How rhetorical training influenced deeds as well as words in the Roman EmpireThe assassins of Julius Caesar cried out that they had killed a tyrant, and days later their colleagues in the Senate proposed rewards for this act of tyrannicide. The killers and their supporters spoke as if they were following a well-known script. They were. Their education was chiefly in rhetoric and as boys they would all have heard and given speeches on a ubiquitous set of themes—incl...

"A wholly original cultural history of Greek and Roman warfare . . . often brilliant in interpretation, elegantly constructed and wonderfully written." —Hans van Wees, author of Greek Warfare: Myths and RealitiesWhat set the successful armies of Sparta, Macedon, and Rome apart from those they defeated? In this major new history of battle from the age of Homer through the decline of the Roman empire, J. E. Lendon surveys a millennium of wa...

Sparta, Macedon, and Rome-how did these nations come to dominate the ancient world? What set their armies apart? Noting this was an age that witnessed few technological advances, J. E. Lendon shows us that the most successful armies were those that made the most effective use of cultural tradition. Ancient combat moved forward by looking backward for inspiration-the Greeks, to Homer; the Romans, to the Greeks and to their own heroic past. The best ancient armies recruited soldiers from soc...

Song of Wrath tells the story of Classical Athens' victorious Ten Years' War (431-421 BC) against grim Sparta -- the first decade of the terrible Peloponnesian War that turned the Golden Age of Greece to lead. Historian J.E. Lendon presents a sweeping tale of pitched battles by land and sea, sieges, sacks, raids, and deeds of cruelty and guile -- along with courageous acts of mercy, surprising charity, austere restraint, and arrogant resistance. Recounting the rise of democratic A...