Bøker i Duckworth Classical Essays-serien

This collection of essays by the classicist Alessandro Barchiesi examines Ovid and his 'rationalistic art of illusion' along with intertextuality in Latin literature more generally, and in the wider context of the Graeco-Roman tradition.

How should I interpret a classical text? This book argues for an approach to interpretation that is theoretically reflective and committed to an open-ended, yet rigorously critical, pluralism.

Slavery was a fundamental institution in the world of the ancient Greeks and Romans. This text attempts to ask the question whether the historian can hope to reconstruct the life of ancient slaves, or just fragments of their image in Greek and Roman literature.

How should we study the democracy of classical Athens? Attitudes to Athenian democracy have always been affected by the circumstances of those studying it. This text examines the different approaches to its study and argues that objectivity should be strived for.

Leisured Resistance examines the varied ways in which cultured Roman aristocrats, of very different periods, used their country estates as a political and literary tool. While for some the villas were retreats in which to compose literature and to escape from politics, others adapted this same tradition of cultured otium (or deliberate retirement from everyday politics) to present radical and competing visions of society and literature alike. Examining in-depth sources from both prose and verse from the time of Cicero to the last centuries of the Roman Empire in the west, the title demonstrates how the traditional image of the Roman aristocrat on his country estate was politically and socially very flexible: allowing authors, as times and circumstances changed, to present themselves or their patrons and friends as being in retreat from politics, or alternatively, as providing a focus for political opposition through the deliberate embracing of cultural values and schools of philosophy that offered resistance to prevailing political orthodoxy. The title ends by exploring how this tradition was adapted in the greatly changed world of the barbarian-ruled kingdoms that replaced direct Roman rule in Gaul in the fifth and sixth centuries.