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Founded 2,600 years ago on a massive limestone eminence, the city of Arles has been the home of Roman emperors and captured slaves, pagan temples and Christian spires, bloody revolutionaries and powerful papists. In The Rock of Arles Richard Klein relays the history of the city as told to him by the Rock, its genius loci, which infallibly remembers every moment of its existence, from the Roman conquest of Gaul to the fall of feudal aristocracy, from the domination of the Catholic Church to the present French representative democracy. The Rock's contrarian and dissident history resurrects the memory of three of the city's most radical yet largely forgotten revolutionary minds: Hellenistic philosopher Favorinus, medieval Hebrew poet Kalonymus ben Kalonymus, and subversive aristocrat Pierre-Antoine Antonelle. For the Rock, each figure represents a freethinking current running through Arlesian history which countered the reactionary, bigoted forces that governed the city for fifteen centuries. Erudite, witty, and opinionated, the Rock tells the story of Arles in order to sketch the broader canvas of European history while invoking the city's possible future.
List of contents
Author's Note ix
Prologue xi
I. Urbs Dupleix 1
II. Quid Obstat Fit in Via 19
III. Colonia Julia Paterna Arelate 31
IV. Venus Genetrix 45
V. Urbs Genesii 54
VI. Peri Tuché 70
VII. Felix Carcar 86
VIII. A Worthy Woman 104
IX. A Republic of Equals 121
Acknowledgments 145
Notes 149
Bibliography 153
About the author
Richard Klein
Summary
Richard Klein tells the millennia-spanning history of the city of Arles, France, from the perspective of the limestone eminence upon which it sits, showing how the city has always had a spirit that contested the reactionary conservative forces of the Church and nobility that governed it for fifteen centuries.
