Classical era, Mediterranean

22 May 2008 00:01

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I couldn't have been more than nine or ten when I started reading books about Greek mythology. At about the same age I first read Mary Renault's The Lion in the Gateway; the agonies that followed on the realization that one set of my ancestors were the Bactrians in Xerxes's army may easily be imagined. Add to this a mother educated at a pukka lyceo classico and high-school and college Latin (begun because, as the principal told me at the time, "It was thought you would do better in a language you didn't have to speak") and you have the makings of a life-long obsession with dead Mediterranean languages with lots of declensions and their speakers.

Cf.: Alexander the Great; Ancient metallurgy; Ancient trade; Democracy; Empires and Imperialism; Epicureanism; the Etruscans (another set of ancestors); Import of Eastern religions to Europe; Ionia; Lucian of Samosata; Lucretius; Myths; Phoenicians; Karl Popper; Proto-industrialism; Republics; Rome. Probably others, too.

Recommended:
• Bryn Mawr Classical Review
• Walter Burket, Orientalizing Revolution: Near Eastern Influence on Greek Culture in the Early Archaic Age [How the Greeks became civilized]
• M. I. Finley, The Ancient Economy
• Peter Green (ed.), Hellenistic History and Culture [Online]
• G. S. Kirk, The Nature of the Greek Myths
• Gilbert Murray, Five Stages of Greek Religion
• Plato, Apology, Meno, and Phaedo [I was very fortunate, as bored thirteen year old, to have a teacher who made a habit of assigning me books to read which I'd hate but have to argue against. Plato was one of his more inspired choices: it's hard to resist the charm, even if he was a totalitarian bugger. (Mr. Epstein also had me read Ayn Rand, who I just found laughable.)]
• Bertrand Russell, A History of Western Philosophy, Part I
• Jennifer Tolbert Roberts, Athens on Trial: The Antidemocratic Tradition in Western Thought
• W. G. Runciman, "The Diffusion of Christianity in the Third Century AD as a Case-Study in the Theory of Cultural Selection", European Journal of Sociology 45 (2004): 3--21 [For more on Runciman's theory of cultural selection, see here.]
• Tacitus, The Histories and The Annals

To read (primary):
• Augustine
  • De civitate Dei
  • Confessioness
• Ausonius
• Avianus, Fabulæ
• Boethius
• Catullus
• Herodotus
• Ovid
  • Ars
  • Fasti
• Posidonius
• Procopious, The Secret History
• Propertius
• Tacitus, Germania

To read (secondary):
• Graham Anderson, The Fairy Tale in the Ancient World
• Janet M. Atwill, Rhetoric Reclaimed: Aristotle and the Liberal Arts Tradition [Rhetoric as techne]
• Sandra Blakely, Myth, Ritual and Metallurgy in Ancient Greece and Recent Africa [Blurb]
• John Boardman, The Diffusion of Classical Art in Antiquity
• Peter Brown, Augustine of Hippo
• Anthony Bulloch, Erich S. Gruen, A.A. Long, and Andrew Stewart (eds.), Images and Ideologies: Self-definition in the Hellenistic World [Online]
• J. B. Bury, E. A. Barber, Edwyn Bevan, and W. W. Tarn, The Hellenistic Age
• Claude Calame
  • The Craft of Poetic Speech in Ancient Greece
  • Myth and History in Ancient Greece: The Symbolic Creation of a Colony [Blurb]
• Lionel Casson, Travel in the Ancient World
• Francois Chamoux, Hellenistic Civilization ["Presents Hellenistic civilization as pluralistic, diverse, and vibrant, looking in particular at the ways in which Greek ideas and cultural forms were received in different contexts and how the Greek language, along with Greek political thought, lifestyles, religion, art, and architecture, spread and were adapted throughout the Mediterranean basin."]
• Marshall Clagett, Greek Science in Antiquity
• Raffaella Cribiore, Gymnastics of the Mind: Greek Education in Hellenistic and Roman Egypt [Blurb]
• Eve D'Ambra, Roman Women [Blurb]
• de Coulanges, The Ancient City
• Janet Delaine, The Baths of Caracalla: A Study in the Design, Construction and Economics of Large-Scale Building in Imperial Rome. [Review in BMCR]
• Aubrey De Selincourt, The World of Herodotus
• Marcel Detienne, The Masters of Truth in Ancient Greece [Blurb]
• O. A. W. Dilke, Greek and Roman Maps
• Suzanne Dixon, The Roman Family
• Eric R. Dodds, Pagan and Christian in an Age of Anxiety: Some Aspects of Religious Experience from Marcus Aurelius to Constantine
• Donald Engels
  • Classical Cats
  • The Logistics of Macedonian Army
• Henry R. Fairclough, Love of Nature Among the Greeks and Romans
• Margalit Finkelberg, The Birth of Literary Fiction in Ancient Greece [Blurb]
• M. I. Finley, Politics in the Ancient World
• Michael Flower, The Seer in Ancient Greece [blurb]
• David Furley, The Greek Cosmologists, vol. I: The Formation of the Atomic Theory and Its Earliest Critics
• Kathy L. Gaca, The Making of Fornication: Eros, Ethics, and Political Reform in Greek Philosophy and Early Christianity [Blurb]
• Mark Golden and Peter Toohey (eds.), Inventing Ancient Culture: Historicism, Periodization, and the Ancient World
• D. W. Graham, Explaining the Cosmos: The Ionian Tradition of Scientific Philosophy ["[T]he history of Presocratic philosophy can be seen not as a series of dialectical failures, but rather as a series of theoretical advances that led to empirical discoveries. Indeed, the Ionian tradition can be seen as the origin of the scientific conception of the world that we still hold today". Blurb, ch. 1]
• Robert Graves, What Food the Centaurs Ate [Pre-classical 'shrooms.]
• Moses Hadas, Ancilla to Classical Reading
• Stephen Halliwell, The Aesthetics of Mimesis: Ancient Texts and Modern Problems
• William V. Harris, Restraining Rage: The Ideology of Anger Control in Classical Antiquity [Blurb]
• Havelock, Preface to Plato
• Frank L. Holt, Alexander the Great and the Mystery of the Elpehant Medallions [Blurb and first chapter; reviewed in BMCR, 2004.06.34]
• Carl Huffman, Archytas of Tarentum: Pythagorean, Philosopher and Matheamtician-King
• Hughes, Pan's Travail: Environmental Problems of the Ancient Greeks and Romans
• Benjamin Isaac, The Invention of Racism in Classical Antiquity [Blurb, with link to first chapter. Reviewed in BMCR, 2004.06.49]
• George B. Kerferd, The Sophistic Movement
• Amelie Kuhrt and Susan Sherwin-White, Hellenism in the East: Greek and Non-Greek Civilizations from Syria to Central Asia after Alexander
• Leslie Kurke, The Traffic in Praise: Pindar and the Poetics of Social Economy [Review in BMCR]
• Jennifer Larson, Greek Heroine Cults
• Ling, Ancient Mosaics
• G. E. R. Lloyd, The Revolutions of Wisdom: Studies in the Claims and Practice of Ancient Greek Science [online]
• Giovanni Manetti, Theories of the Sign in Classical Antiquity
• Dale B. Martin, Inventing Superstition: From the Hippocratics to the Christians [Blurb]
• Adrienne Mayor, Greek Fire, Poison Arrows and Scorpion Bombs: Biological and Chemical Warfare in the Ancient World
• Margaret Christina Miller, Athens and Persia in the Fifth Century BC: A Study in Cultural Receptivity [blurb]
• Patricia Cox Miller, Dreams in Late Antiquity: Studies in the Imagination of a Culture
• Gilbert Murray, The Classical Tradition in Poetry
• Martha Nussbaum, The Therapy of Desire: Theory and Practice in Hellenistic Ethics
• Josiah Ober, Athenian Legacies: Essays of the Politics of Going on Together [Blurb, ch. 1]
• Sarah B. Pomeroy, Goddesses, Whores, Wives and Slaves: Women in Classical Antiquity
• James I. Porter (eds.), Classical Pasts: The Classical Traditions of Greece and Rome [Blurb, intro]
• Joseph Roisman, The Rhetoric of Conspiracy in Ancient Athens [Blurb]
• Michael Ivanovitch Rostovtzeff
  • The Social and Economic History of the Hellenistic World
  • The Social and Economic History of the Roman Empire
• David N. Sedley, Creationism and Its Critics in Antiquity [Blurb]
• Charles Segal, Singers, Heroes, and Gods in the Odyssey ["Looks closely at key forms of social and personal organization that Odysseus encounters in his voyages and considers such topics as the relationship between bard and audience and Homer's treatment of the nature of poetry."]
• Steven Shankman
  • Early China/Ancient Greece: Thinking Through Comparisons
  • The Siren and the Sage: Knowledge and Wisdom in Ancient Greece and China
• Susan Sherwin-White and Amelie Kuhrt, From Samarkhand to Sardis: A New Approach to the Seleucid Empire
• Jocelyn Penny Small, Wax Tablets of the Mind: Cognitive Studies of Memory and and Literacy in Classical Antiquity [Review in BMCR]
• Snyder, The Woman and the Lyre: Women Writers in Classical Greece and Rome
• Elizabeth Speller, Following Hadrian: A Second-Century Journey through the Roman Empire
• David W. Tandy, Warriors into Traders: The Power of Markets in Early Greece
• William G. Thalmann, The Swineherd and the Bow: Representations of Class in the Odyssey
• Rosalind Thomas, Herodotus in Context: Ethnography, Science and the Art of Persuasion [blurb]
• Theresa Urbainczyk, Slave Revolts in Antiquity [blurb]
• A. A. Vasiliev, History of the Byzantine Empire
• Sister Benedicta Ward, SLG, Harlots of the Desert: A Study of Repentance in Early Monastic sources
• Fikret Yegul, Baths and Bathing in Classical Antiquity [Blurb]
• Paul Zanker, The Mask of Socrates: The Image of the Intellectual in Antiquity [Online]