Table of Contents

Part I. Empire: 1. Germs and Empire: The Agency of the Microscopic Kyle Harper; 2. Imperial Integration on Rome's Atlantic Rim Carlos Norena; 3. The Ambitions of Government: Sovereignty and Control in the Ancient Countryside Clifford Ando; 4. Contingency and Context: The Origins of the Jewish War against Rome Erich S. Gruen; Part II. Religion: 5. The First Christian Family of Egypt Sabine R. Huebner; 6. Missionaries, Pious Merchants, Freelance Religious Experts, and the Spread of Christianity Eric Rebillard; 7. Christian Piety in Late Antiquity: Contexts and Contestations Claudia Rapp; 8. Ausonius at the Edge of Empire: Consular Poetics as Cognitive Improvisation Mark Vessey; 9. Peregrinationes in Psalmos Catherine Conybeare; 10. Muhammad's Rivals: Prophets in Late Antique Arabia Glen W. Bowersock; Epilogue: 11. Brent Shaw: An Intellectual Profile Peter Brown.

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Cutting-edge explorations of the Roman Empire, including politics, religion, climate change, pandemic, and the rise of Christianity.

About the Author

Harriet I. Flower is Andrew Fleming West Professor of Classics at Princeton University. She is the author of Ancestor Masks and Aristocratic Power in Roman Culture (1996), The Art of Forgetting: Disgrace and Oblivion in Roman Political Culture (2006), Roman Republics (2010) and The Dancing Lares and the Serpent in the Garden: Religion at the Roman Street Corner (2017), which received the Charles J. Goodwin Award of Merit from the Society of Classical Studies in 2018 . She has also edited The Cambridge Companion to the Roman Republic (2nd edition, 2014).