Greg Woolf

• PhD
• Leon Levy Director of ISAW at New York University

This volume explores Latinization, local languages, and literacies in the Roman West, focusing on the Iberian Peninsula, Gaul, the Germanies, and Britain in the later Iron Age and Roman period. We use a combination of various sets of evidence and an interdisciplinary—historical, archaeological, sociolinguistic, and epigraphic—perspective to uncover...

One of the striking features of ancient Mediterranean urbanism is the capacity of individual cities to weather all kinds of shocks, from earthquakes, floods, droughts, plagues, and crop failures to sieges and violent shifts in political gravity. This is all the more remarkable given the environmental precarity of ancient Mediterranean life, and the...

This interdisciplinary edited volume presents twelve papers by Roman historians and archaeologists, discussing the interconnected relationship between religion and the Roman economy over the period c. 500 bc to ad 350. The connection between Roman religion and the economy has largely been ignored in work on the Roman economy, but this volume explor...

This interdisciplinary edited volume presents twelve papers by Roman historians and archaeologists, discussing the interconnected relationship between religion and the Roman economy over the period c. 500 bc to ad 350. The connection between Roman religion and the economy has largely been ignored in work on the Roman economy, but this volume explor...

Urbanistic projects have dominated the last six thousand years of our species’ history, appearing independently on all the inhabited continents. The majority of the population already live in cities and the trend seems to be increasing. An evolutionary approach entails explaining first what factors first made urban experiments possible in the late...

This article sets out to reconsider the history of curse tablets in the ancient Mediterranean world as the history of a technology, one marked by episodes of innovation and appropriation. Attempts to write a history in terms of diffusion or of the spread of classical ideas or of magic have failed to convince, and most recent studies focus on the pa...

MATTHEW P. LOAR, CAROLYN MACDONALD and DAN-EL PADILLA PERALTA (EDS), ROME, EMPIRE OF PLUNDER: THE DYNAMICS OF CULTURAL APPROPRIATION. Cambridge/New York: Cambridge University Press, 2018. Pp. xii + 325, illus., maps, plans. isbn9781108418423. £90.00. - Greg Woolf

This paper considers a series of problems that emerge from conventional uses of the term ‘power’ in discussing the Roman world. Drawing on critiques and reformulations of the concept by social theorists it explores the operation of power in two spheres, first at the centre of the empire where emperors, aristocrats and other courtiers competed for i...

Kyle Harper, The Fate of Rome. Climate, Disease and the End of an Empire (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2017), 440 pp. ISBN: 978-0691166834, £27.95 (hbk).

The emergence during the Roman Empire of new religious forms and groups alongside the collective cults of the city and ruler worship invites analysis in terms of various kinds of network theory. Some of the main version of network theory currently in use are examined, and their applicability to ancient material is discussed and assessed. Network th...

How to Write the History of Europe? - Jean-Frédéric Schaub, Nicholas Canny, Bartolomé Yun Casalilla, Marek Kornat, Greg Woolf, Jörg Rüpke, Thomas Winkelbauer, Markus A. Denzel, Nikita Harwich Vallenilla, Pieter C. Emmer, Amélia Polónia

Christianity in the Second Century shows how academic study on this critical period of Christian development has undergone substantial change over the last thirty years. The second century is often considered to be a time during which the Christian church moved relentlessly towards forms of institutionalisation and consolidated itself against so-ca...

How did ancient scientific and knowledge-ordering writers make their work authoritative? This book answers that question for a wide range of ancient disciplines, from mathematics, medicine, architecture and agriculture, through to law, historiography and philosophy (focusing mainly but not exclusively on the literature of the Roman Empire). It draw...

A Mobile World? "The importance of mobility in early societies now no longer needs demonstration. Recent work over the last decades has rendered obsolete the image of populations that are for the most part immobile that demographers have sought to purvey. Within the Mediterranean area, throughout a very long period lasting from Antiquity down to mo...

Ancient writing is conventionally approached as a counterpart of speech, as in the dyad orality/literacy. Alphabetical writing systems are often regarded as superior precisely because they are better able to record speech. This paper takes inspiration from the work on ancient Near Eastern writing systems and considers ancient literacy as a general...

THE GODS OF THE NATIONS - Salzman ( M.R.), Sweeney ( M.A.), Adler ( W.) (edd.) The Cambridge History of Religions in the Ancient World. Volume I: From the Bronze Age to the Hellenistic Age. Volume II: From the Hellenistic Age to Late Antiquity. Pp. xiv + 450 + xviii + 589, ills, maps. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013. Cased, £194.99, US$...

The subject of this chapter is the archaeology of ritual in temperate Europe, during the period 500 BCE-500 CE. Many of the practices described may be traced back to the Bronze Age, whilst in Scandinavia and northern Germany some continued until the conversion to Christianity. Certain ritual practices, such as cult at springs or on mountain peaks,...

A series of recent articles have challenged literal and realist readings of the tenth book of Pliny the Younger's Letters. This article builds on these to suggest some poetic effects of this addition to the collection.

Tem sido demonstrado que as análises a partir da teoria de sistemas-mundo são uma ferramenta poderosa para conceber e analisar o mundo moderno. Neste artigo o autor argumenta que ela tem um potencial similar para a compreensão das estruturas e dinâmicas de macro escala do Império Romano e seus vizinhos e para facilitar comparações entre Roma e outr...

It would be churlish (as well as difficult), when my own work is treated so generously in this article, to object to its thrust too strongly. But agreement does not make for much of a dialogue! Let me state my agreements briefly, then. 1. Versluys has nailed the terminological impasse: ‘Romanization’ is far worse than Romanization, because it has a...

WacherJ. (Ed.), The Roman World. London and New York: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1987. 2 vols. Pp. lxiv + 872. 302 illus. (incl. pls, text figs, maps, plans), ISBN 0-7100-9975-4. - Volume 78 - Greg Woolf

MannM., The Sources of Social Power. 1. A History of Power from the Beginning to A.D. 1760. Cambridge, etc.: University Press, 1986. Pp. ix + 549. ISBN 0-521-30851-8 (bound), 0-521-31349-X (paper). - Volume 77 - Greg Woolf

CameronAveril, Christianity and the Rhetoric of Empire: The Development of Christian Discourse (Sather classical lectures LV). Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991. Pp. xv + 261, 16 illus. ISBN 0-520-07160-3. $39.95. - Volume 83 - Greg Woolf

Encyclopaedism before Rome. Encyclopaedism was never a genre within classical antiquity. Our argument in this chapter, in line with the model we have outlined already in the introduction, is that we need to think instead in terms of a spectrum of texts which manipulate, to various degrees, and in a great range of different ways, a set of shared enc...

This chapter focuses on the inscribed objects under the Roman Empire and what they imply about the uses of literacy in specific social and commercial contexts. It discusses the uses of literacy concerning the "joined-up" relationship between private uses of writing and literacy practices as they are developed by the state. The chapter concludes wit...

Tales of the Barbarians traces the creation of new mythologies in the wake of Roman expansion westward to the Atlantic, and offers the first application of modern ethnographic theory to ancient material.• Investigates the connections between empire and knowledge at the turn of the millennia, and the creation of new histories in the Roman West • Exp...

Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness, a story - told on the deck of a cruiser moored on Thames estuary;‘“And this also,” says Marlow, “has been one of the dark places of the earth.”’- quotation from Psalm 74, appeal to God not to forsake his people in the midst of the heathen;Thinking about the British empire - in terms of ancient Rome;Victorian era,...

Pliny on SafariEthnography, Ancient and ModernGetting to Know the BarbariansDomesticating the KeltoiThe Archaeology of SpainNative Wisdom?

A Plurality of ParadigmsThe Uses of GenealogyGeographical UnderstandingsAvoiding Debate

The circulation of books was the motor of classical civilisation. But books were both expensive and rare, and so libraries - private and public, royal and civic - played key roles in articulating intellectual life. This collection, written by an international team of scholars, presents a fundamental reassessment of how ancient libraries came into b...

Histories of ancient libraries. ‘Bibliotheca’ takes its name from the Greek, for bibliōn is translated ‘of books’ and thēkē is a storeroom. That definition of bibliotheca – the most common Latin term for library – is taken from the Etymologies of Isidore, Bishop of Seville, a ‘vastly important conduit for classical antiquity into the medieval world...

Landlords and Peasants in Roman Egypt - RathboneDominic: Economic Rationalism and Rural Society in Third-century A.D. Egypt: The Heroninos Archive and the Appianus Estate. (Cambridge Classical Studies.) Pp. xix + 489; 2 figures, 1 map, 19 tables. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991. £45. - Volume 43 Issue 2 - Greg Woolf

The appearance of large sites known as oppida, and generally qualified as urban or proto-urban, is a central feature of all accounts of late Iron Age Europe. But the category of oppidum groups together sites that are very diverse in morphology, scale and function, and excludes other sites that share many of the same features, but lack fortification...

It is the tenth hour of the Roman day. Business, siesta, bathing are done and now it is dinner, otium following negotium. Mingled with otium the careful performance of social officia as amici groom each other, the host balancing his reciprocal ministrations with his peers, feeding his lesser amici who in turn provide the audience that makes him gre...

HollandT., Rubicon. The Triumph and Tragedy of the Roman Republic. London: Abacus, 2003. Pp. xxviii + 430. ISBN 0-349-11563-x. £8.99. ParentiM., The Assassination of Julius Caesar. A People's History of Ancient Rome. New York: The New Press, 2003. Pp. x + 267. ISBN 1-56584-942-6. US$16.95. MeijerF., Emperors Don't Die in Bed. London/New York: Routl...

Writing the Provinces into a very Roman Revolution Augustus and the City of Rome stand at the heart of all histories of this period. Augustus and his image builders put them there. The contributions made by others were limited in fact, and effaced from memory unless they could be grouped around the person of the emperor. The other great cities of t...

This chapter looks at family history in the northern and western provinces of ancient Rome, mainly by contemplating the potential value of certain aspects of culture, such as a rhetorical education and Roman law, as agents of change and as inducements for family members to adopt Roman family values and structure. It suggests that 'going Roman' had...

Roman archaeology is in good shape, institutionally, financially, and in terms of the high quality of current research. Both fieldwork and publication have increased in quality in the last few decades and the discipline is better at disseminating information widely, albeit through fairly traditional media. The discipline is fortunate in the quality...

The use of Mediterranean paradigms is a heuristic strategy with costs as well as gains. Other paradigms have been more influential in the study of ancient religion. Their weaknesses may be compared to the difficulties Mediterranean paradigms have in accounting for religious change and in linking environment to spirituality. Few, if any, religious f...

This chapter examines one ordering principle that has recently become especially prominent in the study of the cults of the provinces in Rome, referred as the ‘polis-religion model’. However, that model of ancient religion itself has an ideological component. The chapter considers what difference it makes to our understanding of the cults of the Ro...

Archaeological dialogues are not always genteel affairs. I have been very fortunate in the care with which the commentators have read my paper and the generosity with which they have responded to it. Collectively, their remarks raise more issues than I can adequately respond to in my turn.

This paper sets out to examine issues of continuity and change in the social hierarchies of the peoples of the Gallic interior, between the late Iron Age and the early Roman period. This part of the empire is one in which we might reasonably expect to find substantial continuity of social structure. Many scholars have argued that this is indeed the...

Empires, the largest political systems of the ancient and early modern world, powerfully transformed the lives of people within and even beyond their frontiers in ways quite different from other, non-imperial societies. Appearing in all parts of the globe, and in many different epochs, empires invite comparative analysis - yet few attempts have bee...

numérisé

Under the emperors' rule, the cultural lives of all Rome's subjects were utterly transformed. This book is a study of this process - conventionally termed 'Romanization' - through an investigation of the experience of Rome's Gallic provinces in the late Republic and early empire. Beginning with a rejection of the concept of 'Romanization', it descr...

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Trade and Exchange in Roman Gaul and Germany - Volume 49 Issue 2 - Geeg Woolf

This book is a study of the process conventionally termed 'Romanization' through an investigation of the experience of Rome's Gallic provinces in the late Republic and early empire. Beginning with a rejection of the concept of 'Romanization' it describes the nature of Roman power in Gaul and the Romans' own understanding of these changes. Successiv...

Revisionist studies of Roman imperialism and Romanization continue to show the traces of modern debates on imperialism and colonialism, in particular a tendency to analyse cultural change in terms of the interaction of two ethnic cultures. An analysis of the changing unities and diversities of cultures in Gaul (modern France), and of the transforma...

The vast majority of surviving Roman inscriptions originated in a cultural phenomenon that is characteristic of, and in some senses defines, the early Roman Empire. At the end of the last century B.C. — roughly co-incident, then, with the transition to autocracy, the Roman cultural revolution, and the formative period of provincial cultures through...

Daubigney Alain (ed.). Fonctionnement social de l'âge du fer: opérateurs & hypothèses pour la France. 303 pages, 180 figures. 1993. Lons-le-Saunier: Ministère de l'Education et de la Culture; ISBN 2-905854-11-3 paperback FF300. - Volume 68 Issue 260 - Greg Woolf

The nature, and indeed the reality, of Romanization in the east is controversial. One of the most influential accounts of Romanization in the western provinces notes that ‘by contrast, where Greek was already the language of culture, of government and of inter-regional trade, the Romans carried further the process of Hellenization … in general what...