This book reconstructs the life and workings of a large private estate in Egypt under Roman rule in the third century AD, on the basis of hundreds of surviving letters and accounts written on papyrus. Topics include the social and economic position of the estate's owners, managers and workforce, its production and marketing of crops and its system of accounting, which is the most sophisticated yet known from the ancient world, and challenges the common belief that economic thought and practice were uniformly "primitive" in the ancient world. The second section of the book includes the...

A critical study of Persius' poetic aims, aversions and techniques, based mainly on an extended analysis of Satires I. John Bramble shows how Persius' discontent with conventional literary language led him to compress the existing satiric idiom and create a powerful individual style. The author situates Persius' work in the tradition of Roman satire, and shows how he takes the concepts and metaphors of literary criticism back to their physical origins, to indict moral and literary decadence through a series of images connected with, for example, gluttony and sexual excess. This is a model...

How was the poet Homer imagined by ancient Greeks? This book looks at stories circulating between the sixth and fourth centuries BC about his birth, name and origin, blindness and his relationship to other poets and his descendants. The work studies the ancient reception of the Homeric poems, and looks at it in relation to modern representations of Homer, ancient and modern conceptions of authorship, and the "Homeric Question."

Prometheus Bound was accepted without question in antiquity as the work of Aeschylus, and most modern authorities endorse this ascription. But since the nineteenth century several leading scholars have come to doubt Aeschylean authorship. Dr Griffith here provides a thorough and wide-ranging study of this problem, and concludes: 'Had Prometheus Bound been newly dug up from the sands of Oxyrhynchus... few scholars would regard it as the work of Aeschylus.' After a preliminary assessment of the external evidence, Dr Griffith examines minutely the idiosyncrasies of metre, dramatic technique,...

Professor Shipp's purpose in the first edition of this book (published in 1953) was 'to examine in as much detail as possible the development of the language of the Iliad in some of its typical features, with careful attention to the spoken dialects involved and to the influence of metre'. In the second edition he widens the scope of his work to examine the Odyssey as well as the Iliad, and he extends its detail to include syntax as well as grammatical forms and to cover questions of vocabulary more comprehensively. The author's earlier conclusions are shown to be confirmed, and an important...

In contrast to earlier scholarly work on Achilles of the Homeric epics, this study examines how one of the most popular figures of Greek mythology was portrayed on the tragic stage of fifth-century Athens. Pantelis Michelakis asserts that dramatists persistently appropriated Achilles to address concerns ranging from heroism and education to individualism and gender. The book considers the complete corpus of extant Greek tragedy, with particular attention paid to Aeschylus' Myrmidons and Euripides' Hecuba and Iphigenia at Aulis.

In the first new interpretation of Hellenistic and Roman education for fifty years, Teresa Morgan draws on evidence from all over the classical world, including papyri from Graeco-Roman Egypt, to reexamine one of the institutions that made that world an entity, and that was one of its most influential legacies to the West. She introduces fresh interpretations of the function of literature, grammar and rhetoric in education, and in addition explores Hellenistic and Roman theories of cognitive development.

The book offers an interpretation of Euripides' The Trojan Women which issues from the argument that the function of Greek tragedy was to educate.

This book provides a serious modern literary treatment of perhaps the best known of all surviving works of ancient Greek fiction.

This book is a major literary reevaluation of Lucan's epic poem, the Bellum Civile ("The Civil War"). Its main purpose is to bring out the implications of one basic premise: this poem is not only about civil war, but uses the metaphor of civil war (i.e. self-destruction and internal discord) as the basis for the way it tells its story. Aimed primarily at classicists, the book offers a provocative new interpretation of most of the important issues in the poem, while attempting to avoid the glibness of generalization by concentrating on detailed readings of selected parts of the text.