New Books in Ancient History

Exemplarity and Allusion in Macrobius' Saturnalia (Oxford UP, 2026) offers a new framework for interpreting interactions with classical source material in Macrobius’ Saturnalia. It argues that the Saturnalia, an educational dialogue from the fifth century ce, does not view its Greco-Roman models as hegemonic sources of authority but engages with these texts in dynamic and critical ways. In particular, Macrobius responds to both the literary and ethical agendas of his predecessors, a strategy which is termed ethical allusion. The book explores this intertwining of moral, social, and aesthetic commentary in the Saturnalia’s allusions to authors such as Aulus Gellius, Cicero, Plato, Plutarch, and Virgil. It also examines Macrobius’ ethical allusions alongside the aesthetic practices and moral thought of the late fourth and the fifth centuries, and sheds light on the Saturnalia’s role in pioneering a late antique intellectual culture at once less hierarchical and less engaged with civic life.

New Books in Late Antiquity is presented by Ancient Jew Review.

Katherine Krauss is Assistant Teaching Professor of Classics and Ancient Mediterranean Studies at Penn State.

Michael Motia teaches in Classics and Religious Studies at UMass Boston
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Turkmenistan rarely makes international headlines–and when it did, it was often stories that highlighted things like the strange cult of personality that surrounded Saparmurat Niyazov, its first post-Soviet president, who named months after himself and made his memoir required reading.

Olivier Hein joins us on the show today to talk about Turkmenistan’s long history: as a possible origin for Zoroastrianism, the first monotheistic faith; the rise of Merv, at one point possibly one of the world’s largest cities; the emergence of the Turkmen; and how this region ended up becoming the crossroads of empires. Olivier’s work is now a book Mother of the World: The Remarkable History of Turkmenistan (Hurst, 2026)

Olivier Hein is a Mauritian-British author whose books include Star and Key: The Historical Adventure of Mauritius and Borneo: The History of an Enigma. Formerly a UN, UK and OSCE diplomat, posted to New York, Paris, Kosovo and Turkmenistan, he also contributes to The Chap magazine.

You can find more reviews, excerpts, interviews, and essays at The Asian Review of Books. Follow on Twitter at @BookReviewsAsia.

Nicholas Gordon is an editor for a global magazine, and a reviewer for the Asian Review of Books. He can be found on Twitter at @nickrigordon.
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How can we study the late ancient and Byzantine history from ecological perspectives? How might one grapple with the more-than-human in sources and media created by humans? Exploring the diverse ways in which pre-modern texts engaged with the broader natural world, Ecologizing Late Ancient and Byzantine Worlds (Bloomsbury, 2025) presents scholarly ventures into the terrains of the past. From the ancient treatises on dreams to monastic tales from the Hexameron literature to the Byzantine romance, from the Exeter Book to a mysterious Byzantine icon, the chapters investigate a diverse range of literature and other sources, uncovering intricate ecosystems of relationships.

The team of leading international experts behind the volume focuses on encounters between human and more-than-human beings. They pay attention to the entanglement of multiple agencies that cut through texts and other meshes. With insights from such theoretical traditions as ecocriticism, new materialism and environmental humanities, they re-expose ancient media to the elements.

New Books in Late Antiquity is presented by Ancient Jew Review

Laura Borghetti is a Doctoral Candidate in Byzantine Studies at Johannes Gutenberg University of Mainz, Germany.

Thomas Arentzen is a Reader in Church History at Lund University, Sweden, and Associate Professor at Sankt Ignatios College, Stockholm School of Theology, Sweden.

Michael Motia teaches Classics and Religious Studies at UMass Boston
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American democracy is in a period of crisis, so it seems natural to look back to its origins. So here in Episode 10 of Season 5, I interview Professor Josiah Ober.

Having previously taught at Princeton University, Ober is a professor of political science, classics, and philosophy at Stanford University, the Director of the Stanford Civics Initiative, as well as a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution. The author of many books, including Mass and Elite in Democratic Athens (1989), The Rise and Fall of Classical Greece (2015), and Civic Bargain (2023), co-written with Brook Manville, he was previously a Madison’s Notes guest in Season 3.

Drawing on his 2015 book, we discuss the history of ancient Greece and the political legacy of its classical period. Our conversation ranges from the Bronze Age Collapse and the age of Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey to the rise of the Greek city-state and decline of democratic Athens.

We discuss contingencies of the Peloponnesian war, the cases for and against Alcibiades, whether the polity flourished under Macedonian and Roman empires, the relationship of philosophy to civics, was Socrates guilty and how much did Plato invent about him, in what way the god Hermes symbolized Greek trade in the Mediterranean, if James Madison truly understood ancient history, and lastly Ober’s work with the growing civics programs in American higher education.

Hosted by Ryan Shinkel, Madison’s Notes is the podcast of Princeton University’s James Madison Program in American Ideals and Institutions. The transcript for this interview is available on our new Substack page, “Madison’s Footnotes.”
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Curtis Dozier's The White Pedestal: How White Nationalists Use Ancient Greece and Rome to Justify Hate
(Yale University Press, 2026) explores how white nationalist thought
leaders use ancient Greece and Rome to claim historical precedent for
their violent and oppressive politics.It is difficult to ignore the resurgence of white nationalist
movements in the United States, many of which employ symbols and slogans
from Greco-Roman antiquity. A long-established neo-Nazi website
incorporates an image of the Parthenon into its logo, and rioters wore
Spartan helmets in the January 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol.
These juxtapositions may appear incongruous to people who associate the
ancient world with enlightened political ideals and sophisticated
philosophical inquiry. But, as Dozier points out in this
thought-provoking book, it’s hard to imagine a historical period better
suited to rhetorical use by white nationalists. Indeed, some of the most
widely admired voices from ancient literature and philosophy endorsed
ideas that modern white supremacists promote, and the social and
political realities of the ancient world provide models for political
systems that white supremacists would like to establish today.

Part
introduction to contemporary white nationalist thought, part
exploration of ancient racism and xenophobia, and part intellectual
history of the political entanglements of academic study of the past,
this book reveals that contemporary white nationalist intellectuals know
much more about history than many people assume—and they deploy this
knowledge with disturbing success.

Curtis Dozier is associate professor of Greek and Roman studies at
Vassar College. He is the director of the internationally recognized
website Pharos: Doing Justice to the Classics, which documents appropriations of Greco-Roman antiquity by hate groups. He lives in Poughkeepsie, NY.

Morteza Hajizadeh
is a Ph.D. graduate in English from the University of Auckland in New
Zealand. His research interests are Cultural Studies; Critical Theory;
Environmental History; Medieval (Intellectual) History; Gothic Studies;
18th
and 19th Century British Literature.
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