How we came to seek absolute good in religion and nature—and why that quest often leads us astrayPeople have long looked to nature and the divine as paths to the good. In this panoramic meditation on the harmonious life, Michael Mayerfeld Bell traces how...

From the 1880s through the 1920s a motley collection of American scholars, soldiers of fortune, institutional bureaucrats, and financiers created the academic fields that give us our knowledge of the ancient Near East. Bruce Kuklick's new book begins...

The Gibb Memorial Trust was founded in 1902 in memory of Elias John Wilkinson Gibb, a scholar who devoted his life to researching the history, literature, philosophy and religion of the Turks, Persians and Arabs. His particular interest was the poetry of...

The Greeks and Romans lived according to a distinctively Hellenic conception of time as an aspect of cosmic order and regularity. Appropriating ideas from Egypt and the Near East, the Greeks integrated them into a cosmological framework governed by...

How rulers in ancient and medieval Europe expressed their power through cities, buildings, and sitesThe Power of Place explores the nature of power—the power of kings, emperors, and popes—through the places that these rulers created or developed,...

It's a familiar story: a beautiful woman is abducted and her husband journeys to recover her. This story’s best-known incarnation is also a central Greek myth—the abduction of Helen that led to the Trojan War. Stealing Helen surveys a vast range of...

Dream interpretation was a prominent feature of the intellectual and imaginative world of late antiquity, for martyrs and magicians, philosophers and theologians, polytheists and monotheists alike. Finding it difficult to account for the prevalence of...

Aelius Aristides' Hieroi Logoi present a unique first-person narrative from the ancient world—a narrative that seems at once public and private, artful and naive. While scholars have embraced the Logoi as a rich source for Imperial-era religion,...

The definitive biography of the legendary "first citizen of Athens" Pericles has the rare distinction of giving his name to an entire period of history, embodying what has often been taken as the golden age of the ancient Greek world. "Periclean" Athens...

This work is a sampling of the Hippocratic Corpus, a collection of ancient Greek medical works. At the beginning, and interspersed throughout, there are discussions on the philosophy of being a physician. There is a large section about how to treat limb...

Timeless political wisdom from ancient history's greatest statesmanMarcus Cicero, Rome's greatest statesman and orator, was elected to the Roman Republic's highest office at a time when his beloved country was threatened by power-hungry politicians, dire...

Nine Greek biographies illustrate the rise and fall of Athens, from the legendary days of Theseus, the city's founder, through Solon, Themistocles, Aristides, Cimon, Pericles, Nicias, and Alcibiades, to the razing of its walls by Lysander.For more than...

In The Construction of Authority in Ancient Rome and Byzantium, Sarolta Takács examines the role of the Roman emperor, who was the single most important law-giving authority in Roman society. Emperors had to embody the qualities or virtues espoused by...

This series of twenty complementary essays by experts in the field explores the art, social status, reputation and image of the ancient actor in the Greek and Roman worlds, from the sixth century B.C. to the Byzantine period. It covers tragedy, comedy,...