New Books in Ancient History

Blending travelogue, history, and archaeology, Searching for Ashoka: Questing for a Buddhist King from India to Thailand (SUNY Press, 2023) unravels the various avatars of India's most famous emperor, revealing how he came to be remembered—and forgotten—in distinctive ways at particular points in time and in specific locations. Through personal journeys that take her across India and to various sites and cities in Sri Lanka, Myanmar, and Thailand, archaeologist Nayanjot Lahiri explores how Ashoka's visibility from antiquity to the modern era has been accompanied by a reinvention of his persona. Although the historical Ashoka spoke expansively of his ideas of governance and a new kind of morality, his afterlife is a jumble of stories and representations within various Buddhist imaginings. By remembering Ashoka selectively, Lahiri argues, ancient kings and chroniclers created an artifice, constantly appropriating and then remolding history to suit their own social visions, political agendas, and moral purposes.Nayanjot Lahiri is Professor of History at Ashoka University. Her previous books include Finding Forgotten Cities: How the Indus Civilization was Discovered; Marshalling the Past: Ancient India and Its Modern Histories; and Ashoka in Ancient India, which was awarded the John F. Richards Prize in South Asian History in 2016.Raj Balkaran is a scholar of Sanskrit narrative texts. He teaches at the Oxford Centre for Hindu Studies and at his own virtual School of Indian Wisdom. For information see rajbalkaran.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

The Aeneid stands as a towering work of Classical Roman literature and a gripping dramatization of the best and worst of human nature. In the process of creating this epic poem, Vergil (70–19 BCE) became a living legend.But the real Vergil is a shadowy figure; we know that he was born into a modest rural family, that he led a private and solitary life, and that, in spite of poor health and unusual emotional vulnerabilities, he worked tirelessly to achieve exquisite new effects in verse. Vergil’s most famous work, the Aeneid, was commissioned by the emperor Augustus, who published the epic despite Vergil’s dying wish that it be destroyed.In Vergil: The Poet's Life (Yale UP, 2023), Sarah Ruden, widely praised for her translation of the Aeneid, uses evidence from Roman life and history alongside Vergil’s own writings in an endeavor to reconstruct his life and personality. Through her intimate knowledge of Vergil’s work, she evokes the image of a poet who was committed to creating something astonishingly new and memorable, even at great personal cost.Benjamin Phillips is an MA student in History at Ohio University. His primary field is Late Antique Cultural and Intellectual History. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In After Transformation, Maia Kotrosits offers a lyrical history of Christian late antiquity as it lives on in and with the present. Recasting the monumental changes that occurred between the second and fourth centuries, when Rome transitioned from pagan to Christian worship, Kotrosits presents a condensed and evocative meditation on the profound effects of Christian imperialism across time and geography. She employs a collection of forms ranging from micro-essay and vignette to poem and fragment to capture human struggles with time and change, showing how the mundane and intimate details of our lives can themselves be conduits of historical knowing. Arguing for lyricism as a method, Kotrosits reclaims vulnerability, urgency, and storytelling in historical work to model new ways of writing the past and experiencing ourselves more fully in time. Above all, After Transformation is about the ironies of the ways that history is written against the reality of the ways that history is lived. New books in Late Antiquity is sponsored by Ancient Jew Review Maia Kotrosits is a Visiting Scholar/Researcher, Center for the Study of World Religions, Harvard Divinity School and an expert in ancient Judaism and Christianity, writing long histories of empire, colonialism, and race. Michael Motia teaches in Classics and Religious Studies at UMass Boston Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Eric H. Cline, a Professor of classics and anthropology at George Washington University, dives into the thrilling discovery of the Amarna Letters. Listeners learn how these ancient tablets, found in 1887, revealed a vibrant diplomatic scene among powerful Near Eastern rulers. Cline shares tales of the fierce competition among scholars to translate the tablets and discusses their historical significance. He also speculates on potential future archaeological finds, and how social network analysis can shed light on ancient connections.

Ellen Muehlberger, a Professor of History at the University of Michigan, dives into fascinating discussions about how ancient people understood knowledge and identity. She examines how bodies served as evidence in recognizing individuals and challenges how pedagogy shaped notions of women in the late ancient world. Muehlberger also discusses the role of councils in revealing power dynamics, the significance of Fayoum portraits, and the interplay between authority and forged texts. Her insights bridge ancient perspectives with modern understanding, making knowledge approachable for all.

Hugo Méndez is an Associate Professor at the University of North Carolina, specializing in ancient Mediterranean religions. He dives into the complexities of the Gospel of John, exploring its authorship and the high rates of pseudepigraphy in early Christian literature. Méndez argues for a single author while addressing the gospel's connections to the Synoptic Gospels. He discusses the innovative theology within John, the identity of the 'beloved disciple,' and the implications of reading it as pseudepigraphal, emphasizing its creative and unique nature.

The Roman emperor Julian (r. 361-363 CE) was a man of action and of letters, which he employed in an effort to return the Empire to the light of the pagan gods, and reverse the Christianization of the empire advanced by his uncle Constantine and the sons of Constantine. This enterprise was inspired and guided by his conversion to the Neoplatonic philosophy and radical pagan Hellenism of Iamblichus and his disciples, and promoted by his production of Greek orations, letters, and satires. These works present a coherent vision of the providentially guided history and destiny of Rome as a series of foundations and refoundations enacted by rulers such as Romulus, Numa, and Caesar Augustus. As this book demonstrates, Julian offers an Iamblichean approach to the exegesis of the legends of Rome's founding, the allegories of Plato's dialogues, and myths of his own creation in order to articulate his own role in the refounding of the Empire. Furthermore, argues Jeremy Swist, approaching the wider examination of Julian's imperial self-image on these terms ends up nuancing and challenging common assumptions influenced by the rhetoric of his contemporary proponents. In his reverence for the gods and for philosophy, the emperor's self-construction embraces the identities of a statesman and soldier more than of a philosopher, of a Roman more than a Greek, and of a mere human rather than a semi-divine being. While distancing himself from the ideal models of philosophical virtue and imperial founding that inspire his own actions, he adopts a different set of exemplary figures as mirrors of himself. New Books in Late Antiquity is sponsored by Ancient Jew Review Jeremey Swist is Assistant Professor of Romance and Classical Studies at Michigan State University. Click here for The Symposium of the Caesars, and here for his talk on Julian and Constantinople. His dissertation spotlight from AJR is here. Michael Motia teaches in Classics and Religious Studies at UMass Boston. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Gender Violence in Late Antiquity: Male Fantasies and the Christian Imagination (University of California Press, 2025) by Dr. Jennifer Barry confronts the violent ideological frameworks underpinning the early Christian imagination, arguing that gender-based violence is not peripheral but is fundamental to understanding early Christian history. By analyzing hagiographical and doctrinal writings, Dr. Barry reveals how male authors used portrayals of feminized suffering to shape ideals of sanctity and power, exploiting themes of domestic abuse, martyrdom, and sexualized violence to reinforce their visions of piety. The study first traces the roots of gendered violence within the Greco-Roman and early Christian imagination, and then explores the disturbing role of male fantasies and dreams in hagiographical traditions. Dr. Barry draws on womanist scholarship and engages with trauma studies and feminist horror theory in order to challenge traditional readings of Christian texts, offering new perspectives for understanding how narratives of violence continue to shape contemporary interpretations of gender and power. This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. You can find Miranda’s interviews on New Books with Miranda Melcher, wherever you get your podcasts. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Epic poetry, notably the Iliad and the Odyssey, stands as one of the most enduring legacies of ancient Greece. Although the impact of these epics on Western civilization is widely recognized, their origins remain the subject of heated debate. Were they composed in a single era or over the course of centuries? Were they crafted by one or by many poets? Do they reflect historical reality? These and other important questions are answered in this book. Michael Cosmopoulos, in The World of Homer: Archaeology, Social Memory, and the Emergence of Epic Greek Poetry (Cambridge UP, 2025), reconstructs the world of the Homeric poems and explores the interplay between poetry, social memory, and material culture. By integrating key insights from archaeology, philology, anthropology, and oral tradition, he offers a nuanced perspective of the emergence and early development of Greek epic. His wide-canvas approach enables readers to appreciate the complexity of the Homeric world and gain a deeper understanding of the intricate factors that shaped these magnificent poems. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

The world that Alexander remade in his lifetime was transformed once more by his death in 323 BCE. In Age of Conquests: The Greek World from Alexander to Hadrian(Harvard University Press, 2018), Angelos Chaniotis, Professor of Ancient History and Classics at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, examines how his successors reorganized Persian lands to create a new empire stretching from the eastern Mediterranean as far as present-day Afghanistan, while in Greece and Macedonia a fragile balance of power repeatedly dissolved into war. Then, from the late third century BCE to the end of the first, Rome’s military and diplomatic might successively dismantled these post-Alexandrian political structures, one by one.During the Hellenistic period (c. 323–30 BCE), small polities struggled to retain the illusion of their identity and independence, in the face of violent antagonism among large states. With time, trade growth resumed and centers of intellectual and artistic achievement sprang up across a vast network, from Italy to Afghanistan and Russia to Ethiopia. But the death of Cleopatra in 30 BCE brought this Hellenistic moment to a close—or so the story goes. In Angelos Chaniotis’s view, however, the Hellenistic world continued to Hadrian’s death in 138 CE. Not only did Hellenistic social structures survive the coming of Rome, Chaniotis shows, but social, economic, and cultural trends that were set in motion between the deaths of Alexander and Cleopatra intensified during this extended period. Age of Conquests provides a compelling narrative of the main events that shaped ancient civilization during five crucial centuries.Ryan Tripp (Ph.D., History) is currently an adjunct in History at Los Medanos Community College and Southern New Hampshire University. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices