Empire and Religion in the Roman World

Description

The inspiration for this volume comes from the work of its dedicatee, Brent D. Shaw, who is one of the most original and wide-ranging historians of the ancient world of the last half-century and continues to open up exciting new fields for exploration. Each of the distinguished contributors has produced a cutting-edge exploration of a topic in the history and culture of the Roman Empire dealing with a subject on which Professor Shaw has contributed valuable work. Three major themes extend across the volume as a whole. First, the ways in which the Roman world represented an intricate web of connections even while many people's lives remained fragmented and local. Second, the ways in which the peculiar Roman space promoted religious competition in a sophisticated marketplace for practices and beliefs, with Christianity being a major benefactor. Finally, the varying forms of violence which were endemic within and between communities.

Harriet I. Flower is Andrew Fleming West Professor of Classics at Princeton University. She is the author of Ancestor Masks and Aristocratic Power in Roman Culture (1996), The Art of Forgetting: Disgrace and Oblivion in Roman Political Culture (2006), Roman Republics (2010) and The Dancing Lares and the Serpent in the Garden: Religion at the Roman Street Corner (2017), which received the Charles J. Goodwin Award of Merit from the Society of Classical Studies in 2018 . She has also edited The Cambridge Companion to the Roman Republic (2nd edition, 2014).