New Books in Ancient History

With Michael B. Cosmopoulos

Michael B. Cosmopoulos's The World of Homer (Cambridge UP, 2025) reconstructs the world behind the Iliad and the Odyssey using archaeology, philology, anthropology and oral tradition.

With Emily Wilson

Emily Wilson's Odyssey (Norton, 2017) is the first English translation of The Odyssey by a woman, in iambic pentameter and matching the line count of the Greek original.

With Emily Hauser

Emily Hauser's Penelope's Bones (Univ of Chicago Press, 2025) uses archaeology and science to recover the lives of Bronze Age women standing behind Helen, Briseis, Cassandra and Circe.

With Michelle M. Kundmueller

Michelle Kundmueller's Homer's Hero (SUNY Press, 2019) reads the Iliad's love of honor against the Odyssey's longing for home, tracing both through Plato's Republic.

With Gregory Nagy

The Iliad is among the oldest surviving works of literature and went unwritten for a long time; Homer is credited with it, though many storytellers, a lot of them women, more likely composed it.

With Gregory Nagy

With Jessica Romney

Jessica Romney's Lyric Poetry and Social Identity in Archaic Greece (U Michigan Press, 2020) reads sympotic lyric for how Greek poets built group identity in martial poetry, in exile and in political verse.

With Michael Scott

Michael Scott's Themistocles: The Rise and Fall of Athens' Naval Mastermind (Yale UP, 2026) presents the Athenian general as shaping his own destiny through choices, some of them flawed, not a fixed nature.

With Jennifer T. Roberts

With Paul Rahe

Paul Rahe's Sparta's Sicilian Proxy War (Encounter Books, 2023) traces Athens' invasions of Spartan-backed Sicily as one of the earliest proxy wars in the West, comparing ancient Sparta's structure with Athens and modern America.

With Richard Billows

Thucydides heard Herodotus lecture around 450 BC before writing History of the Peloponnesian War, believing history moves in cycles and is more than mere record keeping.

With Richard Billows

With Elizabeth D. Carney

With Rachel Kousser

Rachel Kousser's Alexander at the End of the World (Mariner Books, 2024) follows Alexander after he took Persepolis in 330 BC and his troops burned it, chasing rebellious ex-Persians into India.

With Frank L. Holt

With Paul Kosmin

Paul J. Kosmin's Time and Its Adversaries in the Seleucid Empire (Harvard UP, 2018) traces Seleucid kings imposing continuous numbered years, met by rebels predicting history's total end.

With Angelos Chaniotis

Angelos Chaniotis's Age of Conquests (Harvard UP, 2018) traces how Alexander's successors built an empire from the eastern Mediterranean as far as present-day Afghanistan, later dismantled one by one by Rome.

With Alexandra F. Morris

Alexandra F. Morris's Disability in Ptolemaic Egypt and the Hellenistic World (Routledge, 2024) uncovers overlooked evidence of dwarfism, blindness and other disabilities between 332 and 30 BCE.

With Armand D’Angour

With William H. F. Altman

William H. F. Altman's Ascent to the Beautiful (Rowman & Littlefield, 2020) completes a five-volume reading order of Plato's dialogues, defending Alcibiades Major against Schleiermacher's rejection of it.

With William H. F. Altman

William H. F. Altman's Plato the Teacher (Lexington, 2012) puts the Allegory of the Cave at the center of Plato's teaching order, alongside the examples of Socrates and Cicero.

With Jennifer T. Roberts

With William H. F. Altman

William H. F. Altman's Ascent to the Good (Lexington, 2018) reads Plato's dialogues between Symposium and Republic as preparation for the Idea of the Good, unlike Aristotle's eudaemonism.

With Barbara Sattler

Barbara Sattler's The Concept of Motion in Ancient Greek Thought (Cambridge UP, 2020) traces how Parmenides excluded motion from rational inquiry while Zeno built paradoxes against it.

With John Davie

John Davie's Greek To Us (Bloomsbury, 2026) traces the ancient Greek behind hypocrite and astronaut, behind the Achilles heel and the Midas Touch, and behind crocodile tears.

With Roslyn Weiss

With David Lunt

David Lunt's Crown Games of Ancient Greece (U Arkansas Press, 2022) covers nine centuries of Panhellenic festivals for Zeus at Olympia, Apollo at Delphi, and Poseidon at the Isthmian Games.

With Josiah Ober

Josiah Ober's The Greeks and the Rational (U California Press, 2022) traces practical reason to Greek sophists, historians and philosophers who also recognized its limits.

With Sarah F. Derbew

Sarah F. Derbew's Untangling Blackness in Greek Antiquity (Cambridge UP, 2022) is called the first concerted treatment of black skin color in Greek literature and visual culture, covering Egyptians, Aithiopians and Indians.

With Jill Gordon

With Malcolm Schofield

Malcolm Schofield's How Plato Writes (Cambridge UP, 2023) traces the allegory, myth and paradox that Plato deploys, drawing mainly on the Republic and the lesser-known Laws.

With Matthew Duncombe

Matthew Duncombe's Ancient Relativity (Oxford UP, 2020) reads Plato, Aristotle, the Skeptics and the Stoics as sharing one basic position he calls constitutive relativity.

With Mario Telò

Mario Telò's Archive Feelings (Ohio State UP, 2020) reads Greek tragedy through Derrida's Mal d'Archive and the death drive, locating its aesthetic pull beyond catharsis.

With James Romm

James Romm's Plato and the Tyrant (W.W. Norton, 2025) follows Plato to tyrant-ruled Syracuse, first in 388 BCE while he was writing The Republic, and twice more over the years.

With Adriel M. Trott

Adriel Trott's Aristotle on the Matter of Form (Edinburgh UP, 2019) reads matter and form on the model of a Möbius strip, challenging binary readings of body and soul.

With Marcus Gibson

Marcus Gibson asks whether Socrates was guilty and what the relationship between the philosopher and the city means, discussing The Apology of Socrates as the series' second episode.

With Tatiana Bur

Tatiana Bur's Technologies of the Marvellous in Ancient Greek Religion (Cambridge UP, 2025) traces mechanical strategies in Greek religion, from the tragic deus ex machina to Hellenistic epigrams.

With Simon Critchley

Simon Critchley's Tragedy, the Greeks, and Us (Vintage, 2020) challenges Nietzsche's account of tragedy's origin, Aristotle's catharsis and Plato's hatred of the form.

With Shilo Brooks

Shilo Brooks discusses Xenophon's The Education of Cyrus, asking whether rule can be learned, how military innovations change civil society, and what Machiavelli took from Xenophon.

With Hugh Liebert

Hugh Liebert argues that Plutarch had profound philosophical insights despite his reputation as a historian, and that his work was foundational for Shakespeare, Hamilton, Nietzsche and Montesquieu.

With Tae-Yeoun Keum

Tae-Yeoun Keum's Plato and the Mythic Tradition in Political Thought (Harvard UP, 2020) traces Plato's Myth of Metals and Myth of Er through Bacon, Leibniz and Cassirer.

With James Fredal

James Fredal's The Enthymeme (Penn State UP, 2020) argues Aristotle's enthymeme is neither syllogistic nor the one Attic orators like Lysias and Isaeus used, which was forensic storytelling.

With Robin Waterfield

Robin Waterfield's Plato of Athens (Oxford UP, 2023) follows Plato from wartime Athens through the Academy he founded, to his failed attempt to write a constitution for Syracuse.

With Emily Katz Anhalt

Emily Katz Anhalt's Embattled (Redwood Press, 2021) reads Homer's Iliad and Odyssey alongside Aeschylus's Oresteia and Sophocles's Antigone as warnings against tyranny.

With Michael Leese

Michael Leese's Making Money in Ancient Athens (U Michigan Press, 2021) reads inscriptions and lawsuit speeches to argue Athenians practiced rational, profit-driven economic strategies.

With Demetra Kasimis

With Robin Waterfield

Robin Waterfield writes about ancient Athens in Why Socrates Died, Xenophon's Retreat and Creators, Conquerors, and Citizens, and has translated Aristotle, Plato and Xenophon from ancient Greek.

With Marcus Gibson

Marcus Gibson discusses Books VIII and IX of Plato's Republic, asking whether America today counts as democratic or oligarchic and whether democracies drift toward tyranny.

With Mark D. Usher

With Julia Kindt

Julia Kindt's The Trojan Horse and Other Stories (Cambridge UP, 2024) tells ten tales of mythical creatures, from the Trojan Horse and the Cyclops to the Minotaur.

With Marcus Gibson

Marcus Gibson discusses Plato's Symposium, asking why Socrates does not get drunk, whether love is finding your other half, and what links comedy and tragedy, love and immortality.

With Adrienne Mayor

With Robert C. Bartlett

Robert Bartlett discusses translating Aristophanes' The Acharnians and The Knights alongside Aristotle's The Art of Rhetoric, on how public speech can turn demagogic.

With Demetra Kasimis

Plato's Republic imagines building an ideal city from scratch almost 2,400 years ago, a hypothetical posed to understand justice, human behavior and what a more just society would take.

With Donni Wang

With Marcus Gibson

Marcus Gibson introduces Plato in preparation for a series on the dialogues, asking why Plato wrote dialogues at all and whether Plato counts as a friend to democracy.

With Robin Waterfield

Robin Waterfield's translation collects the complete works of Epictetus, born into slavery around 50 CE, who became a philosophy teacher in Greece after being expelled from Rome and is now considered Stoicism's most important exponent.

With Gerald Lalonde

Gerald Lalonde's Athena Itonia (Brill, 2019) compares the cult of Athena Itonia across the four regions of ancient Greece where major evidence survives.

With Doug Bates

Doug Bates covers Pyrrho, an obscure Greek philosopher who claimed that belief about events disturbs people, and who may have been influenced by Buddhism in creating Pyrrhonism.

With Steven Smith

Plato's Apology is a first-person account of the 399 BC trial of Socrates, who believed in free-thought and whom the Athenian government decided was dangerous, written as a dialogue.

With Sarah Nooter

With Jean-Manuel Roubineau

Jean-Manuel Roubineau's The Dangerous Life and Ideas of Diogenes the Cynic (Oxford UP, 2023) asks whether Diogenes truly met Alexander the Great and how the philosopher actually died.

With James Diggle

James Diggle edited the Cambridge Greek Lexicon (Cambridge UP, 2021), which covers a wider range of usage than Liddell and Scott and moves beyond those Victorian editors' often modest preferences.

With Theodore Papakostas

With Sarah Iles Johnston