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Hadrian: Empire and Conflict | 
| Author: Thorsten Opper
Publisher: British Museum Press
Category: Book
List Price: £25.00
Buy New: £17.49
You Save: £7.51 (30%)
New (22) Used (2) from £13.18
Avg. Customer Rating:  2 reviews
Sales Rank: 9977
Media: Paperback
Pages: 256
Shipping Weight (lbs): 3
Dimensions (in): 11.3 x 8.9 x 0.9
ISBN: 071415069X
EAN: 9780714150697
ASIN: 071415069X
Publication Date: July 7, 2008
Shipping: Eligible for Super Saver Shipping
Availability: Usually dispatched within 24 hours
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| Customer Reviews:
Great book, great price September 29, 2008
3 out of 3 found this review helpful
I attended this exhibition at the British Museum and it was FABULOUS! Very well done, and the book that goes along with the exhibition is quite informative. I really enjoyed both the exhibition and the book. Unfortunately, I purchased the book at the Museum and paid GBP 40 for it! I wish I had realized that it could be purchased on Amazon for a much lower price. Buy it!
Splendid exhibition book and catalogue. July 11, 2008
20 out of 22 found this review helpful
The Roman empire of the second century AD - Gibbon's golden age in all recorded history - suffers from a relative paucity of good historical sources when compared to say the Late Republic, the Julio-Claudian period or the 4th c. AD. How can the lives of that century's mostly good emperors compete in fascination with the likes of Caligula or Nero or, if you're looking for an interesting good guy let's say Augustus, when the written sources are so poor? We know that Hadrian was one of the greatest and pychologically most complex and interesting of all of the Roman emperors and yet for many of the details of his life we have to rely on the woefully inadequate biography in the Historia Augusta so that much of our understanding of the man and his reign derives from archaeological,epigraphic,and numismatic evidence. But even then you bump into all sorts of limitations.For example, it would be fascinating to know much more about Hadrian's relationship with the handsome youth Antinous and the circumstances of the latter's tragic death in the Nile but conjecture is all we're ever likely to have. So how to make Hadrian interesting? Most modern biographies of him are dryish and rather academic and I hope it won't sound heretical if I say that I have always found Marguerite Yourcenar's celebrated Memoirs of Hadrian beautifully written but a tad dull. The first book on Hadrian I read in the 1960s was Stewart Perowne's, a work that now strikes me as quite outdated. That's why I love this type of exhibition book. In their lavishly illustrated pages the past springs to life and in this particular book Hadrian and his age are vividely portrayed. All the important subjects are covered: his life and principate, his travels, the great art and architecture (especially good on the great villa and its iconoclastic rejection of the Vitruvian classical cannon), his relationship with Antinous and his wife Sabina etc. and if like me you're a lover of classical art there's a feast of wonderful images, many of them recent discoveries such as the giant head from Sagalassos in Turkey. And I've never seen before the the head of an extraordinarly youthful Hadrian from the Prado in which he looks about 25 and resembles Queen Victoria's Albert nor Bellotto's 1742 painting of the Pantheon showing how stained the columns and pediment of the facade used to be compared with their present well-scrubbed appearance. The text is scholarly and authoritative and bang-up-to-date without being in the least bit dull (although I have a few minor quibbles such as the lack of background detail about the Jewish revolts that caused such mayhem just as Hadrian came to power and likewise why was he so ham-fisted in his treatment of the Jews resulting in the Bar Kokhba revolt later in his reign - was it simply down to his philhellenism?) For popular consumption this is the most accessible work on Hadrian I've come across (although I must put in a word of recommendation for Royston Lamberts's wonderful "Beloved and God" which focusses on Hadrian and Antinous.) I haven't found time to see the exhibition yet but I've read the book and I loved it.
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