Showing results by publisher "Tantor Audio" in Ancient

Welcome to January 263 B.C. Attacking a pair of long spears with his short dagger was going to hurt and add to Alerio's collection of combat scars. And only leave him injured, if Fortuna smiled on him. If not? That's why he prayed to the other Goddess. This should have been the easiest, most luxurious duty a heavy infantryman could ever imagine. It didn't turn out that way and, at the moment, he regretted throwing the spear. These are the adventures of Alerio Sisera, Corporal of the Republic's Legions, Weapons Instructor, experienced Raider, Combat Rower, and protege of a Roman Senator.

"Live each day as if it were your last." Written in Greek by the only Roman emperor who was also a philosopher, without any intention of publication, Marcus Aurelius's Meditations offers a remarkable series of challenging spiritual reflections and exercises developed as the emperor struggled to understand himself and make sense of the universe.

As the world recently commemorated the hundredth anniversary of the discovery of the tomb of Tutankhamun, our fascination with the pharaoh begs for a balanced view. Most recovered mummies have not escaped the modern trafficking in ancient bodies and body parts. The story of Ankh-Hap, a Ptolemaic-era mummy seized in the nineteenth century from the infamous mummy-pits of Egypt, provides a salutary example of what most mummies have endured.

Servilia is often cited as one of the most influential women of the late Roman Republic. During her second marriage, she began an affair with Julius Caesar, which probably lasted for the rest of his life and is further indicative of the force of her charm and her exceptional intelligence. 

David Weir explores the conflicting attitudes towards modernity present in decadent culture by examining the difference between aesthetic decadence - the excess of artifice - and social decadence, which involves excess in a variety of forms, whether perversely pleasurable or gratuitously cruel. Such contrariness between aesthetic and social decadence led some of its practitioners to substitute art for life and to stress the importance of taste over morality, a maneuver with far-reaching consequences. 

What was it like to live during the time of Jesus? Where did people live? Who did they marry? What was family life like? And how did people survive? These are just some of the questions that Scott Korb answers in this engaging new book, which explores what everyday life entailed two thousand years ago in first-century Palestine, that tumultuous era when the Roman Empire was at its zenith and a new religion---Christianity---was born.

Machiavelli on War offers a comprehensive interpretation of the philosopher-historian's treatment of war throughout his writings, from poems and memoranda drafted while he was Florence's top official to his posthumous works, The Prince and Discourses on Livy. Christopher Lynch argues that the issue of war permeates the form and content of each of Machiavelli works, the substance of his thoughts, and his own activity as a writer, concluding that he was the first great modern philosopher because he was the first modern philosopher of war.

The Victorian Era. The Age of Enlightenment. The post-9/11 years. We are accustomed to demarcating history, fencing off one period from the next. But societies have not always operated in this way. Paul Hay returns to Rome in the first century BCE to glimpse the beginnings of periodization as it is still commonly practiced, exploring how the ancient Romans developed a novel sense of time and used it to construct their views of the past and of the possibilities of the future.

Western philosophers have long claimed that God, if such a being exists, is a personal force capable of reason, and that the path to a good human life is also the path to a happy one. But what if these claims prove false, or at least deeply misleading? The Aztecs of central Mexico had a rich philosophical tradition, recorded in Latin script by Spanish clergymen and passed down for centuries in the native Nahuatl language—one of the earliest transcripts being the Huehuetlatolli, or Discourses of the Elders, compiled by Friar Andres de Olmos circa 1535.

This new edition introduces the core elements of ancient Greek and Roman narratives about immortal gods and heroic humans. It explains how myths once shaped ancient ways of thinking, and how they have fascinated and inspired artists, writers, musicians, scientists, and scholars since.

Belief and Cult argues that belief isn't uniquely Christian but was central to ancient Roman religion. Drawing on cognitive theory, Jacob Mackey shows that despite having nothing to do with salvation or faith, belief underlay every aspect of Roman religious practices—emotions, individual and collective cult action, ritual norms, social reality, and social power. In doing so, he also offers a thorough argument for the importance of belief to other non-Christian religions.