Brill S Companion To Aineias Tacticus

Brill’s Companion to Aineias Tacticus combines studies of the fourth-century BC Greek military handbook. Thirteen scholars discuss Aineias’ historical and intellectual context, his literary contribution and unique insights into ancient warfare, as well as the reception of his work.

Brill’s Companion to Greek Land Warfare Beyond the Phalanx brings together emerging and established scholars to build on the new consensus of multiform Greek warfare, on and off the battlefield, beyond the usual chronological, geographical, and operational boundaries.

This volume offers an overview of current directions in the study of siege warfare from around the ancient Mediterranean world.

In Brill'Companion to Military Defeat in Ancient Mediterranean Society, Jessica H. Clark and Brian Turner compile original case studies that examine how Near Eastern, Greek, and Roman societies addressed – or failed to address – their military defeats and casualties of war.

In classical scholarship of the past two centuries, the term “epyllion” was used to label short hexametric texts mainly ascribable to the Hellenistic period (Greek) or the Neoterics (Latin). Apart from their brevity, characteristics such as a predilection for episodic narration or female characters were regarded as typically “epyllic” features. However, in Antiquity itself, the texts we call “epyllia” were not considered a coherent genre, which seems to be an innovation of the late 18th century. The contributions in this book not only re-examine some important (and some lesser known) Greek and Latin primary texts, but also critically reconsider the theoretical discourses attached to it, and also sketch their literary and scholarly reception in the Byzantine and Middle Ages, the Renaissance, and the Modern Age.

Brill’s Companion to Ancient Greek Scholarship aims at providing a reference work in the field of ancient Greek and Byzantine scholarship and grammar, thus encompassing the broad and multifaceted philological and linguistic research activity during the entire Greek Antiquity and the Middle Ages.

The present collection samples the most current approaches to Lucan’s poem, its themes, its dialogue with other texts, its reception in medieval and early modern literature, and its relevance to audiences of all times.

This book offers a comprehensive review and reassessment of the classical sources describing the cryptographic Spartan device known as the scytale. Challenging the view promoted by modern historians of cryptography which look at the scytale as a simple and impractical 'stick', Diepenbroek argues for the scytale's deserved status as a vehicle for secret communication in the ancient world. By way of comparison, Diepenbroek demonstrates that the cryptographic principles employed in the Spartan scytale show an encryption and coding system that is no less complex than some 20th-century transposition ciphers. The result is that, contrary to the accepted point of view, scytale encryption is as complex and secure as other known ancient ciphers. Drawing on salient comparisons with a selection of modern transposition ciphers (and their historical predecessors), the reader is provided with a detailed overview and analysis of the surviving classical sources that similarly reveal the potential of the scytale as an actual cryptographic and steganographic tool in ancient Sparta in order to illustrate the relative sophistication of the Spartan scytale as a practical device for secret communication. This helps to establish the conceptual basis that the scytale would, in theory, have offered its ancient users a secure method for secret communication over long distances.