Rome: An Empire of Many Nations

The center of gravity in Roman studies has shifted far from the upper echelons of government and administration in Rome or the Emperor’s court to the provinces and the individual. The multidisciplinary studies presented in this volume reflect the turn in Roman history to the identities of ethnic groups and even single individuals who lived in Rome’s vast multinational empire. The purpose is less to discover another element in the Roman Empire’s “success” in governance than to illuminate the variety of individual experience in its own terms. The chapters here, reflecting a wide spectrum of professional expertise, range across the many cultures, languages, religions and literatures of the Roman Empire, with a special focus on the Jews as a test case for the larger issues. This title is also available as Open Access on Cambridge Core.

Jonathan J. PRICE is the Fred and Helen Lessing Professor of Ancient History at Tel Aviv University and the author of many studies on Greek and Roman historiography, and Jewish history and epigraphy of the Roman period. His publications include Jerusalem under Siege: The Collapse of the Jewish State, 66–70 C.E. (1992), Thucydides and Internal War (Cambridge, 2001), and editions of about 3,000 Jewish inscriptions in Corpus Inscriptionum Iudaeae/Palaestinae, Volumes I–V (2010–21).

Margalit Finkelberg is Professor of Classics (emeritus) at Tel Aviv University and a member of the Israel Academy of Sciences and Humanities. She has authored The Birth of Literary Fiction in Ancient Greece (1998), Greeks and Pre-Greeks: Aegean Prehistory and Greek Heroic Tradition (2005), Homer (2014; Hebrew), The Gatekeeper: Narrative Voice in Plato’s Dialogues (2019), Homer and Early Greek Epic: Collected Essays (2020), and numerous scholarly articles. She is the editor of The Homer Encyclopedia (3 vols.; 2011).

Yuval Shahar is Senior Lecturer in Jewish History at Tel Aviv University. His published studies on the history, historiography and historical geography of Palestine in the Hellenistic, Roman and Byzantine periods include Josephus Geographicus: The Classical Context of Geography in Josephus (2004).