Download e-book for iPad: Alexandria in Late Antiquity ; Topography and Social by Christopher Haas

moment in simple terms to Rome within the historic international, Alexandria used to be domestic to lots of overdue antiquity's such a lot extraordinary writers, philosophers, and theologians -- between them Philo, Origen, Arius, Athanasius, Hypatia, Cyril, and John Philoponus. Now, in Alexandria in overdue Antiquity, Christopher Haas deals the 1st publication to put those figures in the actual and social context of Alexandria's bustling city milieu. as a result of its transparent demarcation of communal limitations, Alexandria presents the trendy historian with a terrific chance to probe the multicultural make-up of an historical city unit. Haas explores the vast avenues and again alleys of Alexandria's neighborhoods, its suburbs and waterfront, and facets of fabric tradition that underlay Alexandrian social and highbrow lifestyles. Organizing his dialogue round the city's non secular and ethnic blocs -- Jews, pagans, and Christians -- he info the fiercely aggressive nature of Alexandrian social dynamics. not like contemporary scholarship, which cites Alexandria as a version for peaceable coexistence inside a culturally different group, Haas reveals that the various teams' struggles for social dominance and cultural hegemony frequently led to violence and bloodshed -- a unstable scenario often exacerbated by means of imperial intervention on one part or the other.Eventually, Haas concludes, Alexandrian society accomplished a definite balance and reintegration -- a technique that led to the transformation of Alexandrian civic id throughout the an important centuries among antiquity and the center Ages.