Introduction: the legacy of Greek political thought

This Introduction offers context for the individual papers by examining the intersections and productive tensions between political thought and classical reception studies. While Plato and Aristotle have long been privileged interlocutors for political philosophers, classical reception studies has pluralised both this ancient canon and given rise to a more complex understanding of the modern heirs of ancient political thought. Similarly, the insights of studying the history of political texts and ideas across a longer tradition calls into question the fixity of concepts such as democracy, empire and political freedom. Indeed, we query the very notion of tradition by emphasising how the past has been repeatedly constructed and reconstructed in divergent modern political discourses and conversely how modern political theories and realities have been shaped and reshaped by an idea of antiquity. The Introduction closes with a brief survey of the collected papers.

Columnar translation: an ancient interpretive tool that the Romans gave the Greeks

Among the more peculiar literary papyri uncovered in the past century are numerous bilingual texts of Virgil and Cicero, with the Latin original and a Greek translation arranged in distinctive narrow columns. These materials, variously classified as texts with translations or as glossaries, were evidently used by Greek-speaking students when they first started to read Latin literature. They thus provide a unique window into the experience of the first of many groups of non-native Latin speakers to struggle with reading the classics of Latin literature.

Learning Latin the ancient way: Latin textbooks from the ancient world

A collection of Latin textbooks used by Greek speakers in the Roman empire, translated and annotated for modern readers. Includes reading material such as dialogues, phrasebooks, Colloquia of the Hermeneumata Pseudodositheana, stories about the Trojan war, Aesop's fables, legal treatises, and model letters; grammatical works from Dositheus and Charisius; glossaries/lexica; prose compostion exercises; alphabets. Some texts are transliterated.

Ancient lakes of the Sahara

As a result of climate change over the past 5000 years the Sahara changed from savannah to a desert landscape. The beds of ancient lakes are home to snail shells and the petrified roots of trees and shrubs. Examples of human occupation can also be seen in the form of fireplaces and discarded tools. Examination of the geological history of these sites can give a clearer picture of how the climate changed and how humans coped with these changes.

Experimental crop growing in Jordan to develop methodology for the identification of ancient crop irrigation

Crop irrigation has long been recognized as having been important for the evolution of social complexity in several parts of the world. Structural evidence for water management, as in the form of wells, ditches and dams, is often difficult to interpret and may be a poor indicator of past irrigation that may have had no need for such constructions. It would be of considerable value, therefore, to be able to infer past irrigation directly from archaeo-botanical remains, and especially the type of archaeo-botanical remains that are relatively abundant in the archaeological record, such as phytoliths. Building on the pioneering work of Rosen and Wiener (1994), this paper describes a crop-growing experiment designed to explore the impact of irrigation on the formation of phytoliths within cereals. If it can be shown that a systemic and consistent relationship exists between phytolith size, structure and the intensity of irrigation, and if various taphonomic and palaeoenvironmental processes can be controlled for, then the presence of past irrigation can feasibly be inferred from the phytoliths recovered from the archaeological record.