Simon Swain

George Boys-Stones

Polemon of Laodicea's "Physiognomy" is a manual on how to tell character from appearance, thus enabling its readers to choose friends and avoid enemies on sight. The present volume is the work of a team of leading Classicists and Arabists. The main surviving versions in Greek and Latin are translated into English for the first time.

Polemon's Physiognomy from Classical Antiquity to Medieval Islam

Seeing the Face, Seeing the Soul

A full edition and study of Bryson's Management of the Estate, edited by a leading expert in both Classics and Arabic literature.

A Critical Edition, English Translation, and Study of Bryson's Management of the Estate

Economy, Family, and Society from Rome to Islam

Dio Chrysostom is a major representative of the flourishing world of the Greeks under Rome. He offers an impressive range of high-quality writing, social comment, and appraisal of Rome's Empire at its height. This volume presents eleven new assessments by an international team of experts who for the first time study Dio's politics alongside his philosophy and writing.

Politics, Letters, and Philosophy

Dio Chrysostom

Stephen Harrison

Jas Elsner

Jaś Elsner

This book surveys the Severan period's many developments in literature, philosophy, religion, art, archaeology and culture.

Severan Culture

A critical edition, translation and analysis of four texts illustrating the relation of kings and courtiers in the fourth-century Roman world.

Texts, Translations and Studies of Four Key Works

Themistius, Julian and Greek Political Theory under Rome

Emilie Savage-Smith

G. J. H. van Gelder

Ignacio Javier Sánchez Rojo

"A Literary History of Medicine by the Syrian physician Ibn Abī Uṣaybi'ah (d. 1270) is the earliest comprehensive history of medicine. It contains biographies of over 432 physicians, ranging from the ancient Greeks to the author's contemporaries, describing their training and practice, often as court physicians, and listing their medical works; all this interlaced with poems and anecdotes. These volumes present the first complete and annotated translation along with a new edition of the Arabic text showing the stages in which the author composed the work. Introductory essays provide important background. The reader will find on these pages an Islamic society that worked closely with Christians and Jews, deeply committed to advancing knowledge and applying it to health and wellbeing. Contributors: Ignacio Sánchez, N. Peter Joosse, Alasdair Watson, Bruce Inksetter, Franak Hilloowala"--

The 'Uyūn Al-anbā' Fī Ṭabaqāt Al-aṭibbā', of Ibn Abīuṣaybi'ah

A Literary History of Medicine

Bryson's Management of the Estate (Oikonomikos Logos) offers advice on the key private concerns of the Roman elite: getting rich, managing slaves, love and marriage, and bringing up children. This estate owner is a farmer and a merchant, making his money through good and effective business. His wife is co-owner of the estate and their love promotes material prosperity. Their child needs twenty-four hour supervision in 'all his affairs'. Bryson's book was almost certainly written in the mid-first century AD, but survives mainly in Arabic. It had a profound effect on Islamic thinking on the economy and on marriage, but is virtually unknown to classicists. This new edition of the text together with the first English translation will appeal to Roman social and economic historians, students of imperial Greek literature and all those interested in the development of Greco-Roman thought in the Islamic empire of the Middle Ages.

Professor of Classics and Ancient History and Head of Department Simon Swain

Warwick Research Fellow Simon Swain

Hellenism and Empire explores identity, politics, and culture in the Greek world of the first three centuries AD, the period known as the second sophistic. The sources of this identity were the words and deeds of classical Greece, and the emphasis placed on Greekness and Greek heritage was far greater then than at any other time. Yet this period is often seen as a time of happy consensualism between the Greek and Roman halves of the Roman Empire. The first part of the book shows that Greek identity came before any loyalty to Rome (and was indeed partly a reaction to Rome), while the views of the major authors of the period, which are studied in the second part, confirm and restate the prior claims of Hellenism.

Language, Classicism, and Power in the Greek World, AD 50-250

Hellenism and Empire

Ian Repath

Antonella Ghersetti

Robert Hoyland

Polemon of Laodicea (near modern Denizli, south-west Turkey) was a wealthy Greek aristocrat and a key member of the intellectual movement known as the Second Sophistic. Among his works was the Physiognomy, a manual on how to tell character from appearance, thus enabling its readers to choose friends and avoid enemies on sight. Its formula of detailed instruction and personal reminiscence proved so successful that the book was re-edited in the fourth century by Adamantius in Greek, translated and adapted by an unknown Latin author of the same era, and translated in the early Middle Ages into Syriac and Arabic. The surviving versions of Adamantius, Anonymus Latinus, and the Leiden Arabic more than make up for the loss of the original. The present volume is the work of a team of leading Classicists and Arabists. The main surviving versions in Greek and Latin are translated into English for the first time. The Leiden Arabic translation is authoritatively re-edited and translated, as is a sample of the alternative Arabic Polemon. The texts and translations are introduced by a series of masterly studies that tell the story of the origins, function, and legacy of Polemon's work, a legacy especially rich in Islam. The story of the Physiognomy is the story of how one man's obsession with identifying enemies came to be taken up in the fascinating transmission of Greek thought into Arabic.

Simon Swain

About

Books

Join the club