The essays in this volume cover the whole of the period in which Rome dominated the Mediterranean world. The belief shared by all the contributors is that the Roman empire is best understood from the standpoint of the Mediterranean world looking in to Rome, rather than from Rome looking out. The volume reflects the immense complexity of the political and cultural history of the ancient Mediterranean, from the late Republic to the age of Augustine.

In this genuinely productive interdisciplinary dialogue, engineering scientists, archaeologists and historians discuss how recent exciting developments in imaging, image analysis, and image display/diffusion can be applied to three-dimensional objects of material culture from the classical world, ranging from inscribed writing tablets to buildings and urban sites. The fifteen papers explore the ways in which the scientific contributors and the historians are thinking about subjectivity of interpretation, visual cognition, and the need to improve the presentation of evidence so as to feed...

Greetings, I ask that you send the things which I need for the use of my boys . . . which you well know I cannot properly get hold of here . . . --A Roman solider on the frontier of England around AD 100 Over three hundred letters and documents were recently discovered at the fort of Vindolanda, in Northern England, written on wooden tablets which have survived nearly 2,000 years. Painstakingly deciphered by Alan Bowman, the materials contribute a wealth of evidence for daily life in the Roman Empire. Military documents testify to the lifestyle of officers and soldiers stationed at...

First published in 1998. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

The period described in Volume X of the second edition of The Cambridge Ancient History begins in the year after the death of Julius Caesar and ends in the year after the fall of Nero, the last of the Julio-Claudian emperors. Its main theme is the transformation of the political configuration of the state and the establishment of the Roman Empire. Chapters 16 supply a political narrative history of the period. In chapters 7-12 the institutions of government are described and analysed. Chapters 13-14 offer a survey of the Roman world in this period region by region, and chapters 15-21 deal...

This volume covers the history of the Roman Empire from the accession of Septimius Severus in AD 193 to the death of Constantine in AD 337. This period was one of the most critical in the history of the Mediterranean world. It begins with the establishment of the Severan dynasty as a result of civil war. From AD 235 this period of relative stability was followed by half a century of short reigns of short-lived emperors and a number of military attacks on the eastern and northern frontiers of the empire. This was followed by the First Tetrarchy (AD 284-305), a period of collegial rule in which...

This collection attempts to set the study of literacy in the ancient world in the wider contexts of the debates among anthropologists over the impact of writing on society. Was writing a revolutionary innovation or fundamentally repressive?