In der 1968 gegrundeten Reihe erscheinen Monographien aus den Gebieten der Griechischen und Lateinischen Philologie sowie der Alten Geschichte. Die Bande weisen eine grosse Vielzahl von Themen auf: neben sprachlichen, textkritischen oder gattungsgeschichtlichen philologischen Untersuchungen stehen sozial-, politik-, finanz- und kulturgeschichtliche Arbeiten aus der Klassischen Antike und der Spatantike. Entscheidend fur die Aufnahme ist die Qualitat einer Arbeit; besonderen Wert legen die Herausgeber auf eine umfassende Heranziehung der einschlagigen Texte und Quellen und deren sorgfaltige kritische Auswertung.

In Late Antiquity the otherwise unknown rhetor Callistratus wrote a series - unique in its kind - of fourteen descriptions of works of art (mostly statues), thus enabling us to gain remarkable insights into late antique views on Classical Greek Art. The volume presented here contains a revised Greek text of the collection, its first German translation since 1833 and the first complete archaeological commentary ever on Callistratus' work.

For the first time in more than forty years this volume offers a complete critical edition of the literary writings (as far as they have been handed down to us in complete form) by Julian the Apostate from the times when he was sole emperor of the Late Roman Empire (361-363 AD). The Latin preface gives an introduction into the transmission of Julian's texts and sets out the principles of the edition; the text itself is accompanied by an apparatus criticus (presenting the textual variants and all important conjectures made so far for the improvement of the text) as well as by an apparatus testimoniorum (documenting both Julian's quotations from and allusions to earlier literature and quotations of his texts in later literature, as far as these quotations may be important for the constitution of the text).

In the middle decades of the second century AD the acclaimed orator Aelius Aristides wrote a number of prose hymns to traditional Greek gods and thereby demonstrated that the cults of these gods had not yet become obsolete and were more than just a topic of backward-looking paideia. This volume presents four of these texts, specifically those that focus on the god of healing, Asclepius, together with a new edition of the Greek text, a new English translation with commentary, and a number of essays shedding additional light on these texts from various perspectives. All in all, the volume wants to show how in these texts of Aristides the author's rhetorical skills, his outlook on the world and his personal religiosity come together to form a remarkable whole.