How to Do Things with History is a collection of essays that explores current and future approaches to the study of ancient Greek cultural history. Rather than focus directly on methodology, the essays in this volume demonstrate how some of the most productive and significant methodologies for studying ancient Greece can be employed to illuminate a range of different kinds of subject matter. These essays, which bring together the work of some of the most talented scholars in the field, are based upon papers delivered at a conference held at Cambridge University in September of 2014 in honor of Paul Cartledge's retirement from the post of A. G. Leventis Professor of Ancient Greek Culture. For the better part of four decades, Paul Cartledge has spearheaded intellectual developments in the field of Greek culture in both scholarly and public contexts. His work has combined insightful historical accounts of particular places, periods, and thinkers with a willingness to explore comparative approaches and a keen focus on methodology. Cartledge has throughout his career emphasized the analysis of practice - the study not, for instance, of the history of thought but of thinking in action and through action. The assembled essays trace the broad horizons charted by Cartledge's work: from studies of political thinking to accounts of legal and cultural practices to politically astute approaches to historiography. The contributors to this volume all take the parameters and contours of Cartledge's work, which has profoundly influenced an entire generation of scholars, as starting points for their own historical and historiographical explorations. Those parameters and contours provide a common thread that runs through and connects all of the essays while also offering sufficient freedom for individual contributors to demonstrate an array of rich and varied approaches to the study of the past.

Silius Italicus' Punica, the longest surviving epic in Latin literature, has seen a resurgence of interest among scholars in recent years. A celebration of Rome's triumph over Hannibal and Carthage during the second Punic war, Silius' poem presents a plethora of familiar names to its readers: Fabius Maximus, Claudius Marcellus, Scipio Africanus and, of course, Rome's 'ultimate enemy' - Hannibal. Where most recent scholarship on the Punica has focused its attention of the problematic portrayal of Scipio Africanus as a hero for Rome, this book shifts the focus to Carthage and offers a new reading of Hannibal's place in Silius' epic, and in Rome's literary culture at large. Celebrated and demonised in equal measure, Hannibal became something of an anti-hero for Rome; a man who acquired mythic status, and was condemned by Rome's authors for his supposed greed and cruelty, yet admired for his military acumen. For the first time this book provides a comprehensive overview of this multi-faceted Hannibal as he appears in the Punica and suggests that Silius' portrayal of him can be read as the culmination to Rome's centuries-long engagement with the Carthaginian in its literature. Through detailed consideration of internal focalisation, Silius' Hannibal is revealed to be a man striving to create an eternal legacy, becoming the Hannibal whom a Roman, and a modern reader, would recognise. The works of Polybius, Livy, Virgil, and the post Virgilian epicists all have a bit-part in this book, which aims to show that Silius Italicus' Punica is as much an example of how Rome remembered its past, as it is a text striving to join Rome's epic canon.

Eunuchs tend to be associated with eastern courts, popularly perceived as harem personnel. However, the Roman empire was also distinguished by eunuchs - they existed as slaves, court officials, religious figures and free men. This book is the first to be devoted to the range of Roman eunuchs. Across seven chapters (spanning the third century BC to the sixth century AD), Shaun Tougher examines the history of Roman eunuchs, focusing on key texts and specific individuals. Subjects met include the Galli (the self-castrating devotees of the goddess the Great Mother), Terence's comedy The Eunuch (the earliest surviving Latin text to use the word 'eunuch'), Sporus and Earinus the eunuch favourites of the emperors Nero and Domitian, the 'Ethiopian eunuch' of the Acts of the Apostles (an early convert to Christianity), Favorinus of Arles (a superstar intersex philosopher), the Grand Chamberlain Eutropius (the only eunuch ever to be consul), and Narses the eunuch general who defeated the Ostrogoths and restored Italy to Roman rule. A key theme of the chapters is gender, inescapable when studying castrated males. Ultimately this book is as much about the eunuch in the Roman imagination as it is the reality of the eunuch in the Roman empire.

The emperor Gaius ('Caligula') was assassinated in January A.D.41. Since he was the last of the Julii, and he left no heir, it seemed that the dynasty of Caesar and Augustus was finished. Accordingly, the Republic was restored, but then a coup d'etat by the Praetorian Guard put Claudius in power . . . the dramatic events of these few days are a crucial turning-point in Roman history - the moment when the military basis of the Principate was first made explicit. Tacitus' account has not survived, and Suetonius and Dio Cassisu offer no adequate substitute. Fortunately, the Jewish historian Flavius Josephus chose to insert into his 'Jewish Antiquities' - as an example of the providence of God - a detailed narrative of the assassination plot and its aftermath taken from contemporary and well-informed Roman sources. This new edition of T.P. Wiseman's acclaimed Death of an Emperor (his translation and commentary of Josephus' account of Caligula's assassination) includes an updated bibliography, revised introduction, translation and commentary. Appendix 1 on the Augustan Palatine has been completely revised to take account of recent archaeological information.

Where did the idea of sin arise from? In this meticulously argued book, David Konstan takes a close look at classical Greek and Roman texts, as well as the Bible and early Judaic and Christian writings, and argues that the fundamental idea of "sin" arose in the Hebrew Bible and the New Testament, although this original meaning was obscured in later Jewish and Christian interpretations. Through close philological examination of the words for "sin," in particular the Hebrew hata' and the Greek hamartia, he traces their uses over the centuries in four chapters, and concludes that the common modern definition of sin as a violation of divine law indeed has antecedents in classical Greco-Roman conceptions, but acquired a wholly different sense in the Hebrew Bible and New Testament.