The market today resembles a Leviathan, a great beast growing in accordance with no law outside of the vain rapacity of its uncanny monstrosity, extending its boundaries beyond the nation-state, beyond government intervention, beyond ecologically safe limits and beyond our will to enter into it. It has become properly automatic, functioning for no purpose outside of itsel…
Cities, Monuments and Objects in the Roman and Byzantine Levant celebrates Gabriel Mazor and his lifetime of work at the monumental city of Nysa-Scythopolis, Bet She?an Bays?n. This metropolis, part of the storied Decapolis, or league of ten cities, that flourished during the Hellenistic, Roman-Byzantine and very early Islamic periods until the devastating earthquake of AD 748, has been the sin…
“Most things in the history of Greece have become a subject of dispute” is how Pausanias, the second-century a.d. author of a famous guide to sites throughout Greece, summed up the challenge and the fascination of thinking about the significance of ancient Greek history (Guide to Greece 4.2.3). The subject was disputed then because Pausanias, a Greek, lived and wrote under the Roman Empire,…
It is proposed here to show upon what principles and by what rules Greek and Roman society was governed. We unite in the same study both the Greeks and the Romans, because these two peoples, who were two branches of a single race, and who spoke two idioms of a single language, also had the same institutions and the same principles of government, and passed through a series of similar revolution…
A Great Civilization Many people believe that the greatest of all the civilizations of the ancient world was the civilization of Greece. However, it is a little misleading to speak about ancient Greece as though it were a single civilization. Ancient Greece was not a unified country. It was a collection of independent city-states. The ancient Greek word for city-state was polis (/poh* lihs/). A…