Heritage and Hellenism

Heritage and Hellenism PDF Author: Erich S. Gruen
Publisher: Univ of California Press
ISBN: 0520235061
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 361

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Book Description
In these fictive creations, Jewish writers reinvented their own past, offering us vital insights into Jewish self-perception.

Heritage and Hellenism

Heritage and Hellenism PDF Author: Erich S. Gruen
Publisher: Univ of California Press
ISBN: 0520235061
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 361

Get Book Here

Book Description
In these fictive creations, Jewish writers reinvented their own past, offering us vital insights into Jewish self-perception.

Heritage and Hellenism

Heritage and Hellenism PDF Author: Erich S. Gruen
Publisher: Univ of California Press
ISBN: 0520929195
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 361

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Book Description
The interaction of Jew and Greek in antiquity intrigues the imagination. Both civilizations boasted great traditions, their roots stretching back to legendary ancestors and divine sanction. In the wake of Alexander the Great's triumphant successes, Greeks and Macedonians came as conquerors and settled as ruling classes in the lands of the eastern Mediterranean. Hellenic culture, the culture of the ascendant classes in many of the cities of the Near East, held widespread attraction and appeal. Jews were certainly not immune. In this thoroughly researched, lucidly written work, Erich Gruen draws on a wide variety of literary and historical texts of the period to explore a central question: How did the Jews accommodate themselves to the larger cultural world of the Mediterranean while at the same time reasserting the character of their own heritage within it? Erich Gruen's work highlights Jewish creativity, ingenuity, and inventiveness, as the Jews engaged actively with the traditions of Hellas, adapting genres and transforming legends to articulate their own legacy in modes congenial to a Hellenistic setting. Drawing on a diverse array of texts composed in Greek by Jews over a broad period of time, Gruen explores works by Jewish historians, epic poets, tragic dramatists, writers of romance and novels, exegetes, philosophers, apocalyptic visionaries, and composers of fanciful fables—not to mention pseudonymous forgers and fabricators. In these works, Jewish writers reinvented their own past, offering us the best insights into Jewish self-perception in that era.

Sons of Hellenism, Fathers of the Church

Sons of Hellenism, Fathers of the Church PDF Author: Susanna Elm
Publisher: Univ of California Press
ISBN: 0520287541
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 576

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Book Description
This groundbreaking study brings into dialogue for the first time the writings of Julian, the last non-Christian Roman Emperor, and his most outspoken critic, Bishop Gregory of Nazianzus, a central figure of Christianity. Susanna Elm compares these two men not to draw out the obvious contrast between the Church and the Emperor’s neo-Paganism, but rather to find their common intellectual and social grounding. Her insightful analysis, supplemented by her magisterial command of sources, demonstrates the ways in which both men were part of the same dialectical whole. Elm recasts both Julian and Gregory as men entirely of their times, showing how the Roman Empire in fact provided Christianity with the ideological and social matrix without which its longevity and dynamism would have been inconceivable.

Hellenism and Empire

Hellenism and Empire PDF Author: Simon Swain
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 9780198147725
Category : Foreign Language Study
Languages : en
Pages : 522

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Book Description
Hellenism and Empire explores identity, politics, and culture in the Greek world of the first three centuries AD, the period known as the second sophistic. The sources of this identity were the words and deeds of classical Greece, and the emphasis placed on Greekness and Greek heritage was far greater then than at any other time. Yet this period is often seen as a time of happy consensualism between the Greek and Roman halves of the Roman Empire. The first part of the book shows that Greek identity came before any loyalty to Rome (and was indeed partly a reaction to Rome), while the views of the major authors of the period, which are studied in the second part, confirm and restate the prior claims of Hellenism.

Culture and National Identity in Republican Rome

Culture and National Identity in Republican Rome PDF Author: Erich S. Gruen
Publisher: Cornell University Press
ISBN: 9780801480416
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 372

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Book Description
A compelling account of the assimilation and adaptation of Greek culture by the Romans during the middle and later Republic.

Studies in Greek Culture and Roman Policy

Studies in Greek Culture and Roman Policy PDF Author: Erich S. Gruen
Publisher: BRILL
ISBN: 9789004090514
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 228

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Book Description
This book is an examination of the impact of Greek learning, literature, and religion on central aspects of Roman life in the middle Republic. Acclaimed historian Erich S. Gruen discusses the introduction of and resistance to new cults, the relationship between Roman political figures and literary artists schooled in Greek, and the reaction to Hellenic philosophy and rhetoric by the Roman elite. This book contributes new and important information on the place of Greek culture in Roman public life.

Rethinking the Other in Antiquity

Rethinking the Other in Antiquity PDF Author: Erich S. Gruen
Publisher: Princeton University Press
ISBN: 0691156352
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 432

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Book Description
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.

Hellenistic Constructs

Hellenistic Constructs PDF Author: Paul Cartledge
Publisher: Univ of California Press
ISBN: 0520918339
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 407

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Book Description
The Hellenistic period (approximately the last three centuries B.C.), with its cultural complexities and enduring legacies, retains a lasting fascination today. Reflecting the vigor and productivity of scholarship directed at this period in the past decade, this collection of original essays is a wide-ranging exploration of current discoveries and questions. The twelve essays emphasize the cultural interaction of Greek and non-Greek societies in the Hellenistic period, in contrast to more conventional focuses on politics, society, or economy. The result of original research by some of the leading scholars in Hellenistic history and culture, this volume is an exemplary illustration of the cultural richness of this period. Paul Cartledge's introduction contains an illuminating introductory overview of current trends in Hellenistic scholarship. The essays themselves range over broad questions of comparative historiography, literature, religion, and the roles of Athens, Rome, and the Jews within the context of the Hellenistic world. The volume is dedicated to Frank Walbank and includes an updated bibliography of his work which has been essential to our understanding of the Hellenistic period.

The Classical Heritage and Its Beneficiaries

The Classical Heritage and Its Beneficiaries PDF Author: R. R. Bolgar
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 9780521098120
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 608

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Book Description
Since its first publication in 1954, The Classical Heritage has become established as a classic introduction to cultural and intellectual history from the Carolingian age to the end of the Renaissance.

The Greeks and Their Heritages

The Greeks and Their Heritages PDF Author: Arnold Toynbee
Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA
ISBN:
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 362

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Book Description
Explores successfully the heritage of the Mycenaean Greeks, the Hellenic Greeks, the Byzantine Greeks, and the Modern Greeks.