Books in the Oxford Classical Monographs series

An edition, with introduction and commentary, of the Homeric Hymn to Aphrodite, which tells of the seduction of the shepherd Anchises by the love-goddess Aphrodite, and has long been recognized as a masterpiece of early Western literature.

An examination of the complex inter-relationships between the Roman and Sasanid Empires, and some of their Arab allies and neighbours, during the last century before the emergence of Islam. Greg Fisher stresses the importance of a Near East dominated by Rome and Iran for the formation of early concepts of Arab identity.

A study of the representation of human motivation in Herodotus' Histories. Emily Baragwanath's focus is upon the sophisticated narrative techniques with which Herodotus represents this elusive kind of historical knowledge.

A study of animal sacrifice within Greek paganism, Judaism, and Christianity between 100 BC and AD 200. After a vivid account of the realities of sacrifice in the Greek East and in the Jerusalem Temple, Maria-Zoe Petropoulou explores the attitudes of early Christians towards this practice, and the reasons why they ultimately rejected it.

Taking a different look at the veneration and cult of heroic men, living and dead, in ancient Greece, this book finds the roots of the Hellenistic ruler cult, and hence Roman emperor cult, in the 5th century BC. It also offers a re-evaluation of the epinician genre and extensive studies of five of Pindar's odes.

Blighted and accursed families are an inescapable feature of Greek tragedy. N.J. Sewell-Rutter gives the familiar issues of inherited guilt, curses, and divine causation a fresh appraisal, with particular reference to Aeschylus' Seven against Thebes and the Phoenician Women of Euripides. All Greek quotations are translated.

A new approach to an old question - the relationship between myth and ritual. Barbara Kowalzig shows how choral performances of myth and ritual, taking place all over the ancient Greek world in the early fifth century BC, helped to effect social and political change in their own time.

Alfonso Moreno presents a sweeping re-interpretation of the economy and society of ancient Athens, showing how the city depended for its survival on a supply of grain from overseas sources. The need for grain determined Athenian foreign policy, prompting military conquest, and revealing a Greek world as globalized as our own.

A study of the history of the Aegean islands and changing concepts of insularity, with particular emphasis on the fifth century BC. Island connectivity was expressed on many levels - Constantakopoulou investigates island interaction in the areas of religion and imperial politics in particular.

The play with linguistic styles constitutes an important ingredient of Aristophanic humour. This work uses the stylistic diversity as a source to reconstruct the 'real' styles upon which Aristophanes based his text.

This book is a study of the transformation of the landscape, civic life, and moral values of the pagan city of Rome following the conversion of the emperor Constantine in the early fourth century. It examines the effects of the rise of Christianity and the decline of paganism in the later Roman empire.

Frisbee Sheffield argues that the Symposium has been unduly marginalized by philosophers. Although the topic - eros - and the setting at a symposium have seemed anomalous, she demonstrates that both are intimately related to Plato's preoccupation with the nature of the good life, with virtue, and how it is acquired and transmitted.

Thomas Harrison presents a study of the religious beliefs of the ancient Greek historian Herodotus - his beliefs in divine retribution, in oracles and divination, in miracles or in fate. The author shows not only how such beliefs were central to his work, but also how they were compatible with lived experience.

This book analyses the narrative technique of Thucydides, the historian of the war between Athens and Sparta in the fifth century BC. It relates his shifting uses of various techniques to his explanatory aims, and shows how he narrates the progression of one war and at the same time exposes various truths about the human condition.

This book explores three authors who wrote about the rise of the Roman Empire: Polybius, Posidonius, and Strabo. It examines the overlap between geography and history in their works, and considers the way in which pre-existing traditions were used but transformed in order to describe the new world of Rome.

This book examines the government of the Roman empire at an important period of administrative and religious change. Drawing together material from a wide variety of sources, the book studies the vast range of documents issued by the emperors and their officials, and assesses how effectively the machinery of government matched imperial ambitions.

Lucretius' Epicurean poem De Rerum Natura ('On the Nature of Things') made a fundamental and lasting contribution to the language of Latin philosophy. In this book Barnaby Taylor offers an in-depth reconstruction of core features of Epicurean linguistic theory, and a new understanding of Lucretius' linguistic innovation and creativity.

This new critical edition of the Batrachomyomachia (Battle of the Frogs and Mice) seeks to return the poem to the centre of scholarly attention, presenting a new Greek text alongside an English verse translation, along with a comprehensive introduction and a line-by-line commentary dealing with linguistic, stylistic, and thematic questions.

Surveying a large body of Greek (and occasionally Roman) literature, as well as material remains, this volume offers the first systematic study of a central motif in the praise of humans in antiquity, and explores when, how, why, and to what effect humans are compared to gods in the poetry of archaic and classical Greece.

After Plato's Forms, and Aristotle's substances, the Stoics posited the fundamental reality of lekta - the meanings of sentences, distinct from the sentences themselves. This volume analyses the resulting unique, complex, and consistent cosmic view in which lekta are the keystones of the structure of reality: they are all there is to say.

The Kingdom of Priam offers a detailed exploration of questions about regional integration in the ancient world through a diverse series of case studies focusing on the regional history of Lesbos and the Troad from the seventh century BC down to the first century AD.

This first book-length treatment of religion in Tacitus' Annals analyzes his numerous references to religious material through the lens of cultural memory theory, revealing them as a key vehicle for his assessment of the principate as a system of government, the activities of individual emperors, and their impact on Roman cultural identity.

Scholarship on Roman Republican augury has previously tended towards the view that official divination was organized to tell its users what they wanted to hear. This volume argues instead that its rules did not allow humans simply to create or ignore signs at will: when human and divine will clashed it was the latter which was supposed to prevail.

The epitome misattributed to Arcadius is one of the two main sources for Herodian's highly influential lost work on ancient Greek grammar and prosody, De Prosodia Catholica. This new critical edition contains an extensive introduction, critical apparatus, apparatus of parallel passages, and the first full commentary on the text.

Taking Pindar as its focus, this volume offers the first book-length study devoted to the rhetoric and realities of literary permanence in early Greek poetry. It explores how Pindar's odes address their first and later audiences, and how the poet's vision of his literary world illuminates the context within which he anticipated its permanence.

This volume offers a history of the role of exile in the Greek city-state in the period c. 404-146 BC, from the end of the Peloponnesian War to the Roman conquest of the Greek world.

Traditional accounts of ancient pain tend to focus either on philosophical or medical theories of pain or on Christian notions of suffering: this volume moves beyond these approaches to argue that pain in Imperial Greek culture was not a narrow physiological perception but must be understood within its broad personal, social, and emotional context.

This volume offers a major reinterpretation of Ammianus Marcellinus' Res Gestae, one of the main narrative sources for the political history of the later Roman Empire. Arguing for a re-examination of Ammianus' agenda and methods in depicting Julian, the last 'pagan' emperor, it re-analyses his narration of several key moments in Julian's reign.

New critical editions, with detailed introductions, appendices, and English translations of two important historical sources for late antiquity.

This volume focuses on ideas of kingship and power in the Seleukid empire, specifically the role of usurpers. Redefining the king as only one of several political players, it advances a political history predicated on social power and argues that despite its strong rulers the empire was structurally weak and the position of its kings precarious.