SELECTED PAPERS ON LATE ANTIQUITY

Descrizione

This volume gathers together a selection of papers written during the last quarter-century. They reflect current debates about the end of the Roman empire and the emergence of a uniquely late antique society. They approach these topics through Bowersock’s own special intersts, notably historiography (both ancient and modern), the place of literature in history, mosaics as historical documents, the Graeco-Semitic cultures of Palestine and Arabia, and the problem of continuity or collapse in late antiquity. The papers are all devoted to the period between Constantine and Muhammad and trace the interaction of various indigenous cultures, including many forms of plytheism, during the time of the Christianization of the Mediterranean world.

INDICE

Introduction

THE FOURTH CENTURY

Gibbon and Julian (1977)
The emperor Julian on his predecessors (1982)
The imperial cult: perceptions and persistence (1982)
From Emperor to Bishop: the self conscious transformation of political power in the fourth century A.D. (1986)
Symmachus and Ausonius (1986)

THE FIFTH CENTURY

Urheber konkurrierender transzendentaler Vision in der Spätantike (1987)
Nonnos rising (1994)
Dionysus as an epic hero (1994)

LATE ANTIQUE PALESTINE AND ARABIA

Two Greek historians of pre-islamic Arabia (1997)
Polytheism and Monotheism in Arabia and the three Palestines (1997)
The rich harvest of near eastern mosaics (1998)
The Greek Moses: confusion of ethnic and cultural components in later roman and early Byzantine Palestine (1998)

LATE ANTIQUITY AND THE FALL OF ROME

The dissolution of the Roman empire (1988)
The vanishing paradigm of the fall of Rome (1996)