At the very beginnings of the Archaic Age, the great singer Orpheus taught a new religion that centered around the immortality of the human soul and its journey after death on its way to finding a permanent home. He felt that achieving purity by avoiding meat and refraining from committing harm further promoted the pursuit of a peaceful life. ......
Athanassakis has lightly improved his translation throughout the text, expertly balancing the natural flow of the verse while adhering closely to the literal Greek.
From the First Century CE to the Third Revised and Updated Edition
At the height of its power, the Roman Empire encompassed the entire Mediterranean basin, extending much beyond it from Britain to Mesopotamia, from the Rhine to the Black Sea. Rome prospered for centuries while successfully resisting attack, fending off everything from overnight robbery raids to full-scale invasion attempts by entire nations ......
A rich source for students of Greek mythology and literature, the Homeric Hymns are also fine poetry. Attributed by the ancients to Homer, these prooimia, or preludes, were actually composed by various poets over centuries. They were performed at religious festivals as entertainment meant to stir up enthusiasm for far more ambitious ......
The Roman emperor Commodus wanted to kill a rhinoceros with a bow and arrow, and he wanted to do it in the Colosseum. Commodus's passion for hunting animals was so fervent that he dreamt of shooting a tiger, an elephant, and a hippopotamus; his prowess was such that people claimed he never missed when hurling his javelin or firing arrows from his ......
Lionel Casson's encyclopedic study is the first of its kind to use underwater archaeological data to refine and area of scholarship that had, for the most part, relied on ancient texts and graphic representations. Tracing the history of early ships and seamanship from pre-dynastic Egypt to the Roman empire, from skiffs and barges to huge oared ......
A Study on the Religion, Laws, and Institutions of Greece and Rome
Originally published in 1864 as La Cité Antique, this remarkable work describes society as it existed in Greece during the age of Pericles and in Rome at the time of Cicero. Working with only a fraction of the materials available to todays classical scholar, Fustel de Coulanges fashioned a complete picture of life in the ancient city, resulting ......
Now in its fourth edition, this highly acclaimed sourcebook examines the public and private lives and legal status of Greek and Roman women. The texts represent women of all social classes, from public figures remembered for their deeds (or misdeeds), to priestesses, poets, and intellectuals, to working women, such as musicians, wet nurses, and ......
""For who is so worthless or indolent as not to wish to know by what means and under what system of polity the Romans... succeeded in subjecting nearly the whole inhabited world to their sole government'a thing unique in history?""'Polybius
The year 146 BC marked the brutal end to the Roman Republic's 118-year struggle for the ......
We have been taught to think of ruins as historical artifacts, relegated to the past by a catastrophic event. Instead, Martin Devecka argues in this highly original, engaging, and elegant work, that we should see them as processes taking place over a long present. In Broken Cities, Devecka offers a wide-ranging comparative study of ......
Cut These Words into My Stone offers evidence that ancient Greek life was not only celebrated in great heroic epics, but was also commemorated in hundreds of artfully composed verse epitaphs. They have been preserved in anthologies and gleaned from weathered headstones.Three-year-old Archianax, playing near a well,Was drawn down by his own silent ......
First published in 1990, Children and Childhood in Classical Athens was the first book in English to explore the lives of children in ancient Athens. Drawing on literary, artistic, and archaeological sources as well as on comparative studies of family history, Mark Golden offers a vivid portrait of the public and private lives of children from ......
Aaron Poochigian's new translations of Aeschylus's earliest extant plays provide the clearest rendering yet of their formal structure. The distinction between spoken and sung rhythms is as sharp as it is in the source texts, and for the first time readers in English can fully grasp the balanced, harmonious arrangement of choral odes. The ......
Unfaithful spouses, divorce and remarriage, rebellious children, aging parents--today's headlines are filled with issues said to be responsible for a ''breakdown'' of the traditional family. But are any of these problems truly new? What can we learn from the ways in which societies dealt with them in the past? Suzanne Dixon sets the current debate ......
An interdisciplinary exploration of how writers have conveyed sound through text. Edited by Christopher Cannon and Steven Justice, The Sound of Writing explores the devices and techniques that writers have used to represent sound and how they have changed over time. Contributors consider how writing has channeled sounds as varied as the human ......
Mina Monier argues that Luke-Acts shared with 1 Clement a concern to define and defend a type of Christian piety that would not offend Roman sensibilities. The author used the Temple of Jerusalem positively, as a platform for showing Christian piety towards ancient worship, ancestral customs and God of antiquity.
James R. Harrison investigates how Paul's letter to the Romans might have been heard by an audience in Neronian Rome by examining the material and ideological culture of the city and setting prominent Pauline themes in juxtaposition with Roman ideological themes.