Books in the Cambridge Classical Studies series

Euripides' Heracles is a play of great complexity, tracing its protagonist's development from invincible hero to the courageous bearer of suffering. This work places the play in the context of Euripidean drama, Greek dramaturgy and fifth-century Athenian society. It also explores the play's examination of divinity and human values.

This book studies the reception of Plato's dialogues as performance texts both by his original audience and by his readers down to late antiquity. A combination of well-known and newly discovered pieces of literary and archaeological evidence tell the forgotten story of 'Plato the playwright'.

This book advances a revisionist approach towards the clash between humanism and Christian Orthodoxy in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries that led to the secular utopianism and paganism of visionary Platonist, Gemistos Plethon. An important read for those interested in ancient and medieval philosophy, Byzantine studies and the Renaissance.

Desire is a central concept in Aristotle's ethical and psychological works, but he does not provide us with a systematic treatment of the notion itself. This book reconstructs the account of desire latent in his various scattered remarks on the subject and analyses its role in his moral psychology.

Contributes to the growing interest in ancient bilingualism by focusing on the linguistic history of Sicily down to the Roman Empire. The twelve chapters present overviews of the non-Classical languages as well as specialist studies of Greek and Latin literature, inscriptions, coins and onomastics.

A thorough examination of the nature and function of absolute constructions in Greek, Latin and Sanskrit, including a detailed description of how they interact with their syntactic environment. Of great interest and importance to historical linguists and to classicists and Sanskrit scholars concerned with the history of those languages.

This study in the language of Roman imperialism provides a provocative new perspective on the Roman imperial project. It highlights the prominence of the language of mastery and slavery in Roman descriptions of the conquest and subjection of the provinces. More broadly, it explores how Roman writers turn to paradigmatic modes of dependency familiar from everyday life - not just slavery but also clientage and childhood - in order to describe their authority over, and responsibilities to, the subject population of the provinces. It traces the relative importance of these different models for the imperial project across almost three centuries of Latin literature, from the middle of the first century BCE to the beginning of the third century CE.

The first full study of the survival of Lucretius' De rerum natura, the controversial six-book poem espousing Epicurean philosophy. A detailed analysis of the poem's circulation, readers and commentators in antiquity, as well as its medieval scribes and owners, sheds light on the poem's tenuous threads of transmission.

This book examines foundation myths told about the Ionian cities during the archaic and classical periods. It uses these myths to explore the complex and changing ways in which civic identity was constructed in Ionia, relating this to the wider discourses about ethnicity and cultural difference that were current in the Greek world at this time. The Ionian cities seem to have rejected oppositional models of cultural difference which set in contrast East and West, Europe and Asia, Greek and Barbarian, opting instead for a more fluid and nuanced perspective on ethnic and cultural distinctions. The conclusions of this book have far-reaching implications for our understanding of Ionia, but also challenge current models of Greek ethnicity and identity, suggesting that there was a more diverse conception of Greekness in antiquity than has often been assumed.

After Plato and Aristotle, the Stoics, from the third century BCE onwards, developed the third great classical conception of wisdom. This book offers a reconstruction of this pivotal notion in Stoicism, starting out from the two extant Stoic definitions, 'knowledge of human and divine matters' and 'fitting expertise'. It focuses not only on the question of what they understood by wisdom, but also on how wisdom can be achieved, how difficult it is to become a sage, and how this difficulty can be explained. The answers to these questions are based on a fresh investigation of the evidence, with all central texts offered in the original Greek or Latin, as well as in translation. The Stoic Sage can thus also serve as a source book on Stoic wisdom, which should be invaluable to specialists and to anyone interested in one of the cornerstones of the Graeco-Roman classical tradition.

This book selects central moments in the literary reception of the Works and Days in antiquity, studies these moments in sophisticated depth, and pays particular attention to Hesiod's importance as the founding father of 'didactic literature'. It will appeal to all those with a serious interest in ancient literature.

A pioneering interdisciplinary study of the languages and writing systems of ancient Cyprus, covering a broad time-span (1600-300 BC) and considering not only the languages themselves but also the relationship between them, as well as their social and historical context.

Apuleius of Madauros, writing in the latter half of the second century CE in Roman North Africa, is best known to us today for his Latin fiction, the Metamorphoses aka The Golden Ass, about a man who turned into a donkey and back again. However, he was also a Platonic philosopher, who, even though many of his writings are lost, wrote a range of rhetorical and philosophical works which survive to this day. This book examines these works to reveal how Apuleius' Platonism is a result of his 'impersonation of philosophy', that is, a rhetorically powerful methodological tool that allows him to 'speak' on behalf of Plato and his philosophy. This book is the first exploration of the full scope of his idiosyncratic brand of Platonism across his multifarious literary corpus and is a major contribution to the study of the dynamic between literature and philosophy in antiquity and beyond.

The Athenians themselves invented the notion of 'classical' tragedy just a few generations after the city's defeat in the Peloponnesian War. This study marks the first account of how Athens constructed its theatrical past and sheds new light upon the interaction between the city's literary and political history.

Focusing on key ancient responses to the five-part narrative of human history in Hesiod's Works and Days, this book argues that critical disciplines from philosophy to satire defined themselves in part through questions about 'Hesiodic' teaching. It will be of interest to scholars of ancient literature and the development of intellectual traditions.

This book shows how Plato, in the Laws, theorizes citizenship as simultaneously a political, ethical, and aesthetic practice. Essential reading for all scholars interested in citizenship and the impact of rhetoric in shaping the forms and content of political discourse in societies.

This book emphasises the role of verbal as well as visual allusion in positioning the plays of New Comedy within the context of contemporary polis culture and in instigating sophisticated processes of audience response. It will interest all classicists as well as scholars of theatre, performance and cultural studies in general.

In pre-Roman Italy and Sicily, dozens of languages and writing systems competed and interacted. Using new archaeological evidence and modern theories of bilingualism, this book explores the relationship between Greek and Oscan, two of the most widely spoken languages in the south of the peninsula.

Oscan was spoken in Southern Italy in the second half of the first millennium BC. Here, for the first time, all the evidence for the spelling of Oscan in the Greek alphabet is collected and examined. Understanding the orthography of these inscriptions has far-reaching implications for the historical phonology and morphology of Oscan and the Italic languages (for example providing unique evidence for the reconstruction of the genitive plural). A striking discovery is the lack of a standardised orthography for Oscan in the Greek alphabet, which seriously problematises attempts to date inscriptions by assuming the consistent chronological development of spelling features. There are also intriguing insights into the linguistic situation in South Italy. Rather than a separate community of Oscan-speakers who had adopted and subsequently adapted the Greek alphabet in isolation, we should posit groups who were in touch with contemporary developments in Greek orthography due to widespread Greek-Oscan bilingualism.

In this book, Sophia M. Connell sets out Aristotle's views on female animals and argues that they should be seen in a much more positive light than has been previously thought. This results in a reassessment of many fundamental aspects of Aristotle's metaphysics, philosophy and methodology.

This books proposes a new, cross-cultural approach to Hellenistic intellectual history, focusing on Greece and Babylonia. Connecting intellectual life in the two regions through direct contact as well as parallel responses to Hellenistic imperialism, it argues that Hellenistic intellectual history can and should be written in cross-cultural perspective.

This book speaks to all admirers of Delphi and its famous prophecies, whether they are experts on ancient Greek religion, students of the ancient world, or just lovers of a good story. It highlights key themes of oracle stories and finds religious meaning in the infamous oracular ambiguity.

This book examines how the biographical traditions of ancient poets and artists parallel the creative processes of biographers themselves, both within antiquity and beyond. Each chapter explores a range of biographical material that highlights the complexity of how readers and viewers imagine the lives of ancient creator-figures.

This definitive assessment of the most famous twentieth-century ancient historian engages with his impact beyond as well as within the academy, analysing the means and nature of his impact, and telling how a scholar expelled from the United States for communist links became a part of the British establishment.

This book sheds new light on Virgil's Aeneid via a detailed study of Ascanius, Aeneas' young son and ancestor of the emperor Augustus. In a work that will appeal to students of literature, history and childhood studies, Rogerson shows how the characterisation of Ascanius reflects contemporary concerns about Rome's future.

The first edition with introduction and commentary of a unique second-century BC land survey written on papyrus in Greek which, coming from Edfu in Upper Egypt, provides a new picture of landholding and taxation in the area. This volume is essential for all scholars of ancient Egypt and Hellenistic history.

Collects fourteen important essays of Cambridge sociologist Keith Hopkins - one of the most radical, innovative and influential Roman historians of his generation. It will appeal to all those interested in Roman history and sociology and particularly to those eager to experience challenging and controversial approaches to understanding the past.

Explores the ideological use of Carthage in the most authoritative of the Augustan literary texts, the Aeneid of Virgil. Addressed to students and scholars of the classical world interested in the literature and ideology produced under autocratic regimes, the representations of enemies and the relationship between history, poetry, and myth.

Advances our understanding of Plato's conception of human nature, particularly the interaction between body and soul, how reason affects emotions, pleasures, and desires, the nature of happiness, the role of politics in the good life, and the fate of the soul after death.