Steven D. Smith

Traditionalist Christians who oppose same-sex marriage and other cultural developments in the US wonder why they are being forced to bracket their beliefs in order to participate in public life. This situation is not new, says Steven D. Smith: Christians two thousand years ago in the Roman Empire faced similar challenges and questions. Starting with T. S. Eliot's claim that the future of the West would be determined by a contest between Christianity and "modern paganism," Smith argues in Pagans and Christians in the City that today's culture wars can be seen as a contemporary reprise of the basic antagonism that pitted pagans against Christians in the late Roman Empire. He looks at that historical conflict and explores how the same competing orientations continue to clash today. Readers on both sides of the culture wars, Smith shows, have much to learn from seeing how patterns from ancient history are reemerging in today's most controversial issues.

Culture Wars from the Tiber to the Potomac

Pagans and Christians in the City

David G. Anderson

Allows scholars to more easily examine the record of human activity over the past 13,000 or more years in this part of western Louisiana and adjacent portions of east Texas

Research at Fort Polk, 1972-2002

Archaeology, History, and Predictive Modeling

Steven Douglas Smith

"This book presses us to look harder at closely held beliefs and to question deeply rooted premises and commitments with which we are perhaps too comfortable."---Richard W Garnett Noire Dame Law School --

The Disenchantment of Secular Discourse

This book argues that Aelian's important work on animals, the De natura animalium, represents a sophisticated literary critique of Severan Rome. His fascination with animals reflects the cultural issues of his day: philosophy, religion, the exoticism of Egypt and India, sex, gender, and imperial politics.

The Literary Imagination of Claudius Aelianus

Man and Animal in Severan Rome

I, Chariton of Aphrodisias, secretary of the rhetor Athenagorus, shall relate a love story that took place in Syracuse. Thus begins the earliest of the canonical Greek romances, the 1st century CE historical novel known as Callirhoe. Chariton's erotic tale is about the constancy of love in a world where virtue is always in danger of being corrupted. Chaereas and Callirhoe fall in love, but then are tragically separated after the heroine, believed dead, is buried alive. Each is eventually sold into slavery in the East, and Callirhoe herself contemplates the abortion of her unborn child when she is forced to marry a man she does not love. Hero and heroine are finally reunited in the foreign city of Babylon, only to be plunged into a war between Persia and Egypt.Classical Athenian historiography, philosophy, oratory, myth and drama were all integral in shaping this timely work of fiction set in the years following Athens' doomed Sicilian Expedition (415-413 BC). Chariton's novel is more, though, than just a romanticized representation of a famous episode from Greek history. The novel is clearly meant to be read for pleasure, but it also has a political edge. By imaginatively redeploying Athenian literature and political discourse in the construction of his fictional world, Chariton gives voice to contemporary concerns about freedom, tyranny, the ever-expanding meaning of Greek identity, and the role of Greek culture in a world dominated by Rome. This is a book that will be of value to anyone interested in Greek literature, the classical tradition, and the complex relationship between art and empire.

The Romance of Empire

Greek Identity and the Athenian Past in Chariton

Traditionalist Christians who oppose same-sex marriage and other cultural developments in the United States wonder why they are being forced to bracket their beliefs in order to participate in public life. This situation is not new, says Steven D. Smith: Christians two thousand years ago faced very similar challenges. Picking up poet T. S. Eliot’s World War II–era thesis that the future of the West would be determined by a contest between Christianity and “modern paganism,” Smith argues in this book that today’s culture wars can be seen as a reprise of the basic antagonism that pitted pagans against Christians in the Roman Empire. Smith’s Pagans and Christians in the City looks at that historical conflict and explores how the same competing ideas continue to clash today. All of us, Smith shows, have much to learn by observing how patterns from ancient history are reemerging in today’s most controversial issues.

An exciting analysis of gender and sexual desire in sixth century Greek epigram that bridges classical and early Byzantine culture.

Steven D. Smith

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