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The renowned Basler Homer-Kommentar of the Iliad, edited by Anton Bierl and Joachim Latacz and originally published in German, presents the latest developments in Homeric scholarship. Through the English translation of this ground-breaking reference work, edited by S. Douglas Olson, its valuable findings are now made accessible to students and scholars worldwide.

Consent in Shakespeare's Classical Mediterranean fills a gap in knowledge about how female-identified, gender-fluid, and non-binary characters made choices about intimacy, engagement, and marriage in Shakespeare's classical Mediterranean plays.This classical sequel explores how female-identified, gender-fluid, and non-binary characters accessed agency in Shakespeare's Mediterranean plays set in classical Troy, Athens, Thebes, Antioch, Ephesus, Mytilene, the North African Pentapolis, Tarsus, Egypt, Rome, Antium, Britain, Sardis, Philippi, Sicily, greater Bohemia, and the Balkan region. Through the lens of sources from Eastern and Western Europe, the Middle East, and the Maghrib, Shakespeare's heroines and their supporters may have initially appeared to conform to Early Modern contexts, but the diverse backgrounds of female-identified, gender-fluid, and non-binary characters impacted the right to consent to friendship, affection, betrothal, and marriage in the classical Mediterranean. By focusing on perspective views about female-identified, gender-fluid, and non-binary characters in and around Eastern and Western Europe, the Middle East, and the Maghreb, classical realities collide with Early Modern preconceptions and misconceptions to reveal commonalities and differences in the lived experiences of female-identified and non-binary royalty, nobility, servants, enslaved peoples, matchmakers, courtesans, sex workers, madams, herbalists, tailors, and merchants.This study will be of great interest to students and scholars in Theatre, Middle East Studies, Asian Studies, Eastern European and Eurasian Studies, African and Maghrib Studies, and Social Justice Studies.

This volume collects written and visual works that engage with opportunities of ancient practice from within the continental tradition. More than surveying ancient ethical or political ideas, the chapters develop divergent yet resonant approaches to concrete ways of living, acting, reflecting, and being with others found in antiquity and its reception. The practices involve the habits, exercises, activities, philosophies, and lives of today's readers; and so most chapters encourage the reader to do something, to put the ideas into practice. Withstanding a temptation to simply theorize practice, it insists on the embodied and shared materiality of living in singular times and places. The practical encounters between this book and its readers range across antiquity and the contemporary world, from political theatre, casuistry, and slavery to book production, friendship, and our own mortality. Through thinker-practitioner collaborations, occasional pieces, exhortations to readers, and recipes for action, this work strives to articulate and cultivate old and new practices for our lives.

Fasting has become increasingly popular for a variety of reasons-from weight loss to detoxing, to the faithful who fast in prayer, to seekers pursuing mindfulness, to activists using hunger strikes as protest. Based on extensive historical, scientific, and cultural research and reporting, The Fast illuminates the numerous facets of this act of self-deprivation.It looks at the complex science behind the jaw-dropping biological changes that occur inside the body when we fast. Metabolic switching can prompt repair and renewal down to the molecular level, providing benefits for those suffering from obesity and diabetes, cancer, epilepsy, cardiovascular disease, neurodegenerative disorders, and more. Beyond the physical experience, fasting can be a great collective unifier, and it has been adopted by religions and political movements all over the world. Fasting is central to holy seasons and days such as Lent (Christianity), Ramadan (Islam), Uposatha (Buddhism), and Ekadashi (Hinduism).John Oakes interviews doctors, spiritual leaders, activists, and others who guide him through this practice-and embarks on fasts of his own-to deliver a book that supplies anyone curious about fasting with profound new understanding, appreciation, and inspiration.

Amidst a culture otherwise obsessed with beauty, the Greek theater provided a unique space for Athenians to play with ugliness—to try these anti-ideals on for size. Such imaginative play was considered dangerous by some, such as Plato, who feared its corrupting influence; others, including Aristotle, saw the theater's provocation and release of emotions as educational and even therapeutic. Sophocles'and Euripides'fifth-century audiences could not help but directly confront the ugliness of their drama, but as cultural memory of embodied productions faded, an abstracted contrast emerged between beautiful tragedy and ugly comedy—a pernicious aesthetic polarization that persists to this day. A. C. Duncan's Ugly Productions embraces the materiality of the theater, arguing that dramatic aesthetics are best understood within affective frameworks where beauty or ugliness are produced through a dynamic interplay of verbal and visual modalities. Duncan reframes the Greek concept of “the ugly” not as mere “anti-beauty,” but as an affective disposition positively associated with such painful emotions as pity, fear, grief, and abjection. Through studies of the figures of Xerxes, Electra, Philoctetes, Ajax, Heracles, and other tragic figures, Ugly Productions offers detailed analyses of the various ways ugliness was produced in performance with each chapter serving as an in-depth guide for studying the aesthetics of these works. Duncan confronts the historical neglect of ugliness in critical discourses, calling for a revaluation of negative aesthetics and renewed interest in the uglier aspects of these canonical works of theater.

The essential role of ethnographic thought in the Roman empire and how it evolved in Late AntiquityEthnography is indispensable for every empire, as important as armies, tax collectors, or ambassadors. It helps rulers articulate cultural differences, and it lets the inhabitants of the empire, especially those who guide its course, understand themselves in the midst of enemies, allies, and friends. In The Conqueror's Gift, Michael Maas examines the ethnographic infrastructure of the Roman Empire and the transformation of Rome's ethnographic vision during Late Antiquity. Drawing on a wide range of texts, Maas shows how the Romans'ethnographic thought evolved as they attended to the business of ruling an empire on three continents.Ethnography, the “conqueror's gift,” gave Romans structured ways of finding a place for foreigners in the imperial worldview and helped justify imperial action affecting them. In Late Antiquity, Christianity revolutionized the imperial ethnographic infrastructure by altering old concepts and introducing credal models of community. The Bible became a source for organizing the Roman world. At the same time, many previously unseen collective identities emerged across Western Eurasia in reaction to the diminution of Roman power. These changes deeply affected the Empire's ethnographic infrastructure and vision of the world. Maas argues that a major consequence of these developments was the beginning of a sectarian age, as individuals and political communities came to identify themselves primarily in terms of religion as well as ethnicity. As they adjusted to changing ethnographic realities, Romans understood their place among the peoples of the world in new ways. Willingly or not, we continue to be recipients of the conqueror's gift today.

Scholars have recognized that fake news is not a phenomenon peculiar to the 21st century. While efforts for a more focused approach to fake news in the ancient world have been carried out in the field of Roman history, the phenomenon of fake news in ancient Greece has received limited attention. The contributions in this volume offer a selective approach to this phenomenon by applying media and cultural studies instruments to ancient texts. They pinpoint parallels and differences between ancient and modern fake news by employing methods of literary and cultural studies, as well as historical-documentary analysis of ancient sources. In particular, they explore questions such as: To what extent does reflection on the concepts of truth, lie, and opinion influence ancient Greek political-rhetorical discourse? What is the political or social function of embedding ‘misleading information'in ancient Greek historiographical texts or pamphlets? Which intentions are pursued with the help of fake news in literary and documentary texts? Can parallels be drawn with modern approaches to fake news? Thus, the volume investigates the mechanisms that historically lay behind the creation, dissemination, and adaptation of ‘misleading information'.

In the ancient Greek alphabet, three of the seven letters representing vowels were called dichrona, “of two quantities”: unlike ε, η, ο, ω, which distinguished a quantity, α, ι, and υ could indicate both a short and a long quantity. Among the surviving ancient grammatical treatises on dichrona, the one attributed to Aelius Herodianus (2nd century CE) is the most famous. This volume offers a new critical edition of the treatise on dichrona attributed to Herodianus, the first to be based on its entire manuscript tradition. In the introduction, the contents of this treatise are related to other Herodianic fragments on vowel quantities (these fragments mainly come from the ancient scholia to Homer, but also the epitomes of Ps.- Arcadius and John Philoponus, the grammatical work of Georgius Choeroboscus, Byzantine lexica and etymologica, etc.), as well as to three other anonymous treatises on vowel quantities that are also related to the theory on dichrona elaborated by Herodianus (in the appendix, new critical editions of these three texts are provided, too). By comparing the contents of all these sources, it is possible to shed light on the theory on vowel quantities elaborated by Herodianus.

Der deutsche Historiker Johannes Sleidanus (1506-1556) hat bis heute hauptsächlich mit seinem ersten Hauptwerk, einer umfangreichen Geschichte der Reformation, im Zentrum wissenschaftlichen Interesses gestanden. Sein zweites Hauptwerk, die ‚De quatuor summis imperiis libri tres‘ (‚Drei Bücher über die vier Weltreiche‘), ein Abriss der Weltgeschichte, bestimmt für den Unterrichtsgebrauch an Universitäten und Gymnasien, in zahlreichen Ausgaben in ganz Europa verbreitet und in mehrere europäische Sprachen übersetzt, fand in der Sleidanus-Forschung bislang nicht die ihm gebührende Aufmerksamkeit. Vorliegende Publikation bietet die erste wissenschaftliche Edition des lateinischen Textes zusammen mit der ersten Übersetzung in modernes Deutsch und historischen Erläuterungen. Beigegeben wurden die von dem Helmstedter Historiker Heinrich Meibom d.Ä. (1555-1625) zusammengestellten Quellennachweise, da diese seit 1586 fester Bestandteil der Rezeption von Sleidans Weltgeschichte waren. Von den 28 Drucken, die in Deutschland zwischen 1586 und 1713 erschienen sind, enthielten 27 die Quellennachweise Meiboms. Damit bietet die Neuausgabe zugleich einen umfassenden Einblick in den Wissenshorizont der universitären Historiographie der Frühen Neuzeit.