Search results for ""author henry heitmann-gordon""

In recent decades, scholars have argued that the Roman Republic's political culture was essentially democratic in nature, stressing the central role of the 'sovereign' people and their assemblies. Karl-J. Holkeskamp challenges this view in Reconstructing the Roman Republic, warning that this scholarly trend threatens to become the new orthodoxy, and defending the position that the republic was in fact a uniquely Roman, dominantly oligarchic and aristocratic political form. Holkeskamp offers a comprehensive, in-depth survey of the modern debate surrounding the Roman Republic. He looks at the ongoing controversy first triggered in the 1980s when the 'oligarchic orthodoxy' was called into question by the idea that the republic's political culture was a form of Greek-style democracy, and he considers the important theoretical and methodological advances of the 1960s and 1970s that prepared the ground for this debate. Holkeskamp renews and refines the 'elitist' view, showing how the republic was a unique kind of premodern city-state political culture shaped by a specific variant of a political class. He covers a host of fascinating topics, including the Roman value system; the senatorial aristocracy; competition in war and politics within this aristocracy; and the symbolic language of public rituals and ceremonies, monuments, architecture, and urban topography. Certain to inspire continued debate, Reconstructing the Roman Republic offers fresh approaches to the study of the republic while attesting to the field's enduring vitality.

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How did the Greeks respond to the experiences of uncertainty that they so acutely made in the aftermath of Alexander the Great's world-changing conquest of the Persian Empire? How were old values upheld and reshaped? And how did the societies of Greek cities and royal courts accommodate the overwhelming newfound power of Greek individuals? By developing a custom methodology, this book tries to shed new light on the complex textuality of the period of the Diadochi, the successors of Alexander. In four case studies, new readings are presented of Theophrastus Characters and Xenophon's Cyropaedia, but also of the substantial early Hellenistic anecdotal material, as well as the Colossus of Rhodes. The studies are united by an interest in how these texts cast the relationships between individuals and how they constructed various media of interrelation, such as money, friendship, women and the divine. Reading these texts on these terms reveals how values were renegotiated through paradoxes and inverted stories that subtly reshaped the utopias of the 4th century BCE. Overall, the study's hypothesis is that this particular brand of social storytelling contributed to the stabilisation of the nascent Hellenistic world by providing new visions of society capable of accommodating individual power and offering a new sense of control and place.

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