Ancient Classical category: 1324 books

It's a familiar story: a beautiful woman is abducted and her husband journeys to recover her. This story’s best-known incarnation is also a central Greek myth—the abduction of Helen that led to the Trojan War. Stealing Helen surveys a vast range of folktales and texts exhibiting the story pattern...

The Gift in Antiquity presents a collection of 14 original essays that apply French sociologist Marcel Mauss’s notion of gift-giving to the study of antiquity. • Features a collection of original essays that cover such wide-ranging topics as vows in the Hebrew Bible; ancient Greek wedding...

This is the study of an anonymous ancient work, usually called Joseph and Aseneth, which narrates the transformation of the daughter of an Egyptian priest into an acceptable spouse for the biblical Joseph, whose marriage to Aseneth is given brief notice in Genesis. Kraemer takes issue with the scholarly...

According to legends of Rome’s foundation, Tarpeia was a maiden who betrayed Romulus’ city to the invading Sabines. She was then crushed to death by the Sabines’ shields and her body hurled from the Tarpeian Rock, which became the place from which subsequent traitors of the city were thrown....

This book studies a crucial phase in the history of Roman slavery, beginning with the transition to chattel slavery in the third century bce and ending with antiquity’s first large-scale slave rebellion in the 130s bce. Slavery is a relationship of power, and to study slavery – and not simply...

The Greek View of Poetry details critical theories and the appreciation of poetry by the ancient Greeks. Originally published in 1931, this text deals with a whole range of Greek critics from very early criticism to Longinus and his views on Homer in an attempt to provide a historical view of the importance of poetry to Greek society. This title will be of interest to students of Classics.

In Honor Thy Gods Jon Mikalson uses the tragedies of Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides to explore popular religious beliefs and practices of Athenians in the fifth and fourth centuries B.C. and examines how these playwrights portrayed, manipulated, and otherwise represented popular religion in their...

Many scholars have seen ancient bucolic poetry as a venue for thinking about texts and textuality. This book reassesses Virgil's Eclogues and their genre, arguing that they are better read as fiction - that is, as a work that refers not merely to itself or to other texts but to a world of its own...

'The prose is colourful and vigorous ... Jubber's journeying has indeed been epic, in scale and in ambition. In this thoughtful travelogue he has woven together colourful ancient and modern threads into a European tapestry that combines the sombre and the sparkling' Spectator 'A genuine epic' Wanderlust Award-winning...

From the dawn of ancient civilization to modern times, the Mediterranean Sea looms in the imagination of the people living on its shores as a space of myth and adventure, of conquest and confrontation, of migration and settlement, of religious ferment and conflict. Since its waters linked the earliest...

The Greek novel occupies a special place in the debate on gender in antiquity, forcing us to ask why the female protagonists are such strong and positive characters. This book rejects the hypothesis of a largely female readership, and also sees a problem in ascribing this pattern to the reflection...

Quintilian famously claimed that satire was tota nostra, or totally ours, but this innovative volume demonstrates that many of Roman satire's most distinctive characteristics derived from ancient Greek Old Comedy. Jennifer L. Ferriss-Hill analyzes the writings of Lucilius, Horace, and Persius, highlighting...

It had been thought that theCleitophon was a spurious dialogue. Its brevity and the fact that Socrates does not respond to accusations from Cleitophon suggested to scholars that it was only a fragment. However, in the last fifteen years, the complete and authentic dialogue was rediscovered. Upon its...

In this new student introduction to a Greek tragedy, Isabelle Torrance looks at what makes Iphigenia among the Taurians a successful tragedy in ancient Greek terms, and how dramatic excitement is achieved through the exotic setting, the cast of characters, and the chorus. Assuming no knowledge of...