This book reassesses the premises, nature, and audience of Plautine comedy. Combining textual and literary criticism, Michael Fontaine argues that many of Plautus' puns, jokes, and several characters' names were misunderstood in antiquity. By examining the comedian's tendency to make up and misuse words, Fontaine sheds new light on the close connection between Greek and Roman comedy. The result reveals a Plautus writing in the Hellenistic tradition for a knowledgeable and sophisticated audience.

The Iguvine Tables are among the most invaluable documents of Italic linguistics and religion. Seven bronze tablets discovered in 1444 in the Umbrian town of Gubbio, they record the rites and sacral laws of a priestly brotherhood, the Fratres Atiedii. Taking an interdisciplinary approach that combines philological and linguistic, as well as ritual analysis, Michael Weiss not only addresses the many interpretive cruces that have puzzled scholars for a century and a half, but also constructs a coherent theory of the entire ritual performance described on Tables III and IV.

The Birth of Comedy makes accessible for the first time the rich evidence for all aspects of classical Greek comedy.

Cicero's De Oratore is one of the masterpieces of Latin prose. A literary dialogue in the Greek tradition, it was written in 55 BCE in the midst of political turmoil at Rome, but reports a discussion 'concerning the (ideal) orator' that supposedly took place in 90 BCE, just before an earlier crisis. Cicero features eminent orators and statesmen of the past as participants in this discussion, presenting competing views on many topics. This edition of Book III is the first since 1893 to provide a Latin text and full introduction and commentary in English.

This book investigates Hellenistic popular religion through an interdisciplinary study of terracotta figurines of Egyptian deities, mostly from domestic contexts, from the trading port of Delos. A comparison of the figurines' iconography to parallels in Egyptian religious texts, temple reliefs, and ritual objects suggests that many figurines depict deities or rituals associated with Egyptian festivals. An analysis of the objects' clay fabrics and manufacturing techniques indicates that most were made on Delos.

This is the first history of epiphany as both a phenomenon and a cultural discourse within the Graeco-Roman world. It explores divine manifestations and their representations both in art and in literary, historical and epigraphic accounts. The cultural analysis of epiphany is set within a historical framework that examines its development from the archaic period to the Roman Empire.

Plato's account of the tripartite soul is a memorable feature of dialogues like the Republic, Phaedrus and Timaeus: it is one of his most famous and influential yet least understood theories. It presents human nature as both essentially multiple and diverse ? and yet somehow also one ? divided into a fully human 'rational' part, a lion-like 'spirited part' and an 'appetitive' part likened to a many-headed beast. How these parts interact, how exactly each shapes our agency and how they are affected by phenomena like eros and education is complicated and controversial.

In Masters of Command, Barry Strauss compares the way the three greatest generals of the ancient world?Alexander, Hannibal, and Caesar?waged war and draws lessons from their experiences that apply on and off the battlefield.

In Christians and Their Many Identities in Late Antiquity, North Africa, 200?450 CE, ?ric Rebillard explores how Christians in North Africa between the age of Tertullian and the age of Augustine were selective in identifying as Christian, giving salience to their religious identity only intermittently. By shifting the focus from groups to individuals, Rebillard more broadly questions the existence of bounded, stable, and homogeneous groups based on Christianness.

In this volume, thirty internationally recognized scholars have come together to celebrate the work of the famous Indo-Europeanist Alan J. Nussbaum. The topics range widely from Nussbaum's favorite subject of Indo-European nominal morphology, especially in the Classical languages, to the historical grammars of Tocharian, the stylistics of the Rigveda, Aristophanean philology, and much more. Nussbaum's work is honored with contributions by such renowned experts as Heiner Eichner, Jay Jasanoff, Sergio Neri, Hayden Pelliccia, Richard Thomas, and Michael Weiss.

The eighteen papers collected in this volume - fifteen of which are published in English for the first time - explore the transformations of religious practices between the third and the fifth centuries in the Western part of the Roman Empire. They share an approach that privileges the study of processes and interactions and does not take for granted the categories and roles traditionally ascribed to social actors. A first group of papers focuses on the sermons and letters of Augustine of Hippo.

Twenty-one newly commissioned essays that provide in-depth and up-to-date discussions of a variety of Platonic dialogues and topics.