What were the ideas that the ancient Greeks and Romans held about warfare? What do contemporary sources tell us about this? Is it possible to trace a development in the way of thinking about war in antiquity? These are the questions that are discussed (and answered) in this study. It combines a close reading of all he sources that we have - mostly written, like literary and historiographjcal, but also non-written, like art, monuments and coinage. The analysis of the discourse is accompanied by and contrasted with arguments raised by today's specialists in the field of warfare and culture of ancient Greece and Rome. The study treats recurrent cultural themes like courage, fatherland, or victory within a chronological framework, for discourse features cannot be isolated from the context of their time. For each specific period - Greek, Hellenistic and the six parts of the long and diverse Roman time - conclusions are drawn. The remarkable developments in time that can be observed, especially in Rome, are brought together in the final chapter.

From premodern societies onward, humans have constructed and produced images of ideal masculinity to define the roles available for boys to grow into, and images for adult men to imitate. The figure of Alexander the Great has fascinated people both within and outside academia. As a historical character, military commander, cultural figure and representative of the male gender, Alexander’s popularity is beyond dispute. Almost from the moment of his death Alexander’s deeds have had a paradigmatic aspect: for over 2300 years he has been represented as a paragon of manhood - an example to be followed by other men - and through his myth people have negotiated assumptions about masculinity. This work breaks new ground by considering the ancient and medieval reception of Alexander the Great from a gender studies perspective. It explores the masculine ideals of the Greco-Roman and medieval past through the figure of Alexander the Great, analysing the gendered views of masculinities in those periods and relates them to the ways in which Alexander’s masculinity was presented. It does this by investigating Alexander’s appearance and its relation to definitions of masculinity, the way his childhood and adulthood are presented, his martial performance and skill, proper and improper sexual behaviour, and finally through his emotions and mental attributes. Masculine Ideals and Alexander the Great will appeal to students and scholars alike as well as to those more generally interested in the portrayal of masculinity and gender, particularly in relation to Alexander the Great and his image throughout history.

Power, Image, and Memory examines how leaders and societies have used works of art commemorating historical events to shape collective memory. Through iconic artworks over centuries and across the globe, it explores the power of art to affirm cultural identities and thereby mold social groups and nations.

Graeco-Roman literary works, historiography, and even the reporting of rumours were couched as if they came in response to an insatiable desire by ordinary citizens to know everything about the lives of their leaders, and to hold them to account, at some level, for their abuse of constitutional powers for personal ends. Ancient writers were equally fascinated with how these same individuals used deceit as a powerful tool to disguise private and public reality. The chapters in this collection examine the themes of despotism and deceit from both historical and literary perspectives, over a range of historical periods including classical Athens, the Hellenistic kingdoms, late republican and early imperial Rome, late antiquity, and Byzantium.

In Women and War in Roman Epic, Elina Pyy discusses the narrative and ideological functions of gender in the works of Virgil, Lucan, Statius, Silius Italicus and Valerius Flaccus. By examining the themes of violence, death, guilt, grief, and anger in their epics, she offers an account of the intertextual tradition of the genre and its socio-political background. Through a combination of classical narratology and Julia Kristeva’s subjectivity theory, Pyy scrutinises how gendered marginality is constructed in the genre and how it contributes to the fashioning of Roman imperial identity. Focusing on the ambiguous elements of epic, the study looks beyond the binary oppositions between the Self and the Other, male and female, and Roman and barbarian.

Who or what makes innovation spread? Ten case-studies from Greco-Roman Antiquity and the early modern period address human and non-human agency in innovation. Was Erasmus the ‘superspreader’ of the use of New Ancient Greek? How did a special type of clamp contribute to architectural innovation in Delphi? What agents helped diffuse a new festival culture in the eastern parts of the Roman empire? How did a context of status competition between scholars and poets at the Ptolemaic court help deify a lock of hair? Examples from different societal domains illuminate different types of agency in historical innovation.

The Jewish War describes the history of the First Jewish Revolt against Rome (66-70 CE). This study deals with one of this work's most intriguing features: why and how Flavius Josephus, its author, describes his own actions in the context of this conflict in such detail. Glas traces the thematic and rhetorical aspects of autobiographical discourse in War and uses contextual evidence to situate Josephus’ self-characterisation in a Flavian Roman setting. In doing so, he sheds new light on this Jewish writer’s historiographical methods and his deep knowledge and creative use of Graeco-Roman culture.