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How did sport and festival affect the ancient Greek city? How did the values of athletics pervade Greek culture? This collection of fifteen new studies from an international cast took its inspiration from the exceptional Sydney Olympics of 2000. The focus here is on the ancient world, but additionally there is a sophisticated look at how Greek artefacts linked with sport can best be presented to the modern world.

Plutarch (born before AD 50, died after AD 120) is the ancient author who has arguably contributed more than any other to the popular conception of Sparta. Writing under the Roman Empire, at a time when the glory days of ancient Sparta were already long in the past, Plutarch represents a milestone in Sparta's mythologisation, but at the same time is a vital source for our historical understanding of Sparta. In this volume, eight scholars from around the world come together to consider Plutarch's understanding and presentation of Sparta, his flaws and significance as an historical source, and his development of Sparta as a resonant subject and theme within his best-known work, the Parallel Lives.This book is the latest in a series which the Classical Press of Wales is publishing on major sources for Sparta. Volumes on Xenophon and Sparta (Powell & Richer 2020) and Thucydides and Sparta (Powell & Debnar 2021) have already been released, and a further volume on Herodotus and Sparta is currently in preparation.

The hellenistic royal families, from Alexander the Great to the last Cleopatra, took part in dynastic in-fighting that was vicious, colourful and instructive. In this they anticipated by centuries the better-known excesses under Roman potentates such as Claudius and Nero.This new enhanced and revised edition of a major study explores the intricate quarrels and violence within the ruling hellenistic families. A main theme is the role of 'amphimetric' disputes, competition between a ruler's offspring from different women, and especially between the women themselves. The book also includes a full exploration of the role of courtesans in the political and sexual intrigues of the hellenistic courts.

The study of the Spartans is now pursued more widely and intensively than ever. Indeed, no longer is Sparta the 'second city' of ancient Greece. This volume, the fourth in the established series on which Powell and Hodkinson have collaborated, breaks fresh ground, not least in the range of its contributors. The authors of the fourteen new papers represent nine different countries and demonstrate many of the fertile modern approaches to the history, the archaeology - and the still-influential image - of the city on the Eurotas.

The Hellenistic World assembles fourteen new papers, by an international group of contributors, on the pivotal age between the death of Alexander the Great and Cleopatra VII. Subjects range from settlement patterns, non-Greek populations and marginal peoples, the personnel, rivalries and religious ideologies of the royal courts, and on to the wider question of the political structure of the Hellenistic world. Considerable attention is paid to the revolutionary art of the period and to the reception of its culture in more recent times, including images of Cleopatra on film.

This is the first book in English to provide a systematic treatment of Panhellenism. The author argues that in archaic and classical Greece Panhellenism was a body of narratives that expressed, defined and limited the community of the Hellenes and gave it political substance. Yet Panhellenic narratives also responded to other needs of the community, in particular serving to locate the Hellenes in time and space. Thus one of the chief Panhellenic narratives, the war against the barbarian, provided the conceptual framework in which Alexander the Great could imagine his Asian campaign.

Since its first appearance in 2008, this book has changed the landscape of Virgilian studies. Analysing closely the logic and the literary genres of Virgil's three poems, it politely confronts the modern orthodoxy that Virgil signalled distaste for the methods of his ruler, Octavian-Augustus. It refreshes the study of Virgil's poetry by comparing it with the detail (normally neglected by scholars) of Rome's civil wars after Julius Caesar's death, when Octavian's survival looked highly unlikely. And it argues that Virgil wrote as a passionate - and brave - partisan of Octavian, who - like a good lawyer - confronted his patron's undeniable failings in order to defend.Awarded in 2011 the prize of the Vergilian Society for 'the book that makes the greatest contribution toward our understanding and appreciation of Virgil'.

Here a team of young, established scholars offers new perspectives on poetic texts of wisdom, learning and teaching related to the great line of Greek and Latin poems descended from Hesiod.