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Freedmen occupied a complex and often problematic place in Roman society between slaves on the one hand and freeborn citizens on the other. Playing an extremely important role in the economic life of the Roman world, they were also a key instrument for replenishing and even increasing the size of the citizen body. This book presents an original synthesis, for the first time covering both Republic and Empire in a single volume. While providing up-to-date discussions of most significant aspects of the phenomenon, the book also offers a new understanding of the practice of manumission, its role in the organisation of slave labour and the Roman economy, as well as the deep-seated ideological concerns to which it gave rise. It locates the freedman in a broader social and economic context, explaining the remarkable popularity of manumission in the Roman world.

This volume contains thirty-five papers from a 2010 conference on landscape archaeology focusing on the definition of landscape as used by processual archaeologists, earth scientists, and most historical geographers, in contrast to the definition favored by postprocessual archaeologists, cultural geographers, and anthropologists. This tension provides a rich foundation for discussion, and the papers in this collection cover a variety of topics including: how do landscapes change; how to improve temporal, chronological, and transformational frameworks; how to link lowlands with mountainous areas; applications of scale; new directions in digital prospection and modeling techniques; and the future of landscape archaeology.

Prostitution in the ancient Greek world was widespread, legal, and acceptable as a fact of life and an unavoidable necessity.The state regulated the industry and treated prostitution as any other trade.Almost every prominent man in the ancient world has been truly or falsely associated with some famous hetaira.

The ancient Mysteries have long attracted the interest of scholars, an interest that goes back at least to the time of the Reformation. After a period of interest around the turn of the twentieth century, recent decades have seen an important study of Walter Burkert (1987). Yet his thematic approach makes it hard to see how the actual initiation into the Mysteries took place. To do precisely that is the aim of this book. It gives a ‘thick description’ of the major Mysteries, not only of the famous Eleusinian Mysteries, but also those located at the interface of Greece and Anatolia: the Mysteries of Samothrace, Imbros and Lemnos as well as those of the Corybants. It then proceeds to look at the Orphic-Bacchic Mysteries, which have become increasingly better understood due to the many discoveries of new texts in the recent times. Having looked at classical Greece we move on to the Roman Empire, where we study not only the lesser Mysteries, which we know especially from Pausanias, but also the new ones of Isis and Mithras. We conclude our book with a discussion of the possible influence of the Mysteries on emerging Christianity. Its detailed references and up-to-date bibliography will make this book indispensable for any scholar interested in the Mysteries and ancient religion, but also for those scholars who work on initiation or esoteric rituals, which were often inspired by the ancient Mysteries.

The majority of books in English on historic building conservation and heritage preservation training are often restricted to Western architecture and its origins. Consequently, the history of building conservation, the study of contemporary paradigms and case studies in most universities and within wider interest circles, predominantly in the UK, Europe, and USA focus mainly on Europe and sometimes the USA, although the latter is often excluded from European publications. With an increasingly multicultural student body in Euro-American universities and with a rising global interest in heritage preservation, there is an urgent need for publications to cover a larger geographical and social area including not only Asia, Australia, Africa and South America but also previously neglected countries in Europe like the new members of the European Community and the northern neighbour of the USA, Canada. The inclusion of the 'other' in built environment education in general and in building conservation in particular is a pre-requisite of cultural interaction and widening participation. International Heritage and Historic Building Conservation assesses successful contemporary conservation paradigms from around the world. The book evaluates conservation case studies from previously excluded areas of the world to create an integrated account of Historic Building Conservation that crosses the boundaries of language and culture and sets an example for further inclusive research. Analyzing the influence of financial constraints, regional conflicts, and cultural differences on the heritage of disadvantaged countries, this leading-edge volume is essential for researchers and students of heritage studies interested in understanding their topics in a wider framework.

In the aftermath of Alexander the Great's conquests in the late fourth century B.C., Greek garrisons and settlements were established across Central Asia, through Bactria (modern-day Afghanistan) and into India. Over the next three hundred years, these settlements evolved into multiethnic, multilingual communities as much Greek as they were indigenous. To explore the lives and identities of the inhabitants of the Graeco-Bactrian and Indo-Greek kingdoms, Rachel Mairs marshals a variety of evidence, from archaeology, to coins, to documentary and historical texts. Looking particularly at the great city of Ai Khanoum, the only extensively excavated Hellenistic period urban site in Central Asia, Mairs explores how these ancient people lived, communicated, and understood themselves. Significant and original, The Hellenistic Far East will highlight Bactrian studies as an important part of our understanding of the ancient world.

This collection of essays investigates signs of toleration, recognition, respect and other positive forms of interaction between and within religious groups of late antiquity. At the same time, it acknowledges that examples of tolerance are significantly fewer in ancient sources than examples of intolerance and are often limited to insiders, while outsiders often met with contempt, or even outright violence. The essays take both perspectives seriously by analysing the complexity pertaining to these encounters. Religious concerns, ethnicity, gender and other social factors central to identity formation were often intertwined and they yielded different ways of drawing the limits of tolerance and intolerance. This book enhances our understanding of the formative centuries of Jewish and Christian religious traditions. It also brings the results of historical inquiry into dialogue with present-day questions of religious tolerance. The book contains contributions by Ismo Dunderberg, Carmen Palmer, Michael Labahn, Nina Nikki, Anna-Liisa Rafael, Sami Yli-Karjanmaa, Galit Hasan-Rokem & Israel Yuval, Paul Middleton, Outi Lehtipuu, Elizabeth Dowling, and Amy-Jill Levine.

TWO OXEN AHEAD This revealing study of farming practices in societies around the Mediterranean draws out the valuable contribution that knowledge of recent practices can make to our understanding of husbandry in prehistoric and Greco-Roman times. It reflects increased academic interest in the formative influence of farming regimes on the societies they were designed to feed. The author's intensive research took him to farming communities around the Mediterranean, where he recorded observational and interview data on differing farming strategies and practices, many of which can be traced back to classical antiquity or earlier. The book documents these variables, through the annual chaîne opératoire (from ploughing and sowing to harvesting and threshing), interannual schemes of crop rotation and husbandry, and the generational cycle of household development. It traces the interdependence of these successive stages and explores how cultural tradition, ecological conditions, and access to resources shape variability in husbandry practice. Each chapter identifies ways in which heuristic use of data on recent farming can shed light on ancient practices and societies.

Recent years have witnessed an intense debate concerning the size of the population of Roman Italy. This book argues that the combined literary, epigraphic and archaeological evidence supports the theory that early-imperial Italy had about six million inhabitants. At the same time the traditional view that the last century of the Republic witnessed a decline in the free Italian population is shown to be untenable. The main foci of its six chapters are: military participation rates; demographic recovery after the Second Punic War; the spread of slavery and the background to the Gracchan land reforms; the fast expansion of Italian towns after the Social War; emigration from Italy; and the fate of the Italian population during the first 150 years of the Principate.

To what extent did mythological figures such as Circe and Medea influence the representation of the powerful ‘oriental’ enchantress in modern Western art? What role did the ancient gods and heroes play in the construction of the imaginary worlds of the modern fantasy genre? What is the role of undead creatures like zombies and vampires in mythological films? Looking across the millennia, from the distrust of ancient magic and oriental cults, which threatened the new-born Christian religion, to the revival and adaptation of ancient myths and religion in the arts centuries later, this book offers an original analysis of the reception of ancient magic and the supernatural, across a wide variety of different media – from comics to film, from painting to opera. Working in a variety of fields across the globe, the authors of these essays deconstruct certain scholarly traditions by proposing original interdisciplinary approaches and collaborations, showing to what extent the visual and performing arts of different periods interlink and shape cultural and social identities.