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The interactions of the Celtic-speaking communities of Southern Gaul with the Mediterranean world have intrigued commentators since antiquity. This book combines sociolinguistics and archaeology to bring to life the multilingualism and multiple identities of the region from the foundation of the Greek colony of Massalia in 600 BC to the final phases of Roman Imperial power. It builds on the interest generated by the application of modern bilingualism theory to ancient evidence by modelling language contact and community dynamics and adopting an innovative interdisciplinary approach. This produces insights into the entanglements and evolving configurations of a dynamic zone of cultural contact. Key foci of contact-induced change are exposed and new interpretations of cultural phenomena highlight complex origins and influences from the entire Mediterranean koine. Southern Gaul reveals itself to be fertile ground for considering the major themes of multilingualism, ethnolinguistic vitality, multiple identities, colonialism and Mediterraneanization.

This book presents a theoretically informed, up-to-date study of interactions between indigenous peoples of Mediterranean France and Etruscan, Greek, and Roman colonists during the first millennium BC. Analyzing archaeological data and ancient texts, Michael Dietler explores these colonial encounters over six centuries, focusing on material culture, urban landscapes, economic practices, and forms of violence. He shows how selective consumption linked native societies and colonists and created transformative relationships for each. Archaeologies of Colonialism also examines the role these ancient encounters played in the formation of modern European identity, colonial ideology, and practices, enumerating the problems for archaeologists attempting to re-examine these past societies.

There was racism in the ancient world, after all. This groundbreaking book refutes the common belief that the ancient Greeks and Romans harbored \"ethnic and cultural,\" but not racial, prejudice. It does so by comprehensively tracing the intellectual origins of racism back to classical antiquity. Benjamin Isaac's systematic analysis of ancient social prejudices and stereotypes reveals that some of those represent prototypes of racism--or proto-racism--which in turn inspired the early modern authors who developed the more familiar racist ideas. He considers the literature from classical Greece to late antiquity in a quest for the various forms of the discriminatory stereotypes and social hatred that have played such an important role in recent history and continue to do so in modern society. Magisterial in scope and scholarship, and engagingly written, The Invention of Racism in Classical Antiquity further suggests that an understanding of ancient attitudes toward other peoples sheds light not only on Greco-Roman imperialism and the ideology of enslavement (and the concomitant integration or non-integration) of foreigners in those societies, but also on the disintegration of the Roman Empire and on more recent imperialism as well. The first part considers general themes in the history of discrimination; the second provides a detailed analysis of proto-racism and prejudices toward particular groups of foreigners in the Greco-Roman world. The last chapter concerns Jews in the ancient world, thus placing anti-Semitism in a broader context.

Prevalent among classicists today is the notion that Greeks, Romans, and Jews enhanced their own self-perception by contrasting themselves with the so-called Other--Egyptians, Phoenicians, Ethiopians, Gauls, and other foreigners--frequently through hostile stereotypes, distortions, and caricature. In this provocative book, Erich Gruen demonstrates how the ancients found connections rather than contrasts, how they expressed admiration for the achievements and principles of other societies, and how they discerned--and even invented--kinship relations and shared roots with diverse peoples. Gruen shows how the ancients incorporated the traditions of foreign nations, and imagined blood ties and associations with distant cultures through myth, legend, and fictive histories. He looks at a host of creative tales, including those describing the founding of Thebes by the Phoenician Cadmus, Rome's embrace of Trojan and Arcadian origins, and Abraham as ancestor to the Spartans. Gruen gives in-depth readings of major texts by Aeschylus, Herodotus, Xenophon, Plutarch, Julius Caesar, Tacitus, and others, in addition to portions of the Hebrew Bible, revealing how they offer richly nuanced portraits of the alien that go well beyond stereotypes and caricature. Providing extraordinary insight into the ancient world, this controversial book explores how ancient attitudes toward the Other often expressed mutuality and connection, and not simply contrast and alienation.

This book examines family life in the Roman empire and Italy, focusing on the influence of Rome on provincial family structure and attitudes towards family life as well as regional differences in family structure, forms of marriage, and kinship patterns. The chapters cover Roman Egypt, Judaea, Spain, Gaul, North Africa, and Pannonia, and make use of both conventional textual sources and epigraphic evidence, as well as material that is less frequently treated, such as the medical writers and the Justinianic receipts. Notions surrounding the family are explored in the abstract and in reality, such as the idea of family as used in the forensic works of Cicero as a touchstone for elite morality, especially for men, and how the social family norms of pietas and affection informed the identity of the Roman nobility. A discussion of family portrait groups on Republican and early imperial funerary commemoration takes up the same set of attitudes toward family life and shows how the emerging urban middle class of Italy, former slaves in Rome and citizens of mixed origins in Cisalpine Gaul, used family imagery to position themselves in the mainstream culture. There is also a chapter on the harder side of ancient family life in a survey of diseases and treatments of illnesses, thus retrieving a sobering dimension of ancient experience which is radically different from the modern. The remaining chapters look at family life in the Roman world outside Italy in a systematic way focusing on specific regions.