Classical era, Mediterranean

Last update: 14 Feb 2026 23:36
First version: 30 November 1996

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I couldn't have been more than nine or ten when I started reading books about Greek mythology. At about the same age I first read Mary Renault's The Lion in the Gateway; the agonies that followed on the realization that one set of my ancestors were the Bactrians in Xerxes's army may easily be imagined. Add to this a mother educated at a pukka lyceo classico and my own high-school and college Latin (begun because, as the principal told me at the time, "It was thought you would do better in a language you didn't have to speak") and you have the makings of a life-long interest in dead Mediterranean languages with lots of declensions and their speakers.

See also:
• Alexander the Great
• Ancient metallurgy
• Ancient trade
• Democracy
• Empires and Imperialism
• Epicureanism
• the Etruscans
• History of Science
• Import of Eastern religions to Europe
• Ionia
• the Late Bronze Age Collapse
• Lucretius
• Myths
• Phoenicians
• Plato
• Karl Popper
• Proto-industrialism
• Reception and Appropriations of Classical Culture
• Republics
• Rome

Recommended, big-picture:
• Walter Burkert, Orientalizing Revolution: Near Eastern Influence on Greek Culture in the Early Archaic Age [How the Greeks became civilized]
• M. I. Finley, The Ancient Economy
• G. S. Kirk, The Nature of the Greek Myths
• Gilbert Murray, Five Stages of Greek Religion
• Plato gets his own notebook
• Bertrand Russell, A History of Western Philosophy, Part I
• Tacitus
  • The Histories
  • The Annals

Recommended, close-ups:
• Bryn Mawr Classical Review
• Peter Green (ed.), Hellenistic History and Culture
• G. E. R. Lloyd
  • Cognitive Variations: Reflections on the Unity and Diversity of the Human Mind
  • Demystifying Mentalities
• Josiah Ober
  • "Learning from Athens: Success by design", Boston Review 31:2 (March-April 2006)
  • Democracy and Knowledge: Innovation and Learning in Classical Athens [Review: Liberty was Born from Endless Meetings]
• Jennifer Tolbert Roberts, Athens on Trial: The Antidemocratic Tradition in Western Thought
• W. G. Runciman, "The Diffusion of Christianity in the Third Century AD as a Case-Study in the Theory of Cultural Selection", European Journal of Sociology 45 (2004): 3--21 [For more on Runciman's theory of cultural selection, see here.]
• W. W. Tarn, The Greeks in Bactria and India [Eurocentric, and in places (e.g., the Macedonian princesses) more imaginative than a historian really ought to be. But extremely thorough and apparently unsurpassed.]
• David Ulansey, The Origins of the Mithraic Mysteries: Cosmology and Salvation in the Ancient World

To read (primary):
• Augustine
  • De civitate Dei
  • Confessioness
• Ausonius
• Avianus, Fabulæ
• Boethius
• Catullus
• Herodotus
• Ovid
  • Ars
  • Fasti
• Posidonius
• Procopious, The Secret History
• Propertius
• Tacitus, Germania

To read, secondary, history of science and technology:
• Sandra Blakely, Myth, Ritual and Metallurgy in Ancient Greece and Recent Africa
• Marshall Clagett, Greek Science in Antiquity
• O. A. W. Dilke, Greek and Roman Maps
• David Furley, The Greek Cosmologists, vol. I: The Formation of the Atomic Theory and Its Earliest Critics
• D. W. Graham, Explaining the Cosmos: The Ionian Tradition of Scientific Philosophy
• Carl Huffman, Archytas of Tarentum: Pythagorean, Philosopher and Mathematician-King
• G. E. R. Lloyd
  • The Revolutions of Wisdom: Studies in the Claims and Practice of Ancient Greek Science
  • The Ambitions of Curiosity: Understanding the World in Ancient Greece and China
  • The Way and the Word: Science and Medicine in Early China and Greece
  • Adversaries and Authorities: Investigations into Ancient Greek and Chinese Science
• Adrienne Mayor, Greek Fire, Poison Arrows and Scorpion Bombs: Biological and Chemical Warfare in the Ancient World
• Reviel Netz, The Transformation of Mathematics in the Early Mediterranean World: From Problems to Equations
• James L. Zainaldin, The Artes and the Emergence of a Scientific Culture in the Early Roman Empire

To read, secondary, democracy and popular participation in government:
• Ryan K. Balot, Courage in the Democratic Polis:: Ideology and Critique in Classical Athens [Review in BMCR]
• Phillip Brook Manville, The Origins of Citizenship in Ancient Athens
• Anna Missiou, Literacy and Democracy in Fifth-Century Athens
• Josiah Ober
  • Athenian Legacies: Essays of the Politics of Going on Together
  • Athenian Revolution: Essays on Ancient Greek Democracy and Political Theory
  • Mass and Elite in Democratic Athens: Rhetoric, Ideology, and the Power of the People
• David M. Pritchard (ed.), War, Democracy and Culture in Classical Athens
• Raaflaub, Ober and Wallace, The Origins of Democracy in Ancient Greece
• Eric Robinson, Democracy beyond Athens: Popular government in the Greek classical age
• Peter Temin, The Roman Market Economy

To read, secondary, ancient economies and ecologies:
• Alain Bresson, The Making of the Ancient Greek Economy: Institutions, Markets, and Growth in the City-States
• Tom Brughmans and Andrew Wilson (eds.), Simulating Roman Economies: Theories, Methods, and Computational Models
• Peter Garnsey, Famine and Food Supply in the Graeco-Roman World: Responses to Risk and Crisis
• J. Donald Hughes, Environmental Problems of the Greeks and Romans: Ecology in the Ancient Mediterranean
• Alfonso Moreno, Feeding the Democracy: The Athenian Grain Supply in the Fifth and Fourth Centuries BC

To read, secondary, not otherwise or not yet classified:
• Ory Amitay, From Alexander to Jesus
• Graham Anderson, The Fairy Tale in the Ancient World
• Arnaldo Momigliano, Alien Wisdom: The Limits of Hellenization
• Janet M. Atwill, Rhetoric Reclaimed: Aristotle and the Liberal Arts Tradition [Rhetoric as techne]
• John Boardman, The Diffusion of Classical Art in Antiquity
• Hugh Bowden, Mystery Cults of the Ancient World
• Anthony Bulloch, Erich S. Gruen, A. A. Long, and Andrew Stewart (eds.), Images and Ideologies: Self-definition in the Hellenistic World
• Walter Burkert, Babylon, Memphis, Persepolis: Eastern Contexts of Greek Culture
• J. B. Bury, E. A. Barber, Edwyn Bevan, and W. W. Tarn, The Hellenistic Age
• Claude Calame
  • The Craft of Poetic Speech in Ancient Greece
  • Myth and History in Ancient Greece: The Symbolic Creation of a Colony
• Lionel Casson
  • Travel in the Ancient World
  • Libraries in the Ancient World
• Francois Chamoux, Hellenistic Civilization
• Joan Breton Connelly, Portrait of a Priestess: Women and Ritual in Ancient Greece
• Raffaella Cribiore, Gymnastics of the Mind: Greek Education in Hellenistic and Roman Egypt
• de Coulanges, The Ancient City
• Aubrey De Selincourt, The World of Herodotus
• William Desmond, Cynics
• Marcel Detienne, The Masters of Truth in Ancient Greece
• Eric R. Dodds, Pagan and Christian in an Age of Anxiety: Some Aspects of Religious Experience from Marcus Aurelius to Constantine
• Donald Engels
  • Classical Cats
  • The Logistics of Macedonian Army
• Henry R. Fairclough, Love of Nature Among the Greeks and Romans
• Margalit Finkelberg, The Birth of Literary Fiction in Ancient Greece
• M. I. Finley, Politics in the Ancient World
• Michael Flower, The Seer in Ancient Greece
• Kathy L. Gaca, The Making of Fornication: Eros, Ethics, and Political Reform in Greek Philosophy and Early Christianity
• Cathy Gere, Knossos and the Prophets of Modernism
• Mark Golden and Peter Toohey (eds.), Inventing Ancient Culture: Historicism, Periodization, and the Ancient World
• Jose Gonzalez, The Epic Rhapsode and His Craft: Homeric Performance in a Diachronic Perspective
• Robert Graves, What Food the Centaurs Ate [Pre-classical 'shrooms.]
• Peter Green, Alexander to Actium: The Historical Evolution of the Hellenistic Age
• Erich S. Gruen, Rethinking the Other in Antiquity
• Moses Hadas, Ancilla to Classical Reading
• Stephen Halliwell, The Aesthetics of Mimesis: Ancient Texts and Modern Problems
• William V. Harris, Restraining Rage: The Ideology of Anger Control in Classical Antiquity
• Greta Hawes, Pausanias in the World of Greek Myth ["Pausanias gives us the clearest glimpse of Greek myth as a living, local tradition... "]
• Eric Havelock
  • The Liberal Temper in Greek Politics
  • The Literate Revolution in Greece and its Cultural Consequences
• Brooke Holmes, The Symptom and the Subject: The Emergence of the Physical Body in Ancient Greece
• Frank L. Holt, Alexander the Great and the Mystery of the Elephant Medallions [reviewed in BMCR, 2004.06.34]
• Benjamin Isaac, The Invention of Racism in Classical Antiquity [Reviewed in BMCR, 2004.06.49]
• George Kennedy, History of Rhetoric, Volume I: The Art of Persuasion in Greece
• George B. Kerferd, The Sophistic Movement
• Amelie Kuhrt and Susan Sherwin-White, Hellenism in the East: Greek and Non-Greek Civilizations from Syria to Central Asia after Alexander
• Leslie Kurke, The Traffic in Praise: Pindar and the Poetics of Social Economy [Review in BMCR]
• Robert Lamberton and John J. Keaney, Homer's Ancient Readers: The Hermeneutics of Greek Epic's Earliest Exegetes
• Jennifer Larson, Greek Heroine Cults
• Mary R. Lefkowitz, Greek Gods, Human Lives: What We Can Learn from Myths
• Ling, Ancient Mosaics
• Carolina López-Ruiz, When the Gods Were Born: Greek Cosmogonies and the Near East
• Nicole Loraux
  • The Divided City: On Memory and Forgetting in Ancient Athens
  • [The Invention of Athens: The Funeral Oration in the Classical City
• Giovanni Manetti, Theories of the Sign in Classical Antiquity
• Dale B. Martin, Inventing Superstition: From the Hippocratics to the Christians
• Indra Kagis McEwen, Vitruvius: Writing the Body of Architecture
• Margaret Christina Miller, Athens and Persia in the Fifth Century BC: A Study in Cultural Receptivity
• Gilbert Murray, The Classical Tradition in Poetry
• F. S. Naiden, Ancient Suplication
• Martha Nussbaum, The Therapy of Desire: Theory and Practice in Hellenistic Ethics
• Sarah B. Pomeroy, Goddesses, Whores, Wives and Slaves: Women in Classical Antiquity
• James I. Porter (eds.), Classical Pasts: The Classical Traditions of Greece and Rome
• Diane J. Rayor, Sappho's Lyre: Archaic Lyric and Women Poets of Ancient Greece
• Bryan P. Reardon, The Form of Greek Romance
• Daniel T. Reff, Plagues, Priests, and Demons: Sacred Narratives and the Rise of Christianity in the Old World and the New
• L. D. Reynolds and N. G. Wilson, Scribes and Scholars: A Guide to the Transmission of Greek and Latin Literature
• Jennifer Tolbert Roberts
  • Out of One, Many: Ancient Greek Ways of Thought and Culture/cite>
  • The Plague of War: Athens, Sparta, and the Struggle for Ancient Greece
• Nicholas Rockwell, Thebes: A History
• James S. Romm, The Edges of the Earth in Ancient Thought: Geography, Exploration, and Fiction [Review in BMCR]
• Joseph Roisman, The Rhetoric of Conspiracy in Ancient Athens
• Michael Ivanovitch Rostovtzeff, The Social and Economic History of the Hellenistic World
• Giovanni Roberto Ruffini, Social Networks in Byzantine Egypt
• W. G. Runciman, "Doomed to extinction: the polis as an evolutionary dead end", in Oswyn Murray and Simon Price (eds.), The Greek City: From Homer to Alexander, 1990
• Richard Seaford, Money and the Early Greek Mind: Homer, Philosophy, Tragedy
• David N. Sedley, Creationism and Its Critics in Antiquity
• Charles Segal, Singers, Heroes, and Gods in the Odyssey
• Steven E. Sidebotham, Berenike and the Ancient Maritime Spice Route
• Steven Shankman
  • Early China/Ancient Greece: Thinking Through Comparisons
  • The Siren and the Sage: Knowledge and Wisdom in Ancient Greece and China
• Susan Sherwin-White and Amelie Kuhrt, From Samarkhand to Sardis: A New Approach to the Seleucid Empire
• Jocelyn Penny Small, Wax Tablets of the Mind: Cognitive Studies of Memory and and Literacy in Classical Antiquity [Review in BMCR]
• Snyder, The Woman and the Lyre: Women Writers in Classical Greece and Rome
• Michael Sommer, Palmyra: A History
• Deborah Tarn Steiner, The Tyrant's Writ: Myths and Images of Writing in Ancient Greece
• Peter T. Struck, Birth of the Symbol: Ancient Readers at the Limits of Their Texts
• David W. Tandy, Warriors into Traders: The Power of Markets in Early Greece
• William G. Thalmann, The Swineherd and the Bow: Representations of Class in the Odyssey
• Rosalind Thomas, Herodotus in Context: Ethnography, Science and the Art of Persuasion
• Frances B. Titchener and Richard F. Moorton, The Eye Expanded: Life and the Arts in Greco-Roman Antiquity
• Giusto Traina, 428 AD: An Ordinary Year at the End of the Roman Empire
• Theresa Urbainczyk, Slave Revolts in Antiquity
• Megan Hale Williams, The Monk and the Book: Jerome and the Making of Christian Scholarship
• Fikret Yegul, Baths and Bathing in Classical Antiquity
• Paul Zanker, The Mask of Socrates: The Image of the Intellectual in Antiquity