Greek artefacts, craftsmen and artists had penetrated Rome since regal days; from the second century BC this trickle had become a continuing and influential flood, contributing together with Italic and Etruscan architecture and art, and the developing central Italian and Roman concrete architecture, to the rich tapestry of the art of the capital. Vespasian (69-79), founder of the Flavian dynasty, showed an astute pragmatism in his handling of architecture and art. In the provinces the architectural and art forms characteristic of the Flavian era continued to flourish. Dynamism returned to imperial commissions with the Romano-Spanish Trajan. The age of Hadrian (117-38) proved to be extraordinary, largely because of the extent to which he was able to impress upon it his own many-sided personality: ruler, philhellene, architect, dilettante, poet, traveller and romantic. The rich artistic harvest of the Flavian to the Antonine ages was not just an imperial, but a corporate achievement, one which offered a worthy inheritance to following generations.

Art and architecture

Nag Hammadi and Manichaean Studies

This chapter discusses the total revolution in the nature of the imperial senatorial order. It considers the institutional changes put in place in the course of the century, the new career patterns which resulted, and the evolving political role of senators, both in central, imperial politics and in the governing of localities. The most obvious institutional innovation of the fourth century was the creation of the senate of Constantinople. The new body did not spring fully formed from the head of the emperor Constantine, however, having at least three marked phases of development. The link between the bureaucracy and the senate was fully institutionalized in the reign of Valentinian I and Valens. The fundamental changes in the nature of the senatorial order naturally affected the type of careers being followed by its members. Individual senators and institutional bodies dominated by senators were involved in a wide variety of ways in imperial politics: the formulation of policy and regimes.

Senators and Senates

This thesis examines the dialogue genre in seventeenth-century England. In 1681 when Henry Care established his periodical The Popish Courant he chose the format of a dialogue because people were ‘so set upon dialoging.’ Care’s choice of dialogue for his periodical is indicative of the popularity of dialogue in the seventeenth century. Yet, despite the popularity that dialogue enjoyed in this period it has not received comparative attention by scholars. This thesis seeks to address this gap and make two specific historiographical contributions. Firstly, it demonstrates how the digitization of early modern sources can enable scholars to approach literary history from perspectives that physical books prevent. Using the digital collections of Early English Books Online, British Periodicals Online, and Eighteenth Century Collections Online for its source material this thesis has used a database of dialogues to analyze the genre and provide contextual knowledge about the genre as a whole that can illuminate the rhetorical objectives behind specific uses of dialogue. This is particularly exposed in the final chapter that utilizes this contextual information to understand the appeal of dialogue in Roger L’Estrange’s Observator.

Secondly this thesis adds to the growing number of studies of early modern genres such as pamphlets, newspapers, ballads, and chapbooks. The period under discussion was one of significant change in terms of political and social circumstances and this thesis demonstrates that dialogue was sensitive to these political events. By situating the dialogue within the broader print landscape of seventeenth-century England the thesis maps how dialogue adapted to changing circumstances with pamphlet dialogues, periodical dialogues, and dialogues of the dead, in particular emerging in response to social and political events. Looking at the dialogue in the context of other literary forms this thesis argues that the appeal of dialogue was its flexibility and ability to educate a broad range of people across all demographics of seventeenth-century England.

'Of dialogue, that great and powerful art' : a study of the dialogue genre in seventeenth-century England

This chapter revolves around urban demand for commodities, both staples and luxury goods. This is because it was in the cities that the mass of non-producing consumers and most of the wealthy were concentrated. Goods changed hands in other settings, but the city remained the central place where rural production converged and exchange took place. Demand was continuous and remained high, for two main reasons. First, though traditional civic institutions did decline, the cities on the whole survived as economic units. Second, their economic life was still dominated by a landed elite. The movement of goods over medium or long distances did not dry up in the late empire, as the finds of pottery amply demonstrate. It was above all the participation of the propertied classes in the urban economy which guaranteed a certain level of independent economic activity, a certain volume of market exchange.

Trade, industry and the urban economy

In 1989 the University of Groningen celebrated its 375th anniversary. Near Eastern Studies, in one form or another, have been part of the Groningen curriculum almost from the beginning. For this reason the Department of Middle-Eastern Languages and Cultures decided to contribute to the anniversary celebrations by organizing an international Symposium and a Workshop on The Literary Debate in Semitic and Related Literatures. The topic of the Symposium and the Workshop was chosen and prepared by the members of the research programme "Disclosure of Semitic Texts". Since 1985 the literary debate in the Sumerian, Akkadian, Hebrew, Aramaic/Syriac and Arabic language and literature has been a central theme within this Groningen research programme. Because the research group sees as one of its tasks to place the study of the literary and cultural heritage of the Ancient and Mediaeval Near East also in the wider context of its connection with Classical Antiquity and the European Middle Ages, specialists in Byzantine and Mediaeval Studies were also invited to contribute to the Symposium and Workshop. The present volume contains the contributions presented during the Symposium and Workshop on The Literary Debate in the Semitic and Related Literatures. Some of the more important issues regarding matters of genesis, development and possible interdependence of the dispute poems, dialogues and related texts, which can all be subsumed under the general type of 'debate', are discussed in the introduction, which also reflects a number of points raised in the discussions during the Workshop itself.

Related Literatures

Papers

Dispute poems and dialogues in the ancient and mediaeval Near East : forms and types of literary debates in Semitic and related literatures