Journeys in the Roman East

Book excerpt: In the Roman Empire, travelling was something of a central feature, facilitating commerce, pilgrimage, study abroad, tourism, and ethnographic explorations. The present volume investigates for the first time intellectual aspects of this phenomenon by giving equal attention to pagan, Jewish, and Christian perspectives. A team of experts from different fields argues that journeys helped construct cultural identities and negotiate between the local and the particular on the one hand, and wider imperial discourses on the other. A special point of interest is the question of how Rome engages the attention of intellectuals from the Greek East and offers new opportunities of self-fashioning. Pagans, Jews, and Christians shared similar experiences and constructed comparable identities in dialogue, sometimes polemical, with each other. Contributors: Knut Backhaus, Ewen Bowie, Janet Downie, Kendra Eshleman, Reinhard Feldmeier, Georgia Frank, Amit Gevaryahu, Catherine Hezser, Benjamin Isaac, Richard Kalmin, Sarit Kattan Gribetz, Yonatan Moss, Laura Nasrallah, Maren Niehoff, Jonathan Price, Ian Rutherford, Daniel Schwartz, Froma Zeitlin, Nicola Zwingmann