When the Senate ordered Julius Caesar, conqueror of Gaul, to disband his troops, he instead marched his soldiers across the Rubicon River, in violation of Roman law. The Senate turned to its proconsul, Pompey the Great, for help. But Pompey's respons...

We often talk loosely of the "tyranny of the majority" as a threat to the workings of democracy. But, in ancient Greece, the analogy of demos and tyrant was no mere metaphor, nor a simple reflection of elite prejudice. Instead, it highlighted an impo...

During the Persian Wars, Sparta and Athens worked in tandem to defeat what was, in terms of relative resources and power, the greatest empire in human history. For the decade and a half that followed, they continued their collaboration until a rift o...

The first democracy, established in ancient Greece more than 2,500 years ago, has served as the foundation for every democratic system of government instituted down the centuries. In this lively history, author Thomas N. Mitchell tells the full and r...

Conspirator and assassin, philosopher and statesman, promoter of peace and commander in war, Marcus Brutus (ca. 85-42 BC) was a controversial and enigmatic man even to those who knew him. His leading role in the murder of Julius Caesar on the Ides of...

The Roman Empire has been a source of inspiration and a model for imitation for Western empires practically since the moment Rome fell. Yet, as Julia Hell shows in "The Conquest of Ruins", what has had the strongest grip on aspiring imperial imaginat...

Authored by internationally renowned scholars, the 20 essays written for this volume explore topics ranging from the influence of Hellenistic art in the ancient Roman world to the ongoing excavations at Pergamon. All aspects of Hellenistic art are di...

What distinguished the true alchemist from the fraud? This question animated the lives and labors of the common men – and occasionally women – who made a living as alchemists in the sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Holy Roman Empire. As purveyors o...