Overview

Our conception of the culture and values of the ancient Greco-Roman world is largely based on texts and material evidence left behind by a small and atypical group of city-dwellers. The people of the deep Mediterranean countryside seldom appear in the historical record from antiquity, and almost never as historical actors. This book is the first extended historical ethnography of an ancient village society, based on an extraordinarily rich body of funerary and propitiatory inscriptions from a remote upland region of Roman Asia Minor. Rural kinship structures and household forms are analysed in detail, as are the region's demography, religious life, gender relations, class structure, normative standards and values. Roman north-east Lydia is perhaps the only non-urban society in the Greco-Roman world whose culture can be described at so fine-grained a level of detail: a world of tight-knit families, egalitarian values, hard agricultural labour, village solidarity, honour, piety and love.

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9781009123211

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'In The Lives of Ancient Villages Peter Thonemann has turned to the remains of villages in one particular part of what is now Turkey ... What we find here, he suggests, has important implications for our understanding of Roman power in the area, of family relations and the diversity of Roman imperial culture - and of what the empire felt like from the bottom up.' Kate Cooper, Times Literary Supplement 'Peter Thonemann has written a highly innovative book in a style that is accessible and even entertaining for the non-specialist as well as insightful and stimulating for the expert. His results establish a completely new basis for all those who are interested in rural Asia Minor. But the importance of the book goes far beyond the regional context. It is a case study of high quality that will be valuable for all those who investigate questions of demography, kinship relationships, household structures, rural society, and religious history of the Roman imperial period.' Christof Schuler, Bryn Mawr Classical Review

Author Information

Peter Thonemann is Forrest-Derow Fellow and Tutor in Ancient History at Wadham College, Oxford. His books include The Maeander Valley: A Historical Geography from Antiquity to Byzantium (Cambridge, 2011), which won the 2012 Runciman Prize; The Hellenistic World: Using Coins as Sources (Cambridge, 2015); and An Ancient Dream Manual: Artemidorus' The Interpretation of Dreams (2020). He is currently Editor of the Journal of Roman Studies.

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