Ronald J. Mellor | |
---|---|
Born | September 30, 1940 |
Nationality | American |
Education | Regis High School Princeton University (PhD) |
Occupation | Historian |
Ronald J. Mellor (born September 30, 1940) is a distinguished professor of history at the University of California, Los Angeles. [1] His area of research has been ancient religion and Roman historiography, where he has published a number of books. [2] [3]
Mellor attended Regis High School in New York City. [4] He received his Ph.D. in Classics from Princeton University in 1968. His previous teaching posts include Stanford University. He has been a Visiting Fellow/Scholar at University College, London, the Humanities Research Centre of the Australian National University, the American Academy in Rome, and the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey. [2]
Titus Livius, known in English as Livy, was a Roman historian. He wrote a monumental history of Rome and the Roman people, titled Ab Urbe Condita, ''From the Founding of the City'', covering the period from the earliest legends of Rome before the traditional founding in 753 BC through the reign of Augustus in Livy's own lifetime. He was on good terms with members of the Julio-Claudian dynasty and was a friend of Augustus, whose young grandnephew, the future emperor Claudius, he encouraged to take up the writing of history.
Polybius was a Greek historian of the middle Hellenistic period. He is noted for his work The Histories, a universal history documenting the rise of Rome in the Mediterranean in the third and second centuries BC. It covered the period of 264–146 BC, recording in detail events in Italy, Iberia, Greece, Macedonia, Syria, Egypt and Africa, and documented the Punic Wars and Macedonian Wars among many others.
Tiberius Julius Caesar Augustus was Roman emperor from AD 14 until 37. He succeeded his stepfather Augustus, the first Roman emperor. Tiberius was born in Rome in 42 BC to Roman politician Tiberius Claudius Nero and his wife, Livia Drusilla. In 38 BC, Tiberius' mother divorced his father and married Augustus. Following the untimely deaths of Augustus' two grandsons and adopted heirs, Gaius and Lucius Caesar, Tiberius was designated Augustus' successor. Prior to this, Tiberius had proved himself an able diplomat, and one of the most successful Roman generals: his conquests of Pannonia, Dalmatia, Raetia, and (temporarily) parts of Germania laid the foundations for the empire's northern frontier.
The Pax Romana is a roughly 200-year-long period of Roman history which is identified as a golden age of increased and sustained Roman imperialism, relative peace and order, prosperous stability, hegemonic power, and regional expansion. This is despite several revolts and wars, and continuing competition with Parthia. It is traditionally dated as commencing with the accession of Augustus, founder of the Roman principate, in 27 BC and concluding in AD 180 with the death of Marcus Aurelius, the last of the "Five Good Emperors".
Marcus Agrippa Postumus, later named Agrippa Julius Caesar, was a grandson of Roman Emperor Augustus. He was the youngest child of Marcus Vipsanius Agrippa and Julia the Elder. Augustus initially considered Postumus as a potential successor and formally adopted him as his heir, before banishing Postumus from Rome in AD 6 on account of his ferocia. In effect, though not in law, the action cancelled his adoption and virtually assured Tiberius' emplacement as Augustus' sole heir. Postumus was ultimately executed by his own guards shortly after Augustus' death in AD 14.
In ancient Roman religion, Roma was a female deity who personified the city of Rome and, more broadly, the Roman state. She was created and promoted to represent and propagate certain of Rome's ideas about itself, and to justify its rule. She was portrayed on coins, sculptures, architectural designs, and at official games and festivals. Images of Roma had elements in common with other goddesses, such as Rome's Minerva, her Greek equivalent Athena and various manifestations of Greek Tyche, who protected Greek city-states; among these, Roma stands dominant, over piled weapons that represent her conquests, and promising protection to the obedient. Her "Amazonian" iconography shows her "manly virtue" (virtus) as fierce mother of a warrior race, augmenting rather than replacing local goddesses. On some coinage of the Roman Imperial era, she is shown as a serene advisor, partner and protector of ruling emperors. In Rome, the Emperor Hadrian built and dedicated a gigantic temple to her as Roma Aeterna, and to Venus Felix, emphasising the sacred, universal and eternal nature of the empire.
Gaius Sallustius Crispus, usually anglicised as Sallust, was a historian and politician of the Roman Republic from a plebeian family. Probably born at Amiternum in the country of the Sabines, Sallust became a partisan of Julius Caesar, circa 50s BC. He is the earliest known Latin-language Roman historian with surviving works to his name, of which Conspiracy of Catiline on the eponymous conspiracy, The Jugurthine War on the eponymous war, and the Histories remain extant. As a writer, Sallust was primarily influenced by the works of the 5th-century BC Greek historian Thucydides. During his political career he amassed great and ill-gotten wealth from his governorship of Africa.
Interpretatio graeca, or "interpretation by means of Greek [models]", refers to the tendency of the ancient Greeks to identify foreign deities with their own gods. It is a discourse used to interpret or attempt to understand the mythology and religion of other cultures; a comparative methodology using ancient Greek religious concepts and practices, deities, and myths, equivalencies, and shared characteristics.
The Annals by Roman historian and senator Tacitus is a history of the Roman Empire from the reign of Tiberius to that of Nero, the years AD 14–68. The Annals are an important source for modern understanding of the history of the Roman Empire during the 1st century AD. Tacitus' final work, modern historians generally consider it his magnum opus which historian Ronald Mellor says represents the "pinnacle of Roman historical writing".
Richard John Alexander Talbert is a British-American contemporary ancient historian and classicist on the faculty of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, where he was William Rand Kenan, Jr., Professor of History and is currently Research Professor in charge of the Ancient World Mapping Center. Talbert is a leading scholar of ancient geography and ideas of space in the ancient Mediterranean world.
Glen Warren Bowersock is a historian of ancient Greece, Rome and the Near East, and former Chairman of Harvard’s classics department.
The Titii was a college (sodalitas) of Roman priests.
Roman historiography stretches back to at least the 3rd century BC and was indebted to earlier Greek historiography. The Romans relied on previous models in the Greek tradition such as the works of Herodotus and Thucydides. Roman historiographical forms are usually different from their Greek counterparts, however, and often emphasize Roman concerns. The Roman style of history was based on the way that the Annals of the Pontifex Maximus, or the Annales Maximi, were recorded. The Annales Maximi include a wide array of information, including religious documents, names of consuls, deaths of priests, and various disasters throughout history. Also part of the Annales Maximi are the White Tablets, or the "Tabulae Albatae", which consist of information on the origin of the Roman Republic.
Hellenic historiography involves efforts made by Greeks to track and record historical events. By the 5th century BC, it became an integral part of ancient Greek literature and held a prestigious place in later Roman historiography and Byzantine literature.
Vibullius Agrippa was an ancient Roman man of the first century who was accused of a crime and killed himself in front of the Roman senate.
Publius Cornelius Tacitus, known simply as Tacitus, was a Roman historian and politician. Tacitus is widely regarded as one of the greatest Roman historians by modern scholars.
John Richard "Jaś" Elsner, is a British art historian and classicist, who is Professor of Late Antique Art in the Faculty of Classics at the University of Oxford, Humfry Payne Senior Research Fellow in Classical Archaeology and Art at Corpus Christi College, Oxford, and Visiting Professor of Art History at the University of Chicago. He is mainly known for his work on Roman art, including Late Antiquity and Byzantine art, as well as the historiography of art history, and is a prolific writer on these and other topics. Elsner has been described as "one of the most well-known figures in the field of ancient art history, respected for his notable erudition, extensive range of interests and expertise, his continuing productivity, and above all, for the originality of his mind", and by Shadi Bartsch, a colleague at Chicago, as "the predominant contemporary scholar of the relationship between classical art and ancient subjectivity".
David Stone Potter is the Francis W. Kelsey Collegiate Professor of Greek and Roman History and the Arthur F. Thurnau Professor, Professor of Greek and Latin in Ancient History at The University of Michigan. Potter is a graduate of Harvard and Oxford universities and specializes in Greek and Roman Asia Minor, Greek, and Latin historiography and epigraphy, Roman public entertainment, and the study of ancient warfare.
Gregory Duncan Woolf, is a British ancient historian, archaeologist, and academic. He specialises in the late Iron Age and the Roman Empire. Since July 2021, he has been Ronald J. Mellor Chair of Ancient History at University of California, Los Angeles. He previously taught at the University of Leicester and the University of Oxford, and was then Professor of Ancient History at the University of St Andrews from 1998 to 2014. From 2015 to 2021, he was the Director of the Institute of Classical Studies, and Professor of Classics at the University of London.