Cornell University classicist Barry Strauss is an accomplished author of several scholarly books and articles on ancient Greek military, social, and economic problems. Starting about 20 years ago, Strauss increasingly turned his expertise and attention to writing riveting (and reliable) accounts for popular audiences about some of the most famous events of Greek and Roman antiquity, among them the battle of Salamis, the Trojan War, Spartacus’s slave revolt, various Roman emperors, and the assassination of Julius Caesar. He is currently the profession’s most gifted and accomplished classicist in making accessible to general readers the mesmerizing world of Greece and Rome. And that’s no easy task.
Ancient literary, historical, epigraphical, and archaeological sources for these seminal episodes are often fragmentary. Classical historians argue endlessly about their historicity. Yet it is difficult to find classicists who can translate such complexity into engaging narratives. And it becomes perhaps even harder to find effective stylists and popularizers who possess the philological skills and expertise to weigh and evaluate such conflicting ancient evidence.
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