marycatelli: (Golden Hair)
Portrait of a Priestess: Women and Ritual in Ancient Greece by Joan Breton Connelly

A bit of a misnomer. The author is pulling together evidence over the entire known history of ancient Greek, Homeric, Archaic, Classical, Hellenistic and even Roman, right up to the conversion, and seeing what is known or can be deduced, including changes.

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marycatelli: (Golden Hair)
Greece Against Rome: The Fall of the Hellenistic Kingdoms 250-31 BC by Philip Matyszak

The subtitle is more accurate than the title. Greece was a backwater at this time, ruled by Macedon, suffering serious depopulation owing at all the Greeks who left it to form the city-based forces of the Hellenistic kings.

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marycatelli: (Golden Hair)
Paganism in the Roman Empire by Ramsay MacMullen

A large and not entirely coherent subject, with very patchy evidence. So this contains much discussion of the incoherency and the difficulty in reconstruction.

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marycatelli: (Golden Hair)
The Roman Empire and the Silk Routes: The Ancient World Economy and the Empires of Parthia, Central Asia and Han China by Raoul McLaughlin

An overview of the political situations and other factors playing into the trade between China and Rome.
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marycatelli: (Golden Hair)
Destroyer of the Gods: Early Christian Distinctiveness in the Roman World by Larry W. Hurtado

Discussing what Christians looked like from the outside at the time.

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marycatelli: (Golden Hair)
Metropolis and Hinterland: The City of Rome and the Italian Economy, 200 BC Ad 200 by Neville Morley

A technical and involved discussion of the relationship of the countryside and the city -- mostly revolving about food, unsurprisingly. There is math.

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marycatelli: (Golden Hair)
Soldiers and Ghosts: A History of Battle in Classical Antiquity by J.E. Lendon

Armies and soldiers in ancient Greece and Rome. A bit various.

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marycatelli: (Golden Hair)
Greek Religion by Walter Burkert

An intensive look at the religion practice of the ancient Greeks, up to the time of Alexander. Not a beginning text, assuming a basic knowledge of Greek history and also of the study of religion.

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marycatelli: (Golden Hair)
Religions of Late Antiquity in Practice by Richard Valantasis

An array of documents. Many Christian, including hymns, sermons, acts of martyrs and other accounts, but also Manichean, with hymns and a service, pagan, such as a spell tablet invoking Osiris to recapture a husband's attentions, Julian the Apostate arguing against Christianity, claiming that Solomon worshipped other gods because he was wise, an aretalogy of Isis listing her virtues, and a Mithradic liturgy, and various other things, such as Talmudic tales, and the Gnostic Gospel of Thomas. A number were taken from incomplete documents, so the lacunae pile up, and some of the commentary begs the question a bit.
marycatelli: (Golden Hair)
Carthage Must Be Destroyed: The Rise and Fall of an Ancient Civilization by Richard Miles

A history of Carthage. Insofar as it can be reconstructed.

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marycatelli: (Golden Hair)
Birds in the Ancient World: Winged Words by Jeremy Mynott

What ancient Greeks and Romans thought about birds. Arranged by topics.

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marycatelli: (Golden Hair)
Magic, Witchcraft and Ghosts in the Greek and Roman Worlds: A Sourcebook by Daniel Ogden

A heavy book. It includes hundreds of translated passages from ancient sources about magic. They range all over.

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marycatelli: (Golden Hair)
The World of Odysseus by Moses I. Finley

Looking at Homer's works and the world they are set in.
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marycatelli: (Golden Hair)
Hounds and Hunting in Ancient Greece by Denison Bingham Hull

This is an interesting little work, written by a man conversant with both ancient Greek and hunting, to bring the knowledge together.

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marycatelli: (Golden Hair)
Women in the Classical World by Elaine Fantham, Helene Peet Foley, Natalie Boymel Kampen, Sarah B. Pomeroy, and H. A. Shapiro

Archaic Greece, classical Greece, the Hellenistic world (including Egypt, where the papyri survive better than records elsewhere), a little on Etruscans, republican Rome, imperial Rome. . . . a fair amount of ground.

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marycatelli: (Golden Hair)
The Spartans:  The World of the Warrior-Heroes of Ancient Greece by Paul Cartledge

A survey of their history, with the details of their life.
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marycatelli: (Golden Hair)
The Greeks and the Irrational by E. R. Dodds

A book on a somewhat loose and heterogeneous collection of concepts.  Then,  it was to combat the pop culture image of the Greeks as the perfect culture of rationality that the Enlightenment is so blameworthy for coming up with.  (The middle ages get the equally and oppositely ridiculous image of the world of irrationality; for that I recommend C. S. Lewis's The Discarded Image.)  To be sure, it uses the loose-goosey, pop culture notion of what's rationality and irrationality, but then, so does the image.

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marycatelli: (Golden Hair)
Witchcraft and Magic in Europe: Ancient Greece And Rome edited by Bengt Ankarloo and Stuart Clark

Volume 2.  Covering a large range of practice and theory -- and time.

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marycatelli: (Golden Hair)
Courtesans and Fishcakes:  The Consuming Passions of Classical Athens by James Davidson

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