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Tyrants and tyranny are more than the antithesis of democracy and the mark of political failure: they are a dynamic response to social and political pressures. This book examines the autocratic rulers and dynasties of classical Greece and Rome and the changing concepts of tyranny in political thought and culture. It brings together historians, political theorists and philosophers, all offering new perspectives on the autocratic governments of the ancient world. The volume is divided into four parts. It looks at the ways in which the term ‘tyranny’ was used and understood, and the kinds of individual who were called tyrants. The book then focuses on the genesis of tyranny and the social and political circumstances in which tyrants arose. The chapters in the final part of the book examine the presentation of tyrants by themselves and in literature and history. Part IV discusses the achievements of episodic tyranny within the non-autocratic regimes of Sparta and Rome and of autocratic regimes in Persia and the western Mediterranean world. Written by a wide range of leading experts in their field, this book offers a new and comparative study of tyranny within Greek, Roman, and Persian society.

During the Hellenistic Period (c. 330-30 BCE), Alexander the Great and his successors reshaped their Persian and Greco-Macedonian legacies to create a new kind of rulership that was neither ‘western’ nor ‘eastern’ and would profoundly influence the later development of court culture and monarchy in both the Roman West and Iranian East. Drawing on the socio-political models of Norbert Elias and Charles Tilly, and covering topics such as palace architecture, royal women and court ritual, Courts and Elites in the Hellenistic Empires shows how the Hellenistic dynastic courts were instrumental in the integration of local elites in the empires, and the (re)distribution of power, wealth, and status. It analyses the competition among courtiers for royal favour and the, not always successful, attempts of the Hellenistic rulers to use these struggles to their own advantage.

The book is an attempt to synthesize the results of several studies in archaeology, numismatics, history, and sigillography that have recently advanced our knowledge of early medieval Greece. Instead of a polar opposition between the Byzantine Empire and “barbarians” (Slavs or Bulgars), the history of early medieval Greece must be understood within a larger Balkan context shaped fundamentally by complex economic and social phenomena. An older tradition has seen the changes taking place in Greece between ca. 500 and ca. 1050 as the result of exclusively political factors, mainly related to the revival of Byzantine military power under the Macedonian dynasty and the desire to convert the Slavs to Christianity. Nevertheless, recent studies in the economic history of early medieval Europe suggest a different view. Moreover, archaeologists interested in long-term changes have long recognized that the explosion of settlement assemblages is not unique to Greece and that similar developments are archaeologically documented for other areas of the Balkans that were not under Byzantine rule at that time. More economically minded accounts of the so-called Middle Byzantine period have revealed the complex relation between trade and agriculture in the economic take-off of the Macedonian period. The book offers for the first time a synthetic view of the economic and social processes at work in early medieval Greece, but pays attention also to political and religious phenomena.

The civilisation of Ancient Mesopotamia flourished between 3300 BC and 2000 BC in the southern half of the lands between and either side of the Tigris and Euphrates, where a vast grain harvest (about equal to Canada's today) supported a large and well-ordered population. The early development of cuneiform writing, the world's first phonetic script, means that, for the first time in the history of humanity, it is possible to learn something of how people thought and felt. This book aims to do just that and, as the reader soon finds out, succeeds triumphantly. It takes the reader on a voyage of discovery into the public and private realms of the lives of our first civilised ancestors – their cooking and eating, feasts and festivals, wine and drinking, love and sex, what women could do and what they could not, magic and medicine, trial by ordeal, life in a palace above and below stairs, astrology and divination, gods and religion, and literature and myth.

This book describes the legends surrounding the origins, foundation, and early history of Rome; the significance the Romans attached to the legends of their origins; and the uses to which they put them. Between 1000 BC and 650 BC a cluster of small, isolated groups of thatched huts on the Roman hills became an extensive and complex city, its monumental buildings and large public spaces evidence of power and wealth. Two competing foundation legends accounted for this shift, one featuring the Trojan fugitive Aeneas and the other the wolf-reared Romulus and Remus. Both played a significant role in Roman thought and identity, preoccupying generations of Roman historians and providing an important theme in Roman poetry. In the last two centuries, the foundation era of Rome has been the subject of extensive investigations by archaeologists. These have revealed much that was previously a mystery and have allowed the piecing together of a coherent account of the early history of the city. The book considers this evidence and the degree to which it supports or undermines the legends, Roman documentary accounts, and the work of modern scholars. It reveals what now seems the most probable history of Rome's origins and rise to regional pre-eminence.

This volume brings together an international team of scholars to explore the shifting shapes and functions of laughter and tears in the history, religion, art and literature of Greek communities from Antiquity to Byzantium and beyond. What makes us laugh and cry, sometimes at the same time? How do these two primal, seemingly discrete and non-verbal modes of expression intersect in the everyday life and ritual of Greek communities, and what range of emotions do they entail? How may they be voiced, shaped and coloured in literature and liturgy, art and music? What happens when laughter and tears slip into each other and back again? What can we learn about human emotions and communicative modes across the ages, genres and cultures of Hellenic civilisation? The book breaks new ground in tracing the emotional, socio-cultural, religious and literary aspects of laughter and tears in a range of different artistic, cultural and historical contexts, across the longue durée of Greek civilisation. It brings students of ancient and Byzantine emotion into dialogue and shows how much is to be gained by collaborating across the disciplinary and chronological boundaries that demarcate the historical study of the Greek world.

This book offers a new approach to the study of ancient slavery. Informed by the global history of slavery, it eschews traditional approaches to slavery as a static institution. It explores instead the diverse strategies and the various contexts in which slavery was employed. It offers a new historicist approach to the study of slave identity and the various networks and communities that slaves created or participated in. Instead of seeing slaves merely as passive objects of exploitation and domination, it focuses on slave agency and the various ways in which slaves played an active role in the history of ancient societies. It examines slavery not only as an economic and social phenomenon, but also in its political, religious and cultural ramifications. Finally, it presents a comparative framework for the study of ancient slaveries, by examining Greek and Roman slaveries alongside other slaving systems in the Near East, the Mediterranean and the Black Sea.

This is an account of life in ancient Rome from the end of the third century to the beginning of the seventh. At the beginning of the period Rome was an imperial power and the centre of a classical civilisation, albeit with a growing Christian minority. By its end, Rome was a Papal power, the centre of western Christianity – the Pantheon itself was being transformed into a church. The book charts the change in terms of its effect on the city and its environs (the destruction of temples, the building of St Peter’s), the nature and consequences of Vandal and Gothic invasions, the survival and conversion of the nobility and the plebes, and the long struggle between ancient religions and rituals and Christianity and its consequences for the social and physical fabric of the city. There are chapters on the family and life cycle, the changing measurement of time (a crucial cultural revolution), education, the final years of the games, and the early years of the papacy. The book provides a social history of the city of Rome during a period when its role as the centre of western civilisation was transformed yet, against considerable odds, maintained.

This book collects and introduces some of the writing on sexual behaviour and gender differences in ancient Greece and ancient Rome, including four chapters translated from German and French. For centuries, discussions of sexuality and gender in the ancient world, if they took place at all, focussed on how the roles and spheres of the sexes were divided. While men occupied the public sphere of the community, ranged through the Greek and Roman worlds and participated in politics, courts, theatre and sport, women kept to the home. Sex occupied a separate sphere, in scholarly terms restricted to specialists in ancient medicine. And then the subjects were transformed, first by Sir Kenneth Dover, then by Michel Foucault. The book charts and illustrates the evolution of scholarly investigation of a once-hidden aspect of the ancient world. In so doing, it sheds light on aspects of ancient lives and thought.

This book describes every aspect of women's lives in ancient Greece, including their religious, familial and domestic duties; their economic importance; and their social, moral and legal status as wives, cohabitees or slaves. It examines women's sexual roles, what the status of a woman's body was and what her own and others' attitudes were likely to be towards it. The book does all this in the context of the development and achievements of Greek civilisation. Women appear not to have been highly regarded in ancient Greece, with female infanticide a common practice. Strains of misogyny can be heard in Greek literature, drama and philosophy: ‘The most unintelligent people in the world’ is how one character refers to women in Plato's Symposium (which also features Diotima, his best-known female sage). Women had few duties beyond the home, and the evidence that they existed at all is tantalisingly small. Yet, by piecing together fragments and clues, the book gives us a vivid account of women's lives in Greece 2,500 years ago.