Bøger af Clifford Ando

This book provides a new approach to the study of the History of Roman Law. It collects the first results of the European Research Council Project, Scriptores iuris Romani, highlighting important methodological issues, together with innovative reconstructions of the profiles of some ancient jurists and works.

The Roman empire during the period framed by the accession of Septimus Severus in 193 and the rise of Diocletian in 284 has conventionally been regarded as one of crisis. This book describes and integrates the contrasting histories of different parts of the empire and assesses the impacts of administrative, political and religious change.

What did the Romans know about their gods? Why did they perform the rituals of their religion, and what motivated them to change those rituals? To these questions Clifford Ando proposes simple answers: In contrast to ancient Christians, who had faith, Romans had knowledge, and their knowledge was empirical in orientation. In other words, the Romans acquired knowledge of the gods through observation of the world, and their rituals were maintained or modified in light of what they learned. After a preface and opening chapters that lay out this argument about knowledge and place it in context, The Matter of the Gods pursues a variety of themes essential to the study of religion in history.

The Roman empire remains unique. Although Rome claimed to rule the world, it did not. Rather, its uniqueness stems from the culture it created and the loyalty it inspired across an area that stretched from the Tyne to the Euphrates. Moreover, the empire created this culture with a bureaucracy smaller than that of a typical late-twentieth-century research university. In approaching this problem, Clifford Ando does not ask the ever-fashionable question, Why did the Roman empire fall? Rather, he asks, Why did the empire last so long? Imperial Ideology and Provincial Loyalty in the Roman Empire argues that the longevity of the empire rested not on Roman military power but on a gradually realized consensus that Roman rule was justified. This consensus was itself the product of a complex conversation between the central government and its far-flung peripheries. Ando investigates the mechanisms that sustained this conversation, explores its contribution to the legitimation of Roman power, and reveals as its product the provincial absorption of the forms and content of Roman political and legal discourse. Throughout, his sophisticated and subtle reading is informed by current thinking on social formation by theorists such as Max Weber, Jurgen Habermas, and Pierre Bourdieu.

Draws on expertise from lawyers, historians of philosophy, and scholars of classical studies and ancient history, to investigate, historically and comparatively, the relationship between the law, legal institutions, and the boundaries of knowledge in classical Greece and Rome.

Law, Language, and Empire in the Roman Tradition demonstrates how Roman civil law functioned as an instrument of empire by tracking its application to the challenges of governing diverse and distant people.

Lucid, insightful, and innovative, the essays in Roman Social Imaginaries constitute some of today's most original thinking about the power of language in the ancient world.

Demonstrating how religion is talked about in the languages of very different academic disciplines, this book addresses various issues: fundamentalism, the role of religion in American democracy, the tension between secular liberalism and religious rhetoric, monotheism versus pluralism, and the relationship between poverty and liberation theology.