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1101 results in Ancient history

Page 1 of 56

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.

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:
    September 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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Locality and Agency in the Iron Age Mediterranean
  • Edited by Erich Kistler, Christian Heitz, Birgit Öhlinger, Peter Van Dommelen
  • Coming soon
  • Expected online publication date:
    July 2026
    Print publication:
    31 July 2026
  • Against the background of the interest in ancient Mediterranean connectivity and globalization, the present volume examines local places and local communities. Exploring the interplay between the local and the global, the focus shifts from long-distance connections and 'global' trends to the local dimensions of Mediterranean interactions, highlighting how local contexts engaged with their long-distance counterparts. Given the transformative nature of this period and region, our focus is firmly on the western Mediterranean during the first half of the first millennium BCE. Discussions of the local places and local communities of the Iron Age West Mediterranean are wrapped around the twin notions of agency and locality. We argue that everyday local agency produces locality in an ongoing dialectic, ranging from collaboration to struggle, with globalizing influences and colonial forces. The eighteen West Mediterranean case studies are organized around the themes of 'Indigeneity and locality', 'agency and empowerment' and 'practice and production'.

The Topography and Monuments of Ancient Rome
  • C. Brian Rose
  • Coming soon
  • Expected online publication date:
    June 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.

What is Religion?
  • European Thought from Antiquity to the Present
  • Philippe Borgeaud
  • Preface by Guy Stroumsa
  • Translated by Aaron Kachuck
  • Coming soon
  • Expected online publication date:
    June 2026
    Print publication:
    30 June 2026
  • How should we explain differences in religious belief and practice? Philippe Borgeaud's ambitious intellectual history tells the story of how reflection on religious phenomena emerged, throughout the centuries, in European consciousness and scholarship. Christianity in particular, as Borgeaud shows, long wrestled with how to understand polytheistic cultures versus its own belief in a single omnipotent God. The Church Fathers, the author argues, sought to inherit the core of Graeco-Roman culture while rejecting its deities and religious practices; and patristic ideas were later adopted when Europeans travelling and colonising the world encountered ever more varied polytheistic traditions. At times detached, at times enchanted, these travellers' reflections provided the basis for the modern study of 'religions', and have since conditioned the mindset of anyone brought up in a European culture. The book concludes by arguing for the importance of liberation from these assumptions and instead considering religion as a form of 'play'.

Roman Rural Archaeology
  • Society, Economy, and Culture
  • Edited by Gijs Willem Tol, Astrid Van Oyen
  • Coming soon
  • Expected online publication date:
    June 2026
    Print publication:
    25 June 2026
  • The Roman world was a rural world. Most of the Roman population lived in the countryside and had their immediate rural surroundings as their social and economic frame of reference. For much of the Roman period, rural property provided the basis for political power and urban development, and it was in rural areas that the agricultural crops that sustained an expanding empire were grown and many of the most important Roman industries were situated. Rural areas witnessed the presence of some of the most durable symbols of Roman imperial hegemony, such as aqueducts and paved roads. It was mainly here that native and Roman traditions collided and were negotiated. This volume, containing 30 chapters by leading scholars, leverages recent methodological advancements and new interpretative frameworks to provide a holistic view, with an empire-wide reach, of the importance of Roman rural areas in the success of ancient Rome.

The Cambridge History of International Law
  • Volume 4, International Law in the Middle East and the Mediterranean during Antiquity
  • General editor Randall Lesaffer
  • Edited by Jesper Eidem, Jacob Giltaij, Kaius Tuori
  • Coming soon
  • Expected online publication date:
    May 2026
    Print publication:
    31 May 2026
  • Volume IV of The Cambridge History of International Law explores the existence and scope of international law in Antiquity, spanning approximately 1800 BCE to 650 CE. During this period, the territories surrounding the Mediterranean engaged in various forms of cross-border interaction, from trade wars to diplomacy; this traffic was regulated through a patchwork of laws, regulations and treaties. However, the existence of international law as a coherent concept in Antiquity remains contested. We can speak only about 'territories', which include empires, tribal lands and cities, not about 'countries' or 'nations' in the modern sense. Rather than offering an overview of legal relations between territories surrounding the Mediterranean in Antiquity, this volume presents a set of case studies centred around various topics commonly associated with the modern idea of international law. Together, these studies result in a novel but accessible perspective on the (in)existence of international law in Antiquity.

Diodoros of Sicily: Bibliotheke Historike
  • Translation, with Introduction and Notes
  • Volume 2, Books 16-17: The Rise of Macedon under Philip II and the Conquests of Alexander III (the Great)
  • Edited and translated by Phillip Harding
  • Coming soon
  • Expected online publication date:
    May 2026
    Print publication:
    07 May 2026
  • Diodoros of Sicily (c.90–c.30 BC) spent thirty years producing an encyclopedic compendium of world history from its mythical beginnings to his own day. His is the only surviving, connected account of Greek affairs from 480/79 to 302/1. The books translated in this volume offer the best account of the career of Philip II of Macedon, his conquest of Greece and his assassination, as well as the earliest extant history of the career of Alexander the Great. Book 16 is also the main source for the Persian re-conquest of Egypt by Artaxerxes III (Okhos), the seizure of Delphi by the Phokians in the Third Sacred War, and Athens' defeat by a coalition of her allies in the Social War. The translation is supported by extensive notes, and the Introduction examines Diodoros' moral and educational purpose in writing, the plan of his work, his sources, and his qualities as a historian.

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