Cribiore casts into striking relief the importance of rhetoric in late antiquity and its influence not only on pagan intellectuals but also on prominent Christian figures. She gives a balanced view of Libanius and his circle against the far-flung panorama of the Greek East.
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Within the framework of these studies, the analysis of glass finds has a central importance. The state of the art on glass from Rome between late antiquity and the early Middle Ages is rather limited and broad interdisciplinary studies, going beyond the analysis of one single site, lack completely. Research conducted in the last twenty years shows that the end of the Western Roman Empire and the rise of Constantinople did not mark a sudden interruption of international commerce that connected the capital to the Mediterranean and northern Europe. Rome continued to be a nodal point for the arrival and distribution of goods until the seventh century [8,9,10,11]. This model is mainly based on the identification of imported ceramics and amphorae [12, 13], but the dynamics regulating the glass trade are still blurred [14]. The chronology of glass vessels documented in Rome and Latium between the fourth and the eight centuries is well defined [15,16,17,18,19], but the few chemical analyses available were mainly published when the division of natron glass into different base glass groups was not yet fully established [15, 20,21,22,23]. The primary aim of this article is to clarify the dynamics regulating the glass economy in Rome during the transitional phase between the fifth and the eleventh century, based on the glass finds from the Forum of Caesar. The glass corpus from the Forum includes vessels, window panes, indicators of production, and mosaic tesserae. It was investigated with an interdisciplinary approach to elucidate the relationships between the chronology, typology and provenance of the glasses circulating in Rome. The published chemical data on glass from Rome were at the same time re-evaluated in the light of the most recent advances in the state of the art. The glasses from the Forum of Caesar have thus been placed in the wider context of the city and the trade networks crossing Europe and the Mediterranean, to evaluate the impact of collecting and recycling on the creation of a new glass economy at the beginning of the Middle Ages.
The history of glass in Rome between late antiquity and the early Middle Ages is still very patchy, but the results obtained with the glass corpus from the Caesar Forum have shed light on the changes in the dynamics of the glass supply during a period of political and economic transition. The identification of the different base glasses and their chronologies traces the main changes of the glass market, which was dominated by a shifting hegemony of the Levant and Egypt as exporters of raw glass. Rome, the capital of the empire, was for centuries one of the most important centres where goods, including glass, from the south of the Mediterranean converged and were redistributed across Europe. From at least the fifth century, fresh glass circulated in Rome alongside recycled compositions, which were probably obtained locally by collecting and recycling the glass from the waste produced in the city. The eight century marks the drastic contraction of these commercial flows and the interruption of imports of raw glass, but this dramatic change did not exclude Rome from the glass economy. Some fresh eastern glass continued to travel along the trade routes crossing the Adriatic, but the volume of these imports was limited. The experience acquired during centuries of glass recycling in the peninsula was certainly fundamental in responding to the sudden shortage of raw glass and in opening the way for a parallel market based on the exploitation of glass as a renewable material. 2ff7e9595c
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