Classics

Simon Birol examines the conceptions of Jacob of Serugh regarding the ascetic life, both as a solitary and within the community, and situates them within the development of early Syriac monasticism. The basis for this study consists of two Syriac texts by Jacob, including the work On the Solitaries, here critically edited for the first time.

This volume contributes to the reconstruction of the history of ancient Christians on the basis of an exemplary selection of Greek inscriptions. Fifteen essays discussing inscriptions from Asia Minor and Greece offer striking insights into the lives, beliefs, and diversity of Christian communities that literary sources largely pass over.

Literature or textbook? In antiquity, no clear distinction was made in this respect, as Christian Neumann demonstrates regarding the complex interplay of literary design and didactic function in Plutarch's Quaestiones Graecae and Romanae and Gellius' Noctes Atticae.

Philippa Townsend argues that early Christian sacrificial ideas were shaped by a widespread discursive association between ethnicity and sacrifice in ancient Mediterranean texts. Christians used sacrificial rhetoric to establish and perpetuate their identity as a people in ways that have shaped modern ideas about race and religion.