Greek athletics flourished more in the Roman empire than ever before. Jason Konig offers an exciting new cultural history of the athletics of this period, setting out neglected evidence for athletic festivals and athletic education. He also explores the way in which discussion of athletics, a highly controversial subject, could become entangled in wider debates in Greek and Roman culture.

William Hutton provides the first exhaustive literary study of the Periegesis Hellados, the most important example of non-fictional travel literature in ancient Greek, to appear in nearly one hundred years. He examines Pausanias' arrangement and expression of his material and evaluates his authorial choices in light of the contemporary literary currents of the day and the cultural milieu of the Roman empire in the time of Hadrian and the Antonines. The descriptions offered in the Periegesis Hellados are also examined in the context of the archaeological evidence available for the places...

This text was the first systematic study of what it meant to be 'Greek' in late antiquity and Byzantium, an identity that could alternatively become national, religious, philosophical, or cultural. Through close readings of the sources, Professor Kaldellis surveys the space that Hellenism occupied in each period; the broader debates in which it was caught up; and the historical causes of its successive transformations. The first section (100 400) shows how Romanisation and Christianisation led to the abandonment of Hellenism as a national label and its restriction to a negative religious...

Studies of religious interaction in the fourth century AD have often assumed that the categories of 'pagan', 'Christian' and 'Jew' can be straightforwardly applied, and that we can assess the extent of Christianization in the Graeco-Roman period. In contrast, in this text, Dr Sandwell tackles the fundamental question of attitudes to religious identity by exploring how the Christian preacher John Chrysostom and the Graeco-Roman orator Libanius wrote about and understood issues of religious allegiance. By comparing the approaches of these men, who were living and working in Antioch at...

Latin and especially Greek texts of the imperial period contain a wealth of references to 'India'. Professor Parker offers a survey of such texts, read against a wide range of other sources, both archaeological and documentary. He emphasises the social processes whereby the notion of India gained its exotic features, including the role of the Persian empire and of Alexander's expedition. Three kinds of social context receive special attention: the trade in luxury commodities; the political discourse of empire and its limits; and India's status as a place of special knowledge, embodied in...

Greek athletics flourished more in the Roman empire than ever before. Jason Konig offers an exciting new cultural history of the athletics of this period, setting out neglected evidence for athletic festivals and athletic education. He also explores the way in which discussion of athletics, a highly controversial subject, could become entangled in wider debates in Greek and Roman culture.

William Hutton provides the first exhaustive literary study of the Periegesis Hellados, the most important example of non-fictional travel literature in ancient Greek, to appear in nearly one hundred years. He examines Pausanias' arrangement and expression of his material and evaluates his authorial choices in light of the contemporary literary currents of the day and the cultural milieu of the Roman empire in the time of Hadrian and the Antonines. The descriptions offered in the Periegesis Hellados are also examined in the context of the archaeological evidence available for the places...

This is the first volume of collected papers to be devoted to the work of Philostratus, the great essayist, biographer and historian of Greek culture in the Roman world, and the most scintillating writer of Greek prose in the third century AD. The papers cover his remarkable range, from hagiographic fiction to historical dialogue, from pictorial description to love letters, and from prescriptions for gymnastics to the lives of the Sophists. The quality of his writing and the concerns within his purview - religion, aesthetics, athletics and education - make Philostratus's writings among the...

In the first two centuries AD, the eastern Roman provinces experienced a proliferation of elite public generosity unmatched in their previous or later history. In this study, Arjan Zuiderhoek attempts to answer the question why this should have been so. Focusing on Roman Asia Minor, he argues that the surge in elite public giving was not caused by the weak economic and financial position of the provincial cities, as has often been maintained, but by social and political developments and tensions within the Greek cities created by their integration into the Roman imperial system. As...

This book explores the intersection between two key developments of the fourth through seventh centuries CE: the construction of monumental churches and the veneration of saints. While Christian sacred topography is usually interpreted in narrowly religious terms as points of contact with holy places and people, this book considers church buildings as spatial environments in which a range of social 'work' happened. It draws on approaches developed in the fields of anthropology, ritual studies, and social geography to examine, for example, how church buildings facilitated commemoration of the...