Books in the Oxford Classical Monographs series

Anna J. Clark explores 'divine qualities', such as Concord, Faith, Hope, and Clemency, to show how they reveal an aspect of how Romans thought about themselves. Clark draws on a wide range of evidence (literature, drama, coins, architecture, inscriptions and graffiti) to show that these qualities were relevant to a wide range of people.

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.

This is a study of six historians from different corners of the Roman empire at the end of the Republic. All these writers accept the new ruling power, but comment on how that power might best be used. They therefore provide a unique insight into the minds of the conquered peoples and the intellectual culture which allowed them to influence their conquerors.

As well as giving a better understanding of the history of Greek accentuation, this study yields insights into aspects of Indo-European accentuation and into the effects of word frequency on language change.

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.

Reconstructs the lives of some of the men who shaped events in the final controversial years of the Western Roman Empire during the fifth century AD. Ranging from the Balkans and Italy to northern France, this study uses a wide range of historical evidence, folklore, letters, poems, sermons, archaeology, and coins.

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.

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.

The text is about the tension between the classical city and the individual of superlative power, status and ambition. It looks at the way Alcibiades is approximated to archetypes of the individual "outside" the city: the tyrant, the victor, the ostracism victim, the scapegoat, the barbarian.

This is the first book-length study of Philo (159-84 BC), the principal philosophical teacher of Cicero. Charles Brittain reconstructs the Platonic Academy's gradual rejection of scepticism under Philo's leadership, which prepared the way for the revival of Platonism in the first century AD. The Appendix contains a full collection of the testimonia and 'fragments' of Philo.

This study explores how Christian women of the classical world initiated ascetic ways of living, and how these practices were then institutionalized. The author demonstrates that - in direct contrast to later conceptions - asceticism began primarly as an urban movement.

"The Pharsalia" is Lucan's epic on the civil wars between Caesar and Pompey. It is a poem of energy in which spectacle and spectatorship are prominent. The author shows that by transforming certain Virgilian narrative devices Lucan launches an attack on the Augustan ideology of the Aeneid.

Aristocles of Messene is a first century AD Aristotelian philosopher who discusses the thought of ancient Greek philosophers, including Plato, Zeno, Pyrrho, and Epicurus, as well as Eleatic and Cyrenaic philosophies. His main contribution is his testimony on Pyrrhonism, and his political verve makes his On Philosophy an interesting and amusing read for specialists and non-specialists alike.

Cicero's Topica is one of the canonical texts on ancient rhetorical theory. This is the first full-scale commentary on this work, and the first critical edition of the work that is informed by a full analysis of its transmission.

The author examines images of the fall of Troy in early Greek epic poetry, fifth-century Athenian tragedy, and Athenian black- and red-figure vase painting to focus on the narrative artistry with which poets and painters blended the various components of the myth into a balanced whole and intertwined them with other chapters in the story of Troy.

The force of example was a distinctive determiner of Roman identity. In this study of the representation of certain central characters in Silius Italicus' Punica, Ben Tipping considers the virtues and vices they embody, their status as exemplars, and the process by which Silius as epic poet heroizes, demonizes, and establishes models.

This volume examines the question of whether early Greek poetry was inspired by texts from the neighbouring civilizations of the ancient Near East, especially Mesopotamia.

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 detailed commentary on Tristia 2, Ovid's verse letter addressed from exile to the emperor Augustus. Jennifer Ingleheart provides an indispensable guide to all aspects of the poem - textual, literary, historical, and political - while her Introduction explores, among other topics, its ironical and subversive aspects.

The comic drama of the late fifth and early fourth century BCE was typified by the combination of absurd and fantastic plots, often dealing with social and political issues of the day. This study puts these elements centre-stage and argues that it was through them that the comedy of the period made its political interventions.

This volume studies the origin and evolution of philosophical interest in Aristotle's Categories, and illuminates the earliest arguments for Aristotle's approach to logic as the foundation of higher education.

Investigates the myths of three Cretan women - King Minos' wife, Pasiphae, and their daughters Ariadne and Phaedra - as they appear in Latin poetry of the late Republic and early Empire. This title offers detailed readings of several treatments of the stories, alongside a thematic investigation of the ideas of memory, wildness, and morality.

A totally original and exciting new study on Homer. Drawing on the latest linguistic and literary theory, Kahane looks at the literary significance of word repetition and linguistic patterns in Homer, and highlights the sophisticated irony, allusion, and ambiguity in Homer's discourse.

This text describes Athenian attempts to cope with the contradictions in the character of Theseus who seemed the perfect Athenian, but under this exterior lay a heartless seducer, rapist and killer of his own son. Theseus in the context of 5th century Athenian culture is also discussed.

In this study of the relationship between a modern philosophical idea and an ancient historical moment, Lauren Apfel explores how the notion of pluralism, made famous by Isaiah Berlin, features in the Classical Greek world and, more specifically, in the thought of three of its most prominent figures: Protagoras, Herodotus, and Sophocles.

McEvoy addresses the phenomenon of the Roman child-emperor during the late fourth century. Tracing the course of their reigns, the book looks at the sophistication of the Roman system of government which made their accessions possible, and the adaptation of existing imperial ideology to portray boys as young as six as viable rulers.

This book is an investigation of how semivowels were realised in Indo-European and in early Greek. It examines the extent to which Indo-European *i and *y were independent phonemes, in what respects their alternation was predictable, and how this situation changed as Indo-European developed into Greek.

Goldschmidt looks at the relationship between Rome's two great epic poems, Ennius' Annales and Virgil's Aeneid. Focusing on the intersections between intertextuality and the appropriations of cultural memory, Goldschmidt considers how Virgil's poem appropriates and re-writes the myths and memories which Ennius had enshrined in Roman epic.

Cotton examines Plato's ideas about education and learning, with a particular focus on the experiences a learner must go through in approaching philosophical understanding.

Sharing with the Gods examines one of the most ubiquitous yet little studied aspects of ancient Greek religion, the offering of so-called 'first-fruits' (aparchai) and 'tithes' (dekatai), from the Archaic period to the Hellenistic.