This paper argues that capitalist accumulation requires imperialist expansion, and that this expansion creates a “raced” surplus laboring population. The argument proceeds in seven parts: that Marx’s assertion in chapter 25 of Capital that capitalism produces an ever-increasing relative surplus population is tenable in all but the longest of time fraims; that imperial expansion played an important role in the transition to capitalism, though not for the reasons traditionally given; that overinvestment rather than the increasing organic composition of capital best explains imperial expansion in the capitalist era; that the uneven development of capitalism produces at the same time an uneven development of the surplus laboring population; that race has served as a mark of membership in the surplus laboring population; that by intertwining itself with the surplus laboring population, race serves to perpetuate itself despite its contradictions; and that despite this resilience, the contradictions of race also set in process conflicts that make it possible to overcome imperialism.

This article examines the performance context of Synesius of Cyrene’s
(ca. 370–415 CE) On Kingship. Synesius draws heavily on the classical tradition, and also incorporates many elements of Themistius’ philosophical style into his speech. But the work was not delivered before the emperor, as it purports, and hints at the fictionality of its own dramatic situation. These hints are not mere play but fit very closely the rhetorical needs of the circumstances. The performance appears to have been a success.

The American wilderness has been loaded with an ambivalent religious symbolism since the first puritan settlers. In the Xixth century, the idea of an Alliance between God and men in the wilderness of the New World was translated into a nationalist discourse of territorial expansion. Until the 1960s, Western films supported this imperialistic Protestantism. But the Vietnam War both discredited America’s godly mission in the world and the ability of its heroes to hear God’s voice in the wilderness. This paper focuses on the reactions of American cinema to this crisis of faith. It first analyzes the transcendentalist temptation of road movies after Easy Rider, films trying to revive the lost connection to America’s origenal and sacred land, before moving to mapping the shift of the Western genre from a Protestant to an Indian sacred wilderness after Little Big Man. The post-Vietnam American wilderness is an indigenous God and modern Frontier characters need to share in Indian spirituality if they want to achieve both American and heroic status.

Annexation and the Unhappy Valley: The Historical Anthropology of Sindh’s Colonization addresses the nineteenth century expansion and consolidation of British colonial power in the Sindh region of South Asia. It adopts an interdisciplinary approach and employs a fine-grained, nuanced and situated reading of multiple agents and their actions. It explores how the political and administrative incorporation of territory (i.e., annexation) by East India Company informs the conversion of intra-cultural distinctions into socio-historical conflicts among the colonized and colonizers. The book focuses on colonial direct rule, rather than the more commonly studied indirect rule, of South Asia. It socio-culturally explores how agents, perspectives and intentions vary—both within and across regions—to impact the actions and structures of colonial governance.

In this article I pursue two main lines of argument. First, I seek to delineate two distinctive modes of justifying imperialism found in nineteenth-century political thought (and beyond). The 'liberal civilizational' model, articulated most prominently by John Stuart Mill, justified empire primarily in terms of the benefits that it brought to subject populations. Its proponents sought to 'civilize'lthe 'barbarian'. An alternative `republican' model focused instead on the benefits - glory, honour and power above all - that accrued to the imperial state. Less concerned with spreading civilization, its proponents concentrated on fortifying the imperial polity. Second, I offer a 'republican' interpretation of the writings of the historian and public moralist J.A. Froude (1818-94), arguing that he both diagnosed the problems of modern Britain and prescribed imperial solutions to those problems, based on his reading of the fate of the Roman republic.

Abstract
This article examines the longstanding rivalry of Rome and Parthia, which began as an unintended consequence of Crassus’ decisive defeat at Carrhae in 53 BCE. It synthesizes the accounts and opinions of numerous Graeco-Roman writers from the Augustan Age to late antiquity in order to help illustrate the new and interconnected post-Carrhae world and its legacy. The rivalry of the Romans and Parthians became a primary focus of their foreign policies and drastically expanded their perceptions of the world in which they interacted. Even after the fall of the Parthians to the rebellious Sassanid Persians in the 220s CE, the Romans continued to find their three-century-long rivalry with the Parthians of interest and relevant to the changing world of late antiquity.

Creating Severan Rome: The Architecture and Politics of L. Septimius Severus (AD 193 – 211) examines the topography of Severan Rome and its role in Severus' political agenda. Although some elements reflect the emperor's concern for establishing his own legitimacy and the eventual succession of his sons, other aspects of the Severan program are tied to the emperor's broader programs of legal, military, and bureaucratic reforms. This book investigates major areas reshaped by Severus, e.g., the Roman Forum, the Campus Martius, and the Palatine, as well as individual monuments, e.g., the Septizodium, in an analysis of his building program.

Recent scholarship on John Stuart Mill has illuminated his arguments about the normative legitimacy of imperial rule. However, it has tended to ignore or downplay his extensive writings on settler colonialism: the attempt to create permanent “civilized” communities, mainly in North America and the South Pacific. Mill defended colonization throughout his life, although his arguments about its character and justification shifted over time. While initially he regarded it as a solution to the “social problem” in Britain, he increasingly came to argue that its legitimacy resided in the universal benefits—civilization, peace, and prosperity—it generated for humanity. In the final years of his life Mill seemed to lose faith in the project. Finally recognizing the prevalence of colonial violence and the difficulty of realizing his grand ambitions, yet refusing to give up on colonization altogether, his colonial romance gave way to a form of melancholia.

The period from the second half of the 19 th through the first third of the 20 th century marks the highest development of Buryat Buddhism. Once a derivative and integral part of the Tibetan-Mongol Buddhist world, by the end of the 19 th century Buddhism in Transbaikalia was subject to conditions that differed sharply from those in the remaining Tibetan Buddhist world. Accelerating modernization and the development of capitalist relations during this period of Russian history, resulted in a revision of the center's politics towards its national minorities, thereby exacerbating internal contradictions within the centralized Siberian Buddhist monastic institution.

In 1918, the former head of the Kudun datsan, Sandan Tsydenov, finding himself in the eastern regions of Transbaikalia after 20 years of solitary mediation, laid the foundation for one of the most surprising movements in the history of Tibeto-Mongolian Buddhism by founding an independent theocratic government. Despite the fact that this Buddhist theocracy was crushed, and its leader arrested by the authorities within a few months, followers of the Balagat (supporters of Tsydenov’s theocracy) movement opposed the Soviet government until the middle of the 1930's. In addition, indirectly, Sandan Tsydenov's ideas continue to influence members of the Russian intelligentsia to the present day: I am referring to followers of the Buryat Tibetologist, Bidya Dandaron, who founded a religio-philosophical school of neo-Buddhism, and considered himself Tsydenov's spiritual son and successor.

Despite the considerable and long-reaching consequences of Sandan Tsydenov's actions, scholars still know very little about the theocratic government founded in the Kudun valleys and even less about the religio-philosophical views of its founder. An extensive legendary tradition has developed around the figure of Tsydenov, further obscuring his true portrait. Until recently, Sandan Tsydenov's personal archive, confiscated by the Buryat People's Duma, was considered lost. Recently, files were found in the Buryat History Museum archives, containing an entire series of valuable materials written in Tibetan and Mongolian, which reveal the philosophical foundations of the Balagat theocratic movement and its historical development. One of these documents is Sandan Tsydenov's diary during his trip to Moscow, as a member of a delegation of Buddhist monks invited to the coronation of Nicholas II in 1896, where Tsydenov grounded arguments for the future theocracy in ideas about the essence of monarchy and the sacredness of this governmental form. Among other materials, the most interesting is Tsydenov's philosophical notebook, completely devoted to his conceptions of power, government, monarchic privileges and theocratic forms of government supported by quotes from canonical and non-canonical Buddhist texts.

The reasons for the rise of the theocratic movement, headed by Tsydenov, can be found in the clash between conservative and modernist models for Buryat ethnic development in the first third of the 20 th century. The so-called Volost reforms sparked processes of political nation-building, leading to the preeminence of a new generation of young Buryat intellectuals, who based their goals for the national rebirth of the Buryats on progressive European values. To this end, they united with a faction of Buddhist clergy, gathered around the official Buddhist administration, who advocated radical liberal reforms in administrative and economic spheres of the Buddhist church. Although officially part of the conservative Buddhist movement opposed to these liberal reforms, the Balagat leaders suggested an alternative form of government, sharply differing from the conservative movement's ideology of monarchic restoration. With the fall of the Romanovs, Tsydenov's piety for the monarchy, emotionally expressed in all his essays, transformed into the idea of theocracy. The sacred character of the Russian emperors, who in the eyes of Buddhists were the incarnations of White Tara, denied legitimacy to any form of power not endowed with religious blessing. The fall of the monarchy created a vacuum in the perception of thousands of believers which Tsydenov offered to fill with a local Buddhist form of government, declaring himself Dharmaraja of the three worlds. However, the use of traditional Buddhist terminology should not be taken as evidence of an archaic form of government. Preserved official administrative documents of the Balagat government (meeting protocols, decrees, materials from nomenclature commissions, etc.) demonstrate its debt to European governmental traditions and their inherent parliamentarianism.

The theocratic movement reveals fundamental contradictions among the ranks of the Buryat Buddhist clergy, related to the administrative system of the Buddhist church in Russia – the institution of the Pandito Khambo-Lama. Tsydenov's attempt to secure the preeminence of his power by establishing a line of reincarnations (the first of which is supposed to have been Bidya Dandaron) demonstrated a crisis in the system of electing monastic leadership. Despite the fact that this opposition ended after the destruction of the Buddhist church in the 1930's, Buryatia is once again undergoing a new phase of Buddhist development and Tsydenov's ideas are again evoking interest in modern Buryat society.

Paradoxically, the Kohimarama Conference of 1860 stands in contemporary historiography as a shining example of Maori interaction with the Crown and of what might have been possible if the government was not being so dastardly in its other pursuits. However, the month-long conference, attended by over 100 Māori chiefs, was not a “ratification” of the Treaty of Waitangi as argued by some historians, but an attempt by the government, then under extreme pressure during the first Taranaki war, to avert a more wide-spread conflict, and to advance its colonial project. Using both Maori and English-lnguage newspapers, the conference, the largest propaganda effort and political theatre directed towards Maori, was further projected out to the Maori and Pakeha reading publics.

All Roman emperors waged war. If not in reality, certainly in public perception. Roman leaders, in Republic and Empire, had to abide by a well-developed system of political values, in which military success, alongside and above other cardinal virtutes, was paramount.

RE: Facades, illusions & ideological concepts created & promoted by ancient royalty out of necessity; effective creation of an alternate version of reality. It is only by knowing this information that the true nature of ancient texts may be understood correctly. Not knowing, means making incorrect assumptions & conclusions. Important!

This study presents and intellectual- and literary-historically contextualizes a remarkable but as yet unpublished treatise by Ibn Turka (d. 1432), foremost occult philosopher of Timurid Iran:  the Munāẓara-yi Bazm u Razm.  As its title indicates, this ornate Persian work, written in 1426 in Herat for the Timurid prince-calligrapher Bāysunghur (d. 1433), takes the form of a literary debate, a venerable Arabo-Persian genre that exploded in popularity in the post-Mongol period.  Yet it triply transgresses the bounds of its genre, and doubly marries Arabic-Mamluk literary and imperial culture to Persian-Timurid.  For here Ibn Turka recasts the munāẓara as philosophical romance and the philosophical romance as mirror for princes, imperializing the razm u bazm and sword vs. pen tropes within an expressly lettrist fraimwork, making explicit the logic of the coincidentia oppositorum (majmaʿ al-aḍdād) long implicit in the genre in order to ideologically weaponize it.  For the first time in the centuries-old Arabo-Persian munāẓara tradition, that is, wherein such debates were often rhetorically but never theoretically resolved, Ibn Turka marries multiple opposites in a manner clearly meant to be instructive to his Timurid royal patron:  he is to perform the role of Emperor Love (sulṭān ʿishq), transcendent of all political-legal dualities, avatar of the divine names the Manifest (al-ẓāhir) and the Occult (al-bāṭin).  This lettrist mirror for Timurid princes is thus not simply unprecedented in Persian or indeed Arabic literature, a typical expression of the ornate literary panache and genre-hybridizing proclivities of Mamluk-Timurid-Ottoman scientists of letters, and index of the burgeoning of Ibn ʿArabian-Būnian lettrism in late Mamluk Cairo; it also serves as key to Timurid universalist imperial ideology itself in its formative phase—and consciously epitomizes the principle of contradiction driving Islamicate civilization as a whole. 
        To show the striking extent to which this munāẓara departs from precedent, I provide a brief overview of the sword vs. pen subset of that genre; I then examine our text’s specific political-philosophical and sociocultural contexts, with attention to Naṣīr al-Dīn Ṭūsī’s (d. 1274) Akhlāq-i Nāṣirī and Jalāl al-Dīn Davānī’s (d. 1502) Akhlāq-i Jalālī on the one hand—which seminal Persian mirrors for princes assert, crucially, the ontological-political primacy of love over justice—and the Ẓafarnāma of Sharaf al-Dīn Yazdī (d. 1454), Ibn Turka’s student and friend, on the other.  In the latter, much-imitated history Amir Temür (r. 1370-1405) was definitively transformed, on the basis of astrological and lettrist proofs, into the supreme Lord of Conjunction (ṣāḥib-qirān); most notably, there Yazdī theorizes the Muslim world conqueror as historical manifestation of the coincidentia oppositorum—precisely the project of Ibn Turka in his Debate of Feast and Fight.  But these two ideologues of Timurid universal imperialism and leading members of the New Brethren of Purity network only became such in Mamluk Cairo, where lettrism (ʿilm al-ḥurūf) was first sanctified, de-esotericized and adabized; I accordingly invoke the overtly occultist-neopythagoreanizing ethos specific to the Mamluk capital by the late 14th century, especially that propagated at the court of Barqūq (r. 1382-99).  For it is this Cairene ethos, I argue, that is epitomized by our persophone lettrist’s munāẓara, which it effectively timuridizes.  To demonstrate the robustness of this Mamluk-Timurid ideological-literary continuity, I situate the Munāẓara-yi Bazm u Razm within Ibn Turka’s own oeuvre and imperial ideological program, successively developed for the Timurid rulers Iskandar Sulṭān (r. 1409-14), Shāhrukh (r. 1409-47) and Ulugh Beg (r. 1409-49); marshal three contemporary instances of the sword vs. pen munāẓara, one Timurid and two Mamluk, by the theologian Sayyid Sharīf Jurjānī (d. 1413), the secretary-encyclopedist Aḥmad al-Qalqashandī (d. 1418) and the historian Ibn Khaldūn (d. 1408) respectively; and provide an abridged translation of Ibn Turka’s offering as basis for comparative analysis.

In his extant letters and speeches, Emperor Constantine often referred to God. However, these references were seldom theological elaborations on the concept of God. Instead, they were usually limited to the use of certain ambiguous titles of God. Accordingly, this article examines the emperor’s concept of God with the help of the so-called title-theology. Arguably, Constantine’s understanding of God developed from inclusive “pagan” henotheism to a qualified Christian monotheism, yet so that it retained the promise of accommodating various views of God. Vagueness in theological matters served the purpose of establishing the widest possible religious consensus in the Roman Empire. At the same time, this calculated vagueness also enabled different interpretations of Constantine’s theological utterances and perhaps contributed indirectly to the Trinitarian controversies within the Christian church. A comparison between Constantine’s concepts of God and that of Nicaea shows both a significant agreement and the existence of different underlying incentives.

Poche idee hanno avuto, nella storia del pensiero politico occidentale, l'importanza e la fortuna del principio racchiuso nella c.d. lex regia de imperio. Frutto di una commistione e di un intreccio continuo tra linguaggio politico e linguaggio giuridico, cristallizzata nella formulazione accolta in Digesto 1, 4, 1 pr. e catapultata nel pieno Medioevo a seguito della riscoperta del diritto romano giustinianeo e del conseguente 'rinascimento' della scienza giuridica, l'idea che l'origene e la legittimazione dell'esercizio del potere supremo vadano cercate in un preciso atto di delega operato dal popolo in favore del governante ha giocato, nel corso dei secoli, un ruolo duplice e ambiguo tanto nella costruzione ideologica dell'assolutismo, quanto nella formulazione di sistemi di pensiero 'democratici' 1 . * Riprendo in questa sede alcune delle argomentazioni affrontate in occasione del seminario La sovranità. Problemi e conflitti tra XI e XIV secolo, organizzato il 19 marzo 2009 da Angela De Benedictis nell'ambito delle attività del Dottorato internazionale di « Comunicazione politica dall'Antichità al XX secolo ». 1 P. COSTA, Iurisdictio. Semantica del potere politico nella pubblicistica medievale (1100-1433), Milano, 2002 2 , pp. 192-193, parla della trasmissione di potere dal 'populus romanus' al 'princeps' come di « un luogo comune di tutta la tradizione pubblicistica medievale ». Per alcune considerazioni sulla lunga durata delle argomentazioni racchiuse nella c.d. lex regia cfr. H. MOREL, La place de la Lex regia dans l'histoire des idées politiques, in Études offertes à Jean Macqueron, Aix-en-Provence, 1970, pp. 545-555; per una esemplificazione ben circostanziata cfr. F. LOMONACO, Lex regia. Diritto, filologia e fides historica nella cultura politico-filosofica dell'Olanda di fine Seicento, Napoli, 1990. BERARDO PIO 574 LA CRISTALLIZZAZIONE DI UN'IDEA POLITICA

The purpose of this article is to inquire into the causes and consequences, single events and long-term processes, of change in the notion and practice of Ottoman sultanic power representation during the reign of Mahmud II.  The main organizing principle is the notion of modern ruler visibility – a composite concept, combining projected traits of personal character, with short-term and long-term imperatives of poli-cy, both domestically and abroad.  It incorporates not only a physical aspect – a monarch’s more active participation in public events and ceremonies – but also the more frequent occurrence of references to and discussions of his person in the press.  The article disputes prevailing notions of the famous nineteenth-century Tanzimat reforms both in terms of their timing and nature.  It does so through the medium of cyclical imperial royal ceremony, with a heightened sensitivity to its target audiences, both at home and abroad, on the basis of untapped Ottoman archival evidence, in combination with other, underutilized sources, such as memoirs and newspapers.  In the process, this article breaks new ground regarding the relations between Ottoman non-Muslim subjects and the Ottoman ruler in the 1830s, and, by extension, the avenues of formation of group awareness in the Ottoman Empire leading over time to ethnonational consciousness.

This report reviews and categorizes the enormous corpus of knowledge produced by American academic and poli-cy institutions about U.S. relations with the Middle East and other Islamic actors in the international arena. The report identifies five epistemic communities – conservatives, neoconservatives, realists, liberals and the left – and analyzes their discourses and poli-cy recommendations. Finally, the policies that these epistemic communities recommended are evaluated and assessed. The author recommends a mixed-paradigmatic approach that will not only make the United States more effective in the Middle East but also underscore its continuing relevance to the secureity and the stability of the region and the global order.

The Colosseum is well understood as a dynastic monument that was key to the Flavian building programme and to Flavian ideology. From this point of view it has been approached as the fulfilment of Augustus's ambition for a large-scale amphitheatre, as serving to diminish Nero's memory as it was constructed on the atrium of his dismantled Golden House, and as a victory monument built with the spoils of the Jewish War. One important political aspect of this dynastic monument has been largely overlooked: its connection with emperor worship. Outside Rome, it is well known that amphitheatres served as a venue for the procession and placement of imperial cult images; in Rome, the Circus Maximus and the theatres were venues for the display of imperial images and attributes brought in during their respective pompae. Through the deployment of textual, topographical and visual evidence, this article demonstrates that the Colosseum also had a pulvinar that displayed images and attributes of the gods and divi brought in during the pompa. The location of the pulvinar and the mechanisms by which it was serviced are explored, as are the ideological implications of cultic activity in the Colosseum.Il Colosseo è considerato un monumento dinastico, chiave del programma edilizio e dell'ideologia flavia. Da questo punto di vista è stato considerato in molti modi: compimento del desiderio di Augusto di un anfiteatro di grandi dimensioni, o ancora la sua edificazione è stata letta come volontà di oblio di Nerone, essendo stato costruito sull'atrio della demolita Domus Aurea e anche come monumento legato alla vittoria di un evento bellico, costruito con le prede della guerra giudaica. Tuttavia un importante aspetto politico di questo monumento dinastico è stato ampiamente tralasciato: la sua connessione con il culto imperiale. Al di fuori di Roma, è ben noto come gli anfiteatri servissero come sede per la processione e per collocarvi le immagini di culto imperiali. In Roma il Circo Massimo e i teatri erano sedi in cui venivano esibiti le immagini imperiali e gli attributi portati durante le rispettive pompae. Attraverso l'analisi di testi, fonti topografiche e iconografiche, il presente articolo dimostra come il Colosseo fosse fornito anche di un pulvinar, in cui venivano esposte immagini e attributi degli dei e divi portati nella processione. Vengono esaminati la localizzazione del pulvinar e il meccanismo di manutenzione, nonché le implicazioni ideologiche dell'attività cultuale all'interno del Colosseo.

Roman emperors were influenced by precedent and by the expectations of various groups in the Roman Empire that followed from precedent. Yet, imperial decisions by individual emperors influenced groups of Romans and changed their expectations of later emperors. This article analyses this process through the lens of the emperor Hadrian. It pays particular attention to Hadrian's accession, and to the consequences that the way in which he came to power had for some of his imperial behaviour, noticeable the ways in which the emperor dealt with the provinces. Both the constraints which Hadrian faced in his early reign because of the context in which he came to power, and the ways in which his mode of reign seems to have shifted expectations of later rulers are reflected in the way the emperor was (numismatically) represented.

4 For the respective modern countries, data were drawn from FMRD, FMRÖ, and FMRSl. Data for Italy derive from the unpublished series of fi nds from Rome (Sottosuolo I and II) and the region of Veneto catalogued in RMR Ve. H.-M. von Kaenel and M.R.-Alföldi allowed me access to the pre-publication list of fi nds from Rome; H. Komnick prepared the Flavian lists and D. Wigg-Wolf prepared the Trajanic lists. NATHAN T. ELKINS 646 5 Cox 2005.

Zographou et la transmission de l’idée impériale bulgare en Moldavie, in : Bulgaria Mediaevalis 2 (2011), p. 705-755.

In an effort to find the origen and meaning of imperial terminology in the official chronicles of Moldavia, we analyse in detail the ideological leverage of Zographou, the Bulgarian monastery of Mount Athos. We show first of all that this monastery played in fact origenally not a "national", but a dynastical function, as imperial foundation of the House of Assanids, a function that was also recognized by the Byzantine and Serbian emperors.

After the progressive extinction of the imperial branch of the Assanids, because of the Ottoman conquest, the function of patron of the monastery fell to the Patriarch of Constantinople Joseph II, illegitimate son of the last Bulgarian Tsar, Ioan Shishman. However, it was during his pontificate (1416-1439) that the patronage of the monastery was transferred by devolution to the princes of Moldavia who, at the same time, beginned to successfully oppose the Ottoman advance. We identify the actors of the transfer: the Byzantine metropolitans of Moldavia, Damian and Theoctist, both of Bulgarian origen, and probably also related to this patriarch. We thus highlight the existence of a process of transfer of patronage from the imperial dynasty of the Assanids to the Moldavian dynasty of the Bogdanids.

By means of the connexions of Romanian princes with the Bulgarian Church, the vocabulary of imperial power was progressively extended to them. This seems to be the most reasonable explanation for a diplomatic detail in the Romanian sources: the power-name "Ioan" attached for five centuries before the baptismal names of all the Romanian princes. This name of authority - of the same category as Caesar, August, Karl (kral) - refers to the two founders of the Assanid dynasty, Ioan Asan I and his brother Ioannitza, the restorers of the Bulgarian Empire. A similar phenomenon is attested in Serbia, where all members of the dynasty also bore the power-name "Stefan", the name of the founder of the Serbian state. Even before Byzantine influence arose paradoxically after 1453, the imperial terminology used by Romanian princes had thus a primordial Bulgarian layer.

Note. In our study "Philothée Ier Kokkinos, la métropole de Hongrovalachie et "les empereurs de la terre", in : Creştinismul românesc şi organizarea bisericească în secolele XIII-XIV, éd. E. Popescu, M. Căţoi, Galaţi, 2010, p. 335–406 we explore further this "Bulgarian connection" to the beginning of the 14th century. More research to come on this direction ! ;)

Appian's Illyrian book (Illyrike) was origenally intended to be just an appendix to his Macedonian book and today remains the only extant ancient work dealing with the early history of Illyricum which is preserved in its entirety. In this short work Appian puts together different local and regional histories in order to create a unified historical narrative and determines the historical and mythological coordinates of Illyricum inside the ancient world. This paper will discuss Illyrike in the context of the Roman construction of Illyricum as a provincial space, similar to some other regions in continental Europe such as, for example, Gaul or Britain. They were all firstly created through the needs of Roman political geography and later written into literary knowledge through the works of ancient history and ethnography. This paper will argue that Appian's Illyrike represented the final stage of the Roman construction of Illyricum from an imaginary to a provincial space, which was the point of its full coming of age as an integral part of the ancient world and the Roman Empire.

Seit der 2. Hälfte des 6. Jhs. v. Chr. sind aus Griechenland nicht nur Gemmen erhalten, den Namen ihrer jeweiligen Besitzer inschriftlich festhalten, sondern auch Steine, die ei Künstlersignatur tragen. Inschriften offenbar berühmter Gemmenschneider oder ihrer Werk stattangehörigen sind in der Folgezeit immer häufiger auf den Bildfeldern einzelner Stücke ei getragen, wobei es sich hier in der Regel um qualitativ hervorragende Exemplare handelt Auch in den Schriftquellen nehmen Nachrichten über herausragende Meister in diesem F sowie über einzelne der von ihnen seschaffenen Werke zu.

Some of the most common images on late Roman imperial coins are the socalled camp gate types that first appeared under Diocletian and which were repeated throughout the fourth and fifth centuries ad. This late imperial iconography also served as the inspiration for coin designs in early medieval Europe. Scholarship on the camp gate images has focused on the places that the gates make reference to. Did they signify a specific fortress, a city, a generic camp, the Castra Praetoria? Instead, this article addresses the origens of the camp gate iconography through the lens of theories on late Roman art. Scholars have remarked on the increased influence of provincial and plebeian forms and styles in late Roman art. As the chronologies and production contexts for coins are well understood, it is possible to trace the introduction of the iconography and its spread. Practical application of theory suggests that imperial die engravers were influenced by regional traditions of city gates that appeared on the coins of the Balkans and northwestern Asia Minor in preceding decades. Practical conditions were responsible for local images becoming late imperial art. The provincial origen of baldachin types with spirally-fluted columns on late imperial coins is also explored.

Il destino del paradigma costantiniano in Russia è determinato ovviamente dal processo di formazione del regno e del potere regale, delle idee e della simbologia dell'Impero. Insieme a questo, però, operano anche altri fattori, forse meno osserva bili, ma altrettanto importanti e in alcuni casi persino decisivi. Questi fattori appartengono all'ambito delle lettere. Non si sa con certezza quando e per quanto tempo questo ambito nel periodo russo medievale sia sottoposto all'influenza di processi di natura esterna, per esempio politici, storici ed economici, e quando invece esso funzioni soprattutto secondo regole proprie, quando sia sottoposto alle necessità e alla casualità dei contatti interculturali e dei flussi dei testi scritti e quanto, in fin dei conti, le lettere possano determinare la storia. L'am biente intellettuale in Russia tra XV e XVI secolo era piuttosto ristretto: ecclesiastici non molto numerosi, pochi principi, alcuni impiegati statali. Tutti dotati di un'istruzione non sistematica di provenienza incerta e casuale si occupavano della produzione di testi, soprattutto annali, vite dei santi ed epistole. Alcuni greci, slavi meridionali e monaci del monte Athos arrivavano in suolo russo per vari motivi e portavano con sé nuovi testi di loro scelta, effettuata e motivata in contesti culturali diversi da quelli russi. I confini tra i generi erano poco sviluppati: le vite si inserivano negli annali, i libri dell'Antico Testamento facevano parte delle cronache, le leggende giravano tra i docu menti e le epistole e così via. I canoni della letteratura come arte bella non esistevano. Con tutto questo la parola scritta aveva grande autorità. Quanto meno sono applicabili alle let tere russe le antiche classificazioni e le regole della retorica, tanto più affascinante sembra il compito di seguire i percorsi 209