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152433 results in Classical Studies

Page 2 of 7622

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.

Virgilian Geopoetics
  • The Poetics and Politics of Space in the Aeneid
  • Alessandro Barchiesi
  • Coming soon
  • Expected online publication date:
    August 2026
    Print publication:
    31 August 2026
  • This is an exploration of how the spatial dimension of the Aeneid is enriched by history, memory, and prophecy. As the travel of Aeneas moves on through the Mediterranean, space is turning into place, and place is turning into a Romanized map of the world. Alessandro Barchiesi brings to bear on the poetry of Virgil issues that are central to historical studies, such as colonization, imperialism, exile, conquest, diaspora, ethnicity, and deportation. He clarifies a number of connections between space, geography, and historical memory, revealing the significance of landscapes and seascapes in the light of a poetics of empire. He further investigates the political significance of contact zones, the recurring role of cult and religion, and the function of intertextuality in the construction of space. The book encourages dialogue between ancient studies and ecocriticism and provides a case study of how poetry interacts with Roman ideologies of empire.

Plutarch: Selected Political Writings
  • Plutarch
  • Translated by Liz Sawyer
  • Edited by Rebecca Kingston
  • Coming soon
  • Expected online publication date:
    August 2026
    Print publication:
    31 August 2026
  • Bringing together new and accessible translations of texts from Plutarch's Lives and the Moralia, this volume demonstrates Plutarch's enduring importance in the history of political thought. The texts selected include the essays 'Beasts are Rational' and 'How to Profit from Enemies', which were taken up by key theorists including Hobbes and Rousseau, alongside full translations of lesser-known works including 'Life of Phocion', 'On Women's Courage' and 'Advice on the Conduct of Politics' which inspired numerous political actors and writers throughout Europe. With an introductory essay, explanatory notes on the translation and bibliography, the volume offers fresh insights for readers seeking an understanding of Plutarch's work and its continued influence and relevance for politics.

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.

Plot and Character in the Iliad
  • Reading the Hero's Mind
  • Luigi Battezzato
  • Coming soon
  • Expected online publication date:
    August 2026
    Print publication:
    31 August 2026
  • In this book, Luigi Battezzato argues that Homer's poem is a tightly woven narrative of motives, misreadings, and reversals. Bringing cognitive 'mind-reading' into dialogue with ancient scholia and close attention to the text, he shows how Achilles, Hector, and Zeus pursue honour and care – yet, through failures of communication, achieve the opposite. The book reframes Zeus's 'plan', the Embassy to Achilles, and Hector's fatal choices as examples of Aristotelian peripeteia, or reversal, grounded in human (and divine) fallibility rather than simple fate. Two chapters examine anger and gender, tracing how the poem stages women's constrained speech and how ancient critics policed it, while one of the appendices dismantles the modern myth of a Homeric 'heroic code'. Clear, compact, and argumentative, the book offers students, scholars, and curious readers a new way to follow the plot and to hear Homer's characters think. In order to ensure a wide readership, all Greek texts have been translated.

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.

Paul's Letter Openings
  • An Analysis of High-register Language
  • Gillian Asquith
  • Coming soon
  • Expected online publication date:
    August 2026
    Print publication:
    31 August 2026
  • Interest in the relationship between Paul's letter openings and Koine Greek letter-writing conventions has been steady for over a century, but little new data has emerged in recent years. In this study, Gillian Asquith offers a fresh perspective on Paul's epistolary practice by adopting a multidisciplinary method that synthesises sociolinguistics and lexicography. Comparing the language of Paul's letter openings with the register of language in documentary papyri, she demonstrates that high-register language in Koine Greek epistolary formulae contributes to warm and friendly relations between correspondents. Asquith argues that Paul creatively modifies epistolary norms by using unexpected, high-register language in the remembrance motif and litotic disclosure formula. Such usage, she posits, emphatically reassures Paul's recipients of his pastoral concern for them and heightens the persuasive force of his letters. Asquith's nuanced analysis contributes valuable new data to long-running debates around Paul's practice of prayer and the structure of his letters.

Aristotle on Justice
  • The Virtues of Citizenship and Constitutions
  • Thornton Lockwood
  • Coming soon
  • Expected online publication date:
    August 2026
    Print publication:
    30 June 2026
  • Aristotle's account of justice has inspired thinkers as diverse as Thomas Aquinas and Martha Nussbaum. Concepts such as distributive justice, equity, the common good, and the distinction between just and unjust political organizations find articulations in his writings. But although Aristotle's account of justice remains philosophically relevant, its intellectual, social, and political origins in the Mediterranean world of the fourth century BCE have often been overlooked. This book places Aristotle's account of justice in dialogue with his fourth-century intellectual colleagues such as Plato, Xenophon, and Isocrates, and allows it to be understood within the framework of fourth-century institutions as they were experienced by citizens of ancient Greek political communities. It thus provides the modern reader with the framework which Aristotle presupposed for his original work in antiquity, including the intellectual debates which formed its context.
Hegel, Dewey, Democracy

Hegel, Dewey, Democracy
  • Terry Pinkard
  • Coming soon
  • Expected online publication date:
    July 2026
    Print publication:
    31 July 2026
  • Hegel referred to Geist as 'self-conscious life' as a being which exists within a 'web' of sense it spins for itself both collectively and individually. As Geist collectively develops itself in history and in theory, it ties 'knots' in various parts of its web which then form the settled basis for further progress. John Dewey spoke of the fundamental 'deposits' laid down in history in the same way Hegel spoke of 'knots.' Both Hegel and Dewey thought that the kinds of obligations necessary in modern political life could only be actualized in terms of a larger conception of the good life individually and collectively led. However, Dewey argued that given the fact of democracy as a 'way of life' and not merely a form of government was the necessary replacement for Hegel's concept of Sittlichkeit (ethical life) as the living good in which the watchword is freedom.

The Afterlife of the Mausoleum of Halicarnassus
  • Re-conceiving an Ancient Wonder in Early Modern Europe
  • Edited by Desmond Bryan Kraege, Felix Martin
  • Coming soon
  • Expected online publication date:
    July 2026
    Print publication:
    31 July 2026
  • Few buildings have been as important to Western culture as the Mausoleum of Halicarnassus. One of the Seven Wonders of antiquity, it was destroyed during the Middle Ages, leading countless architects, antiquarians, painters and printmakers in Early Modern Europe to speculate upon its appearance. This book – the first on its subject – examines their works, from erudite publications to simple pen sketches, from elegant watercolours to complete buildings inspired by the monument. Spanning the period between the Italian Renaissance and the discovery and archaeological excavation of the Mausoleum's foundations in the 1850s, it covers the most important cultural contexts of Western Europe, without neglecting artworks from Peru, China and Japan. The monument's connexion with themes of widowhood and female political power are analysed, as are the manifold interactions between architecture, text and image in the afterlife of the Mausoleum. This title is also available as Open Access on Cambridge Core.
Animals and Society in the Iron Age to Persian Period

Animals and Society in the Iron Age to Persian Period
  • Economy, Culture and Environment
  • Lidar Sapir-Hen
  • Coming soon
  • Expected online publication date:
    July 2026
    Print publication:
    31 July 2026

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.
Slavery in Capitalism

Slavery in Capitalism
  • A Deep History
  • Tâmis Parron
  • Coming soon
  • Expected online publication date:
    July 2026
    Print publication:
    31 July 2026
  • The enslavement of Africans in the Americas profoundly shaped the continent's demography, cultures, languages, and legal systems, playing a decisive role in modern economic growth and the rise of industrial capitalism. Yet, its historical interpretation remains contested. One view sees modern slavery as beginning with the transatlantic slave trade, disconnecting it from earlier traditions in Europe, Africa, and Asia. Another claims slavery is a universal institution, unchanged across millennia. Moving beyond this dichotomy, the book offers a new framework for the study of Black slavery in the Americas. It situates slavery within a broader and older human geography: a world region of enslavement that dates back to the deep historical formation of the Mediterranean basin. By tracing the emergence of modern slavery from within this ancient system, the book sheds new light on its conditions of existence, collapse, and reconfiguration up to the present day.

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'.

Reading Linear B
  • Volume 1, An Introduction to the Writing System and Mycenaean Greek
  • Lisa Maria Bendall
  • Coming soon
  • Expected online publication date:
    July 2026
    Print publication:
    31 July 2026
  • This book, which draws on Lisa Bendall's lectures over three decades, provides an engaging and accessible survey of everything students need to know to read and understand texts in Linear B. As John Chadwick noted, the Linear B scholar must be 'not just an epigraphist, not just a linguist, not just an economic historian and archaeologist; ideally he or she…must be all these things simultaneously'. Volume 1 introduces the student to the writing system and the language, especially the phonology and morphology. It also explains the formal aspects of the documents and gives guidance on the tools available to the student and scholar. Volume 2 will provide a guide to using the documents to understand the Mycenaean world.

  • 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.

Page 2 of 7622