Books in the Wisconsin Studies in Classics series

Latin plays were written for audiences whose gender perspectives and expectations were shaped by life in Rome, and the crowds watching the plays included both female citizens and female slaves. This is the first book to confront directly the role of women in Roman Republican plays of all genres, as well as to examine the role of gender in the influence of this tradition on later dramatists.

Jean Andreau and Raymond Descat break new ground in this comparative history of slavery in Greece and Rome. Focusing on slaves' economic role in society, their crucial contributions to Greek and Roman culture, and their daily and family lives, the authors examine the different ways in which slavery evolved in the two cultures.

Challenges the often-romanticised view of the prostitute as an urbane and liberated courtesan by examining the social and economic realities of the sex industry in Greco-Roman culture. Departing from the conventional focus on elite society, these essays consider the Greek prostitute as displaced foreigner, slave, and member of an urban underclass.

Ancient Athenians were known to reuse stone artifacts, architectural blocks, and public statuary in the creation of new buildings and monuments. These construction decisions were often a visible mechanism for shaping communal memory. Sarah Rous develops the concept of upcycling to refer to this meaningful reclamation.

Examines speech loss across all of Ovid's writings and the ways that motif is explored, developed, and modified in the poet's work after his exile from Rome.

The Persica is an extensive history of Assyria and Persia written by the Greek historian Ctesias around 400 BCE. Written for a Greek readership, the Persica influenced the development of both historiographic and literary traditions in Greece. It also, contends Matt Waters, is an essential but often misunderstood source for the history of the Achaemenid Persian Empire.

Engages postmodern and materialist feminist thought in readings of three significant poets writing in the early years of Rome's Augustan Principate. In their poems, they represent the flesh-and-blood body in both its integrity and vulnerability, as an index of social position along intersecting axes of sex, gender, status, and class.

Reveals major figures in Ovid's ""Metamorphoses"", highlighting the conflicted revisionist nature of the ""Metamorphoses"". This title explores issues central to Ovid's poetics - the status of the image, the generation of plots, repetition, opposition between refined and inflated epic style, and the interrelation of rhetoric and poetry.

The foremost religious festival of ancient Athens was the Panathenaia. This work addresses the problems of its interpretation, discussing the seasonal controversy over the Parthenon frieze. The festival is also compared with others held throughout the ancient Greek world.

This lively translation accurately captures the wit and uncensored bawdiness of the epigrams of Martial, who satirized Roman society, both high and low, in the first century CE. His pithy little poems amuse, but also offer vivid insight into the world of patrons and clients, doctors and lawyers, prostitutes, slaves, and social climbers in ancient Rome.

Scholarly investigations of the rich field of verbal and extraverbal Athenian insults have typically been undertaken piecemeal. Deborah Kamen provides an overview of this vast terrain and synthesizes the rules, content, functions, and consequences of insulting fellow Athenians.

Taking a fresh look at the poetry and visual art of the Hellenistic age, from the death of Alexander the Great in 323 BC to 20 BC, Graham Zanker makes enlightening discoveries about the assumptions and conventions of Hellenistic poets and artists and their audiences.

In 2004 director Oliver Stone's epic film ""Alexander"" generated a renewed interest in Alexander the Great. The critical response to the film offers a fascinating lesson in the contentious dialogue between historiography and modern entertainment. This book scrutinizes Stone's project from its inception and design to its production and reception.