'Ostia in Late Antiquity' narrates the life of Ostia Antica, Rome's ancient harbor, during the later empire.

2019 PROSE Award finalist in the Classics category! A Social and Cultural History of Late Antiquity examines the social and cultural landscape of the Late Antique Mediterranean. The text offers a picture of everyday life as it was lived in the spaces around and between two of the most memorable and towering figures of the time—Constantine and Muhammad. The author captures the period using a wide-lens, including Persian material from the mid third century through Umayyad material of the mid eighth century C.E. The book offers a rich picture of Late Antique life that is not just focused on Rome, Constantinople, or Christianity. This important resource uses nuanced terms to talk about complex issues and fills a gap in the literature by surveying major themes such as power, gender, community, cities, politics, law, art and architecture, and literary culture. The book is richly illustrated and filled with maps, lists of rulers and key events. A Social and Cultural History of Late Antiquity is an essential guide that: Paints a rich picture of daily life in Late Antique that is not simply centered on Rome, Constantinople, or Christianity Balances a thematic approach with rigorous attention to chronology Stresses the need for appreciating both sources and methods in the study of Late Antique history Offers a sophisticated model for investigating daily life and the complexities of individual and group identity in the rapidly changing Mediterranean world Includes useful maps, city plans, timelines, and suggestions for further reading A Social and Cultural History of Late Antiquity offers an examination of everyday life in the era when adherents of three of the major religions of today—Christianity, Judaism, and Islam—faced each other for the first time in the same environment. Learn more about A Social and Cultural History of Late Antiquity’s link to current social issues in Boin’s article for the History News Network.

In The Cult of Mithras in Late Antiquity David Walsh explores how the cult of Mithras developed across the 3rd and 4th centuries A.D. and why by the early 5th century the cult had completely disappeared. Contrary to the traditional narrative that the cult was violently persecuted out of existence by Christians, Walsh demonstrates that the cult’s decline was a far more gradual process that resulted from a variety of factors. He also challenges the popular image of the cult as a monolithic entity, highlighting how by the 4th century Mithras had come to mean different things to different people in different places.

There is no agreement over how to name the 'pagan' cults of late antiquity. Clearly they were more diverse than this Christian label suggests, but also exhibited tendencies towards monotheism and internal changes which makes it difficult to describe them as 'traditional cults'. This volume, which includes two extensive bibliographic essays, considers the decline of urban temples alongside the varying evolution of other focii of cult practice and identity. The papers reveal great regional diversity in the development of late antique paganism, and suggest that the time has come to abandon a single compelling narrative of 'the end of the temples' based on legal sources and literary accounts. Although temple destructions are attested, in some regions the end of paganism was both gradual and untraumatic, with more co-existence with Christianity than one might have expected. Contributors are Javier Arce, Béatrice Caseau, Georgios Deligiannakis, Koen Demarsin, Jitse H.F. Dijkstra, Demetrios Eliopoulos, James Gerrard, Penelope J. Goodman, David Gwynn, Luke Lavan, Michael Mulryan, Helen G. Saradi, Eberhard W. Sauer, Gareth Sears, Peter Talloen, Peter Van Nuffelen and Lies Vercauteren.

The last half century has seen an explosion in the study of late antiquity, which has characterised the period between the third and seventh centuries not as one of catastrophic collapse and ‘decline and fall’, but rather as one of dynamic and positive transformation. Yet research on cities in this period has provoked challenges to this positive picture of late antiquity. This study surveys the nature of this debate, examining problems associated with the sources historians use to examine late antique urbanism, and the discourses and methodological approaches they have constructed from them. It aims to set out the difficulties and opportunities presented by the study of cities in late antiquity in terms of transformations of politics, the economy, and religion, and to show that this period witnessed very real upheaval and dislocation alongside continuity and innovation in cities around the Mediterranean.

This book investigates the nature of 'public space' in Mediterranean cities, A.D. 284-650, meaning places where it was impossible to avoid meeting people from all parts of society, whether different religious confessions or social groups. 0The first volume considers the architectural form and everyday functions of streets, fora / agorai, market buildings, and shops, including a study of processions and everyday street life. 0The second volume analyses archaeological evidence for the construction, repair, use, and abandonment of these urban spaces, based on standardised principles of phasing and dating. The conclusions provide insights into the urban environment of Constantinople, an assessment of urban institutions and citizenship, and a consideration of the impact of Christianity on civic life at this time.

For centuries, statuary décor was a main characteristic of any city, sanctuary, or villa in the Roman world. However, from the third century CE onward, the prevalence of statues across the Roman Empire declined dramatically. By the end of the sixth century, statues were no longer a defining characteristic of the imperial landscape. Further, changing religious practices cast pagan sculpture in a threatening light. Statuary production ceased, and extant statuary was either harvested for use in construction or abandoned in place. The Afterlife of Greek and Roman Sculpture is the first volume to approach systematically the antique destruction and reuse of statuary, investigating key responses to statuary across most regions of the Roman world. The volume opens with a discussion of the complexity of the archaeological record and a preliminary chronology of the fate of statues across both the eastern and western imperial landscape. Contributors to the volume address questions of definition, identification, and interpretation for particular treatments of statuary, including metal statuary and the systematic reuse of villa materials. They consider factors such as earthquake damage, late antique views on civic versus “private” uses of art, urban construction, and deeper causes underlying the end of the statuary habit, including a new explanation for the decline of imperial portraiture. The themes explored resonate with contemporary concerns related to urban decline, as evident in post-industrial cities, and the destruction of cultural heritage, such as in the Middle East.

In (Re)using Ruins, Douglas Underwood presents a new account of the use and reuse of Roman urban public monuments in a crucial period of transition, A.D. 300-600. Commonly seen as a period of uniform decline for public building, especially in the western half of the Mediterranean, (Re)using Ruins shows a vibrant, yet variable, history for these structures. Douglas Underwood establishes a broad catalogue of archaeological evidence (supplemented with epigraphic and literary testimony) for the construction, maintenance, abandonment and reuses of baths, aqueducts, theatres, amphitheatres and circuses in Italy, southern Gaul, Spain, and North Africa, demonstrating that the driving force behind the changes to public buildings was largely a combined shift in urban ideologies and euergetistic practices in Late Antique cities.

"This volume is dedicated to eliciting the interactions between localities across late antique and early medieval Europe and the wider Mediterranean. Significant research has been done in recent years to explore how late "Roman" and post-"Roman" cities, towns and other localities communicated vis-à-vis larger structural phenomena, such as provinces, empires, kingdoms, institutions and so on. This research has contributed considerably to our understanding of the place of the city in its context, but tends to portray the city as a necessarily subordinate conduit within larger structures, rather than an entity in itself, or as a hermeneutical object of enquiry. Consequently, not enough research has been committed to examining how local people and communities thought about, engaged with, and struggled against nearby or distant urban neighbors.Urban Interactions addresses this lacuna in urban history by presenting articles that apply a diverse spectrum of approaches, from archaeological investigation to critical analyses of historiographical and historical biases and developmental consideration of antagonisms between ecclesiastical centers. Through these avenues of investigation, this volume elucidates the relationship between the urban centers and their immediate hinterlands and neighboring cities with which they might vie or collaborate. This entanglement and competition, whether subterraneous or explicit across overarching political, religious or other macro categories, is evaluated through a broad geographical range of late "Roman" provinces and post-"Roman" states to maintain an expansive perspective of developmental trends within and about the city."