Online research in philosophy

The Romans commanded the largest and most complex empire the world had ever seen, or would see until modern times. The challenges, however, were not just political, economic and military: Rome was also the hub of a vast information network, drawing in worldwide expertise and refashioning it for its own purposes. This groundbreaking collection of essays considers the dialogue between technical literature and imperial society, drawing on, developing and critiquing a range of modern cultural theories (including those of Michel Foucault and Edward Said). How was knowledge shaped into textual forms, and how did those forms encode relationships between emperor and subjects, theory and practice, Roman and Greek, centre and periphery? Ordering Knowledge in the Roman Empire will be required reading for those concerned with the intellectual and cultural history of the Roman Empire, and its lasting legacy in the medieval world and beyond.

The basic framework of Roman policy towards the Jews and Judaism, initiated at the time of Julius Caesar, until before the time of Claudius, was quite permissive, allowing the Jews considerable religious freedom and privileges. There were of course occasional different applications of the policy depending on the Emperors or procurators in the regions. Nonetheless, Judaism in the first half of the first century to some degree infiltrated into the Roman Empire and the range of the social status of the constituents was wide, from low class to high. There were considerable numbers of gentile adherents to Judaism and also of proselytes: among them were Roman adherents and proselytes and some of them were even members of the royal house. The pragmatic policy of Rome towards the Jews and their religion, the wide range of Jewish infiltration into various classes of people, and in particular the numerous cases of conversion among the Romans do not exclude the possibility of the conversion of a Roman officer, despatched to the province in approximately AD 39, to a sect of the Jewish religion.

In recent years, the mutual interaction between philosophy and Roman political and cultural life has aroused much interest. In this collection of papers, originally delivered at the seminar on Philosophy and Roman Society at the University of Oxford, scholars from several disciplines investigate this interaction in the late Republic and early Empire, with particular emphasis on the formative period of the first century B.C. The book presents chapters on key digures such as Posidonius, Antiochus of Ascalon, Philodemus, Lucretius, Cicero, and Plutarch, as well as general essays on "Philosophy, Politics, and Politicians at Rome", and "Roman Rulers and the Philosophic Adviser," with contributions from Julia Annas, P.A. Brunt, David Sedley, and others.

Runar M. Thorsteinsson presents a challenge to this view by comparing Christian morality in first-century Rome with contemporary Stoic ethics in the city ...