This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press’s mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1961.

This book shares little-known facts from and excerpts of primary source documents to correct popular misconceptions about Ancient Rome and to show how those misconceptions became widespread. Roman personalities and history have always had a larger-than-life profile in American popular culture, but most people think of this ancient civilization as merely decadent, cruel, and elitist. Most of our stereotypical conceptions of the empire and its people, however, are wrong. This book corrects popular misconceptions about the ancient Roman world, thus making ancient history relevant and accessible to modern readers and allowing modern critics of American politics and society to draw accurate comparisons. Each chapter discusses how a particular misconception developed, spread, and evolved into what we now believe to be the historical truth. Topics discussed include crucifixion, the destruction of Carthage, Julius Caesar's last words, and Roman hygiene. Excerpts from primary source documents provide evidence of both the rise of the historical fictions and the truths behind the myths.

That there are four canonical versions of the one gospel story is often seen as a problem for Christian faith: where gospels multiply, so too do apparent contradictions that may seem to undermine their truth claims. In Gospel Writing Francis Watson argues that differences and tensions between canonical gospels represent opportunities for theological reflection, not problems for apologetics. Watson presents the formation of the fourfold gospel as the defining moment in the reception of early gospel literature -- and also of Jesus himself as the subject matter of that literature. As the canonical division sets four gospel texts alongside one another, the canon also creates a new, complex, textual entity more than the sum of its parts. A canonical gospel can no longer be regarded as a definitive, self-sufficient account of its subject matter. It must play its part within an intricate fourfold polyphony, and its meaning and significance are thereby transformed. In elaborating these claims, Watson proposes nothing less than a new paradigm for gospel studies — one that engages fully with the available noncanonical material so as to illuminate the historical and theological significance of the canonical.

The essays collected in this book present the first comprehensive appreciation of The Fall of the Roman Empire from historical, historiographical, and cinematic perspectives. The book also provides the principal classical sources on the period. It is a companion to Gladiator: Film and History (Blackwell, 2004) and Spartacus: Film and History (Blackwell, 2007) and completes a triad of scholarly studies on Hollywood’s greatest films about Roman history. A critical re-evaluation of the 1964 epic film The Fall of the Roman Empire, directed by Anthony Mann, from historical, film-historical, and contemporary points of view Presents a collection of scholarly essays and classical sources on the period of Roman history that ancient and modern historians have considered to be the turning point toward the eventual fall of Rome Contains a short essay by director Anthony Mann Includes a map of the Roman Empire and film stills, as well as translations of the principal ancient sources, an extensive bibliography, and a chronology of events

First published in 2001. This is the first substantial reference work in English on the various forms that constitute "life writing." As this term suggests, the Encyclopedia explores not only autobiography and biography proper, but also letters, diaries, memoirs, family histories, case histories, and other ways in which individual lives have been recorded and structured. It includes entries on genres and subgenres, national and regional traditions from around the world, and important auto-biographical writers, as well as articles on related areas such as oral history, anthropology, testimonies, and the representation of life stories in non-verbal art forms.