The Pharsalia is Lucan's epic on the civil wars between Caesar and Pompey. It is a poem of immense energy and intelligence in which spectacle and spectatorship are prominent. The author shows that by transforming certain Virgilian narrative devices Lucan launches an attack on the Augustan ideology of the Aeneid: where Virgil writes the foundation myth for the new regime and celebrates the connections between Augustus and Aeneas, Lucan produces a savagely republican anti-Aeneid which represents the civil wars as the death of Rome.

Comedy and the Rise of Rome invites the reader to consider Roman comedy in the light of history and Roman history in the light of comedy. Plautus and Terence base their dramas on the New Comedy of fourth- and third-century BC Greece. Yet many of the themes with which they engage are peculiarly alive in the Rome of the Hannibalic war, and the conquest of Macedon. This study takes issues as diverse as the legal status of the prisoner of war, the ethics of ambush, fatherhood and command, and the clash of maritime and agrarian economies, and examines responses to them both on the comic stage and in the world at large. This is a substantially new departure in ways of thinking about Roman comedy and one that opens it up to a far wider public than has previously been the case.

From Polypragmon to Curiosus is a study of how Greek and Latin writers describe curious, meddlesome, and exaggerated behaviour. Founded on a detailed investigation of a family of Greek terms, often treated as synonymous with each other, and of the Latin words used to describe them, opening chapters survey how they were used in Greek literature from the 5th and 4th centuries BC, moving onto their Latin usage and relationship to that of Hellenistic and imperial Greek. Other chapters adopt a more thematic approach and consider how words, such as polypramon, periergos, philopragmon, and curiosus, are employed in descriptions of the world of knowledge opened up by empire - in discourses of pious and impious curiosity, in reflections on what constitutes useful and useless learning, and in descriptions of style. The themes which the volume addresses remain alive throughout the literature of the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, most obviously through emblematic figures of human curiosity, such as Dante's Ulisse and Marlowe's Dr Faustus.

This volume includes "Divide and Edit: A Brief History of Book Divisions" by Carolyn Higbie; "Aristotle's Hamartia Reconsidered" by Ho Kim; "Callimachus and his Allusive Virgins" by Andrew Faulkner; "Theokritos' Idyll 16: The Kharites and Civic Poetry" by Jose Gonzalez; "Boxing and Sacrifice in Epic: Apollonius, Vergil, and Valerius" by Matthew Leigh; "The Rhodian Loss of Caunus and Stratonicea in the 160s" by Sviatoslav Dmitriev; "Trina tempestas (Carmina Einsidlensia 2.33)" by Radoslaw Pietka; "The Vanishing Gardens of Priapus" by James Uden; "Trimalchio and Fortunata as Zeus and Hera" by Maria Ypsilanti; "Ps.-Dionysius on Epideictic Rhetoric: Seven Chapters, or One Complete Treatise?" by Martin Korenjak; "The Grammarian C. Iulius Romanus and the Fabula Togata" by Jarrett T. Welsh; "Quintus of Smyrna and the Second Sophistic" by Silvio Bar; and "The Conversion of A. D. Nock in the Context of His Life, Scholarship, and Religious View" by Simon Price.

'The Comedies of Terence' presents entirely new translations, in rhyming couplets, of all six extant plays by this Latin author, dating from the period 166-60 BC. An excellent literary translation, the versions remain very close to Terence's texts; consequently they will be not only enjoyable to the general reader, but also great value to the student of classics. The Introduction is in itself a major contribution to our understanding of Terence. Matthew Leigh, who has written the Introduction to this volume, first became interested in Terence while serving as Lecturer in Classics and Ancient History at the University of Exeter. He is currently Fellow and Tutor in Classics at St Anne's College, Oxford. He is author of 'Lucan: Spectacle and Engagement' (Oxford, 1997) and 'Comedy and the Rise of Rome' (Oxford, 2004).

The fathers of modern freemasonry sought a classical pedigree for their rituals and forms of association. This volume offers the first academic study of how freemasons writing in the first half of the 18th century deployed their knowledge of antiquity to bolster this claim and how the creative literature of the period reflected their ideas. The scholarly investigation of freemasonry is a relatively new phenomenon. The writings of active freemasons tend either to generate new masonic myths or to focus on the minutiae of insignia, rank, and ritual. Only in the last 50 years have non-masons given serious thought to freemasonry as a social practice and to its place within the intellectual and political life of Enlightenment Europe and beyond. Study of masonic elements in literary texts lags much further behind. This volume offers the first English translations of three mid-18th century comedies on female curiosity about this exclusively male order and shows how they reflect contemporary attempts to forge a link with ancient mystery cult. The theatrical aspect of masonic ritual and the ancient mysteries is examined in depth. This volume opens up important new ground in classical reception and 18th century theatre history.

Comedy and the Rise of Rome invites the reader to consider Roman comedy in the light of history and Roman history in the light of comedy. Plautus and Terence base their dramas on the New Comedy of fourth- and third-century BC Greece. Yet many of the themes with which they engage are peculiarly alive in the Rome of the Hannibalic war, and the conquest of Macedon. This study takes issues as diverse as the legal status of the prisoner of war, the ethics of ambush, fatherhood and command, and the clash of maritime and agrarian economies, and examines responses to them both on the comic stage and in the world at large. This is a substantially new departure in ways of thinking about Roman comedy and one that opens it up to a far wider public than has previously been the case.