BCPaperbacks – serie

Our understanding of Greek and Roman civilization is in considerable measure a product of the intelligence and literary skills of its historians. Writing at different times and from different vantage points, the surviving historians illustrate the influences to which the genre was subjected in the course of its development. After Herodotus had established history as an independent form of literature, Thucydides defined its purpose and set a high standard of scientific and literary skill. Xenophon introduced new and abiding characteristics and Polybius repudiated the influences of rhetoric and drama and introduced Hellenistic qualities and an new focus - Rome. Sallust, Caesar, Tacitus and Livy among others, commented on the affairs of the Roman Republic and Empire. This book provides a survey of the historians of the ancient Greek and Roman world, exporing their surviving work, style and influences.

This study appraises the work of all the Roman satirists, from the 2nd century BC, to the end of the reign of Hadrian in AD 138. The satirists' work is shown to reflect the constantly changing society in which they lived, and its topics range from the morally earnest to the bawdy. Certain themes are examined which are common to some degree to all the satirists - autobiographical revelation, personal invective, political and ethical judgements and literary criticism. The book provides an exposition of the tradition of verse satire from Lucilius through Horace and Persius to Juvenal, with an assessment of the structure and distinctive literary quality of each satire. It discusses satire in the Menippean tradition, a composite form of prose and verse which was used first by Varro, then by Petronius and by Seneca in his "Apocolocyntosis", a comical and malicious satire on the deification of the emperor Claudius.

The first edition of this study of the greatest and most original of Roman historians appeared in 1981 and was enthusiastically received by reviewers as the most ambitious book on Tacitus to appear since Sir Ronald Syme's great work thirty years ago. This is the second paperback edition, incorporating corrections and an up-to-date bibliography.

Seutonius, a Roman historian, was the author of "The Lives of the Caesars". This biography sets the historian's career and his method of dealing with his subject matter in the context of Roman society in the early Empire, and draws a picture of the coherence of Suetonius's life, appointments, scholarship and literary activities. Seutonius is presented as a man of learning, rather than as a failed narrative historian. This portrait takes account of recent evidence concerning his life and seeks to clarify the character of "The Lives of the Caesars" as a description of emperors and Roman imperial society by a scholarly biographer who himself was in the service of a scholarly Caesar - the Emperor Hadrian.

This introductory history of Sparta gives readers an accessible overview of the intense and brilliant history of the great Greek city state.It covers the gradual expansion of Sparta's authority in the Peloponnese, her leadership of the Greeks against the Persians, the rivalry with Athens, her short period of complete supremacy in Greece until 371, and the collapse which followed down to the Roman conquest.

This text sets out to illuminate all the central themes of Roman satire. It offers a synchronic assessment of different aspects of the work of Lucilius, Horace, Persius and Juvenal: their aims; their styles; and their views on freedom of speech, class patronage, Greeks and sex. In addition it contains a sympathetic presentation in English of the poetry of Lucilius.

This study of early Greek lyric provides portraits of Archilochus, Alcaeus and Sappho and their poetry. It looks at their social setting, and their purposes within it.

This history of Athenian democracy covers the period 403-322 BC, and focuses in particular on the crucial last thirty years which coincided with the political career of Demosthenes and ended with his suicide in 322. It examines Athenian democracy both as a political system and as an ideology. In describing the former it distinguishes between the three major decision-making organs (the Assembly,the Legislators and the People's Courts) and the magistrates who were responsible for preparing the agenda for the legislature and also for carrying its decisions into effect. In discussing Athenian democratic ideology, the book also makes the important distinction between the ideals held by the democrats themselves and those imputed to them by the critics of democracy. The Athenians conceived of liberty both as the ability to participate in the decision-making process, and as the privilege to live without oppression from state or other citizens. Equality was not considered as an equality of nature, but as one of opportunity.

This text offers an introduction, Latin text, translation and literary commentary on seventeen poems by Catullus, Propertius, Tibullus and Ovid. It is intended for students who are approaching the genre of Latin love elegy for the first time - both those who have a knowledge of Latin and those who may wish to study the genre in translation. The poems have been selected to represent each author's particular qualities; while the commentary aims to bring out their literary qualities and invites comparison and contrast between them. Revised from a previous edition - "Reading Latin Love Elegy" - which contained no text, this book includes translations of Catullus, Propertious and Ovid by Guy Lee; and versions of Tibullus by Joan Booth, who also provides the introduction and commentary.

"The Aeneid of Virgil" is one of the greatest works of Classical antiquity. This study by the Virgilian scholar R. Deryck Williams, first published in 1987 and long unavailable, sets the "Aeneid" in its historical literary background and shows how Virgil related his own world of the newly established Roman Empire to the experience of the past. The poetic qualities of epic are analysed and illustrated by frequent quotations from the Latin, always with prose translations. The book will be appreciated by students and teachers of literature, and by knowledgeable non-academic readers. James Morwood's new Foreword for this edition contains an appreciation of R.D. Williams' work and provides a select bibliography of later writing on the subject.

No Western text boasts a life as long as the "Iliad", and few can match its energy and glory. This introduction to Homer's poem sees it as rooted in a particular culture with narrative and thematic conventions that are only partly explained by assumptions about the properties of oral poetry. Professor Mueller follows Plato and Aristotle in seeing the plot of the "Iliad" as a distinctly Homeric 'invention' which shaped Attic tragedy and the concept of dramatic action in Western literature. In this second edition the text has been revised in many places, and a new chapter on Homeric repetitions has been added.

It is a commonplace to say that in antiquity philosophy was conceived as a way of life or an art of living, but precisely what such claims amount to has remained unclear. If ancient philosophers did think that philosophy should transform an individual's way of life, then what conception of philosophy stands behind this claim? John Sellars explores this question via a detailed account of ancient Stoic ideas about the nature and function of philosophy. He considers the Socratic background to Stoic thinking about philosophy and Sceptical objections raised by Sextus Empiricus, and offers readings of late Stoic texts by Epictetus and Marcus Aurelius. Sellars argues that the conception of philosophy as an 'art of living', inaugurated by Socrates and developed by the Stoics, has persisted since antiquity and remains a living alternative to modern attempts to assimilate philosophy to the natural sciences. It also enables us to rethink the relationship between an individual's philosophy and their biography. The book appears here in paperback for the first time with a new preface by the author.

This engrossing book was the first ever investigation into the plight of the disabled and deformed in Graeco-Roman society, drawing on a wealth of material, including literary texts, medical tracts, vase paintings, sculpture, mythology and ethnography. It is now issued in paperback for the first time with a new preface and updated bibliography.

The Theodosian Code, put together under the Eastern Roman Emperor Theodosius II, is a compliation of the laws dating from 312 to 438 AD, when the code was published. It brought order to a vast unmanageable body of law and formed part of the basis for the sixth-century Institutes of Justinian, fundamental to later jurisprudence. This book is an important collection of articles, well established as an essential resource for students of Roman law, long unavailable and here published in paperback for the first time with a new preface and updated bibliography. Contributors: Simon Corcoran; Brian Croke; Judith Evans Grubbs; Jill Harries; Tony Honore; David Hunt; John Matthews; Boudewijn Sirks; Mark Vessey; Dafydd Walters; Ian Wood.