The Persian Invasion of Greece and the Evacuation of Attica
Between June 480 and August 479 BC, tens of thousands of Athenians evacuated, following King Xerxes' victory at the Battle of Thermopylae. Abandoning their homes and ancestral tombs in the wake of the invading Persian army, they sought refuge abroad. Women and children were sent to one safe haven, the elderly to another, while all men of ......
Scattered through the vast expanse of stone and sand that makes up Egypt's Western Desert are several oases. These islands of green in the midst of the Sahara owe their existence to springs and wells drawing on ancient aquifers. In antiquity, as today, they supported agricultural communities, going back to Neolithic times but expanding greatly in ......
Victory at Sea and Its Tragic Aftermath in the Final Years of the Peloponnesian War
A pivotal skirmish involving nearly three hundred Athenian and Spartan ships toward the end of the Peloponnesian War, the Battle of Arginusae was at the time the largest naval battle ever fought between warring Greeks. It was a crucial win for the Athenians, since losing the battle would have led to their total defeat by Sparta and, perhaps, the ......
Since the first edition of Approaches to Greek Myth was published in 1990, interest in Greek mythology has surged. There was no simple agreement on the subject of 'myth' in classical antiquity, and there remains none today. Is myth a narrative or a performance? Can myth be separated from its context? What did myths mean to ancient Greeks and ......
In Pythagorean Women, classical scholar Sarah B Pomeroy discusses the ground breaking principles that Pythagoras established for family life in Archaic Greece, such as constituting a single standard of sexual conduct for women and men. Among the Pythagoreans, women played an important role and participated actively in the philosophical life. While ......
Scholars of ancient literature have often focused on the works and lives of major authors rather than on such questions as how these works were produced and who read them. In Roman Literary Culture, Elaine Fantham fills that void by examining the changing social and historical context of literary production in ancient Rome and its empire. ......
Alexander the Great led one of the most successful armies in history and conquered nearly the entirety of the known world while wearing armor made of cloth. How is that possible? In Reconstructing Ancient Linen Body Armor, Gregory S. Aldrete, Scott Bartell, and Alicia Aldrete provide the answer.An extensive multiyear project in experimental ......
Self-Command and Political Speech in Seneca and Petronius
In The Empire of the Self, Christopher Star studies the question of how political reality affects the concepts of body, soul, and self. Star argues that during the early Roman Empire the establishment of autocracy and the development of a universal ideal of individual autonomy were mutually enhancing phenomena. The Stoic ideal of individual empire ......
Sophocles' Theban Plays -- Oedipus Rex, Oedipus at Colonus, and Antigone -- lie at the core of the Western literary canon. They are extensively translated, universally taught, and frequently performed. Chronicling the downfall of Oedipus, the legendary king of Thebes, and his descendants, the Theban Plays are as relevant to present thought about ......
A classical epic of fratricide and war, the Thebaid retells the legendary conflict between the sons of Oedipus Polynices and Eteocles for control of the city of Thebes. The Latin poet Statius reworks a familiar story from Greek myth, dramatized long before by Aeschylus in his tragedy Seven against Thebes. Statius chose his subject well: the ......
Composed in the third century A.D., the Trojan Epic is the earliest surviving literary evidence for many of the traditions of the Trojan War passed down from ancient Greece.
''This book presents a series of concise sketches of key phases of life in the Roman world during its greatest period, the peaceful and prosperous years of the first and second centuries A.D.: what life was like in the city, in the countryside, on the road; what it was like in the various levels of society . . . The sketches are fashioned to ......
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 ......
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 ......
Traces how the day has served as a key organizing concept in Roman culture--and beyond. How did ancient Romans keep track of time? What constituted a day in ancient Rome was not the same twenty-four hours we know today. In The Ordered Day, James Ker traces how the day served as a key organizing concept, both in antiquity and in modern ......
Though New Testament scholars have written extensively on the Roman Empire over the past few decades, the topic of the military has been conspicuously neglected. This book fills this void with a detailed analysis of the military in early Roman Palestine and the depiction of the military in the New Testament.
The power of the court to overturn a law or decree'called judicial review'is a critical feature of modern democracies. Contemporary American judges, for example, determine what is consistent with the Constitution, though this practice is often criticized for giving unelected officials the power to strike down laws enacted by the people's ......
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 ......
