Henning Börm Bücher

The West of the Roman Empire experienced a chain of dramatic events and development from 396 AD onwards. The last Western emperor was deposed in 476 AD and Justinian abolished the Western Roman court in 554 AD. These events, which mark the transition from antiquity to the Middle Ages in Europe, are often explained by a „civic migration“. However, this book, by contrast, highlights internal Roman conflicts: Western Rome was not conquered. Its successive empires only superseded the authority of the imperial government, when endless civil wars had led to the collapse of Roman rule. A systematic overview of Empire, administration, army, economy and religion completes the presentation.

Das Phänomen der teils bürgerkriegsartigen Konflikte in griechischen Poleis, das die Forschung unter dem Begriff „Stasis" zusammenfasst, ist in der Vergangenheit vorwiegend mit Blick auf die Archaik und Klassik untersucht worden. Henning Börm zeigt hingegen, dass es auch nach Alexander dem Großen in den Städten, die sich zunächst im Spannungsfeld der makedonischen Monarchien, später dann unter römischer Dominanz wiederfanden, vielfach zu Staseis kam. Ausgehend von einer Auswertung der literarischen und epigraphischen Überlieferung fragt Börm nach den Hintergründen und Konsequenzen der auffälligen Anfälligkeit vieler hellenistischer Poleis für innere Konflikte. Die Neigung zur Stasis lässt sich dabei nicht nur als Epiphänomen und Katalysator, sondern auch als Inhibitor von Transformationsprozessen in der griechischen Welt deuten. Statt eine bloße Randerscheinung zu sein, war Stasis vielmehr ein zentraler Faktor, dessen Analyse dazu beiträgt, sowohl die Entwicklung der Poleis zwischen Alexander und Augustus besser zu verstehen als auch die Mechanismen der römischen Expansion im Osten des Mittelmeerraums.

Die Festschrift zum 65. Geburtstag von Peter Weiß, Ordinarius für Alte Geschichte an der Christian-Albrechts-Universität zu Kiel von 1987 bis 2008, enthält 16 Beiträge, mit denen Kollegen und Schüler den Jubilar ehren möchten. Der Titel des Buches nimmt Bezug auf Forschungsschwerpunkte und Methoden von Peter Weiß, der durch die meisterliche Kombination von Quellen unterschiedlichster Gattungen grundlegende Erkenntnisse zur griechischen und römischen Geschichte erzielt und diese in zahlreichen Aufsätzen veröffentlicht hat. In methodisch ähnlicher Weise werden von den Beiträgern der Festschrift unpublizierte oder wenig beachtete Denkmäler diskutiert und historisch eingeordnet. Dabei reicht das Spektrum von Grabmälern, Ehrenmonumenten und Votiven bis zu Militärdiplomen und Gerichtsprotokollen.

Civil war is the most radical form of political conflict. This volume analyses the impact of civil war on society and culture in Greco-Roman antiquity. The collected papers examine phenomena such as tyrannicide, staseis and usurpations from the classical age to late antiquity. The focus lies on the lasting impact violence and disorder had on political discourse and memory culture. In particular, the contributions explore how internal conflicts were staged and performed. Beyond spectacular triumphal celebrations there existed a broad range of symbolic forms of communication pertaining to civil rituals of reconciliation, reintegration and restoration as well as acts of commemoration and condemnation. The multidisciplinary volume aims at contributing to a better understanding of the performative and communicative logic of civil conflict within the ancient societies of Greece and Rome.

The civil wars of the first century BCE disrupted Roman society, which in turn was a major cause of the destabilisation of the political system. While this has of course long been recognised, the cultural dimension of the disintegration of the res publica demands equal attention. The present volume aims for an analysis of the more implicit, yet fundamental effects which the increasingly militarised conflict had on Roman society, starting with the assumption that the radical dynamics and intrinsic brutality constituted a completely new experience for contemporaries. To solve this problem, Romans of the late Republican period devised multiple strategies for coping with the phenomenon of civil war. While some turned to narrative patterns deployed by the Greeks who had been accustomed to civil conflict for centuries, the bella civilia also influenced many other aspects of cultural life. The latent fear of permanent civil strife thus became a source of innovation on multiple levels which (re-)shaped Roman collective imaginary. The resulting structures and developments constituted a highly elaborate and comprehensive “culture of civil war”.

After having been for decades the province of a relatively small group of scholars, the Hellenistic polis has become central to the research agenda of Ancient historians more broadly. This development can be traced from the early nineties of the last century, and has picked up pace in a sustained fashion at the turn of the millennium. Recent research has started approaching the Greek polis of the centuries between Alexander and Cleopatra as a specific historical phenomenon, striving to define its most peculiar aspects from as many angles as possible, and to point to new avenues of interpretation that might contribute to recognizing its historical role. In this general framework, this volume attempts to explore new lines of thought, to question established ways of reading the evidence, and to take stock of recent developments. The contributors do not subscribe to any particular shared approach; on the contrary, their approaches and questions stem from many different scholarly traditions and methodologies. Rather than seeking to achieve a complete coverage, the volume provides a selection of current research agendas, in many cases offering glimpses of ongoing projects.

When analyzing the character of monarchic regimes and their strategies for creating obedience and acceptance, the focus usually lies on the ruler ideology and the self-representation of the individual monarch. However, the contributions to the present volume try to approach the matter from the angle of the – real or merely anticipated – criticism against the background of which monarchic legitimization was expressed: what conditions, what elements, and what strategies were characteristic of a critical discussion of monocracy in antiquity, and to what extent was the relationship between ruler ideology and antimonarchic sentiment marked by mutual dependence? What significance did the eternal background noise possess which as a contre-discourse compelled rulers in Egypt, Persia, Judea, Greece and Rome to justify themselves again and again?

The present volume, dedicated to the memory of the late Zeev Rubin (1942 to 2009), Professor of Ancient History and Languages at Tel Aviv University, includes contributions of friends and colleagues connected with his central fields of research – the Late Roman, Sasanian, and Early Islamic Mediterranean and Near East as well as Iranian and Early Islamic historical traditions. Just like Rubin’s own works, the articles collected in this volume aim to examine the political and mental “landscapes” of the Near East in Late Antiquity, as well as Sasanian and Early Islamic concepts of history and the variety of political and cultural contacts between Oriens and Occidens. The following authors have contributed to this publication: Henning Börm, Matthew Canepa, Geoffrey Greatrex, Rika Gyselen, James Howard-Johnston, Avshalom Laniado, Fergus Millar, Karin Mosig-Walburg, Antonio Panaino, Parvaneh Pourshariati, Peter Riedlberger, Nikolaus Schindel, Joel Walker, Ursula Weber, Michael Whitby and Josef Wiesehöfer.