To save content items to your account,
please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies.
If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account.
Find out more about saving content to .
To save content items to your Kindle, first ensure no-reply@cambridge.org
is added to your Approved Personal Document E-mail List under your Personal Document Settings
on the Manage Your Content and Devices page of your Amazon account. Then enter the ‘name’ part
of your Kindle email address below.
Find out more about saving to your Kindle.
Note you can select to save to either the @free.kindle.com or @kindle.com variations.
‘@free.kindle.com’ emails are free but can only be saved to your device when it is connected to wi-fi.
‘@kindle.com’ emails can be delivered even when you are not connected to wi-fi, but note that service fees apply.
Hipparchus was the most important astronomer of the ancient Greek world. This volume provides a comprehensive introduction to almost everything that can be known or reasonably surmised about his life and work. Hipparchus was the first to apply an effective geometric model to the cosmos, which enabled him to predict the positions of the Sun, Moon and stars more reliably than before. He was also the first to catalogue most of the stars that were visible in the northern hemisphere, giving a detailed account of their risings, settings and culminations. His most important discovery was the long-term movement of the sky, known as precession. Crucially, this study provides a translation and analysis of Hipparchus' only surviving work, the Commentary on the Phenomena of Aratus and Eudoxus, and reconstructs his catalogue of the stars, which has not survived, using a modern precession model.
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.
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 period of the Persian Wars, ending in 479. 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.
Roman law is justly famous, but what was its relationship to governing an empire? In this book, Ari Z. Bryen argues that law, as the learned practice that we know today, emerged from the challenge of governing a diverse and fractious set of imperial subjects. Through analysis of these subjects' political and legal ideologies, Bryen reveals how law became the central topic of political contest in the Roman Empire. Law offered a means of testing legitimacy and evaluating government, as well as a language for asking fundamental political questions. But these political claims did not go unchallenged. Elites resisted them, and jurists, in collaboration with emperors, reimagined law as a system that excluded the voices of the governed. The result was to separate, for the first time, 'law' from 'society' more broadly, and to define law as a primarily literate and learned practice, rather than the stuff of everyday life.
Latin poetry is defined by its relationships with poetry in other languages. It was originally constituted by its relation to Greek, and in later times has been constituted by its relation to the European vernaculars. In this bold and innovative book, distinguished Latinist Stephen Hinds explores these relationships through a series of vignettes. These explore ancient conversations between Latin and Greek verse texts, followed by modern (especially early modern) conversations between Latin and European vernacular verse texts, reflecting the linked stories of reception that make up the so-called 'classical tradition': conversations across language, across period, and sometimes both at the same time. The book's range is expansive, ranging from Homer through Virgil and the Augustans to late antiquity, the Renaissance, Romanticism and on to Seamus Heaney. There is an especial focus on the parallel vernacular and Latin output of Milton and Marvell in England and Du Bellay in France.
Naming new discoveries is central to science, and for centuries, Latin dominated this process. The resulting terminology still shapes modern science, yet the influences behind its creation have remained largely unexplored. This is the first comprehensive exploration of how modern scientific terminology took shape during the early modern period. Far from being the product of individual scientists or institutions, the development of this terminology emerged over several centuries, involving a remarkably diverse range of contributors. In particular, the process was often influenced by factors unrelated to science itself – such as the appeal of certain linguistic forms or even sheer coincidence – revealing the unexpected and sometimes arbitrary forces behind the creation of technical terms.
Rome's calendar often falls into the background in studies of republican political, legal, and religious practices. Its relationship to celestial phenomena is usually unexamined and modernizing assumptions are made about its regularity of operations and the advantages of Caesar's reform. In this book, Daniel Gargola clarifies its relationship to celestial phenomena and reveals the extent to which celestial references permeated public cult; he also demonstrates that the competent authorities often intervened in its operations in order to accommodate other concerns. The calendar also provided the temporal framework for the regulation of public and cultic activities and thus had a central role in Roman law. Roman writers attempted to bring clarity to the norms involving the calendar, and their efforts have often influenced modern attempts to study it. Nevertheless, the complexity of public and cultic life undermined these attempts and Romans always had to navigate between competing norms.
This book is about the power of story-telling and the place of myth in the cultural memory of ancient Mesopotamia. Rather than reducing mythology to an archaic state of the mind, this study redefines myth as a system of knowledge (episteme) and part of cognitive and cultural experience serving as an explanatory system. It demonstrates how among the multiple ways of world-making (Nelson Goodman) myth not only reflects experiences and reality but also constitutes reality in text and image alike. Drawing on cognitive semiotics, visual studies, and cognitive narratology, it explores the power of the image in showing and revealing something that is absent (deixis). Thus, it demonstrates the contribution of the image to knowledge production. The book calls for re-introducing meaning when dealing with the imagery and iconology of ancient Mesopotamia and introduces an innovative approach to the art history of the ancient Near East.
Athena's Sisters transforms our understanding of Classical Athenian culture and society by approaching its institutions—kinship, slavery, the economy, social organisation—from women's perspectives. It argues that texts on dedications and tombstones set up by women were frequently authored by those women. This significant body of women's writing offers direct insights into their experiences, values, and emotions. With men often absent, women redefined the boundaries of the family in dialogue with patriarchal legal frameworks. Beyond male social and political structures, women defined their identities and relationships through their own institutions. By focusing on women's engagement with other women, rather than their relationships to men, this timely and necessary book reveals the richness and dynamism of women's lives and their remarkable capacity to shape Athenian society and history.
Many think that reality is structured such that some beings are more fundamental than others and characterize this structure in terms of 'grounding.' Grounding is typically regarded as explanatory and as exhibiting certain order-theoretic properties: asymmetry, irreflexivity, and transitivity. Aristotle's notion of ontological priority, which inspired discussions of grounding, also has these features. This Element clarifies Aristotle's discussions of ontological priority, explores how it relates to other kinds of priority, and identifies important connections to metaphysical grounding. Aristotle provides numerous examples that appear to impugn ontological priority's order-theoretic coherence. This is Aristotle's “Priority Problem.” But Aristotle has an independently motivated solution that eliminates the threat from each of the apparently problematic examples and explains why such examples are ubiquitous. The author argues that a ground-theoretic analog of Aristotle's solution to the Priority Problem addresses recent challenges to grounding.
The reign of Constantine, Roman emperor from 306 to 337, was one of the most important periods in world history. Although literary texts often represented him as the first Christian emperor, the inscriptions engraved on monuments, statue bases, and milestones offer alternative perspectives. Inscriptions highlight the influence of the other emperors, the prominence of senators at Rome, the civic traditions for praising benefactors in provincial cities, the logistics of the economy, and the abiding importance of traditional cults. This book includes the Greek and Latin texts of over 800 inscriptions from the early fourth century, with translations and critical annotations. An extended Introduction and almost 200 short essays provide context by explaining the issues and problems, correlating the literary texts, and comparing the legends and images of coins. Without the emperor as the constant focus, the Age of Constantine becomes all the more fascinating.
Previous studies of Greek oracles have largely studied their social and political connections. In contrast, this pioneering volume explores the experience of visiting the oracle of Zeus at Dodona in NW Greece, focusing on the role of the senses and embodied cognition. Building on the unique corpus of oracular question tablets found at the site, it investigates how this experience made new ways of knowing and new forms of knowledge available. Combining traditional treatments of evidence with more recent theoretical approaches, including from psychology, narratology and environmental humanities, the chapters explore the role of nature, sound, touch, and stories in the experience of consultation. By evoking the details of this experience, they help the reader understand more deeply what it was like for ancient men and women to visit the oracle and ask the god for help. This title is also available as open access on Cambridge Core.
The Athenians invented democracy – and as they grappled with the implications, they also invented democratic political theory. By reconstruing Protagoras the sophist, Thucydides the historian, and Democritus the cosmologist in the context of political developments and contemporary scientific, literary, and philosophical works, Cynthia Farrar's seminal study reveals the emergence of a distinctive and still cogent understanding of democratic order. All three thinkers wrestled with democracy's insistence on separating political from social identity and status. Unlike Plato and Aristotle, they constructed democratic theories that were genuinely democratic: addressed to citizens, and inviting them to interpret what their own and collective well-being demands in the world as it is. In a new introduction, Farrar makes the case for the continued relevance of the ideas explored in this book by recounting her own attempts to adapt Athenian structures of democratic citizenship and to reinterpret their democratic theory for the modern world.
What is wrong with disobedience? What makes an act of disobedience civil or uncivil? Under what conditions can an act of civil or uncivil disobedience be justified? Can a liberal democratic regime tolerate (un)civil disobedience? This Element book presents the main answers that philosophers and activist-thinkers have offered to these questions. It is organized in 3 parts: Part I presents the main philosophical accounts of civil disobedience that liberal political philosophers and democratic theorists have developed and then conceptualizes uncivil disobedience. Part II examines the origins of disobedience in the praxis of activist-thinkers: Henry David Thoreau on civil resistance, anarchists on direct action, and Mohandas Gandhi and Martin Luther King Jr. on nonviolence. Part III takes up the question of violence in defensive action, the requirement that disobedients accept legal sanctions, and the question of whether uncivil disobedience is counterproductive and undermines civic bonds.
Pat Easterling's articles are fundamental to her status as one of the most influential Hellenists of her generation. Characterised by unostentatious astuteness and an arresting capacity for observation, they put forward tersely considered arguments that have the weight of much longer discussions. Exacting attention to language and detail combines with clear-sighted openness to new developments within and beyond the discipline to allow the texts to speak in deeply human terms. This collection gathers significant articles from all stages of Easterling's career, many of them major points of reference. Volume 1 is devoted to Greek tragedy, and represents in particular her great affinity for Sophocles. Volume 2 presents work on other Greek literature, acting, transmission, scholia, reception, history of scholarship. Reflecting Easterling's extensive academic ties, several of the articles were originally published in less well-known volumes and are here made more widely available.
Pat Easterling's articles are fundamental to her status as one of the most influential Hellenists of her generation. Characterised by unostentatious astuteness and an arresting capacity for observation, they put forward tersely considered arguments that have the weight of much longer discussions. Exacting attention to language and detail combines with clear-sighted openness to new developments within and beyond the discipline to allow the texts to speak in deeply human terms. This collection gathers significant articles from all stages of Easterling's career, many of them major points of reference. Volume 1 is devoted to Greek tragedy, and represents in particular her great affinity for Sophocles. Volume 2 presents work on other Greek literature, acting, transmission, scholia, reception, history of scholarship. Reflecting Easterling's extensive academic ties, several of the articles were originally published in less well-known volumes and are here made more widely available.
Economies are fundamental to all human societies by providing the material support for their populations and respective social institutions. This volume brings together scholars from archaeology, anthropology, and history in a collaborative examination of how premodern societies produced and mobilized resources to support social, political, and religious institutions. Thirteen societies from horticultural/pastoral groups to expansionistic states are used to develop a truly comparative view of economic development. Topics discussed include the nature of productive self-sufficiency, forms of economic specialization, the economics of labor and resource mobilization, economic inequality and stratification, commerce and the marketplace, and urban and ritual economies. The book's collective discussions have led to the construction of five generalizations and eighteen specific hypotheses about the way that ancient and premodern societies navigated the material worlds in which they lived. These hypotheses will serve as a basis for scholars exploring how societies in other times and places navigated their economic landscapes.
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.
This textbook offers students who have no prior background in biblical studies an understanding of the lasting contribution of Israel's scriptures. Bringing a literary approach to the topic, it strikes a balance between historical reconstructions, comparative religions, and theology. Among several distinctive features, It traces the legacy of monotheism first emerging in the pages of Israel's scriptures as an enduring contribution for twenty-first century readers. Monotheism gives the volume an immediate relevance because the so-called Abrahamic religions are rooted in this concept. Whether one is Jewish, Christian, Muslim, or secularist, students will gain a new understanding of the origins of monotheism as their common heritage. The Second Edition of this textbook includes expanded discussions within the text and in sidebars, notably on the history of biblical scholarship, modern methods of interpretation, and wisdom literature.