Polemon of Laodicea (near modern Denizli, south-west Turkey) was a wealthy Greek aristocrat and a key member of the intellectual movement known as the Second Sophistic. Among his works was the Physiognomy, a manual on how to tell character from appearance, thus enabling its readers to choose friends and avoid enemies on sight. Its formula of detailed instruction and personal reminiscence proved so successful that the book was re-edited in the fourth century by Adamantius in Greek, translated and adapted by an unknown Latin author of the same era, and translated in the early Middle Ages into Syriac and Arabic. The surviving versions of Adamantius, Anonymus Latinus, and the Leiden Arabic more than make up for the loss of the original.
The present volume is the work of a team of leading Classicists and Arabists. The main surviving versions in Greek and Latin are translated into English for the first time. The Leiden Arabic translation is authoritatively re-edited and translated, as is a sample of the alternative Arabic Polemon. The texts and translations are introduced by a series of masterly studies that tell the story of the origins, function, and legacy of Polemon's work, a legacy especially rich in Islam. The story of the Physiognomy is the story of how one man's obsession with identifying enemies came to be taken up in the fascinating transmission of Greek thought into Arabic.

Heliodorus' Aethiopica (Ethiopian Story) is the latest, longest, and greatest of the ancient Greek romances. It was hugely admired in Byzantium, and caused a sensation when it was rediscovered and translated into French in the 16th century: its impact on later European literature (including Shakespeare and Sidney) and art is incalculable. As with all post-classical Greek literature, its popularity dived in the 19th century, thanks to the influence of romanticism. Since the 1980s, however, new generations of readers have rediscovered this extraordinary late-antique tale of adventure, travel, and love. Recent scholars have demonstrated not just the complexity and sophistication of the text's formal aspects, but its daring experiments with the themes of race, gender, and religion. This volume brings together fifteen established experts in the ancient romance from across the world: each explores a passage or section of the text in depth, teasing out its subtleties and illustrating the rewards reaped thanks to slow, patient readings of what was arguably classical antiquity's last classic.