Today, only a fraction of their work survives. It is lyrical, witty, innovative, and inspiring, offering surprising insights into the closed world of women in antiquity, from childhood friendships, through love affairs and marriage, to motherhood and bereavement. In addition to the ancient poems, Balmer has translated some inscriptions, folk-songs, and even graffiti, into English.

    Was the author of the Iliad and the Odyssey a single individual who created the poems at a particular moment in history? Or does the name "Homer" hide the shaping influence of the epic tradition during a long period of oral composition and transmission?In this innovative investigation, Gregory Nagy applies the insights of comparative linguistics and anthropology to offer a new historical model for understanding how, when, where, and why the Iliad and the Odyssey were ultimately preserved as written texts that could be handed down over two millennia. His model draws on the comparative evidence provided by living oral epic traditions, in which each performance of a song often involves a recomposition of the narrative.This evidence suggests that the written texts emerged from an evolutionary process in which composition, performance, and diffusion interacted to create the epics we know as the Iliad and the Odyssey. Sure to challenge orthodox views and provoke lively debate, Nagy's book will be essential reading for all students of oral traditions.

    Central to this enterprise is a comprehensive historical-sociological analysis of the Polis form of social organization, which charts the evolution of its basic institutions, roles, statuses, and class relations. From the Dark Age period of "genesis" on to the Hellenistic era of "eclipse" by the emergent forces of imperial patrimonialism, Polis society promoted and sustained corresponding normative codes which mobilized and channeled the requisite emotive commitments and cognitive judgments for functional proficiency under existing conditions of life. The aristocratic warrior-ethos canonized in the Homeric epics; the civic ideology of equality and justice espoused by reformist lawgivers and poets; the democratization of status honor and martial virtue that attended the shift to hoplite warfare; the philosophical exaltation of the Polis-citizen bond as found in the architectonic visions of Plato and Aristotle; and the subsequent retreat from civic virtues and the interiorization of value articulated by the Skeptics, Epicureans, and Stoics, new age philosophies in a world remade by Alexander's conquests--these are the key phases in the evolving currents of Hellenic moral discourse, as structurally framed by transformations within the institutional matrix of Polis society.

    It stresses the role of performance and the performer in the re-creative process of composition-in-performance. It addresses questions of authority and authorship in the making of oral poetry, and it examines the efforts of ancient scholars to edit a definitive text of the real Homer.

    Chapter by chapter, the relevant historical periods from the age of colonization to Alexander the Great are reconstructed. Emphasis is laid on the interpretation of the available sources, and the book sets out to give a clear treatment of all the major problems within a chronological framework.The book covers:the main literary sources: Aristotle, Diodorus, Herodotus, Plutarch, Thucydides and Xenophon Greek political and military history from the eighth century to Alexander's conquest of Persia.To ease understanding, the book also includes maps, a glossary of Greek terms and a full bibliography.

    It explains the techniques of the manufacture of Greek sculpture, and traces its production from the 8th century BC to the Hellenistic period. The author explores the effects the culture of heroes had on sculpture and the faith in deities in human form. Also examined are the causes of the "Greek Revolution", when sculptors discovered how to portray the human form more naturally.

    John Cantacuzene was unique in that he wrote his own memoirs and in his varied talents and interests in a long life, as a soldier, scholar, and theologian. His dealings with the earliest leaders of the Ottoman Turks, with the merchants of Venice and Genoa, with the papacy, and with Stephen Dusan of Serbia also give his career a special interest. This is the first biography of John Cantacuzene in English.

    The origins and applications of such equations occur in a variety of different fields, ranging from fluid dynamics, electromagnetism, heat conduction and diffusion, to quantum mechanics, wave propagation and general relativity.This volume introduces the important methods used in the solution of partial differential equations. Written primarily for second-year and final-year students taking physics and engineering courses, it will also be of value to mathematicians studying mathematical methods as part of their course. The text, which assumes only that the reader has followed a good basic first-year ancillary mathematics course, is self-contained and is an unabridged republication of the third edition published by Longman in 1985.

    It treats the Balkans as the frontier of the Byzantine empire, and considers imperial relations with the peoples living in the Balkans, including the Serbs, Croats, Bulgarians and Hungarians. It also considers responses to invasions from beyond the frontier: by steppe nomads, from beyond the Danube, and by western powers through Hungary and across the Adriatic sea. The first four crusades, 1095-1204, are considered in some detail, and extensive use is made of archaeology.

    Books iv-v.24 cover the years 425-421 BC and contain the Pylos-Spakteria narrative, the Delion Campaign, and Brasidas' operations in the north of Greece. This volume ends with the Peace of Nikias and the alliance between Athens and Sparta.A new feature of this volume is the full thematic introduction which discusses such topics as Thucydides and Herodotus, Thucydide's presentation of Brasidas, Thucydides and kinship, speech--direct and indirect--in iv-v.24, Thucydides and epigraphy (including personal names), iv-v.24 as a work of art: innovative or merely incomplete?Thucydides intended his work to be an everlasting Possession and the continuing importance of his work is undisputed. Simon Hornblower's commentary, by translating every passage of Greek commented on for the first time, allows readers with little or no Greek to appreciate the detail of Thucydides' thought and subject-matter. A full index at the end of the volume.

    Students learn why the numerical methods work, what type of errors to expect, and when an application might lead to difficulties. The authors also provide information about the availability of high-quality software for numerical approximation routines. The techniques are essentially the same as those covered in the authors' top-selling Numerical Analysis text, but in this text, full mathematical justifications are provided only if they are concise and add to the understanding of the methods. The emphasis is placed on describing each technique from an implementation standpoint, and on convincing the student that the method is reasonable both mathematically and computationally.

    This authoritative new work attempts to bridge the gap that usually divides Greek religion from Greek history, setting it firmly in the thick of contemporary events and politics. How did people actually worship the gods? Was Socrates's trial a crisis for religion or the state, or both? These are among the key issues addressed in what promises to be the definitive work on the subject for many years to come.