The crisis of the Roman Republic and its transformation into an Empire have fascinated generations of scholars. It has long been assumed that a dramatic demographic decline of the rural free peasantry (which was supplanted by slaves) triggered the series of social and economic developments which eventually led to Rome's political crisis during the first century BC.  Meer

This book explores the history of rhetorical thought and examines the gradual association of different aspects of rhetorical theory with two outstanding fourth-century BCE writers: Lysias and Isocrates.  Meer

This book argues that New Comedy has a far richer performance texture than has previously been recognised. Offering close readings of all the major plays of Menander, it shows how intertextuality - the sustained dialogue of New Comedy performance with the diverse ideological, philosophical, literary and theatrical discourses of contemporary polis culture - is crucial in creating semantic depth and thus offsetting the impression that the plots are simplistic love stories with no political or ideological resonances.  Meer

M. I. Finley (1912–86) was the most famous ancient historian of his generation. He was admired by his peers, and was Professor of Ancient History at the University of Cambridge and Fellow of the British Academy.  Meer

This volume offers a new and interdisciplinary treatment of syllabic writing in ancient Cyprus. A team of distinguished scholars tackles epigraphic, palaeographic, linguistic, archaeological, historical and terminological problems relating to the island's writing systems in the Late Bronze Age and Iron Age, from the appearance of writing around the fifteenth century down to the end of the first millennium BC.  Meer

This book demonstrates that we need not choose between seeing so-called Presocratic thinkers as rational philosophers or as religious sages. In particular, it rethinks fundamentally the emergence of systematic epistemology and reflection on speculative inquiry in Hesiod, Xenophanes and Parmenides.  Meer

This book explores the history of rhetorical thought and examines the gradual association of different aspects of rhetorical theory with two outstanding fourth-century BCE writers: Lysias and Isocrates.  Meer

A prolific philosopher who also held Rome's highest political office, Cicero was uniquely qualified to write on political philosophy. In this book Professor Atkins provides a fresh interpretation of Cicero's central political dialogues - the Republic and Laws.  Meer

In this book Dr Wallace makes a fundamental contribution to the study of urbanism in the Roman provinces. She attempts for the first time to present a detailed archaeological account of the first decade of one of the best-excavated cities in the Roman Empire.  Meer

The Roman sanctuary at Bath has long been used in scholarship as an example par excellence of religious and artistic syncretisms in Roman Britain. With its monumental temple, baths, and hot springs, its status as one of the most significant Roman sites in the province is unquestioned.  Meer

Book 4 of Tacitus' Annals, described by Sir Ronald Syme as 'the best that Tacitus ever wrote', covers the years AD 23–28, the pivotal period in the principate of the emperor Tiberius.  Meer

Ascanius is the most prominent child hero in Virgil's Aeneid. He accompanies his father from Troy to Italy and is present from the first book of the epic to the last; he is destined to found the city of Alba Longa and the Julian family to which Caesar and Augustus both belonged; and he hunts, fights, makes speeches, and even makes a joke.  Meer

After Plato and Aristotle, the Stoics, from the third century BCE onwards, developed the third great classical conception of wisdom. This book offers a reconstruction of this pivotal notion in Stoicism, starting out from the two extant Stoic definitions, 'knowledge of human and divine matters' and 'fitting expertise'.  Meer

The satirist Juvenal remains one of antiquity's greatest question marks. His Satires entered the mainstream of the classical tradition with nothing more than an uncertain name and a dubious biography to recommend them.  Meer

Through a series of interdisciplinary studies this book argues that the Athenians themselves invented the notion of 'classical' tragedy just a few generations after the city's defeat in the Peloponnesian War.  Meer

In this book, Chad Jorgenson challenges the view that for Plato the good life is one of pure intellection, arguing that his last writings increasingly insist on the capacity of reason to impose measure on our emotions and pleasures.  Meer

Oscan was spoken in Southern Italy in the second half of the first millennium BC. Here, for the first time, all the evidence for the spelling of Oscan in the Greek alphabet is collected and examined.  Meer

The Colloquia are manuals written to help ancient Greeks and Romans get around in each other's languages; they contain examples of how to conduct activities like shopping, banking, visiting friends, hosting parties, taking oaths, winning lawsuits, using the public baths, having fights, making excuses and going to school.  Meer

David Balme's major critical edition of Aristotle's largest and perhaps least studied treatise is based on a collation of the 26 known extant manuscripts and a study of the early Latin translations.  Meer

When does a continuum become a divide? This book investigates the genetic relationship between Linear A and Linear B, two Bronze Age scripts attested on Crete and Mainland Greece and understood to have developed one out of the other.  Meer