Daniel Gómez Castro

Toni Ñaco del Hoyo

Roger Riera

For millennia catastrophes, whether those caused by nature, or by human violence, have impacted on historical societies. In the Graeco-Roman world, as nowadays, the immediate consequences of such disasters only anticipated subsequent measures applied by the public authorities, or whoever was in charge thereafter. This volume originated in a workshop funded by a Spanish research grant. Two theoretical chapters deal with the actual meaning of catastrophes for the ancients, as well as how distorted our view of the remote past may be when applying modern terminology such as 'humanitarian crises' to events in the ancient world. The following chapters seek to explore such topics as collateral damage in war, earthquake recovery, breakdown of interstate relations, deportation, and postwar policies implemented on defeated societies.

Ancient Disasters and Crisis Management in Classical Antiquity

Mike Dobson

Jordi Principal

To date, Rome’s intervention to the West from the mid-second century BC has not really been looked at with any sense of overview. Instead, there has been an unconnected series of micro-regional studies looking at particular areas, from the river Ebro in Spain round to Italy on the land front, and from the Balearic Islands to Corsica, Sardinia and even Sicily as regards the seaborne aspect. In contrast, the aim of this volume is to push the historical and archaeological debates about Rome’s expansion beyond these traditional geographical boundaries and the discipline-based previous research. The entire north-western Mediterranean is treated as a micro-region and is addressed using various interdisciplinary approaches. The result is to provide an innovative and comprehensive overview of the north-western Mediterranean in a period of historical crossroads, aided particularly by focusing on the connectivity and integration within this region as two interrelated issues. While Republican Rome enforced itself as an expansive power towards the West, all sorts of polities, military operations and individuals also played a significant role in creating interconnectivity and integration of the north-western Mediterranean into a new hybrid reality. In order to uncover such processes of hybridisation, contributors to this volume were encouraged to focus on the historical, archaeological and numismatic material from several areas within the region, and to incorporate aspects of interdisciplinary methodologies in order to address the region’s military, political, social and economic interconnections with Italy, Rome and each other within the overall period.

Toni Ñaco del Hoyo

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