Colour and Meaning in Ancient Rome by Mark Bradley

The study of colour has become familiar territory in recent anthropology, linguistics, art history and archaeology. Classicists, however, have traditionally subordinated the study of colour to form. By drawing together evidence from contemporary philosophers, elegists, epic writers, historians and satirists, Mark Bradley reinstates colour as an essential informative unit for the classification and evaluation of the Roman world. He also demonstrates that the questions of what colour was and how it functioned - as well as how it could be misused and misunderstood - were topics of intellectual debate in early imperial Rome. Suggesting strategies for interpreting Roman expressions of colour in Latin texts, Dr Bradley offers new approaches to understanding the relationship between perception and knowledge in Roman elite thought. In doing so, he highlights the fundamental role that colour performed in the realms of communication and information, and its intellectual contribution to contemporary discussions of society, politics and morality.

Explores how ancient Romans categorised, organised and described colours, and outlines the principal differences and similarities between ancient and modern concepts of colour. By drawing together evidence from contemporary philosophers, elegists, epic writers, historians and satirists, Bradley explores the definition and function of colour in Rome during the early Empire.

Ethnicity and Foreigners in Ancient Greece and China by Hyun Kim

Why did the Greeks claim to be superior to their neighbors and yet record, rightly or wrongly, that the founders of some of their most important cities were foreigners from the Near East? Can we find similar ethnocentric representations of outsiders in the literature of the other great literate civilization of the Ancient World, Early China? How do the Greek and Chinese representations of the foreigner differ?

These questions are examined in a comparative analysis of Archaic/Classical Greek and Early Chinese historical and ethnographic sources, in particular the 'Histories' of Herodotus and the 'Shiji' of Sima Qian. The author argues that Greece was an integral part of the wider Eastern Mediterranean and Near Eastern civilization and that this had a major impact on the ways in which the Greeks chose to represent foreigners in their literature. He also shows that the Ancient Chinese of the Han dynasty were as assertive as the Greeks in claiming their ethnic superiority over non-Chinese, but concludes that, although the two cultures shared the same breadth and variety of prejudices towards outsiders, they chose to emphasize different categories of differentiation.

Hyun Jin Kim took his DPhil at Oxford and is now University of Sydney Postdoctoral Research Fellow in the Department of Classics and Ancient History.