"The Spartacus War" is the extraordinary story of the most famous slave rebellion in the ancient world, the fascinating true story behind a legend that has been the inspiration for novelists, filmmakers, and revolutionaries for 2,000 years. Starting with only seventy-four men, a gladiator named Spartacus incited a rebellion that threatened Rome itself. With his fellow gladiators, Spartacus built an army of 60,000 soldiers and controlled the southern Italian countryside. A charismatic leader, he used religion to win support. An ex-soldier in the Roman army, Spartacus excelled in combat. He defeated nine Roman armies and kept Rome at bay for two years before he was defeated. After his final battle, 6,000 of his followers were captured and crucified along Rome's main southern highway.

"The Spartacus War" is the dramatic and factual account of one of history's great rebellions. Spartacus was beaten by a Roman general, Crassus, who had learned how to defeat an insurgency. But the rebels were partly to blame for their failure. Their army was large and often undisciplined; the many ethnic groups within it frequently quarreled over leadership. No single leader, not even Spartacus, could keep them all in line. And when faced with a choice between escaping to freedom and looting, the rebels chose wealth over liberty, risking an eventual confrontation with Rome's most powerful forces.

The result of years of research, "The Spartacus War" is based not only on written documents but also on archaeological evidence, historical reconstruction, and the author's extensive travels in the Italian countryside that Spartacus once conquered.

In this volume, literary scholars and ancient historians from across the globe investigate the creation, manipulation and representation of ancient war landscapes in literature. Landscape can spark armed conflict, dictate its progress and influence the affective experience of its participants. At the same time, warfare transforms landscapes, both physically and in the way in which they are later perceived and experienced. Landscapes of War in Greek and Roman Literature breaks new ground in exploring Greco-Roman literary responses to this complex interrelationship. Drawing on current ideas in cognitive theory, memory studies, ecocriticism and other fields, its individual chapters engage with such questions as: how did the Greeks and Romans represent the effects of war on the natural world? What distinctions did they see between spaces of war and other landscapes? How did they encode different experiences of war in literary representations of landscape? How was memory tied to landscape in wartime or its aftermath? And in what ways did ancient war landscapes shape modern experiences and representations of war? In four sections, contributors explore combatants' perception and experience of war landscapes, the relationship between war and the natural world, symbolic and actual forms of territorial control in a military context, and war landscapes as spaces of memory. Several contributions focus especially on modern intersections of war, landscape and the classical past.

While researching for my book about the Indian Air Force Himalayan Eagle - The Story of the Indian Air Force, I came across some very interesting details about the military/warrior traditions of India that seemed at odds with the general image of a country thought to be spiritual and pacifist - the Buddha and "Mahatma" Gandhi immediately spring to mind in this context. The details were intriguing enough for me to embark upon another ambitious project - to gather together and collate the data available on this Indian warrior tradition and its resurgence in modern-day India. This work is the presentation of certain pertinent details that are available in the open sources but told in a comprehensive, objective and readable form so that an interested reader gains a better understanding of India's little-known martial and warrior history! It is a narrative of the warrior/military traditions of India going back to its pre-Vedic roots and covers the birth of the Indian warrior caste, the Kshatriyas. How these warriors dominated among the empire builders, and how their pre-eminence was superseded by civilian rule, a change in the political scene of India that was to have ramifications from the 10th to 20th century CE. The title chosen for this work may confuse those readers who are aware that the emperor Ashoka eschewed violence for pacificism as a Buddhist. The lions in the title refer to the four represented on the Ashoka pillars at Sarnath, each facing to the points of the compass and which are symbolic of the present-day warriors of the country, the Indian armed forces, guarding against intrusions from any point.

Only one surviving source provides a continuous narrative of Greek history from Xerxes' invasion to the Wars of the Successors following the death of Alexander the Great--the Bibliotheke, or "Library," produced by Sicilian historian Diodorus Siculus (ca. 90-30 BCE). Yet generations of scholars have disdained Diodorus as a spectacularly unintelligent copyist who only reproduced, and often mangled, the works of earlier historians. Arguing for a thorough critical reappraisal of Diodorus as a minor but far from idiotic historian himself, Peter Green published Diodorus Siculus, Books 11-12.37.1, a fresh translation, with extensive commentary, of the portion of Diodorus's history dealing with the period 480-431 BCE, the so-called "Golden Age" of Athens.

This is the only recent modern English translation of the Bibliotheke in existence. In the present volume--the first of two covering Diodorus's text up to the death of Alexander--Green expands his translation of Diodorus up to Athens' defeat after the Peloponnesian War. In contrast to the full scholarly apparatus in his earlier volume (the translation of which is incorporated) the present volume's purpose is to give students, teachers, and general readers an accessible version of Diodorus's history. Its introduction and notes are especially designed for this audience and provide an up-to-date overview of fifth-century Greece during the years that saw the unparalleled flowering of drama, architecture, philosophy, historiography, and the visual arts for which Greece still remains famous.

What are the interrelationships between the language of rhetoric and the code of imperial images, from Constantine to Theodosius? How are imperial images shaped by the fact that they were produced and promoted at the behest of the emperor? Nine contributors from Spain, Italy, the U.K. and the Netherlands will guide the reader about these issues by analyzing how imperial power was articulated and manipulated by means of literary strategies and iconographic programmes. The authors scrutinize representations from Constantine to Julian and from the Valentinians to Theodosius by considering material culture and texts as interconnected sources that engaged with and reacted to each other.

This book recovers Dionysus and Apollo as the twin conceptual personae of life’s dual rhythm in an attempt to redesign contemporary theory through the reciprocal affirmation of event and form, earth and world, dance and philosophy. It revisits Heidegger and Lévi-Strauss, and combines them with Roy Wagner, with the purpose of moving beyond Nietzsche’s manifold legacy, including post-structuralism, new materialism, and speculative realism. It asks whether merging philosophy and anthropology around issues of comparative ontologies may give us a chance to re-become earthbound dwellers on a re-worlded earth.

In The Iconography of Family Members in Egypt's Elite Tombs of the Old Kingdom,, Jing Wen offers a comprehensive survey of how ancient Egyptians portrayed their family members in the reliefs of an elite tomb. Through the analysis of the depiction of family members, this book investigates familial relations, the funerary cult of the dead, ancestor worship, and relevant texts. It provides a new hypothesis and perspective that would update our understanding of the Egyptian funerary practice and familial ideology. The scenes of family members are not a record of family history but language games of the tomb owner that convey specific meaning to those who enter the chapel despite time and space.