Life in ancient Greece was musical life. Soloists competed onstage for popular accolades, becoming centrepieces for cultural conversation and even leading Plato to recommend that certain forms of music be banned from his ideal society. And the music didn't stop when the audience left the theatre: melody and rhythm were woven into the whole fabric of daily existence for the Greeks. Vocal and instrumental songs were part of religious rituals, dramatic performances, dinner parties, and even military campaigns. Like Detroit in the 1960s or Vienna in the 18th century, Athens in the 400s BC was the hotspot where celebrated artists collaborated and diverse strands of musical tradition converged. The conversations and innovations that unfolded there would lay the groundwork for musical theory and practice in Greece and Rome for centuries to come. In this perfectly pitched introduction, Spencer Klavan explores Greek music's origins, forms, and place in society. In recent years, state-of-the-art research and digital technology have enabled us to decipher and understand Greek music with unprecedented precision. Yet many readers today cannot access the resources that would enable them to grapple with this richly rewarding subject. Arcane technical details and obscure jargon veil the subject - it is rarely known, for instance, that authentic melodies still survive from antiquity, helping us to imagine the vivid soundscapes of the Classical and Hellenistic eras. Music in Ancient Greece distills the latest discoveries into vivid prose so readers can come to grips with the basics as never before. With the tools in this book, beginners and specialists alike will learn to hear the ancient world afresh and come away with a new, musical perspective on their favourite classical texts.

This accessible edition for students presents Herodotus as one of the most fascinating and colourful authors from the ancient world. Book III of Herodotus’ nine-book work is one of the richest in its exploration of themes, such as the practices and customs of different peoples and the nature of political power, issues still much debated today. This commentary illuminates the geographical and even anthropological scope of Herodotus' history, and enables students to confidently tackle the text in the original Greek. Bringing together a full introduction, text, commentary and translation, Longley makes Herodotus accessible to students of ancient Greek. This guide shows us why Herodotus is still considered the ‘Father of History’.

Just who did the British think they were? For much of the last 1,500 years, when the British looked back to their origins they saw the looming mythological figure of Brutus of Troy. A great-great-grandson of the love goddess Aphrodite through her Trojan son Aeneas (the hero of Virgil's Aeneid), Brutus accidentally killed his father and was exiled to Greece. He liberated the descendants of the Trojans who lived there in slavery and led them on an epic voyage to Britain. Landing at Totnes in Devon, Brutus overthrew the giants who lived in Britain, laid the foundations of Oxford University and London and sired a long line of kings, including King Arthur and the ancestors of the present Royal Family.Invented to give Britain a place in the overarching mythologies of the Classical world and the Bible, Brutus's story long underpinned the British identity and played a crucial role in royal propaganda and foreign policy. His story inspired generations of poets and playwrights, including Spenser, Shakespeare, Milton, Pope, Wordsworth, Dickens and Blake, whose hymn 'Jerusalem' was a direct response to the story of Brutus founding London as the New Troy in the west.Leading genealogist Anthony Adolph traces Brutus's story from Roman times onwards, charting his immense popularity and subsequent fall from grace, along with his lasting legacy in fiction, pseudo-history and the arcane mythology surrounding some of London's best-known landmarks, in this groundbreaking biography of the mythological founder of Britain.

Demosthenes' oration On the Chersonese is a masterpiece of rhetorical brilliance and contains some of the best examples of his skill as a political orator, coming as one of his final surviving speeches in the corpus. It was delivered to the Athenians in 341 BC, at a time of turbulent events when Athens was coming under increasing pressure resulting from the actions of Philip of Macedon. The Chersonese was a region of great importance for Athens. At the time of the speech, Philip was in the middle of an extensive military and diplomatic campaign in Thrace that would threaten the security of the Athenian grain trade from the Black Sea. The resulting pressure in the Chersonese, however, was seen by Demosthenes as an attempt by Philip to weaken Athens as a prelude to taking the whole of Greece. In this context he argued in the speech that the general Diopeithes, who had been sent out to the Chersonese in 346 with a naval force, be supported in the face of protest from Philip regarding Diopeithes' actions in the wider area. He focuses on Athenian relations with Philip in this crucial northern region and why Philip was a threat to Athenian interests in the area. This edition with Greek text, translation and commentary contains the first detailed commentary on this speech. The introduction explains the historical background in some detail, as well as examining Demosthenes' deliberative oratory, the structure and style of the speech, and relationship to the speeches that followed, including the famous Third Philippic. The commentary focuses on all political, military, social and religious references presented by Demosthenes, as well as oratorical aspects.

Marginal Comment, which attracted keen and widespread interest on its original publication in 1994, is the remarkable memoir of one of the most distinguished classical scholars of the modern era. Its author, Sir Kenneth Dover, whose academic publications included the pathbreaking book Greek Homosexuality (1978, reissued by Bloomsbury in 2016), conceived of it as an 'experimental' autobiography - ruthlessly candid in retracing the full range of the author's experiences, both private and public, and unflinching in its attempt to analyse the entanglements between the life of the mind and the life of the body. Dover's distinguished career involved not only an influential series of writings about the ancient Greeks but also a number of prominent positions of leadership, including the presidencies of Corpus Christi College, Oxford, and the British Academy. It was in those positions that he became involved in several high-profile controversies, including the blocking of an honorary degree for Margaret Thatcher from Oxford University, and a bitter debate in the British Academy over the fellowship of Anthony Blunt after his exposure as a former Soviet spy. This edition of Marginal Comment is much more than a reissue: it includes an introduction which frames the book in relation to its author's life and work, as well as annotations based in part on materials originally excluded by Dover but left in his personal papers on this death. Now newly available, the memoir provides not only the self-portrait of an exceptional individual but a rich case-study in the intersections between an intellectual life and its social contexts.

This volume contains the edition and translation of the chapter of al-Maqrizi's al-H abar 'an al-basar dealing with Greeks, Romans, Byzantines, Franks, and Goths. This chapter is, for the most part, an almost exact reproduction of Ibn Haldun's Kitab al-'Ibar, from which al-Maqrizi derived material from many other sources, including prominent Christian sources such as Kitab Hurusiyus, Ibn al-'Amid's History, and works by Muslim historians like Ibn al-Atir's Kamil. Therefore, this chapter of al-H abar 'an al-basar is a continuation of the previous Arabic historiographical tradition, in which European history is integrated into world history through the combination of Christian and Islamic sources.

This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press's mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1930.