Projects

The rock tombs at Dayr al-Barshā rank among the most important monuments of the Egyptian Middle Kingdom (c. 2050-1750 BC). However, due to ancient quarrying and looting, this provincial elite cemetery is now in a dilapidated state. The puzzle of partially in situ architecture grows every year as hundreds of decorated blocks surface during new excavations, but the fragmented state of the remains currently prohibits an in-depth study. As ...

Monumental commemorative monuments form the basis of epigraphic research, shedding new light on aspects of Roman society, such as social mobility. Did the degree of romanization in the provinces ensure an imitation of the model? The influence of provincial subcultures will be investigated. Attention is paid to the social stratification and mobility within the provinces and the relationship to the Roman model of society.

Romans meticulously described their social position, but modern researchers often use general categories treating humiliores as an undifferentiated 'class'. We want to investigate 'status groups' from local Italian municipalities and the relationships between them and compare them with material from Lugdunum. How are power relations, competition and violence connected with 'class' and hierarchy? We will use concepts from P. Bourdieu.

This project examines the role of written records in the construction of religious knowledge in ancient Greece. Traditionally, Greek religion has been understood as an action-orientated religion based on oral tradition, in which writing was only of significance in so-called U+2018marginalU+2019 and U+2018magicalU+2019 practices like Orphism and curse-writing. This project challenges such a portrayal by uncovering the varied spaces and ...

The phenomenon of lobbyists attempting to influence the decisions of government is nothing new. While official, regulated lobbying is a modern institution, informal lobbying is much older. In Roman Antiquity, many individuals and groups tried to influence imperial decisions to their advantage. I will investigate the lobby work of Greeks from Asia Minor in the first three centuries CE. Texts by famous orators stress the role of their ...

The main object of the research is the analysis of the Epicurean position towards politics, as a doctrine, and towards effective political action. Because of the inadequate reception of statements as λάθε βιώσας or μὴ πολιτεύεσθαι, Epicureans have been considered cut off from politics and as society's parasites, interested only in satisfying their «belly's pleasure», without contributing to society's life. Indeed, Epicurus used a double ...

The RSRC is an joint research center of Ghent University and the Free University of Brussels. Our aim is to promote studies in the history of the Roman World in all its various aspects. We embrace contributions in the field of economic, social, political, cultural and mentality history from the dawn of Roman history (8th c. BCE) to the end of Late Antiquity (6 c. CE), including the (hellenised) East. We welcome also contributions from sister ...

This project studies mass-elite relations in the Greek cities of the Roman empire by examining PlutarchU+2019s Parallel Lives, a second-century AD collection of biographies of Greek and Roman statesmen from classical Athens to Republican Rome. Up till now, historians have explored these biographies as sources on the periods they describe, whereas Plutarch scholars have focused on their function as a programme for moral ...

The project studies how the vowel system of so-called "Classical Latin" (CL) evolved into the vowel system of the Romance languages from a diachronic, diatopic, and sociolinguistic perspective (the former system was based on distinctions of vowel quantity, while the latter is mostly based on quality oppositions). To this end, the research considers two different kinds of evidence: metalinguistic testimonies in Latin grammarians ("the indirect ...