New Books in Ancient History

How can we study the late ancient and Byzantine history from ecological perspectives? How might one grapple with the more-than-human in sources and media created by humans? Exploring the diverse ways in which pre-modern texts engaged with the broader natural world, Ecologizing Late Ancient and Byzantine Worlds (Bloomsbury, 2025) presents scholarly ventures into the terrains of the past. From the ancient treatises on dreams to monastic tales from the Hexameron literature to the Byzantine romance, from the Exeter Book to a mysterious Byzantine icon, the chapters investigate a diverse range of literature and other sources, uncovering intricate ecosystems of relationships.

The team of leading international experts behind the volume focuses on encounters between human and more-than-human beings. They pay attention to the entanglement of multiple agencies that cut through texts and other meshes. With insights from such theoretical traditions as ecocriticism, new materialism and environmental humanities, they re-expose ancient media to the elements.

New Books in Late Antiquity is presented by Ancient Jew Review

Laura Borghetti is a Doctoral Candidate in Byzantine Studies at Johannes Gutenberg University of Mainz, Germany.

Thomas Arentzen is a Reader in Church History at Lund University, Sweden, and Associate Professor at Sankt Ignatios College, Stockholm School of Theology, Sweden.

Michael Motia teaches Classics and Religious Studies at UMass Boston
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American democracy is in a period of crisis, so it seems natural to look back to its origins. So here in Episode 10 of Season 5, I interview Professor Josiah Ober.

Having previously taught at Princeton University, Ober is a professor of political science, classics, and philosophy at Stanford University, the Director of the Stanford Civics Initiative, as well as a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution. The author of many books, including Mass and Elite in Democratic Athens (1989), The Rise and Fall of Classical Greece (2015), and Civic Bargain (2023), co-written with Brook Manville, he was previously a Madison’s Notes guest in Season 3.

Drawing on his 2015 book, we discuss the history of ancient Greece and the political legacy of its classical period. Our conversation ranges from the Bronze Age Collapse and the age of Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey to the rise of the Greek city-state and decline of democratic Athens.

We discuss contingencies of the Peloponnesian war, the cases for and against Alcibiades, whether the polity flourished under Macedonian and Roman empires, the relationship of philosophy to civics, was Socrates guilty and how much did Plato invent about him, in what way the god Hermes symbolized Greek trade in the Mediterranean, if James Madison truly understood ancient history, and lastly Ober’s work with the growing civics programs in American higher education.

Hosted by Ryan Shinkel, Madison’s Notes is the podcast of Princeton University’s James Madison Program in American Ideals and Institutions. The transcript for this interview is available on our new Substack page, “Madison’s Footnotes.”
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Curtis Dozier's The White Pedestal: How White Nationalists Use Ancient Greece and Rome to Justify Hate
(Yale University Press, 2026) explores how white nationalist thought
leaders use ancient Greece and Rome to claim historical precedent for
their violent and oppressive politics.It is difficult to ignore the resurgence of white nationalist
movements in the United States, many of which employ symbols and slogans
from Greco-Roman antiquity. A long-established neo-Nazi website
incorporates an image of the Parthenon into its logo, and rioters wore
Spartan helmets in the January 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol.
These juxtapositions may appear incongruous to people who associate the
ancient world with enlightened political ideals and sophisticated
philosophical inquiry. But, as Dozier points out in this
thought-provoking book, it’s hard to imagine a historical period better
suited to rhetorical use by white nationalists. Indeed, some of the most
widely admired voices from ancient literature and philosophy endorsed
ideas that modern white supremacists promote, and the social and
political realities of the ancient world provide models for political
systems that white supremacists would like to establish today.

Part
introduction to contemporary white nationalist thought, part
exploration of ancient racism and xenophobia, and part intellectual
history of the political entanglements of academic study of the past,
this book reveals that contemporary white nationalist intellectuals know
much more about history than many people assume—and they deploy this
knowledge with disturbing success.

Curtis Dozier is associate professor of Greek and Roman studies at
Vassar College. He is the director of the internationally recognized
website Pharos: Doing Justice to the Classics, which documents appropriations of Greco-Roman antiquity by hate groups. He lives in Poughkeepsie, NY.

Morteza 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.
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What would you do if you were pressured to support a rebellion that
you believed was misguided and doomed to failure? What if the safety of
your family and business depended on your answer? In A Ram for Mars (NFB Publishing, 2026), Marcus
and Miriam, recently freed slaves from Asia Minor, arrive in Israel
buoyed by hopes of finding Marcus's long-lost mother and starting a new
life together. They discover that the land is seething with social and
political unrest, with anti-Roman parties in the ascendancy. ​Marcus,
who grew up in a Roman colony and owes his present prosperity to a Roman
master, finds these anti-Roman sentiments perplexing. His uncertainty
increases when war breaks out and he's asked to ship supplies to the
rebel army, including a newfound cousin who protects the northern
front. As his entanglement with the rebellion deepens, Marcus is torn
between loyalty to the world in which he was nurtured and the need to
secure his family's safety. Then his adopted son runs off to join the
rebels. What is he to do? Fans of Conn Iggulden, Ken Follett, and Robert
Graves will be captivated by this richly detailed and compelling
exploration of the Jewish revolt against Rome (66-73 AD/CE) through the
lens of a pro-Roman Jew in the rural district of Galilee.

More about A Ram for Mars, as well as the trilogy, “A Slave’s Story,” can be found here.

Christopher D. Stanley is a social and religious historian who writes
about early Christianity and Judaism in the Greco-Roman world. He
served for over twenty years as a professor at St. Bonaventure
University in western New York, where he holds the title of Professor
Emeritus.

Dr. Stanley has written or edited ten books and dozens of
professional articles on early Christian texts and history and presents
papers at academic conferences around the world. The “A Slave’s Story”
trilogy, which grew out of his historical research on first-century Asia
Minor, is his first foray into fiction. He continues to write for the
academic world as well, including a recently finished book on sickness
and healing in the Greco-Roman world that explores some of the history
behind this trilogy, Paul and Asklepios: The Greco-Roman Quest for Healing and the Apostolic Mission (T&T Clark, 2023).

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).
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Themistocles is one of the great personages of ancient Athens, known for his heroics in warfare as well as for his overweening and ultimately tragic ambitions. In Themistocles: The Rise and Fall of Athen’s Naval Mastermind (Yale UP, 2026), Michael Scott takes a distinctly human measure of this complex figure. As he tells me in our conversation, it would be wrong to see Themistocles, as some ancient scribes were disposed to, as the product of a fixed nature. Born and raised as an outsider in the status-obsessed world of Athens, he shaped his destiny through his own choices, some of them flawed. Scott is professor of classics and ancient history at the University of Warwick, UK.
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