Human communities thrive on prosocial behavior. This book demonstrates from a wide range of perspectives how such behavior is anchored and promoted in classical antiquity by a varied and conceptually rich discourse of ‘valuing others’.

How does a discourse of ‘valuing others’ help to make a group a group? The fifth in a series exploring ‘ancient values’, this book investigates what value terms and evaluative concepts were used in Greece and Rome to articulate the idea that people ‘belong together’, as a family, a group, a polis, a community, or just as fellow human beings. Human communities thrive on prosocial behavior. In eighteen chapters, ranging from Greek tragedy to the Roman gladiators and from house architecture to the concept of friendship, this book demonstrates how such behavior is anchored and promoted by culturally specific expressions of evaluative discourse. Valuing others in classical antiquity should be of interest to linguists, literary scholars, historians, and philosophers alike.

How do people respond to and evaluate their sensory experiences of the natural and man-made world? What does it mean to speak of the ‘value’ of aesthetic phenomena? And in evaluating human arts and artifacts, what are the criteria for success or failure? The sixth in a series exploring ‘ancient values’, this book investigates from a variety of perspectives aesthetic value in classical antiquity. The essays explore not only the evaluative concepts and terms applied to the arts, but also the social and cultural ideologies of aesthetic value itself. Seventeen chapters range from the ‘life without the Muses’ to ‘the Sublime’, and from philosophical views to middle-brow and popular aesthetics. Aesthetic value in classical antiquity should be of interest to classicists, cultural and art historians, and philosophers.

‘Where am I?’. Our physical orientation in place is one of the defining characteristics of our embodied existence. However, while there is no human life, culture, or action without a specific location functioning as its setting, people go much further than this bare fact in attributing meaning and value to their physical environment. 'Landscape’ denotes this symbolic conception and use of terrain. It is a creation of human culture. In Valuing Landscape we explore different ways in which physical environments impacted on the cultural imagination of Greco-Roman Antiquity. In seventeen chapters with different disciplinary perspectives, we demonstrate the values attached to mountains, the underworld, sacred landscapes, and battlefields, and the evaluations of locale connected with migration, exile, and travel.

How did ancient Greeks and Romans regard work? It has long been assumed that elite thinkers disparaged physical work, and that working people rarely commented on their own labors. The papers in this volume challenge these notions by investigating philosophical, literary and working people’s own ideas about what it meant to work. From Plato’s terminology of labor to Roman prostitutes’ self-proclaimed pride in their work, these chapters find ancient people assigning value to multiple different kinds of work, and many different concepts of labor.

The fourth in a series that explores cultural and ethical values in Classical Antiquity, this volume examines the negative foils, the anti-values, against which positive value notions are conceptualized and calibrated in Classical Antiquity. Eighteen chapters address this theme from different perspectives –historical, literary, legal and philosophical. What makes someone into a prototypically ‘bad’ citizen? Or an abomination of a scholar? What is the relationship between ugliness and value? How do icons of sexual perversion, monstruous emperors and detestable habits function in philosophical and rhetorical prose? The book illuminates the many rhetorical manifestations of the concept of ‘badness’ in classical antiquity in a variety of domains.

Winner of CAMWS' 2023 Bolchazy Pedagogy Award. Ancient Women Writers of Greece and Rome features the extant writings of major female authors from the Greco-Roman world, brought together for the first time in a single volume, in both their original languages and translated into English with accompanying commentaries. The most cost-effective and comprehensive way to study the women writers of Greece and Rome, this book provides original texts, accessible text-commentaries, and detailed English translations of the works of ancient female poets and authors such as Sappho and Sulpicia. It takes a student-focused approach, discussing texts alongside new and original English translations and highlighting the rich, diverse scholarship on ancient women writers to specialists and non-specialists alike. The perspectives of women in the ancient world are still relevant and of interest today, as issues of gender and racial (in)equality remain ever-present in modern society. Ancient Women Writers of Greece and Rome provides a valuable teaching tool for students of Greek, Latin, and Classical Studies, as well as those interested in ancient literature, history, and gender studies who do not have proficiency in Greek or Latin.