Pergamon and Rome: Culture, Identity, and Influence
Thomas J. Nelson · Giuseppe Pezzini · Stefano Rebeggiani
Jun 2025 · Oxford University Press
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About this ebook
This interdisciplinary volume provides the first comprehensive study of Rome's relationship with the kingdom and city of Pergamon. It surveys the rich and diverse interactions between these two cities from the late third century BCE to the fourth century CE, ranging across multiple cultural spheres (including art and architecture, history and politics, literature and poetry, philosophy and thought, scholarship and rhetoric). The book reassesses the nature, scope, and extent of Pergamon and Rome's so-called 'special relationship', shedding light on much-discussed problems, offering new evidence for their cultural interactions, and questioning long-established assumptions. One recurrent theme concerns the limitations of our knowledge: extant evidence is limited and often skewed by later Roman sources, and it is frequently very difficult to identify and define cultural features that are distinctively 'Pergamene'. Nevertheless, there was certainly an important relationship between these two cities, which this volume seeks to map out with greater nuance, precision, and breadth, setting it within a wider interconnected Hellenistic context. As a whole, the volume reflects on the scholarly reception of Pergamon, uncovering how and when a certain view of a cohesive 'Pergamene culture' took shape among modern scholarship and what factors, prejudices, and assumptions undergirded its creation. It also challenges and rethinks the frameworks that shape our view of cultural activity in the Hellenistic world, emphasizing the porousness of cultural movements across political boundaries. This book will be of interest not only to scholars of Roman culture, but also to those interested in the impact of Hellenistic culture on Rome more generally and to scholars engaged with theories and models of cultural influence.
About the author
Thomas J. Nelson is a Career Development Fellow in Ancient Greek at St Hilda's College, Oxford. He has previously held research and lectureship positions in both Oxford and Cambridge, including a British Academy Postdoctoral Fellowship. He has published widely on archaic, classical, and Hellenistic Greek literature and its Roman reception, with particular interests in early Greek intertextuality and Hellenistic poetry beyond Alexandria. He is the author of Markers of Allusion in Archaic Greek Poetry (2023) and co-editor (with Matthew Chaldekas) of Hellenistic Aesthetics: Approaches and Frameworks (BICS 67.2, Oxford 2024). Giuseppe Pezzini is Tutor and Fellow in Latin at Corpus Christi College, Oxford which he joined in 2021, after five years of teaching in St Andrews (2016–2021), and research fellowships at Magdalen College Oxford (2013–2015) and the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton (2016). He worked as an assistant editor for the Dictionary of Medieval Latin from British Sources (completed in 2013), and has published especially on Latin language and literature, philosophy of language, and the theory of fiction, ancient and modern. He was awarded a British Academy Mid-Career Fellowship in 2019 and the Philip Leverhulme Prize in 2021. Stefano Rebeggiani is Associate Professor of Classics at the University of Southern California. His main interests are in Roman literature and culture, especially epic and its relationship with the socio-political contexts of the Roman empire; the interactions of poetry and philosophical traditions; and the interplay of texts and monuments in Republican and Imperial Rome. He has written on Lucretius, Virgil, Statius, Valerius Flaccus, on the role of Greek works of art in Republican and Imperial monuments, and on the political significance of myth in Roman monumental contexts. His first monograph was published in 2018: The Fragility of Power: Statius, Domitian, and the Politics of the Thebaid (Oxford).
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