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De imperatoribus Romanis: An On-line Encyclopedia of Roman Emperors
http://www.salve.edu/~romanemp/startup.htmDe Imperatoribus Romanis, a project initiated by Michael DiMaio and in development since 1996, aims to make available through the Internet comprehensive, up-to-date, scholarly information about claimants to rule of the Roman Empire from the formation of the Principate to the fall of Byzantium. Eventually, it will include biographical articles on all members of imperial families - male and female, adults and children - and on the usurpers and pretenders who did not succeed in enforcing their claims to legitimacy, as well as on the recognized rulers who did. The medium affords greater flexibility in presenting different kinds of information than traditional print encyclopedias such as Der Kleine Pauly: Lexikon der Antike or the Oxford Classical Dictionary. DIR articles are illustrated by imperial portraits, and linked to maps of Roman territory in the appropriate period. Related articles are cross-linked. The website also includes stemmata of the major dynasties, through which individual lives can also be reached. A second, tremendous advantage of Internet publication is that it reaches not only scholars and students, but also a wide audience of serious amateurs. Since it was first mounted up on the World Wide Web in late August 1996, the DIR website has recorded over 130,000 visitors. It has received several awards and notices from various classical associations and from such organizations as the History Channel, the Encyclopedia Britannica, and Hachette:net. All articles are rigorously peer-reviewed; the Editorial Board is made up of professional scholars employed in History, Classical Studies, and Philosophy departments in universities across the United States and Canada. As more articles come on-line and as knowledge of the DIR spreads, the Editorial Board expects that it will continue to be recognized as a fundamental electronic work of reference within the fields of classics and ancient history, and as a font of information from which professional scholars and amateurs alike may draw.
To date, the DIR has posted biographies covering most of the emperors of the classical and late antique periods; some are already being updated, and empresses, junior emperors, and usurpers are being filled in. We are hoping, while this work progresses, also to start moving more aggressively into the Byzantine period.
Lynda Garland
University of New England(Check out Geoffrey Greatrex's life of Euphemia, wife of Justin I, which has only just appeared on the site - Ed.)
Studia Antiqua Australiensia
Prof. Sam Lieu and A/Prof. Alanna Nobbs as joint-Directors of the Ancient History Documentary Research Centre at Macquarie have successfully negotiated with Brepols of Turnhout, publishers of Corpus Christianorum, for a new text and monograph series on Antiquity to be based in Australia - Studia Antiqua Australiensia. This is meant to complement Byzantina Australiensia and will therefore avoid taking on works on Byzantine studies unless an unacceptable queue has developoed for Byz. Aus. The new series will have four sub-series(es):
1. Monographs and Dissertations (the latter has to be outstanding and recommended by examiners for publication with minimum improvement)
2. Texts and/or translations (incl. inscriptions and papyri)
3. Lexica and other useful reference works (a Thucydides Lexicon has been suggested)
4. Translations of outstanding modern works on Ancient History (esp. in German, Italian, Japanese etc.)There is no hard and fast time-frame and works, especially on topics up to the Crusading period will be considered, as long as they are not purely of interest to medievalists. As this is an Australian series, contributions are invited from scholars who work on non-Graeco-Roman ancient civilizations (Egypt, China, Near East etc.)
The first volume of the series will be Ian Plant's monograph: Revolt in Thucydides. Future volumes will include Corpus of Macquarie Papyri, the Laws and Letters of Julian, inscriptions from Roman Asia Minor (esp. Ephesus), the Asiarchs, Roman Republican Aristocracy. Sam and Alanna hope that other senior scholars will join the editorial board to make the series a truly Australasian venture.
Sam Lieu
Macquarie UniversityChristianskiï Bostok (The Christian East)
In 1999 the above journal was launched under the auspices of the Russian Academy of Sciences. With an editorial council combining the services of eminent scholars such as Gilbert Dagron, Sebastian Brock, Nina Garsoïan, Glen Bowersock and Robert Taft supporting a Russian editorial committee drawn largely from scholars active in the St Petersburg Society for Byzantine and Slavic Studies, the journal has a strong focus on matters Late Antique and Byzantine. The journal is divided into Articles, Notes and Reports, History of Scholarship, and Reviews and Bibliographical Annotations. While many of the articles and reviews are necessarily in Russian, items appear also in English, French and German. Articles and notes in the first issue cover topics as diverse as newly discovered texts of Caucasian Albania, new texts found in the Syriac mss of Kerala, the Syriac Julian romance and its place in literary history, the Refutatio et eversio of Nicephorus as a source for George the Monk, Armenian canonical collections, spiritual perception in Gregory Palamas, whether Athanasius knew Antony, and a miracle from the Vita of Basil the Great in the Byzantine and Old Georgian traditions. The survey of recent Russian books on oriental christian and related topics at the end of the volume (in English) is particularly useful. In its role as a new venue for reports about recently discovered texts and the publication of previously unedited documents it is well worth scanning this publication on a regular basis.
Wendy Mayer
Australian Catholic University
