By the Roman age the traditional stories of Greek myth had long since ceased to reflect popular culture. Mythology had become instead a central element in elite culture. If one did not know the stories one would not understand most of the allusions in the poets and orators, classics and contemporaries alike; nor would one be able to identify the scenes represented on the mosaic floors and wall paintings in your cultivated friends' houses, or on the silverware on their tables at dinner.

Mythology was no longer imbibed in the nursery; nor could it be simply picked up from the often oblique...

Agrippina the Younger, wife of the emperor Claudius and mother of his successor Nero, wielded power and authority at the center of the Roman empire in ways unmatched by almost any other woman in Roman history. Such, at least, is the portrait of Agrippina delivered by our sources and perpetuated in modern scholarship. In this posthumous work, Judith Ginsburg provides a fresh look at both the literary and material representations of Agrippina. Unlike previous treatments, she seeks neither to condemn nor to rehabilitate Agrippina. Nor does she endeavor to exhume the "real Agrippina" from the...

This is a one-volume reprinted edition with corrections and a new foreword of D. R. Shackleton Bailey's acclaimed translation of Cicero's letters, previously appearing in two volumes. It includes an introduction, appendices on Roman history, glossaries, maps, and a concordance.

Studies on the Text of Macrobius' Saturnalia is a companion to new editions of Macrobius' encyclopedic dialogue that are to appear in the Loeb Classical Library and the Oxford Classical Texts series. The first chapter reports the results of a new survey of all the extant manuscripts of the work written before the 13th century and provides the first detailed stemma, which allows the early medieval archetype to be reconstructed more reliably than previously. Chapter 2 discusses some of the nearly 300 passages in which the new text differs from the standard edition of James Willis...

Though often assumed by scholars to be a product of traditional, and perhaps oral, compositional practices comparable to those found in early Greek epic, archaic elegy has not until this point been analyzed in similar detail with respect to such verse-making techniques. This volume is intended to redress some of this imbalance by exploring several issues related to the production of Greek elegiac poetry. By investigating elegy's metrical partitioning and its localizing patterns of repeated phraseology, Traditional Elegy makes clear that the oral-formulaic processes lying at the heart...