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24952 results in Ancient history

Page 1 of 1248

The Annals of Tacitus: Book 16
  • Edited by Salvador Bartera
  • Coming soon
  • Expected online publication date:
    January 2027
    Print publication:
    31 January 2027
  • This is the first scholarly commentary in English on Annals 16 in over a century. It offers a literary, historical and linguistic analysis of one of the most gripping books of the work, which includes, among other things, the narratives of Bassus' treasure trove, Poppaea's death, Petronius' suicide, and Thrasea Paetus' demise, at which point the text breaks off. The detailed commentary pays particular attention to Tacitus' narrative technique and idiosyncratic language, revealing his precise narrative strategy, which becomes evident when compared to the other sources of Nero's principate, such as Suetonius and Cassius Dio. The edition will be invaluable for scholars and postgraduate students who work on Tacitus, as well as those interested in early imperial historiography and history more broadly, especially of the Julio-Claudian period.

Divine and Human Agency in Ancient Greek Thought
  • Edited by Alexandre Johnston, Rebecca Van Hove
  • Coming soon
  • Expected online publication date:
    December 2026
    Print publication:
    31 December 2026
  • This book explores the ways in which divine and human agency interacted in ancient Greek thought. It offers new interpretations of a wide array of texts and sources, from Homeric epic, Aeschylean tragedy and Herodotus to Neoplatonist thought, emphasising the fascinating diversity, ambiguity and complexity of ancient Greek responses to divine intervention, and asking what these can tell us about how the Greeks related to their gods. At the same time, the volume charts the intellectual history of debates on divine and human agency, from ancient philosophy to twentieth-century scholarship. Most radically, it considers whether commonly used concepts such as 'double motivation' and 'over-determination' have outlived their purpose; and puts forward potential alternative approaches. By engaging with all these questions, the book yields novel insights into how the ancient Greeks responded to the idea of divine intervention, and, by extension, into how they experienced and interpreted the world around them.

The Stratēgoi of Classical Athens
  • Magistrates, Commanders, 'Shepherds of the People'
  • Davide Morassi
  • Coming soon
  • Expected online publication date:
    December 2026
    Print publication:
    31 December 2026
  • This book offers a broad-ranging study of the Athenian stratēgoi in the fifth and fourth centuries BCE, combining an institutional approach with close analysis of command in practice. The commanders' numerous responsibilities at every stage of a campaign, from mustering troops to managing finances, point to considerable autonomy and authority exercised within the often loose boundaries of mandates issued by the Assembly. The analysis of extra-legal authority is shown to be consistent with this interpretation: personal authority shaped how individual stratēgoi exercised power and helps explain discrepancies in independence, attitude, and performance. The result is a fresh perspective on the stratēgoi that rethinks established scholarly interpretations, including their progressive professionalisation, the significance of individual agency, and the role of unmet expectations in their accountability. The volume situates Athenian commanders within broader contemporary debates on military leadership and the widely recognised non-institutional dynamics that regulated public life in Athens.

Patterns of Tyranny in Ancient Greece
  • Marcaline J. Boyd
  • Coming soon
  • Expected online publication date:
    December 2026
    Print publication:
    31 December 2026
  • This book rethinks how we understand tyrannical rule in the ancient world. Challenging the conventional notion of tyranny as a uniform model of autocracy, it reveals a spectrum of tyrannical types – or patterns – based on language, behavior, and storytelling in Greek historians. Drawing on literary, archaeological, and epigraphic evidence, it employs a historical-anthropological approach to show how Greek authors constructed and debated the image of the tyrant. Ranging from the Archaic to the Hellenistic period and from mainland Greece and Asia Minor to the Black Sea region, North Africa, and southern Italy and Sicily, Marcaline Boyd situates these portrayals in their wider historiographic and historical contexts. She highlights how tyranny intersected with political authority, legitimacy, and moral order. The book illuminates the diversity, instability, and narrative construction of tyrannical power, offering fresh insight into the complexity of Greek political history and thought.

Greeting the Roman Emperor
  • Rituals of Power from Augustus to Late Antiquity
  • Mads Ortving Lindholmer
  • Coming soon
  • Expected online publication date:
    December 2026
    Print publication:
    30 November 2026
  • This is the first comprehensive study of the imperial admission, a daily ritual in which the elite greeted the emperor. It covers the period from Augustus to the fifth century and thus breaks down traditional periodisation in order to explore the admission in the longue durée. Mads Ortving Lindholmer reconstructs the details and development of this ritual and adopts an anthropological approach to reveal its centrality to the construction and performance of imperial power and legitimacy as well as to elite hierarchy. He also explores how a variety of writers challenged or supported the self-presentation of the emperor in the admission by creating literary representations of this ritual. Overall, the book provides new insights into the daily workings of imperial power and sheds new light on the long-term development of the Roman Empire.

Thucydides' Search for the Truth
  • On Politics, Human Nature, and Religion
  • Peter J. Ahrensdorf
  • Coming soon
  • Expected online publication date:
    November 2026
    Print publication:
    30 November 2026
  • Thucydides' book on the war between the Peloponnesians and the Athenians has generally been considered a historical chronicle. By contrast, Peter Ahrensdorf here makes the case that it is better understood as a work of philosophy, inasmuch as it seeks to understand the permanent truth about human nature. Thucydides, he argues, focuses on this particular war because of its theoretical significance. It presents a clash, not only between military powers, but between two theoretical outlooks – Periclean Athenians' progressive and humanistic understanding of the fundamental character and condition of human beings, and the Spartans' traditional and religious understanding. Ahrensdorf leads us through Thucydides' examination of the case for and against both Athens and Sparta and shows how Thucydides ultimately offers for our consideration an account of himself as an individual who -- unlike outstanding characters as such Alcibiades, the Athenian ambassadors at Sparta and Melos, Diodotus, and Pericles – ascends to a truly independent and genuinely philosophic understanding of the human condition.

Medicine and Empire in the Roman World
  • Rebecca Flemming
  • Coming soon
  • Expected online publication date:
    November 2026
    Print publication:
    30 November 2026
  • This book explores relations between medicine and empire in the Roman world. It charts Rome's accumulation of medical resources in the Republic, bound up with the acquisition of territory and power, and then reveals the redistribution of those resources as part of the larger project of imperial consolidation after Augustus. It demonstrates the ways in which medicine – ideas and practices around health, disease and healing – supported the Roman imperial enterprise. From the medical care of large enslaved workforces and Roman armies to the hierarchies of medical practitioners in communities across the empire and the ordering of health and bodies. Rome was the medical and political capital of the Mediterranean. It was also the disease capital, and the integration of imperial territory by the second century CE not only established a unified (but not uniform) medical culture but also helped the spread of disease, culminating in the Antonine Plague.

Geography in the Hellenistic Courts
  • Propaganda, Parrhesia, and Bending Space
  • Joshua David McDermott
  • Coming soon
  • Expected online publication date:
    November 2026
    Print publication:
    30 November 2026
  • The Hellenistic kings following Alexander the Great harboured imperial ambitions to rule the entire known world. While such pretensions were unrealised on the ground, the distortions of court geographers could depict these hyperbolic claims to universal empire. However, not all geographers were uncritical ciphers. Leveraging their status as royal philoi (friends), certain scholars utilised scientific tools to speak truth to power (parrhesia), their maps placing sobering limits on the flattering propaganda of the court. By applying modern geographical tools to ancient texts, this book reveals how court geography functioned as an integral part of contested discourse. While some produced imperial propaganda, others under the Ptolemies and Seleukids used maps to place limits on their kings' reach. In a culture wary of sycophants' honeyed words, science provided an antidote to unrestrained propaganda. This study offers vital insights into how scholars can challenge the excesses of authoritarian regimes.

Lawgiving in the Ancient Near East
  • Dylan R. Johnson
  • Coming soon
  • Expected online publication date:
    October 2026
    Print publication:
    30 September 2026
  • Lawgiving in the Ancient Near East offers a comprehensive study on the enactment of law from the mid-third to mid-first millennium BCE. Unlike the biblical tradition, whereby all law emanates from Israel's divine sovereign, ancient Near Eastern kings were the most common agents to assume the moniker of 'lawgiver'. Their unrivaled access to the higher moral order of justice granted them a 'functional divinity' in the eyes of their subjects. Considering key theories about the origin, nature, and function of law, Dylan Johnson analyzes the world's earliest legal collections, not as isolated objects, but within the context of the legal regimes from which they emerge. His study offers new insights into the prevailing regimes and royal and elite justice as reflected in these collections. Questioning the assumption that lawgiving was a coercive attempt to monopolize legal authority, Johnson also develops new explanations that reveal the subjects of the law as social agents who helped construct and maintain legal power.

Language and Civil Conflict in the Greco-Roman Tradition
  • Daniel Sutton
  • Coming soon
  • Expected online publication date:
    August 2026
    Print publication:
    31 August 2026
  • Offering new readings on language and civil conflict in a variety of Ancient Greek and Roman texts, this study puts these reflections from the classical world in dialogue with contemporary philosophy and political theory. Daniel Sutton focuses on Thucydides, Plato, Sallust, and Tacitus, exploring the ways in which the figure of paradiastole (often termed 'rhetorical redescription') was deployed to explain the conflicts of value which underpinned civil strife. These texts paint vivid pictures of what happens to language during civil discord: pictures which seem increasingly familiar today. Simultaneously, they grapple deeply with what it means to search for timeless values in times of conflict. This study demonstrates how ancient texts can offer us new ways of understanding the role of language in civil discord, of restoring political dialogue in fractious times, and of approaching intellectual history itself.

Beyond Magic in the Roman World
  • Reconstructing Cultural Alterity and Ritual Deviance
  • Andrew Durdin
  • Coming soon
  • Expected online publication date:
    August 2026
    Print publication:
    31 August 2026
  • Beyond Magic in the Roman World reconsiders how Romans understood ritual, deviance, and alterity by moving past the modern category of 'magic.' Instead of treating magic as a single system, Andrew Durdin reveals how Roman authors used labels of ritual deviance to negotiate cultural diversity, social tension, and political authority. Drawing on texts from the late Roman Republic through the Principate, and written by Cicero, Lucan, Pliny, Tacitus, and Apuleius, he offers clear, engaging explanations as to how Romans classified the unfamiliar. The result is a vivid portrait of a society using language, accusation, and imagination to make sense of an expanding world. Durdin's book equips readers with the tools to recognize how scholarly categories – especially 'magic' – carry colonial and imperial legacies that shape interpretation. Accessible and compelling, his study will appeal to readers of Roman history, ancient religion, and anyone curious about how cultures create – and contest – categories of difference.

The Social Networks of Early Medieval Trading Emporia
  • Harbouring Strangers in a Viking World
  • Søren Michael Sindbæk
  • Coming soon
  • Expected online publication date:
    August 2026
    Print publication:
    31 August 2026
  • Trading emporia emerged in Northern Europe in the Early Middle Ages and were the first coin-based markets and urban settlements in this region. In this study, Søren Michael Sindbæk proposes a new account of the origins of these trading centres by tracing their role in hosting strangers. Sindbæk proposes that 'weak' social ties are a widely overlooked middle ground in pre-modern societies that bridge the gap between 'strong' family ties and formal institutions. By adapting cultural norms, networks, and institutions, it was possible to combine a high level of trust within an open form of society. Emporia developed when the ancient conventions of hosting and guest-friendship became insufficient to accommodate the growing connections between peoples brought together through seafaring. Sindbæk demonstrates that the history of emporia is closely linked to the expansion of maritime trade, colonization, piracy, and warfare – the basis for what we know today as the Viking Age.

Legal Curses and Politics in Archaic and Classical Sicily
  • Sofia Bianchi Mancini
  • Coming soon
  • Expected online publication date:
    August 2026
    Print publication:
    31 August 2026
  • Sicilian curse practices have often been misread through Athenocentric paradigms. This book repositions Sicily at the centre of inquiry, offering the first holistic analysis of legal curse tablets (defixiones iudiciariae) from the sixth to the fourth centuries BCE, with particular focus on Selinous, Akragas and Kamarina. Moving beyond isolated textual readings, it situates these inscriptions within the legal, social and political environments that shaped their production. The study provides new editions and drawings of key tablets – revisited after decades of neglect – while addressing palaeographic, chronological and editorial issues. For the first time, it also assembles a complete set of images of all major examples, making them fully accessible. By embedding curses within civic life and predominantly elite rivalries, it reveals them as 'paralegal' instruments in the renegotiation of status, authority and power. Sicilian legal curses thus emerge as independent from, rather than appendices to, their better-known Attic and Athenian counterparts.

The Mediterranean in Antiquity
  • New Perspectives from Prehistory to the Byzantine Period
  • Edited by Rubina Raja
  • Coming soon
  • Expected online publication date:
    August 2026
    Print publication:
    31 August 2026
  • This is a cross-disciplinary study of the Mediterranean, which combines archaeology, historiography, ecology, climate, globalization, and network theories. It situates the Mediterranean both within and beyond traditional area studies, promoting broader, comparative, and cross-disciplinary approaches to antiquity. Its nine contributions, written by internationally recognized scholars within their respective study areas, challenge existing frameworks and encourage scholars to rethink how the Mediterranean is conceptualized, drawing on renewed concepts and diverse evidence. The studies guide the reader to desert environments such as the Sahara, Egypt, Palmyra, and Greece, while exploring topics including urban religion, mythology, social complexity, and iconography.

Appropriation and Religion in the Greek and Roman Worlds
  • Edited by Andreas Bendlin, Jitse H. F. Dijkstra
  • Coming soon
  • Expected online publication date:
    July 2026
    Print publication:
    31 July 2026
  • Appropriation, 'making something one's own', is a modern way of thinking about social practices. This volume highlights the potential of this critical concept for the investigation of everyday religious practice – and more generally, everyday social practice – in Antiquity. Appropriation foregrounds the agency of the social actors against the strictures imposed by the dominant culture's social order, whose ideas and practices they make their own, altering them in multiple, often subtle ways. How does appropriation transform pre-existing, traditional practices? What are the dominant structures against which the actors operate? Which tactics do they use? These are only some of the questions this volume seeks to address. The critical term 'appropriation' has yet to be fully discovered by classicists; the case studies in this volume, ranging from classical Greece to Late Antique Egypt, endeavour to demonstrate its pertinence to the study of religion in Antiquity.

Japan and Ancient Greece
  • Culture and Possession
  • Michael Lucken
  • Translated by Malcolm DeBevoise
  • Edited by Phillip Mitsis
  • Coming soon
  • Expected online publication date:
    July 2026
    Print publication:
    31 July 2026
  • Japan and ancient Greece. Placed side by side, these two concepts give the impression of something very strange, a sort of chimera - half Apollo, half samurai; half Venus, half geisha - set on a ground that is at once white and blue like the Cyclades, dark green and vermillion like Shintō shrines. How could two countries so distant from each other be joined together to form a coherent image, to give birth to a meaningful concept? In this groundbreaking study - translated into English for the first time - Michael Lucken analyses the manifold ways in which Japan has adopted and engaged with ancient Greece in the period from the Meiji restoration to the present. This invaluable and timely volume not only demonstrates that the influence of ancient Greece has permeated all aspects of Japanese public and cultural life, but ultimately illustrates that the reception of Classics is a global phenomenon.

The Archaic and Early Classical Greek World
  • Using Coins as Sources
  • Keith Rutter
  • Coming soon
  • Expected online publication date:
    July 2026
    Print publication:
    31 July 2026
  • The western tradition of coinage began in Asia Minor around 650 BCE and from there the idea spread quite rapidly to other parts of the Mediterranean. This book describes and evaluates developments in coinage down to the middle of the fifth century. Early coinage was not monolithic. The new medium of exchange proved attractive to a variety of rulers and societies – kings, dynasts, tribes, city–states with varying forms of governance. The physical characteristics of the coins produced were another source of difference. Initially there was no fixed idea of what a coin should look like, and there were several experiments before a consensus emerged around a small, circular metal object with a design, or type, on both sides. This book provides students with an authoritative introduction, with all technical terms and methodologies explained, as well as illustrations of over 200 important coins with detailed captions.

The Topography and Monuments of Ancient Rome
  • C. Brian Rose
  • Coming soon
  • Expected online publication date:
    July 2026
    Print publication:
    30 June 2026
  • Tracing the development of Rome over a span of 1200 years, The Topography and Monuments of Ancient Rome offers an overview of the changing appearance of the city and the social, political, and military factors that shaped it. C. Brian Rose places Rome's architecture, coinage, inscriptions and monuments in historical context and offers a nuanced analysis regarding the evolution of the city and its monuments over time. He brings an interdisciplinary approach to his study, merging insights gained from cutting-edge techniques in archaeological research, such as remote sensing, core-sampling, palaeobotany, neutron-activation analysis, and isotopic analysis, with literary, epigraphic, and numismatic evidence. Rose also includes reconstructions of the ancient city that reflect the rapid developments in digital technology and mapping in the last three decades.  Aimed at scholars and students alike, Rose's study demonstrates how evidence can be drawn from a variety of approaches. It serves as a model for studying and viewing the growth and structure of ancient cities.

  • Chapter 7 - Inequality, Property, and Stratification

  • Edited by Kenneth Hirth, Pennsylvania State University, Timothy Earle, Northwestern University, Illinois
  • Book:
    Premodern Economies
    Published online:
    22 January 2026
    Print publication:
    30 June 2026, pp 153-179

  • Summary

    As economies become more complicated with increasing interdependence tied to exchange and specialization, inequality appears as an outcome of dispersed versus concentrated flows and accumulations of value that affect differences in well-being, power, and institutional formations. We look at the complicated institutional arrangements that favor or limit inequality, perhaps the most important of which is the development of institutional property and how it allowed control over production and distribution. The theoretical and empirical breadth of inequality is vast. For this comparative effort, we formulate an approach that can analyze inequalities in wealth and property from widely different social formations, including the segmentary societies of Pare, Tanzania, and Zuni in the American Southwest, chiefdoms in the Scandinavian Bronze Age (BA), and advanced states and empires such as Rome and the Inca. Within this broad spectrum, differences in the control of wealth, prestige, ranking and/or ascribed rank are intertwined but not necessarily overlapping. Our approach focusses on how access to and control over material wealth is distributed in our sample.

  • Chapter 8 - Commerce and the Marketplace

  • Edited by Kenneth Hirth, Pennsylvania State University, Timothy Earle, Northwestern University, Illinois
  • Book:
    Premodern Economies
    Published online:
    22 January 2026
    Print publication:
    30 June 2026, pp 180-202

  • Summary

    The development of commerce and integrated market exchange is perhaps one of the most dramatic factors determining the nature and evolution of human economies. Among other things, these developments become closely linked to urban communities and other central places as points to assemble and distribute labor and goods. These places, when they developed as part of the broader process of commercialization, were transformative, increasing the ease of day-by-day interactions, specialization, and freedom of movement.

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