- Actors in the Audience
- Shadi Bartsch
- This is a book about language, theatricality, and empire--about how the Roman emperor dramatized his rule and how his subordinates in turn staged their response. Informed by theories of dramaturgy, sociology, new historicism, and cultural criticism, this close reading of literary and historical texts gives us a new perspective on the politics of the Roman empire--and on the languages and representation of power.
- Hardcover 1998
- Amber
- Andrew Ross
- The fossilized resin of ancient trees, amber preserves organic material--most commonly insects and other invertebrates--and with it the shape and surface detail that are usually obliterated or hopelessly distorted during the mineralization we associate with fossils. This fascinating substance offers a unique intersection of the fields of paleontology, botany, entomology, and mineralogy.
- Paperback 1999
- Ancient Roman Gardens
- Edited by Elizabeth Blair MacDougall
- Edited by Wilhelmina F. Jashemski
- Hardcover 1981
- Ancient Roman Villa Gardens
- Edited by Elizabeth Blair MacDougall
- Hardcover 1987
- Athanasius and Constantius
- Timothy D. Barnes
- In this new reconstruction of Athanasius's career, Barnes analyzes the nature and extent of the Bishop's power, especially as it intersected with the policies of these emperors. Untangling longstanding misconceptions, Barnes reveals the Bishop's true role in the struggles within Christianity, and in the relations between the Roman emperor and the Church at a critical juncture.
- Paperback 2001 / Hardcover
- Caesar
- Mattias Gelzer
- Translated by Peter Needham
- The political career of one of the great statesmen of Antiquity--indeed of all times--is here captured in a full, authoritative, and lively biography that has long been a classic.
- Hardcover / Paperback
- Cicero, XXV, Letters to Friends
- Cicero
- Edited and translated by D. R. Shackleton Bailey
- The 435 letters collected here represent Cicero's correspondence with friends and acquaintances over a period of 20 years, from 62 BCE, when Cicero's political career was at its peak, to 43 BCE, the year he was put to death by the victorious Triumvirs.This new Loeb Classical Library edition of the Letters to Friends, in three volumes, brings together D. R. Shackleton Bailey's standard Latin text, now updated, and a revised version of his much admired translation first published by Penguin. The first volume of Letters to Friends contains letters 1-113.
- Hardcover 2001
- Cicero, XXVI, Letters to Friends
- Cicero
- Edited and translated by D. R. Shackleton Bailey
- Volume II contains letters 114-280.
- Hardcover 2001
- Cicero, XXVII, Letters to Friends
- Cicero
- Edited and translated by D. R. Shackleton Bailey
- Volume III contains letters 281-435.
- Hardcover 2001
- Cleopatra and Rome
- Diana E. E. Kleiner
- In this beautifully illustrated book, we experience the synthesis of Cleopatra's and Rome's defining moments through surviving works of art and other remnants of what was once an opulent material culture. This culture best chronicles Cleopatra's legend and suggests her subtle but indelible mark on the art of imperial Rome at the critical moment of its inception.
- Hardcover 2005
- The Colosseum
- Keith Hopkins
- Mary Beard
- The history of the Colosseum--chockfull of romantic but erroneous myths--is, in reality, much stranger than the legend. In this engaging book, we learn the details of how the arena was built and at what cost; we are introduced to the emperors who sometimes fought in gladiatorial games staged at the Colosseum; and we take measure of the audience who reveled in, or opposed, these games. The authors also trace the strange afterlife of the monument--as fortress, shrine of martyrs, church, and glue factory.
- Hardcover 2005
- The End of the Past
- Aldo Schiavone
- Translated by Margery J. Schneider
- Western history is split into two discontinuous eras, Aldo Schiavone tells us: the ancient world was fundamentally different from the modern one. He locates the essential difference in a series of economic factors: a slave-based economy, relative lack of mechanization and technology, the dominance of agriculture over urban industry. Schiavone's lively and provocative examination of the ancient world offers a stimulating opportunity to view modern society in light of the experience of antiquity.
- Hardcover 2000 / Paperback 2002
- The Epic City
- Annette L. Giesecke
- As Greek and Trojan forces battled in the shadow of Troy's wall, Hephaistos created a wondrous, ornately decorated shield for Achilles. Viewed as Homer's blueprint for an ideal, or utopian, social order, the Shield reveals that restraining and taming Nature would be fundamental to the Hellenic urban quest. It is this ideal that Classical Athens, with her utilitarian view of Nature, exemplified. This new ideal, vividly expressed through the domestication of Nature in villas and gardens and also through primitivist and Epicurean tendencies in Latin literature, informed the urban endeavors of Rome.
- Paperback 2007
- Et Tu, Brute?
- Greg Woolf
- Beginning with Caesar's legendary political assassination, immortalized in art and literature through the ages, Woolf delivers a remarkable meditation on Caesar's murder as it echoes down the corridors of history, affecting notions and acts of political violence to our day.
- Hardcover 2007
- The Fires of Vesuvius
- Mary Beard
- Although Pompeii still does not give up its secrets quite as easily as it may seem, Mary Beard makes sense of the remains. From sex to politics, food to religion, slavery to literacy, she offers us the big picture of the inhabitants of the lost city.
- Hardcover 2008
- The Founders and the Classics
- Carl J. Richard
- The influence of Greek and Roman authors on our American forefathers finally becomes clear in this fascinating book--the first comprehensive study of the founders' classical reading. In this analysis, we see how the classics not only supplied the principal basis for the U.S. Constitution but also contributed to the founders' conception of human nature, their understanding of virtue, and their sense of identity and purpose within a grand universal scheme.
- Paperback 1995 / Hardcover
- Greek and Roman Life
- Ian Jenkins
- Paperback
- Hadrian
- Thorsten Opper
- Even in the panoply of Roman history, Hadrian stands out. This book moves beyond the familiar image of Hadrian to offer a new appraisal of this Emperor’s contradictory personality, his exploits and accomplishments, his rule, and his military role, against the backdrop of his twenty-one-year reign.
- Hardcover 2008
- A History of Private Life, Volume I, From Pagan Rome to Byzantium
- Series edited by Phillippe Ariès
- Series edited by Georges Duby
- Paul Veyne, Volume editor
- Translated by Arthur Goldhammer
- First of the widely celebrated and sumptuously illustrated series, this book reveals in intimate detail what life was really like in the ancient world.
- Hardcover 1987 / Paperback 1992
- The Inner Citadel
- Pierre Hadot
- Translated by Michael Chase
- Written by the Roman emperor for his own private guidance and self-admonition, the Meditations set forth principles for living a good and just life. Hadot probes Marcus Aurelius's guidelines and convictions and discerns the hitherto unperceived conceptual system that grounds them.
- Hardcover 1998 / Paperback 2001
- Italy and Its Invaders
- Girolamo Arnaldi
- Translated by Antony Shugaar
- From the earliest times, successive waves of foreign invaders have left their mark on Italy. Beginning with Germanic invasions that undermined the Roman Empire and culminating with the establishment of the modern nation, Girolamo Arnaldi explores the dynamic exchange between outsider and “native.”
- Hardcover 2005 / Paperback 2008
- Julian the Apostate
- G. W. Bowersock
- This portrayal of one of antiquity's most enigmatic figures offers a vivid and compact assessment of the Apostate's life and reign. Proceeding directly from an evaluation of the ancient sources--the testimony of friends and enemies of Julian as well as the writings of the emperor himself--the author traces Julian's youth, his years as the commander of the Roman forces in Gaul, and his emergence as sole ruler in the course of a dramatic march to Constantinople. In Bowersock's analysis of Julian's religious revolution, the emperor's ardent espousal of a lost cause is seen to have made intolerable demands upon pagans, Jews, and Christians alike.
- Hardcover 1978 / Paperback 1997
- The Making of a Christian Aristocracy
- Michele Renee Salzman
- What did it take to cause the Roman aristocracy to turn to Christianity, changing centuries-old beliefs and religious traditions? Salzman takes a fresh approach to this much-debated question. Focusing on a sampling of individual aristocratic men and women as well as on writings and archeological evidence, she brings new understanding to the process by which pagan aristocrats became Christian, and Christianity became aristocratic.
- Hardcover 2002 / Paperback 2004
- The Middle East under Rome
- Maurice Sartre
- Translated by Catherine Porter
- Translated by Elizabeth Rawlings
- Sartre has written a long overdue and comprehensive history of the Semitic Near East (modern Syria, Lebanon, Jordan, and Israel) from the eve of the Roman conquest to the end of the third century C.E. and the dramatic rise of Christianity. His broad yet finely detailed perspective takes in all aspects of this history, not just the political and military, but economic, social, cultural, and religious developments as well.
- Hardcover 2005 / Paperback 2007
- The Murder of Regilla
- Sarah B. Pomeroy
- Born to an illustrious Roman family in 125 BCE, Regilla was married at the age of fifteen to Herodes, a wealthy Roman. Twenty years later--and eight months pregnant with her sixth child--Regilla died under mysterious circumstances, after a blow to the abdomen delivered by Herodes's freedman. Though Herodes was charged, he was acquitted. Pomeroy's investigation suggests that despite Herodes's erection of numerous monuments to his deceased wife, he was in fact guilty of the crime.
- Hardcover 2007
- Nero
- Edward Champlin
- The Roman emperor Nero is remembered by history as the vain and immoral monster who fiddled while Rome burned. He murdered his younger brother and rival to the throne, probably at his mother's prompting. He then murdered his mother, with whom he may have slept. He ordered the spectacular punishment of Christians for the burning of Rome, many of whom were burned as human torches to light up his gardens at night. Edward Champlin reinterprets Nero's enormities on their own terms, as the self-conscious performances of an imperial actor with a formidable grasp of Roman history and mythology and a canny sense of his audience.
- Hardcover 2003 / Paperback 2005
- Restraining Rage
- William V. Harris
- The angry emotions, and the problems they presented, were an ancient Greek preoccupation from Homer to late antiquity. Drawing on a wide range of ancient texts, and on recent work in anthropology and psychology, Restraining Rage explains the rise and persistence of this concern. W. V. Harris shows that the discourse of anger-control was of crucial importance in several different spheres, in politics--both republican and monarchical--in the family, and in the slave economy.
- Hardcover 2002 / Paperback 2004
- Riding for Caesar
- Michael P. Speidel
- Written by one of the world's leading authorities on the Roman army, this history reveals the remarkable part the horse guard played in the fate of the Roman empire. Riding for Caesar follows the horsemen in political maneuvers and on the battlefield, from Caesar to Constantine. It offers a colorful picture of these horsemen in all their changing guises and duties--as the emperor's bodyguard or his parade troops, as a training school and officer's academy for the Roman army, or as a shock force in the endless wars of the second and third centuries.
- Hardcover 1994 / Paperback 1997
- The Roman Empire
- Colin Wells
- This sweeping history of the Roman Empire from 44 B.C. to A.D. 235 has three purposes: to describe what was happening in the central administration and in the entourage of the emperor; to indicate how life went on in Italy and the provinces, in the towns, in the countryside, and in the army camps; and to show how these two different worlds impinged on each other. Colin Wells's vivid account is now available in an up-to-date second edition.
- Paperback 1995
- The Roman Frontier in Central Jordan
- S. Thomas Parker
- Until the 1980s, the Roman frontier in modern Jordan was among the least studied of the empire's far-flung border regions. From 1980 until 1989, excavation focused on the late Roman legionary fortress of el-Lejjun as well as four smaller but contemporaneous forts. This report presents detailed results from the excavated forts, a broad range of material evidence from animal bones to bedouin burials, and provides a synthesis of the history of this frontier, which witnessed the first confrontation between the Byzantine Empire and the forces of Islam.
- Hardcover 2006
- The Roman Triumph
- Mary Beard
- A radical reexamination of the most extraordinary of ancient ceremonies, this book explores the magnificence of the Roman Triumph--but also its darker side. The Triumph, Beard contends, prompted the Romans to question as well as celebrate military glory. Her richly illustrated work is a testament to the profound importance of the triumph in Roman culture--and for monarchs, dynasts and generals ever since.
- Hardcover 2007
- Rome from the Ground Up
- James H. S. McGregor
- Rome is not one city but many, each with its own history unfolding from a different center. Beginning with the very shaping of the ground on which Rome first rose, this book conjures all these cities, past and present, conducting the reader through time and space to the complex and shifting realities--architectural, historical, political, and social--that constitute Rome.
- Hardcover 2005 / Paperback 2006
- Ruling the Later Roman Empire
- Christopher Kelly
- In this highly original work, Kelly paints a remarkable picture of running a superstate. He portrays a complex system of government openly regulated by networks of personal influence and the payment of money. Focusing on the Roman Empire after Constantine's conversion to Christianity, Kelly illuminates a period of increasingly centralized rule through an ever more extensive and intrusive bureaucracy.
- Hardcover 2004 / Paperback 2006
- Urban Religion in Roman Corinth
- Edited by Daniel Schowalter
- Edited by Steven J. Friesen
- This book discusses the history, topography, and urban development of Corinth with special attention to civic and private religious practices in the Roman colony. Expert analysis of the latest archaeological data is coupled with consideration of what can be known about the emergence and evolution of religions in Corinth. The volume seeks to gain insight into the nature of the Greco-Roman city visited by Paul, and the ways in which Christianity gradually emerged as the dominant religion.
- Paperback 2005 / Hardcover 2005