This book will be the second volume in the American Classical Studies series. The subject is Sextus Empiricus, one of the chief sources of information on ancient philosophy and one of the most influential authors in the history of skepticism. Sextus' works have had an extraordinary influence on western philosophy, and this book provides the first exhaustive and detailed study of their recovery, transmission, and intellectual influence through Late Antiquity, the Middle Ages, and the Renaissance. This study deals with Sextus' biography, as well as the history of the availability and reception of his works. It also contains an extensive bibliographical section, including editions, translations, and commentaries.

The essays collected in this volume apply an interdisciplinary approach to explore aspects of the relationship between animal and human in late antiquity. With a focus on ways that anthropozoological connections were defined in the emergent Christian religious discourse of the epoch, the authors contribute to our understanding of a thematic area largely neglected in previous research.

The Roman historian Livy saw the past as a storehouse of lessons. Jane Chaplin examines how his historical figures manipulate the shifting meaning of the past and reveals Livy's acute sensitivity to contemporary problems. Special emphasis is placed on Romans versus foreigners as students of the past, the competing claims of near and remote events, and history's relevance for current dilemmas.

The present volume comprises 6 highly original studies on material text cultures in different nontypographic societies stretching from the 3rd millennium cuneiform textual record of Ancient Mesopotamia to 20th century Qur'anic boards of northern and central African provenience. It provides a multidisciplinary approach to material text cultures complementary to the interdisciplinary, strongly theory-grounded research scheme of the CRC 933. Six research fellowships were awarded to outstanding young researchers for innovative, high-risk research proposals pertinent to the CRC 933's overall research scheme. Their studies contained in this volume add multidisciplinary dimension to material text culture research, satisfy the curiosity as to the applicability of the theoretical premises and methodology developed and tested by the CRC 933 to research on inscribed artefacts carried out on an international level and in different research environments and contribute to anchoring material text culture research as proposed by the CRC 933 within the tradition and broader context of other research strategies devoted to the material dimension of writing, such as the filologia materiale.

Libertas and Res Publica in the Roman Republic offers some essential ideas for an understanding of Roman politics during the Republican period by analysing two key concepts: libertas (liberty) and res publica (public matter, republic). Exploring these concepts through a variety of different aspects - legal, religious, literary, political, and cultural - this book aims to explain the profound relationship between the two. Through the examination of a rich array of sources ranging from classical authors to coins, from legal texts to works of art, Balmaceda and her co-authors propose new readings that elucidate the complex meanings and inter-related functions of libertas and res publica, in a thought-provoking, deep, but very readable study of Roman political culture and identity.

Jon Lendon offers a bold new analysis of how Roman government worked in the first four centuries AD. A despotism rooted in force and fear enjoyed widespread support among the ruling classes of the provinces on the basis of an aristocratic culture of honour shared by rulers and ruled.

In a new interpretation of Parmenides philosophical poem On Nature, Vishwa Adluri considers Parmenides as a thinker of mortal singularity, a thinker who is concerned with the fate of irreducibly unique individuals. Adluri argues that the tripartite division of Parmenides poem allows the thinker to brilliantly hold together the paradox of speaking about being in time and articulates a tragic knowing: mortals may aspire to the transcendence of metaphysics, but are inescapably returned to their mortal condition.Parmenides.

The book covers Egyptian history from the Predynastic to the late Roman Period. It also introduces early contemporary literary references to ancient Egypt and uses a number of theoretical approaches to interrogate the archaeological and textual data.

Gothic literature imagines the return of ghosts from the past. But what about the ghosts of the classical past? Spectres of Antiquity is the first full-length study to describe the relationship between Greek and Roman culture and the Gothic novels, poetry, and drama of the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Rather than simply representing the opposite of classical aesthetics and ideas, the Gothic emerged from an awareness of the lingering power of antiquity. The Gothic reflects a new and darker vision of the ancient world: no longer inspiring modernity through its examples, antiquity has become a ghost, haunting contemporary minds rather than guiding them. Through readings of works by authors including Horace Walpole, Ann Radcliffe, Matthew Lewis, Charles Brockden Brown, and Mary Shelley, Spectres of Antiquity argues that these authors' plots and ideas preserve the remembered traces of Greece and Rome. James Uden provides evidence for many allusions to ancient texts that have never previously been noted in scholarship, and he offers an accessible guide both to the Gothic genre and to the classical world to which it responds. In fascinating and compelling detail, Spectres of Antiquity rewrites the history of the Gothic, demonstrating that the genre was haunted by a far deeper sense of history than has previously been assumed.

This book demonstrates how the Romans constructed garden boundaries specifically in order to open up or undermine the division between a number of oppositions, such as inside/outside, sacred/profane, art/nature, and real/imagined. Using case studies from across literature and material and visual culture, Victoria Austen explores the perception of individual garden sites in response to their limits, and showcases how the Romans delighted in playing with concepts of boundedness and separation. Transculturally, the garden is understood as a marked-off and cultivated space. Distinct from their surroundings, gardens are material and symbolic spaces that constitute both universal and culturally specific ways of accommodating the natural world and expressing human attitudes and values. Although we define these spaces explicitly through the notions of separation and division, in many cases we are unable to make sense of the most basic distinction between 'garden' and 'not-garden'. In response to this ambiguity, Austen interrogates the notion of the 'boundary' as an essential characteristic of the Roman garden.

This book brings together our present-day knowledge about textile terminology in the Akkadian language of the first-millennium BC. In fact, the progress in the study of the Assyrian dialect and its grammar and lexicon has shown the increasing importance of studying the language as well as cataloging and analysing the terminology of material culture in the documentation of the first world empire. The book analyses the terms for raw materials, textile procedures, and textile end products consumed in first-millennium BC Assyria. In addition, a new edition of a number of written records from Neo-Assyrian administrative archives completes the work. The book also contains a number of tables, a glossary with all the discussed terms, and a catalogue of illustrations. In light of the recent development of textile research in ancient languages, the book is aimed at providing scholars of Ancient Near Eastern studies and ancient textile studies with a comprehensive work on the Assyrian textiles.

Here is a blueprint for a new interdisciplinary approach that decompartmentalizes disciplines for the study of this district of the Achaemenid Empire including Syria, Phoenicia, Palestine and Cyprus. Remarkable cultural evolutions and changes in this area need closer study: the introduction of coinage and the coin economy, the sources of tension over problems of power and identity, the emergence of city-states similar to the Greek city type, the development of mercenary armies, the opening up of the Western fringe of the Persian Empire to the Greek world. Completely new research initiatives can extensively modify the vision that classical and oriental specialists have traditionally formed of the history of the Persian Empire.>

This sourcebook includes a rich and accessible selection of Roman original sources in translation ranging from the Regal Period through Republican and Imperial Rome to the late Empire and the coming of Christianity. From Roman goddesses to mortal women, imperial women to slaves and prostitutes, the volume brings new perspectives to the study of Roman women's lives. Literary sources comprise works by Livy, Catullus, Ovid, Juvenal and many others. Suggestions for further reading, a general bibliography, and an index of ancient authors and works are also included.

It has often been argued that Zerubbabel, the Jewish governor of Yehud at the time of the rebuilding of the temple (late 6th century BCE), was viewed by the prophets Haggai and Zechariah as the new king in the line of David. In this new study, Rose offers a contrary proposal for the interpretation of the oracles in Haggai 2 and Zechariah 3 and 6. He traces their background in the pre-exilic prophets, pays special attention to often neglected details of semantics and metaphor, and concludes that neither Haggai nor Zechariah designated Zerubbabel as the new king in Jerusalem. Instead, the oracles in Zechariah 3 and 6 should be seen as fully messianic.>

With a clear comparative approach, this volume brings together for the first time contributions that cover different periods of the history of ancient pharmacology, from Greek, Byzantine, and Syriac medicine to the Rabbinic-Talmudic medical discourses. This collection opens up new synchronic and diachronic perspectives in the study of the ancient traditions of recipe-books and medical collections. Besides the highly influential Galenic tradition, the contributions will focus on less studied Byzantine and Syriac sources as well as on the Talmudic tradition, which has never been systematically investigated in relation to medicine. This inquiry will highlight the overwhelming mass of information about drugs and remedies, which accumulated over the centuries and was disseminated in a variety of texts belonging to distinct cultural milieus. Through a close analysis of some relevant case studies, this volume will trace some paths of this transmission and transformation of pharmacological knowledge across cultural and linguistic boundaries, by pointing to the variety of disciplines and areas of expertise involved in the process.

This is the first synthesis on Egyptian enigmatic writing (also referred to as "cryptography") in the New Kingdom (c.1550-1070 BCE). Enigmatic writing is an extended practice of Egyptian hieroglyphic writing, set against immediate decoding and towards revealing additional levels of meaning. This first volume consists of studies by the main specialists in the field. The second volume is a lexicon of all attested enigmatic signs and values.

While modern students of Greek religion are alert to the occasion-boundedness of epiphanies and divinatory dreams in Greek polytheism, they are curiously indifferent to the generic parameters of the relevant textual representations on which they build their argument. Instead, generic questions are normally left to the literary critic, who in turn is less interested in religion. To evaluate the relation of epiphanies and divinatory dreams to Greek polytheism, the book investigates relevant representations through all major textual genres in pagan antiquity. The evidence of the investigated genres suggests that the 'epiphany-mindedness' of the Greeks, postulated by most modern critics, is largely an academic chimaera, a late-comer of Christianizing 19th-century-scholarship. It is primarily founded on a misinterpretation of Homer's notorious anthropomorphism (in the Iliad and Odyssey but also in the Homeric Hymns). This anthropomorphism, which is keenly absorbed by Greek drama and figural art, has very little to do with the religious lifeworld experience of the ancient Greeks, as it appears in other genres. By contrast, throughout all textual genres investigated here, divinatory dreams are represented as an ordinary and real part of the ancient Greeks' lifeworld experience.

"Greek Tragedy" sets ancient tragedy into its original theatrical, political and ritual context and applies modern critical approaches to understanding why tragedy continues to interest modern audiences.
An engaging introduction to Greek tragedy, its history, and its reception in the contemporary world with suggested readings for further study
Examines tragedy's relationship to democracy, religion, and myth
Explores contemporary approaches to scholarship, including structuralist, psychoanalytic, and feminist theory
Provides a thorough examination of contemporary performance practices
Includes detailed readings of selected plays