New Books in Ancient History

Plato is a philosophical writer of unusual and ingenious versatility. His works engage in argument but are also full of allegory, imagery, myth, paradox and intertextuality. He astutely characterises the participants whom he portrays in conversation. Sometimes he composes fictive dialogues in dramatic form while at other times he does so as narratives. In How Plato Writes: Perspectives and Problems (Cambridge UP, 2023), world-renowned scholar Malcolm Schofield illustrates the variety of the literary resources that Plato deploys to achieve his philosophical purposes. He draws key passages for discussion particularly, but not only, from Republic and the less well-known Laws and also shows how reconstructing the original historical context of a dialogue and of its assumed readership is essential to understanding Plato's approach. The book will open the eyes of readers of all levels of expertise to Plato's masterly ability as a writer and how an understanding of this is crucial if we are to appreciate his philosophy.Malcolm Schofield is Emeritus Professor of Ancient Philosophy and Fellow of St John's College, Cambridge UniversityMorteza Hajizadeh is a Ph.D. graduate in English from the University of Auckland in New Zealand. His research interests are Cultural Studies; Critical Theory; Environmental History; Medieval (Intellectual) History; Gothic Studies; 18th and 19th Century British Literature. YouTube channel. Twitter. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Composed within the first Christian century by a Roman named Hermas, the Shepherd remains a mysterious and underestimated book to scholars and laypeople alike. In The Shepherd of Hermas As Scriptura Non Grata: From Popularity in Early Christianity to Exclusion from the New Testament Canon (Rowman & Littlefield, 2023), Robert D. Heaton argues that early Christians mainly received the Shepherd positively and accepted it unproblematically alongside texts that would ultimately be canonized, requiring decisive actions to exclude it from the late-emerging collection of texts now known as the New Testament. Freshly evaluating the evidence for its popularity in patristic treatises, manuscript recoveries, and Christian material culture, Heaton propounds an interpretation of the Shepherd of Hermas as a book meant to guide his readers toward salvation. Ultimately, Heaton depicts the loss of the Shepherd from the closed catalogue of Christian scriptures as a deliberate constrictive move by the fourth-century Alexandrian bishop Athanasius, who found it useless for his political, theological, and ecclesiological objectives and instead characterized it as a book favored by his heretical enemies. While the book’s detractors succeeded in derailing its diffusion for centuries, the survival of the Shepherd today attests that many dissented from the church’s final judgment about Hermas’s text, which portends a version of early Christianity that was definitively overridden by devotion to Christ himself, rather than principally to his virtues.Robert D. Heaton teaches New Testament, Christian Origins, and Early Christianity at Anderson University in Indiana. He also hosts podcasts for New Books in Religion. His research focuses on the New Testament canon and other early Christian literature, especially subcanonical books like The Shepherd of Hermas and the Apostolic Fathers. For more about Rob and his work, please see his website.Jonathon Lookadoo is Associate Professor at the Presbyterian University and Theological Seminary in Seoul, South Korea. While his interests range widely over the world of early Christianity, he is the author of books on the Epistle of Barnabas, Ignatius of Antioch, and the Shepherd of Hermas, including The Christology of Ignatius of Antioch (Cascade, 2023). Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Personhood is central to the worldview of ancient India. Across voluminous texts and diverse traditions, the subject of the puruṣa, the Sanskrit term for "person," has been a constant source of insight and innovation. Yet little sustained scholarly attention has been paid to the precise meanings of the puruṣa concept or its historical transformations within and across traditions. In Puruṣa: Personhood in Ancient India (Oxford UP, 2024), Matthew I. Robertson traces the history of Indic thinking about puruṣas through an extensive analysis of the major texts and traditions of ancient India.Through clear explanations of classic Sanskrit texts and the idioms of Indian traditions, Robertson discerns the emergence and development of a sustained, paradigmatic understanding that persons are deeply confluent with the world. Personhood is worldhood. Puruṣa argues for the significance of this "worldly" thinking about personhood to Indian traditions and identifies a host of techniques that were developed to "extend" and "expand" persons to ever-greater scopes. Ritualized swellings of sovereigns to match the extent of their realm find complement in ascetic meditations on the intersubjective nature of perceptually delimited person-worlds, which in turn find complement in yogas of sensory restraint, the dietary regimens of Ayurvedic medicine, and the devotional theologies by which persons "share" and "eat" the expansive divinity of God. Whether in the guise of a king, an ascetic, a yogi, a buddha, or a patient in the care of an Ayurvedic physician, fully realized persons know themselves to be coterminous with the horizons of their world.Offering new readings of classic works and addressing the fields of religion, politics, philosophy, medicine, and literature, Puruṣa: Personhood in Ancient India challenges us to reexamine the goals of ancient Indian religions and yields new insights into the interrelated natures of persons and the worlds in which they live. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

A vivid and intimate glimpse of ancient life under the sway of cosmic and spiritual forces that the modern world has forgotten.Life: The Natural History of an Early Christian Universe (U California Press, 2024) immerses the reader in the cosmic sea of existences that made up the late ancient Mediterranean world. Loosely structured around events in the biography of one early Christian writer and traveler, this book weaves together the philosophical, religious, sensory, and scientific worlds of the later Roman Empire to tell the story of how human lives were lived under different natural and spiritual laws than those we now know today.This book takes a highly literary and sensory approach to its subject, evoking an imagined experience of an ancient natural and supernatural world, rather than merely explaining ancient thought about the natural world. It mixes visual and literary genres to give the reader a sensory and affective experience of a thought-world that is very different from our own. An experimental intellectual history, Life invites readers into the premodern cosmos to experience a world that is at once familiar, strange, and deeply compellingMike Chin is Associate Professor of Classics at the University of California DavisMichael Motia is a Lecturer in the Religious Studies and Classics Department at UMass Boston (michael.motia@umb.edu) Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Scott Crawford, a novelist and historian specializing in Sino-steppe relations, dives deep into the struggles between Han China and the Xiongnu nomadic empire. He reveals the complexities of a marriage alliance that sought parity through tribute, the unique mobile warfare of the Xiongnu, and the political intrigue within the Han court that impacted military campaigns. Crawford also discusses the challenging task of writing history without direct Xiongnu records and unveils the factors leading to their eventual collapse.

The contributions to Visnu-Narayana: Changing Forms and the Becoming of a Deity in Indian Religious Traditions (Austrian Academy of Sciences Press, 2023) deal with the complex history of the Indian deity Visnu-Narayana. This conception of God evolved in various traditions in India, especially in South India, during the first millennium CE. The history of this development is reconstructed here by various means, including philological exegesis, the history of ideas, and iconographic evidence. In their respective discussions, the contributors examine a range of textual material in Sanskrit, Tamil, and Manipravala, including the early Cankam literature of the 3rd to 6th century CE; the Vaisnava text corpus, in particular the Nalayiradivviyapirabandham (6th-9th century CE); Puranic literature, especially the Visnupurana (5th-6th century CE); Pancaratra literature; and the later (10th-14th century CE) literature of the philosophical and theological tradition of theistic Visistadvaita Vedanta, in which Visnu-Narayana plays a central role. Also examined is how Visnu-Narayana came to be seen as a solitary supreme God, with a reconstruction of the theological arguments supporting this monotheism. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

How was the Roman way of war unique, and what were the virtues that defined the Roman Republic? Are there lessons for modern Republics from the Roman one? Annika sits down with 2022-2023 James Madison Program Garwood Visiting Fellow Dr. Steele Brand, a professor of history and director of the Politics, Philosophy, and History Program at Cairn University. Dr. Brand, Professor of History at Cairn University and former U.S. Army tactical intelligence officer to discuss his book Killing for the Republic: Citizen-Soldiers and the Roman Way of War (Johns Hopkins UP, 2019).Dr. Brand shares why, while serving in Afghanistan, he felt compelled to write a book about ancient citizen-soldiery. He discusses the virtues that defined Roman citizen-soldiers and how these virtues contributed to Rome's resilience and success, how these Classical virtues intersect with modern Christian virtues, and the fall of the Republic. The conversation also touches on the challenges of maintaining these virtues in modern democracies and the parallels between ancient Roman and modern American republicanism.Steele Brand, 2022-2023 James Madison Program Garwood Visiting Fellow, is a Professor of History at Cairn University, where he is also the director and founder of the Politics, Philosophy, & History Program. Formerly, he has taught at The King's College and The University of Texas at Austin. A former U.S. Army tactical intelligence officer, he has also managed a veterans’ reintegration program in Manassas, VA and directed a military historical training program. He received his Ph.D. from Baylor University and his M.A.Th. from Southwestern Seminary, and is currently completing a manuscript on the conception and early exemplars of late antique statesmanship.Annika Nordquist is the Communications Coordinator of Princeton University’s James Madison Program in American Ideals and Institutions and host of the Program’s podcast, Madison’s Notes. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

One orthodoxy of critical biblical scholarship on the Third Gospel, attributed by later Christian tradition to a companion of Paul named Luke, holds that its author was not ethnically Jewish but rather a Gentile of some kind, either a proselyte to Judaism, a “Godfearer” once attached to a diasporic synagogue, or perhaps a pagan convert to a form of early Christianity reverent to Israel’s scriptures. In Luke Was Not A Christian: Reading the Third Gospel and Acts within Judaism (Brill, 2024), Joshua Paul Smith addresses the consensus for the supposedly Gentile Luke and concludes that no solid New Testament or patristic evidence exists to substantiate such a claim. Moreover, Smith suggests by means of a cognitive linguistic analysis of insider and outsider terms in Luke and Acts, as well as their author’s attitudes toward the Torah and intricate knowledge of Jewish festival celebrations, that these books were more likely to have been written by an individual enculturated in “a Jewish setting … among the Hellenistic Jewish diaspora” (p. 233). Smith joined the New Books Network to discuss this revision of his Ph.D. thesis, our ability to know an ancient author through their textual remains, and why it would be inappropriate to interpret Luke’s full-throated embrace of the Gentile mission as an indicator of his non-Jewish identity.Joshua Paul Smith (Ph.D., University of Denver/Iliff School of Theology, 2021) teaches presently at Southeast Missouri State University. His research interests include literary and cognitive approaches to New Testament texts, as well as early Jewish and Christian identity formation. He is currently working on a short book on Acts for a general audience, and conducting research for an article that applies social network analysis to named characters in Luke and Acts. Additionally, he serves as Managing Editor for Reviews of the Enoch Seminar, publishing book reviews on a wide range of topics related to the study of Jewish, Christian, and Islamic origins.Rob Heaton (Ph.D., University of Denver, 2019) hosts Biblical Studies conversations for New Books in Religion and teaches New Testament, Christian origins, and early Christianity at Anderson University in Indiana. He recently authored The Shepherd of Hermas as Scriptura Non Grata: From Popularity in Early Christianity to Exclusion from the New Testament Canon (Lexington Books, 2023). For more about Rob and his work, or to offer feedback related to this episode, please visit his website at https://www.robheaton.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

The idea of sexual fluidity may seem new, but it is at least as old as the ancient Greeks, who wrote about queer experiences with remarkable frankness, wit, and insight. Sarah Nooter's  How to Be Queer: An Ancient Guide to Sexuality (Princeton UP, 2024) is an infatuating collection of these writings about desire, love, and lust between men, between women, and between humans and gods, in lucid and lively new translations. Filled with enthralling stories, this anthology invites readers of all sexualities and identities to explore writings that describe many kinds of erotic encounters and feelings, and that envision a playful and passionate approach to sexuality as part of a rich and fulfilling life.How to Be Queer starts with Homer's Iliad and moves through lyric poetry, tragedy, comedy, philosophy, and biography, drawing on a wide range of authors, including Sappho, Plato, Anacreon, Pindar, Theognis, Aristophanes, and Xenophon. It features both beautiful poetry and thought-provoking prose, emotional outpourings and humorous anecdotes. From Homer's story of the relationship between Achilles and Patroclus, one of the most intense between men in world literature, to Sappho's lyrics on the pleasures and pains of loving women, these writings show the many meanings of what the Greeks called eros.Complete with brief introductions to the selections, and with the original Greek on facing pages, How to Be Queer reveals what the Greeks knew long ago--that the erotic and queer are a source of life and a cause for celebration. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

David S. Richeson's book Tales of Impossibility: The 2000-Year Quest to Solve the Mathematical Problems of Antiquity (Princeton University Press, 2019) is the fascinating story of the 2000 year quest to solve four of the most perplexing problems of antiquity: squaring the circle, duplicating the cube, trisecting the angle, and constructing regular polygons. The eventual conclusion was that all four of these problems could not be solved under the conditions laid out millennia ago. But it's also an engaging tale of some of the greatest mathematicians, and some not-so-well known ones, who met the challenge and moved mathematics forward in ways that the Greek geometers could never have envisioned. Even if you never read a single proof through to its conclusion, you'll enjoy the many entertaining side trips into a geometry far beyond what you learned in high school. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices