Books in the Key Themes in Ancient History series

This 2007 book explores the long-disputed role of trade in classical antiquity. It examines how trade underpinned Athenian and Roman power by supplying cities, armies and the dominant elite. It also provides a new perspective on the significance of ancient trade by exploring its ecological and cultural implications.

Roman Law in Context explains how Roman law worked for those who lived by it, by viewing it in the light of the society and economy in which it operated. The book discusses three main areas of Roman law and life: the family and inheritance; property and the use of land; commercial transactions and the management of businesses. It also deals with the question of litigation and how readily the Roman citizen could assert his or her legal rights in practice. In addition it provides an introduction to using the main sources of Roman law. The book ends with an epilogue discussing the role of Roman law in medieval and modern Europe, a bibliographical essay, and a glossary of legal terms. The book involves the minimum of legal technicality and is intended to be accessible to students and teachers of Roman history as well as interested general readers.

This book, first published in 1994, is concerned with discovering what it was like to be a slave in the classical Roman world.

Accessible to students and non-specialists, this book provides an engaging guide to Roman political thought and its enduring relevance for contemporary liberal democracies. It uses a thematic approach that relates key political ideas to Roman republicanism, covers all major periods of Roman history, and includes the contributions of early Christianity.

This book explores the surprising variety of texts used to communicate scientific and mathematical ideas in the ancient Greek and Roman worlds. Each chapter concentrates on a particular genre - poetry, letter, encyclopaedia, commentary and biography - and considers the broader cultural contexts in which these texts were produced and read.

This book provides an accessible survey of scholarly debates on Greek and Roman cities, as well as a sketch of the cities' chief characteristics. It is aimed primarily at students of ancient history and general readers, but also at scholars working on urbanism in other periods and places.

An accessible and up-to-date narrative of the millennium of Jewish history following Alexander's conquest of the East, by one of the most exciting historians of the subject. Introduces and analyses key events, institutions, and texts, and provides an excellent synthesis for students and scholars of Jewish history and of ancient history.

Employs the full range of literary, epigraphic and archaeological evidence in order to demonstrate the many different ways in which spatial analysis can illuminate our understanding of Greek and Roman society and the ways in which these societies thought of, and interacted with, the spaces they occupied and created.

This book explores the beginnings and development of geographical ideas in Classical antiquity and demonstrates technical methods for describing landscape, topographies and ethnographies. The survey relies on a variety of sources: philosophical and scientific texts but also poems and travelogues; papyrological remains and visual monuments.

This book was the first comprehensive analysis of the impact of money on the economy, society and culture of the Greek and Roman worlds. State-formation, expanding political networks, metal supply and above all an increasing sophistication of credit and contractual law are demonstrated as being the crucial factors in money's increasing influence.

Explores the archaeological remains of housing in the Greek and Roman worlds, using written evidence and artistic representations to set them in a wider cultural framework. Together, this material is used to address wider questions about social structure, change through time and patterns of cultural interaction.

Asceticism was practised in every religious tradition in antiquity: pagan, Jewish, Christian and Manichean. This book presents for the first time a combined study of ancient ascetic traditions, which have been previously misunderstood by being studied separately.

Ancient Greece was a place of tremendous political experiment and innovation, and it was here too that the first serious political thinkers emerged. Using carefully-selected case-studies, This book investigates the dynamic interaction between ancient Greek political thought and practice from early historic times to the Roman Empire.

Roman rules about crime were constantly influenced by wider moral and social attitudes. This book explains how crime was treated in the Roman legal tradition, but also examines topics such as the politicisation of corruption and treason, and ancient legal and social debates on sex, violence, murder and magic.

More than ever before, students and scholars of the classical world use Roman images and wish to understand them. Using selected examples and themes, Stewart provides an introduction to the study of ancient Roman art in its social context and explains how and why Roman art was made and used.

Through five case-studies from different periods and concerning different aspects of technology, this book sets ancient technical knowledge in its political, social and intellectual context. Unlike existing accounts of the same subject, it makes an extensive use not only of textual but also of epigraphical and archaeological sources.

Evaluates a hundred years of scholarship on how empire transformed the Roman world, and advances a new theory of how the Empire worked and was experienced. Accessible to undergraduate and graduate students as well as of interest to all scholars concerned with the rise and fall of the Roman Empire.

This is a critical study of the system of law and order in ancient Rome in both Republican and Imperial periods. Wilfried Nippel identifies the mechanisms of self-regulation which operated as a stabilising force within Roman society, and considers the issue of the absence of a professional police force in the city of Rome, before and after the collapse of the Republic.

This book explores the role of written and oral communication in Greece and is the first systematic and sustained treatment at this level. It examines the recent theoretical debates about literacy and orality and explores the uses of writing and oral communication, and their interaction, in ancient Greece.

This work explores current debates on early Christianity in Roman society. It adopts an interdisciplinary and thematic approach to examine topics such as paganism, martyrdom and the church. It offers the student unfamiliar with the Christian tradition a comprehensive introduction to its role in the Roman world.

This is the first book to present a synthetic view of Roman banking and financial life from the fourth century BC to the end of the third century AD.

This is the first study of food in classical antiquity that treats it as both a biological and a cultural phenomenon. The variables of food quantity, quality and availability, and the impact of disease, are evaluated and a judgement reached which inclines to pessimism. Food is also a symbol, evoking other basic human needs and desires, especially sex, and performing social and cultural roles which can be either integrative or divisive. The book explores food taboos in Greek, Roman, and Jewish society, and food-allocation within the family, as well as more familiar cultural and economic polarities which are highlighted by food and eating. The author draws on a wide range of evidence new and old, from written sources to human skeletal remains, and uses both comparative historical evidence from early modern and contemporary developing societies and the anthropological literature, to create a case-study of food in antiquity.

This book - the only history of friendship in classical antiquity that exists in English - examines the nature of friendship in Greece and Rome from Homer to the Christian Roman Empire of the fourth century AD.

Investigates the ideals, practices and performance of gender in the ancient classical world, exploring archaeological, visual and written sources. Essential reading for gender specialists from a wide range of disciplines and an ideal introduction for undergraduate and postgraduate readers studying gender in the past.

This 1999 book is about the religious life of the Greeks from the eighth century BC to the fifth century AD, looked at in the context of a variety of different cities and periods. Simon Price does not describe some abstract and self-contained system of religion or myths but examines local practices and ideas in the light of general Greek ideas, relating them for example, to gender roles and to cultural and political life (including Attic tragedy and the trial of Socrates). He also lays emphasis on the reactions to Greek religions of ancient thinkers - Greek, Roman, Jewish and Christian. The evidence drawn on is of all kinds: literary texts, which are translated throughout; inscriptions, including an appendix of newly translated Greek inscriptions; and archaeology, which is highlighted in the numerous illustrations.

Translated examples from Greek, Latin and other languages give an accessible account for students and general readers of how language illuminates topics such as ethnicity, social mobility, religion, gender and sexuality in the ancient world. Questions addressed include the rise and fall of languages, obscenity, and what language Jesus spoke.

Thematic treatment of the broader impact of warfare in the Roman world, integrating Late Antiquity alongside the Republic and Principate.

A very readable introduction to Roman Republican politics which takes a distinctive and original approach while exploring much-contested issues concerning political rituals, popular participation, and the role of ideology. It will be important for all students and scholars of Roman history and of politics in general.

A concise introduction to ancient Greek sport.

This book examines the legal regulation of violence and the role of litigation in Athenian society.