Books in the Ancients and Moderns series

Ancient Greece is famous as the civilization which 'gave' the world democracy. Democracy has in modern times become the rallying cry of liberation from supposed totalitarianism and dictatorship. This title shows that much can be learned about the practice of politics from a comparative discussion of the classical and the contemporary politics.

Slaves are associated not just with the Colosseum of ancient Rome but also with Californian labour factories and south Asian sweatshops, while young women and children appear increasingly vulnerable to sexual trafficking. This title shows that slavery, far from being extinct, is alive and well in the contemporary era.

By re-examining ancient notions of sexual difference, bodies, culture, and identity, this book shows that Plato, Aristotle, the Stoics, Epicureans and others force us to reassess what is at stake in discussions about gender.

The impulse to try to anticipate the future, and make sense of apparently random events, is irrepressible. This title explores the legacy of ancient Greek notions of luck, fate and fortune in our own era. It also explores some of the key ideas of ancient Greek culture that resonate with modern conceptions of destiny.

Modern science and its technology are the children of the seventeenth-century. Shedding fresh light on topics such as Euclid's geometry, Aristotelian physics and the proto-Darwinism of pre-Socratic thinkers like Empedocles, this work addresses the fascinating differences and similarities between ancient and modern conceptions of 'science'.

The Art of the Body offers a series of comparative and thematic accounts, demonstrating the range of cultural ideas and anxieties that were explored through the figure of the body both in antiquity and in the various cultural landscapes that came afterwards.

Mario Erasmo creatively explores the nexus between classical and contemporary approaches to dying, death and interment. From theme funerals in St Louis to Etruscan sarcophagi, he offers a rich and insightful discussion of finitude across the ages.

This provocative book boldly explores the complex matrices of race - and the differing interpretations of ancient and modern - across epic, tragedy and the novel. Ranging from Theocritus to Toni Morrison, and from Tacitus and Pliny to Bernal's seminal study Black Athena, this is a powerful and original new assessment.