Since its first appearance in 2008, this book has changed the landscape of Virgilian studies. Analysing closely the logic and the literary genres of Virgil's three poems, it politely confronts the modern orthodoxy that Virgil signalled distaste for the methods of his ruler, Octavian-Augustus. It refreshes the study of Virgil's poetry by comparing it with the detail (normally neglected by scholars) of Rome's civil wars after Julius Caesar's death, when Octavian's survival looked highly unlikely. And it argues that Virgil wrote as a passionate - and brave - partisan of Octavian, who - like a...
Since its first appearance in 2008, this book has changed the landscape of Virgilian studies. Analysing closely the logic and the literary genres of V...
The studies in this volume provide new insights into the traditional historians' question, 'What actually happened at Sparta?'. But the implications of the work go far beyond Laconia. They concern preoccupations of some of the most studied of Greek writers.
The studies in this volume provide new insights into the traditional historians' question, 'What actually happened at Sparta?'. But the implications o...
Nine new studies here explore, and reconstruct, determinant episodes of Greek, Hellenistic and Roman history. The authors argue that hindsight - especially in modern works - has falsified the past, by playing down or eliminating the record of ancient unfulfilled forecasts, and of trends in events which in the long term did not obviously prove predominant. The authors also highlight the efforts of the best-placed writers in Antiquity not to be misled by hindsight, but rather to give due weight to the working of hopes and fears, and of trends in events, which with remote retrospect would tend...
Nine new studies here explore, and reconstruct, determinant episodes of Greek, Hellenistic and Roman history. The authors argue that hindsight - espec...
This collection, first published in 1989, investigates aspects of the Spartan polity which have often been overlooked or underestimated. Viewed at least until the Renaissance as the epitome of classical virtues, Sparta has in the last two centuries suffered a rapid decline in reputation among liberal-minded scholars, repelled by many of the repressive measures employed by this remarkably successful city-state, which for centuries dominated mainland Greece. Recent studies have emphasised permanent problems which beset Sparta: the small size of her citizen body, the tensions between noble...
This collection, first published in 1989, investigates aspects of the Spartan polity which have often been overlooked or underestimated. Viewed at lea...
