At the end of the book, the conclusion revisits the current debate among world historians whether to favour comparative approaches or search for cultural connections. Based on the themes analyzed in the current volume, this chapter argues in conclusion that ancient world history will have to combine both. Macro- and micro-perspectives should be seen as complementary; the former makes it possible to identify broader patterns while the latter enables the study of cultural exchanges. The latter, however, has often been preoccupied with marginal phenomena while the former sometimes has been too teleological, subsuming everything to a developmental logic ending in Europe. The view of ancient world history developed here seeks to identify a set of global patterns that combine both the population majority and the most central social, political and cultural developments of the period into a unified whole while exploring how these phenomena interacted across ancient Afro-Eurasia. Roman historians can gain a lot from intensifying the dialogue with students of other premodern Afro-Eurasian societies.

This chapter deals with the history of money in ancient times. We start with ancient Mesopotamia, where fundamental value (silver and barley) was stored in temples. Clay tablets circulated openly, supporting fundamental value and contractual arrangements. Coinage in ancient Greece and Rome was a step forward in terms of ease of use but involved the risk of debasement – reduction of the content of precious metals. We describe debasement of coins from the late Roman empire to the Middle Ages, then move to China, where the first banknotes were printed in the early part of the second millennium. The use of paper in finance spread to Europe, where it became the key technology supporting the rise of banks in the late Middle Ages and the Renaissance. We describe the rise of central banks in Europe, starting from Sweden and ending with Germany and Italy. We draw several lessons from these experiences. The main one is that a successful money is a private–public partnership, where “public administration” and “private interest” combine and complement each other. The chapter ends with the birth of telecommunication in the nineteenth century and its early applications at the beginning of the twentieth century, which gave rise to radical changes in monetary technology in the subsequent period.

In the opening lines of the twenty-third book of his universal history, Diodorus Siculus praises his native Sicily as “the fairest of all islands, since it can contribute greatly to the growth of an empire.”1 Sitting at the intersection of prevailing maritime routes, the island served as a natural landing for ships plying their way between the Mediterranean’s Eastern and Western Basins. Its broad coastal plains supported large urban centers and entrepôts that opened onto the Tyrrhenian Sea to the north, the Ionian Sea to the east, and the vast Libyan Sea to the south and west, inviting contacts from the Italian Peninsula, the Greek mainland, and North Africa. Indeed, located at the heart of the Mediterranean basin, Sicily has occupied an equally central place in the geopolitics of the region across much of the last three millennia.

This chapter focuses on ancient Sparta as a representative case for the general reception of classical antiquity in heavy metal music. The Spartans are the basis of songs and albums by dozens of bands across the globe: their last stand at Thermopylae is the most popular ancient battle in metal music, and their king Leonidas is one of the most popular ancient figures. Their appropriation by metal bands is a product of their rise in popularity in popular culture since the premiere of the 2006 film 300, and as in pop-culture, their appeal resonates with political and nationalistic agendas, especially of Greek bands. Sparta’s wide appeal harmonises with metal’s core ethos of hypermasculinity, the liberation of animal instincts and the disruption of systems of conformity and control. As with other topics from the classical world, heavy metal music takes the Spartans from both ancient sources and modern media and remakes them in the image of its own counterculture, that of the few standing defiant against the many.

This Introduction to Volume I of The Cambridge World History of Genocide, which covers the ancient, medieval, and early modern worlds, raises questions about the nature of premodern genocide, about the meaning of genocide and genocidal intent in the premodern era, and about both perpetrators and victim groups, and about the scale, techniques, and ideologies of genocide in that long historical period in comparison to those of genocides committed in modern times. The chapter considers whether or not genocide can be considered a ‘transhistorical phenomenon’. It also asks whether mass violence in the pre-modern and early modern periods occurred in a different moral context than that of modern times, presenting some differing views on this question. Finally the chapter introduces the substantive chapters of the volume, and how they variously examine material, political, sociocultural, and ideological factors that contributed to premodern outbreaks of genocide, as well as noting some changes over time from prehistory to the early modern era.

In this chapter, we see how Cicero, as a rising Roman politician, uncovers hidden lines of influence, pinpoints shades of political support, and frames partisan divides in the Roman Republic. Here, Cicero uses voluntas both to analyze politics as he finds it and to argue for its rational improvement. Descriptively, Cicero uses voluntate and summa voluntate to identify subtler shades of opposition or support and to trace lines of unseen influence among Rome’s leading men like Pompey and Caesar. Through his gifted pen, will becomes a measurable force as it had seemingly not been before. To measure will is to rationalize it, and Cicero builds new philosophical arguments for the primacy of voluntas over violence and for a vision of politics that transacts power rationally by the intersecting wills of magistrates and people. I use powermapping, a tool of modern advocacy, as a lens to examine Cicero’s political strategy and use of language. This vision, at once old and new, is upended by the ascent of Caesar, whose sole voluntas undoes Cicero’s rational framework, exerting will by brute force and eliminating the old pluralist order.

This short chapter recapitulates the substantive advances made by the individual chapters in this volume before closing remarks on the difference between using probability to represent epistemic uncertainty and modelling variability, two exercises that are easily confused, and on the use of models to answer historical questions.

This chapter explains what is – and isn’t – archaeology, its historical development, thematic and global spread, and the development of the discipline as a profession. The chapter also discusses archaeological ethics, professional standards, and codes of conduct.

The present contribution offers a neurosociological and socio-cognitive re-analysis of the two festivities dedicated to the ancient Roman goddess known as Bona Dea, both managed and attended by women only. Additionally, the main variants of Bona Dea’s mythography are assessed as a violent reminder of gendered behavioural norms and as a coercive mate-guarding strategy supported by religious storytelling. The two festivities are assessed as different expressions of class stratification and socio-political negotiation within the Roman agnatic patriarchy. The patrician December festival is identified as a special agent ritual with distinctly imagistic features. The poorly known May celebration is tentatively reconstructed as a predominantly doctrinal, non-patrician special patient ritual, mainly attended by freedwomen, and led by a priestess known as the damiatrix. The supposedly orgiastic Greek roots of the cult are questioned on linguistic, historiographical, and archaeological grounds. The conclusions highlight the need to establish a cross-disciplinary cognitive historiography of sex and gender in antiquity to overcome the limitations behind the study of ancient women’s religious experiences.