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Between becoming king of Macedonia in 336 BC and his death in 323, Alexander the Great conquered not only the Greek city states but also Persia and as far east as the Punjab in India, as far south as Egypt. Claude Mossé describes the progress of Alexander's career in the first part of her book, while the second examines the effects of his conquests on the history of the ancient, medieval and modern world.Central to the book is the myth of Alexander and how the image of Alexander was created and evolved over the centuries. From the illustrious son of Zeus down to the absolute monarch idealised by Louis XIV, from the valiant knight of the crusaders to the Moslem philosopher-king, the author reveals the gamut of contrasts that make up the legend of this extraordinary hero of history and myth.
Athens has, at different times and from different points of view, been cited as a model of moderate democracy and triumphant humanism, or, on the contrary, as an illustration of the disorders due to demagoguery and misguided imperialism. Professor Mossé looks beyond these judgments to discuss the exceptional destiny of Athens – a city which for two centuries dominated the Eastern Mediterranean world, but then faded from the political scene when Rome extended its control over the whole Mediterranean. The history of Athenian democracy does not end in 404 BC, as is sometimes thought, when the city capitulated to Sparta at the end of its Golden Age. Athens in Decline, first published in 1973, demonstrates how the city experienced another seventy-five years of greatness, and survived, more or less curtailed, under Macedonian domination. She examines the reasons for the final collapse and follows the stages of a decline which was not wholly without grandeur.
Love Between Women examines female homoeroticism and the role of women in the ancient Roman world. Employing an unparalleled range of cultural sources, Brooten finds evidence of marriages between women and establishes that condemnations of female homoerotic practices were based on widespread awareness of love between women. "An extraordinary accomplishment. . . . A definitive source for all future discussion of homoeroticism and the Bible."—Mary Rose D'Angelo, Harvard Gay & Lesbian Review "[Brooten's] convincing analysis . . . not only profoundly reshapes our understanding of the past, but it should also shape the way in which that past, particularly the early Christian texts with their im...
A gripping tale of mystery and adventure from the bestselling author of THE CITY OF LIES and LABYRINTH. 1891. Seventeen-year-old Léonie Vernier and her brother abandon Paris for the sanctuary of their aunt's isolated country house near Carcassonne, the Domaine de la Cade. But Léonie stumbles across a ruined sepulchre - and a timeless mystery whose traces are written in blood. 2007. Meredith Martin arrives at the Domaine de la Cade to research a biography. But Meredith is also seeking the key to her own complex legacy and becomes immersed in the story of a tragic love, a missing girl, a unique deck of tarot cards and the strange events of one cataclysmic night a century ago...
The Age of Nihilism explores the ruinous philosophies currently underwriting the devastating slow-motion implosion of Western civilization. Most Western democracies structure their social and political orders around a vague, poorly defined body of ideas called “progressive” and whose stated goal is “social justice.” But using sources as powerful and diverse as Plato, Friedrich Nietzsche, Herman Melville, and Albert Camus, McManus explodes the myth of progress and unmasks the falsehood of social justice. He argues instead for cycles of history, and in doing so, McManus reveals that the citizens of twenty-first century Western democracies exist in the fast-fading twilight of an increasingly distempered civilization whose fate was always determined. We designate as “progress” the cultural and social changes of the past thirty years. But it is not progress. It is nihilism. And it is the presence of nihilism itself that informs us that we are living at the end of an age.
The Greek Polis and the Invention of Democracy presents a series of essays that trace the Greeks’ path to democracy and examine the connection between the Greek polis as a citizen state and democracy as well as the interaction between democracy and various forms of cultural expression from a comparative historical perspective and with special attention to the place of Greek democracy in political thought and debates about democracy throughout the centuries. Presents an original combination of a close synchronic and long diachronic examination of the Greek polis - city-states that gave rise to the first democratic system of government Offers a detailed study of the close interactionbetween ...
""In 15 chapters, Rudi Volti, €succinctly but comprehensively covers the changes in the world of work, encompassing everything from gathering and hunting to working in today's Information Age.""
Diocesan Justice in Late Fifteenth-Century Carpentras uses notarial records from the 1480s to reconstruct the procedures, caseload, and sanctions of the bishop’s court of Carpentras and compare them to other secular and ecclesiastical courts. The court provided a robust forum for debt litigation utilized by a wide variety of people. Its criminal proceedings focused on recidivist clerics who engaged in fights, disobedience, anti-Jewish activities, and sexual transgressions. Its justice varied depending on whether cases involved violence, sex, or contracts. The judge applied sanctions gingerly and protected litigants’ rights carefully, in ways we might not expect: his role was to intervene in, explore, and document conflicts, and to elicit confessions and mediate disputes. Participants exploited this narrative and archival space well.
This book is an examination of nineteenth-century interpretations of Socrates by Hegel, Kierkegaard, and Nietzsche in the light of the contemporary debates over rationality in the modern world. These interpretations of Socrates have fundamentally influenced modern and postmodern thought, and their complexity reflects both an attraction to, and a fear of, the peculiarly modern concept of reason that Socrates is read as embodying. Socrates is seen in this book as an emblematic figure through which the constitutive tensions between enlightenment and romanticism in modern thought can be understood. In the concluding chapter, Harrison analyzes the claims of discursive reason versus those of deconstruction in the postmodern conflict over the figure of Socrates.