The Making of Roman India
The Making of Roman India
$62.99
USDLatin and especially Greek texts of the imperial period contain a wealth of references to 'India'. Professor Parker offers a survey of such texts, read against a wide range of other sources, both archaeological and documentary. He emphasises the social processes whereby the notion of India gained its exotic features, including the role of the Persian empire and of Alexander's expedition. Three kinds of social context receive special attention: the trade in luxury commodities; the political discourse of empire and its limits; and India's status as a place of special knowledge, embodied in 'naked philosophers'. Roman ideas about India ranged from the specific and concrete to the wildly fantastic and the book attempts to account for such variety. It ends by considering the afterlife of such ideas into late antiquity and beyond.
- Explores the concept of Orientalism in its ancient manifestations
- Establishes the importance of India in the mainstream of classical culture
- Provides broad coverage over a thousand years of history with particular emphasis on the Roman Imperial period
Reviews & endorsements
"Parker makes a welcome foray into the study of cultural connections between two of the most significant civiilzations in the ancient world, Rome and India. ...a valuable contribution to a neglected field of scholarship. ...Parker's work has value as an exploration of Indian images in the Roman world. Recommended." --Choice
"...this is a book that through its approach deals with much more than the making of Roman India alone. It is about the nature of Rome as both a successor culture and a world Empire, and as such it deserves to be widely studied and used as a source of inspiration on how to deal with processes of cultural interaction in the Hellenistic and Roman world." --BMCR
"...this work offers much food for thought, not only for studies of Roman conceptions of the world and their empire but for other significant debates in Roman culture."
NECJ, Nevile Morley, University of Bristol
Product details
March 2011Paperback
9780521175364
374 pages
229 × 152 × 21 mm
0.55kg
Available
Table of Contents
- Introduction
- Part I. Creation of a Discourse:
- 1. Achaemenid India and Alexander
- Part II. Features of a Discourse:
- 2. India described
- 3. India depicted
- Part III. Contexts of a Discourse:
- 4. Commodities
- 5. Empire
- 6. Wisdom
- Conclusion: intersections of a discourse.
