The Republic is Plato's most famous work and one of the seminal texts of Western philosophy and politics. The characters in this Socratic dialogue - including Socrates himself - discuss whether the just or unjust man is happier. They are the philosopher-kings of imagined cities and they also discuss the nature of philosophy and the soul among other things.

Why philosophy was politics by other means for Rome's greatest statesman In the 40s BCE, during his forced retirement from politics under Caesar's dictatorship, Cicero turned to philosophy, producing a massive and important body of work. As he was acutely aware, this was an unusual undertaking for a Roman statesman because Romans were often hostile to philosophy, perceiving it as foreign and incompatible with fulfilling one's duty as a citizen. How, then, are we to understand Cicero's decision to pursue philosophy in the context of the political, intellectual, and cultural life of the late Roman republic? In A Written Republic, Yelena Baraz takes up this question and makes the case that philosophy for Cicero was not a retreat from politics but a continuation of politics by other means, an alternative way of living a political life and serving the state under newly restricted conditions. Baraz examines the rhetorical battle that Cicero stages in his philosophical prefaces—a battle between the forces that would oppose or support his project. He presents his philosophy as intimately connected to the new political circumstances and his exclusion from politics. His goal—to benefit the state by providing new moral resources for the Roman elite—was traditional, even if his method of translating Greek philosophical knowledge into Latin and combining Greek sources with Roman heritage was unorthodox. A Written Republic provides a new perspective on Cicero's conception of his philosophical project while also adding to the broader picture of late-Roman political, intellectual, and cultural life.

"Archetypes of the cowboy story, tropes drawn from sci-fi, love letters, diaries, confessions all abound in this relentlessly engaging tale. Dodson has quite brilliantly exposed the gears and cogs whirring in the novelist’s imagination. It is a mad and beautiful thing.” --Keith Donohue, The Washington Post Winner of Best of Region for the Southwest in PRINT’s 2016 Regional Design Awards Bats of the Republic is an illuminated novel of adventure, featuring hand-drawn maps and natural history illustrations, subversive pamphlets and science-fictional diagrams, and even a nineteenth-century novel-within-a-novel—an intrigue wrapped in innovative design. In 1843, fragile naturalist Zadock Thomas must leave his beloved in Chicago to deliver a secret letter to an infamous general on the front lines of the war over Texas. The fate of the volatile republic, along with Zadock’s future, depends on his mission. When a cloud of bats leads him off the trail, he happens upon something impossible... Three hundred years later, the world has collapsed and the remnants of humanity cling to a strange society of paranoia. Zeke Thomas has inherited a sealed envelope from his grandfather, an esteemed senator. When that letter goes missing, Zeke engages a fomenting rebellion that could free him—if it doesn’t destroy his relationship, his family legacy, and the entire republic first. As their stories overlap and history itself begins to unravel, a war in time erupts between a lost civilization, a forgotten future, and the chaos of the wild. Bats of the Republic is a masterful novel of adventure and science fiction, of elliptical history and dystopian struggle, and, at its riveting core, of love.

This book is a study both of anachronism in antiquity and of anachronism as a vehicle for understanding antiquity. It explores the post-classical origins and changing meanings of the term 'anachronism' as well as the presence of anachronism in all its forms in classical literature, criticism and material objects. Contrary to the position taken by many modern philosophers of history, this book argues that classical antiquity had a rich and varied understanding of historical difference, which is reflected in sophisticated notions of anachronism. This central hypothesis is tested by an examination of attitudes to temporal errors in ancient literary texts and chronological writings and by analysing notions of anachronistic survival and multitemporality. Rather than seeing a sense of anachronism as something that separates modernity from antiquity, the book suggests that in both ancient writings and their modern receptions chronological rupture can be used as a way of creating a dialogue between past and present. With a selection of case-studies and theoretical discussions presented in a manner suitable for scholars and students both of classical antiquity and of modern history, anthropology, and visual culture, the book's ambition is to offer a new conceptual map of antiquity through the notion of anachronism.

'[A] marvellously original, densely researched study of the English republican imagination.' Tom Paulin, The Independent

Writing History in the Third Republic offers new insight to the historiographical output of French historians between 1860 and 1914, a period often referred to as of positivistic historians or the école méthodique. Asserting their independence from Germanic influence by emphasising the French element in their work, historians in the period described their approach as methodical and positivistic and maintained that this was a distinctively French way of studying history. A heightened concern with sources, with facts as basis for all true knowledge, and with truth itself were unifying elements of the historiography of those historians now called école méthodique. The école represented the most sophisticated theoretical considerations about history and a method for historical studies in French academia in the late nineteenth century. The purpose of this book is to reassess whether or not this school is legitimately to be seen as having emerged in the Third Republic in response to political developments of nineteenth-century France, or if the so-called méthodiques share more in terms of philosophy of history and methodology than previously emphasized by scholars. This book contributes to the debate surrounding the role of history and its method, offering a counter-argument to postmodernist scholars while reassessing the contribution of twentieth-century theorists of history to the history of historiography.

With the emergence of democracy in the city-state of Athens in the years around 460 BC, public speaking became an essential skill for politicians in the Assemblies and Councils - and even for ordinary citizens in the courts of law. In response, the technique of rhetoric rapidly developed, bringing virtuoso performances and a host of practical manuals for the layman. While many of these were little more than collections of debaters' tricks, the Art of Rhetoric held a far deeper purpose. Here Aristotle (384-322 BC) establishes the methods of informal reasoning, provides the first aesthetic evaluation of prose style and offers detailed observations on character and the emotions. Hugely influential upon later Western culture, the Art of Rhetoric is a fascinating consideration of the force of persuasion and sophistry, and a compelling guide to the principles behind oratorical skill.