|
|
Books > History > World history > BCE to 500 CE
This edition of Thucylides epic chronicle, The History of the
Peloponnesian War, contains all eight books in the authoritative
English translation of Richard Crawley. Thucylides himself was an
Athenian general who personally witnessed the various skirmishes of
the war. Ordering all of the events chronologically - a first for
any work of history - he offers a straightforward account of the
conflict, straying little to personal opinions or permitting his
history to be influenced by the politics of the era. For this,
Thucylides' is lauded for his methodical telling of each battle,
which offers the reader insight into Greek and Spartan tactics and
cultures. Throughout the history, we are given transcripts of
various speeches. Although the inclusion of such lengthy quotations
of sources is unheard of in modern history books, the presence of
lengthy oratory in Thucylides' history is considered to be a
cultural trait: speech and rhetoric were prized in Greece as the
prime means of transferring knowledge.
In The Tradition of Hermes Trismegistus, Christian H. Bull argues
that the treatises attributed to Hermes Trismegistus reflect the
spiritual exercises and ritual practices of loosely organized
brotherhoods in Egypt. These small groups were directed by Egyptian
priests educated in the traditional lore of the temples, but also
conversant with Greek philosophy. Such priests, who were
increasingly dispossessed with the gradual demise of the Egyptian
temples, could find eager adherents among a Greek-speaking audience
seeking for the wisdom of the Egyptian Hermes, who was widely
considered to be an important source for the philosophies of
Pythagoras and Plato. The volume contains a comprehensive analysis
of the myths of Hermes Trismegistus, a reevaluation of the Way of
Hermes, and a contextualization of this ritual tradition.
The period between the Roman take-over of Egypt (30 BCE) and the
failure of the Jewish diaspora revolt (115-117 CE) witnessed the
continual devaluation in the status of the Jews in Egypt, and
culminated in the destruction of its Jewish community. This volume
collects and presents all papyri, ostraca, amulets and inscriptions
from this early Roman period connected to Jews and Judaism,
published since 1957. It is a follow-up of the 1960 volume 2 of the
Corpus Papyrorum Judaicarum. It includes over 80 documents in
Greek, Demotic, and Hebrew, both documentary and literary. The
expansion of the scope of documents, to include languages other
than Greek and genres beyond the documentary, allows for a better
understanding of the life of the Jews in Egypt. The documents
published in this volume shed new light on aspects discussed
previously: The Demotic papyri better explain the Jewish settlement
in Edfu, new papyri reveal more about Jewish tax, about the Acta
papyri, and about the developments of the Jewish revolt. The
magical papyri help explain cultural developments in the Jewish
community of Egypt. This volume is thus a major contribution to the
study of the decline of the greatest diaspora Jewish community in
antiquity.
A systematic and historical treatment of the civil and criminal
procedure of Cicero's time. At the same time, the author examines
the legal difficulties and contradictions found in Cicero's
writings on procedure. With a subject index and index to passages
found in Cicero's works. Of value to the student of Roman Law,
ciminal and military procedure and law, and the history of European
courts.
Winner of the 2017 Choice Outstanding Academic Title Award The
Later Han dynasty, also known as Eastern Han, ruled China for the
first two centuries of the Christian era. Comparable in extent and
power to the early Roman empire, it dominated east Asia from
present-day Vietnam to the Mongolian steppe. Rafe de Crespigny
presents here the first full account of this period in Chinese
history to be found in a Western language. Commencing with a
detailed account of the imperial capital, the history describes the
nature of government, the expansion of the Chinese people to the
south, the conflicts of scholars and officials with eunuchs at
court, and the final collapse which followed the rebellion of the
Yellow Turbans and the rise of regional warlords.
Turkey's northern edge is a region of contrasts and diversity. From
the rugged peaks of the Pontic mountains and hidden inland valleys
to the plains and rocky alcoves of the Black Sea coast, this
landscape shaped and was shaped by its inhabitants' ways of life,
their local cultural traditions, and the ebbs and flows of
land-based and maritime networks of interaction. Between 2009 and
2011, an international team of specialists and students of the Cide
Archaeological Project (CAP) investigated the challenging
landscapes of the Cide and S enpazar districts of Kastamonu
province. CAP presents the first systematic archaeological survey
of the western Turkish Black Sea region. The information gathered
by the project extends its known human history by 10,000 years and
offers an unprecedented insight into the region's shifting
cultural, social and political ties with Anatolia and the
Circumpontic. This volume presents the project's approach and
methodologies, its results and their interpretation within
period-specific contexts and through a long-term landscape
perspective.
Mercury's Wings: Exploring Modes of Communication in the Ancient
World is the first-ever volume of essays devoted to ancient
communications. Comparable previous work has been mainly confined
to articles on aspects of communication in the Roman empire. This
set of 18 essays with an introduction by the co-editors marks a
milestone, therefore, that demonstrates the importance and rich
further potential of the topic. The authors, who include art
historians, Assyriologists, Classicists and Egyptologists, take the
broad view of communications as a vehicle not just for the
transmission of information, but also for the conduct of religion,
commerce, and culture. Encompassed within this scope are varied
purposes of communication such as propaganda and celebration, as
well as profit and administration. Each essay deals with a
communications network, or with a means or type of communication,
or with the special features of religious communication or
communication in and among large empires. The spatial, temporal,
and cultural boundaries of the volume take in the Near East as well
as Greece and Rome, and cover a period of some 2,000 years
beginning in the second millennium BCE and ending with the spread
of Christianity during the last centuries of the Roman Empire in
the West. In all, about one quarter of the essays deal with the
Near East, one quarter with Greece, one quarter with Greece and
Rome together, and one quarter with the Roman empire and its
Persian and Indian rivals. Some essays concern topics in cultural
history, such as Greek music and Roman art; some concern economic
history in both Mesopotamia and Rome; and some concern traditional
historical topics such as diplomacy and war in the Mediterranean
world. Each essay draws on recent work in the theory of
communications.
This is a pioneering study that examines the sale of sex in
classical Athens from a commercial (rather than from a cultural or
moral) perspective. Following the author's earlier book on Athenian
banking, Athenian Prostitution analyzes erotic business at Athens
not anachronistically, but in the context of the Athenian economy.
For the Athenians, the social acceptability and moral standing of
human labor was largely determined by the conditions under which
work was performed. Pursued in a context characteristic of servile
endeavor, prostitution-like all forms of slave labor-was
contemptible. Pursued under conditions appropriate to non-servile
endeavor, prostitution-like all forms of free labor-was not
violative of Athenian work ethics. As a mercantile activity,
however, prostitution was not untouched by Athenian antagonism
toward commercial and manual pursuits; as the "business of sex,"
prostitution further evoked negativity from segments of Greek
opinion uncomfortable with any form of carnality. Yet ancient
sources also adumbrate another view, in which the sale of sex,
lawful and indeed pervasive at Athens, is presented alluringly. In
Athenian Prostitution, Edward E. Cohen explores the high
compensation earned by female sexual entrepreneurs who often
controlled prostitutional businesses that were perpetuated from
generation to generation on a matrilineal basis, and that
benefitted from legislative restrictions on pimping. The author
juxtaposes the widespread practice of "prostitution pursuant to
written contract" with legislation targeting male prostitutes
functioning as governmental leaders, and explores the seemingly
contradictory phenomena of extensive sexual exploitation of slave
prostitutes (male and female) coexisting with Athenian society's
pride in its legislative protection of slaves and minors against
sexual outrage.
Situated within contemporary posthumanism, this volume offers
theoretical and practical approaches to materiality in Greek
tragedy. Established and emerging scholars explore how works of the
three major Greek tragedians problematize objects and affect,
providing fresh readings of some of the masterpieces of Aeschylus,
Sophocles, and Euripides. The so-called new materialisms have
complemented the study of objects as signifiers or symbols with an
interest in their agency and vitality, their sensuous force and
psychosomatic impact-and conversely their resistance and
irreducible aloofness. At the same time, emotion has been recast as
material "affect," an intense flow of energies between bodies,
animate and inanimate. Powerfully contributing to the current
critical debate on materiality, the essays collected here
destabilize established interpretations, suggesting alternative
approaches and pointing toward a newly robust sense of the
physicality of Greek tragedy.
Canidia is one of the most well-attested witches in Latin
literature. She appears in no fewer than six of Horace's poems,
three of which she has a prominent role in. Throughout Horace's
Epodes and Satires she perpetrates acts of grave desecration,
kidnapping, murder, magical torture and poisoning. She invades the
gardens of Horace's literary patron Maecenas, rips apart a lamb
with her teeth, starves a Roman child to death, and threatens to
unnaturally prolong Horace's life to keep him in a state of
perpetual torment. She can be seen as an anti-muse: Horace
repeatedly sets her in opposition to his literary patron, casts her
as the personification of his iambic poetry, and gives her the
surprising honor of concluding not only his Epodes but also his
second book of Satires. This volume is the first comprehensive
treatment of Canidia. It offers translations of each of the three
poems which feature Canidia as a main character as well as the
relevant portions from the other three poems in which Canidia plays
a minor role. These translations are accompanied by extensive
analysis of Canidia's part in each piece that takes into account
not only the poems' literary contexts but their magico-religious
details.
|
|