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Boiotia was - next to Athens and Sparta - one of the most important regions of ancient Greece. Albert Schachter, a leading expert on the region, has for many decades pioneered and fostered the exploration of it and its people through his research. His seminal publications have covered all aspects of its history, institutions, cults, and literature from late Mycenaean times to the Roman Empire, revealing a mastery of the epigraphic evidence, archaeological data, and the literary tradition. This volume conveniently brings together twenty-three papers (two previously unpublished, others revised and updated) which display a compelling intellectual coherence and a narrative style refreshingly immune to jargon. All major topics of Boiotian history from early Greece to Roman times are touched upon, and the book can be read as a history of Boiotia, in pieces.

Benjamin Isaac is one of the most distinguished historians of the ancient world, with a number of landmark monographs to his name. This volume collects most of his published articles and book chapters of the last two decades, many of which are not easy to access, and republishes them for the first time along with some brand new chapters. The focus is on Roman concepts of state and empire and mechanisms of control and integration. Isaac also discusses ethnic and cultural relationships in the Roman Empire and the limits of tolerance and integration, as well as attitudes to foreigners and minorities, including Jews. The book will appeal to scholars and students of ancient, imperial, and military history, as well as to those interested in the ancient history of problems which still resonate in today's societies.

In this book, an international team of experts draws upon a rich range of Latin and Greek texts to explore the roles played by individuals at ports in activities and institutions that were central to the maritime commerce of the Roman Mediterranean. In particular, they focus upon some of the interpretative issues that arise in dealing with this kind of epigraphic evidence, the archaeological contexts of the texts, social institutions and social groups in ports, legal issues relating to harbours, case studies relating to specific ports, and mercantile connections and shippers. While much attention is inevitably focused upon the richer epigraphic collections of Ostia and Ephesos, the papers draw upon inscriptions from a very wide range of ports across the Mediterranean. The volume will be invaluable for all scholars and students of Roman history.

In the context of recent challenges to long-standing assumptions about the nature of Ennius'Annals and the editorial methods appropriate to the poem's fragmentary remains, this volume seeks to move Ennian studies forward on three axes. First, a re-evaluation of the literary and historical precedents for and building blocks of Ennius'poem in order to revise the history of early Latin literature. Second, a cross-fertilization of recent critical approaches to the fields of poetry and historiography. Third, reflection on the tools and methods that will best serve future literary and historical research on the Annals and its reception. Adopting different approaches to these broad topics, the fourteen papers in this volume illustrate how much can be said about Ennius'poem and its place in literary history independent of any commitment to inevitably speculative totalizing interpretations.

Keith Hopkins was a sociologist and Professor of Ancient History at Cambridge from 1985 to 2001. He is widely recognised as one of the most radical, innovative and influential Roman historians of his generation. This volume presents fourteen of Hopkins'essays on an impressive range of subjects: contraception, demography, economic history, slavery, literacy, imperial power, Roman religion, Early Christianity, and the social and political structures of the ancient world. The papers have been re-edited and revised with accompanying essays by Hopkins'colleagues, friends and former students. This volume brings Hopkins'work up to date. It sets his distinctive and pioneering use of sociological approaches in a wider intellectual context and explores his lasting impact on the ways that ancient history is now written. This volume will interest all those fascinated by Rome and its empire, and particularly those eager to experience challenging and controversial ways of understanding the past.

The role of the Phoenicians in the economy, culture and politics of the ancient Mediterranean was as large as that of the Greeks and Romans, and deeply interconnected with that'classical'world, but their lack of literature and their oriental associations mean that they are much less well-known. This book brings state-of-the-art international scholarship on Phoenician and Punic studies to an English-speaking audience, collecting new papers from fifteen leading voices in the field from Europe and North Africa, with a bias towards the younger generation. Focusing on a series of case-studies from the colonial world of the western Mediterranean, it asks what'Phoenician'and'Punic'actually mean, how Punic or western Phoenician identity has been constructed by ancients and moderns, and whether there was in fact a'Punic world'.

This volume assembles fourteen highly influential articles written by Michael H. Jameson over a period of nearly fifty years, edited and updated by the author himself. They represent both the scope and the signature style of Jameson's engagement with the subject of ancient Greek religion. The collection complements the original publications in two ways: firstly, it makes the articles more accessible; and secondly, the volume offers readers a unique opportunity to observe that over almost five decades of scholarship Jameson developed a distinctive method, a signature style, a particular perspective, a way of looking that could perhaps be fittingly called a'Jamesonian approach'to the study of Greek religion. This approach, recognizable in each article individually, becomes unmistakable through the concentration of papers collected here. The particulars of the Jamesonian approach are insightfully discussed in the five introductory essays written for this volume by leading world authorities on polis religion.

This book aims to enhance our appreciation of the modernity of the classical cultures and, conversely, of cinema's debt to ancient Greece and Rome. It explores filmic perspectives on the ancient verbal and visual arts and applies what is often referred to as pre-cinema and what Sergei Eisenstein called cinematism: that paintings, statues, and literature anticipate modern visual technologies. The motion of bodies depicted in static arts and the vividness of epic ecphrases point to modern features of storytelling, while Plato's Cave Allegory and Zeno's Arrow Paradox have been related to film exhibition and projection since the early days of cinema. The book additionally demonstrates the extensive influence of antiquity on an age dominated by moving-image media, as with stagings of Odysseus'arrow shot through twelve axes or depictions of the Golden Fleece. Chapters interpret numerous European and American silent and sound films and some television productions and digital videos.

This is the first volume on the history of the Nile Delta to cover the c.7000 years from the Predynastic period to the twentieth century. It offers a multidisciplinary approach engaging with varied aspects of the region's long, complex, yet still underappreciated history. Readers will learn of the history of settlement, agriculture and the management of water resources at different periods and in different places, as well as the naming and mapping of the Delta and the roles played by tourism and archaeology. The wide range of backgrounds of the contributors and the broad panoply of methodological and conceptual practices deployed enable new spaces to be opened up for conversations and cross-fertilization across disciplinary and chronological boundaries. The result is a potent tribute to the historical significance of this region and the instrumental role it has played in the shaping of past, present and future Afro-Eurasian worlds.

Ever since Aristotle opened the discussion on the role of the chorus in Greek tragedy, theories of the chorus have continued to proliferate and provoke debate to this day. The tragic chorus had its own story to tell; it was a collective identity, speaking within and to a collective citizen body, acting as an instrument through which stories of other times and places were dramatized into resonant heroic narratives for contemporary Athens. By including detailed case studies of three different tragedies (one each by Aeschylus, Euripides and Sophocles), Claude Calame's seminal study not only re-examines the role of the chorus in Greek tragedy, but pushes beyond this to argue for the'polyphony'of choral performance. Here, he explores the fundamentally choral nature of the genre, and its deep connection to the cultic and ritual contexts in which tragedy was performed.

How did Roman writers use the metaphor of the body politic to respond to the downfall of the Republic? In this book, Julia Mebane begins with the Catilinarian Conspiracy in 63 BCE, when Cicero and Catiline proposed two rival models of statesmanship on the senate floor: the civic healer and the head of state. Over the next century, these two paradigms of authority were used to confront the establishment of sole rule in the Roman world. Tracing their Imperial afterlives allows us to see how Romans came to terms with autocracy without ever naming it as such. In identifying metaphor as an important avenue of political thought, the book makes a significant contribution to the history of ideas. This title is part of the Flip it Open Programme and may also be available Open Access. Check our website Cambridge Core for details.

This book offers a new look at the transformation of the classical world in Late Antiquity. It focuses on a particular region, rich in both archaeological and literary evidence, and examines the social, cultural and religious history of late antique southern Gaul through the lens of popular culture. Using material culture, comparative and theoretical material alongside the often dominant normative and prescriptive texts produced by the late antique church, Lucy Grig shines a fresh light on the period. She explores city and countryside alike as contexts for late antique popular culture, and consider a range of case-studies, including the vibrant late antique festival of the Kalends of January. In this way important questions of continuity, change and historical agency are brought to the fore. This title is part of the Flip it Open Programme and may also be available Open Access. Check our website Cambridge Core for details.

From Greece to Palmyra, Tyre or Babylon, the names of the gods, like'Thundering Zeus','Three-faced Moon','Baal of the Force'or the enigmatic YHWH, reveal their history, family ties, fields of competence and capacity for action. Shared or specific, these names bring to light networks of gods: the Saviour gods, the Ancestral gods, the gods of a city or a family. Names tell stories about the relationship between men and gods, gods and places, places and cultures and so on. They show how gods travel and spread, how they appear and disappear, how they participate in the political, social, intellectual history of each community. Through the study of divine names, the twelve chapters of this book unfold a gallery of portraits that reveal the changing aspects of the divine throughout the ancient Mediterranean.

What if formularity, meter, and Kunstsprache in Homer weren't abstract, mechanical systems that constrained the poet's freedom, but rather adaptive technologies that helped poets to sustain feats of great creativity? This book explores this hypothesis by reassessing the key formal features of Homer's poetic technique through the lenses of contemporary linguistics and the cognitive sciences, as well as by drawing some unexpected parallels from the contemporary world (from the dialects of English used in popular music, to the prosodic strategies employed in live sports commentary, to the neuroscience of jazz improvisation). Aimed at Classics students and specialists alike, this book provides thorough and accessible introductions to the main debates in Homeric poetics, along with new and thought-provoking ways of understanding Homeric creativity.

This is a study of Hellenistic athletics from the perspective of the victors. By analyzing agonistic epigrams as poetry on commission, it investigates how successful athletes and horse owners and their sponsors wanted their victories to be understood. Based on the identification of recurring motifs that exceed the conventions of the genre, a multiplicity of agonistic cultures is detected on three different levels – those of the polis, the region and the empire. Kings and queens used athletics in order to legitimate their rule, cities tried to compensate for military defeats by agonistic successes, and victorious aristocrats created virtual halls of fame to emphasize their common regional identity. Without a doubt, athletic victories represented far more than just leisure activities of Hellenistic noblemen. They clearly mattered in terms of politics and social status.

How do the senses shape the way we perceive, understand, and remember ritual experiences? This book applies cognitive and sensory approaches to Roman rituals, reconnecting readers with religious experiences as members of an embodied audience. These approaches allow us to move beyond the literate elites to examine broader audiences of diverse individuals, who experienced rituals as participants and/or performers. Case studies of ritual experiences from a variety of places, spaces, and contexts across the Roman world, including polytheistic and Christian rituals, state rituals, private rituals, performances, and processions, demonstrate the dynamic and broad-scale application that cognitive approaches offer for ancient religion, paving the way for future interdisciplinary engagement. This title is part of the Flip it Open Programme and may also be available Open Access. Check our website Cambridge Core for details.

In classical Athens, a funeral speech was delivered for dead combatants almost every year, the most famous being that by Pericles in 430 BC. In 1981, Nicole Loraux transformed our understanding of this genre. Her The Invention of Athens showed how it reminded the Athenians who they were as a people. Loraux demonstrated how each speech helped them to maintain the same self-identity for two centuries. But The Invention of Athens was far from complete. This volume brings together top-ranked experts to finish Loraux's book. It answers the important questions about the numerous surviving funeral speeches that she ignored. It also undertakes a comparison of the funeral oration with other genres that is missing in her famous book. What emerges is a speech that had a much greater political impact than Loraux thought. This volume puts the study of war in Athenian culture on a completely new footing.

The fourth and fifth centuries AD gave rise to a particular phenomenon in the Roman Empire: the colonate. The colonate involved the fiscal regulation of a relationship of surety between landowners and farmers in the later Roman Empire and played a major role in agrarian and social relations, with implications for these farmers'freedom of movement and transmission of status. This study provides a clear and comprehensive reassessment of the legal aspects of the phenomenon, embedding them as far as possible in their social and economic contexts. As well as taking the innovative approach of working retrogradely, or backwards through time, the volume provides a thorough assessment of two critical sources, the Theodosian and Justinian Codes, and will therefore be an invaluable resource for students and scholars of Roman law and the agricultural and social history of late antiquity.

The boni, the wealthy, but largely non-political, section of the Roman elite, have hitherto escaped scholarly attention. This book draws a detailed and rounded picture of the boni, their identity, values and interests, also tracing their – often tense - relationship to the political class, whose inner circle of noble families eventually lost their trust and support. Concerns about property played a central part in this process, and the book explores key Roman concepts associated with property, including frugality, luxury, patrimony, debt and the all-important otium that ensured the peaceful enjoyment of private possessions. Through close readings of Cicero and other republican writers, a new narrative of the'fall of the republic'emerges. The shifting allegiances of the wider elite of boni viri played an important part in the events that brought an end to the republic and ushered in a new political system better attuned to their material interests.

In this concise but stimulating book on history and Greek culture, Hans-Joachim Gehrke continues to refine his work on'intentional history', which he defines as a history in the self-understanding of social groups and communities – connected to a corresponding understanding of the other – which is important, even essential, for the collective identity, social cohesion, political behaviour and the cultural orientation of such units. In a series of four chapters Gehrke illustrates how Greeks'histories were consciously employed to help shape political and social realities. In particular, he argues that poets were initially the masters of the past and that this dominance of the aesthetic in the view of the past led to an indissoluble amalgamation of myth and history and lasting tension between poetry and truth in the genre of historiography. The book reveals a more sophisticated picture of Greek historiography, its intellectual foundations, and its wider social-political contexts.

Pliny's Epistles are full of literary artistry. This volume of essays by an impressive international team of scholars showcases this by exploring the intertextual, interdiscursive and also intermedial character of the collection. It provides a contribution to the recent scholarly interest in Latin prose intertextuality and in the literary and cultural interactions of the Imperial period. Focusing on the whole collection as well as on single books and selected letters, it investigates Pliny's strategies of incorporating literary models and genres into his epistolary oeuvre, thus creating a kind of'super-genre'himself. In addition to displaying Pliny's literary techniques, the volume also serves as an advanced introduction to Latin prose poetics.

Which dimensions of the religious experience of the ancient Greeks become tangible only if we foreground its local horizons? This book explores the manifold ways in which Greek religious beliefs and practices are encoded in and communicate with various local environments. Its individual chapters explore'the local'in its different forms and formulations. Besides the polis perspective, they include numerous other places and locations above and below the polis-level as well as those fully or largely independent of the city-state. Overall, the local emerges as a relational concept that changes together with our understanding of the general or universal forces as they shape ancient Greek religion. The unity and diversity of ancient Greek religion becomes tangible in the manifold ways in which localizing and generalizing forces interact with each other at different times and in different places across the ancient Greek world.

This innovative and wide-ranging volume is the first systematic exploration of the multifaceted relationship between human bodies and machines in classical antiquity. It examines the conception of the body and bodily processes in mechanical terms in ancient medical writings, and looks into how artificial bodies and automata were equally configured in human terms; it also investigates how this knowledge applied to the treatment of the disabled and the diseased in the ancient world. The volume examines the pre-history of what develops, at a later stage, and more specifically during the early modern period, into the full science of iatromechanics in the context of which the human body was treated as a machine and medical treatments were devised accordingly. The volume facilitates future dialogue between scholars working on different areas, from classics, history and archaeology to history of science, philosophy and technology.

In this book one of the world's leading Hellenists brings together his many contributions over four decades to our understanding of major genres of Greek literature, above all the Greek novel, but also Attic Comedy, fifth-century historiography, and Hellenistic and Imperial Greek poetry. Many are already essential reading, such as the chapter on the figure of Lycidas in Theocritus'Idyll 7, or two chapters on the ancient readership of Greek novels. Discussions of Imperial Greek poetry published three decades ago opened up a world almost entirely neglected by scholars. Several chapters address literary and linguistic issues in Longus'novel Daphnis and Chloe, complementing the author's commentary published in 2019; two contribute to a better understanding of the enigmatic Aethiopica of Heliodorus; and many explore important questions arising from examination of the form of the Greek novel as a whole. This is the second of a planned three-volume collection.

This book delves into the political and cultural developments of pre-Islamic Arabia, focusing on the religious attitudes of the inhabitants of the Arabian Peninsula and its northern extension into the Syrian desert. Between the third and the seventh century, Arabia was on the edge of three great empires (Iran, Rome and Aksūm) and at the centre of a lucrative network of trade routes. Valentina Grasso offers an interpretative framework which contextualizes the choice of Arabian elites to become Jewish sympathisers and/or convert to Christianity and Islam by probing the mobilization of faith in the shaping of Arabian identities. For the first time the Arabians of the period are granted autonomy from marginalizing (mostly Western) narratives framing them as'barbarians'inhabiting the fringes of Rome and Iran and/or deterministic analyses in which they are depicted retrospectively as exemplified by the Muslims'definition of the period as Jāhilīyah,'ignorance'.

In this volume an international group of scholars revisits the themes of John Marincola's ground-breaking Authority and Tradition in Ancient Historiography. The nineteen chapters offer a series of case studies that explore how ancient historians'approaches to their projects were informed both by the pull of tradition and by the ambition to innovate. The key themes explored are the relation of historiography to myth and poetry; the narrative authority exemplified by Herodotus, the'father'of history; the use of'fictional'literary devices in historiography; narratorial self-presentation; and self-conscious attempts to shape the historiographical tradition in new and bold ways. The volume presents a holistic vision of the development of Greco-Roman historiography and the historian's dynamic position within this practice.

This is the first comprehensive study of prosthetics and assistive technology in classical antiquity, integrating literary, documentary, archaeological, and bioarchaeological evidence to provide as full a picture as possible of their importance for the lived experience of people with disabilities in classical antiquity. The volume is not only a work of disability history, but also one of medical, scientific, and technological history, and so will be of interest to members of multiple academic disciplines across multiple historical periods. The chapters cover extremity prostheses, facial prostheses, prosthetic hair, the design, commission and manufacture of prostheses and assistive technology, and the role of care-givers in the lives of ancient people with impairments and disabilities. Lavishly illustrated, the study further contains informative tables that collate the aforementioned different types of evidence in an easily accessible way.

The Bacchic gold tablets are a remarkable collection of objects from the Ancient Greek world: inscribed with short verse texts and buried in graves of mystery initiates, they express extraordinary hopes for post-mortem salvation. Past approaches to these objects have sought to reconstruct their underlying belief system. This book is the first to examine them primarily within the context of early Greek poetry and performance culture. The patterns of thought and expression in the tablets find instructive poetic antecedents and analogies, including in non-canonical and inscribed genres that are not included in conventional descriptions of the poetic tradition. Applying a range of analytical approaches from the fields of epigraphy, anthropology, and religious studies, this book ultimately uses the tablets to cast more familiar literature in a new light.

Cultural memory is a framework which elucidates the relationship between the past and the present: essentially, why, how, and with what results certain pieces of information are remembered. This volume brings together distinguished classicists from a variety of sub-disciplines to explore cultural memory in the Roman Republic and the Age of Augustus. It provides an excellent and accessible starting point for readers who are new to the intersection between cultural memory theory and ancient Rome, whilst also appealing to the seasoned scholar. The chapters delve deep into memory theory, going beyond the canonical texts of Jan Assmann and Pierre Nora and pushing their terminology towards Basu's dispositifs, Roller's intersignifications, Langlands'sites of exemplarity, and Erll's horizons. This innovative framework enables a fresh analysis of both fragmentary texts and archaeological phenomena not discussed elsewhere.

This book rethinks the Christianisation of the late Roman empire as a crisis of knowledge, pointing to competitive cultural re-assessment as a major driving force in the making of the Constantinian and post-Constantinian state. Emperor Julian's writings are re-assessed as key to accessing the rise and consolidation of a Christian politics of interpretation that relied on exegesis as a self-legitimising device to secure control over Roman history via claims to Christianity's control of paideia. This reconstruction infuses Julian's reaction with contextual significance. His literary and political project emerges as a response to contemporary reconfigurations of Christian hermeneutics as controlling the meaning of Rome's culture and history. At the same time, understanding Julian as a participant in a larger debate re-qualifies all fourth-century political and episcopal discourse as a long knock-on effect reacting to the imperial mobilisation of Christian debates over the link between power and culture.

During the fourth and third centuries BCE, Roman expansion into Italy reshaped the peninsula's Archaic societies and prompted new political relationships, new economic practices, and new sociocultural structures. Rural landscapes and urban spaces throughout Latium saw intensified use amidst novel principles of land management, animal husbandry, and architectural design. This book offers fresh perspectives on these transformations by embracing a wide range of approaches to Middle Republican history. Chapters take up topics and methods ranging from fiscal sociology, bioarchaeology, comparative slaveries, field survey, art and architectural history, numismatics, elite mobility, and beyond. An emphasis is placed on how developments in this period reshaped not only Rome, but also other Latin and Italian societies in complex and often multilinear ways. The volume promotes the Middle Republic as a period whose full dynamism is best appreciated at the intersection of diverse lines of inquiry.

This book suggests that poetry offers a way to remain in the world – not only by declarations of intent or the promotion of remembrance, but also through the durable physicality of its practice. Whether carved in stone or wood, printed onto a page, beat out by a mimetic or rhythmic body, or humming in the mind, poems are meant to engrave and adhere. Ancient Greek poetry exhibits a particularly acute awareness of change, decay, and the ephemerality inherent in mortality. Yet it couples its presentation of this awareness with an offering of meaningful embodiment in shifting forms that are aligned with, yet subtly manipulative of, mortal time. Sarah Nooter's argument ranges widely across authors and genres, from Homer and the Homeric Hymns through Sappho and Archilochus to Pindar and Aeschylus. The book will be compelling reading for all those interested in Greek literature and in poetry more broadly.

A Greek declamation was an'imaginary speech': a fictitious speech composed for a rhetorical scenario set in Classical Greece. Although such speeches began as rhetorical exercises, under the high Roman empire they developed into a full-blown prestigious genre in their own right. This first monograph on Greek declamation for nearly forty years re-evaluates a genre that was central to Greek imperial literature and to ancient and modern notions of the'Second Sophistic'. Rejecting traditional conceptions of the genre as'nostalgic', this book considers the significance of Greek declamation's re-enactment of classical history for its own times, and integrates the genre into the wider history of the period. It shows through extended readings how the genre came to constitute a powerful and subtle instrument of identity formation and social interaction, and a site for free thinking on issues of major contemporary importance such as imperialism and inter-polis relations.

This book presents a new history of the leadership, organization, and disposition of the field armies of the east Roman empire between Julian (361–363) and Herakleios (610–641). To date, scholars studying this topic have privileged a poorly understood document, the Notitia dignitatum, and imposed it on the entire period from 395 to 630. This study, by contrast, gathers all of the available narrative, legal, papyrological, and epigraphic evidence to demonstrate empirically that the Notitia system emerged only in the 440s and that it was already mutating by the late fifth century before being fundamentally reformed during Justinian's wars of reconquest. This realization calls for a new, revised history of the eastern armies. Every facet of military policy must be reassessed, often with broad implications for the period. The volume provides a new military narrative for the period 361–630 and appendices revising the prosopography of high-ranking generals and arguing for a later Notitia.

From beginning to end, the De rerum natura upsets expectations. This book's premise is that Lucretius intentionally provokes his imagined male audience, playfully and forcefully proving to them that they are not the men they suppose themselves to be. From astral bodies to the magnetic draw of human sexuality to the social bonds linking parents to children, Lucretius shows that everything is compounded material, both a source of atomic issue and receptacle of atomic ingress. The universe, as Lucretius presents it, is a never-ending cycle of material interpenetration, connectivity, and dissolution. Roman men, in the vastness of it all, are only exceptional in their self-defeating fantasies. Close analysis of Lucretius'poetics reveals an unremitting assault upon the fictions that comprise Roman masculinity, from seminal conception in utero to existential decomposition in the grave. Nevertheless, Lucretius offers an Epicurean vision of masculinity that just might save the Republic.

How was the Roman emperor viewed by his subjects? How strongly did their perception of his role shape his behaviour? Adopting a fresh approach, Panayiotis Christoforou focuses on the emperor from the perspective of his subjects across the Roman Empire. Stress lies on the imagination: the emperor was who he seemed, or was imagined, to be. Through various vignettes employing a wide range of sources, he analyses the emperor through the concerns and expectations of his subjects, which range from intercessory justice to fears of the monstrosities associated with absolute power. The book posits that mythical and fictional stories about the Roman emperor form the substance of what people thought about him, which underlines their importance for the historical and political discourse that formed around him as a figure. The emperor emerges as an ambiguous figure. Loved and hated, feared and revered, he was an object of contradiction and curiosity.

The solo singer takes center stage in Euripides'late tragedies. Solo song – what the Ancient Greeks called monody – is a true dramatic innovation, combining and transcending the traditional poetic forms of Greek tragedy. At the same time, Euripides uses solo song to explore the realm of the interior and the personal in an expanded expressive range. Contributing to the current scholarly debate on music, emotion, and characterization in Greek drama, this book presents a new vision for the role of monody in the musical design of Ion, Iphigenia among the Taurians, Phoenician Women, and Orestes. Drawing on her practical experience in the theater, Catenaccio establishes the central importance of monody in Euripides'art.

Ephorus of Cyme, who lived in the fourth century BC, is one of the most important historians of antiquity whose work has not survived and, according to Polybius, was the first to have written a universal history. His lost Histories are known from numerous'fragments', that is, quotations by later authors such as Polybius, Diodorus, Strabo and Plutarch, among others. Through a study of these'fragments'within their broader context, Giovanni Parmeggiani throws new light on the methodology of Ephorus and both the contents and the purpose of his work. By changing our perspective on a major Greek historian between Thucydides and Polybius, this book fills a significant gap in the field, and sets the basis for a new conception of the history of ancient Greek historiography and the Greek intellectual development in general.

In this book, Melissa Mueller brings two of the most celebrated poets from Greek antiquity into conversation with contemporary theorists of gender, sexuality, and affect studies. Like all lyric poets of her time, Sappho was steeped in the affects and story-world of Homeric epic, and the language, characters, and themes of her poetry often intersect with those of Homer. Yet the relationship between Sappho and Homer has usually been framed as competitive and antagonistic. This book instead sets the two side by side, within the embrace of a non-hierarchical,'reparative reading'culture, as first conceived by queer theorist and poet Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick. Reintroducing readers to a Sappho who supplements Homer's vision, it is an approach that locates Sappho's lyrics at the center of timely discussions about materiality, shame, queer failure, and the aging body, while presenting a sustaining and collaborative way of reading both lyric and epic.

The use of disability as a metaphor is ubiquitous in popular culture – nowhere more so than in the myths, stereotypes and tropes around blindness. To be'blind'has never referred solely to the inability to see. Instead blindness has been used as shorthand for, among other things, a lack of understanding, immorality, closeness to death, special insight or second sight. Although these'meanings'attached to blindness were established as early as antiquity, readers, receivers and spectators into the present have been implicated in the stereotypes, which persist because audiences can be relied on to perpetuate them. This book argues for a new way of seeing – and of understanding classical reception - by offering assemblage-thinking as an alternative to the presumed passivity of classical influence. And the theatre, which has been (incorrectly) assumed to be principally a visual medium, is the ideal space in which to investigate new ways of seeing.

Hero of Alexandria was a figure of great importance not only for ancient technology but also for the medieval and early modern traditions that drew on his work. In this book Courtney Roby presents Hero's key strategies for developing, solving, and contextualizing technical problems, not only in his own lifetime but as an influential tradition of creating accessible technical treatises spanning multiple disciplines. While Hero's historical biography is all but impossible to reconstruct, she examines “Hero” as a corpus, a textual tradition of technical problem-solving capable of incorporating textual transformations like interpolation, epitomization, and translation, as well as intermedial transformation from text to artifact. Key themes include ancient and early modern technical readerships, the relationship between mathematics and mechanics, the materiality of manuscript and printed texts, and the shifting cultural contexts for scientific and technical literature.

In around 550 the Latin poet Corippus composed his epic Iohannis to celebrate the forgotten wars of a Byzantine general against the'Moorish'or'Berber'peoples of North Africa. This book explores the rich narrative of that poem and the changing political, social and cultural environment within which he worked. It reappraises the dramatic first decades of Byzantine North Africa (533-550) and discusses the ethnography of Moorish Africa, the diplomatic and military history of the imperial administration, and the religious transformations (both Christian and'pagan') of this period. By considering the Iohannis as a political text, it sheds new light on the continued importance of poetry and literature on the southern fringes of imperial power, and presents a model for reading epic as a historical source. This title is part of the Flip it Open Programme and may also be available Open Access. Check our website Cambridge Core for details.

The taxonomies of narratology have proven valuable tools for the analysis of ancient literature, but, since they were mostly forged in the analysis of modern novels, they have also occluded the distinct quality of ancient narrative and its understanding in antiquity. Ancient Greek Texts and Modern Narrative Theory paves the way for a new approach to ancient narrative that investigates its specific logic. Jonas Grethlein's sophisticated discussion of a wide range of literary texts in conjunction with works of criticism sheds new light on such central issues as fictionality, voice, Theory of Mind and narrative motivation. The book provides classicists with an introduction to ancient views of narrative but is also a major contribution to a historically sensitive theory of narrative.

This book explores how Virgil in his Aeneid incorporates the ancient Stoics'thinking about how humans can exercise moral responsibility and how this can affect providential world fate. The third-century BC philosopher Chrysippus of Soli located this freedom in the way we can assent to courses of action, and Graham Zanker innovatively demonstrates how Virgil appropriates this concept in the way that Jupiter and Aeneas can assent to the world fate in which they have discovered they must play a part, or Juno and Dido can withhold their assent to it. Indeed, Virgil even offers the model to no-one less than Augustus: the emperor is invited to give his assent to ruling what was believed to be his'world-wide'empire justly. The book is accessible to both students and professional scholars of the Aeneid, with all Greek and Latin translated into idiomatic English.

This book situates discussions of Christian monasticism in Egypt and Palestine within the socio-economic world of the long Late Antiquity, from the golden age of monasticism into and well beyond the Arab conquest (fifth to tenth century). Its thirteen chapters present new research into the rich corpus of textual sources and archaeological remains and move beyond traditional studies that have treated monastic communities as religious entities in physical seclusion from society. The volume brings together scholars working across traditional boundaries of subject and geography and explores a diverse range of topics from the production of food and wine to networks of scribes, patronage, and monastic visitation. As such, it paints a vivid picture of busy monastic lives dependent on and led in tandem with the non-monastic world.

This book explores the many strategies by which elite Greeks and Romans resisted the cultural and political hegemony of the Roman Empire in ways that avoided direct confrontation or simple warfare. By resistance is meant a range of responses including'opposition','subversion','antagonism','dissent', and'criticism'within a multiplicity of cultural forms from identity-assertion to polemic. Although largely focused on literary culture, its implications can be extended to the world of visual and material culture. Within the volume a distinguished group of scholars explores topics such as the affirmation of identity via language choice in epigraphy; the use of genre (dialogue, declamation, biography, the novel) to express resistant positions; identity negotiation in the scintillating and often satirical Greek essays of Lucian; and the place of religion in resisting hegemonic power.

Historians constantly wrestle with uncertainty, never more so than when attempting quantification, yet the field has given little attention to the nature of uncertainty and strategies for managing it. This volume proposes a powerful new approach to uncertainty in ancient history, drawing on techniques widely used in the social and natural sciences. It shows how probability-based techniques used to manage uncertainty about the future or the present can be applied to uncertainty about the past. A substantial introduction explains the use of probability to represent uncertainty. The chapters that follow showcase how the technique can offer leverage on a wide range of problems in ancient history, from the incidence of expropriation in the Classical Greek world to the money supply of the Roman empire.

During the period 500–1000 CE Egypt was successively part of the Byzantine, Persian and Islamic empires. All kinds of events, developments and processes occurred that would greatly affect its history and that of the eastern Mediterranean in general. This is the first volume to map Egypt's position in the Mediterranean during this period. Drawing on a wide range of disciplines, the individual chapters detail its connections with imperial and scholarly centres, its role in cross-regional trade networks, and its participation in Mediterranean and Near Eastern cultural developments, including their impact on its own literary and material production. With unparalleled detail, the book tracks the mechanisms and structures through which Egypt connected politically, economically and culturally to the world surrounding it.

This is the first volume to explore the commentaries on ancient texts produced and circulating in Byzantium. It adopts a broad chronological perspective (from the twelfth to the fifteenth century) and examines different types of commentaries on ancient poetry and prose within the context of the study and teaching of grammar, rhetoric, philosophy and science. By discussing the exegetical literature of the Byzantines as embedded in the socio-cultural context of the Komnenian and Palaiologan periods, the book analyses the frameworks and networks of knowledge transfer, patronage and identity building that motivated the Byzantine engagement with the ancient intellectual and literary tradition.

How did the cities of Ionia construct and express a distinct sense of Ionian identity under Roman rule? With the creation of the Roman province of Asia and the ever-growing incorporation of the Greeks into the Roman Empire, issues of identity gained new relevance and urgency for the Greek provincials. The Ionian cities are a special case as they, unlike many other cities in Asia Minor, were all old Greek poleis and could look back on a glorious tradition of great antiquity. Martin Hallmannsecker provides answers to this question using studies of the extant literary sources complemented with analyses of the rich epigraphic and numismatic material from the cities of Ionia. In doing so, he draws a more holistic and nuanced picture of the region and furthers understanding of Greek culture under the Roman Empire.