Cosmopolitanism and Empire: Universal Rulers, Local Elites, and Cultural Integration in the Ancient Near East and MediterraneanMyles Lavan, Richard E. Payne, John Weisweiler Oxford University Press, 2016 - 282 pagine The empires of the ancient Near East and Mediterranean invented cosmopolitan politics. In the first millennia BCE and CE, a succession of territorially extensive states incorporated populations of unprecedented cultural diversity. Cosmopolitanism and Empire traces the development of cultural techniques through which empires managed difference in order to establish effective, enduring regimes of domination. It focuses on the relations of imperial elites with culturally distinct local elites, offering a comparative perspective on the varying depth and modalities of elite integration in five empires of the ancient Near East and Mediterranean. If cosmopolitanism has normally been studied apart from the imperial context, the essays gathered here show that theories and practices that enabled ruling elites to transcend cultural particularities were indispensable for the establishment and maintenance of trans-regional and trans-cultural political orders. As the first cosmopolitans, imperial elites regarded ruling over culturally disparate populations as their vocation, and their capacity to establish normative frameworks across cultural boundaries played a vital role in the consolidation of their power. Together with an introductory chapter which offers a theory and history of the relationship between empire and cosmopolitanism, the volume includes case studies of Assyrian, Seleukid, Ptolemaic, Roman, and Iranian empires that analyze encounters between ruling classes and their subordinates in the domains of language and literature, religion, and the social imaginary. The contributions combine to illustrate the dilemmas of difference that imperial elites confronted as well as their strategies for resolving the cultural contradictions that their regimes precipitated. |
Sommario
The Assimilation and Subordination
of Elite Cultures | 1 |
The Assyrian Development of Elite
Recognition Ethics | 29 |
Local Elites and Imperial Ideologies
in Hellenistic Greece and Babylonia | 65 |
4 Hellenism Cosmopolitanism and the Role of Babylonian Elites
in the Seleucid Empire | 89 |
5 Toward a Translocal Elite Culture in the Ptolemaic Empire | 103 |
6 What Is Imperial Cosmopolitanism? Revisiting Kosmopolitēs
and Mundanus | 129 |
Ecumenical Language
and the Limits of Elite Integration in the Early Roman Empire | 153 |
Citizens Subjects and Subjectivity
in Republican Empire | 169 |
Ecumenical Language
and Cosmopolitan Consciousness in the Later Roman Aristocracy | 187 |
World Religions at the Sasanian Court | 209 |
Cosmopolitanism Comparison and Empire | 231 |
| 239 | |
| 275 | |
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