The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire by Edward Gibbon
Constructed on the orders of the emperor Hadrian during the 120s AD, the Wall was maintained for almost three centuries before ceasing to operate as a Roman frontier during the fifth century. The scale and complexity of Hadrian's Wall makes it one of the most important ancient monuments in the British Isles. It is the most well-preserved of the frontier works that once defined the Roman Empire. While the Wall is famous as a Roman construct, its monumental physical structure did not suddenly cease to exist in the fifth century. This volume explores the after-life of Hadrian's Wall and considers the ways it has been imagined, represented, and researched from the sixth century to the internet. The sixteen chapters, illustrated with over 100 images, show the changing manner in which the Wall has been conceived and the significant role it has played in imagining the identity of the English, including its appropriation as symbolic boundary between England and Scotland.
Information about women is scattered throughout the fragmented mosaic of ancient history: the vivid poetry of Sappho survived antiquity on remnants of damaged papyrus; the inscription on a beautiful fourth century B.C.E. grave praises the virtues of Mnesarete, an Athenian woman who died young; a great number of Roman wives were found guilty of poisoning their husbands, but was it accidental food poisoning, or disease, or something more sinister. Apart from the legends of Cleopatra, Dido, and Lucretia, and images of graceful maidens dancing on urns, the evidence about the lives of women of the classical world--visual, archaeological, and written--has remained uncollected and uninterpreted. Now, the lavishly illustrated and meticulously researched Women in the Classical World lifts the curtain on the women of ancient Greece and Rome, exploring the lives of slaves and prostitutes, Athenian housewives, and Rome's imperial family. The first book on classical women to give equal weight to written texts and artistic representations, it brings together a great wealth of materials--poetry, vase painting, legislation, medical treatises, architecture, religious and funerary art, women's ornaments, historical epics, political speeches, even ancient coins--to present women in the historical and cultural context of their time. Written by leading experts in the fields of ancient history and art history, women's studies, and Greek and Roman literature, the book's chronological arrangement allows the changing roles of women to unfold over a thousand-year period, beginning in the eighth century B.C.E. Both the art and the literature highlight women's creativity, sexuality and coming of age, marriage and childrearing, religious and public roles, and other themes. Fascinating chapters report on the wild behavior of Spartan and Etruscan women and the mythical Amazons; the changing views of the female body presented in male-authored gynecological treatises; the new woman represented by the love poetry of the late Republic and Augustan Age; and the traces of upper- and lower-class life in Pompeii, miraculously preserved by the eruption of Mount Vesuvius in 79 C.E. Provocative and surprising, Women in the Classical World is a masterly foray into the past, and a definitive statement on the lives of women in ancient Greece and Rome.
It collects 487 inscriptions (mostly on stone, but also on metal, wood, tile and ceramic), the majority from Britain but many from other Roman provinces and Italy, so as to illustrate the history and character of Roman Britain (AD 43–410). Each inscription is presented in the original (in Latin, except for eight in Greek), followed by a translation and informal commentary; they are linked by the narrative which they illustrate, and more than half (236) are accompanied by photographs. All Latin terms in the narrative and commentary are translated and explained.
Available at JSCC Campus
Ancient Rome was an imposing city even by modern standards, a sprawling imperial metropolis of more than a million inhabitants, a "mixture of luxury and filth, liberty and exploitation, civic pride and murderous civil war" that served as the seat of power for an empire that spanned from Spain to Syria. Yet how did all this emerge from what was once an insignificant village in central Italy? Classicist Mary Beard narrates the unprecedented rise of a civilization that even two thousand years later still shapes many of our most fundamental assumptions about power, citizenship, responsibility, political violence, empire, luxury, and beauty. From the foundational myth of Romulus and Remus to 212 CE -- nearly a thousand years later -- when the emperor Caracalla gave Roman citizenship to every free inhabitant of the empire, S.P.Q.R. (the abbreviation of "The Senate and People of Rome") examines not just how we think of ancient Rome but challenges the comfortable historical perspectives that have existed for centuries by exploring how the Romans thought of themselves: how they challenged the idea of imperial rule, how they responded to terrorism and revolution, and how they invented a new idea of citizenship and nation. Opening the book in 63 BCE with the famous clash between the populist aristocrat Catiline and Cicero, the renowned politician and orator, Beard animates this "terrorist conspiracy," which was aimed at the very heart of the Republic, demonstrating how this singular event would presage the struggle between democracy and autocracy that would come to define much of Rome's subsequent history. Illustrating how a classical democracy yielded to a self-confident and self-critical empire, S.P.Q.R. reintroduces us to famous and familiar characters -- Hannibal, Julius Caesar, Cleopatra, Augustus, and Nero, among others -- while expanding the historical aperture to include those overlooked in traditional histories: the women, the slaves and ex-slaves, conspirators, and those on the losing side of Rome's glorious conquests.
Available for Check out at JSCC Jackson Campus
Examines the life and history of the Celts, their wars, gods, craftsmanship in metal, wood, and stone, life under Roman rule, and continuing traditions after 400 A.D.
The dominant view of this period today is that the' fall of Rome' was a largely peaceful transition to Germanic rule and the start of a positive cultural transformation. Bryan Ward-Perkins encourages every reader to think again by reclaiming the drama and violence of the last days of the Roman world and reminding us of the very real horrors of barbarian occupation.
Available for Check out in the Jackson Library
Did "barbarians" really cause the catastrophic collapse of civilization? Boin is the first to give a historically sound account from the "barbarian" perspective, through the life of Alaric the Goth. On August 24, 410 A.D., the Senate and the People of Rome awoke to a seismic shock. Intruders, led by a disaffected forty-year-old immigrant, known only as Alaric, had stormed the city. There were kidnappings, robbery, and acts of arson. The effects were long-lasting. Within two generations, Rome's world fell apart. A city predicted to rule an empire without end, in the words of its famous Latin poet Virgil, was governed by a savage band of foreigners, called Goths. Alaric the Goth offers a deeply researched look at the end of the Roman Empire but from a surprising point of view. Offering the first full-length biography of Alaric, a talented and frustrated immigrant living in a time of pervasive bigotry, state-supported Christian violence, and irrational xenophobia, it breaks out of decades of tired, traditional approaches to the period, most of which overidentify with the Roman people. And it reveals the lasting contributions Goths made to legal history, to the values of religious toleration, and to modern ideas of citizenship. By moving this man from the borders to the center of Rome's story, it asks readers to think deeply and differently about the lives of marginalized people too often invisible in our history books
The death of the Roman Empire is one of the perennial mysteries of world history. Now, in this groundbreaking book, Peter Heather proposes a stunning new solution: Centuries of imperialism turned the neighbors Rome called barbarians into an enemy capable of dismantling an Empire that had dominated their lives for so long.
This is a sweeping tour of the Mediterranean world from the Atlantic to Persia during the last half-century of the Roman Empire. By focusing on a single year not overshadowed by an epochal event, 428 AD provides a truly fresh look at a civilization in the midst of enormous change--as Christianity takes hold in rural areas across the empire, as western Roman provinces fall away from those in the Byzantine East, and as power shifts from Rome to Constantinople.
Brings to light the laboring men, housewives, prostitutes, freedmen, slaves, soldiers, and gladiators who formed the backbone of the ancient Roman world, and the outlaws and pirates who lay beyond it. The lives of these invisible Romans emerge from graffiti, incantations, fables, astrological writings, and even the New Testament.
A History of the Later Roman Empire features extensive revisions and updates to the highly-acclaimed, sweeping historical survey of the Roman Empire from the accession of Diocletian in AD 284 to the death of Heraclius in 641. Features a revised narrative of the political history that shaped the late Roman Empire Includes extensive changes to the chapters on regional history, especially those relating to Asia Minor and Egypt Offers a renewed evaluation of the decline of the empire in the later sixth and seventh centuries Places a larger emphasis on the military deficiencies, the collapse of state finances, and role of bubonic plague throughout Europe in Rome's decline.
Concepts of childhood and the treatment of children are often used as a barometer of society's humanity, values, and priorities.
This surprising study suggests that, far from seeing Christianity as the cause of the fall of the Roman Empire, we should understand the Christianisation of the household as a central Roman survival strategy. By establishing new ground rules for marriage and family life, the Roman Christians of the last century of the Western empire found a way to re-invent the Roman family as a social institution to weather the political, military, and social upheaval of two centuries of invasion and civil war.
Theodosius II (AD 408–450) was the longest reigning Roman emperor. Ever since Edward Gibbon, he has been dismissed as mediocre and ineffectual. Yet Theodosius ruled an empire that retained its integrity while the West was broken up by barbarian invasions. This book explores Theodosius'challenges successes.
Embracing the Provinces is a collection of essays focused on people and their daily lives living in the Roman provinces, c. 27 BC-AD 476.
This book investigates how varying practices of gender shaped people's lives and experiences across the societies of ancient Greece and Rome.
The Lives of the Caesars include the biographies of Julius Caesar and the eleven subsequent emperors: Augustus, Tiberius, Gaius Caligula, Claudius, Nero, Galba, Otho, Vitellius, Vespasian, Titus, Domitian. Suetonius composed his material from a variety of sources, without much concern for their reliability. His biographies consist of the ancestry and career of each emperor in turn; however, his interest is not so much analytical or historical, but anecdotal and salacious which gives rise to a lively and provocative succession of portraits. The account of Julius Caesar does not simply mention his crossing of the Rubicon and his assassination but draws attention to his dark piercing eyes and attempts to conceal his baldness. The Live of Caligula presents a vivid picture of the emperor's grotesque appearance, his waywardness, and his insane cruelties.
Available for check out at the Main Campus
If you need a book or an article that the Jackson State Community College Library doesn't own, please contact Scott Cohen at 731-424-3520 ext. 52615 or by email at scohen@jscc.edu. Provide him with the author, title, date of publication and publisher. for a book. For an article in a journal or magazine, provide him the name of the journal or magazine, the date of the journal or magazine, the title of the article and the pages on which the article appears.
The Library will then ask another library to loan us the book or send a scanned copy of the article. We use the Online College Library Center to connect us to most academic libraries in the country.
It takes about 2 weeks for a book to be sent here from another library and about a week for a copy of an article.
