Kategoria BISAC: History >> Ancient - Rome

• Tacitus is one of the most important Roman historians of his time, as well as a great literary stylist, whose work is characterized by his philosophy of human nature
• Encourages interdisciplinary discussion intended to engage scholars beyond Classics...

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...

Slavery is a word heavy with emotional and political overtones - to be owned by another person and treated as a commodity is the ultimate injustice. But this was the fate of a substantial percentage of the population of the ancient world. Slavery was essential to their societies; thus slavery is necessarily a core topic in the study of classical civilisation. Most previous studies of ancient slavery have grown out of historical and literary research. In the flood of books and papers on the subject, the archaeological evidence has often been ignored. This book fills the gap by confronting,...

Interest in food and drink as an academic discipline has been growing significantly in recent years. This sourcebook is a unique asset to many courses on food as it offers a thematic approach to eating and drinking in antiquity. For classics courses focusing on ancient social history to introductory courses on the history of food and drink, as well as those offerings with a strong sociological or anthropological approach this volume provides an unparalleled compilation of essential source material. The chronological scope of the excerpts extends from Homer in the Eighth Century BCE to the...

From flowers and perfumes to urban sanitation and personal hygiene, smell a sense that is simultaneously sublime and animalistic has played a pivotal role in western culture and thought. Greek and Roman writers and thinkers lost no opportunity to connect the smells that bombarded their senses to the social, political and cultural status of the individuals and environments that they encountered: godly incense and burning sacrifices, seductive scents, aromatic cuisines, stinking bodies, pungent farmyards and festering back-streets.

The cultural study of smell has largely focused on...

Within the colonial history of the British Empire there are difficulties in reconstructing the lives of people that came from very different traditions of experience. The Archaeology of Roman Britain argues that a similar critical approach to the lives of people in Roman Britain needs to be developed, not only for the study of the local population but also those coming into Britain from elsewhere in the Empire who developed distinctive colonial lives. This critical, biographical approach can be extended and applied to places, structures, and things which developed in these...

War as Spectacle examines the display of armed conflict in classical antiquity and its impact in the modern world. The contributors address the following questions: how and why was war conceptualized as a spectacle in our surviving ancient Greek and Latin sources? How has this view of war been adapted in post-classical contexts and to what purpose?

This collection of essays engages with the motif of war as spectacle through a variety of theoretical and methodological pathways and frameworks. They include the investigation of the portrayal of armed conflict in ancient Greek...

This volume has its origin in the 14th University of South Africa Classics Colloquium in which the topic and title of the event were inspired by Josiah Ober's seminal work Mass and Elite in Democratic Athens (1989). Indeed the influence this work has had on later research in all aspects of the Greek and Roman world is reflected by the diversity of the papers collected here, which take their cue and starting point from the argument that, in Ober's words (1989, 338): 'Rhetorical communication between masses and elites... was a primary means by which the strategic ends of social...