This book showcases a figure whose life and work bridge Classical and Hellenistic Greece. It comprises Tiziano Dorandi’s comprehensive new edition of the Clearchus ‘fragments’, accompanied by a richly annotated English translation from Stephen White, as well as nine new studies examining key aspects of Clearchus’ thought. Clearchus, from Soli on the island of Cyprus, was an Aristotelian philosopher and cultural historian active in the later fourth and early third centuries BCE. A versatile thinker and prolific author, he wrote on a wide range of subjects. Although none of his works survive, he is cited extensively by later authors. Topics addressed in this volume include his accounts of souls during sleep, educational traditions, forms of love, luxurious living, sage maxims and other traditional sayings, aquatic wildlife, lunar phenomena, and his relation to Plato and Platonism. Clearchus of Soli will interest both students and scholars of ancient Greek history, philosophy and science, and especially anyone interested in Aristotle and his circle, Hellenistic literature and culture, or Greek cultural history generally.

This landmark contribution to ongoing debates about perceptions of the Jews in antiquity examines the attitudes of Greek writers of the Hellenistic period toward the Jewish people. Among the leading Greek intellectuals who devoted special attention to the Jews were Theophrastus (the successor of Aristotle), Hecataeus of Abdera (the father of "scientific" ethnography), and Apollonius Molon (probably the greatest rhetorician of the Hellenistic world). Bezalel Bar-Kochva examines the references of these writers and others to the Jews in light of their literary output and personal background; their religious, social, and political views; their literary and stylistic methods; ethnographic stereotypes current at the time; and more.

Relations between Jews and non-Jews in the Hellenistic-Roman period were marked by suspicion and hate, maintain most studies of that topic. But if such conjectures are true, asks Louis Feldman, how did Jews succeed in winning so many adherents, whether full-fledged proselytes or "sympathizers" who adopted one or more Jewish practices? Systematically evaluating attitudes toward Jews from the time of Alexander the Great to the fifth century A.D., Feldman finds that Judaism elicited strongly positive and not merely unfavorable responses from the non-Jewish population. Jews were a vigorous presence in the ancient world, and Judaism was strengthened substantially by the development of the Talmud. Although Jews in the Diaspora were deeply Hellenized, those who remained in Israel were able to resist the cultural inroads of Hellenism and even to initiate intellectual counterattacks. Feldman draws on a wide variety of material, from Philo, Josephus, and other Graeco-Jewish writers through the Apocrypha, the Pseudepigrapha, the Church Councils, Church Fathers, and imperial decrees to Talmudic and Midrashic writings and inscriptions and papyri. What emerges is a rich description of a long era to which conceptions of Jewish history as uninterrupted weakness and suffering do not apply.

This fascinating book contains information on over 2,300 ancient Western philosophers, from Abammon to Zoticus. Covering the period from the seventh century BC to the seventh century AD, it brings together the extremely well-known and the thoroughly obscure. Those already familiar with ancient philosophy will find it an invaluable and handy work of reference with a breadth of coverage that far exceeds any other single-volume work on the subject. Those new to the subject will find it a useful introduction. The ideas of the major thinkers are summarised and an historical overview of ancient philosophy allows them to be placed in their proper context. The book also provides useful background reading for anyone interested in the ancient world who wants to find out more about its intellectual life. A minimum of philosophical jargon ensures its accessibility to a wide audience. As in ancient histories of philosophy, there is also a modest amount of gossip.

This book collects twenty two previously published essays and one new one by Erich S. Gruen who has written extensively on the literature and history of early Judaism and the experience of the Jews in the Greco-Roman world. His many articles on this subject have, however, appeared mostly in conference volumes and Festschriften, and have therefore not had wide circulation. By putting them together in a single work, this will bring the essays to the attention of a much broader scholarly readership and make them more readily available to students in the fields of ancient history and early Judaism. The pieces are quite varied, but develop a number of connected and related themes: Jewish identity in the pagan world, the literary representations by Jews and pagans of one another, the interconnections of Hellenism and Judaism, and the Jewish experience under Hellenistic monarchies and the Roman empire.

An innovative multidisciplinary study of the relationship between visual perception and temporal meaning in ancient Greek literature and history writing

Why would I spend a good portion of my time over the last 35 years gathering information on the Gymnosophists? The story begins even earlier. As an undergraduate student in the Flint College of the University of Michigan, I pursued an English major with a strong history minor-always looking for something between the two, and rarely finding it. Then in my practice teaching, I happened into one of the early experimental high school courses in Interdisciplinary Humanities. With the exciting interrelationships between art, literature, music, philosophy and history, I said YES-this was what I had been looking for. So I pioneered in teaching high school Humanities for the next few years. Interdisciplinary Humanities was a bottom-up movement. Gradually, colleges began offering Masters programs to give teachers the rich background they needed. I decided I was not tied to Michigan where it was cold; I would find the best Masters program in Humanities anywhere in the world, and go there. Well, it turned out that the best Masters program in the world was at Wayne State University in Detroit, of all places. Unlike other programs that were really just double majors, Wayne offered truly interdisciplinary classes. Moreover, they offered an Eastern track and a Western track. Knowing that I would never find that Eastern track anywhere else, I studied interdisciplinary courses in the cultures of India, China, Japan, and Egypt. (The middle-eastern professor was on sabbatical when I was there.) I especially liked India-perhaps because I had already travelled around the world, and India impressed me the most.