Michael Vickers

Publication was in 2010, not 2009. For full details see

The largest surviving portion of the first major collection of Classic antiquities in Britain - the sculpture and inscriptions collected by Thomas Howard, Earl of Arundel for his London house and garden - is in the Antiquities Department of the Ashmolean Museum. This book tracks their eventful history.

Since the eighteenth century, classical scholars have generally agreed that the Greek playwright Aristophanes did not as a matter of course write "political" plays. Yet, according to an anonymous Life of Aristophanes, when Dionysius the tyrant of Syracuse wanted to know about the government of Athens, Plato sent him a copy of Aristophanes' Clouds. In this boldly revisionist work, Michael Vickers convincingly argues that in his earlier plays, Aristophanes in fact used allegory to comment on the day-to-day political concerns of Athenians. Vickers reads the first six of Aristophanes' eleven extant plays in a way that reveals the principal characters to be based in large part on Pericles, the Athenian statesman of the fifth century B.C., and his extended family - particularly his ward Alcibiades. According to Vickers, the plays of Aristophanes - far from being nonpolitical - actually allow us to gauge the reaction of the Athenian public to the events which occured in the years following Pericles' death in 429 B.C., to the struggle for the political succession, and to the problems presented by Alcibiades' gradual emergence as one of the most powerful figures in the state. This view of Aristophanes reaffirms the central role of allegory in his work and challenges all students of ancient Greece to rethink long-held assumptions about this important playwright.

Athens at the time of the Peloponnesian war was the arena for a dramatic battle between politics and religion in the hearts and minds of the people. 'Fear and loathing in ancient athens', originally published in German but now available for the first time in an expanded and revised English edition, sheds new light on this dramatic period of history and offers a new approach to the study of Greek religion. The book explores an extraordinary range of events and topics: impiety charges and prosecutions; the horrors of the plague; the mutilation of hermai and the profanation of the mysteries; the controversy created by the adoption of new gods; the impressive architectural structures of the sculptor Phidias; the military conflicts of the Peloponnesian war; and the thoughts of the mysterious philosopher Socrates. 'Fear and Loathing in Ancient Athens' will be an indispensible study for students and scholars studying Athenian religion and politics.