This book examines the ethical dilemmas and arguments about abortion, very similar to our own, which exercised Greek and Roman doctors, philosophers, historians, theologians, dramatists, novelists and poets. In this important new study, Professor Kapparis extrapolates the views of ancient physicians on abortion from a detailed investigation of the medical facts, medical and philosophical theories concerning the human status of the unborn in antiquity, the Hippocratic Oath, and other important documents on Greek medical ethics. He explores the reasons why women in antiquity sought...

How should I interpret a classical text? However I interpret it, someone else will so do differently, and even the nature of the interpreter's task is a matter of dispute; consensus is not a realistic prospect. Malcolm Heath sees the inevitability of such disagreements, not as a problem to be deplored, but as a constructive force, at once an essential part of the process of enquiry and a reflection of the endless diversity of the questions that interest the readers of classical texts. Accordingly he argues for an approach to interpretation that is theoretically reflective and committed to...

Slavery was a fundamental institution in the world of the ancient Greeks and Romans. It has attracted a great deal of scholarly attention, but little agreement. The modern debate has sometimes been bitter - unsurprisingly, given its background in the abolitionist atmosphere of the 19th century. As we enter the 21st century the battleground has started to shift: can the historian hope to reconstruct the life of ancient slaves, or just fragments of their image in Greek and Roman literature? More than most topics, the ancient slave has therefore attracted constant modern redefinition. But how...

M. Tullius Cicero was a prolific writer, his writing covering an astonishingly wide spectrum: oratory, letters, epic and didactic poetry, pamphlets, philosophical and rhetorical treatises. He was also a major political figure at Rome during the Late Republic. The relationship between these two facets of his career is the subject of this book, which argues that our understanding both of Cicero's oeuvre and of the practice and theory of public life in the Late Republic is transformed if Cicero's writings are read as a unified whole in the context of Roman politics. Writing offered Cicero a...