Series: Sather Classical Lectures

"Superbly acute and unashamedly complex."—The Telegraph "Rich and provocative."—Times Literary Supplement "An engaging exploration."—The New Yorker "The phenomenal Ms. Beard has written another cracking book, one of her best."—The Independent What made the Romans laugh? Was ancient Rome a carnival, filled with practical jokes and hearty chuckles? Or was it a carefully regulated culture in which the uncontrollable excess of...

A free ebook version of this title is available through Luminos, University of California Press's Open Access publishing program. Visit www.luminosoa.org to learn more. The Presocratic philosophers, writing in Greece in the sixth and fifth centuries BCE, invented new ways of thinking about human life, the natural world, and structures of reality. They also developed novel ways of using language...

The Mycenaean civilisation of the Greek Bronze Age was identified 150 years ago, yet its origins remain obscure. Jack L. Davis, codirector of ongoing excavations at the Palace of Nestor at Pylos, takes readers on a tour of the beginnings of Mycenaean civilisation through a case study of this important site. In collaboration with Sharon R. Stocker, Davis demonstrates that...

For much of its history, philosophy was not merely a theoretical discipline but a way of life, an "art of living." This practical aspect of philosophy has been much less dominant in modernity than it was in ancient Greece and Rome, when philosophers of all stripes kept returning to Socrates as a model for living. The idea of philosophy as...

This revisionist history traces an influential theory of practical reason from its origins in ancient Greece to its modern and contemporary permutations. The Greek discovery of practical reason, as the skilled performance of strategic thinking in public and private affairs, was an intellectual breakthrough that remains both a feature and a bug of our modern world. Countering arguments that rational...

As a young man, the historian Polybius was an active politician in the Achaean Confederacy of the second century B.C., and later, during his detention at Rome, became a close friend of some leading Roman families. His History is our most important source for the momentous half-century during which the Romans weathered the war with Hannibal and became masters of...

We tend to suppose that the ancient Greeks had primitive ideas of the self, of responsibility, freedom, and shame, and that now humanity has advanced from these to a more refined moral consciousness. Bernard Williams's original and radical book questions this picture of Western history. While we are in many ways different from the Greeks, Williams claims that the differences...