Recent Faculty Publications

Papyri from Karanis: The Granary C123 is the twenty- first volume of University of Michigan papyri and the fourth devoted to texts from the University’s excavations at Karanis. The volume offers a contextualized edition of thirty-seven documents found in  a single structure, a large granary (C123) originally built in the first century CE, in addition to an analysis of the archaeology and history of the structure.

The documents are presented with an introduction, transcription of the original Greek or Latin, translation, commentary, and images. A unique community prayer to the...

A founding father of the “art of philology,” Aristarchus of Samothrace (216–144 BCE) made a profound contribution to ancient scholarship. In his study of Homer’s Iliad, his methods and principles inevitably informed, even reshaped, his edition of the epic. This systematic study places Aristarchus and his fragments preserved in the Iliadic scholia, or marginal annotations, in the context and cultural environment of his own time.

Francesca Schironi presents a more robust picture of Aristarchus as a scholar than anyone has offered previously. Based on her analysis of over 4,300...

What is Classical Archaeology’s place within the overall study of antiquity and the history of humanity? And what is its relationship to its kindred disciplines of ancient history, art history and Mediterranean prehistory? Forty or so years ago Classical Archaeology appeared to be a very conservative and rather niche area of scholarly endeavour. 

Then both prehistorians and ancient historians might have answered that Classical Archaeology had little to offer their respective fields of study. Since the late 1970s, however, the subject has been transformed, a transformation in which...

Discarded, Discovered, Collected provides an accessible introduction to the University of Michigan’s collection of papyri and related ancient materials, the widest and deepest resource of its kind in the Western hemisphere. The collection was founded in the early part of the 20th century by University of Michigan Professor of Classics Francis W. Kelsey. His original intention was to create a set of artifacts that would be useful in teaching students more directly about the ancient world, at a time when trips to ancient sites were much harder to arrange.

Jointly administered...

Ovid could be considered the original poet of late antiquity. In his exile poetry, he depicts a world in which Rome has become a distant memory, a community accessible only through his imagination. This, Ovid claimed, was a transformation as remarkable as any he had recounted in his Metamorphoses. Ian Fielding's book shows how late antique Latin poets referred to Ovid's experiences of isolation and estrangement as they reflected on the profound social and cultural transformations taking place in the fourth, fifth and sixth centuries AD. There are detailed new readings of texts by major figures...

An influential view of ecphrasis--the literary description of art objects--chiefly treats it as a way for authors to write about their own texts without appearing to do so, and even insist upon the aesthetic dominance of the literary text over the visual image. However, when considering its use in ancient Roman literature, this interpretation proves insufficient. The Captor's Image argues for the need to see Roman ecphrasis, with its prevalent focus on Hellenic images, as a site of subtle, ongoing competition between Greek and Roman cultures. Through close readings of ecphrases in a wide range...

The emotions have long been an interest for those studying ancient Greece and Rome. But while the last few decades have produced excellent studies of individual emotions and the different approaches to them by the major philosophical schools, the focus has been almost entirely on negative emotions. This might give the impression that the Greeks and Romans had little to say about positive emotion, something that would be misguided. As the chapters in this collection indicate, there are representations of positive emotions extending from archaic Greek poetry to Augustine, and in both philosophical...

A Commentary on Cicero, De Divinatione I, is the first English-language commentary on the Latin text of Marcus Tullius Cicero’s dialogue in almost one hundred years. The defense of divination (the science of predicting the future) offered in Book 1 is illustrated with many entertaining anecdotes that make the argument more accessible to a wider range of readers than many of Cicero’s other philosophical works. De Divinatione also preserves many fragments of otherwise lost masterpieces of Roman Republican literature. It is a text important for the study of Roman religion, as well as Roman political...

This year Christians worldwide will celebrate the 1700th anniversary of Constantine's conversion and victory at the Battle of the Milvian Bridge. No Roman emperor had a greater impact on the modern world than did Constantine. The reason is not simply that he converted to Christianity but that he did so in a way that brought his subjects along after him. Indeed, this major new biography argues that Constantine's conversion is but one feature of a unique administrative style that enabled him to take control of an empire beset by internal rebellions and external threats by Persians and Goths. The...