Books on the topic 'Mediterranean streams'

What kind of language is Latin, and who is it for? Contrary to most accounts, this book tells the story of Latin as a language of ordinary people. Surveying the whole span of the language’s history, it explores the evidence that exists for ordinary Latin around the Roman world, arguing that this material is just as worthy of readers’ attention as the famous classics. Those classics are reassessed in the light of popular concerns, as works of art that evoke ancient, sustainable, and communal ways of living, encompassing broad and diverse traditions of readers through time. And of course Latin lived on: this account revisits what happened to the language after the Roman empire, tracing its twin streams — intellectual lingua franca and a series of Romance languages — into the twenty-first century. What emerges is a human chain stretching back thousands of years and still in existence today, a story of workers and weavers, violets and roses, storytellers and musicians, a common and democratic archive of world history. Kerrigan’s strong and attractive case for a new conception of Latin sends out a call to arms to reevaluate the place of Latin in history. On the one hand, an interesting and readable history of the language, on the other, this book sets out to provoke questions for readers, students, and teachers of Latin, as well as anyone interested in the ancient Mediterranean world. Latin was and should always be for all. This historical essay goes in search of the Latin of ordinary people, gathering a wide body of evidence to explore the diversity of the language through time, as well as the role that some of Latin’s most famous texts (the comedies of Plautus and Terence, Virgil’s Aeneid and Ovid’s Metamorphoses) have played in popular culture, from the streets of medieval Naples to contemporary music and film. Based in the latest scholarship and drawing on both Irish and international contexts, this book presents a new take on an old and influential language.

Where Pompeii’s traffic system fits in the history of Roman infrastructure and urbanism is addressed in Chapter 8. To do this, the method for studying traffic developed at Pompeii is exported to Roman cities around the Mediterranean to answer two primary questions: were there two-way streets organized by driving on a particular side, and were there streets restricted to a single direction? The comparison with Timgad in particular offers an important window onto how Romans at the end of first century BCE in Italy and at the beginning of the second century CE in North Africa approached issues of urban design and infrastructural management.

Britain’s Levantine Empire, 1914-1923 explains the rise and decline and nature and extent of British military rule in the urban eastern Mediterranean during the course of the First World War and its aftermath. Combining novel case studies and theoretical approaches, the book reveals the extent of military control that Britain established and anticipated maintaining in the post-Ottoman world, before a series of confrontations with nationalist and socialist anti-imperialists forced a new division of the eastern Mediterranean, still visible in the political borders of the present day. It tells this story through the eyes and ears of the British servicemen who built this empire, analysing the testimony of over 100 such military personal sent to Alexandria, Thessaloniki, Istanbul and the towns and islands between them, as they voyaged, made camp, and explored and patrolled the city streets. Whereas histories examining soldiers’ experiences in the First World War have almost exclusively focused on their lives at the frontlines, this book provides a much needed in depth history of soldiers’ experience and impact on the urban hubs of the Eastern Mediterranean, where urban planning, nightlife and entertainment, policing and security were transformed by the presence of so many men at arms and the imperialist interventions that accompanied them.

This chapter discusses two riverine battles: Achilles fighting the Scamander in Book 21 of the Iliad, and Heracles conquering the Achelous reported in Sophocles’ Trachiniae. The Scamander’s actions in response to Achilles’ rampage evoke the seasonal changes that a sporadic stream goes through; the Achelous’ metamorphoses and Heracles’ conquest of the river in each form allude to the awesome fertility of this grand, persistent river. In these mythical narratives, the characterizations of the rivers are consistent with the natural behaviour of waterways, and additionally, the progress and outcomes of the battles convey knowledgeable observation of the hydrogeology of the Mediterranean and contemporary attitudes towards the dangerous and beneficial power of ancient rivers.

Early medieval Rome is commonly presented as a city of in which ‘power’ flowed through bureaucracy or political factionalism or, in more purely religious terms, through Christian ideology promulgated by the papacy. This chapter explores very different forms of religious power that are usually absent from the ways scholars construct their understanding of the city: those of miracle-working and of cursing. First, it presents an analysis of a detailed eighth-century account describing how a jilted lover sought revenge by throwing a ligature (a curse of the typical, ancient Mediterranean variety) at the feet of his beloved on the streets of Rome, how, as a result, she was possessed by the devil, and how, finally, she was released from the curse by exorcism at an extramural relic shrine. It will then seek to contextualize these two forms of holy power in a wider understanding of lived religion in early medieval Rome.

A journey through the history, cultures, and societies of Marseille. There are many Marseilles, or at least many versions of Marseille: seaside village, haven of gangsters, gateway to the East, city of immigrants and outcasts. It is by turns the dull bourgeois provincial town where nothing ever happens and the mysterious unknowable city of the Mediterranean. In Marseille Mix, William Firebrace explores the many Marseilles, the invented and the actual. Leading readers down narrow streets, through undulating terrain that seems at once, or serially, Italian, Greek, Levantine, and North African, Firebrace traces the history and culture of Marseille through landscapes, buildings, food, films, literature, and criminology. In seven chapters, in writing that is by turns essay, narrative, description, list, recipe, glossary, and conversation, Firebrace investigates the city's defining mix. He tells stories of famous Marseillais, including Marcel Pagnol and Antonin Artaud, and famous visitors, including the dying Arthur Rimbaud and Walter Benjamin (who wrote about one visit in “Hashish in Marseille”). He describes the brief period when Marseille was the point of departure for European refugees fleeing the Nazis and the city's mixture of desperation and decadence during the Vichy regime. He visits the basilica of Notre Dame de la Garde and gazes down from its terrace at the panoramic view: an agglomeration of neighborhoods and landscapes that became a city.

From the critically acclaimed author ofDünkirchen 1940, this is a groundbreaking history of the epic three-day battle for Hill 107 that changed the course of the war in the Mediterranean. In this remarkable history, we discover each of the individuals whose actions determined the outcome of the battle for Hill 107, the key event that decided the campaign to capture the vitally strategic island of Crete in May 1941. All the events are narrated through the filter of these eyewitnesses. The Allied perspective is from the summit of Hill 107. We experience the fear and the adrenalin of a lowly platoon commander, Lieutenant Ed McAra, perilously positioned at the top of the hill, alongside the combat stress and command fatigue of the battalion commander, Lieutenant Colonel Leslie Andew. In contrast, the German view is looking up from below as they cling to the slopes while simultaneous dazzled by the morning glare and decimated by defensive fire. We join the regimental doctor, Dr Heinrich Neumann, as he assumes command of one battalion and leads a daring nighttime charge towards the summit.The Hilldetails what was felt, heard or seen throughout the battle for both attacker and defender. Drawing upon original combat reports, diary entries, letters and interviews, the battle is brought vividly to life. The narrative reads like a Shakespearean tragedy, the soldiers revealing their stories in and around the shadows of Hill 107.

Roman political leaders used distance from Rome as a key political tool to assert pre-eminence. Through the case studies of Caesar’s hegemony, Augustus’s autocracy, and Tiberius’s reign, this book examines how these figures’ experiences and manipulations of absence established a multipolar focus of political life centred less on the city of Rome, and more on the idea of a single leader. The Roman expansion over Italy and the Mediterranean put the political system under considerable stress, and eventually resulted in a dispersal of leadership and a decentralization of power. Absent generals rivalled their peers in Rome for influence and threatened to surpass them from the provinces. Roman leaders, from Sulla to Tiberius, used absence as a mechanism to act autonomously, but it came at the cost of losing influence and control at the centre. In order to hold influence while being split off from the decision-making powers of the geographical nucleus that was Rome, communication channels to mitigate necessary absences were developed during this period, such as travel, intermediate meetings, letters (propaganda writings) and a complex network of mediators, ultimately forming the circle from which the imperial court emerged. Absent leadership, as it developed throughout the Late Republic, a hitherto neglected issue, eventually became a valuable asset in the institutionalising process of the autocracy of Caesar, Augustus, and Tiberius. Rome’s growth brought about a greater challenge to the basic realities of communication, representation, travel and warfare. The constraints of empire gave rise to extraordinary commands held by its foremost generals. These absent leaders began dominating the capital from the provinces, from which C. Julius Caesar emerged as an autocrat after a period of civil war. Whereas presence had defined the Republic, absence clearly was shaping the Principate. In its constitutive phase, the power structure of the monarchy was decisively shaped at the structural and institutional level by the emperor’s absence, a development that can be summed up in vertical hierarchisation through spatial distancing. The art of governing Rome and ruling the empire evolved with Augustus’s and Tiberius’s distance from the centre. In order to show how all parties tried to mediate the geographical distance between the leading figures and the capital in the transitional period between the Republic and the Empire, a range of tools were recurred to and developed to mitigate their necessary absences. This book analyses mobility, correspondence, patronage, and advocacy, maps the paths not taken, and concludes on the degree to which expedients became formalised and institutionalised. The variables of temporality and spatiality in the empire therefore posed a constant challenge to the ruler, whose presence in Rome always revealed his power and powerlessness at the same time. This was Rome’s paradox of proximity.