Richard Finn OP examines the significance of almsgiving in Churches of the later empire for the identity and status of the bishops, ascetics, and lay people who undertook practices which differed in kind and context from the almsgiving practised by pagans. It reveals how the almsgiving crucial in constructing the bishop's standing was a co-operative task where honour was shared but which exposed the bishop to criticism and rivalry. Finn details how practices gained meaning from a discourse which recast traditional virtues of generosity and justice to render almsgiving a benefaction and source of honour, and how this pattern of thought and conduct interacted with classical patterns to generate controversy. He argues that co-operation and competition in Christian almsgiving, together with the continued existence of traditional euergetism, meant that, contrary to the views of recent scholars, Christian alms did not turn bishops into the supreme patrons of their cities.

Xerxes, the Persian king who invaded Greece in 480 BC, quickly earned a notoriety which endured throughout antiquity and beyond. The onslaught of this eastern king upon Greek territory, culminating in the burning of Athens, ensured that the character of Xerxes soon found his way into the Greek cultural encyclopaedia as a symbol of arrogance, hubris and cruelty. The Xerxes-tradition is rich in episodes which have captured the imagination of writers throughout antiquity and into modern times, including the crossing of the Hellespont, the battles of Thermopylae and Salamis, and the destruction of Athens. The earliest ancient Greek sources created an image of a figure to be both feared and mocked by those for whom the experience of the Persian Wars was a key moment in their own self-definition. Within this rhetorical framework Xerxes was constructed as the antitype of the virtuous Greeks who had resisted his attempt to enslave them. In later traditions this image was revisited, adapted and, in some cases, contradicted.Imagining Xerxes is a transhistorical analysis bringing together the disparate cultural responses to the Persian king; it includes an evaluation of his portrayal in historiographical works by Herodotus and Ctesias and in the literary representations of Aeschylus, the Athenian orators, the Roman poetic tradition and Plutarch. It also considers evidence which goes beyond the Hellenocentric view, such as extant Persian epigraphic and artistic sources and the Jewish tradition. From the image of the tyrannical yet effeminate bully seen in Aeschylus' Persae, to the official picture of the rightful king portrayed in Persian inscriptions, or the cruel and enslaving despot who transgresses boundaries seen in the historical and oratorical tradition, Xerxes is a figure who has been reinvented in a remarkable variety of cultural and literary contexts. Analysing these reinventions, this title examines the reception of a key figure in the ancient world: one whose image was in many cases inextricably bound up with notions of how the receiving societies imagined and defined themselves.

Shipley presents the first modern commentary on Plutarch's Life of Agesilaos (c.444-360 BC) together with the full Greek text and a bibliography. Plutarch's biographies have long been valued for their literary, philosophic, and historiographic content, and the Life of Agesilaos, king of Sparta for forty years after the Peloponnesian war, has special interest as an introduction to Greek history, society, and culture in the fourth century, a critical period that has received little attention compared with the fifth century in Athens.

In the past 35 years our archaeological and epigraphic evidence for the history and culture of ancient Macedon has been transformed. This book brings together the leading Greek archaeologists and historians of the area in a major collaborative survey of the finds and their interpretation, many of them unpublished outside Greece. The recent, immensely significant excavations of the palace of King Philip II are published here for the first time. Major new chapters on the Macedonians' Greek language, civic life, fourth and third century BC kings and court accompany specialist surveys of the region's art and coinage and the royal palace centres of Pella and Vergina, presented here with much new evidence. This book is the essential companion to Macedon, packed with new information and bibliography which no student of the Greek world can now afford to neglect.

Packed with cleverly designed graphics, charts and diagrams, Ancient Rome: Infographics uses data visualization to tell the epic tale of the city of Rome and its empire. Every aspect of the Roman world is explored, from the birth of the Republic to the imperial dynasties, from the political and legal system to Rome's military might. Drawing on international sources, this complex history is made clear and comprehensible to modern readers, while offering the insights and rigour that historians demand. Original, accessible and fascinating, Ancient Rome: Infographics will delight history buffs, graphic design aficionados, and everyone seeking an overview of a civilization that shaped the world.

This volume brings together the work of a wide range of international scholars on the most important themes in Plutarch's Greek and Roman Lives. It includes contributions on Plutarch's life and cultural milieu; his methodology; the chronological order of composition and the cross-references from one Life to another; on the possibility that several biographies were edited simultaneously; the methods Plutarch adopted to summarize his own reading and research; the choice of subjects and of sources; Plutarch's compositional techniques; and the criteria for selecting the Greek and Roman pairs. An introduction discusses the traditions of historiography which influenced Plutarch, and the background to Graeco-Roman biography, analysing Plutarch's sources and assessing how he used them. At the cusp between literature, philosophy, and history, Plutarch's biographies and these studies of them are of unique interest to scholars interested in all aspects of the ancient world.

Sources of Evil: Studies in Mesopotamian Exorcistic Lore is a collection of thirteen essays on the body of knowledge employed by ancient Near Eastern healing experts, most prominently the 'exorcist' and the 'physician', to help patients who were suffering from misfortunes caused by divine anger, transgressions of taboos, demons, witches, or other sources of evil. The volume provides new insights into the two most important catalogues of Mesopotamian therapeutic lore, the Exorcist's Manual and the Assur Medical Catalogue, and contains discussions of agents of evil and causes of illness, ways of repelling evil and treating patients, the interpretation of natural phenomena in the context of exorcistic lore, and a description of the symbolic cosmos with its divine and demonic inhabitants. "This volume in the series on Ancient Divination and Magic published by Brill is a welcome addition to the growing literature on ancient magic ..." -Ann Jeffers, Journal for the Study of the Old Testament 43.5 (2019) "Since the focus of the conference from which the essays derive was narrow, most of the essays hang together well and even complement each other. Several offer state-of-the-art treatments of topics and texts that make the volume especially useful. Readers will find much in this volume that contributes to our understanding of Mesopotamian exorcists, magic, medicine, and conceptions of evil." -Scott Noegel, University of Washington, Journal of the American Oriental Society 140.1 (2020)

In Western Ways, for the first time, the "foreign schools" in Rome and Athens, institutions dealing primarily with classical archaeology and art history, are discussed in historical terms as vehicles and figureheads of national scholarship. By emphasising the agency and role of individuals in relation to structures and tradition, the book shows how much may be gained by examining science and politics as two sides of the same coin. It sheds light on the scholarly organisation of foreign schools, and through them, on the organisation of classical archaeology and classical studies around the Mediterranean. With its breadth and depth of archival resources, Western Ways offers new perspectives on funding, national prestige and international collaboration in the world of scholarship, and places the foreign schools in a framework of nineteenth and twentieth century Italian and Greek history.

Herodotus, one of the earliest and greatest of Western prose authors, set out in the late fifth century BC to describe the world as he knew it - its peoples and their achievements, together with the causes and course of the great wars that brought the Greek cities into conflict with the empires of the Near East. Each subsequent generation of historians has sought to use his text and to measure their knowledge of these cultures against his words.
This commentary by leading scholars, originally published in Italian, has been fully revised by the original authors and has now been edited for English-speaking readers by Oswyn Murray and Alfonso Moreno. It is designed for use alongside the Oxford Classical Text of Herodotus, and will replace the century-old historical commentary of How and Wells (1912) as the most authoritative account of modern scholarship on Herodotus.
Books I-IV cover the history and cultures of Lydia, Egypt, Persia, and the nomads of Scythia and North Africa, in their contacts with the Greeks from mythical times to the start of the fifth century BC; these themes, with many digressions, are woven into an account of the expansion of the Persian Empire and its relations with the Greeks.

The Companion to Ancient Israel offers an innovative overview of ancient Israelite culture and history, richly informed by a variety of approaches and fields. Distinguished scholars provide original contributions that explore the tradition in all its complexity, multiplicity and diversity. * A methodologically sophisticated overview of ancient Israelite culture that provides insights into political and social history, culture, and methodology * Explores what we can say about the cultures and history of the people of Israel and Judah, but also investigates how we know what we know * Presents fresh insights, richly informed by a variety of approaches and fields * Delves into religion as lived, an approach that asks about the everyday lives of ordinary people and the material cultures that they construct and experience * Each essay is an original contribution to the subject

What is one of the best ways to successfully predict the future? Winston Churchill believed that the further back you look, the further forward you are likely to be able to see. This intriguing book is testimony to this idea. It looks back two thousand years to the Roman Empire to help us to see into our own future. We imagine the Roman Empire as being a world very distant from ours, so distant that we may think we have nothing to learn from them. That however would be a mistake. The causes of the triumphs and disasters of our times are much the same as those of the Roman Empire. The Romans were people like us and the wisest of their great men and women were as wise as the best of ours. Unfortunately, the most foolish of theirs were just as the foolish as the worst of ours. Pugnare is the first historical account of the Roman Empire written from a practical business perspective. It is also about people, because business is about people. We can learn a lot from their behaviour, from their successes and failures.

Roman identity is one of the most interesting cases of social identity because in the course of time, it could mean so many different things: for instance, Greek-speaking subjects of the Byzantine empire, inhabitants of the city of Rome, autonomous civic or regional groups, Latin speakers under 'barbarian' rule in the West or, increasingly, representatives of the Church of Rome. Eventually, the Christian dimension of Roman identity gained ground. The shifting concepts of Romanness represent a methodological challenge for studies of ethnicity because, depending on its uses, Roman identity may be regarded as 'ethnic' in a broad sense, but under most criteria, it is not. Romanness is indeed a test case how an established and prestigious social identity can acquire many different shades of meaning, which we would class as civic, political, imperial, ethnic, cultural, legal, religious, regional or as status groups. This book offers comprehensive overviews of the meaning of Romanness in most (former) Roman provinces, complemented by a number of comparative and thematic studies. A similarly wide-ranging overview has not been available so far.

From the phenomenal bestselling author of Sapiens and Homo Deus

How can we protect ourselves from nuclear war or ecological catastrophe?

What do we do about the epidemic of fake news or the threat of terrorism?

How should we prepare our children for the future?

21 Lessons is an exploration of what it means to be human in an age of bewilderment.

'Fascinating…Harari has teed up a crucial global conversation about how to take on the problems of the 21st century' Bill Gates, New York Times

For over threescore years Cyrus H. Gordon's scholarship and teaching have provided new directions to the study of the ancient Near East. This collection of 34 essays in honour of his 90th birthday, edited by three of his former pupils, celebrates his fascinating and remarkable achievements and reflects his broad command of ancient studies. The global impact of his research can be seen from the geographical dispersion of the outstanding scholars who have written here on the following topics: archaeology, Bible studies, Ugaritic, Aramaic, Arabic, Egypto-Semitic, the cuneiform world, Indo-European, Samaritan, the Graeco-Roman world, mediaeval studies. The inclusion of a complete bibliography of Gordon's works is of singular value.

The Essential Isocrates is a comprehensive introduction to Isocrates, one of ancient Greece's foremost orators. Jon D. Mikalson presents Isocrates largely in his own words, with original English translations of selections of his writings on his life and times and on morality, religion, philosophy, rhetoric, education, political theory, and Greek and Athenian history. In Mikalson's treatment, Isocrates receives his due not only as a major thinker but as one whose work has resonated across time, influencing even modern education practices and theory. Isocrates wrote extensively about Athens in the fourth century BCE and before, and his speeches, letters, and essays provide a trove of insights concerning the intellectual, political, and social currents of his time. Mikalson details what we know about Isocrates's long, eventful, and complicated life, and much can be gleaned on the personal level from his own writings, as Isocrates was one of the most introspective authors of the Classical Period. By collecting the most representative and important passages of Isocrates's writings, arranging them topically, and placing them in historical context, The Essential Isocrates invites general and expert readers alike to engage with one of antiquity's most compelling men of ideas.