A Cultural History of the Home in Antiquity

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Home is a powerful idea throughout antiquity, from Odysseus epic journey to recover his own home, nostalgically longed-for through his long absence, to the implanting of Christianity in the domestic sphere in late antiquity. We can recognise the idea even if there is no word for it that quite corresponds to our own: the Greek oikos and the Latin domus mean both house and family, the essential components of home. To attempt a history of the home in antiquity means bringing together two separate, if closely related, fields of study. On the one hand, study of the family, both in the legal frameworks that define it as institution and the literary representations of it in daily life; on the other, archaeological study of the domestic setting, within which such relationships are played out. Ranging across a period of over a millennium, this collection looks at the home as a force of integration: of the worlds of family and of the outsider in hospitality; of the worlds of leisure and work; of the worlds of public and private life; of the world of practical structures and furnishings and the world of religion.

Author Bio

Joanne Berry is Lecturer in Ancient History at Swansea University, UK. She is the author of The Complete Pompeii (2007) and the co-author, along with Nigel Pollard, of The Complete Roman Legions(2012). She is also the editor of Unpeeling Pompeii(1998) and, with Ray Laurence, of Cultural Identity in the Roman Empire (1998). Andrew Wallace-Hadrill is Director of Research and Honorary Professor of Roman Studies at the University of Cambridge, UK. He has been awarded an OBE for services to Anglo-Italian cultural relations and is a Fellow of the British Academy. His publications include Suetonius: The Scholar and his Caesars (1983) and Suetonius (1995), both available from Bloomsbury; and more recently Rome's Cultural Revolution (2008) and Herculaneum: Past and Future (2011).