Covering a wide variety of Greek and Latin texts that span from the Archaic period down to Late Antiquity, this volume represents the first concerted attempt to understand ancient literary history in its full complexity and on its own terms. Abandoning long-standing misconceptions derived from the misleading application of modern assumptions and standards, the volume rehabilitates an often neglected but fundamentally important subject: the Greeks' and Romans' representations of the origins and development of their own literary traditions. The fifteen contributors to this volume evince the pervasiveness and diversity of ancient literary history as well as the manifold connections between its manifestations in a variety of texts. Taken as a whole, this volume argues that studying ancient literary history should not only provide insight into the Greek and Roman world but also provoke us to think reflexively about how we go about writing the history of ancient literature today.

How were freed people represented in the Roman world? This volume presents new research about the integration of freed persons into Roman society. It addresses the challenge of studying Roman freed persons on the basis of highly fragmentary sources whose contents have been fundamentally shaped by the forces of domination. Even though freed persons were defined through a common legal status and shared the experience of enslavement and manumission, many different interactions could derive from these commonalities in different periods and localities across the empire. Drawing on literary, epigraphic, and archaeological evidence, this book provides cases studies that test the various ways in which juridical categories and normative discourses shaped the social and cultural landscape in which freed people lived. By approaching the literary and epigraphic representations of freed persons in new ways, it nuances the impact of power asymmetries and social strategies on the cultural practices and lived experiences of freed persons.

This is the first thorough English commentary on the geographical books of Pliny the Elder, written in the AD 70s. Pliny's account is the longest in Latin, and represents the geographical knowledge of that era, when the Roman Empire was the dominant force in the Mediterranean world. The work serves both cultural and ideological functions: much of it is topographical, but it also demonstrates the political need to express a geographical basis for the importance of the Roman state. In five books, Pliny covers the entire world as it was known in his era and includes some of the first information on the extremities of the inhabited region, including Scandinavia and the Baltic, eastern Asia, and sub-Saharan Africa. The commentary provides a detailed analysis of all the points Pliny raises: his sources, toponyms, and understanding of the place of the earth in the cosmos.