"The modern visitor, who approaches Pompeii two thousand years later, coming not only from another region but from quite another world, can still sense the subtle magic of love that emanates from the wall-paintings of the houses, from the bas-reliefs along the streets, from the graffiti scribbled on the walls of the buildings among which he wanders." -- Introduction.

"The modern visitor, who approaches Pompeii two thousand years later, coming not only from another region but from quite another world, can still sense the subtle magic of love that emanates from the wall-paintings of the houses, from the bas-reliefs along the streets, from the graffiti scribbled on the walls of the buildings among which he wanders." -- Introduction.

Offers an in-depth exploration of the only assured brothel from the Greco-Roman world, illuminating the lives of both prostitutes and clients.

A humorous, trenchant and fascinating examination of how Western culture's taboo words have evolved over the millennia

A collection of essays by leading scholars on the linguistic significance of Greek and Latin papyri from Egypt. The Language of the Papyri charts a range of productive approaches to this material, and offers new methodologies suitable for its analysis.

This timely volume attempts to formulate interesting new ways of talking about the entire concept of literacy in the ancient world--literacy not in the sense of whether 10% or 30% of people in the ancient world could read or write, but in the sense of text-oriented events embedded in a particular socio-cultural context. The volume is intended as a forum in which selected leading scholars rethink from the ground up how students of classical antiquity might best approach the question of literacy in the past, and how that investigation might materially intersect with changes in the way that literacy is now viewed in other disciplines.

In From Document to History: Epigraphic Insights into the Greco-Roman World, editors Carlos Noreña and Nikolaos Papazarkadas gather together an exciting set of original studies on Greek and Roman epigraphy, first presented at the Second North American Congress of Greek and Latin Epigraphy (Berkeley 2016). Chapters range chronologically from the sixth century BCE to the fifth century CE, and geographically from Egypt and Asia Minor to the west European continent and British isles. Key themes include Greek and Roman epigraphies of time, space, and public display, with texts featuring individuals and social groups ranging from Roman emperors, imperial elites, and artists to gladiators, immigrants, laborers, and slaves. Several papers highlight the new technologies that are transforming our understanding of ancient inscriptions, and a number of major new texts are published here for the first time.

This well-illustrated volume, written by experts, is an all-embracing survey of The World of Pompeii, the town of Herculaneum and the many urban and rural villas.

When one thinks of inscriptions produced under the Roman Empire, public inscribed monuments are likely to come to mind. Hundreds of thousands of such inscriptions are known from across the breadth of the Roman Empire, preserved because they were created of durable material or were reused in subsequent building. This volume looks at another aspect of epigraphic creation – from handwritten messages scratched on wall-plaster to domestic sculptures labeled with texts to displays of official patronage posted in homes: a range of inscriptions appear within the private sphere in the Greco-Roman world. Rarely scrutinized as a discrete epigraphic phenomenon, the incised texts studied in this volume reveal that writing in private spaces was very much a part of the epigraphic culture of the Roman Empire.