Un-Roman Sex explores how gender and sex were perceived and represented outside the Mediterranean core of the Roman Empire. The volume critically explores the gender constructs and sexual behaviours in the provinces and frontiers in light of recent studies of Roman erotic experience and flux gender identities. At its core, it challenges the unproblematised extension of the traditional Romano-Hellenistic model to the provinces and frontiers. Did sexual relations and gender identities undergo processes of "provincialisation" or "barbarisation" similar to other well-known aspects of cultural negotiation and syncretism in provincial and border regions, for example in art and religion? The 11 chapters that make up the volume explore these issues from a variety of angles, providing a balanced and rounded view through use of literary, epigraphic, and archaeological evidence. Accordingly, the contributions represent new and emerging ideas on the subject of sex, gender, and sexuality in the Roman provinces. As such, Un-Roman Sex will be of interest to higher-level undergraduates and graduates/academics studying the Roman empire, gender, and sexuality in the ancient world and at the Roman frontiers.

Materialising the Roman Empire defines an innovative research agenda for Roman archaeology, highlighting the diverse ways in which the Empire was made materially tangible in the lives of its inhabitants. The volume explores how material culture was integral to the processes of imperialism, both as the Empire grew, and as it fragmented, and in doing so provide up-to-date overviews of major topics in Roman archaeology. Each chapter offers a critical overview of a major field within the archaeology of the Roman Empire. The book’s authors explore the distinctive contribution that archaeology and the study of material culture can make to our understanding of the key institutions and fields of activity in the Roman Empire. The initial chapters address major technologies which, at first glance, appear to be mechanisms of integration across the Roman Empire: roads, writing and coinage. The focus then shifts to analysis of key social structures oriented around material forms and activities found all over the Roman world, such as trade, urbanism, slavery, craft production and frontiers. Finally, the book extends to more abstract dimensions of the Roman world: art, empire, religion and ideology, in which the significant themes remain the dynamics of power and influence. The whole builds towards a broad exploration of the nature of imperial power and the inter-connections that stimulated new community identities and created new social divisions.

This Companion covers a range of receptions of ancient Greek and Roman gender and sexuality. It explores ancient representations of these concepts as we define them today, as well as recent perspectives that have been projected back onto antiquity. Beginning in antiquity, the chapters examine how the ancient Greeks and Romans regarded concepts of what we would today call "gender" and "sexuality" based on the evidence available to us, and chart the varied interpretations and receptions of these concepts across time to the present day. In exploring how different cultures have "received" the classical past, the volume investigates these cultures’ different interpretations of Greek and Roman sexualities, and what these interpretations can reveal about their own attitudes. Through the contributions in this book, the reader gains a deeper understanding of this essential part of human existence, derived from influential sources. From ancient to modern and postmodern perspectives, from cinematic productions to TikTok videos, receptions of ancient gender and sexuality abound. This volume is of interest to students and scholars of ancient history, gender and sexuality in the ancient world, and ancient societies, as well as those working on popular culture and gender studies more broadly.

This volume explores the enigmatic primary source known as the ancient military manual. In particular, the volume explores the extent to which these diverse texts constitute a genre (sometimes unsatisfactorily classified as ‘technical literature’), and the degree to which they reflect the practice of warfare. With contributions from a diverse group of scholars, the chapters examine military manuals from early Archaic Greece to the Byzantine period, covering a wide range of topics including readership, siege warfare, mercenaries, defeat, textual history, and religion. Coverage includes most of the major contemporary siege manual writers, including Xenophon, Frontinus, Vegetius, and Maurice. Close examination of these texts serves to reveals the complex ways in which ancient Greeks, Romans, and Byzantines sought to understand better, and impose order upon, the seemingly irrational phenomenon known as war. Providing insight into the multifaceted collection of texts that constituted military manuals, this volume is a key resource for students and scholars of warfare and military literature in the classical and Byzantine periods.

In The Greek and Roman Trophy: From Battlefield Marker to Icon of Power, Kinnee presents the first monographic treatment of ancient trophies in sixty years. The study spans Archaic Greece through the Augustan Principate. Kinnee aims to create a holistic view of this complex monument-type by breaking down boundaries between the study of art history, philology, the history of warfare, and the anthropology of religion and magic. Ultimately, the kaleidoscopic picture that emerges is of an ad hoc anthropomorphic Greek talisman that gradually developed into a sophisticated, Augustan sculptural or architectural statement of power. The former, a product of the hoplite phalanx, disappeared from battlefields as the Macedonian cavalry grew in importance, shifting instead onto coins and into rhetoric, where it became a statement of military might. For their part, the Romans seem to have encountered the trophy as an icon on Syracusan coinage. Recognizing its value as a statement of territorial ownership, the Romans spent two centuries honing the trophy-concept into an empire-building tool, planted at key locations around the Mediterranean to assert Roman presence and dominance. This volume covers a ubiquitous but poorly understood phenomenon and will therefore be instructive to upper-level undergraduates, graduate students, and scholars in all fields of Classical Studies.

This is the first book to analyse art from the northern frontier zones of Roman Britain and to interpret the meaning and significance of this art in terms of the formation of a regional identity. It argues that a distinct and vibrant visual culture flourished in the north, primarily due to its status as a heavily militarized frontier zone.

This book offers the first systematic, up-to-date, cross-cultural, and detailed study of “semi-volitional bodily behaviour” (sneezing, spitting, coughing, burping, vomiting, defecating, etc.) in the classical world. Examining verse and prose texts, fragments, and scholia from the age of Homer to the second century AD, the central argument put forward in this volume is that semi-volitional bodily acts have the potential to betray individual or collective (ethnic/civic and cultural) identities centred on a variety of different themes. Discussions specifically focus on the following five aspects of the interplay between semi-volitional body language and identity construction: sexuality and gender; the link between sexuality and socioeconomic identity of individuals or groups; the embodied markers of civic/ethnic and cultural collectives and the contrast between “we-ness” and “otherness”; ēthos and emotions; and how dietary habits and illnesses indicate the “somo-psychosocial” identity of individuals or groups. The book offers a comprehensive understanding of representations of the human body in ancient Greece and Rome, while reopening the complex and fascinating discussion about the relationship between intention, mind, body, and identity. This book offers a fascinating study suitable for students and scholars of classics and ancient Greek and Roman history. It is also of interest to those in a variety of other disciplines, including body culture studies, gender and sexuality studies, and performance studies, as well as sociology, anthropology, cognitive medicine, and the history of medicine.

Language in Use: The Case of Youth Entertainment Magazines is a collection of seven studies by several Romanian, Bulgarian and Slovenian linguists on the discourse of entertainment magazines targeted at young readers, and published in their respective countries. The starting point of the seven studies was the idea that the discourse specific to the variety of printed media products selected for analysis was characterized by distinctive features and that these features might exert a manipulative influence on the linguistic and social behavior of the targeted readership. The scholars’ initial aim was to validate these hypotheses and to confirm their soundness across countries. However, they hope that, besides suggesting new perspectives on the discourse chosen for analysis and thus filling a gap in the eastern European literature in the field, they may also develop (admittedly, within limits) media literacy in young readers, by equipping them with skills that could transform them from passive media consumers into responsible readers, able to make informed decisions and thus be less vulnerable to the strategies of manipulation employed by those who control information.

"This book investigates rabbinic treatises relating to animals, humans, and other lifeforms. Through an original analysis of creaturely generation and species classification by late ancient Palestinian rabbis and other thinkers in the Roman empire, Rafael Rachel Neis shows how rabbis blurred the lines between the human and other beings. This they did even as they were intent on classifying creatures and delineating the contours of the human. Recognizing that life proliferates via multiple mechanisms beyond sexual copulation between two heterosexual 'male' and 'female' individuals of the same species, the rabbis produced intricate alternatives. This expansive view of generation included humans. Likewise, in parsing the variety of creatures, the rabbis attended to the overlaps and resemblances across seemingly distinct species, upsetting in turn unmitigated claims of human distinctiveness. Intervening in conversations in animal studies, queer theory, trans theory, and feminist science studies, When a Human Gives Birth to a Raven provincializes sacrosanct ideals of reproduction in favor of a broader range of generation, kinship, and species offering powerful historical alternatives to the paradigms associated with so-called traditional ideas"--