What significations did Egypt have for the Romans a century after Actium and afterwards? How did Greek imperial authors respond to the Roman fascination with the Nile? This book explores Egypt's aftermath beyond the hostility of Augustan rhetoric, and Greek and Roman topoi of Egyptian "barbarism." Set against history and material culture, Julio-Claudian, Flavian, Antonine, and Severan authors reveal a multivalent Egypt that defines Rome's increasingly diffuse identity while remaining a tertium quid between Roman Selfhood and foreign Otherness. Vespasian's Alexandrian uprising, his recognition of Egypt as his power basis, and his patronage of Isis re-conceptualize Egypt past the ideology of Augustan conquest. The imperialistic exhilaration and moral angst attending Rome's Flavian cosmopolitanism find an expressive means in the geographically and semantically nebulous Nile. The rapprochement with Egypt continues in the second and early third centuries. The "Hellenic" Antonines and the African-Syrian Severans expand perceptions of geography and identity within an increasingly decentralized and diverse empire. In the political and cultural discourses of this period, the capacious symbolics of Egypt validate the empire's religious and ethnic pluralism.

Domesticating Empire is the first contextually-oriented monograph on Egyptian imagery in Roman households. Caitlín Barrett draws on case studies from Flavian Pompeii to investigate the close association between representations of Egypt and a particular type of Roman household space: the domestic garden. Through paintings and mosaics portraying the Nile, canals that turned the garden itself into a miniature "Nilescape," and statuary depicting Egyptian themes, many gardens in Pompeii offered ancient visitors evocations of a Roman vision of Egypt. Simultaneously faraway and familiar, these imagined landscapes made the unfathomable breadth of empire compatible with the familiarity of home. In contrast to older interpretations that connect Roman "Aegyptiaca" to the worship of Egyptian gods or the problematic concept of "Egyptomania," a contextual analysis of these garden assemblages suggests new possibilities for meaning. In Pompeian houses, Egyptian and Egyptian-looking objects and images interacted with their settings to construct complex entanglements of "foreign" and "familiar," "self" and "other." Representations of Egyptian landscapes in domestic gardens enabled individuals to present themselves as sophisticated citizens of empire. Yet at the same time, household material culture also exerted an agency of its own: domesticizing, familiarizing, and "Romanizing" once-foreign images and objects. That which was once imagined as alien and potentially dangerous was now part of the domus itself, increasingly incorporated into cultural constructions of what it meant to be "Roman." Featuring brilliant illustrations in both color and black and white, Domesticating Empire reveals the importance of material culture in transforming household space into a microcosm of empire.

Explores how a cultural clash between traditional Pharaonic and latter-day Ptolemaic Egypt is used to mirror the Roman civil war.

Biography is one of the most widespread literary genres worldwide. Biographies and autobiographies of actors, politicians, Nobel Prize winners, and other famous figures have never been more prominent in book shops and publishers' catalogues. This Handbook offers a wide-ranging, multi-authored survey on biography in Antiquity from its earliest representatives to Late Antiquity. It aims to be a broad introduction and a reference tool on the one hand, and to move significantly beyond the state-of-the-art on the other. To this end, it addresses conceptual questions about this sprawling genre, offers both in-depth readings of key texts and diachronic studies, and deals with the reception of ancient biography across multiple eras up to the present day. In addition, it takes a wide approach to the concept of ancient biography by examining biographical depictions in different textual and visual media (epigraphy, sculpture, architecture) and by providing outlines of biographical developments in ancient and late antique cultures other than Graeco-Roman. Highly accessible, this book aims at a broad audience ranging from specialists to newcomers in the field. Chapters provide English translations of ancient (and modern) terminology and citations. In addition, all individual chapters are concluded by a section containing suggestions for further reading on their specific topic.

Fides in Flavian Literature explores the ideology of "good faith" (fides) during the time of the emperors Vespasian, Titus, and Domitian (69–96 CE), the new imperial dynasty that gained power in the wake of the civil wars of the period. The contributors to this volume consider the significance and semantic range of this Roman value in works that deal in myth, contemporary poetry, and history in both prose and verse. Though it does not claim to offer the comprehensive "last word" on fides in Flavian Rome, the book aims to show that fides in this period was subjected to a particularly striking and special brand of contestation and reconceptualization, used to interrogate the broad cultural changes and anxieties of the Flavian period as well as connect to a republican and imperial past. The editors argue that fides was both a vehicle for reconciliation and a means to test the nature of "good faith" in the wake of a devastating and divisive period in Roman history.

Although it was labeled an anti-epic for trumping the celebratory scope of the Roman national epos, Lucan’s Bellum Civile is a hymn to lost republican liberty composed under Nero’s tyrannical empire. Lucan lost his life in a foiled conspiracy to replace the emperor, but his poem survived the wreckage of antiquity and enjoyed uninterrupted readership. The present collection samples the most current approaches to Lucan’s poem, its themes, its dialogue with other texts, its reception in medieval and early modern literature, and its relevance to audiences of all times.