Greek and Roman mythology --European mythology. Celtic and Irish mythology ; Germanic and Norse mythology ; Finnish mythology ; Slavic mythology ; Romance mythology ; Arthurian mythology --Egyptian and African mythology. Egyptian mythology ; African mythology --Middle East and Asian mythology. Mesopotamian mythology ; Middle Eastern mythology ; Indian mythology ; Chinese mythology ; Japanese mythology ; Tibetan mythology --Mythology of Oceania. Oceanic mythology ; Australian Aboriginal mythology ; Maori mythology --Mythology of the Americas. North American mythology ; Mesoamerican mythology ; South American mythology.

    The world’s oldest epic poem is the Epic of Gilgamesh, the tale of a hero who was part god, part man. But just in the past century a thrilling discovery was made – the 4,000-year-old stories of his powerful sister, the goddess Inanna.Inanna is a goddess who embodies the quest for growth. Her stories tell how she develops from childish inexperience and youthful exuberance into maturity and gains the powers to create, to destroy and to name. She is a goddess of spunk and wisdom who outwits and defies the powerful, falls in love with the shepherd Dumuzi and, like Gilgamesh, dares to seek immortality. The people of Sumer associated Inanna with the planet Venus.With the guidance of Sumerian scholars, Kim Echlin has provided a moving, sensitive and knowledgeable translation of the Inanna myths. They describe a goddess who was a warrior, lover, nurturer, seeker of knowledge and giver of power – a figure worthy of admiration by people of any age.

    It offers a fast-track route to GCSE for those with limited time. It is based on experience of what pupils find difficult, concentrating on the essentials and on the understanding of principles in both accidence and syntax: minor irregularities are postponed and subordinated so that the need for rote learning is reduced. It aims to be user-friendly, but also to give pupils a firm foundation for further study. The course has been tested and refined in 15 schools over the last three years. Part 1 covers the basics: the main declensions, a range of active tenses and a vocabulary of 275 Greek words to be learned. Pupil confidence is built up by constant consolidation of the material covered. After the preliminaries, each chapter concentrates on stories with one source or subject: Aesop, the "Odyssey" and Alexander the Great. Part 1 is self-contained, with its own reference section.

    Highly authoritative, this new book covers not only Greek mythologies and Roman festivals, but also devotes attention to topics such as Greek and Roman religious places, monuments, authors and texts, religious organization, imagery, divination, astrology, and magic. Unlike many other references on ancient Greece and Rome, the Dictionary also includes many entries on Judaism and Christianity in the classical world. The editors, area advisors for the third edition of the Oxford Classical Dictionary, have selected, revised, edited, and in some instances completely recast a large number of entries from the OCD to create this handy and accessible reference. The main text is supplemented by an important introductory essay providing overviews of mythology, religious pluralism in the ancient world, and the reception of myths from antiquity to the present. In addition to a helpful thematic index and extensive cross-references, the text is further supported by three maps and six genealogies. Backed by the authority and scholarly rigor of the renowned Oxford Classical Dictionary, The Oxford Dictionary of Classical Myth and Religion is a valuable A-Z reference and is as ideal a tool for students and teachers of ancient history as it is for all classics lovers.

    As beginning students learn basic forms and grammar, they also gain familiarity with patterns of Latin word order and other features of style, thus becoming well prepared for later, more difficult texts. No other beginning Latin book contains unaltered versions of ancient texts. Learn to Read Latin includes the writings of such authors as Caesar, Cicero, Sallust, Catullus, Vergil, and Ovid, arranged chronologically and accompanied by introductions to each author and each work. These readings serve as the chief training texts around which the book's fifteen chapters are constructed. A workbook is also available, providing abundant drills for each chapter of the text. The workbook exercises can be used in the classroom, for homework assignments, for extra individual drill work, or as a home study tool.

    They lived life to the fullest, loved unashamedly, listened to their heart’s desires, and created one of the most advanced, culturally sophisticated societies ever known. Is all that now dead and buried? Or only for the professors to mull over?One classics scholar, Dr. Stephen Bertman, answers this resoundingly in The Eight Pillars of Greek Wisdom. He shows how to bring passion and excellence to the center of your daily life, as the ancient Greeks intended them to be. The lessons they learned—that life is brief and fragile and time is too precious to waste; that we do not know who we are until we discover who we can be; that we cannot undertake our voyage through life alone; that there will be obstacles along the way, but the greatest obstacle is within—led them to develop what Bertman describes as eight guiding principles of wisdom: Humanism The Pursuit of Excellence The Practice of Moderation Self-Knowledge Rationalism Restless Curiosity The Love of Freedom Individualism These eight pillars are explored in the book. Each is illuminated through vivid examples drawn from the rich heritage of classical history and mythology, including tales of gods and goddess, heroes and heroines, adventure and exploration, and self-discovery and personal triumph.

    The product of more than 35 years of research, the book includes a 72-page continuous chart that links 3,673 named figures into a single family tree spanning 20 generations and an 80-page index that provides a citation to an authoritative ancient source for each relationship.The genealogy begins with Chaos and--based on works by Hesiod, Homer, Aeschylus, Pindar, Bacchylides, Herodotus, Euripides, Apollodorus, Pausanias, Diodorus Siculus, and scores of other ancient poets, playwrights, and writers--continues down through the Titans, the gods, legendary kings, and such well-known figures of literature as Odysseus, Jason, Antigone, and Helen of Troy, as well as hundreds of obscure figures, including their spouses, paramours, children, and descendants.The chart shows all of the known relationships--parental, marital, and extramarital--of each figure. In addition to furnishing a citation for each relationship, the index provides brief descriptive information and indicates the quadrant and page of the continuous chart where the relationship is depicted. A two-page master chart illustrates the relationships among the principal figures.

    

    Focusing on hagiographical literature, Virginia Burrus pursues a fresh path of interpretation, arguing that the early accounts of the lives of saints are not antierotic but rather convey a sublimely transgressive countereroticism that resists the marital, procreative ethic of sexuality found in other strands of Christian tradition.Without reducing the erotics of ancient hagiography to a single formula, The Sex Lives of Saints frames the broad historical, theological, and theoretical issues at stake in such a revisionist interpretation of ascetic eroticism, with particular reference to the work of Michel Foucault and Georges Bataille, David Halperin and Geoffrey Harpham, Leo Bersani and Jean Baudrillard. Burrus subsequently proceeds through close, performative readings of the earliest Lives of Saints, mostly dating to the late fourth and early fifth centuries--Jerome's Lives of Paul, Malchus, Hilarion, and Paula; Gregory of Nyssa's Life of Macrina; Augustine's portrait of Monica; Sulpicius Severus's Life of Martin; and the slightly later Lives of so-called harlot saints. Queer, s/m, and postcolonial theories are among the contemporary discourses that prove intriguingly resonant with an ancient art of saintly loving that remains, in Burrus's reading, promisingly mobile, diverse, and open-ended.

    Yet, millennia after their composition, basic questions remain about them. Who was Homer—a real or an ideal poet? When were the poems composed—at a single point in time, or over centuries of composition and performance? And how were the poems committed to writing? These uncertainties have been known as The Homeric Question, and many scholars, including Gregory Nagy, have sought to solve it. In Homeric Responses, Nagy presents a series of essays that further elaborate his theories regarding the oral composition and evolution of the Homeric epics. Building on his previous work in Homeric Questions and Poetry as Performance: Homer and Beyond and responding to some of his critics, he examines such issues as the importance of performance and the interaction between audience and poet in shaping the poetry; the role of the rhapsode (the performer of the poems) in the composition and transmission of the poetry; the “irreversible mistakes” and cross-references in the Iliad and Odyssey as evidences of artistic creativity; and the Iliadic description of the shield of Achilles as a pointer to the world outside the poem, the polis of the audience.

    But it is also difficult to understand and interpret. What are we to make of its protagonist's extremism? Does Ajax deserve the isolation and divine punishment he experiences? Why is his state of mind so difficult to determine? This book offers answers to these and many other questions by drawing together the very latest critical work on the play and introducing the reader to key frames for its interpretation, including Sophoclean heroism, language and form; Homeric intertextuality and Athens' 'masculinist' culture, and the twentieth-century reception of Ajax.

    This legal principle became highly significant because, beginning in the first century A.D., a "new" kind of woman emerged across the Roman empire - a woman whose provocative dress and sometimes promiscuous lifestyle contrasted starkly with the decorum of the traditional married woman. What a woman chose to wear came to identify her as either "new" or "modest." Augustus legislated against the "new" woman. Philosophical schools encouraged their followers to avoid embracing her way of life. And, as this fascinating book demonstrates for the first time, the presence of the "new" woman was also felt in the early church, where Christian wives and widows were exhorted to emulate neither her dress code nor her conduct. Using his extensive knowledge both of the Graeco-Roman world and of the New Testament writings, Bruce Winter shows how changing social mores among women impacted the Pauline communities. This helps to explain the controversial texts on marriage veils in 1 Corinthians, instructions in 1 Timothy regarding dress code and the activities of young widows, and exhortations in Titus for older women to call new wives "back to their senses" regarding their marriage and family responsibilities. Based on a close investigation of neglected literary and archaeological evidence, Roman Wives, Roman Widows makes groundbreaking contributions to our understanding of first-century women, including their participation in public life as lawyers, magistrates, and political figures, which in turn affected women's ministry in the Pauline communities.

    Paul Stephenson reveals that the legend of the Bulgar-slayer was actually created long after his death. His reputation was exploited by contemporary scholars and politicians to help galvanize support for the Greek wars against Bulgarians in Macedonia during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

    By slaying her husband, Klytemnestra exposed the competing ethics of motherhood and matrimony at the beginnings of the Western tradition. In this interdisciplinary study, Kathleen L. Komar first examines the classical archetype of Klytemnestra established by writers such as Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides. Turning to the twentieth century, she investigates the work of modern writers who, since the 1960s, have reconceptualized Klytemnestra’s actions and motivations in the contemporary contexts of dance, fiction, drama, poetry, and the Internet. These revisions include a Martha Graham ballet; a performance piece by multiple authors; a play by Dacia Maraini; novels by Christa Reinig, Nancy Bogen, Christa Wolf, and Marie Cardinal; a short story by Christine Brückner; a poem by Laura Kennelly; a mixed-genre piece by Séverine Auffret; and two Internet presentations. Eloquent, provocative, and richly detailed, Reclaiming Klytemnestra asks us to reassess the roles women were assigned at the beginnings of Western culture and to reenvision how those roles might be changed in the new millennium.

    A book about love, James Rhodes’s work was conceived as a conversation and meant to be read side by side with Plato’s works and those of his worthy interlocutors. It invites lovers to participate in conversations that move their souls to love, and it also invites the reader to take part in the author’s dialogues with Plato and his commentators.            Rhodes addresses two closely related questions: First, what does Plato mean when he says in the Seventh Letter that he never has written and never will write anything concerning that about which he is serious? Second, what does Socrates mean when he claims to have an art of eros and that this techne is the only thing he knows?Through careful analysis, Rhodes establishes answers to these questions.He determines that Plato cannot write anything concerning that about which he is serious because his most profound knowledge consists of his soul’s silent vision of ultimate, transcendent reality, which is ineffable. Rhodes also shows that, for Socrates, eros is a symbol for the soul’s experience of divine reality, which pulls every element of human nature toward its proper end, but which also leads people to evil and tyranny when human resistance causes it to become diseased.            Opening up a new avenue of Plato scholarship, Eros, Wisdom, and Silence is political philosophy at its conversational best. Scholars and students in political philosophy, classical studies, and religious studies will find this work invaluable.

    It emphasizes the literary artistry and comedic nature of the Testament, brings to the task of interpretation a mass of comparative material, and establishes that, although the Testament goes back to a Jewish tale of the first or second century CE, the Christian elements are much more extensive than has previously been realized. The commentary further highlights the dependence of the Testament upon both Greco-Roman mythology and the Jewish Bible. This should be the standard commentary for years to come.

     Presents over 150 sources in translation. Captures the political, social, economic and religious dynamism of the Hellenistic kingdoms and cities. Covers the entire Hellenistic world, with extensive coverage of the Ptolemaic kingdom.