Ostia in Late Antiquity

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Cambridge University Press, Jul 22, 2013 - History - 287 pages
Ostia Antica - Rome's ancient harbor. Its houses and apartments, taverns and baths, warehouses, shops, and temples have long contributed to a picture of daily life in Rome. Recent investigations have revealed, however, that life in Ostia did not end with a bang but with a whimper. Only on the cusp of the Middle Ages did the town's residents entrench themselves in a smaller settlement outside the walls. What can this new evidence tell us about life in the later Roman Empire, as society navigated an increasingly Christian world? Ostia in Late Antiquity, the first academic study on Ostia to appear in English in almost 20 years and the first to treat the Late Antique period, tackles the dynamics of this transformative time. Drawing on new archaeological research, including the author's own, and incorporating both material and textual sources, it presents a social history of the town from the third through ninth century.
 

Contents

Introduction
1
BACKGRO
17
Roman religions and the long reach
83
A city in motion shifting
201
Building identities around the eloelz
216
Postseript
237
Index
283
Copyright

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About the author (2013)

Dr Douglas Boin is Assistant Professor of History at Saint Louis University, Missouri. He is an expert on the religious history of the Roman Empire, particularly as it pertains to the 'pagan', Christian and Jewish world of the ancient Mediterranean. Since 2010 he has taught in the Department of Classics at Georgetown University, Washington DC. His scholarship has appeared in The Journal of Roman Studies and The American Journal of Archaeology and he has authored entries on synagogues and church buildings for the multi-volume reference work The Oxford Encyclopedia of the Greco-Roman World. For ten years, he worked as an archaeologist in Rome, studying the site of a Roman synagogue at Ostia Antica, the harbor town of the empire's capital. He speaks regularly on aspects of late Roman history, archaeology and religion at national and international conferences.

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