Products and services
What are the effects of empire-building, and how can we study them? With Making the Middle Republic, my two co-editors and I present a collection of papers emphasizing the importance of the fourth and third centuries BCE to the broader development of Republican Rome and Italy. This period saw the earliest phases of Roman imperial […]
Read More
The young Augustine was repelled by the Gospels. Or so he says, at least, in a passage from the Confessions (3.5.9) in which he reflects on his former, ‘inflated pride’. The student of rhetoric in love with Latin literature struggled to accept a written style that he perceived as ‘unworthy’ of his Marcus Tully (Cicero). […]
Read More
The Roman Empire was constantly in motion. People, products, and ideas crisscrossed the Mediterranean at what must have seemed like lightning speed. One of these ideas was the worship of the Egyptian gods Isis and Sarapis, which first appeared in Greece in the late 4th century BCE. By the reign of the Roman emperor Hadrian […]
Read More
Do you think with your heart or with your head? Far from a metaphorical question, this debate roiled ancient medicine at a very literal level. The topic of where, precisely, the soul interfaced with the body was a contentious one, with many arguing for the brain but many others rooting for the heart in all […]
Read More
Today’s media increasingly serves us clickbait climate histories. Headlines prompt us to read how the city-states of the Maya collapsed because of drought, how massive empires like that of the Neo-Assyrians or Akkadians buckled from the pressures of aridity and famines, or why Genghis Khan’s armies were successful due to abundant rains across Mongolia. Such […]
Read More
Over the years I have become increasingly fascinated by the relationship of ancient Rome to the United States, not as the source of particular institutions or a political vocabulary, but as revealing unresolved questions of identity that derive from their shared founding myths. That founding is neither located in a constitutional moment nor organized around […]
Read More
The discipline of Classics stands at a curious crossroads. While some of its advocates resist conflating the ancient Greco-Roman world with the twenty-first century, others weaponize Greco-Roman antiquity for modern gain. The latter stance becomes especially contentious when discussions of skin color enter the fray. Intent on correcting myopic perspectives, I foreground dynamic iterations of […]
Read More
View of the Stoa of Attalos during reconstruction in 1956 (American School of Classical Studies at Athens, Agora Image: 2012.55.0183)
Read MoreKeep up with the latest from Cambridge University Press on our social media accounts.
