Public Spectacles in Roman and Late Antique Palestine by Zeev Weiss
By Zeev Weiss
Public Spectacles in Roman and past due old Palestine introduces readers to the panoply of public leisure that flourished in Palestine from the 1st century BCE to the 6th century CE. Drawing on a trove of unique archaeological and textual proof, Zeev Weiss reconstructs an historic global the place Romans, Jews, and Christians intermixed amid a heady brew of shouts, roars, and applause to observe various generally pagan spectacles.
Ancient Roman society reveled in lots of such spectacles--dramatic performances, chariot races, athletic competitions, and gladiatorial combats--that required intricate public venues, frequently maintained at nice price. Wishing to ingratiate himself with Rome, Herod the nice equipped theaters, amphitheaters, and hippodromes to carry those kinds of leisure to Palestine. Weiss explores how the indigenous Jewish and Christian populations spoke back, as either spectators and performers, to those cultural imports. might be predictably, the reactions of rabbinic and clerical elites didn't fluctuate tremendously. yet their dire warnings to shun pagan leisure did little to hose down the recognition of those events.
Herod's bold development tasks left a long-lasting imprint at the quarter. His dream of reworking Palestine right into a Roman enclave succeeded a long way past his rule, with video games and spectacles carrying on with into the 5th century CE. via then, notwithstanding, public leisure in Palestine had develop into a cultural establishment in decline, finally disappearing in the course of Justinian's reign within the 6th century.
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Extra resources for Public Spectacles in Roman and Late Antique Palestine
Example text
PUBLIC SPECTACLES IN ROMAN AND LATE ANTIQUE PALESTINE purposes of some of the buildings. We will first clarify the terms Josephus used and to which buildings he was referring in his descriptions, and then discuss the nature of the games held within them. 22 Josephus writes that Herod apparently built a theater and an amphitheater or hippodrome— but not a stadium—in Jerusalem, Caesarea, and in all probability Jericho, although the historian does not say so explicitly. With the king’s death, and in the ensuing period, Josephus mentions additional monuments that stood in Jerusalem and Caesarea that are not listed among Herod’s building projects.
Both were rectangular without permanent benches; the colonnades around the racecourse, which seem to have existed in Jericho as well, held removable seats that were set up expressly for the races, but there were neither carceres nor some kind of partition separating the two sides of the track. The building in Caesarea, in contrast, had permanent seats, a sphendone and carceres, and a partition composed of several elements separating both sides of the track. All three Herodian structures were built in a relatively short span of time, and it is therefore surprising that they were quite different from each other.
Several architectural elements were detected in the preserved remains of the building—the cavea, ambulatorium, and scaenae frons, with a rectangular recess in its center and curvilinear THE BEGINNING niches on either side. Semicircular and rectangular niches in the proscaenium were later replaced by a flat façade. 7). The building that Josephus called an “amphitheater” was a rectangular structure (exterior measurements ca. 312 × 69 m) whose short southern end formed a semicircle (sphendone) and whose opposite end contained the starting gates (carceres).