Focusing on forms of interaction and methods of negotiation in multicultural, multi-ethnic and multilingual contexts during Antiquity and the Middle Ages, this volume examines questions of social and cultural interaction within and between diverse ethnic communities. Toleration and coexistence were essential in all late antique and medieval societies and their communities. However, power struggles and prejudices could give rise to suspicion, conflict and violence. All of these had a central influence on social dynamics, negotiations of collective or individual identity, definitions of ethnicity and the shaping of legal rules. What was the function of multicultural and multilingual interaction: did it create and increase conflicts, or was it rather a prerequisite for survival and prosperity? The focus of this book is society and the history of everyday life, examining gender, status and ethnicity and the various forms of interaction and negotiation.

More than any other type of environment, with the possible exception of mountains, the sea has been understood since antiquity as being immovable to a proverbial degree. Yet it was the sea's capacity for movement – both literally and figuratively through such emotions as fear, hope and pity – that formed one of the primary means of conceptualizing its significance in Late Antique societies. This volume advances a new and interdisciplinary understanding of what the sea as an environment and the pursuit of seafaring meant in antiquity, drawing on a range of literary, legal and archaeological evidence to explore the social, economic and cultural factors at play. The contributions are structured into three thematic parts which move from broad conceptual categories to specific questions of networks and mobility. Part One takes a wide view of the Mediterranean as an environment with great metaphorical and symbolic potential. Part Two looks at networks of seaborne communication and the role of islands as the characteristic hubs of the Mediterranean. Finally, Part Three engages with the practicalities of tackling the sea as a challenging environment that needs to be challenged politically, legally and for the means of travel.

Reconstructing Paul's journey to Rome, day by day In This Way We Came to Rome: With Paul on the Appian Way guides readers along Paul's 150-mile journey to face trial before the Roman emperor (Acts 28). Authors Glen L. Thompson and Mark Wilson draw from both ancient records and modern research to offer the most complete account available of Paul's journey along the ancient world's most famous road—the Appian Way. In addition to geographical and historical insights, the authors provide numerous images, maps, and GPS coordinates, allowing the reader to experience Paul's journey and better understand the ancient world in which he spread the gospel.

This volume honors L. Michael White, whose work has been influential in exploring the “social worlds” of ancient Jews and Christians. Fifteen original essays highlight his scholarly contributions while also signaling new directions in the study of ancient Mediterranean religions.

The Gosford Wellhead is one of the most remarkable works of Roman sculpture to enter The Met collection in decades. This Bulletin traces the marble wellhead’s surprising journey to New York, beginning with its discovery in Ostia, Rome’s ancient port, in 1797, and including a long residence in Gosford House, one of Scotland’s most majestic private homes. The authors closely examine the marble wellhead’s superbly carved imagery of two Greek myths related to water: Narcissus and Echo and Hylas and the Nymphs. Uncovering impressive early restorations and featuring a modern technical analysis, this Bulletin provides a focused study of a singular masterpiece whose cultural history weaves from ancient Rome to the present day.

This book, built around the study of the representation of age and identity in 23,000 Latin funerary epitaphs from the Western Mediterranean in the Roman era, sets out how the use of age in inscriptions, and in turn, time, varied across this region. Discrepancies between the use of time to represent identity in death allow readers to begin to understand the differences between the cultures of Roman Italy and contemporary societies in North Africa, Spain and southern Gaul. The analysis focuses on the timescapes of cemeteries, a key urban phenomenon, in relation to other markers of time, including the Roman invention of the birthday, the revering of the dead at the Parentalia and the topoi of life’s stages. In doing so, the book contributes to our understanding of gender, the city, the family, the role of the military, freed slaves and cultural changes during this period. The concept of the timescape is seen to have varied geographically across the Mediterranean, bringing into question claims of cultural unity for the Western Mediterranean as a region. Mediterranean Timescapes is of interest to students and scholars of Roman history and archaeology, particularly that of the Western Mediterranean, and ancient social history.