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Given their cultural, intellectual, and scientific achievements, surely the Greeks were able to approach their economic affairs in a rational manner like modern individuals? Since the nineteenth century, many scholars have argued that premodern people did not behave like modern businesspeople, and that the “stagnation” that characterized the economy prior to the Industrial Revolution can be explained by a prevailing noneconomic mentality throughout premodern (and nonwestern) societies. This view, which simultaneously extols the “sophistication” of the modern West, relegates all other civilizations to the status of economic backwardness.

But the evidence from ancient Athens, which is one of the best-documented societies in the premodern world, tells a very different story: one of progress, innovation, and rational economic strategies. Making Money in Ancient Athens examines in the most comprehensive manner possible the voluminous source material that has survived from Athens in inscriptions, private lawsuit speeches, and the works of philosophers like Aristotle and Plato. Inheritance cases that detail estate composition and investment choices, and maritime trade deals gone wrong, provide unparalleled glimpses into the specific factors that influenced Athenians at the level of the economic decision-making process itself, and the motivations that guided the specific economic transactions attested in the source material. Armed with some of the most thoroughly documented case studies and the richest variety of source material from the ancient Greek world, Michael Leese argues that the evidence overwhelmingly demonstrates that ancient Athenians achieved the type of long-term profit and wealth maximization and continuous reinvestment of profits into additional productive enterprise that have been argued as unique to (and therefore responsible for) the modern industrial-capitalist system.

In 401 B.C. the Middle East was as much the center of the world attention as it is today. Ten thousand Greeks joined the army of Cyros marching on Babylon to overthrow the great King of the Persians, Artaxerxes. Among the Greeks was an Athenian gentleman, Xenophon, who went along as a sightseer but soon found himself cast in the main role. At Cunaxa, Cyros' forces met and resoundingly defeated the tremendous army of the King, but Cyros was killed while leading the attack. Stranded a thousand miles from home, the Greeks chose Xenophon as their new leader. The wealthy Athenian squire rose to the challenge. Using every trick of the pioneer in hostile territory, he brought his men back to safety. The March Up Country is a classic of courage and adventure.

Based on recently discovered fragments, this is one of the most complete English-language publications of Misoumenos, or The Hated Man.
 
Menander’s Misoumenos, or The Hated Man, is one of his most popular plays to have survived from classical times. Dating to approximately 300 BCE, it tells the story of a mercenary soldier and the captive girl he acquires while on campaign in Cyprus. The play follows the soldier’s growing despair as the girl spurns his advances and slowly turns against him, culminating in his suicidal thoughts.

The play belongs to the ancient genre of New Comedy, of which Menander was the acknowledged master. This edition presents a significantly updated text and the fullest English language translation of the play to date. It aims to restore as much as possible of the action of Misoumenos, reconstructing the language, stagecraft, and theatrical dialogue of the original based on hypothesis and reconstruction. Some sections can be restored nearly in full, permitting access to brilliantly original theatrical dialogue which had been lost for over two millennia. Apart from meter and sophisticated idiom, the themes of love, despair, and sadness that Menander treats are utterly timeless.

Although few of his plays exist in full today, the fourth-century BCE Greek dramatist Menander was known far and wide throughout antiquity. He was one of the first to locate his dramas in the common household, rather than the mythic world of gods and heroes, and is now recognized as one of the pioneering figures of ancient Greek “New Comedy.” 

The design of the Greek stage was such that the interiors of houses were almost never shown, which posed difficulties for a playwright interested in staging the domestic lives of ordinary people. Here, Mitch Brown dissects how Menander responded to this challenge. As Brown demonstrates, Menander successfully conjured offstage action and even characters in the audiences’ imaginations; these offstage universes, Brown argues, are fundamental to understanding Menander’s dramaturgy and its reception in later centuries. Menander’s offstage methods and the new type of play (domestic drama) that he inaugurated directly influenced Western theater into the early modern period—and the impact of his innovations can still be seen indirectly today.

Migration and minority rights are increasingly at the forefront of global discourse. Minority Memory, Identity, and Reconciliation explores the lives of two often overlooked minority communities: the Greek Orthodox minority in Istanbul, Türkiye, and the Turkish Muslim minority in Western Thrace, Greece. As empires dissolved, the leaders and political elites of new, smaller nations that emerged embarked on population exchanges to increase the ethnic and religious homogeneity of their nation-states. Although these two minority communities differ in religious, ethnic, and socioeconomic terms, they both offer unique perspectives on what happens to people who live on what is perceived as the wrong side of an arbitrarily drawn border. 

Drawing from the personal stories of members of these two minority communities regarding their struggle with displacement, discrimination, and cultural assimilation, as well as comprehensive historical analysis, this book examines how historical traumas, national policies, and sociopolitical dynamics have influenced contemporary minority memory and identity formation. By incorporating interviews with community leaders, civil society representatives, and state officials, this book offers a rich, multifaceted perspective on the processes of memory and identity formation that underscores the broader implications of these processes for international relations in the region and minority rights. Gül M. Gür pulls together theories of nationalism, collective memory, and narrative practice to highlight the unique process of minority memory work and its role in sustaining minority identity and their advocacy efforts.

Jack the Ripper. Jeffrey Dahmer. John Wayne Gacy. Locusta of Gaul. If that last name doesn’t seem to fit with the others, it’s likely because our modern society largely believes that serial killers are a recent phenomenon. Not so, argues Debbie Felton—in fact, there’s ample evidence to show that serial killers stalked the ancient world just as they do the modern one.

Felton brings this evidence to light in Monsters and Monarchs, and in doing so, forces us to rethink the assumption that serial killers arise from problems unique to modern society. Exploring a trove of stories from classical antiquity, she uncovers mythological monsters and human criminals that fit many serial killer profiles: the highway killers confronted by the Greek hero Theseus, such as Procrustes, who tortured and mutilated their victims; the Sphinx, or “strangler,” from the story of Oedipus; child-killing demons and witches, which could explain abnormal infant deaths; and historical figures such as Locusta of Gaul, the most notorious poisoner in the early Roman Empire. Redefining our understanding of serial killers and their origins, Monsters and Monarchs changes how we view both ancient Greek and Roman society and the modern-day killers whose stories still captivate the public today.

Motherhood played a central role in ancient Greece and Rome, despite the virtual absence of female participation in the public spheres of life. Mothers could wield enormous influence as the reproductive bodies of society and, in many cases, of culture. Yet motherhood and acts of mothering have received relatively little focused and sustained attention by modern scholars, who have concentrated almost exclusively on analyzing depictions of ancient women more generally.

In this volume, experts from across the humanities present a wealth of evidence from legal, literary, and medical texts, as well as art, architecture, ritual, and material culture, to reveal the multilayered dimensions of motherhood in both Greece and Rome and to confront the fact that not all mothers and acts of mothering can be easily categorized. The authors consider a variety of mothers—from the mythical to the real, from empress to prostitute, and from citizen to foreigner—to expose both the mundane and the ideologically charged lives of mothers in the Classical world. Some essays focus on motherhood as a largely private (emotional, intimate) experience, while others explore the ramifications of public, oftentimes politicized, displays of motherhood. This state-of-the art look at mothers and mothering in the ancient world also takes on a contemporary relevance as the authors join current debates on motherhood and suggest links between the lives of ancient mothers and the diverse, often conflicting roles of women in modern Western society.

In Vergil's Aeneid, the poet implies that those who have been initiated into mystery cults enjoy a blessed situation both in life and after death. This collection of essays brings new insight to the study of mystic cults in the ancient world, particularly those that flourished in Magna Graecia (essentially the area of present-day Southern Italy and Sicily).

Implementing a variety of methodologies, the contributors to Mystic Cults in Magna Graecia examine an array of features associated with such "mystery religions" that were concerned with individual salvation through initiation and hidden knowledge rather than civic cults directed toward Olympian deities usually associated with Greek religion. Contributors present contemporary theories of ancient religion, field reports from recent archaeological work, and other frameworks for exploring mystic cults in general and individual deities specifically, with observations about cultural interactions throughout. Topics include Dionysos and Orpheus, the Goddess Cults, Isis in Italy, and Roman Mithras, explored by an international array of scholars including Giulia Sfameni Gasparro ("Aspects of the Cult of Demeter in Magna Graecia") and Alberto Bernabé ("Imago Inferorum Orphica"). The resulting volume illuminates this often misunderstood range of religious phenomena.