German-speaking nobility. They were often given as gifts and as tribute payment, and they played remarkable roles in the Holy Roman Empire, particularly with regard to courtly notions about the important early modern issues of universal Christian monarchy, the Reformation, the Counter-Reformation, the encroachment of the Ottoman Empire, and global trade. Demonstrating how automata produced in the Holy Roman Empire spoke to a convergence of historical, religious, and political circumstances, Animating Empire is a fascinating analysis of the animation of inanimate matter in the early modern period. It will appeal especially to art historians and historians of early modern Europe. E-book editions have been made possible through support of the Art History Publication Initiative (AHPI), a collaborative grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.

Emperor in the Roman World

Emperor in the Roman World PDF Author: Fergus Millar
Publisher: Bristol Classical Press
ISBN: 9780715617229
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 656

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Book Description
This book offers a large scale reassessment of the function of Roman emperor over three centuries (from Augustus to Constantine) and of the social realities of this exercise of power. Concentrating on the patterns of communication between the emperor and his subjects, the author shows that such communications were normally initiated by the subjects - whether grouped in cities or other associations, or individually and that the emperor fulfilled his role primarily by making responses to them or giving decisions or verdicts between them. The book casts new light on a number of detailed historical questions such as the sources of the emperor's wealth and the ways he spent it; the imperial residences and the mobility of the court; and the relatively small and simple entourage that the emperor needed to perform his functions. But above all, it emphasizes two major historical themes: the steady detachment of the emperor from the republican institutions of the city of Rome; and the way in which relations between Emperor and Church were shaped by the emperor's long-standing relations with cities, temples and associations in the pagan world. Drawing on a wide range of evidence, from literature and legal writings to inscriptions and papyri, the main text can be read without any knowledge o f Latin or Greek.

Light as Experience and Imagination from Paleolithic to Roman Times

Light as Experience and Imagination from Paleolithic to Roman Times PDF Author: David S. Herrstrom
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
ISBN: 1683930959
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 203

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Book Description
This book is an interdisciplinary synthesis and interpretation about the experience of light as revealed in a wide range of art and literature from Paleolithic to Roman times. Humanistic in spirit and in its handling of facts, it marshals a substantial body of scholarship to develop an explication of light as a central, even dramatic, reality of human existence and experience in diverse cultural settings. David S. Herrstrom underscores our intimacy with light—not only its constant presence in our life but its insinuating character. Focusing on our encounters with light and ways of making sense of these, this book is concerned with the personal and cultural impact of light, exploring our resistance to and acceptance of light. Its approach is unique. The book’s true subject is the individual’s relationship with light, rather than the investigation of light’s essential nature. It tells the story of light seducing individuals down through the ages. Consequently, it is not concerned with the “progress” of scientific inquiries into the physical properties and behavior of light (optical science), but rather with subjective reactions to it as reflected in art (Paleolithic through Roman), architecture (Egyptian, Grecian, Roman), mythology and religion (Paleolithic, Egyptian), and literature (e.g., Akhenaten, Plato, Aeschylus, Lucretius, John the Evangelist, Plotinus, and Augustine). This book celebrates the complexity of our relation to light’s character. No individual experience of light is “truer” than any other; none improves on any previous experience of light’s “tidal pull” on us. And the wondrous variety of these encounters has yielded a richly layered tapestry of human experience. By its broad scope and interdisciplinary approach, this pioneering book is without precedent.

The Final Pagan Generation

The Final Pagan Generation PDF Author: Edward J. Watts
Publisher: University of California Press
ISBN: 0520379225
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 348

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Book Description
A compelling history of radical transformation in the fourth-century--when Christianity decimated the practices of traditional pagan religion in the Roman Empire. The Final Pagan Generation recounts the fascinating story of the lives and fortunes of the last Romans born before the Emperor Constantine converted to Christianity. Edward J. Watts traces their experiences of living through the fourth century’s dramatic religious and political changes, when heated confrontations saw the Christian establishment legislate against pagan practices as mobs attacked pagan holy sites and temples. The emperors who issued these laws, the imperial officials charged with implementing them, and the Christian perpetrators of religious violence were almost exclusively young men whose attitudes and actions contrasted markedly with those of the earlier generation, who shared neither their juniors’ interest in creating sharply defined religious identities nor their propensity for violent conflict. Watts examines why the "final pagan generation"—born to the old ways and the old world in which it seemed to everyone that religious practices would continue as they had for the past two thousand years—proved both unable to anticipate the changes that imperially sponsored Christianity produced and unwilling to resist them. A compelling and provocative read, suitable for the general reader as well as students and scholars of the ancient world.