Description: This book explores new ways of analysing interactions between different linguistic, cultural, and religious communities across the Roman Empire from the reign of Nerva to the Severans (96-235 CE). Bringing together leading scholars in classics with experts in the history of Judaism, Christianity and the Near East, it looks beyond the Greco-Roman binary that has dominated many studies of the period, and moves beyond traditional approaches to intertextuality in its study of the circulation of knowledge across languages and cultures. Its sixteen chapters explore shared ideas about aspects of imperial experience - law, patronage, architecture, the army - as well as the movement of ideas about history, exempla, documents and marvels. As the second volume in the Literary Interactions series, it offers a new and expansive vision of cross-cultural interaction in the Roman world, shedding light on connections that have gone previously unnoticed among the subcultures of a vast and evolving Empire.
Brief description: James Uden is an Associate Professor of Classical Studies at Boston University. He researches and writes broadly on Latin and Greek literature and the cultural history of the Roman Empire. He is the author of The Invisible Satirist: Juvenal and Second-Century Rome (2015) and has published articles on Catullus, Vergil, love elegy, fables, travel, and time. He is also interested in the transformation of classical ideas in English literature of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and his forthcoming monograph, Spectres of Antiquity, shows how authors of Gothic novels and poetry wrote within the shadow of ancient texts.