Bøger i Wisconsin Studies in Classics serien

In 2004 director Oliver Stone's epic film ""Alexander"" generated a renewed interest in Alexander the Great. The critical response to the film offers a fascinating lesson in the contentious dialogue between historiography and modern entertainment. This book scrutinizes Stone's project from its inception and design to its production and reception.

Taking a fresh look at the poetry and visual art of the Hellenistic age, from the death of Alexander the Great in 323 BC to 20 BC, Graham Zanker makes enlightening discoveries about the assumptions and conventions of Hellenistic poets and artists and their audiences.

This sparkling new translation of Ovid's love poems, notorious for the sexual content that led to his exile by the emperor Augustus, also includes Tristia 2, Ovid's witty self-defense. With helpful footnotes and a comprehensive introduction, this edition gives readers a poetic tour of the literature, mythology, topography, religion, politics, and sexuality of ancient Rome.

The sexualized serial murder of women by men is the subject of this provocative book. Jane Caputi argues that the sensationalized murders by men such as Jack the Ripper, Son of Sam, Hillside Strangler, and the Yorkshire Ripper represent a contemporary genre of sexually political crimes. The awful deeds function as a form of patriarchal terrorism, disappearing women at a rate of some four thousand annually in the United States alone. Caputi asks us not only to name the phenomenon of sexually political murder, but to recognize sex crime in all of its various interconnecting manifestations."

Flinders Petrie has been called the ""Father of Modern Egyptology"" and was one of the pioneers of modern archaeology. Here Drower, a student of his in the 1930s, traces his life from his boyhood, when he was already a budding scholar, to his stunning career in the deserts of Egypt.

In this examination of Etruscan religion, Jean-Rene Jannot uses three major constructs - death, ritual, and the nature of the gods to present an overview of ancient Etruscan beliefs, including the afterlife, funerary customs, and mythology.

Argues that the story of Hylas - a famous episode of the Argonauts' voyage - was used by poets throughout classical antiquity to reflect symbolically on the position of their poetry in the literary tradition. Certain elements of the story, including the characters of Hylas and Hercules themselves, functioned as metaphors of the art of poetry.

This insightful study of the Roman poet Horace's first book of Epistles explores his representations of slavery and freedom as a response to the new imperial era in Rome.

By turns outlandish, humorous, and scatological, the "Historia Augusta" is an eccentric compilation of biographies of the Roman emperors and usurpers of the second and third centuries. By analyzing it as literature rather than as history, David Rohrbacher offers a new and compelling explanation for this strange text that has long vexed scholars.

This text questions the Hellenistic dating of many famous monuements, based on careful examination of the evidence.

Latin plays were written for audiences whose gender perspectives and expectations were shaped by life in Rome, and the crowds watching the plays included both female citizens and female slaves. This is the first book to confront directly the role of women in Roman Republican plays of all genres, as well as to examine the role of gender in the influence of this tradition on later dramatists.

The foremost religious festival of ancient Athens was the Panathenaia. This work addresses the problems of its interpretation, discussing the seasonal controversy over the Parthenon frieze. The festival is also compared with others held throughout the ancient Greek world.

Reveals major figures in Ovid's ""Metamorphoses"", highlighting the conflicted revisionist nature of the ""Metamorphoses"". This title explores issues central to Ovid's poetics - the status of the image, the generation of plots, repetition, opposition between refined and inflated epic style, and the interrelation of rhetoric and poetry.

Scrutinizes most of the best-known pieces of Greek sculpture to determine what can be securely considered to have been produced during 200-100 BC. This book reveals a tentative but plausible picture of the artistic trends of this fascinating period.

Shedding light on the evidence of well-known and recently excavated sites and the objects they have yielded - their iconography, manufacturing techniques, and afterlives - this collection follows the first archaeological traces of the rise of ancient Italy to its rediscovery in the Renaissance and its reinvention in contemporary fiction.

Offering a reminder of the complex uses to which institutionalized violence can be put, this study shows how the deadly violence of arena sport and political suicide served a social purpose in ancient Rome.