Search results for ""Author Natale Barca""

This new history of the last years of the Roman Republic sets the leading men, and women, in the complex social and political system of the time, to provide a full context to the historical events and epic battles of the 1st century BC. Scholar Natale Barca examines the actions not only of the leading actors of the political process but also to those with a smaller role – history is not just made up of great individuals. To understand the end of the Roman Republic it is necessary to also examine the key figures’ relationship with family and friends – essential relationships in an era where ties and interactions between individuals, families, and clans constantly shaped the political process, and thus the Roman state. This account also attempts to decolonize this history – liberating it from a Romano-centric perspective and restoring it to indigenous populations. The history of a subjugated people does not begin with their conquest, and the Roman conquest was basically a predatory practice, although it cannot be denied Roman domination did – in some territories – lead to a transformation of the vanquished into friends and allies, and then to Roman citizens, with all that this could entail in terms of social integration. This wide-ranging narrative, examining both the actions of key individuals and the experience of subjugated populations, provides a new insight into this most important and turbulent era of Roman history.

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In 136 BC, in Sicily (which was then a Roman province), some four hundred slaves of Syrian origin rebelled against their masters and seized the city of Henna with much bloodshed. Their leader, a fortune-teller named Eunus, was declared king (taking the Syrian royal name Antiochus), and tens of thousands of runaway slaves as well as poor native Sicilians soon flocked to join his fledgling kingdom. Antiochus' ambition was to drive the Romans from the whole of Sicily. The Romans responded with characteristic intransigence and relentlessness, leading to years of brutal warfare and suppression. Antiochus' Kingdom of the Western Syrians' was extinguished by 132 but his agenda was revived in 105 BC when rebelling slaves proclaimed Salvius as King Tryphon, with similarly bitter and bloody results. Natale Barca narrates and analyses these events in unprecedented detail, with thorough research into the surviving ancient sources. The author also reveals the long-term legacy of the slaves' defiance, contributing to the crises that led to the seismic Social War and setting a precedent for the more-famous rebellion of Spartacus in 73-71 BC.

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This book charts the rise of and interplay between the first Mediterranean civilisations – with particular reference to the Minoan, Cycladic, Mycenaean and Trojan – and on the causes of their decline, which are identified in a jumble of natural and human causes, and in a slow, but irreversible crisis. It takes into account that the Mediterranean Dimension of the Bronze Age is a garden in which many legends flourished, clearly distinguishing between myth and history. Using written sources and archaeological evidence, it charts these civilisations' fortunes and crises, and the wars and natural disasters that led to their decline.Chapters explore political geography, military and economic development, religion, monumental architecture and the rise and fall of the palatial dynasties and successive centralised governments, social life and material culture, with emphasis on the importance of commerce. A characterising element of Knossos, Mycenae, Troy is the wide use of the ‘historical present’ to represent events and construct the text. In doing so, it immerses the reader in the narrated events, facilitating our understanding. The result is a fascinating picture of the cultures that laid the foundations of Western civilisation.

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This book shows how a military colony became a large, impressive and prosperous city. Legendary for its walls and port, it was able to play a basic role in the great strategy of ancient Rome between the Po and the Danube, spanning the centuries from its foundation (181 BC) to the fateful days of blood and violence of its fall (AD 452).Based on a study of ancient sources, contemporary literature and the latest archaeological research, and written in a fast-paced and accessible style, the book provides a portrait of Aquileia in a diachronic key, under various aspects; it sets the city in the complex societal and political system of the time, gives a thorough account of the great events of which it was a protagonist or victim and offers detailed portraits of key figures, whether famous or less well-known, and analyses of epic battles.Combining academic scholarship with storytelling, biographies of important personalities and stories of political intrigue, assassinations and full-scale warfare which narrate the evocative epic of the rise, decline and disappearance of ancient cities, the volume highlights a significant topic in Roman political, social, economic, religious and military history, but one which has been inexplicably neglected in the Anglo-Saxon world until now.

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