Why read Hellenism and Empire?

Book cover of Hellenism and Empire: Language, Classicism, and Power in the Greek World

Book description

Hellenism and Empire explores identity, politics, and culture in the Greek world of the first three centuries AD, the period known as the second sophistic. The sources of this identity were the words and deeds of classical Greece, and the emphasis placed on Greekness and Greek heritage was far greater…

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Why read it?

1 author picked Hellenism and Empire as one of their favorite books. Why do they recommend it?

Michael Kulikowski

Author

This is a dense study of what was once cordoned off as ‘the Second Sophistic’, the flourishing of a revived Classical Greek culture under Roman hegemony. It’s the first really successful transformation of that perspective to a much broader vision of ‘being Greek under Rome’. It gets you to take seriously the many different ways in which language shapes identity, and places the medical writings of Galen and the sprawling histories of Cassius Dio back into the mainstream of Greek cultural history.

From Michael's list on Rome in the third century.