Overview

A unique variety of approaches to all aspects of urban culture in the ancient world can be found in Urban Dreams and Realities in Antiquity, a collection of 19 essays addressing ancient cities from an interdisciplinary perspective. As the title indicates, the volume considers both how ancient people lived in their cities as physical structures and how they thought with them as ideas and symbols. Essays in this volume deal with texts and sites from Spain to South India, but there is a particular focus on the archaeology and epigraphy of Roman-era Italy, civic identity in the Roman provinces, the Hebrew Bible and Early Christian literature, Vergil and other imperial Latin authors.

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9789004277359

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Reviews

The volume's structure mirrors its theme, as the groupings themselves reflect qualities of a city-cohesive and planned, yet organic and sprawling. (...) The volume as a whole functions as an extended meditation on the epistemological and theoretical problem referenced in the title-the relationship between urban 'dreams' and urban 'realities.' Although each author displays preferences for certain types of evidence (remains or representations), no one takes the 'dreams' either more or less seriously than the 'realities.' Indeed, central to the volume are two implicit acknowledgements: 1) that the ancient urban 'realities' are inaccessible to the modern scholar except by means of imaginative approaches, and 2) that urban 'dreams' no less 'real' than their material counterparts. Jordan Conley (Boston University)

Author Information

Adam Kemezis is associate professor in the Department of History and Classics at the University of Alberta and author of Greek Narratives of the Roman Empire under the Severans (Cambridge, forthcoming) and several articles on Imperial Roman literature and history. Contributors are: Ehud Ben Zvi, Christer Bruun, Raymond L. Capra, Fabio Colivicchi, Edward Dandrow, Megan Daniels, Owen M. Ewald, Tanya K. Henderson, Steven Hijmans, Adam M. Kemezis, Eric Kondratieff, Ralph J. Korner, Matthew Maher, Aloka Parasher-Sen, Darryl A. Phillips, Daniel Unruh, Emily Varto, LuAnn Wandsnider, Josef Wiesehöfer and Ian Douglas Wilson.

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