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In 2004 director Oliver Stone's epic film ""Alexander"" generated a renewed interest in Alexander the Great. The critical response to the film offers a fascinating lesson in the contentious dialogue between historiography and modern entertainment. This book scrutinizes Stone's project from its inception and design to its production and reception.

The foremost religious festival of ancient Athens was the Panathenaia. This work addresses the problems of its interpretation, discussing the seasonal controversy over the Parthenon frieze. The festival is also compared with others held throughout the ancient Greek world.

Reveals major figures in Ovid's ""Metamorphoses"", highlighting the conflicted revisionist nature of the ""Metamorphoses"". This title explores issues central to Ovid's poetics - the status of the image, the generation of plots, repetition, opposition between refined and inflated epic style, and the interrelation of rhetoric and poetry.

The Persica is an extensive history of Assyria and Persia written by the Greek historian Ctesias around 400 BCE. Written for a Greek readership, the Persica influenced the development of both historiographic and literary traditions in Greece. It also, contends Matt Waters, is an essential but often misunderstood source for the history of the Achaemenid Persian Empire.

Ancient Athenians were known to reuse stone artifacts, architectural blocks, and public statuary in the creation of new buildings and monuments. These construction decisions were often a visible mechanism for shaping communal memory. Sarah Rous develops the concept of upcycling to refer to this meaningful reclamation.

Challenges the often-romanticised view of the prostitute as an urbane and liberated courtesan by examining the social and economic realities of the sex industry in Greco-Roman culture. Departing from the conventional focus on elite society, these essays consider the Greek prostitute as displaced foreigner, slave, and member of an urban underclass.

Jean Andreau and Raymond Descat break new ground in this comparative history of slavery in Greece and Rome. Focusing on slaves' economic role in society, their crucial contributions to Greek and Roman culture, and their daily and family lives, the authors examine the different ways in which slavery evolved in the two cultures.