A mammoth and successful endeavour by Richard Frost, Ancient Greece: Its Principal Gods and Minor Deities offers Greek mythology enthusiasts a comprehensive 'who's who' dictionary for quick reference to the myriad gods and goddesses of ancient Greece. Produced and expanded from the author's original student notebook, and intended primarily to aid others studying the subject, it is an ideal companion to classical studies for both the curious and the connoisseur.

The standard view in scholarship is that disease in Lucretius' De rerum natura is mainly a problem to be solved and then dispensed with. However, a closer reading suggests that things are more layered and complex than they appear at first sight: just as morbus causes a radical rearrangement of atoms in the body and makes the patient engage with alternative and up to that point unknown dimensions of the sensible world, so does disease as a theme generate a multiplicity of meanings in the text. The present book argues for a reconsideration of morbus in De rerum natura along those lines: it invites the reader to revisit the topic of disease and reflect on the various, and often contrasting, discourses that unfold around it. More specifically, it illustrates how, apart from calling for therapy, disease, due to its dominant presence in the narrative, transforms at the same time into a concept that is integral both to the poem's philosophical agenda but also to its wider aesthetic concerns as a literary product. The book thus sheds new light on De rerum natura's intense preoccupation with morbus by showing how disease is not exclusively conceived by Lucretius as a blind, obliterating force but is crucially linked to life and meaning-both inside and outside the text.

A history of women in the Roman empire, including Livia, Octavia, Cleopatra, Livilla, Agrippina, and many others.

'Accessible, informative, enjoyable' - All About History _____________________ Spend 24 hours with the ancient Athenians. See the city through their eyes as it teeters on the edge of the fateful war that would end its golden age. Athens, 416 BC. A tenuous peace holds. The city-state's political and military might are feared throughout the ancient world; it pushes the boundaries of social, literary and philosophical experimentation in an era when it has a greater concentration of geniuses per capita than at any other time in human history. Yet even geniuses go to the bathroom, argue with their spouse and enjoy a drink with friends. During the course of a day we meet 24 Athenians from all strata of society - from the slave-girl to the councilman, the vase painter to the naval commander, the housewife to the hoplite - and get to know what the real Athens was like by spending an hour in their company. We encounter a different one of these characters every chapter, with each chapter forming an hour in the life of the ancient city. We also get to spy on the daily doings of notable Athenians through the eyes of regular people as the city hovers on the brink of the fateful war that will destroy its golden age.

Veneration of the saints is one of the defining characteristics of early medieval society and culture. This important book by a group of distinguished experts adopts for the first time an interdisciplinary approach to examine the innumerable local cults which developed in western Europe between about 400 and 1000, concentrating especially on Celtic and Anglo-Saxon saints. The volume combines wide-ranging surveys with crucial reference material, including a handlist of all known Anglo-Saxon saints.

This volume deals with the chronology of Ancient Egypt from the fourth millennium until the Hellenistic Period. An initial section reviews the foundations of Egyptian chronology, both ancient and modern, from annals and kinglists to C14 analyses of archaeological data. Specialists discuss sources, compile lists of known dates, and analyze biographical information in the section devoted to relative chronology. The editors are responsible for the final section which attempts a synthesis of the entire range of available data to arrive at alternative absolute chronologies. The prospective readership includes specialists in Near Eastern and Aegean studies as well as Egyptologists.

The Church in Ancient Society provides a full and enjoyable narrative history of the first six centuries of the Christian Church. Ancient Greek and Roman society had many gods and an addiction to astrology and divination. This introduction to the period traces the process by which Christianity changed this and so provided a foundation for the modern world: the teaching of Jesus created a lasting community, which grew to command the allegiance of the Roman emperor.

Any reader of scholarship on the ancient and early medieval world will be familiar with the term 'Germanic', which is frequently used as a linguistic category, ethnonym, or descriptive identifier for a range of forms of cultural and literary material. But is the term meaningful, useful, or legitimate? The term, frequently applied to peoples, languages, and material culture found in non-Roman north-western and central Europe in classical antiquity, and to these phenomena in the western Roman Empire's successor states, is often treated as a legitimate, all-encompassing name for the culture of these regions. Its usage is sometimes intended to suggest a shared social identity or ethnic affinity among those who produce these phenomena. Yet, despite decades of critical commentary that have highlighted substantial problems, its dominance of scholarship appears not to have been challenged. This edited volume, which offers contributions ranging from literary and linguistic studies to archaeology, and which span from the first to the sixteenth centuries AD, examines why the term remains so pervasive despite its problems, offering a range of alternative interpretative perspectives on the late and post-Roman worlds.

Brill's Companion to Aineias Tacticus is a collection of articles on the significance of the earliest Greek handbook on military tactics. Aineias' (Aeneas) wrote his Poliorketika in the mid-fourth century BC, offering a unique perspective on contemporary Greek city-states, warfare and intellectual trends. We offer an introduction to Aineias and his work, and then discuss the work's historical and intellectual context, his qualities as a writer, and aspects of his work as a historical source for the Greek polis of the fourth century BC. Several chapters discuss Aineias' approach to warfare, specifically light infantry, mercenaries, naval operations, fortifications and technology. Finally, we include a lengthy study of the reception of ancient military treatises, specifically Aineias' Poliorketika, in the Byzantine period.

Greece and Rome have long featured in books for children and teens, whether through the genres of historical fiction, fantasy, mystery stories or mythological compendiums. These depictions and adaptations of the Ancient World have varied at different times, however, in accordance with changes in societies and cultures. This book investigates the varying receptions and ideological manipulations of the classical world in children's literature. Its subtitle, Heroes and Eagles, reflects the two most common ways in which this reception appears, namely in the forms of the portrayal of the Greek heroic world of classical mythology on the one hand, and of the Roman imperial presence on the other. Both of these are ideologically loaded approaches intended to educate the young reader.

Until the Renaissance the centrality of Roman tragedy in Western society and culture was unchallenged. Studies on Roman Republican tragedy and on Imperial Roman tragedy by the contributors have been directing the gaze of scholarship back to Roman tragedy. This volume has two goals: first, to demonstrate that Republican tragedy had a far more central role in shaping Imperial tragedy than is currently thought, and quite possibly more important than Classical Greek tragedy. Second, the influence of other Roman literary genres on Roman tragedy is greater than has formerly been credited. Studies on von Kleist and Shelley, Eliot and Claus help reconstruct the ancient Roman stage by showing how moderns had thought to change it for contemporary aesthetics.

Olynthus, an ancient city in northern Greece, was preserved in an exceptionally complete state after its abrupt sacking by Phillip II of Macedon in 348 B.C., and excavations in the 1920s and 1930s uncovered more than a hundred houses and their contents. In this book Nicholas Cahill analyzes the results of the excavations to reconstruct the daily lives of the ancient Greeks, the organization of their public and domestic space, and the economic and social patterns in the city. Cahill compares the realities of daily life as revealed by the archaeological remains with theories of ideal social and household organization espoused by ancient Greek authors. Describing the enormous variety of domestic arrangements, he examines patterns and differences in the design of houses, in the occupations of owners, and in the articulations between household and urban economies, the value of land, and other aspects of ancient life throughout the city. He thus challenges the traditional view that the Greeks had one standard household model and approach to city planning. He shows how the Greeks reconciled conflicting demands of ideal and practice, for instance between egalitarianism and social inequality or between the normative roles of men and women and roles demanded by economic necessities. The book, which is extensively illustrated with plans and photographs, is supported by a Web site containing a database of the architecture and finds from the excavations linked to plans of the site.

In this book you will discover a history of humanity unlike anything you have ever heard of. Ever wonder what happened to all of the civilizations that have gone before us? Well, the events in history are continually repeated by different cultures throughout time with the same finale, affecting the entire globe in a relatively short time. From the ancient writings of all of the historians, religious scriptures and mythology, we also find the same understanding. And their writings unveil the true nature of the forces behind the events. Yet, we are not taught about these things in schools, universities or the media. The various types of natural disasters, terrorism and war always end up producing the same result. In fact, humans and Nature are so much a part of each other that we literally take turns in accomplishing the same objective, as part of an overall process involving a living Earth. Our ancestors were not ignorant people, but were, in many cases, very capable and intelligent. They were also celestial observers and knew astronomy so well that they have even taught us things we did not know today. They also built structures that were used as astronomical observatories. Much of this was done in an attempt to fully understand what was taking place, for there were dramatic celestial events as well. Natural disasters have been undergoing a steady climb, as things become more and more unstable

The Impact of Justice on the Roman Empire discusses ways in which notions, practice and the ideology of justice impacted on the functioning of the Roman Empire. The papers assembled in this volume follow from the thirteenth workshop of the international network Impact of Empire. They focus on what was considered just in various groups of Roman subjects, how these views were legitimated, shifted over time, and how they affected policy making and political, administrative, and judicial practices. Linking all of the papers are three common themes: the emperor and justice, justice in a dispersed empire and differentiation of justice.

This unique study is the first systematic examination to be undertaken of the high priesthood in ancient Israel, from the earliest local chief priests in the pre-monarchic period down to the Hasmonaean priest-kings in the first century BCE. It discusses material from the Old Testament and Apocrypha, together with contemporary documents and coins. It challenges the view that by virtue of his office the high priest became sole political leader of the Jews in later times.

Roman Republican Augury: Freedom and Control proposes a new way of understanding augury, a form of Roman state divination designed to consult the god Jupiter. Previous scholarly studies of augury have tended to focus either upon its legal-constitutional effects or upon its role in maintaining and perpetuating Roman social and political structures. This volume makes a new contribution to the study of Roman religion, politics, and cultural history by focusing instead upon what augury can tell us about how Romans understood their relationship with their gods. Augury is often thought to have told Romans what they wanted to hear. This volume argues that augury left space for perceived expressions of divine will which contradicted human wishes, and that its rules and precepts did not permit human beings to create or ignore signs at will. This analysis allows the Jupiter whom Romans approached in augury to emerge as not simply a source of power to be channelled to human ends, but a person with his own interests and desires, which did not always overlap with those of his human enquirers. When human will and divine will clashed, it was the will of Jupiter which was supposed to prevail. In theory as in practice, it was the Romans, not their supreme god, who were bound by the auguries and auspices.