Erich S. Gruen's Books

The Last Generation of the Roman Republic

By: Erich S. Gruen

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The Last Generation of the Roman Republic

By: Erich S. Gruen

Includes new introduction dated July 1994.

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626

Publisher

Univ of California Press

Published Date

ISBN 10

0520201531

ISBN 13

9780520201538

Studies in Greek Culture and Roman Policy

By: Erich S. Gruen

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Studies in Greek Culture and Roman Policy

By: Erich S. Gruen

Gruen studies the Hellenization of Rome during the middle Republic years, where changes in arts, religion and philosophy, and politics altered Roman public life by introducing Greek learning.

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Page Count

219

Publisher

Univ of California Press

Published Date

ISBN 10

0520204832

ISBN 13

9780520204836

Diaspora

Jews Amidst Greeks and Romans

By: Erich S. Gruen

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Diaspora

Jews Amidst Greeks and Romans

By: Erich S. Gruen

What was life like for Jews settled throughout the Mediterranean world of Classical antiquity--and what place did Jewish communities have in the diverse civilization dominated by Greeks and Romans? In a probing account of the Jewish diaspora in the four centuries from Alexander the Great's conquest of the Near East to the Roman destruction of the Jewish Temple in 70 C.E., Erich Gruen reaches often surprising conclusions. By the first century of our era, Jews living abroad far outnumbered those living in Palestine and had done so for generations. Substantial Jewish communities were found throughout the Greek mainland and Aegean islands, Asia Minor, the Tigris-Euphrates valley, Egypt, and Italy. Focusing especially on Alexandria, Greek cities in Asia Minor, and Rome, Gruen explores the lives of these Jews: the obstacles they encountered, the institutions they established, and their strategies for adjustment. He also delves into Jewish writing in this period, teasing out how Jews in the diaspora saw themselves. There emerges a picture of a Jewish minority that was at home in Greco-Roman cities: subject to only sporadic harassment; its intellectuals immersed in Greco-Roman culture while refashioning it for their own purposes; exhibiting little sign of insecurity in an alien society; and demonstrating both a respect for the Holy Land and a commitment to the local community and Gentile government. Gruen's innovative analysis of the historical and literary record alters our understanding of the way this vibrant minority culture engaged with the dominant Classical civilization.

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Page Count

410

Publisher

Harvard University Press

Published Date

ISBN 10

0674037995

ISBN 13

9780674037991

Ethnicity in the Ancient World – Did it matter?

By: Erich S. Gruen

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Ethnicity in the Ancient World – Did it matter?

By: Erich S. Gruen

This study raises that difficult and complicated question on a broad front, taking into account the expressions and attitudes of a wide variety of Greek, Roman, Jewish, and early Christian sources, including Herodotus, Polybius, Cicero, Philo, and Paul. It approaches the topic of ethnicity through the lenses of the ancients themselves rather than through the imposition of modern categories, labels, and frameworks. A central issue guides the course of the work: did ancient writers reflect upon collective identity as determined by common origins and lineage or by shared traditions and culture?

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276

Publisher

Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG

Published Date

ISBN 10

3110685655

ISBN 13

9783110685657

The Last Generation of the Roman Republic

By: Erich S. Gruen

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The Last Generation of the Roman Republic

By: Erich S. Gruen

Available for the first time in paperback, with a new introduction that reviews related scholarship of the past twenty years, Erich Gruen's classic study of the late Republic examines institutions as well as personalities, social tensions as well as politics, the plebs and the army as well as the aristocracy.

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626

Publisher

Univ of California Press

Published Date

ISBN 10

0520342038

ISBN 13

9780520342033

Fragmentary Jewish Historians and Biblical History

By: Erich S. Gruen

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Fragmentary Jewish Historians and Biblical History

By: Erich S. Gruen

In his contribution to the fragmentary Jewish historians of Hellenistic times and their treatment of the biblical tradition Erich Gruen shows not only that the fragments disclose a remarkable range and diversity of texts, but also that their authors' engagement with biblical texts was more light-hearted in tone, deliberately idiosyncratic, and, far from parochial in temperament, tended to connect with Hellenic and Near Eastern cultures in order to set Jewish traditions into a broader context. These historians did not see their mission primarily as setting the record straight. They provided arresting twists on biblical tales, alternative versions, provocative variations, and, almost always, some entertainment value. The sacrality of the Scriptures remained untouched.

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Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht

Published Date

ISBN 10

3946317510

ISBN 13

9783946317517

The Hellenistic World and the Coming of Rome

By: Erich S. Gruen

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The Hellenistic World and the Coming of Rome

By: Erich S. Gruen

In this revisionist study of Roman imperialism in the Greek world, Gruen considers the Hellenistic context within which Roman expansion took place. The evidence discloses a preponderance of Greek rather than Roman ideas: a noteworthy readiness on the part of Roman policymakers to adjust to Hellenistic practices rather than to impose a system of their own.

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Page Count

882

Publisher

Univ of California Press

Published Date

ISBN 10

0520057376

ISBN 13

9780520057371

Heritage and Hellenism

The Reinvention of Jewish Tradition

By: Erich S. Gruen

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Heritage and Hellenism

The Reinvention of Jewish Tradition

By: Erich S. Gruen

The interaction of Jew and Greek in antiquity intrigues the imagination. Both civilizations boasted great traditions, their roots stretching back to legendary ancestors and divine sanction. In the wake of Alexander the Great's triumphant successes, Greeks and Macedonians came as conquerors and settled as ruling classes in the lands of the eastern Mediterranean. Hellenic culture, the culture of the ascendant classes in many of the cities of the Near East, held widespread attraction and appeal. Jews were certainly not immune. In this thoroughly researched, lucidly written work, Erich Gruen draws on a wide variety of literary and historical texts of the period to explore a central question: How did the Jews accommodate themselves to the larger cultural world of the Mediterranean while at the same time reasserting the character of their own heritage within it? Erich Gruen's work highlights Jewish creativity, ingenuity, and inventiveness, as the Jews engaged actively with the traditions of Hellas, adapting genres and transforming legends to articulate their own legacy in modes congenial to a Hellenistic setting. Drawing on a diverse array of texts composed in Greek by Jews over a broad period of time, Gruen explores works by Jewish historians, epic poets, tragic dramatists, writers of romance and novels, exegetes, philosophers, apocalyptic visionaries, and composers of fanciful fables—not to mention pseudonymous forgers and fabricators. In these works, Jewish writers reinvented their own past, offering us the best insights into Jewish self-perception in that era.

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Page Count

361

Publisher

Univ of California Press

Published Date

ISBN 10

0520929195

ISBN 13

9780520929197

The Construct of Identity in Hellenistic Judaism

Essays on Early Jewish Literature and History

By: Erich S. Gruen

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The Construct of Identity in Hellenistic Judaism

Essays on Early Jewish Literature and History

By: Erich S. Gruen

This book collects twenty two previously published essays and one new one by Erich S. Gruen who has written extensively on the literature and history of early Judaism and the experience of the Jews in the Greco-Roman world. His many articles on this subject have, however, appeared mostly in conference volumes and Festschriften, and have therefore not had wide circulation. By putting them together in a single work, this will bring the essays to the attention of a much broader scholarly readership and make them more readily available to students in the fields of ancient history and early Judaism. The pieces are quite varied, but develop a number of connected and related themes: Jewish identity in the pagan world, the literary representations by Jews and pagans of one another, the interconnections of Hellenism and Judaism, and the Jewish experience under Hellenistic monarchies and the Roman empire.

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540

Publisher

Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG

Published Date

ISBN 10

3110387190

ISBN 13

9783110387193

Rethinking the Other in Antiquity

By: Erich S. Gruen

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Rethinking the Other in Antiquity

By: Erich S. Gruen

Prevalent among classicists today is the notion that Greeks, Romans, and Jews enhanced their own self-perception by contrasting themselves with the so-called Other--Egyptians, Phoenicians, Ethiopians, Gauls, and other foreigners--frequently through hostile stereotypes, distortions, and caricature. In this provocative book, Erich Gruen demonstrates how the ancients found connections rather than contrasts, how they expressed admiration for the achievements and principles of other societies, and how they discerned--and even invented--kinship relations and shared roots with diverse peoples. Gruen shows how the ancients incorporated the traditions of foreign nations, and imagined blood ties and associations with distant cultures through myth, legend, and fictive histories. He looks at a host of creative tales, including those describing the founding of Thebes by the Phoenician Cadmus, Rome's embrace of Trojan and Arcadian origins, and Abraham as ancestor to the Spartans. Gruen gives in-depth readings of major texts by Aeschylus, Herodotus, Xenophon, Plutarch, Julius Caesar, Tacitus, and others, in addition to portions of the Hebrew Bible, revealing how they offer richly nuanced portraits of the alien that go well beyond stereotypes and caricature. Providing extraordinary insight into the ancient world, this controversial book explores how ancient attitudes toward the Other often expressed mutuality and connection, and not simply contrast and alienation.

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432

Publisher

Princeton University Press

Published Date

ISBN 10

0691156352

ISBN 13

9780691156354

Scriptural Tales Retold

The Inventiveness of Second Temple Jews

By: Erich S. Gruen

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Scriptural Tales Retold

The Inventiveness of Second Temple Jews

By: Erich S. Gruen

Erich S. Gruen investigates a remarkable phenomenon in religious and literary history: the freedom with which Jewish writers in antiquity retold and recast, sometimes distorted or bypassed, biblical narratives that ostensibly had the status of sacred texts. Gruen asks the question of what prompted such tampering with tales that carried divine authority, and what implications this widespread practice of liberal revising had for attitudes toward the sacrality of the scriptures in general. Gruen focuses upon writings of the Second Temple period, an era of the deep integration of Jewish history and the Greco-Roman world. Gruen brings to the task the training of a classicist and ancient historian rather than that of a biblical textual critic or a rabbinics scholar, not pursuing the commentaries of the later rabbis with their very different approaches, methods, and goals. As such, Gruen's emphasis rests upon narrative rather than legal matters, the haggadic rather than the halakhic. The former lends itself most readily to the creative instincts of the re-tellers.

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Page Count

185

Publisher

Bloomsbury Publishing

Published Date

ISBN 10

0567715183

ISBN 13

9780567715180

Studies in Greek Culture and Roman Policy

By: Erich S. Gruen

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Studies in Greek Culture and Roman Policy

By: Erich S. Gruen

Gruen studies the Hellenization of Rome during the middle Republic years, where changes in arts, religion and philosophy, and politics altered Roman public life by introducing Greek learning.

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