Rome: An Empire of Many Nations New Perspectives on Ethnic Diversity and Cultural Identity

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 multi-disciplinary 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.

List of figures; List of contributors; Acknowledgements; Introduction: Part I. Ethnicity and Identity in the Roman Empire: 1. From Rome to Constantinople Benjamin Isaac; 2. The imperial senate: center of a multinational empire Werner Eck; 3. Ethnic types and stereotypes in Ancient Latin idioms Daniela Dueck; 4. Keti, son of Masawalat: ethnicity and empire Brent D. Shaw; Part II. Ethnicity and Identity in the Roman Empire: 5. Roman reception of the Trojan war Margalit Finkelberg; 6. Claiming Roman origins: Greek cities and the Roman colonial pattern Cédric Brélaz; 7. Roman theologies in the cities of Italy and the provinces John Scheid; 8. The involvement of provincial cities in the administration of school teaching Ido Israelowich; 9. Many nations, one night? Historical aspects of the night in the Roman Empire Angelos Chaniotis; Part III. Ethnicity and Identity in the Roman Empire: the Case of the Jews: 10. Religious pluralism in the Roman Empire: did Judaism test the limits of Roman tolerance? Erich S. Gruen; 11. Rome's attitude to Jews and Judaea after the great rebellion – beyond raison d'état? Alexander Yakobson; 12. Between ethnos and populus: the boundaries of being a Jew Youval Rotman; 13. Local identities of synagogue communities in the Roman Empire Jonathan J. Price; 14. The good the bad and the middling: Roman emperors in Talmudic literature Yuval Shahar; 15. The severans and rabbi Judah ha-Nasi Aharon Oppenheimer; Part IV. Iudaea/Palaestina: 16. The Roman legionary base in Legio-Kefar 'Othnay' – the evidence from the small finds Yotam Tepper; 17. The camp of the legion X Fretensis and the emergence of Aelia capitolina Shlomit Weksler-Bdolah; Bibliography; Indexes.

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 3000 Jewish inscriptions in Corpus Inscriptionum Iudaeae/Palaestinae, Volumes I-V (2010-2020).
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 (Cambridge, 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).