Ancient category: 10855 books

Stoicism was a key philosophical movement in the Hellenistic period. Today, the stoics are central to the study of Ethics and Ancient Philosophy. In The Stoics: A Guide for the Perplexed, M. Andrew Holowchak sketches, from Zeno to Aurelius, a framework thatcaptures the tenor of stoic ethical thinking...

Classical Greek Oligarchy thoroughly reassesses an important but neglected form of ancient Greek government, the "rule of the few." Matthew Simonton challenges scholarly orthodoxy by showing that oligarchy was not the default mode of politics from time immemorial, but instead emerged alongside,...

Work in Progress offers an in-depth study of the role of literary revision in the compositional practices and representational strategies of Roman authors at the end of the republic and the beginning of the principate. It focuses on Cicero, Horace, Quintilian, Martial, and Pliny the Younger, but also...

Ancient Monuments of the United States is a brief survey of the remains of Native American Fortifications, Places of Worship, Sepulchral Mounds and other remains of the civilization that occupied the Eastern Seaboard and Mississippi Valley prior to European Colonization. Written in the mid 19th century...

The concept of human rights has a long history. Its practical origins, as distinct from its theoretical antecedents, are said to be comparatively recent, going back no further than the American and French Bills of Rights of the eighteenth century. Even those landmarks are seen as little more than...

The success of ancient Egyptian civilization came partly from its ability to adapt to the conditions of the Nile River valley. The predictable flooding and controlled irrigation of the fertile valley produced surplus crops, which supported a more dense population, and social development and culture....

An interest in the magic, religion and spirituality of the ancient Egyptians continues to increase steadily as people begin to realise that it is possible to follow this ancient tradition in the 21st century. The Egyptian religion is the oldest recorded belief system in the world, having just entered...

Magic has always been a widespread phenomenon in Greek Society, starting from Homer’s Circe (the first ‘evil witch’ in western history) and extending to the pervasive belief in the ‘evil eye’ in the twenty-first century Greece. Indeed, magic is probably the most ancient and durable among...

This is an in-depth study of a vital and fascinating aspect of ancient Egyptian religion as preserved in the Pyramid Texts of the Fifth Dynasty. The creative and life-giving powers of the waters that sustain this world are also present in the Egyptian underworld and enable the dead king who has lived...

There has been much debate in scholarship over the factors determining the outcome of legal hearings in classical Athens. Specifically, there is divergence regarding the extent to which judicial panels were influenced by non-legal considerations in addition to, or even instead of, questions of law....

Challenging both traditional and fashionable theories, this collection of pieces from an international range of contributors explores the separation of the human past into history, archaeology and their related sub-disciplines. Each case study challenges the validity of this separation and...

We all have choices to make in our lives. How do we know if our decisions are the correct ones? How can we tell if our judgment is sound? Will the abandoned choices, the lost options, the lives we never led, haunt us like spectral reproaches? Will we be surrounded by wraiths of lives unlived, wistfully...

Who marched in religious processions and why? How were blood sacrifice and communal feasting related to identities in the ancient Greek city? With questions such as these, current scholarship aims to demonstrate the ways in which religion maps on to the socio-political structures of the Greek polis...

Few authors of the Victorian period were as immersed in classical learning as Oscar Wilde. Although famous now and during his lifetime as a wit, aesthete, and master epigrammist, Wilde distinguished himself early on as a talented classical scholar, studying at Trinity College Dublin and Oxford and...