Greg Woolf
Datos Biográficos
| ID | 267601 |
|---|---|
| NOMBRE | Greg Woolf |
| NOMBRES | Greg |
| APELLIDO | Woolf |
| FIRMA | WOOLF G |
| AFILIACIONES | University of St Andrews |
| ORCID | 0000-0003-3470-9061 |
| VERIFICADO | Sí |
| TOTAL DE OBRAS | 60 |
| TOTAL DE CITAS | 600 |
| TOTAL COMO AUTOR | 55 |
| TOTAL COMO EDITOR | 5 |
| PRIMER AÑO DE PUBLICACIÓN | 1990 |
| AÑO MÁS RECIENTE DE PUBLICACIÓN | 2025 |
| ÍNDICE H | 9 |
Alien Magic
Inscribed objects reveal a world of magical practice that is poorly described by ancient texts or modern theories of magic. They cast vivid light on conflict and fear within the complex social worlds of the Roman Empire from its metropolitan capital to its most remote peripheries. Ancient discourse co-opted magical practice to assert an ideological, moral, and political order against its actual and imagined opponents. Modern anthropologies of mag…
Ross Iain Thomas 1978–2022
Patronage of the rural poor in the Roman world
We begin with two paradoxes. The first is to do with the existence of the poor in antiquity, the second with their survival. The poor were ubiquitous but are more or less invisible. The poor you will have always with you’ are words spoken by an unusually sympathetic observer. The regular spokesmen for ancient society, the standard-bearers of Greco-Roman urban culture, were less concerned with the poor and disinclined to broadcast their presence
Locating Resilience in Ancient Urban Networks
One of the striking features of ancient Mediterranean urbanism is the capacity of individual cities to weather all kinds of shocks, from earthquakes, floods, droughts, plagues, and crop failures to sieges and violent shifts in political gravity. This is all the more remarkable given the environmental precarity of ancient Mediterranean life, and the relative instability of so many of the political entities that ruled them. This paper considers the…
Gendering Roman Imperialism
For more than fifty years the standard debates about Roman Imperialism were written more or less entirely in terms of male agency, male competition, and male participation. Not only have women been marginalized in these narratives as just so much collateral damage but there has been little engagement with gender history more widely, with the linkages between masculinity and warfare, with the representation of relations of power in terms of gender…
Religion in the Roman Empire
The Roman Empire was home to a fascinating variety of different cults and religions. Its enormous extent, the absence of a precisely definable state religion and constant exchanges with the religions and cults of conquered peoples and of neighbouring cultures resulted in a multifaceted diversity of religious convictions and practices. This volume provides a compelling view of central aspects of cult and religion in the Roman Empire, among them th…
Kyle Harper, The Fate of Rome. Climate, Disease and the End of an Empire
Kyle Harper, The Fate of Rome. Climate, Disease and the End of an Empire (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2017), 440 pp. ISBN: 978-0691166834, £27.95 (hbk)
The rulers ruled
This paper considers a series of problems that emerge from conventional uses of the term ‘power’ in discussing the Roman world. Drawing on critiques and reformulations of the concept by social theorists it explores the operation of power in two spheres, first at the centre of the empire where emperors, aristocrats and other courtiers competed for influence, and second in the provinces where identity politics and economic interests intersected in …
Sensorivm
SENSORIVM: The Senses in Roman Polytheism explores how a range of cults and rituals were perceived and experienced by participants through one or more senses. The present collection brings together papers from an international group of researchers all inspired by ‘the sensory turn’. Focusing on a wide range of ritual traditions from around the ancient Roman world, they explore the many ways in which smell and taste, sight and sound, separately an…
Moving Peoples in the Early Roman Empire
The opening pages of James C. Scott’s The Art of Not Being Governed offer a global account of the political economy and ecology of early states. The first states, for Scott, were miniscule authoritarian regimes nestled on arable plains and plateaux and surrounded by vast ungoverned peripheries of mountain, marshland, swamp, steppe and desert. Around them peripheral populations were both natural trading partners – because the ecologies of their re…
Fragments of an Emperor’s Religious Policy
Neither the concept of “imperial policy” nor of “religion” are easily applied to antiquity. Yet the activities of Roman emperors often did have consequences for religious activity, and their behaviour was not necessarily chaotic or random. Hadrian provides a good case for examining how religious activity was incorporated into ancient biography and historical writing, and how it was related to other fields of imperial conduct. A good deal is re…
Pliny’s Province
Only Connect? Network Analysis and Religious Change in the Roman World
The emergence during the Roman Empire of new religious forms and groups alongside the collective cults of the city and ruler worship invites analysis in terms of various kinds of network theory. Some of the main version of network theory currently in use are examined, and their applicability to ancient material is discussed and assessed. Network thinking turns out to be very useful, but the problems in conducting a more formal network analysis ar…
Empires, Diasporas and the Emergence of Religions
A summary is not available for this content so a preview has been provided. Please use the Get access link above for information on how to access this content.
Authority and Expertise in Ancient Scientific Culture
Roman things and Roman people
Roma
Ancient Illiteracy
Ancient writing is conventionally approached as a counterpart of speech, as in the dyad orality/literacy. Alphabetical writing systems are often regarded as superior precisely because they are better able to record speech. This paper takes inspiration from the work on ancient Near Eastern writing systems and considers ancient literacy as a general competence in handling sign systems that are often as much about numbers and quantities as about pho…
Pliny/Trajan and the Poetics of Empire
A series of recent articles have challenged literal and realist readings of the tenth book of Pliny the Younger's Letters. This article builds on these to suggest some poetic effects of this addition to the collection
Romanization 2.0 and its alternatives
It would be churlish (as well as difficult), when my own work is treated so generously in this article, to object to its thrust too strongly. But agreement does not make for much of a dialogue! Let me state my agreements briefly, then.1.Versluys has nailed the terminological impasse: 'Romanization' is far worse than Romanization, because it has all the sins of the former without its conviction. But I have less sympathy for those TRAC speakers 'or…
Religious Dimensions of the Self in the Second Century CE
Did new senses of the self emerge in the High Roman Empire, and if so what were the religious corollaries? Were such changes connected to processes of institutional change? Could they usefully be described as »individualisation«? These are the key concerns of the authors of this volume. They address the field of Hellenistic philosophy, medical texts and the literature of the so-called Second Sophistic, which all have been recruited to this debate…
Ancient Libraries
Ritual and the Individual in Roman Religion
This chapter takes up the notions of religious individuation as a biographical process of acquiring religious roles and experiences. Roman religion was no abstract system, but action carefully drafted on tradition in an always changing present, and on the action of competent actors. Inscriptional protocols of rituals and highly individualized historiographical narratives offer ample evidence. The growth in complexity of Mediterranean societies fr…
Regional productions in early Roman Gaul
One of archaeology’s main contributions to the debate over the nature of the ancient economy has been to demonstrate that, during the early Roman period, a number of productions developed to an unprecedented scale, providing mass-produced goods for markets that were large, and sometimes relatively distant. Arretine ware, the Tuscan wine transported in Dressel 1 amphorae, Baetican oil and African grain all come into this category.1 Moses Finley of…
Generations of aristocracy
This paper sets out to examine issues of continuity and change in the social hierarchies of the peoples of the Gallic interior, between the late Iron Age and the early Roman period. This part of the empire is one in which we might reasonably expect to find substantial continuity of social structure. Many scholars have argued that this is indeed the case, notwithstanding the evident changes in material culture. This paper argues that the opposite …
Becoming Roman, staying Greek
The nature, and indeed the reality, of Romanization in the east is controversial. One of the most influential accounts of Romanization in the western provinces notes that ‘by contrast, where Greek was already the language of culture, of government and of inter-regional trade, the Romans carried further the process of Hellenization ... in general what was specifically Latin in the common civilization of the empire made little impact in the east’, …
Becoming Roman
This book is a study of the process conventionally termed 'Romanization' through an investigation of the experience of Rome's Gallic provinces in the late Republic and early empire. Beginning with a rejection of the concept of 'Romanization' it describes the nature of Roman power in Gaul and the Romans' own understanding of these changes. Successive chapters then map the chronology and geography of change and offer new interpretations of urbanism…
Monumental Writing and the Expansion of Roman Society in the Early Empire
The vast majority of surviving Roman inscriptions originated in a cultural phenomenon that is characteristic of, and in some senses defines, the early Roman Empire. At the end of the last century B.C. — roughly co-incident, then, with the transition to autocracy, the Roman cultural revolution, and the formative period of provincial cultures throughout the Empire — an epigraphic boom occurred, in Italy and in every province of the Empire. That exp…
Beyond Romans and natives
Revisionist studies of Roman imperialism and Romanization continue to show the traces of modern debates on imperialism and colonialism, in particular a tendency to analyse cultural change in terms of the interaction of two ethnic cultures. An analysis of the changing unities and diversities of cultures in Gaul (modern France), and of the transformation of Roman culture during and as a result of imperial expansion, suggests a new view of the natur…
Imperialism, empire and the integration of the Roman economy
While the political economy of the Roman empire is well understood, the nature of the economy as a whole is a matter of fierce debate. A range of competing hypotheses about the nature of the Roman economy are presented, and then distributions of amphorae and certain other artefact categories are used to suggest some broad patterns which successful theories of the Roman economy will have to address. In particular, it is argued that regional distri…
Food, poverty and patronage
CIBO, POVERTÀ E PROTEZIONE SOCIALE In quest'articolo si vuole analizzare il carattere dell'azione imperiale attraverso un riesame degli alimenta in Italia. Si ipotizza che queste distribuzioni alimentari non venivano organizzate per risollevare dalle difficoltà economiche particolari regioni o particolari gruppi sociali dell'Italia romana. La distribuzione di alimenti, epigraficamente attestata, è in relazione alla distribuzione generale delle is…
Pliny/Trajan and the Poetics of Empire
A series of recent articles have challenged literal and realist readings of the tenth book of Pliny the Younger's Letters. This article builds on these to suggest some poetic effects of this addition to the collection
World-systems analysis and the Roman empire
An abstract is not available for this content so a preview has been provided. Please use the Get access link above for information on how to access this content
Rethinking the Oppida
The appearance of large sites known as oppida, and generally qualified as urban or proto‐urban, is a central feature of all accounts of late Iron Age Europe. But the category of oppidum groups together sites that are very diverse in morphology, scale and function, and excludes other sites that share many of the same features, but lack fortifications and/or are located outside the supposed heartland of the oppida civilisation. Few oppida seem to b…
Romanization 2.0 and its alternatives
It would be churlish (as well as difficult), when my own work is treated so generously in this article, to object to its thrust too strongly. But agreement does not make for much of a dialogue! Let me state my agreements briefly, then.1.Versluys has nailed the terminological impasse: 'Romanization' is far worse than Romanization, because it has all the sins of the former without its conviction. But I have less sympathy for those TRAC speakers 'or…
Only Connect? Network Analysis and Religious Change in the Roman World
The emergence during the Roman Empire of new religious forms and groups alongside the collective cults of the city and ruler worship invites analysis in terms of various kinds of network theory. Some of the main version of network theory currently in use are examined, and their applicability to ancient material is discussed and assessed. Network thinking turns out to be very useful, but the problems in conducting a more formal network analysis ar…
Women and the Roman City in the Latin West
Roman Cities, as conventionally studied, seem to be dominated by men. Yet as the contributions to this volume—which deals with the Roman cities of Italy and the western provinces in the late Republic and early Empire—show, women occupied a wide range of civic roles. Women had key roles to play in urban economies, and a few were prominent public figures, celebrated for their generosity and for their priestly eminence, and commemorated with public …
The Present State and Future Scope of Roman Archaeology
Roman archaeology is in good shape, institutionally, financially, and in terms of the high quality of current research. Both fieldwork and publication have increased in quality in the last few decades and the discipline is better at disseminating information widely, albeit through fairly traditional media. The discipline is fortunate in the quality and commitment of its academic leaders and the energy and creativity of many other researchers, in …
Gendering Roman Imperialism
For more than fifty years the standard debates about Roman Imperialism were written more or less entirely in terms of male agency, male competition, and male participation. Not only have women been marginalized in these narratives as just so much collateral damage but there has been little engagement with gender history more widely, with the linkages between masculinity and warfare, with the representation of relations of power in terms of gender…
Generations of aristocracy
This paper sets out to examine issues of continuity and change in the social hierarchies of the peoples of the Gallic interior, between the late Iron Age and the early Roman period. This part of the empire is one in which we might reasonably expect to find substantial continuity of social structure. Many scholars have argued that this is indeed the case, notwithstanding the evident changes in material culture. This paper argues that the opposite …
Generations of aristocracy
This paper sets out to examine issues of continuity and change in the social hierarchies of the peoples of the Gallic interior, between the late Iron Age and the early Roman period. This part of the empire is one in which we might reasonably expect to find substantial continuity of social structure. Many scholars have argued that this is indeed the case, notwithstanding the evident changes in material culture. This paper argues that the opposite …
Sensorivm
SENSORIVM: The Senses in Roman Polytheism explores how a range of cults and rituals were perceived and experienced by participants through one or more senses. The present collection brings together papers from an international group of researchers all inspired by ‘the sensory turn’. Focusing on a wide range of ritual traditions from around the ancient Roman world, they explore the many ways in which smell and taste, sight and sound, separately an…
Slavery and rebellion in the Roman World 140 BC–170 BC
(1991). Slavery and rebellion in the Roman World 140 BC–170 BC. History of European Ideas: Vol. 13, No. 5, pp. 643-644
Religion in the Roman Empire
The Roman Empire was home to a fascinating variety of different cults and religions. Its enormous extent, the absence of a precisely definable state religion and constant exchanges with the religions and cults of conquered peoples and of neighbouring cultures resulted in a multifaceted diversity of religious convictions and practices. This volume provides a compelling view of central aspects of cult and religion in the Roman Empire, among them th…
Ancient Illiteracy
Ancient writing is conventionally approached as a counterpart of speech, as in the dyad orality/literacy. Alphabetical writing systems are often regarded as superior precisely because they are better able to record speech. This paper takes inspiration from the work on ancient Near Eastern writing systems and considers ancient literacy as a general competence in handling sign systems that are often as much about numbers and quantities as about pho…
Diasporas and colonization in Classical Antiquity
During the early Holocene humans had followed the retreating glaciers and repopulated Europe. The subsequent spread of agriculture westwards and northwards raised population densities across the continent and provided the conditions for complex societies to emerge. Long‐distance exchange can be documented for the Neolithic and Bronze Ages in many commodities, among them spondylus shells, stone axes, amber, and metal ores. Transfers of technology …
World-systems analysis and the Roman empire
An abstract is not available for this content so a preview has been provided. Please use the Get access link above for information on how to access this content
Food, poverty and patronage
CIBO, POVERTÀ E PROTEZIONE SOCIALE In quest'articolo si vuole analizzare il carattere dell'azione imperiale attraverso un riesame degli alimenta in Italia. Si ipotizza che queste distribuzioni alimentari non venivano organizzate per risollevare dalle difficoltà economiche particolari regioni o particolari gruppi sociali dell'Italia romana. La distribuzione di alimenti, epigraficamente attestata, è in relazione alla distribuzione generale delle is…
The Romanization of Britain
Slavery and rebellion in the Roman World 140 BC–170 BC
(1991). Slavery and rebellion in the Roman World 140 BC–170 BC. History of European Ideas: Vol. 13, No. 5, pp. 643-644
Tribal Societies in Northern Gaul. An Anthropological Perspective
Imperialism, empire and the integration of the Roman economy
While the political economy of the Roman empire is well understood, the nature of the economy as a whole is a matter of fierce debate. A range of competing hypotheses about the nature of the Roman economy are presented, and then distributions of amphorae and certain other artefact categories are used to suggest some broad patterns which successful theories of the Roman economy will have to address. In particular, it is argued that regional distri…
Les prospections ACO en vallée de Somme
ACO is a multy-period field survey carried out by the Universities of Amiens, Cambridge and Oxford in the valley of the Somme. This interim report summarises the aims and research design of the project, and reports on the seasons held in September 1991 and September 1992. The aims are to assess how complete and how representative a record of the ancient landscape is provided by aereal photography ; to investigate the transformation of the late pr…
Rethinking the Oppida
The appearance of large sites known as oppida, and generally qualified as urban or proto‐urban, is a central feature of all accounts of late Iron Age Europe. But the category of oppidum groups together sites that are very diverse in morphology, scale and function, and excludes other sites that share many of the same features, but lack fortifications and/or are located outside the supposed heartland of the oppida civilisation. Few oppida seem to b…
Shorter Notices
Journal Article Shorter Notices Get access GREG WOOLF GREG WOOLF Brasenose CollegeOxford Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar The English Historical Review, Volume CIX, Issue 431, April 1994, Pages 399-a–399, https://doi.org/10.1093/ehr/CIX.431.399-a Published: 01 April 1994
Becoming Roman, staying Greek
The nature, and indeed the reality, of Romanization in the east is controversial. One of the most influential accounts of Romanization in the western provinces notes that ‘by contrast, where Greek was already the language of culture, of government and of inter-regional trade, the Romans carried further the process of Hellenization ... in general what was specifically Latin in the common civilization of the empire made little impact in the east’, …
Monumental Writing and the Expansion of Roman Society in the Early Empire
The vast majority of surviving Roman inscriptions originated in a cultural phenomenon that is characteristic of, and in some senses defines, the early Roman Empire. At the end of the last century B.C. — roughly co-incident, then, with the transition to autocracy, the Roman cultural revolution, and the formative period of provincial cultures throughout the Empire — an epigraphic boom occurred, in Italy and in every province of the Empire. That exp…
Beyond Romans and natives
Revisionist studies of Roman imperialism and Romanization continue to show the traces of modern debates on imperialism and colonialism, in particular a tendency to analyse cultural change in terms of the interaction of two ethnic cultures. An analysis of the changing unities and diversities of cultures in Gaul (modern France), and of the transformation of Roman culture during and as a result of imperial expansion, suggests a new view of the natur…
Becoming Roman
This book is a study of the process conventionally termed 'Romanization' through an investigation of the experience of Rome's Gallic provinces in the late Republic and early empire. Beginning with a rejection of the concept of 'Romanization' it describes the nature of Roman power in Gaul and the Romans' own understanding of these changes. Successive chapters then map the chronology and geography of change and offer new interpretations of urbanism…
Literacy and Power in the Ancient World
Outside the Hillfort Ramparts in Iron Age France
International audience
Becoming Roman
1. On Romanization 2. Roman power and the Gauls 3. The civilising ethos 4. Mapping cultural change 5. Urbanising the Gauls 6. The culture of the countryside 7. Consuming Rome 8. Keeping faith? 9. Being Roman in Gaul
Literacy
Roman Britain illustrates the possible limits of literacy in the provinces. Most of the graffiti scratched on pottery derives either from military sites or from towns, just as most of the names written on tiles and bricks before they were fired are Roman names, most of them probably soldiers. Writing played a number of important roles in the life and working of the Roman army in Britain, yet it seems hardly to have penetrated the countryside, exc…
Making the most of historical Roman archaeology
Archaeological dialogues are not always genteel affairs. I have been very fortunate in the care with which the commentators have read my paper and the generosity with which they have responded to it. Collectively, their remarks raise more issues than I can adequately respond to in my turn
Generations of aristocracy
This paper sets out to examine issues of continuity and change in the social hierarchies of the peoples of the Gallic interior, between the late Iron Age and the early Roman period. This part of the empire is one in which we might reasonably expect to find substantial continuity of social structure. Many scholars have argued that this is indeed the case, notwithstanding the evident changes in material culture. This paper argues that the opposite …
A Sea of Faith
The use of Mediterranean paradigms is a heuristic strategy with costs as well as gains. Other paradigms have been more influential in the study of ancient religion. Their weaknesses may be compared to the difficulties Mediterranean paradigms have in accounting for religious change and in linking environment to spirituality. Few, if any, religious forms or practices can be shown to be characteristic of and exclusive to the Mediterranean. A brief c…
Becoming Roman
The Present State and Future Scope of Roman Archaeology
Roman archaeology is in good shape, institutionally, financially, and in terms of the high quality of current research. Both fieldwork and publication have increased in quality in the last few decades and the discipline is better at disseminating information widely, albeit through fairly traditional media. The discipline is fortunate in the quality and commitment of its academic leaders and the energy and creativity of many other researchers, in …
Provincial Perspectives
W riting the P rovinces into a very R oman R evolution Augustus and the City of Rome stand at the heart of all histories of this period. Augustus and his image builders put them there. The contributions made by others were limited in fact, and effaced from memory unless they could be grouped around the person of the emperor. The other great cities of the Mediterranean - Athens and Alexandria above all - were plundered and marginalised. Augustus w…
Family History in the Roman North-West
This chapter looks at family history in the northern and western provinces of ancient Rome, mainly by contemplating the potential value of certain aspects of culture, such as a rhetorical education and Roman law, as agents of change and as inducements for family members to adopt Roman family values and structure. It suggests that ‘going Roman’ had the greatest appeal for men, but in many aspects Gallo-Romano families, like those in Egypt and Lusi…
The Cambridge Companion to the Age of Augustus
The age of Augustus, commonly dated to 30 BC – AD 14, was a pivotal period in world history. A time of tremendous change in Rome, Italy, and throughout the Mediterranean world, many developments were underway when Augustus took charge and a recurring theme is the role that he played in shaping their direction. The Cambridge Companion to the Age of Augustus captures the dynamics and richness of this era by examining important aspects of political …
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