As an urban movement, the early groups of Christ followers came into contact with the many small groups in Greek and Roman antiquity. Organized around the workplace, a deity, a diasporic identity, or a neighborhood, these associations gathered in sma...

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...

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...

As an aesthetic ideal, classicism is often associated with a conventional set of rules founded on supposedly timeless notions such as order, reason, and decorum. As a result, it is sometimes viewed as rigid, outdated, or stodgy. But in actuality, cla...

The Battle for Alesia was a decisive moment in world history. It determined whether Rome would finally conquer Gaul or whether Celtic chieftain Vercingetorix would throw off the yoke and consequently whether a number of independent Celtic tribal king...

Memory studies one of the most vibrant research fields of the present day brings together such diverse disciplines as art and archaeology, history, religion, literature, sociology, media studies, and neuroscience. In scholarship on ancient Rome, stud...

This volume completes publication of the cuneiform documents of the Hellenistic period in the "Yale Babylonian Collection", begun by A. T. Clay in 1913. This long-awaited edition contains reproductions of 103 texts from the city of Uruk, dating to th...

As any reader of the "Symposium" knows, the ancient Greek philosopher Socrates conversed over lavish banquets, kept watch on who was eating too much fish, and imbibed liberally without ever getting drunk. In other words, James Davidson writes, he ref...

This is an illuminating collection of essays that explore the idea of cultural identity in the ancient Mediterranean. Cultural identity is a slippery and elusive concept. When applied to the collective self-consciousness among people or nations, it b...

Ancient chroniclers, including Julius Caesar himself, made the Druids and their sacred rituals infamous throughout the Western world. But in fact, as Miranda Aldhouse-Green shows in this fascinating book, the Druids' day-to-day lives were far less lu...