J. A. S. Evans

Caligula: The Corruption of Power. By Anthony A. Barrett. Yale. $27. 50. Claudius. By Barbara Levick. Yale. $25.00. It is hard to like the Roman emperor Gaius Caligula. His uncle and successor, Claudius, found a defender in Robert Graves, who publ [...]

Herodotean Narrative and Discourse. By Mabel L. Lang. Harvard. $20.00. Herodotus was the "Father of History." The title was given to him by Cicero, who lived in the first century before Christ, four centuries after Herodotus published his Histories [...]

Cupid and Psyche: Apuleius and the Monuments. By Carl C. Schlam. Scholars Press. $4.50. Art and Thought in the Hellenistic Age. By John Onians. Thames and Hudson. $19.95. Persephone's Cave. By Howard Baker. Georgia. $18.00. "A king and queen used [...]

Economy and Society in Ancient Greece. By M. I. Finley. Viking. $22.50. All my life," the nonagenarian Bernard Berenson wrote in 1957 in a letter to the Swedish archaeologist, Axel Bolthius, "I have been reading about Homer, philological, historic [...]

Diaspora: Jews Amidst Greeks and Romans. By Erich Gruen. Harvard University Press. $39.95 There are two delightful and unexpected chapters in Erich Gruen's Diaspora, which deals with the mindset and the social condition of the Jews who dwelt out [...]

Gladiators and Caesars: The Power of Spectacle in Ancient Rome. Edited by Eckart Köhne and Cornelia Ewigleben; English version edited by Ralph Jackson. University of California Press. $29.95. The Museo Nazionale in Rome, which occupies part of [...]

The summer after I passed my preliminary examinations for a doctorate at Yale, I sailed for Greece. I had written the examination for the Seymour Fellowship at the American School of Classical Studies in Athens, and won it. The year was 1954, I was 2 [...]

Alexandria in Late Antiquity. By Christopher Haas. Johns Hopkins. $45. 00. The Virgin and the Bride: Idealized Womanhood in Late Antiquity. By Kate Cooper. Harvard. $37. 50. "Late Antiquity" is that slice of history filling the space between the [...]

The night of Oct. 30, 1995, was one of high drama across Canada. The referendum on Quebec secession that day attracted an enormous voter turnout in the province. Ninety-three per cent of eligible Quebec voters cast their ballots. The question whic [...]

The Humanity of Thucydides.> By Clifford Orwin. Princeton. $35.00. Thucydides continues to fascinate. The old Athenian historian, who died before he could finish his one masterwork, was a pioneer in a remarkable number of academic fields which hav [...]

Alexander to Actium: The Historical Evolution of the Hellenistic Age. By Peter Green. California. $65.00. The Hellenistic Age began in June, 323 B. C. , when Alexander the Great lay dying in Babylon, and on being asked to whom he left his conquest [...]