Although the Romans lived in a society very different from ours, they were like us in fearing crime and in hoping to control it by means of the law. Ordinary citizens wanted protection from muggers in the streets or thieves at the public baths. They demanded laws to punish officials who abused power or embezzled public monies. Even emperors, ......
In private and in public life, the ancient Greeks danced to express divine adoration and human festivity. They danced at feasts and choral competitions, at weddings and funerals, in observance of the cycles of both nature and human existence. Formal and informal dances marked the rhythms of life and death.In Dance and Ritual Play in Greek ......
Stephen L. Dyson examines rural communities as functioning, largely autonomous societies. Dyson traces the major outlines of community development from the end of the war with Hannibal to the early Middle Ages. He shows how local communities responded to changes in the greater Roman society while still retaining their distinctive identity. He ......
What value did the Greeks put on farming beyond its capacity to produce food? Who owned the land, and who worked it? Alison Burford examines the Greeks' preoccupation with land and agriculture to understand the nature of their society and culture in general. She focuses on how the need to make the land productive influenced social, economic, and ......
How did figure painting fit into the economic and artistic life of Pompeii? Did the best painters work in conjunction with one another? Did they paint only the important pictures in the best rooms and, if so, who painted the rest? Were the best houses the showplaces for these painters' work? If not, what was the function of these decorations in ......
Second only to Rome in the ancient world, Alexandria was home to many of late antiquity's most brilliant writers, philosophers, and theologiansamong them Philo, Origen, Arius, Athanasius, Hypatia, Cyril, and John Philoponus. Now, in Alexandria in Late Antiquity, Christopher Haas offers the first book to place these figures within the physical and ......
Concepts of the Hero in Archaic Greek Poetry, revised edition (POD)
Despite widespread interest in the Greek hero as a cult figure, little was written about the relationship between the cult practices and the portrayals of the hero in poetry. The first edition of The Best of the Achaeans bridged that gap, raising new questions about what could be known or conjectured about Greek heroes. In this revised edition, ......
As one of the few groups in the Greco-Roman world to resist cultural assimilation, the Jews remained an object of fascination throughout antiquity. Greek and Roman writers devoted much space to them, but few bothered to learn the facts about Jews, preferring to report stereotypes and rumor. Evidence does exist, however, to show what real Jews were ......
Throughout nearly all of antiquity, the legendary Greek physician, Asclepius, son of Apollo and Coronis, was not only the primary representative of divine healing, but also so influential in the religious life of later centuries that, as Emma J. Edelstein and Ludwig Edelstein point out, ''in the final stages of paganism, of all genuinely Greek ......
