Peter Thonemann

S. R. F. Price

Shares revisionist insights into the influences of classical cultures, revealing the lesser-known roles played by ancient civilizations on shaping the modern West, in an account that also cites the contributions of world-shaping Greek and Roman figures.

A History from Troy to Augustine

The Birth of Classical Europe

John North

Mary Beard

This survey of over the course of a millennium, places religion in its full cultural context. Topics covered include, interpreting the Romans' own theories of their religious system and its origins and the boundaries of Roman religion.

Religions of Rome: A history

Emily Kearns

Describes religion in mythology in the ancient Mediterranean.

The Oxford Dictionary of Classical Myth and Religion

From Freud to Artemidorus

The Future of Dreams

The Dictionary of Classical Myth and Religion offers a fully rounded and highly authoritative point of access to all aspects of ancient religious life and thought. Dr Simon Price and Dr Emily Kearns, area advisers for the third edition of the Oxford Classical Dictionary, have come together to select, revise, edit, and in some cases wholly recast, a large number of key entries from OCD to create this handy, accessible reference work on mythology and religion in the Graeco-Roman world. Bringing to the attention of a wider audience the authority and scholarly rigour of OCD, the Oxford Dictionary of Classical Myth and Religion provides students, teachers, and general readers with an affordable comprehensive, and wide-ranging A-Z reference source. The Dictionary is unique in that in addition to Greek myths and Roman festivals it covers Greek and Roman religious places, monuments, religious personnel, divination, astrology, and magic, and also contains many entries on Judaism and Christianity in Greek and Roman times.

To an extraordinary extent we continue to live in the shadow of the classical world. At every level from languages to calendars to political systems, we are the descendants of a 'classical Europe', using frames of reference created by ancient Mediterranean cultures. As this consistently fresh and surprising new book makes clear, however, this was no less true for the inhabitants of those classical civilizations themselves, whose myths, history, and buildings were an elaborate engagement with an already old and revered past filled with great leaders and writers, emigrations and battles. Indeed, much of the reason we know so much about the classical past is the obsessive importance it held for so many generations of Greeks and Romans, who interpreted and reinterpreted their changing casts of heroes and villains. Figures such as Alexander the Great and Augustus Caesar loom large in our imaginations today, but they were themselves fascinated by what had preceded them. The Birth of Classical Europe is therefore both an authoritative history, and also a fascinating attempt to show how our own changing values and interests have shaped our feelings about an era which is by some measures very remote but by others startlingly close.

Simon R. F. Price

Simon Price attempts to discover why the Roman Emperor was treated like a god.

S. R. F. Price

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