The surviving body of ancient letters offers the reader a stunning variety of material, ranging from the everyday letters preserved among the Oxyrhynchus papyri to imperial rescripts, New Testament Epistles, fictional or pseudepigraphical letters and a wealth of missives on almost every conceivable subject. They offer us a unique insight into ancient practices in the fields of politics, literature, philosophy, medicine and many other areas. This collection presents a series of case studies in ancient letters, asking how each letter writer manipulates the epistolary tradition, why he chose the...

Lucretius' didactic masterpiece De Rerum Natura (On the Nature of Things) is one of the most brilliant and powerful poems in the Latin language, a passionate attempt at dispelling humanity's fear of death and its enslavement by false beliefs about the gods, and a detailed exposition of Epicurean atomist physics. For centuries, it has raised the question of whether it is primarily a poem or primarily a philosophical treatise, which also presents scientific doctrine. The current volume seeks to unite the three disciplinary aspects -- poetry, philosophy, and science -- in order to offer a...