This book is a literary study of the Cyropaedia, Xenophon's fictional account of Cyrus the Great and the founding of his empire. The Cyropaedia is a complex blend of various literary forms, and this book examines several of its literary genres. General discussions of the works of Xenophon's predecessors and contemporaries, in particular Herodotus, Plato, and Ctesias, are combined with a detailed commentary on select passages.

This critical study provides the first comprehensive analysis of the Latin poet Prudentius, considered one of the greatest Christian poets of the late Antique period. Palmer examines the poet's life and society, investigates the purpose of the poems--especially the Peristephanon--and their intended audience, and discusses them in relation to both the heritage of Classical literature and to sources in contemporary martyr-literature. He shows that Prudentius, writing most of his poems at a turning point in the history of the Western Empire, accepted many aspects of secular poetry and combined...

Pliny's Natural History has too often been regarded as simply a quarry for quaint stories--a view which has tended to overshadow its overall structure and purpose. In this book, Beagon redresses the balance and illuminates the Natural History as the work of an author with an identifiable mode of thinking and a coherent attitude toward his clearly-stated theme, Nature. Taking its cue from Pliny, the book examines his cosmology and in particular his portrayal of the relationship between nature and what he considered nature's greatest creation, Humankind. Author and work are also placed in their...

Jerome (c. 345-420) was one of the greatest biblical scholars of antiquity. Among his achievements was his Latin translation of the Bible "according to the Hebrew," or iuxta Hebraeos. In this study, Adam Kamesar considers the origin of this project through an analysis of the Quaestiones Hebraicae in Genesim, a commentary on the book of Genesis published at approximately the same time as the first installments of the translation. Providing a look at the man and the work behind one of the most important Bibles in the history of the West, this study will be of keen interest to classicists,...

This is a study of the relationship between Greek prose literature of the Antonine Age in the second century AD (the Second Sophistic) and idea-theory, a type of literary stylistics best known from the Peri Ideon of Hermogenes of Tarsus. The author considers sophistic declamation, the relative value attributed to prose and poetry, attitudes towards Xenophon and Demosthenes, and the reputation of Aelius Aristides.

Oxyrynchus in Egypt is the best documented city of the Roman empire. This book uses the thousands of papyrus documents found there to examine how its urban landowning class derived its wealth from the outlying rural lands, and the relationships they held with their tenants.

This study is designed to make the Meditations more accessible to the modern reader. Rutherford carefully explains the historical and philosophical background, charts the main themes and tendencies of Marcus's thought, and relates stylistic detail to the intellectual and moral outlook of the author. His goal is to define Marcus's aims, attitudes, and styles more precisely and restore his work to the position it held in the past, that of a spiritual classic which can be read and enjoyed by people who are not professional scholars.

Claudian was one of the last great Latin poets of the classical tradition, writing in the fourth century A.D. This simplified text of his poem, De Raptu Prosperpinae, has a facing-page translation to make the work more accessible to non-specialists. This book sets Claudian in his rightful place as a distinctive creative writer of late antiquity with the roots of the whole classical tradition before him. In addition to an incisive commentary, the book includes a text designed to simplify Hall's apparatus.

This book is a study of an influential fourth-century B.C. Athenian politician, Apollodoros the son of Pasion. It provides the first full-length treatment if his career and of the seven law-court speeches which he delivered, which have come down to us wrongly attributed to the famous orator Demosthenes. These speeches, that are our main source of information about Apollodoros, not only tell us about his political career but also illuminate Athenian banking and social attitudes, since his father had risen from servile origins to become a very wealthy banker and, ultimately, an Athenian...

Ovid's Fasti has remained curiously neglected as an historical source for the period in which it was written. This new study reveals that the poem of some five thousand lines on the Roman calendar, written and revised in the years between A.D. 4-16, provides students of the Augustan age with a wealth of information, both about the author himself, and about his cultural and political environment. In addition to revelations about the way in which Augustus and his family were incorporated into the ancient religion of the city of Rome, and details of the last decade of Augustus' life and the...