Professor Reinhold, a distinguished senior classicist, has produced a fascinating and accessible collection of essays devoted to the study of ancient history. Among the articles included are "The Generation Gap," a major survey exploring myths of the uprising of one generation against another; "Augustus' Conception of Himself," a detailed summary and interpretation of Augustus' life and career; and "The Declaration of War against Cleopatra," an investigation of the charge against Cleopatra that she betrayed her pledge to Rome as a client ruler. Taken together, these essays form a unified and coherent survey of ancient history that will appeal to a broad audience.

Sport and Society in Ancient Greece provides a concise and readable introduction to ancient Greek sport. It covers such topics as the links between sport, religion and warfare, the origins and history of the Olympic games, and the spirit of competition among the Greeks. Its main focus, however, is on Greek sport as an arena for the creation and expression of difference among individuals and groups. Sport not only identified winners and losers. It also drew boundaries between groups (Greeks and barbarians, boys and men, males and females) and offered a field for debate on the relative worth of athletic and equestrian competition. The book includes guides to the ancient evidence and to modern scholarship on the subject.

Professor Reinhold, a distinguished senior classicist, has produced a fascinating and accessible collection of essays devoted to the study of ancient history. Among the articles included are "The Generation Gap," a major survey exploring myths of the uprising of one generation against another; "Augustus' Conception of Himself," a detailed summary and interpretation of Augustus' life and career; and "The Declaration of War against Cleopatra," an investigation of the charge against Cleopatra that she betrayed her pledge to Rome as a client ruler. Taken together, these essays form a unified and coherent survey of ancient history that will appeal to a broad audience.

This is the first study of food in classical antiquity that treats it as both a biological and a cultural phenomenon. The variables of food quantity, quality and availability, and the impact of disease, are evaluated and a judgement reached which inclines to pessimism. Food is also a symbol, evoking other basic human needs and desires, especially sex, and performing social and cultural roles which can be either integrative or divisive. The book explores food taboos in Greek, Roman, and Jewish society, and food-allocation within the family, as well as more familiar cultural and economic polarities which are highlighted by food and eating. The author draws on a wide range of evidence new and old, from written sources to human skeletal remains, and uses both comparative historical evidence from early modern and contemporary developing societies and the anthropological literature, to create a case-study of food in antiquity.

"This commentary pays close critical attention to Dio's historical sources, methods, and assumptions as it also strives to present him as a figure in his own right. During a long life (ca. 164-after 229), Dio served as a Roman senator under seven emperors from Commodus to Severus Alexander, governed three Roman provinces, and was twice consul."--BOOK JACKET.

This social history of war from the third millennium BCE to the 10th-century CE in the Mediterranean, the Near East and Europe (Egypt, Achamenid Persia, Greece, the Hellenistic World, the Roman Republic and Empire, the Byzantine Empire, the early Islamic World and early Medieval Europe) with parallel studies of Mesoamerica (the Maya and Aztecs) and East Asia (ancient China, medieval Japan). The volume offers a broadly based, comparative examination of war and military organization in their complex interactions with social, economic and political structures, as well as cultural practices.

Traditional and still prevalent accounts of late antique literature draw a clear distinction between 'pagan' and 'Christian' forms of poetry: whereas Christian poetry is taken seriously in terms its contribution to culture and society at large, so-called pagan or secular poetry is largely ignored, as though it has no meaningful part to play within the late antique world. The Myth of Paganism sets out to deconstruct this view of two contrasting poetic traditions and proposes in its place a new integrated model for the understanding of late antique poetry. As the book argues, the poet of Christ and the poet of the Muses were drawn together into an active, often provocative, dialogue about the relationship between Christianity and the Classical tradition and, ultimately, about the meaning of late antiquity itself. An analysis of the poetry of Nonnus of Panopolis, author of both a 'pagan' epic about Dionysus and a Christian translation of St John's Gospel, helps to illustrate this complex dialectic between pagan and Christian voices.