Violence and Community: Law, Space and Identity in the Ancient Eastern Mediterranean World

While various aspects of violence (warfare, murder, theft, piracy) have been long studied on their own, there has been little effort to study violence as a unified field and to explore its role in community formation. This volume examines the historiography of the study of violence in antiquity and highlights a number of important paradoxes of violence. It explores the nexus between wealth, power and the passions by focusing on three major aspects that link violence and community: the attempts of communities to regulate violence through law, the constitutive role of violence in communal identities, and the ways in which communities dealt with violence in regard to private and public space, and territories.