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This book emphasises the role of verbal as well as visual allusion in positioning the plays of New Comedy within the context of contemporary polis culture and in instigating sophisticated processes of audience response. It will interest all classicists as well as scholars of theatre, performance and cultural studies in general.

Focusing on key ancient responses to the five-part narrative of human history in Hesiod's Works and Days, this book argues that critical disciplines from philosophy to satire defined themselves in part through questions about 'Hesiodic' teaching. It will be of interest to scholars of ancient literature and the development of intellectual traditions.

The Athenians themselves invented the notion of 'classical' tragedy just a few generations after the city's defeat in the Peloponnesian War. This study marks the first account of how Athens constructed its theatrical past and sheds new light upon the interaction between the city's literary and political history.

Offers scholars of Greek literature new evidence of Aristophanes' polemical use of philosophy in poetic competition; ancient philosophers new evidence of the popular reception of Parmenides; and scholars in theatre studies new evidence that explicit theorizing about theatre begins with a comic appropriation of Eleatic ideas about reality and illusion.

This book selects central moments in the literary reception of the Works and Days in antiquity, studies these moments in sophisticated depth, and pays particular attention to Hesiod's importance as the founding father of 'didactic literature'. It will appeal to all those with a serious interest in ancient literature.

A pioneering interdisciplinary study of the languages and writing systems of ancient Cyprus, covering a broad time-span (1600-300 BC) and considering not only the languages themselves but also the relationship between them, as well as their social and historical context.

The first full study of the survival of Lucretius' De rerum natura, the controversial six-book poem espousing Epicurean philosophy. A detailed analysis of the poem's circulation, readers and commentators in antiquity, as well as its medieval scribes and owners, sheds light on the poem's tenuous threads of transmission.

A thorough examination of the nature and function of absolute constructions in Greek, Latin and Sanskrit, including a detailed description of how they interact with their syntactic environment. Of great interest and importance to historical linguists and to classicists and Sanskrit scholars concerned with the history of those languages.

Desire is a central concept in Aristotle's ethical and psychological works, but he does not provide us with a systematic treatment of the notion itself. This book reconstructs the account of desire latent in his various scattered remarks on the subject and analyses its role in his moral psychology.

This book studies the reception of Plato's dialogues as performance texts both by his original audience and by his readers down to late antiquity. A combination of well-known and newly discovered pieces of literary and archaeological evidence tell the forgotten story of 'Plato the playwright'.

This book advances a revisionist approach towards the clash between humanism and Christian Orthodoxy in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries that led to the secular utopianism and paganism of visionary Platonist, Gemistos Plethon. An important read for those interested in ancient and medieval philosophy, Byzantine studies and the Renaissance.

This book makes a fundamental contribution to the study of urbanism in the Roman provinces with a detailed and copiously illustrated archaeological account of the first decade of one of the best-excavated cities in the Roman Empire. It draws on both published and archived archaeological evidence, to which it applies a novel methodology.

This book provides a close reading of Augustine's Confessions and Eusebius' Life of Constantine to demonstrate that early Christian biography as a genre needs more careful attention than it has hitherto been given, extending beyond mere hagiography to a different understanding of the world.

Major study of the literary treatment of rumour and renown across the canon of authors from Homer to Alexander Pope, including readings in historiographical and dramatic texts, and authors such as Petrarch, Chaucer, Spenser, Shakespeare and Milton. Of interest to students of classical and comparative literature and of reception studies.

A radical interdisciplinary reappraisal of the agrarian background to the political events which shaped the destiny of Rome (from Republic to Empire). The book actively builds upon the textual and archaeological evidence to trace the fate of the Italian rural free population during a crucial period of its history.

In this 1965 text, Dr Moore divides the extant manuscripts of Polybius, the second century BC Greek historian of Rome, into their families, and demonstrates their relationship to each other. He considers the three traditions separately, and in each he describes the manuscripts briefly and discusses their relevant history.

Written for scholars and advanced students working in both classics and political theory, this book provides a new interpretation of Cicero's central works of political philosophy. It demonstrates that Cicero's Republic and Laws are critical for understanding the history of the concepts of rights, the mixed constitution and natural law.

Explores how ancient Romans categorised, organised and described colours, and outlines the principal differences and similarities between ancient and modern concepts of colour. By drawing together evidence from contemporary philosophers, elegists, epic writers, historians and satirists, this text explores the definition and function of colour in Rome during the early Empire.

The Rhetoric of Identity in Isocrates provides an interpretation of an important, but largely neglected and disregarded, fourth-century Athenian author to show how he uses writing to provide a model of political engagement which is distinct from his own contemporaries' (especially Plato's) and from our own notions of political involvement.

This book consists of two closely related parts. Volume I publishes fifty-four Ptolemaic papyri from the Fayum and Middle Egypt, with English translations and extensive commentaries. Volume II uses these texts, created for purposes of taxation, to provide historical studies analysing fundamental aspects of Ptolemaic Egypt.

This book explores the assumptions and principles which determined the conduct and representation of interstate politics in Greece during the fifth and fourth centuries BC. A wide range of ancient evidence is employed, both epigraphic and literary, as well as some contemporary theoretical approaches to international politics.

This book is an in-depth study of the topic of rape in classical Athens. Its central focus is on violent sexual encounters but it also raises questions about the nature and ingredients of any type of sexual activity in Athens.

This study, first published in 1998, explores the subtle, many-faceted interplay of power in Tibullus' first book of elegies. A series of power relationships are created by the text (lover and beloved, poet and patron) and the processes through which power of various sorts can be exercised are brought to the foreground.

It has long been held that conditions in the Roman economy resembled those found in early modern Europe. In this intriguing study, Peter Bang interrogates this claim and argues that Roman trade and markets could more accurately be compared to those of the Mughal Empire in India.

The first study to examine the role and character of Homer's people in Homeric story-telling, arguing that Homeric poetry is crucially concerned with the people as a basis for communal life. The Iliad and The Odyssey are read as meditations on the processes involved in protecting and destroying the people.

Archaic Greek poetry is an important source for the history of the period. This 2005 book offers close readings of this poetry, particularly that of Solon, in order to explore the politics and ideologies of the day. The influence of performance context is also examined.

Dr Wild has written an account of textile manufacture in the northern and western Roman provinces. The main body of his survey is a detailed account of the evidence, archaeological and literary, for Roman looms, and an examination of surviving textiles. This is an important work of reference on a major, but neglected, aspect of Roman technology and economics.

Latin translations of Greek works have received much less attention than vernacular translations of classical works. This book examines the work of three Latin translators of the Renaissance and attempts to provide a broad perspective on the development of Latin writing about translation by drawing together the ideas of these three very different translators.

A study of a small agricultural village in the Fayum as a social and economic unit towards the end of the second century BC, which was a period of civil unrest and economic disruption in Egypt. The book is based on papyrus documents from the archive of the village scribe.

This book is a comprehensive survey of the often difficult and scattered sources and an attempt to locate Stoic material in the rich array of contexts, ancient and modern, which alone can guarantee full appreciation of its subtlety, scope and complexity.