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Badian, Ernest, From Plataea to Potidaea, Studies in the History and Historiography of the Pentecontaetia. From the Greek victory over Persian forces on the field of Plataea to the Athenian blockade of the rebel city of Potidaea--key events in the Persian and Peloponnesian wars, respectively--the half-century of Greek history known as the Pentecontaetia is an era for which sources are few and interpretation is controversial. Now, eminent historian E. Badian brings together six essays--one new and five revised for this volume--that shed new light on one of the key periods in the history of the ancient world. How was the Persian War finally settled, and what was the nature of the relationship that emerged between the two great powers of the Aegean, Athens and Persia? E. Badian provides penetrating insights and rigorous scholarly argument in answering these questions.

Barnstone, Willis, ed., The Other Bible. Gathered here for the first time in one comprehensive volume are excerpted ancient holy texts from Judeo-Christian traditions that were excluded from the official canon of the Old and New Testaments. The Other Bible is a unique sourcebook of essential selections from Jewish Pseudepigrapha, early Kabbalah, Haggadah, Midrash, Christian, and Gnostic scripture. The Other Bible provides a rare opportunity to discover the poetic and narrative riches of this long-suppressed literature and experience firsthand its visionary discourses on the nature of God, humanity, the spiritual life, the world around us, and infinite worlds beyond this one.

Berlitz Travelers Guide, Greece. (I've referenced here the volume I used for my trip to Greece. You'll want an updated version. JDS) In a classs by itself, the 1993 Berlitz Travellers Guide to Greece is a travel guide you can use with confidence and read with pleasure. Written by 12 respected travel correspondents, each a specialist in a different part of Greece, this Travelers Guide is designed to provide candid insider advice that reveals the cultural significance, personality, and pleasures of the places you'll visit. It also tells you authoritatively what's changed and what's new in Greece for 1993. The writer's first-hand recommendations of hotels, restaurants, nightlife, shops, activities, and sights to see are carefully selective, to help guide you to those special experiences that make traveling memorable.

Bonfante, Larissa (Editor), Etruscan Life and Afterlife, A Handbook of Etruscan Studies. Eight internationally-known scholars provide a fascinating and authoritative synthesis of Etruscan studies, taking full account of the latest finding and new trends in interpretation. The eight essays in this volume cover the history, customs, art, and architecture of the Etruscans, standard headings under which we are accustomed to study a civilization. We face a peculiar situation with regard to the Etruscans: there is no literature. What we know most about, their monuments, has to be "read" in order to gain information about their history, religion, and daily life. The unevenness of the coverage there reflects, in part, the state of our knowledge.

Botsford, George Willis and Charles Alexander Robinson, Jr., Hellenic History. Fourth Edition, 1956. The Hellenic History was first published in 1922 after Professor Botsford's death, having been seen through the press by his son, the late Professor Jay Barrett Botsford of Brown University. From the Introduction: "Greece is a small mountainous peninsula (some 45,000 square miles in area) with a long seacoast, formed by countless inlets and bays and provided, especially on the east, with many harbors adequate for the boats of antiquity. Everywhere there are plains, some of considerable size, but these are hemmed in by ranges of mountains, which generally do not come to a peak. Mountain passes, as we understand them, are not common, and to go from one plain or valley to the next is difficult."

Bradford, Ernle, Thermopylae, The Battle for the West. The three-day battle for the pass a Thermopylae--the Hot Gates--was a critical contest in Xerxes's massive invasion of Greece. The bloody stand made there by Leonidas and his small Spartan army in 480 BC has been hailed ever since as an outstanding example of Patriotism, courage, and sacrifice. The ambitions of King Xerxes were vast. having amassed a Persian army that was the largest force of men and ships ever assembled, he set out to conquer Greece, at the same time sending an army of Carthaginians to overrun Sicily. thus the two forces planned to open the gates to the wealth of the western Mediterranean and march upon most of the known world. Ernie Bradford's narrative embraces the entire era of the invasion, from the building of the incredible wooden bridge across the hellespont to the final crushing defeat of the Persian rear guard at the battle of Plataea.

Brown, Norman O., Hermes the Thief, The Evolution of a Myth. In this classic, prescient work (first published in 1947, and foreshadowing all subsequent work greeting the return of the gods) Norman O. Brown asks, "is Hermes the Thief the prototype, from which, by extension and analogy, the Trickster was derived? Hermes--trickster and culture hero, divine child and patron of stealthy action, master of magic words, seducer and whisper--is a vital and complex figure in Greek mythology. Shepherd, craftsman, herald, musician, athlete, merchant--who is this tricky shapechanger confronting man at every turn? Brown deals with myth and cult, art and ritual, gods and goddesses as he traces the evolution of Hermes from sacred stoneheap and phallus to the Homeric Hymn to Hermes and the Hesiodic poems.

Budge, E. A. Wallis, The Divine Origin of the Craft of the Herbalist. Just as astronomy owes its origins to Sumerian and Babylonian astrology, and chemistry to alchemy, the modern science of herbalism developed from knowledge of plants acquired by the peoples of the ancient Near East. the herb-doctors and physicians of Sumer, Babylon, Assyria and Egypt thought that the curative properties of water, herbs, plants and oils were a gift to mankind from the gods. Despite the linking of herbalism with the divine, however, Egyptian papyri tell us that, by 2,000 BC, physicians had come to believe that sickness and disease were caused not by any supernatural agencies, but by purely natural causes. In this fascinating and erudite study, one of the world's foremost authorities on ancient Egypt and Assyria discusses the earliest Oriental herbals and the role of the herbalist in ancient society.

Bugh, Glenn, The Horsemen of Athens. Glenn Bugh provides a comprehensive discussion of a subject that has not been treated in full since the last century: the history of the Athenian cavalry. Integrated into a narrative history of the cavalry from the Archaic period through the Hellenistic age is a detailed analysis of a military and social organization the member of which came predominantly from the upper classes of Athens. Professor Bugh demonstrates that this organization was not merely a military institution but an aristocratic social class with political expectations and fluctuating loyalties to the Athenian democracy.

Burkert, Walter, Greek Religion, tr. by John Raffan. From the Introduction: Greek religion has to some extent always remained familiar, but is far from easy to know and understand. Seemingly natural and yet atavistically estranged, refined and barbaric at the same time, it has been taken as a guide again and again in the search for the origin of all religion. "This book has established itself as a masterpiece, packed with learning but also rich in ideas and connections of every sort. Its appearance in a good English translation is an even not only for Hellenists but for all those interested in the study of religion... nobody else could have produced an account of the subject of comparable range and power. This will be the best history of Greek religion for this generation." --New York Review of Books

Burkert, Walter, Ancient Mystery Cults. The foremost historian of Greek religion provides the first comprehensive, comparative study of a little-known aspect of ancient religious beliefs and practices. Secret mystery cults flourished within the larger culture of the public religion of Greece and Rome for roughly a thousand years. This book is neither a history nor a survey but a comparative phenomenology, concentrating on five major cults. In defining the mysteries and describing their rituals, membership, organization, and dissemination, Walter Burkert displays the remarkable erudition we have come to expect of him; he also shows sensitivity and sympathy in interpreting the experiences and motivations of the devotees.

Burnett, Anne Pippin, Three Archaic Poets, Archilochus, Alcaeus, Sappho. From the discussion of Sappho: "Sappho sang for an audience in some way very much like the fraternity that Alcaeus fought with during the day and drank with at night. Her circle, like the hetaireia, had a customary role to play in Lesbian society, and it too was aristocratic, musical, and constrained only by bonds of love and loyalty. When Sappho performed for this group, she used the same metres, the same song-structures, and the same mixture of local dialect with epic speech that Alcaeus used, but her songs were nevertheless of a very different sort, for where his subject was the changing world, hers was the unchanging beauty that sometimes touched that world."