Our understanding of the culture and values of the ancient Greco-Roman world is largely based on texts and material evidence left behind by a small and unusual group of city dwellers. The people of the deep Mediterranean countryside rarely appear in historical records from antiquity and almost never as historical actors. This book is the first extensive historical ethnography of an ancient rural society, based on an exceptionally rich body of inscriptions from a remote mountainous area of Roman Asia Minor. The kinship structures of the countryside and household forms, as well as the area's demographics, religious life, gender relations, social structure, normative standards, and values are analyzed in detail. Roman northern Lydia is perhaps the only non-urban society in the Greco-Roman world whose culture can be described in such detail: a world of close-knit families, balanced values, hard rural labor, village solidarity, honor, piety, and love.

Pages: 396, Dimensions: 17.8x17.8cm