Robin Lane Fox is a distinguished British historian specializing in antiquity. His work delves into the depths of ancient history, offering readers insightful perspectives on Greek and Roman culture. Lane Fox's scholarly approach, informed by his extensive tenure at Oxford University, illuminates the complexities of the ancient world with depth and nuance. His expertise extends beyond classical history to encompass early Islamic history and literature, reflecting the breadth of his academic inquiry.
Like its heroes Homer's Iliad has earned immortal glory. It is the sublime Greek epic poem which tells of the anger of Achilles, and its dreadful consequences for persons and events during the war at Troy. Great questions still remain for its many readers: where, how and when it was composed and why it has such exceptional power. Robin Lane Fox applies his life-long love and engagement with the poem to answer them, deepening and enhancing what we will find in it as a result. Long planned, compellingly written and conceived, it is a memorable tribute to the poem underlying many of his own books.
Tough, resolute, fearless, Alexander was a born warrior and ruler of passionate ambition who understood the intense adventure of conquest and of the unknown. When he died in 323 BC aged thirty-two, his vast empire comprised more than two million square miles, spanning from Greece to India. His achievements were unparalleled - he had excelled as leader to his men, founded eighteen new cities and stamped the face of Greek culture on the ancient East. The myth he created is as potent today as it was in the ancient world. Robin Lane Fox�s superb account searches through the mass of conflicting evidence and legend to focus on Alexander as a man of his own time. Combining historical scholarship and acute psychological insight, it brings this colossal figure vividly to life.
The Bible is moving, inspirational and endlessly fascinating - but is it true? Starting with Genesis and the implicit background to the birth of Christ, the author sets out to discover how far biblical descriptions of people, places and events are confirmed or contradicted by external written and archaeological evidence.
"Religion and the religious life from the second to the fourth century A.D. when the gods of Olympus lost their dominion and Christianity, with the conversion of Constantine, triumphed in the Mediterranean world"--Jacket subtitle
"In Augustine, celebrated historian Robin Lane Fox follows Augustine of Hippo on his journey to the writing of his Confessions. Unbaptized, Augustine indulged in a life of lust before finally confessing and converting. Lane Fox recounts Augustine's sexual sins, his time in an outlawed heretical sect, and his gradual return to spirituality. Magisterial and beautifully written, Augustine is the authoritative portrait of this colossal figure at his most thoughtful, vulnerable, and profound." --Publisher
Fox traces our ongoing struggle to maintain open societies in the face of
profoundly tribal human needs that, paradoxically, hold the key to our
survival. This latest book ranges from incest and arranged marriage to poetry
and myth, from human rights and vengeance to pop icons such as Seinfeld.
From the foundation of the world's first democracy in Athens to the Roman Republic and the Empire under Hadrian, this title presents the turbulent histories of Greece and Rome together. Discussing figures such as Homer, Socrates, Alexander, Julius Caesar, Augustus and the first Christian martyrs, it explores freedom, justice, and luxury.
Explores how the intrepid seafarers of eighth-century Greece sailed around the
Mediterranean, encountering strange new sights - volcanic mountains, vaporous
springs, huge prehistoric bones - and weaving them into the myths of gods,
monsters and heroes that would become the cornerstone of Western civilization:
the Odyssey and the Iliad.
Medicine is one of the great fields of achievement of the Ancient Greeks. Hippocrates is celebrated worldwide as the father of medicine and the Hippocratic Oath is admired throughout the medical profession as a founding statement of ethics and ideals. In the fifth century BC, Greeks even wrote of medicine as a newly discovered craft they had invented. Robin Lane Fox's remarkable book puts their invention of medicine in a wider context, from the epic poems of Homer to the first doctors known to have been active in the Greek world. He examines what we do and do not know about Hippocrates and his Oath and the many writings that survive under his name. He then focuses on seven core texts which give the case histories of named individuals, showing that books 1 and 3 belong far earlier than previously recognised. Their re-dating has important consequences for the medical awareness of the great Greek dramatists and the historians Herodotus and Thucydides. Robin Lane Fox pieces together the doctor's thinking from his terse observations and relates it in a new way to the history of Greek prose and ideas. This original and compelling book opens windows onto many other aspects of the classical world, from women's medicine to street-life, empire, art, sport, sex and even botany. It fills a dark decade in a new way and carries readers along an extraordinary journey form Homer's epics to the grateful heirs of the Greek case histories, first in the Islamic world and then in early modern Europe
