The equation of the ascetic life with “the angelic life” permeates ancient writing about the renunciatory efforts of Christians; indeed, contemporary scholars often use this same discourse as shorthand for the ascetic movement in Christianity. While the analogy between renunciation and angels began as an inventive exegetical extension of a gospel…[Read more]

Co-edited volume of essays on ancient balletic interpretations of playscripts

Summary and table of contents.

Originally presented at McMaster University in May 2005.

The re-evaluation of classical education (paideia) recurred throughout the Roman period, reaching a particularly fevered pitch during the late fourth century, as the empire became Christian. The political consequences of Christian learning become particularly clear in the debate between two learned, Latin-speaking Christians who translated Greek…[Read more]

In this essay, I reconsider early Christian conversion through the writings of Epiphanius of Salamis (d. 404 C.E.). Far from the notion of conversion as an interior movement of soul (familiar from Augustine, A.D. Nock, and William James), Epiphanius shows us a variety of conversions—from lay to clergy, from orthodox to heretic, and from Jew to C…[Read more]

Compared to more philosophical biblical interpreters such as Origen, Epiphanius of Salamis often appears to modern scholars as plodding, literalist, reactionary, meandering, and unsophisticated. In this article I argue that Epiphanius’s eclectic and seemingly disorganized treatment of the Bible actually draws on a common, imperial style of a…[Read more]

Article exploring the status of mint workers from the Republic to the period of Late Antiquity.

Article exploring the status of mint workers from the Republic to the period of Late Antiquity.

CUP Co-Edited volume about actors and acting in Greek & Roman civilisation

Co-edited volume about progressive uses of classical culture in Britain 1789-1969

Book on classical Athenian theatre and society

A Cultural History of Euripides’ Black Sea Tragedy

Monograph on the Cultural History of the Odyssey

Co-edited volume of essays on the ancient Greek tragedian Sophocles and his continuing cultural presence (C.U.P.)

Co-edited volume of essays about female classical philologists

Co-Edited collection of essays on the performance history of Aeschylus’ Agamemnon from the fifth century BCE until the 21st century

OUP 1989

This article explores the use of gender in the Religious History, demonstrating the multiple ways that Theodoret of Cyrrhus marked ostensibly male characters with traits associated in ancient medical literature with female bodies. Beyond simply depicting ascetics as extraordinary human beings, these complexly gendered portraits more importantly…[Read more]

Thucydides’s unusual praise of the Athenian general Phrynichus in 8.27.5 gives insight into how the historian thought and wrote. The praise seems unwarranted in the immediate instance and in light of Phrynichus’s subsequent actions. I argue that the praise seems directed at the manner in which Phrynichus made his decisions, and how Thucydides’s…[Read more]