Author: Emma Bridges
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN: 1472511379
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 246
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Book Description
Xerxes, the Persian king who invaded Greece in 480 BC, quickly earned a notoriety that endured throughout antiquity and beyond. The Greeks' historical encounter with this eastern king – which resulted, against overwhelming odds, in the defeat of the Persian army – has inspired a series of literary responses to Xerxes in which he is variously portrayed as the archetypal destructive and enslaving aggressor, as the epitome of arrogance and impiety, or as a figure synonymous with the exoticism and luxury of the Persian court. Imagining Xerxes is a transhistorical analysis that explores the richness and variety of Xerxes' afterlives within the ancient literary tradition. It examines the earliest representations of the king, in Aeschylus' tragic play Persians and Herodotus' historiographical account of the Persian Wars, before tracing the ways in which the image of Xerxes was revisited and adapted in later Greek and Latin texts. The author also looks beyond the Hellenocentric viewpoint to consider the construction of Xerxes' image in the Persian epigraphic record and the alternative perspectives on the king found in the Jewish written tradition. Analysing these diverse representations of Xerxes, this title explores the reception of a key figure in the ancient world and the reinvention of his image in a remarkable array of cultural and historical contexts.
Author: Owen Rees
Publisher: Casemate Publishers
ISBN: 1473889847
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 274
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Book Description
Naval warfare is the unsung hero of ancient Greek military history, often overshadowed by the more glorified land battles. Owen Rees looks to redress the balance, giving naval battles their due attention. This book presents a selection of thirteen naval battles that span a defining century in ancient Greek history, from the Ionian Revolt and Persian Invasion to the rise of external naval powers in the Mediterranean Sea, such as the Carthaginians.Each battle is set in context. The background, wider military campaigns, and the opposing forces are discussed, followed by a narrative and analysis of the fighting. Finally, the aftermath of the battles are dealt with, looking at the strategic implications of the outcome for both the victor and the defeated. The battle narratives are supported by maps and tactical diagrams, showing the deployment of the fleets and the wider geographical factors involved in battle. Written in an accessible tone, this book successfully shows that Greek naval warfare did not start and end at the battle of Salamis.
Author: Alexia Petsalis-Diomidis
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
ISBN: 1040264840
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 279
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Book Description
Western travel and collecting classical antiquities in the nineteenth century informed European understandings of Greece's past and present, and enriched private collections and museums. Travel and collecting have typically been studied separately by literary scholars, historians of archaeology, and historians of the Ottoman Empire and modern Greece. Similarly, publications have largely prioritised evidence from and about elite social groups. This book breaks new ground through its interdisciplinary approach, its insistence on the interweaving of the phenomena of travel and collecting, and its emphasis on marginalised perspectives. Contributors drawn from art history, classics, history of architecture, Ottoman history and modern Greek history foreground diversity and small-scale engagements with the landscape and material past of Ottoman Greece. The book explores the perspectives of both foreign travellers and local inhabitants through case studies, keeping a sharp focus on ethnicity and social status. Diaries, visual art, and rich archival material are analysed, often from a novel perspective, to give voice to a range of people including English servants, Albanian peasants, an illiterate Greek fighter, and the Ottoman Sultan. The result is a micro-cultural history of travel and classical collecting which expands existing narratives. As such, it changes the simplistic dichotomy between collecting as ‘pillaging’ or ‘saving’, and nuances the important current debate surrounding repatriation. Travel and Classical Antiquities in Nineteenth-Century Ottoman Greece addresses scholars in the areas of classical reception studies, classical archaeology, material culture studies, nineteenth-century studies, Ottoman studies and modern Greek studies. It will also appeal to a broader audience of people interested in travel writing, the history of archaeology and the history of Greece.
Author: Michelle Stephens Michelle Stephens
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
ISBN: 1786612771
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 497
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Book Description
Contemporary Archipelagic Thinking takes as point of departure the insights of Antonio Benítez Rojo, Derek Walcott and Edouard Glissant on how to conceptualize the Caribbean as a space in which networks of islands are constitutive of a particular epistemology or way of thinking. This rich volumetakes questions that have explored the Caribbean and expands them to a global, Anthropocenic framework. This anthology explores the archipelagic as both a specific and a generalizable geo-historical and cultural formation, occurring across various planetary spaces including: the Mediterranean and Aegean Seas, the Caribbean basin, the Malay archipelago, Oceania, and the creole islands of the Indian Ocean. As an alternative geo-formal unit, archipelagoes can interrogate epistemologies, ways of reading and thinking, and methodologies informed implicitly or explicitly by more continental paradigms and perspectives. Keeping in mind the structuring tension between land and water, and between island and mainland relations, the archipelagic focuses on the types of relations that emerge, island to island, when island groups are seen not so much as sites of exploration, identity, sociopolitical formation, and economic and cultural circulation, but also, and rather, as models. The book includes 21 chapters, a series of poems and an Afterword from both senior and junior scholars in American Studies, Archaeology, Biology, Cartography, Digital Mapping, Environmental Studies, Ethnomusicology, Geography, History, Politics, Comparative Literary and Cultural Studies, and Sociology who engage with Archipelago studies. Archipelagic Studies has become a framework with a robust intellectual genealogy.. The particular strength of this handbook is the diversity of fields and theoretical approaches in the Humanities, Social Sciences and Natural Sciences that the included essays engage with. There is an editor's introduction in which they meditate about the specific contributions of the archipelagic framework in interdisciplinary analyses of multi-focal and transnational socio-political and cultural context, and in which they establish a dialogue between archipelagic thinking and network theory, assemblages, systems theory, or the study of islands, oceans and constellations.
Author: Katherine Clarke
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0192552376
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 368
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Book Description
This volume explores the spatial framework of Herodotus' Histories, the Greek historian's account of Persian imperialism in the sixth and fifth century BC and its culmination in a series of grand expeditions against Greece itself. Focusing on his presentation of the natural world through careful geographical descriptions, ranging from continents and river and mountain networks on a vast scale down to the local settings for individual episodes, it also examines how these landscapes are charged with greater depth and resonance through Herodotus' use of mythological associations and spatial parallels. Man's interaction with, and alteration of, the physical world of the Histories adds another critical dimension to the meaning given to space in Herodotus' work, as his subjects' own agency serves to transform their geography from a neutral backdrop into a resonant landscape with its own role to play in the narrative, in turn reinforcing the placing of the protagonists along a spectrum of positive or negative characterizations. The Persian imperial bid may thus be seen as a war on nature, no less than on their intended subjects: however, as Herodotus reflects, Greece itself is waiting in the wings with the potential to be no less abusive an imperial power. Although the multi-vocal nature of the narrative complicates whether we can identify a 'Herodotean' world at all, still less one in which moral judgements are consistently cast, the fluid and complex web of spatial relationships revealed in discussion nevertheless allows focalization to be brought productively into play, demonstrating how the world of the Histories may be viewed from multiple perspectives. What emerges from the multiple worlds and world-views that Herodotus creates in his narrative is the mutability of fortune that allows successive imperial powers to dominate: as the exercise of political power is manifested both metaphorically and literally through control over the natural world, the map of imperial geography is constantly in flux.
Author: William Shepherd
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN: 1472808649
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 545
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Book Description
'An exciting, highly informative and also enjoyable read: Shepherd writes with clarity and verve... this book should find its way into the hands of all schools, universities and lovers of Herodotus.' - Peter Jones, Classics for All Weaving together the accounts of the ancient historian Herodotus with other ancient sources, this is the engrossing story of the triumph of Greece over the mighty Persian Empire. The Persian War is the name generally given to the first two decades of the period of conflict between the Greeks and the Persians that began in 499 BC and ended around 450. The pivotal moment came in 479, when a massive Persian invasion force was defeated and driven out of mainland Greece and Europe, never to return. The victory of a few Greek city-states over the world's first superpower was an extraordinary military feat that secured the future of Western civilization. All modern accounts of the war as a whole, and of the best-known battles of Marathon, Thermopylae and Salamis, depend on the ancient sources, foremost amongst them Herodotus. Yet although these modern narratives generally include numerous references to the ancient authors, they quote little directly from them. This is the first book to bring together Herodotus' entire narrative and interweave it with other ancient voices alongside detailed commentary to present and clarify the original texts. The extracts from other ancient writers add value to Herodotus' narrative in various ways: some offer fresh analysis and credible extra detail; some contradict him interestingly; some provide background illumination; and some add drama and colour. All are woven into a compelling narrative tapestry that brings this immense clash of arms vividly to life. 'Distinguished military historian of the Persian Wars William Shepherd [...] shows himself to be also a most sensitive interpreter of those Wars' original historian Herodotus. With Shepherd as our guide and Herodotus by our side this key moment in West-East relations is given its full cultural and strategic due.' Paul Cartledge, A.G. Leventis Senior Research Fellow of Clare College, Cambridge
Author: Sean Sheehan
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN: 1474292682
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 337
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Book Description
Modern scholarship judges Herodotus to be a more complex writer than his past readers supposed. His Histories is now being read in ways that are seemingly incompatible if not contradictory. This volume interrogates the various ways the text of the Histories has been and can be read by scholars: as the seminal text of our Ur-historian, as ethnology, literary art and fable. Our readings can bring out various guises of Herodotus himself: an author with the eye of a travel writer and the mind of an investigative journalist; a globalist, enlightened but superstitious; a rambling storyteller but a prose stylist; the so-called 'father of history' but in antiquity also labelled the 'father of lies'; both geographer and gossipmonger; both entertainer and an author whom social and cultural historians read and admire. Guiding students chapter-by-chapter through approaches as fascinating and often surprising as the original itself, Sean Sheehan goes beyond conventional Herodotus introductions and instead looks at the various interpretations of the work, which themselves shed light on the original. With text boxes highlighting key topics and indices of passages, this volume is an essential guide for students whether reading Herodotus for the first time, or returning to revisit this crucial text for later research.
Author: Chloë Houston
Publisher: Springer Nature
ISBN: 3031226186
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 300
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Book Description
This book is a study of the representation of the Persian empire in English drama across the early modern period, from the 1530s to the 1690s. The wide focus of this book, encompassing thirteen dramatic entertainments, both canonical and little-known, allow it to trace the changes and developments in the dramatic use of Persia and its people across one and a half centuries. It explores what Persia signified to English playwrights and audiences in this period; the ideas and associations conjured up by mention of ‘Persia’; and where information about Persia came from. It also considers how ideas about Persia changed with the development of global travel and trade, as English people came into people with Persians for the first time. In addressing these issues, this book provides an examination not only of the representation of Persia in dramatic material, but of the broader relationship between travel, politics and the theatre in early modern England.
Author: Adrastos Omissi
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0192558277
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 334
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Book Description
One of the great maxims of history is that it is written by the victors, and nowhere does this find greater support than in the later Roman Empire. Between 284 and 395 AD, no fewer than 37 men claimed imperial power, though today we recognize barely half of these men as 'legitimate' rulers and more than two thirds died at their subjects' hands. Once established in power, a new ruler needed to publicly legitimate himself and to discredit his predecessor: overt criticism of the new regime became high treason, with historians supressing their accounts for fear of reprisals and the very names of defeated emperors chiselled from public inscriptions and deleted from official records. In a period of such chaos, how can we ever hope to record in any fair or objective way the history of the Roman state? Emperors and Usurpers in the Later Roman Empire is the first history of civil war in the later Roman Empire to be written in English and aims to address this question by focusing on the various ways in which successive imperial dynasties attempted to legitimate themselves and to counter the threat of almost perpetual internal challenge to their rule. Panegyric in particular emerges as a crucial tool for understanding the rapidly changing political world of the third and fourth centuries, providing direct evidence of how, in the wake of civil wars, emperors attempted to publish their legitimacy and to delegitimize their enemies. The ceremony and oratory surrounding imperial courts too was of great significance: used aggressively to dramatize and constantly recall the events of recent civil wars, the narratives produced by the court in this context also went on to have enormous influence on the messages and narratives found within contemporary historical texts. In its exploration of the ways in which successive imperial courts sought to communicate with their subjects, this volume offers a thoroughly original reworking of late Roman domestic politics, and demonstrates not only how history could be erased, rewritten, and repurposed, but also how civil war, and indeed usurpation, became endemic to the later Empire.
Author: Richard Stoneman
Publisher: Yale University Press
ISBN: 0300216041
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 313
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Book Description
Xerxes, Great King of the Persian Empire from 486–465 B.C., has gone down in history as an angry tyrant full of insane ambition. The stand of Leonidas and the 300 against his army at Thermopylae is a byword for courage, while the failure of Xerxes’ expedition has overshadowed all the other achievements of his twenty-two-year reign. In this lively and comprehensive new biography, Richard Stoneman shows how Xerxes, despite sympathetic treatment by the contemporary Greek writers Aeschylus and Herodotus, had his reputation destroyed by later Greek writers and by the propaganda of Alexander the Great. Stoneman draws on the latest research in Achaemenid studies and archaeology to present the ruler from the Persian perspective. This illuminating volume does not whitewash Xerxes’ failings but sets against them such triumphs as the architectural splendor of Persepolis and a consideration of Xerxes’ religious commitments. What emerges is a nuanced portrait of a man who ruled a vast and multicultural empire which the Greek communities of the West saw as the antithesis of their own values.
