Arjan Zuiderhoek

Ghent University | UGhent · Department of History

How were space and movement in Roman cities affected by economic life? What can the study of Roman urban landscapes tell us about the nature of the Roman economy? These are the central questions addressed in this volume. While there exist many studies of Roman urban space and of the Roman economy, rarely have the two topics been investigated toget...

In this chapter the author identifies the chief continuities and changes in civic munificence in the poleis under Roman imperial rule in comparison with the previous periods of Greek history. To do so, the author develops a model to answer the question of why elite public giving was a such an enduring element of polis society in the first place. He...

Historians generally study elite public gift-giving in ancient Greek cities as a phenomenon that gained prominence only in the Hellenistic and Roman imperial periods. The contributors to this volume challenge this perspective by offering analyses of various manifestations of elite public giving in the Greek cities from Homeric times until Late Anti...

Historians generally study elite public gift-giving in ancient Greek cities as a phenomenon that gained prominence only in the Hellenistic and Roman imperial periods. The contributors to this volume challenge this perspective by offering analyses of various manifestations of elite public giving in the Greek cities from Homeric times until Late Anti...

Historians generally study elite public gift-giving in ancient Greek cities as a phenomenon that gained prominence only in the Hellenistic and Roman imperial periods. The contributors to this volume challenge this perspective by offering analyses of various manifestations of elite public giving in the Greek cities from Homeric times until Late Anti...

Research on the Roman economy and the possibility of Roman economic growth has focused on demographic structures, on market integration, on credit facilities, on technology and modes of organization, and on institutions and mentalities. A factor that has received less attention is investment in capital goods. Economists have found, however, that am...

Investment in capital, both physical and financial, and innovation in its uses are often considered the linchpins of modern economic growth, while credit and credit markets now seem to determine the wealth—as well as the fate—of nations. This book asks whether it always thus, and whether the Roman economy—large, complex, and sophisticated as it was...

In this chapter, I discuss civic munificence in the Roman imperial East as a form of extramercantile exchange. Following the lead of recent social scientific research into gift exchange, I explore the various interactions between euergetism and the urban economy, as well as its contribution to the generation of macrosocial trust. Competitive gift g...

S. T. ROSELAAR (ED.), PROCESSES OF CULTURAL CHANGE AND INTEGRATION IN THE ROMAN WORLD (Mnemosyne Supplements. History and Archaeology of Classical Antiquity 382). Leiden/Boston: Brill, 2015. Pp. x + 314. isbn 9789004294547. £100.00/€115.00/US$149.00. - Volume 107 - Arjan Zuiderhoek

In recent years, the debate on Romanisation has often been framed in terms of identity. Discussions have concentrated on how the expansion of empire impacted on the constructed or self-ascribed sense of belonging of its inhabitants, and just how the interaction between local identities and Roman ideology and practices may have led to a multicultura...

Greece and Rome were quintessentially urban societies. Ancient culture, politics and society arose and developed in the context of the polis and the civitas. In modern scholarship, the ancient city has been the subject of intense debates due to the strong association in Western thought between urbanism, capitalism and modernity. In this book, Arjan...

J. NICOLS , CIVIC PATRONAGE IN THE ROMAN EMPIRE (Mnemosyne Supplement 365). Leiden/Boston: Brill, 2014. Pp. xvii + 344. isbn 9789004214668. €125.00/US$162.00. C. RAPP and H. A. DRAKE (EDS), THE CITY IN THE CLASSICAL AND POST-CLASSICAL WORLD: CHANGING CONTEXTS OF POWER AND IDENTITY. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014. Pp. xiii + 265, illus....

Explanation of the success and failure of the Roman economy is one of the most important problems in economic history. As an economic system capable of sustaining high production and consumption levels, it was unparalleled until the early modern period. This volume focuses on how the institutional structure of the Roman Empire affected economic per...

This Dutch-language article offers an overview of debates on Greco-Roman urbanism, in particular concerning city-country relations, urban middling groups and cities and state formation, intended for a broad audience of urban historians of all periods.

From Archaic Greece until the Late Roman Empire (c. 800 BCE to c. 500 CE), food was more than a physical necessity; it was a critical factor in politics, economics and culture. On the one hand, the Mediterranean landscape and climate encouraged particular crops – notably cereals, vines and olives – but, with the risks of crop failure ever-present,...

From Archaic Greece until the Late Roman Empire (c. 800 BCE to c. 500 CE), food was more than a physical necessity; it was a critical factor in politics, economics and culture. On the one hand, the Mediterranean landscape and climate encouraged particular crops – notably cereals, vines and olives – but, with the risks of crop failure ever-present,...

In the Roman world, the bulk of both agrarian and non-agrarian production and distribution took place at the local urban and the regional level, to satisfy local and regional demand. In a large territorial empire with, by pre-industrial standards, unusually high levels of urbanisation (particularly in its core areas) this implied productive local a...

LomasK. and CornellT. (eds), ‘Bread and Circuses’: Euergetism and Municipal Patronage in Roman Italy. London/New York: Routledge, 2003. Pp. xii + 170. ISBN 0-0415-14689-5. £50.00. - Volume 94 - Arjan Zuiderhoek

EilersC., Roman Patrons of Greek Cities. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002. Pp. xiii + 334, 5 tables, 3 figs, ISBN 0-19-924848-6. £50.00. - Volume 94 - Arjan Zuiderhoek

This paper offers the working hypothesis that increased central government intervention in civic and provincial affairs in the late secondand third-century A. D. Roman Empire can be partly explained by the effects of the demographic contraction following the Antonine Plague pandemic. The sharp reduction in the number of people who could work and pa...

In the first two centuries AD, the eastern Roman provinces experienced a proliferation of elite public generosity unmatched in their previous or later history. In this study, Arjan Zuiderhoek attempts to answer the question why this should have been so. Focusing on Roman Asia Minor, he argues that the surge in elite public giving was not caused by...

But above all things, we must remind them that being a pol-itician consists not only in holding office, being ambassador, vociferating in the assembly and ranting round the speakers' platform proposing laws and motions. Most people think all that is part of being a politician, just as they think of course that those are philosophers who sit in a ch...

Millar(F.)Rome, the Greek World, and the East. Volume 3: The Greek World, the Jews, and the East. Edited by Hannah M. Cotton and Guy M. Rogers. Pp. xxxii + 516, ills, maps. Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 2006. Paper, US$29.95 (Cased, US$70). ISBN: 978-0-8078-5693-2 (978-0-8078-3030-7 hbk). - Volume 57 Issue 2 - ARJAN ZUIDERHOE...