The Future of Rome Roman, Greek, Jewish and Christian Visions

How was the future of Rome, both near and distant in time, imagined by different populations living under the Roman Empire? It emerges from this collection of essays by a distinguished international team of scholars that Romans, Greeks, Jews and Christians had strikingly different answers to that question, revealing profound differences in their conceptions of history and historical time, the purpose of history, the meaning of written words and oral traditions. It is also argued that practically no one living under Rome's rule, including the Romans themselves, did not think about the question in one form or another.

Introduction; 1. Some remarks on Cicero's perception of the future of Rome Carlos Lévy; 2. , Eclogue 4 and the Futures of Rome Brian W. Breed; 3. Lushkov, Imperium sine fine: Rome's Future in Augustan Epic Ayelet Haimson; 4. Posterity in the Arval Acta Greg Woolf; 5. The Future of Rome in Three Greek Historians of Rome Jonathan J. Price; 6. Philo on the Impermanence of Empires Katell Berthelot; 7. From Human Freedom to Divine Intervention: Agrippa II's Address on the Eve of the Jewish War Samuele Rocca; 8. Josephus, Caligula and the Future of Rome Jonathan Davies; 9. “Will this one never be brought down?”: Reflections of Jewish hopes for the downfall of the Roman Empire in biblical exegesis Vered Noam; 10. The Sibylline Oracles and Resistance to Rome Erich S. Gruen; 11. Revelation 17.1–19.10: A Prophetic Vision of the Destruction of Rome Peter Oakes; 12. Cicero and Virgil in the Catacombs: Pagan Messianism and Monarchic Propaganda in Constantine's Oration to the Assembly of Saints Marko Marinčič; 13. The Future of Rome after 410 CE: The Latin Conceptions (410-480 CE) Hervé Inglebert.

Jonathan Price is Lessing Professor of Ancient History at Tel Aviv University. He is the author of Jerusalem Under Siege: The Collapse of the Jewish State, 66-70 C.E. (1992), Thucydides and Internal Conflict (Cambridge, 2002), and dozens of articles on Greek and Roman historiography, the Jews under Roman rule, and epigraphy in Greek, Hebrew and Aramaic. He is the editor of the Jewish inscriptions for the Corpus Inscriptionum Iudaeae/Palaestinae: A Multi-lingual corpus of the Inscriptions from Alexander to Muhammad (CIIP) (5 volumes, 2010-2020).
Katell Berthelot is a CNRS Professor within the University of Aix-Marseille, working on the history of Judaism in the Hellenistic and Roman period. Her most recent book is In Search of the Promised Land? The Hasmonean Dynasty Between Biblical Models and Hellenistic Diplomacy (2018). She has received a Consolidator Grant from the European Research Council, to work on the political and religious challenge posed by the Roman Empire to the Jews (www.judaism-and-rome.org).