A seventeenth-century English traveler to the Eastern Mediterranean would have faced a problem in writing about this unfamiliar place: how to describe its inhabitants in a way his countrymen would understand? In an age when a European education meant mastering the Classical literature of Greece and Rome, he would naturally turn to touchstones like the Iliad to explain the exotic customs of Ottoman lands. His Turk would have been Homer's Turk.
An account of epic sweep, spanning the Crusades, the Indian Raj, and the postwar decline of the British Empire, Homer's Turk...
A seventeenth-century English traveler to the Eastern Mediterranean would have faced a problem in writing about this unfamiliar place: how to descr...
Roman Disasters looks at how the Romans coped with, thought about, and used disasters for their own ends. Rome has been famous throughout history for its great triumphs. Yet Rome also suffered colossal disasters. From the battle of Cannae, where fifty thousand men fell in a single day, to the destruction of Pompeii, to the first appearance of the bubonic plague, the Romans experienced large scale calamities.Earthquakes, fires, floods and famines also regularly afflicted them.
This insightful book is the first to treat such disasters as a conceptual unity. It shows that...
Roman Disasters looks at how the Romans coped with, thought about, and used disasters for their own ends. Rome has been famous throughout histo...
Ideas in Profile: Small Introductions to Big Topics This introduction to the ancient world, part of the Ideas in Profile series, covers all its different cultures, from the million people crammed into Rome to the Jews and Syrians who refused to be Romanised. Jerry Toner shows what can be learnt from new approaches to ancient history, from analysing the bones of the dead in Pompeii or assessing the impact of environmental change, and considers how we can discover what it was like to live back then. He looks at every period, not just classical Athens and Republican Rome, but the...
Ideas in Profile: Small Introductions to Big Topics This introduction to the ancient world, part of the Ideas in Profile series, covers all...
Rome is an empire with a bad reputation. From its brutal games to its depraved emperors, its violent mobs to its ruthless wars, its name resounds down the centuries like a scream in an alley. But was it as bad as all that? Join the historian Jerry Toner on a detective's hunt to discover the extent of Rome's crimes. From the sexual peccadillos of Tiberius and Nero to the chances of getting burgled if you left your apartment unguarded (pretty high, especially if the walls were thin enough to knock through) he leaves no stone unturned in his quest to bring the Eternal City to book. Meet a...
Rome is an empire with a bad reputation. From its brutal games to its depraved emperors, its violent mobs to its ruthless wars, its name resounds down...
