Beate Dignas and Engelbert Winter's Rome and Persia in Late Antiquity: Neighbours and Rivals reviewed by Alan Farahani at the University of California, Berkeley:
The Sasanian Empire has often been neglected or
marginalized compared to its Western (and in more recent years, its
Eastern, Chinese) neighbor. Studies that focus on the Roman Near East
usually include the Sasanians only when warfare between the Romans and
the Sasanians is involved, and such analyses are frequently undertaken
from an exclusively Roman perspective. Lately, however, there has been
an increased interest in understanding not only Roman-Sasanian
relations more fully, but also in generating multifaceted approaches to
the Sasanian impact on the Near East.To this end, the
present volume, coauthored by Beate Dignas and Engelbert Winter, seeks
to fill an intellectual gap and provide a narrative and sourcebook on
Roman and Sasanian relations "based on a foundation that shows respect
for the history of the East and does not shape this history according
to Western needs" (p. 2). This English-language edition published in
2007 by Cambridge University Press is the successor to a
German-language original (Rom und das Perserreich. Zwei Weltmächte zwischen Konfrontation und Koexistenz)
published in 2001 by Akademie Verlag. This edition is not merely a
translation; the authors have greatly expanded on their original text
and have added new chapters, new maps, updated appendices, and have in
places responded, above all, to comments provided by one of the
original reviewers, Stefan R. Hauser, a historian and archaeologist of
the Parthian and Sasanian periods of Iran. As Hauser's
evaluation surveyed the entirety of the book, much of the content of
which remains unchanged, this review focuses instead on the impact of
the revisions upon the original.
Full review at the Bryn Mawr Classical Review.
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