Ancient & Classical

In classical Latin, luxuria means 'desire for luxury'; it is linked with the ideas of excess and deviation from a standard. It is in most cases labelled as a vice which contrasts with the innate frugal nature of the Romans. Latin authors do not see it as...

Bringing together philologists, historians, and archaeologists, Rome, Empire of Plunder bridges disciplinary divides in pursuit of an interdisciplinary understanding of Roman cultural appropriation - approached not as a set of distinct practices but as a...

No comic author from the ancient world features the gods as often as Lucian of Samosata, yet the meaning of his works remain contested. He is either seen as undermining the gods and criticizing religion through his humor, or as not engaging with religion...

Apologies but we at Booksplease don't have a full description for this book.Book InformationISBN 9780903521901Author Margaret Clunies RossFormat PaperbackPage Count 181Imprint Viking Society for Northern ResearchPublisher Viking Society for Northern...

Carolyne Larrington has gathered together a uniquely comprehensive collection of writing by, for and about medieval women, spanning one thousand years and Europe from Iceland to Byzantiu. The extracts are arranged thematically, dealing with the central...

When the eighteenth-century choreographer Jean-Georges Noverre sought to develop what is now known as modern ballet, he turned to ancient pantomime as his source of inspiration; and when Isadora Duncan and her contemporaries looked for alternatives to...

The story of Jason and the Argonauts and their quest for the Golden Fleece is one of the oldest and most familiar tales in classical literature. Apollonius of Rhodes wrote the best-known version, in Greek, in the third century B.C.E. The Latin poet Gaius...

Re-Reading Sappho reflects the recent fascination with Sappho's "afterlife." The essays examine the changing interpretations of scholars and writers who have read the fragmentary remains of Sappho's poetry. As the contributors explore the ways that each...

A Companion to Roman Rhetoric introduces the reader to the wide-ranging importance of rhetoric in Roman culture. A guide to Roman rhetoric from its origins to the Renaissance and beyondComprises 32 original essays by leading international...

The study of gender in classical antiquity has undergone rapid and wide-ranging development in the past. The contributors reassess the role of women in diverse contexts and areas, such as archaic and classical Greek literature and cult, Roman imperial...

Plato challenges his readers by depicting an elderly Socrates as an enthusiastic student of rhetoric who has learned from his teacher Aspasia to recite an inspiring funeral oration, an oration that conspicuously refers to events occurring after the...

This volume centres on one of the most important questions in the study of antiquity - the interaction between Greece and the Ancient Near East, from the Mycenaean to the Hellenistic periods. Focusing on the stories that the peoples of the eastern...

How should I interpret a classical text? However I interpret it, someone else will so do differently, and even the nature of the interpreter's task is a matter of dispute; consensus is not a realistic prospect. Malcolm Heath sees the inevitability of...

This is the first new biography in English for nearly eighty years of Italy's foremost writer and thinker, and weaves into a single thread the whole of Dante's life and works. Dante is an intensely philosophical writer as well as a socio-political one,...

In Private Lives, Public Deaths, Jonathan Strauss shows how Sophocles' tragedy Antigone crystallized the political, intellectual, and aesthetic forces of an entire historical moment-fifth century Athens-into one idea: the value of a single living person...

"The Poetics of Consent" breaks new ground in Homeric studies by interpreting the Iliad's depictions of political action in terms of the poetic forces that shaped the Iliad itself. Arguing that consensus is a central theme of the epic, David Elmer...

How does a written literature come into being within an oral culture, and how does such a literature achieve and maintain its authority? Joseph Falaky Nagy addresses those issues in his wide-ranging reading of the medieval literature of Ireland, from the...

After neo-evolutionism, how does one talk about the pre-modern state? Over the past two decades archaeological research has shifted decisively from check-list identifications of the state as an evolutionary type to studies of how power and authority were...

In a poem written in exile, Ovid pictures his latest book in conversation with his previous volumes, united in the bookcase containing his collected works back in Rome. One can imagine their dialogue - in the protected space of the whispering bookcase -...

"Nicole Loraux brilliantly elucidates how Athenian politics were 'gendered' in the Classical period. She investigates the Athenian state's interdiction of ritualized mourning by women, in a city where public mourning constituted a vital act of civic...

This book offers a concise introduction to Xenophon, the Athenian historian, political thinker, moral philosopher and literary innovator who was also a pupil of Socrates, a military general on campaign in Persia, and an exile in residence in the...

Marcus Aurelius, Roman emperor from AD 161 to 180, is renowned for his just rule at home and for his long frontier wars. But his lasting claim to fame rests on the work known as the Meditations - a bedside book of reflections and self-admonitions...

New and exciting scholarship on medieval and early modern English culture in all its diversity. This book honours James Simpson, an enormously influential figure in English literary studies. Known for championing once-neglected writers such as Gower,...

How should a literary scholar approach a text characterized not by stability but by variation and flux? This book offers a radical new perspective on the limits-and the accomplishments-of the modern traditions of textual criticism in classics. Sean...

Based on the conviction that only translators who write poetry themselves can properly re-create the celebrated and timeless tragedies of Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides, the Greek Tragedy in New Translations series offers new translations that go...

This engaging, readable yet impeccably scholarly investigation of monsters in Classical literature will entertain and stimulate as well as inform. It covers all the major mythical monsters mentioned by Greek and Roman authors (Medusa, Hydra, Polyphemus,...

De Imperio Cn. Pompeii (in support of Pompey), or Pro Lege Manilia, (in favour of the Manilian law) was Cicero's first speech on public affairs. Delivered in 66 BC when Cicero was praetor, he argued in support of a proposal from Manilius, the tribune at...

Agamemnon is the first of the three plays within the Oresteia trilogy and is considered to be one of Aeschylus' greatest works. This collection of 12 essays, written by prominent international academics, brings together a wide range of topics surrounding...

A collection of contributions by prominent Ciceronian scholars on Cicero's forensic speeches as examples of advocacy designed to secure a verdict, setting the speeches in the context of the Roman court system and of ancient rhetoric, discussing the...

"Middle English" is a student guide to the most influential critical writing on Middle English literature. This title brings together extracts from some of the major authorities in the field. It introduces readers to different critical...

In The Mourning Voice, Nicole Loraux presents a radical challenge to what has become the dominant view of tragedy in recent years: that tragedy is primarily a civic phenomenon, infused with Athenian political ideology, which envisions its spectators...

Chosen as one of the ten canonical plays by Euripides during the Hellenistic period in Greece, Hecuba was popular throughout Antiquity. The play also became part of the so-called 'Byzantine triad' of three plays of Euripides (along with Phoenician Women...

This exciting collection constitutes the first analysis of the modern performance of ancient Greek drama from a theoretical perspective. The last three decades have seen a remarkable revival of the performance of ancient Greek drama; some ancient plays -...

The transformation of human beings to animals, plants, and stones is one of the commonest and most characteristic themes of Greek mythology; whereas many cultures contain some such stories, in none are they so popular as in the Greek myths. ...

Speeches of praise and blame constituted a form of oratory put to brilliant and creative use in the classical Greek period (fifth to fourth century BC) and the Roman imperial period (first to fourth century AD), and they have influenced public speakers...

This volume explores the extraordinary contribution that classical poetics has made to twentieth and twenty-first century theories of narrative, aiming not to argue that modern narratologies simply present 'old wine in new wineskins', but rather to...

This volume brings together eleven chapters on the genre of Latin elegy by leading scholars in the field. Latin elegy is typically thought to have flourished for a brief period at Rome between c. 40 BC and the early decades of the first century AD; it...

This accessible one-volume survey of the literature of Greece and Rome covers the period between Homer around 700 BC and Augustine around AD 410. Highlights what is important historically and of continuing interest and value in classical literature.An...

Andrew Ford here addresses, in a manner both engaging and richly informed, the perennial questions of what poetry is, how it came to be, and what it is for. Focusing on the critical moment in Western literature when the heroic tales of the Greek oral...

Michael Silk presents a radically new critical study of Aristophanes. Against the limited view of Aristophanes as Athenian theatrical satirist, Professor Silk identifies him as one of the world's great writers. Through an exploration of Aristophanes'...