Sather classical lectures,

To study the economies of the ancient world, one must begin by discarding many premises that seemed self-evident before Sir Moses Finley showed that they were useless or misleading. Available again, with a new foreword by Ian Morris, these sagacious, fertile, and occasionally combative essays are just as electrifying today as when Finley first wrote them.

Petronius's Satyricon is famous today primarily for the amazing banquet tale, "Trimalchio's Feast," also celebrated in Fellini's film, Satyricon. But this episode is only one part of the larger picture offered by the work. In The Hidden Author, Professor Conte starts with the structure of the work as a whole, inviting the reader to appreciate the elements of irony and fantasy woven into the text. The author has hidden himself with the aim of striking at the vanity of the contemporary cultured scene, handing over his stage to his characters, who are living in various sorts of degradation, but who see themselves, in minds overactively appropriating a great literary heritage, as figures of mythic proportions. In the foreground of Petronius's work can be seen the follies and excesses of the Rome of Nero's time; in the background, the outlines of the intellectual life of the early Empire.

This little volume discusses not only the greater Roman historians, but also their background, including the Hellenistic background. Thus it has become a general account of Roman historiography, approaching it both as literature and as history.

The portraits of the great writers and thinkers from antiquity are never photographic likenesses. Many of these images were created long after the subject's death, and few tell us very much about the historical individual. Yet these visual representations can become fascinating witnesses to the role and function of the intellectual in ancient Greco-Roman society when seen in the context of the cultural aims with which they were created. In this richly illustrated work, Paul Zanker offers the first comprehensive history of the visual representation of Greek and Roman intellectuals. Zanker draws on a variety of source materials such as Graeco-Roman literature, historiography, and philosophy, in addition to artistic renderings; his work takes the reader from the earliest visual images of Socrates and Plato to the figures of Christ, the Apostles, and contemporaneous pagan and civic dignitaries. Through his interpretations of postures, gestures, facial expressions, and stylistic changes of particular pieces, we come to know these great poets through all of their various personas - the prophetic wise man, the virtuous democratic citizen, or the self-absorbed bon vivant. Zanker's analysis of the ways the iconography of influential thinkers and writers changed demonstrates the rise and fall of trends and the movement of schools of thought and belief, each successively embodying the most valued characteristics of the period and culture. Zanker provides a new and deeper perspective on the interaction of visual representation and classical culture from the fifth century B.C. to the fourth-century A.D.

Moderns tend to view the drama of ancient Athens as a presentation of social or moral problems, as if ancient drama showed the same realism seen on the present-day stage. Because it was a state theater, the Attic stage is also supposed to have offered lessons in the peaceable virtues that the city required. Such views are belied by the plays themselves, in which supremely violent actions occur in a legendary time and place distinct both from reality and from the ethics of ordinary life. We who live among tired and demystified political institutions are afraid that individuals unrestrained by the influence of the community may resort to crime and violence. Yet in an Attic vengeance play, a treacherous "criminal" triumphs over a victim. How could the city of Athens show its citizens Medea's murder of her children? Orestes' killing of his mother? Anne Burnett reveals a larger reality in these ancient plays, comparing them to later drama and finding in them forgotten and powerful meaning.