Oxford Index Browse

Aeschylus (also spelled Aischylos or Aiskhylos) was born c. 525/4 bce to an aristocratic family in Eleusis, a town in western Attica, part of the territory controlled by Athens. He was...

It has been said about Alexander the Great (b. 356–d. 323 bce) that his name marked the end of an old world epoch and the beginning of a new one. Alexander’s empire that stretched from...

Ammianus Marcellinus (b. c. 330—d. after 390) was a native Greek speaker who served in the Roman army and in about 390 completed the Res gestae, a Latin history in thirty-one books from...

The island of Crete holds a special position in classical studies, primarily as the birthplace of the earliest “high culture” in Europe: the Minoan civilization of the Bronze Age. But in...

The Greek language is first attested written in an awkward syllabic script on clay tablets dating to the 14th–13th centuries bce. After a gap of around four centuries, it is found again...

Apollonius of Rhodes (3rd century bce) is the author of the Argonautica, the only full-scale epic surviving from the seven centuries that separate Virgil’s Aeneid from Homer’s Iliad and...

Apuleius (no other names certain, c. 125–after 170 ce) is one of the key Latin writers of the 2nd century ce, a period that marks the transition from the end of traditional classical...

Aratus of Soli (3rd century bce) is the author of the Phaenomena, a hexameter poem of just over one thousand lines on constellations and weather signs, presented as clues to the will of...

Perhaps more than other aspect of Roman culture, the study of architecture is affected by two preconceptions, the first resulting from its durability, the second from later attitudes. First, because...

The staging of various types of violent spectacle characterizes Roman urban culture from the mid-Republic until Late Antiquity. Gradually, temporary structures erected in the Forum were...