Carl Newell Jackson Lectures

The foremost historian of Greek religion providers the first comprehensive, comparative study of a little-known aspect of ancient religious beliefs and practices.

Peter Brown presents a masterly history of Roman society in the second, third, and fourth centuries. Brown interprets the changes in social patterns and religious thought, breaking away from conventional modern images of the period.

Momigliano traces the growth of ancient biography from the fifth century to the first century B.C. By clarifying the implications of the fact that the Greeks kept biography and autobiography distinct from historiography, he contributes to an understanding of a basic dichotomy in the Western tradition of historical writing.

From Augustus to Constantine, the Roman Empire in the Near East expanded step by step, southward to the Red Sea and eastward across the Euphrates to the Tigris. In a remarkable work of interpretive history, Fergus Millar shows us this world as it was forged into the Roman provinces of Judea, Arabia, Mesopotamia, and Syria.

Peter Dronke illuminates a unique literary tradition: the narrative that mixes prose with verse. Highlighting a wide range of texts, he defines and explores the creative ways in which mixed forms were used in Europe from antiquity through the thirteenth century.

Fusing high scholarship with high drama, Grafton and Weinberg uncover a secret and extraordinary aspect of legendary Renaissance scholar Isaac Casaubon’s already celebrated achievement.

The earliest philosophers thought deeply about ethical questions, but Aristotle founded ethics as a well-defined discipline. Brad Inwood focuses on the reception of Aristotelian ethical thought in the Hellenistic and Roman worlds and explores the thinker’s influence on the philosophers who followed in his footsteps from 300 BCE to 200 CE.

The eastern Roman Empire was the largest state in western Eurasia in the sixth century. A century later, it was a fraction of its former size. Ravaged by warfare and disease, the empire seemed destined to collapse. Yet it did not die. John Haldon elucidates the factors that allowed the empire to survive against all odds into the eighth century.