Written in the author's maternal Greek, the Roman History of the third-century A.D. historian Cassius Dio is our fullest surviving historical source for the reign of the Emperor Augustus. In The Augustan Succession Peter Michael Swan provides an ample historical and historiographic commentary on Books 55-56 of the History. These books recount Augustus's last twenty-three years (9 B.C.-A.D. 14), during which the aging monarch, amid dynastic tragedies and military setbacks, orchestrated the continuation of the constitutional and imperial system developed under his leadership,...

The Virgilian centos anticipate the avant-garde and smash the image of a staid, sober, and centered classical world. This book examines the twelve mythological and secular Virgilian centos that survive from antiquity. The centos, in which authors take non-consecutive lines or segments of lines from the Eclogues, Georgics, and Aeneid and reconnect them to produce new poems, have received limited attention. No other book-length study exists of all the centos, which date from ca. 200 to ca. 530.

The centos are literary games, and they have a playful shock value...

Eleusis and Athens offers a new text and detailed commentary on two account-inventories for a major panhellenic sanctuary (Demeter) during the final decade of the fifth century BC. In addition to the publication of inscriptions, the accompanying commentary provides a wide array of information regarding the daily operations of a religious sanctuary and argues for a re-dating of the First-Fruits decree and the Epistatai decree to the 430s.

This bilingual edition, with introduction and brief commentary, makes accessible for the first time in English a text of great importance for the history and interpretation of Homer. Although attributed to Plutarch, the Essay is probably the work of a grammaticus of the second and third century and is the single most valuable source of evidence for the nature of the teaching of Homer in the schools of the Roman Empire. Well represented in the manuscript tradition, the Essay was used as prefatory material by Renaissance editors of Homer, beginning with the editio princeps (1488), and so...

This unique collaboration between a classicist and physicist at the University of Illinois at Chicago is the first work to combine the evidence from both China and Rome for the spectacular daylight comet of 44 BC, perhaps the most famous comet in antiquity. This investigation, which also examines allusions to this comet in astrological literature from later antiquity, sheds new light on the significance of the comet as a powerful symbol in the political propaganda that launched Augustus' career.

This work aims to show how certain striking features of classical Latin prose style have their roots in forms of expression established in archaic Latin and even beyond that in Indo-European. Some of these forms are to be explained by the origins of complex syntactical constructions, some by cultural conditions, while others are peculiar to the Latin language. These factors are exemplified in texts ranging from about 450 BC (the Twelve Tables) to about 100 BC, which are accompanied by a full commentary not confined to stylistic issues. These texts will be of interest not only to students of...

This book provides a new understanding of Pliny's letters by combining historical analysis of the social pressures that shape Pliny's authorial pose with close literary analysis of the letters themselves. It demonstrates how ruling-class ideology is disseminated and how it shapes the literary persona and personal identity of a ruling-class member. The powerful heuristic tool of examining the interplay between confidence and anxieties in the letters will help restore Pliny's relatively neglected masterpiece to a more prominent place in undergraduate Latin and Roman Civilization courses.

The fragments of Matro of Pitane (c. 300 BC) offer insights not only into the largely forgotten and obscure late-classical genre of epic parody, but also into 4th-century Athenian history, the role of food and dining in antiquity, and the history of the text of Homer and the reception of the Iliad and the Odyssey in the pre-Alexanderian period. Sens and Olson offer a new text of the 144 surviving lines of Matro's parodies based on a fresh examination of the manuscripts; a translation; a detailed philological, historical, and gastronomic commentary; and a lively introduction to the poet and...