The culmination of a project aimed at showcasing, in a systematic way, the potential of applying anthropological perspectives to classical studies, this volume highlights the fundamental contribution this approach has to make to our understanding of ancient Roman culture. Through the close study of themes such as myth, polytheism, sacrifice, magic, space, kinship, the gift, friendship, economics, animals, plants, riddles, metaphors, and images in Roman society (often in comparison with Greece) - where the texts of ancient culture are allowed to speak in their own terms and where the experience of the natives (rather than the horizon of the observer) is privileged - a rich panorama emerges of the worldview, beliefs, and deep structures that shaped and guided this culture.
There are a surprising number of stories from antiquity about people who fall in love with statues or paintings, and about lovers who use such visual representations as substitutes for an absent belov
If you told a woman her sex had a shared, long-lived history with weasels, she might deck you. But those familiar with mythology know better: that the connection between women and weasels is an ancien
?Though in many respects similar to us moderns, the Greeks and Romans often conceived things differently than we do. The cultural inheritance we have received from them can therefore open our eyes to
