Using almost a thousand case studies, both real and fictional, Dr van Hooff provides us with a unique and engaging insight into self-killing in the Graeco-Roman world. The author analyses the methods and motives which lie behind self-killing relating them to ancient popular morality as it appears in the various media and traces the development of the concept of self-murder, as opposed to the original idea of autothanasia, which lies at the root of the Christian abhorrence of suicide.

Cicero was one of classical antiquity's most prolific, varied and self-revealing authors. His letters, speeches, treatises and poetry chart a political career marked by personal struggle and failure and the collapse of the republican system of government to which he was intellectually and emotionally committed. They were read, studied and imitated throughout antiquity and subsequently became seminal texts in political theory and in the reception and study of the Classics. This Companion di...

Beginning in Rome around 600 BC, Latin became the language of the civilized world and remained so for more than two millennia. French, Spanish, Italian, and Romanian are among its progeny and it provides the international vocabulary of law and life science. No known language, including English - itself enriched by Latin words and phrases - has achieved such success and longevity. Tore Janson tells its history from origins to present. Brilliantly conceived and written with the same light to...

Roman Dress and the Fabrics of Roman Culture investigates the social symbolism and cultural poetics of dress in the ancient Roman world in the period from 200 BCE-400 CE. Editors Jonathan Edmondson and Alison Keith and the contributors to this volume explore the diffusion of Roman dress protocols at Rome and in the Roman imperial context by looking at Rome's North African provinces in particular, a focus that previous studies have overlooked or dealt with only in passing. Another ...

Matrona Docta presents a unique study of the education of upper-class women in Roman society in the central period of Roman history, from the second century BC to AD 235.Emily A. Hemelrijk reconstructs women's opportunities to acquire an education, the impediments they faced, the level of education they could reach and the judgement on educated women in Roman society. She examines also the role of women as patronesses of literature, learning and Roman women's writing.

Tacitus is universally recognised as ancient Rome's greatest writer of history, and his account of the Roman Empire in the first century AD has been fundamental in shaping the modern perception of Rome and its emperors. This Companion provides a new, up-to-date and authoritative assessment of his work and influence which will be invaluable for students and non-specialists as well as of interest to established scholars in the field. First situating Tacitus within the tradition of Roman hist...

This radical study argues against the view that the historian's craft has remained largely unchanged since classical times. Includes detailed discussion of the work of Thucydides, Cicero, Sallust, Livy and Tacitus.

A group of men dig a tunnel under the threshold of a house. Then they go and fetch a heavy, sagging object from inside the house, pull it out through the tunnel, and put it on a cow-hide to be dragged off and thrown into the offal-pit. Why should the corpse of a suicide – for that is what it is– have earned this unusual treatment? In The Curse on Self-Murder, the second volume of his three-part Suicide in the Middle Ages, Alexander Murray explores the origin of the condem...

Pliny's Panegyricus (AD 100) survives as a unique example of senatorial rhetoric from the early Roman Empire. It offers an eyewitness account of the last years of Domitian's principate, the reign of Nerva and Trajan's early years, and it communicates a detailed senatorial view on the behaviour expected of an emperor. It is an important document in the development of the ideals of imperial leadership, but it also contributes greatly to our understanding of imperial political culture more ge...

Women in ancient Greece and Rome played a much more active role in battle than previously assumed.The martial virtues—courage, loyalty, cunning, and strength—were central to male identity in the ancient world, and antique literature is replete with depictions of men cultivating and exercising these virtues on the battlefield. In Women and War in Antiquity, sixteen scholars reexamine classical sources to uncover the complex but hitherto unexplored relations...

In the Roman republic, only the People could pass laws, only the People could elect politicians to office, and the very word republica meant 'the People's business'. So why is it always assumed that the republic was an oligarchy? The main reason is that most of what we know about it we know from Cicero, a great man and a great writer, but also an active right-wing politician who took it for granted that what was good for a small minority of self-styled 'best people' (optimates) wa...

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, ...