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Parker: Making of Roman India

Parker, Grant Richard
The making of Roman India / by Grant Parker. - Cambridge ; New York : Cambridge University Press, 2008. - xiii, 357 S. : Ill., Kt. - (Greek culture in the Roman world)
ISBN 978-0-521-85834-2
£ 55,00

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Beschreibung
Latin 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. [Verlagsinformation]

Inhalt
List of figures page. x
List of maps. xi
Preface. xii
Introduction. 1
PART 1: CREATION OF A DISCOURSE
1. Achaemenid India and Alexander. 11
   I.The extent of Achaemenid power. 13
      I.1.Scylax and the King of Kings. 14
      I.2.Hecataeus' cosmos. 18
      I.3.Herodotus and the satrapies. 21
      I.4.Marvels and lies of Ctesias. 28
   II.Alexander and aftermath. 33
      II.1.A conqueror and his historians. 33
      II.2.Megasthenes and Chandragupta's court. 42
      II.3.Bactrians and 'Indo-Greeks'. 48
      II.4.Mapping India: from the bematists to Eratosthenes. 51
   III.Origins and process in the making of Roman India. 54
PART 2: FEATURES OF A DISCOURSE
2. India described. 69
   I. Contexts of indography. 71
      I.1.Historiography. 71
      I.2.Geography. 72
      I.3.Natural history. 78
      I.4.Romance and mime. 80
   II.'Hanging tags': topics of thought. 82
      II.1.Indian pasts. 83
      II.2.Profusion. 86
      II.3.Social divisions. 87
      II.4.Gender relations. 90
      II.5.Space and race. 93
      II.6.Catalogue or system? 94
   III.Literary features: modes of description. 97
      III.1.The Periplus form. 98
      III.2.Omission and abbreviation. 100
      III.3.Authors and authority. 103
      III.4.Utopianism and barbarism. 105
      III.5.Narrative space. 110
      III.6.Analogy. 111
      III.7.Fragments. 113
      III.8.Closure. 116
   IV.Conclusion. 117
3. India depicted. 121
   I.Varieties of image. 122
      I.1.Marvel. 122
      I.2.Triumph of Bacchus. 125
      I.3.Personification. 131
      I.4.Christian topography. 135
   II.A typology of Indias. 140
   III.Conclusion. 142
PART 3: CONTEXTS OF A DISCOURSE
4. Commodities. 147
   I.Objects of exchange and the materiality of distance. 149
      I.1.Spices and aromatics. 150
      I.2.Precious stones. 154
      I.3.Fabrics. 156
      I.4.Slaves. 157
      I.5.Animals. 159
      I.6.Craft goods. 163
   II.The rhetoric of excess. 165
   III.Trade networks and the longue durée. 171
      III.1.Varieties of evidence. 171
      III.2.Chronologies, personnel and routes. 178
   IV.Counting commodities, or how to lie with statistics. 183
   V.Mapping commodities. 189
      V.1.Experience and mediation. 191
      V.2.Specificity and identification. 196
   VI.Conclusion: fragments and big men. 198
5. Empire. 203
   I.Pax Romana and people of the dawn. 207
      I.1.Orbis terrarum imperio populi Romani subiecta. 209
      I.2.City and empire. 214
      I.3.The production of imperial space: Strabo and Pliny. 217
      I.4.Policy and propaganda. 219
      I.5.Trajan's Parthian campaign. 221
      I.6.Itinerarium Alexandri. 223
   II.Christian topography, Christian empire. 227
      II.1.The western tradition of Orosius and Isidore. 229
      II.2.The eastern tradition of Cosmas Indicopleustes. 236
   III.The rhetorical background: imperial panegyric. 240
   IV.Orbis terrarum urbi spectandus: the mechanics of representation. 244
   V.Conclusion. 247
6. Wisdom. 251
   I.Writing wisdom. 251
   II.Wisdoms alien and other. 254
      II.1.Metamorphoses of sophia. 254
      II.2.Elements of wisdom. 260
      II.3.Jews, Chaldaeans and Indians. 264
   III.Brahmans and Gymnosophists. 272
      III.1.Social hierarchy. 272
      III.2.Alexander's interview: Palladius and others. 278
      III.3.Christians and Cynics. 286
   IV.The diffusion of paideia: Apollonius of Tyana. 288
   V.Modalities of travel. 294
      V.1.Pilgrimage into mission. 295
      V.2.Thomas and tradition. 297
      V.3.Belatedness and extrapolation. 301
   VI.Conclusion. 305
Conclusion: intersections of a discourse. 308
I. Mutations of Indography. 308
II. Readers, speakers and popular xenology. 311
III. Imperial memories of Alexander. 315
Bibliography. 319
Index. 355

Autor
GRANT PARKER, Assistant Professor of Classics, Stanford University. Faculty Profile.

Quellen: Cambridge University Press; Amazon (UK); WorldCat; Library of Congress.
Schlagwörter: Geschichte; Indien; Rom; Kulturbeziehungen; Handelsbeziehungen