This book advances our understanding of the place of Latin inscriptions in the Roman world. It enables readers, especially those new to the subject, to appreciate both the potential and the limitations of inscriptions as historical source material, by considering the diversity of epigraphic culture in the Roman world and how it has been transmitted to the twenty-first century. The first chapter offers an epigraphic sample drawn from the Bay of Naples, illustrating the dynamic epigraphic cu...

This second edition of Alison E. Cooley's accessible introduction to Pompeii takes into account the major new theories and discoveries that have emerged since the first edition was published 20 years ago.Italy's third most popular tourist destination, Pompeii attracts millions of visitors each year, and images of the town are familiar all around the world. However, even today our picture of the site is being impacted by new archaeological discoveries. This book focuses particularly...

At the end of his life the emperor Augustus wrote an account of his achievements in which he reviewed his rise to power, his conquest of the world and his unparalleled generosity towards his subjects. This edition provides a text, translation and detailed commentary - the first substantial one in English for more than four decades - which is suitable for use with students of all levels. The commentary deals with linguistic, stylistic and historical matters. It elucidates how Augustus under...

**'A gripping work, and a gripping translation' Nicholas Lezard, GuardianNiccolò Machiavelli's brutally uncompromising manual of statecraft, The Prince is translated and edited with an introduction by Tim Parks in Penguin Classics**As a diplomat in turbulent fifteenth-century Florence, Niccolò Machiavelli knew how quickly political fortunes could rise and fall. The Prince, his tough-minded, pragmatic handbook on how power really works, made his name notori...

Based upon Machiavelli's first-hand experience as an emissary of the Florentine Republic to the courts of Europe, The Prince analyses the usually violent means by which men seize, retain, and lose political power. This fluent new translation is accompanied by comprehensive notes and an introduction that dispels some of the myths associated with Machiavelli, and considers the true purpose of The Prince. - ;'A prince must not have any other object nor any other thought...but war, its institu...

"The first biography of an important personality from the beginnings of Rome's empire" (Graham Sumner, coauthor of Arms and Armour of the Imperial Roman Soldier).Nero Claudius Drusus Germanicus (Drusus the Elder) was the first conqueror of Germania (the Netherlands and Germany) and one of ancient Rome's most beloved military heroes. Yet there has never been a full volume dedicated to his remarkable story, achievements, and legacy. Eager for Glory ...

The author of Rome Is Burning separates fact from fiction as he examines the life of an ancient Roman figure made famous in the TV miniseries I Claudius.Livia—wife of the first Roman emperor, Caesar Augustus, and mother of the second, Tiberius—wielded extraordinary power at the center of Roman politics. In this biography of Livia, the first in English, Anthony Barrett sets aside the portrait of a cunning and sinister schemer to reveal Livia as a c...

Machiavelli's commentary on Livy's history of Rome sets out his fundamental preference for a republican state. This translation is richly annotated, providing the contemporary reader with sufficient historical, linguistic, and political information to understand and interpret the revolutionary affirmations Machiavelli made, based on the historical evidence he found in Livy. - ;IDiscourses on Livy (1531) is as essential to an understanding of Machiavelli as his famous treatise, The Prince. ...

Roman towns and their history are generally regarded as being the preserve of the archaeologist or the economic historian. In this famous, unusual and radical book which touches on such disparate themes as psychology and urban architecture, Joseph Rykwert has considered them as works of art. His starting point is the mythical, historical and ritual texts in which their foundation is recounted rather than the excavated remains, such texts having parallels not merely in ancient Greece but al...

Using the results of archaeological techniques, and examining methodological debates, Tim Cornell provides a lucid and authoritative account of the rise of Rome.The Beginnings of Rome offers insight on major issues such as:Rome’s relations with the Etruscansthe conflict between patricians and plebeiansthe causes of Roman imperialismthe growth of slave-based economy.Answering the need for raising acute questions and...

Histories of medieval Europe have typically ignored southern Italy, looking south only in the Norman period. Yet Southern Italy in the ninth and tenth centuries was a complex and vibrant world that deserves to be better understood. In Before the Normans, Barbara M. Kreutz writes the first modern study in English of the land, political structures, and cultures of southern Italy in the two centuries before the Norman conquests. This was a pan-Meditteranean society, where the Roman p...

The games comprised gladiatorial fights, staged animal hunts (venationes) and the executions of convicted criminals and prisoners of war. Besides entertaining the crowd, the games delivered a powerful message of Roman power: as a reminder of the wars in which Rome had acquired its empire, the distant regions of its far-flung empire (from where they had obtained wild beasts for the venatio), and the inevitability of Roman justice for criminals and those foreigners who had ...