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Social scientists and political theorists have recently come to realize the potential importance of the classical Greek world and its legacy for testing social theories. Meanwhile, some Hellenists have mastered the techniques of contemporary social science. They have come to recognize the value of formal and quantitative methods as a complement to traditional qualitative approaches to Greek history and culture. Some of the most exciting new work in social science is now being done within interdisciplinary domains for which recent work on Greece provides apt case studies. This book features essays examining the role played by democratic political and legal institutions in economic development; the potential for inter-state cooperation and international institutions within a decentralized ecology of states; the relationship between state government and the social networks arising from voluntary associations; the interplay between political culture, informal politics, formal institutions and political change; and the relationship between empirical and formal methods of analysis and normative political theory. In sum, this book introduces readers to the emerging field of “social science ancient history.”

Tyrants and tyranny are more than the antithesis of democracy and the mark of political failure: they are a dynamic response to social and political pressures. This book examines the autocratic rulers and dynasties of classical Greece and Rome and the changing concepts of tyranny in political thought and culture. It brings together historians, political theorists and philosophers, all offering new perspectives on the autocratic governments of the ancient world. The volume is divided into four parts. It looks at the ways in which the term ‘tyranny’ was used and understood, and the kinds of individual who were called tyrants. The book then focuses on the genesis of tyranny and the social and political circumstances in which tyrants arose. The chapters in the final part of the book examine the presentation of tyrants by themselves and in literature and history. Part IV discusses the achievements of episodic tyranny within the non-autocratic regimes of Sparta and Rome and of autocratic regimes in Persia and the western Mediterranean world. Written by a wide range of leading experts in their field, this book offers a new and comparative study of tyranny within Greek, Roman, and Persian society.

Classical archaeology has changed beyond recognition in the past generation, in its aims, its choice of subject-matter and the methods it uses. This book contains twenty-five chapters, some of them previously published only in rather inaccessible places, which have contributed to this change. The chapters cover four decades of work on pre-classical and classical Greece and some adjacent fields of scholarship, beginning in the 1960s when classical archaeology was not widely seen as a free-standing subject. They chart the progress of a movement for the intellectual independence of Greek archaeology and art, from history and textual studies and for recognition among other branches of archaeology. The key theme of the chapters is the importance of the Iron Age as the formative period in the making of classical Greece and the text varies this with comment on literature, history, anthropology, Aegean and European prehistory and Roman provincial archaeology. This collection represents innovative work in classical archaeology; challenges accepted boundaries and inhibitions; and is wide in scope, covering history, prehistory, art, literary interpretation, and field archaeology.

Over his long and illustrious career as Lecturer, Reader and Professor in Edinburgh University (1961-1976), Lawrence Professor of Classical Archaeology at Cambridge (1976-2001) and currently Fellow of the McDonald Institute of Archaeology at Cambridge, Anthony Snodgrass has influenced and been associated with a long series of eminent classical archaeologists, historians and linguists .In acknowledgement of his immense academic achievement, this collection of essays by a range of international scholars reflects his wide-ranging research interests: Greek prehistory, the Greek Iron Age and Archaic era, Greek texts and Archaeology, Classical Art History, societies on the fringes of the Greek and Roman world, and Regional Field Survey. Not only do they celebrate his achievements but they also represent new avenues of research which will have a broad appeal.

During the Hellenistic Period (c. 330-30 BCE), Alexander the Great and his successors reshaped their Persian and Greco-Macedonian legacies to create a new kind of rulership that was neither ‘western’ nor ‘eastern’ and would profoundly influence the later development of court culture and monarchy in both the Roman West and Iranian East. Drawing on the socio-political models of Norbert Elias and Charles Tilly, and covering topics such as palace architecture, royal women and court ritual, Courts and Elites in the Hellenistic Empires shows how the Hellenistic dynastic courts were instrumental in the integration of local elites in the empires, and the (re)distribution of power, wealth, and status. It analyses the competition among courtiers for royal favour and the, not always successful, attempts of the Hellenistic rulers to use these struggles to their own advantage.

Narratologies, both ‘classical’ structuralist narratology and the ‘new narratologies’ of the past twenty years, have mostly been built around the novel. At the same time, the history of narrative methods has become a recognized area of scholarly discussion. While this work is not confined to the history of the novel, the novel tends to be most prominent. Meanwhile, structuralist narratology has been adapted and applied to ancient literary texts. These studies tend to go directly from an individual text to universals, showing that a Greek author uses a technique found in modern literatures, or that the author's combination of techniques is unusual. They do not show how the methods of storytelling develop over time from one author or genre to another, or how Greek narrative is like and unlike other narrative traditions. This volume represents the beginnings of such a project. Several papers look particularly at ways in which early Greek narrative, particularly Homer, differs from earlier and contemporary Near Eastern narratives. Another group looks at typical features of Greek narrative (exemplarity, occasion, favoured structures). Another considers particular genres (historiography, lyric, tragedy). Others examine particular narrative devices through time or consider how Latin authors read and adapt Greek narrative. The volume as a whole shows how much remains to be explored once we study narrative historically; how much comparison can enhance our understanding of Greek; and how much the study of Greek narrative can contribute to narratology more broadly.

The book is an attempt to synthesize the results of several studies in archaeology, numismatics, history, and sigillography that have recently advanced our knowledge of early medieval Greece. Instead of a polar opposition between the Byzantine Empire and “barbarians” (Slavs or Bulgars), the history of early medieval Greece must be understood within a larger Balkan context shaped fundamentally by complex economic and social phenomena. An older tradition has seen the changes taking place in Greece between ca. 500 and ca. 1050 as the result of exclusively political factors, mainly related to the revival of Byzantine military power under the Macedonian dynasty and the desire to convert the Slavs to Christianity. Nevertheless, recent studies in the economic history of early medieval Europe suggest a different view. Moreover, archaeologists interested in long-term changes have long recognized that the explosion of settlement assemblages is not unique to Greece and that similar developments are archaeologically documented for other areas of the Balkans that were not under Byzantine rule at that time. More economically minded accounts of the so-called Middle Byzantine period have revealed the complex relation between trade and agriculture in the economic take-off of the Macedonian period. The book offers for the first time a synthetic view of the economic and social processes at work in early medieval Greece, but pays attention also to political and religious phenomena.

The civilisation of Ancient Mesopotamia flourished between 3300 BC and 2000 BC in the southern half of the lands between and either side of the Tigris and Euphrates, where a vast grain harvest (about equal to Canada's today) supported a large and well-ordered population. The early development of cuneiform writing, the world's first phonetic script, means that, for the first time in the history of humanity, it is possible to learn something of how people thought and felt. This book aims to do just that and, as the reader soon finds out, succeeds triumphantly. It takes the reader on a voyage of discovery into the public and private realms of the lives of our first civilised ancestors – their cooking and eating, feasts and festivals, wine and drinking, love and sex, what women could do and what they could not, magic and medicine, trial by ordeal, life in a palace above and below stairs, astrology and divination, gods and religion, and literature and myth.

This book describes the legends surrounding the origins, foundation, and early history of Rome; the significance the Romans attached to the legends of their origins; and the uses to which they put them. Between 1000 BC and 650 BC a cluster of small, isolated groups of thatched huts on the Roman hills became an extensive and complex city, its monumental buildings and large public spaces evidence of power and wealth. Two competing foundation legends accounted for this shift, one featuring the Trojan fugitive Aeneas and the other the wolf-reared Romulus and Remus. Both played a significant role in Roman thought and identity, preoccupying generations of Roman historians and providing an important theme in Roman poetry. In the last two centuries, the foundation era of Rome has been the subject of extensive investigations by archaeologists. These have revealed much that was previously a mystery and have allowed the piecing together of a coherent account of the early history of the city. The book considers this evidence and the degree to which it supports or undermines the legends, Roman documentary accounts, and the work of modern scholars. It reveals what now seems the most probable history of Rome's origins and rise to regional pre-eminence.

This book explores the Greek gods from Homer to Late Antiquity. The Greek gods are still very much present in modern consciousness. Yet even though Apollo and Dionysos, Artemis and Aphrodite, Zeus and Hermes are household names, it is much less clear what these divinities stood for in Ancient Greece. In fact they have been rather neglected in modern scholarship which has tended to focus on other aspects of Greek religion such as ritual and myth. The book brings together a term of international scholars with the aim of remedying the situation and generating new approaches to the study of the nature and development of the Greek gods. It looks at the individual gods but it also asks to what extent cult, myth and literary genre determine the nature of a divinity. How do the Greek gods function in a polytheistic pantheon and what is their connection to heroes? What is the influence of philosophy? What does archaeology tell us about the gods? In what ways do the gods of late antiquity differ from those of classical Greece? The aim of this book is to present a comprehensive view of the gods as they functioned in Greek culture until the triumph of Christianity.

This volume brings together an international team of scholars to explore the shifting shapes and functions of laughter and tears in the history, religion, art and literature of Greek communities from Antiquity to Byzantium and beyond. What makes us laugh and cry, sometimes at the same time? How do these two primal, seemingly discrete and non-verbal modes of expression intersect in the everyday life and ritual of Greek communities, and what range of emotions do they entail? How may they be voiced, shaped and coloured in literature and liturgy, art and music? What happens when laughter and tears slip into each other and back again? What can we learn about human emotions and communicative modes across the ages, genres and cultures of Hellenic civilisation? The book breaks new ground in tracing the emotional, socio-cultural, religious and literary aspects of laughter and tears in a range of different artistic, cultural and historical contexts, across the longue durée of Greek civilisation. It brings students of ancient and Byzantine emotion into dialogue and shows how much is to be gained by collaborating across the disciplinary and chronological boundaries that demarcate the historical study of the Greek world.

The nineteen chapters of this book cover a wide variety of topics concerned with the Macedonian monarchy of the Ptolemies, which ruled Egypt after Alexander the Great until the Roman empire, and which rested on military control based on a Greek and Macedonian military force settled on the land. The first five chapters examine ways in which Ptolemy I, Ptolemy III, and Cleopatra VII sought political legitimacy and support in this multicultural society. The next section looks at the Greek experience in Egypt, as settlers on the land, as members of specific ethnic groups, and as creators of an urban milieu in which they could feel at home. The third part treats the complex economic life of Ptolemaic Egypt, with its tension between the king's need for revenue and the Greeks' desire to enrich themselves in their new home and in particular to acquire some of Egypt's rich grainland, not only to work as soldiers or bureaucrats. The resulting interactions between Greeks and Egyptians occupy the final section. Throughout the case-studies that make up this book, the author stresses the internal stresses and fractures of this colonial society, with multiple groups of actors having conflicting interests but needing to cooperate for any of them to succeed.

This book is a profile of an extraordinary man, and a new interpretation of one of the most controversial figures in history. Julius Caesar played a leading role in the politics and culture of a world empire, dwarfing his contemporaries in ambition, achievement, and appetite. For that, he has occupied a central place in the political imagination of Europe ever since. Yet he remains something of an enigma, struck down by his own lieutenants because he could be neither comprehended nor contained. In surviving evidence, he emerges as incommensurate and nonpareil, just beyond the horizons of contemporary political thought and understanding. The result of the author's many years of research is a portrait of the Roman dictator that combines the evidence of political history and psychology. The product of a comprehensive study of the ancient sources, it paints a detailed portrait of a complex personality whose mission of ‘Romanisation’ lies at the root of modern Europe.

This book addresses two historical mysteries. The first is the content and character of the fourth century BCE Greek works on the Persian Achaemenid Empire treatises called the Persica. The second is the method of work of the second century CE biographer Plutarch of Chaeronea (CE 45-120) who used these works to compose his biographies, in particular the Life of the Persian king Artaxerxes. By dealing with both issues simultaneously, Almagor proposes a new way of approaching the two entangled problems, and offers a better understanding of both the portrayal of ancient Persia in the lost Persica works and the manner of their reception and adaptation nearly five hundred years later. Intended for both scholars and students of the Achaemenid Empire and Greek imperial literature, this book bridges the two worlds and two important branches of scholarship. The book builds a picture of the character and structure of the lost Persica works by Ctesias of Cnidus, Deinon of Colophon, Heracleides of Cyme. While focusing on the Artaxerxes (and certain other passages), it shows how Plutarch used the Persica.

This book introduces students to the complex and foreign world of Roman religion, and to major trends in its study. Praised in the Enlightenment for its supposed tolerance, Roman religion has been vilified for persecuting the early Christians. It professed a profound conservatism and yet received myths from Greece and Asia and gods from every corner of the Empire. The book presents fourteen papers on central topics in the study of Roman religion and its connections with Roman literature, history and culture. Subjects treated include the nature and development of religious authority and religious institutions; the control of space and time; and religion's role in fashioning Roman identity. Also under discussion is the narration and analysis of Rome's transition from Republic to Empire. In introducing the volume and its individual parts, the book considers issues of method and substance arising from the study of Roman religion, and places each chapter in context. Its selection of papers illustrates a range of approaches from Europe, Britain and America during a century of scholarship. Four papers are published in English for the first time. The book includes a chronology, biographical dictionary, glossary and guide to further reading; all passages of ancient languages are translated.

This is an account of life in ancient Rome from the end of the third century to the beginning of the seventh. At the beginning of the period Rome was an imperial power and the centre of a classical civilisation, albeit with a growing Christian minority. By its end, Rome was a Papal power, the centre of western Christianity – the Pantheon itself was being transformed into a church. The book charts the change in terms of its effect on the city and its environs (the destruction of temples, the building of St Peter’s), the nature and consequences of Vandal and Gothic invasions, the survival and conversion of the nobility and the plebes, and the long struggle between ancient religions and rituals and Christianity and its consequences for the social and physical fabric of the city. There are chapters on the family and life cycle, the changing measurement of time (a crucial cultural revolution), education, the final years of the games, and the early years of the papacy. The book provides a social history of the city of Rome during a period when its role as the centre of western civilisation was transformed yet, against considerable odds, maintained.

Rome Season Two: Trial and Triumph is a collection of seventeen original research essays that responds to the critical and commercial success of the second season of the HBO television series, Rome (2005-07). While Rome gained immediate notoriety for its heady mix of exceptionally high production values with gripping performances and plot lines, the series also offers a new visual, narrative, and thematic aesthetic for the depiction of the tumultuous period after Caesar’s assassination, and in particular, the struggle between Octavian and Antony, the role of Cleopatra, and the story’s many received meanings. The essays in this volume explore the ways in which Rome nods to earlier receptions of ancient Rome as well as to more recent popular onscreen recreations of antiquity, while at the same time the series applies new techniques of interrogation to current social issues and concerns. The contributors to this volume are all authorities in their various sub-fields of ancient history and literature, whose academic work also engages expertly with popular culture and modern media appropriations and adaptations of the ancient world. Individual chapters address questions of politics, war, and history, while examining the representation of gender and sexuality, race and class, spectacle and violence, all in the setting of late Republican Rome. This volume considers the second season of Rome as a provocative contribution to the understanding of how specific threads of classical reception are constantly being reinvented to suit contemporary tastes, aspirations, and anxieties.

The Sasanian Empire (third-seventh centuries) was one of the largest empires of antiquity, stretching from Mesopotamia to modern Pakistan and from Central Asia to the Arabian Peninsula. This mega-empire withstood powerful opponents in the steppe and expanded further in Late Antiquity, whilst the Roman world shrunk in size. Recent research has revealed the reasons for this success, notably population growth in some territories, economic prosperity and urban development, made possible through investment in agriculture and military infrastructure on a scale unparalleled in the late antique world. This volume explores the empire’s relations with its neighbours and key phenomena which contributed to its wealth and power, from the empire’s armed forces to agriculture, trade and treatment of minorities. The latest discoveries, notably major urban foundations, fortifications and irrigations systems, feature prominently. An empire whose military might and urban culture rivalled Rome and foreshadowed the caliphate will be of interest to scholars of the Roman and Islamic world.

Screening the Golden Ages of the Classical Tradition explores how films and television programs have engaged with one of the most powerful myths in the Western classical tradition: that humans once lived under ideal conditions, as defined by proximity to the divine. We feel nostalgia for this imagined origin, regret at being born too late to enjoy it, and worry over why we lost it. We seek to recover that “golden age” by religious piety—or, by technological innovation, try to create our own utopia. The breach between this imagined world and lived reality renders these mythical constructs as powerful political tools. For the “golden age” concept influences how participants in the Western classical tradition view our own times by comparison, as an “iron age” whose degradation we lament and wish to escape. This “golden age” complex has manifested in the world-building activities of ancient Greek and Roman texts, from Hesiod to Suetonius, and in modernity’s hagiographic memory of certain historical societies: Periclean Athens, Thermopylae-era Sparta, and Augustan Rome. These fourteen collected essays discuss how golden age themes animate screen texts ranging from prestige projects like Gladiator and HBO’s Rome, to cult classics like Xanadu and Hercules: The Legendary Journeys, to films made by auteurs including Jules Dassin’s Phaedra and the Coen Brothers’ O Brother, Where Art Thou? Essays also examine the classical “golden age” tradition in fantasy (Game of Thrones), science fiction (Serenity), horror (The Walking Dead), war/combat (the 300 franchise, Centurion, The Eagle), and the American Western.

In Semiramis’ Legacy, the history of Persia (in its widest sense) is followed as it has been described by the Greek author Diodorus of Sicily (first century bc) as a part of his Historical Library. Diodorus starts his description with the legendary Queen Semiramis, an Assyrian queen who was said to also have ruled ancient Persia and ends it with the situation in his own days. This makes it the fullest description of ancient Persian history we have from antiquity, subsequently focusing on the vicissitudes of Assyrians (from their legendary rulers Ninus and Semiramis onward) and their direct successors, the Medes and Chaldeans, then the Achaemenid kings, Alexander the Great, the Seleucids, and the arrival of Rome in the Ancient Near East. Semiramis’ Legacy is the first complete translation of Diodorus entirely focused on the historiography of Persia (apart from the translation of his whole work in the Loeb Classical Library). Different from that edition, this book has been provided with an array of comments to give the reader the maximum of background information. As such, this study, therefore, contains as first the selected comprehensive account of ‘Ancient Persian History’, its contacts, and its context as seen by a relatively well informed Greek.