e emperor Nero is etched into the Western imagination as one of ancient Rome's most infamous villains, and Tacitus' Annals have played a central role in shaping the mainstream historiographical understanding of this flamboyant autocrat. This section of the text plunges us straight into the moral cesspool that Rome had apparently become in the later years of Nero's reign, chronicling the emperor's fledgling stage career including his plans for a grand tour of Greece; his participation in a city-wide orgy climaxing in his publicly consummated 'marriage' to his toy boy Pythagoras; the great fire of AD 64, during which large parts of central Rome went up in flames; and the rising of Nero's 'grotesque' new palace, the so-called 'Golden House', from the ashes of the city. This building project stoked the rumours that the emperor himself was behind the conflagration, and Tacitus goes on to present us with Nero's gruesome efforts to quell these mutterings by scapegoating and executing members of an unpopular new cult then starting to spread through the Roman empire: Christianity. All this contrasts starkly with four chapters focusing on one of Nero's most principled opponents, the Stoic senator Thrasea Paetus, an audacious figure of moral fibre, who courageously refuses to bend to the forces of imperial corruption and hypocrisy. This course book offers a portion of the original Latin text, study aids with vocabulary, and a commentary. Designed to stretch and stimulate readers, Owen's and Gildenhard's incisive commentary will be of particular interest to students of Latin at both A2 and undergraduate level. It extends beyond detailed linguistic analysis and historical background to encourage critical engagement with Tacitus' prose and discussion of the most recent scholarly thought.

Anders E. Nielsen presents a fresh look on New Testament eschatology by analysing the Gospel of Luke and the Book of Acts. He first of all considers whether ancient literary expressions of farewell motif may or may not lead to an outlook of some sort of transcendental nature, which could play an active role in the composition of the text as read text. He concludes that in a fairly representative number of non-biblical as well as biblical farewell-addresses we do find transcendental outlooks with eschatological implications. Furthermore, these particular outlooks seem to be at work in close relation to the approaching death of the intended speaker of the addresses. Against this background the two major farewell addresses, the one of Jesus in Luke 22 and the one of Paul in Acts 20, are at great length analysed by means of a rhetorical and text-linguistic approach. Anders E. Nielsen divides his exegetical-theological findings into three main-points. First of all the traditional hypothesis of an imminent expectation of the parousia is seen as problematic, because the eschatology in Luke seems to be less a matter of chronology and more a question of quality. Secondly, some of the sayings in a hellenistic work like Luke-Acts may sometimes be free to express a vertical-transcendent aspect with individual-eschatological associations, while other phases are sufficiently vague to call up in the audience both individual and/or collective-eschatological connotations. Thirdly, all this put together suggests that Luke's religious language does in fact not play down eschatology. On the contrary, Anders E. Nielsen suggests that one can speak of some sort of applied eschatology in the sense that all the relevant expressions in the compositions examined suggest a far more parenetic or prescriptive semantic function than an informative one.

This book contains over fifty passages of Latin from 200 BC to AD 900, each with translation and linguistic commentary. It is not intended as an elementary reader (though suitable for university courses), but as an illustrative history of Latin covering more than a millennium, with almost every century represented. Conventional histories cite constructions out of context, whereas this work gives a sense of the period, genre, stylistic aims and idiosyncrasies of specific passages. 'Informal' texts, particularly if they portray talk, reflect linguistic variety and change better than texts adhering to classicising norms. Some of the texts are recent discoveries or little known. Writing tablets are well represented, as are literary and technical texts down to the early medieval period, when striking changes appear. The commentaries identify innovations, discontinuities and phenomena of long duration. Readers will learn much about the diversity and development of Latin.

What modern economics can tell us about ancient Rome The quality of life for ordinary Roman citizens at the height of the Roman Empire probably was better than that of any other large group of people living before the Industrial Revolution. The Roman Market Economy uses the tools of modern economics to show how trade, markets, and the Pax Romana were critical to ancient Rome's prosperity. Peter Temin, one of the world's foremost economic historians, argues that markets dominated the Roman economy. He traces how the Pax Romana encouraged trade around the Mediterranean, and how Roman law promoted commerce and banking. Temin shows that a reasonably vibrant market for wheat extended throughout the empire, and suggests that the Antonine Plague may have been responsible for turning the stable prices of the early empire into the persistent inflation of the late. He vividly describes how various markets operated in Roman times, from commodities and slaves to the buying and selling of land. Applying modern methods for evaluating economic growth to data culled from historical sources, Temin argues that Roman Italy in the second century was as prosperous as the Dutch Republic in its golden age of the seventeenth century. The Roman Market Economy reveals how economics can help us understand how the Roman Empire could have ruled seventy million people and endured for centuries.