Bucchero is a very common type of fine pottery that was made by the Etruscans when their civilization was at its height, from the seventh to the fourth century BC. This study concentrates on the products of South Etruria, where the earliest and finest bucchero was made, and where the tradition lasts longest. Until recently bucchero has been little studied, and the aim of this book is to present a sequence of pottery from archaeological contexts, so that the development of the ware can be seen as a whole within a chronological framework. Many of the tomb-groups catalogued are published here...

The economics of imperialism, its political background and institutional frameworks, the material benefits it conferred, the ideologies of ruler and ruled - these are some of the more important aspects of imperialism discussed in this volume. In presenting the evidence for ancient imperialims and suggesting concepts and methods of interpretation these articles, which are the work of the Cambridge University Research Seminar in Ancient History, range from New Kingdom Egypt and Carthage, through the classical Greek world of Athens and Sparta, to Macedonia and Rome. This book will be...

Commentaries on the Hellenica Oxyrhynchia, an anonymous history of events in the Greek world in the late fifth and early fourth centuries BC, have usually dealt almost entirely with problems of the text. In this book, Dr Bruce has written an historical commentary, basing his work on both the London and Florence papyri, which between them provide all the surviving fragments of the text. Dr Bruce begins with a brief description of the two papyri. He then discusses the Oxyrhynchus historian's style and method - his sources, chronology, bias, interest in causation, etc. The introduction ends with...

Dispatched to Sicily in 344 BC as an elderly man at the head of a small, motley band of mercenaries, Timoleon had no experience of the island. Yet, in less than eight years Timoleon overthrew tyrants, expelled the Carthaginians, and introduced peace, prosperity and constitutional government to an area which for decades had known only disorder. The peace he had brought was broken after his death, and tyranny returned in 317 BC; but the prosperity which he had set in motion continued to increase well into the third century. Dr Talbert has deliberately avoided the temptation to write a...

This book is a wide-ranging study of the language of the tragedian Sophocles. From a detailed analysis of sentence structure in the first chapter, it moves on to discuss how language shapes the perception of characters, of myths, of gods and of choruses. All chapters are united by a shared concern: how does Sophoclean language engage readers and spectators? Although the book focuses on the original Greek, translations make it accessible to anyone interested in Greek tragedy.

The Epicurean philosophical system has enjoyed much recent scrutiny, but the question of its philosophical ancestry remains largely neglected. This book traces its origins in the fifth-century BC atomist Democritus, in his fourth-century followers such as Anaxarchus and Pyrrho, and in Epicurus' disagreements with his own Democritean teacher Nausiphanes. The result is not only a fascinating reconstruction of a lost tradition, but also an important contribution to the philosophical interpretation of Epicureanism, bearing especially on its ideal of tranquillity and on the relation of ethics to...

This book investigates the history of the ancient Greek tradition of oral epic poetry which culminated in the Iliad and Odyssey. These masterpieces did not exhaust the tradition, and poems were composed in the same style for several generations afterwards. One group of such poems is the 'Homeric Hymns', ascribed to Homer in antiquity. In fact the origins of these Hymns are as mysterious as those of the Homeric epics themselves with little external evidence to assist. This book will be of interest to scholars concerned with Greek philology and dialects, Homeric epic and Greek literature of the...

This book studies the origins and development of cult practice at Olympia and Delphi, challenging many assumptions about the nature and role of the archaeological record. Professor Morgan's study is exceptional for the emphasis placed on the two sites in their contemporary local contexts. The book concludes with the first detailed study of the wider roles of Olympia and Delphi as major sanctuaries in Archaic Greece.

In the first half of the first century BC the Academy of Athens broke up in disarray. From the wreckage of the semi-sceptical school there arose the new dogmatic philosophy of Antiochus, synthesized from Stoicism and Platonism, and the hardline Pyrrhonist scepticism of Aenesidemus. With his extensive knowledge of the ways in which Plato was read and invoked as an authority in late antiquity Dr Tarrant builds a most impressive reconstruction of Philo of Larissa's brand of Platonism and of its arrival in Middle Platonism, particularly that of Plutarch, long after the Academy's institutional...

A study of a small agricultural village in the Fayum as a social and economic unit towards the end of the second century BC, which was a period of civil unrest and economic disruption in Egypt. The book is based on papyrus documents from the archive of the village scribe. The archive illustrates many aspects of the village life: types of landholding and methods of cultivation, religious cults, and the names and racial distribution of the people. Where possible, Dr Crawford relates the material to the broader context of the Ptolemaic state. A special feature is the analysis of much more...