September - 2025

In Living with Risk in the Late Roman World (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2025, 376 p., $75.00), Cam Grey begins by asserting that the Roman world from the late third century to the mid-sixth century was characterized by a diversity of risks to societies, from natural ones (floods, earthquakes, volcanic eruptions, epidemic diseases, etc.) to violence perpetrated by, for example, tax collectors, bandits, and military and religious adversaries. The author's objective is to investigate human protagonism in the face of these risks, how individuals, communities, and societies perceived, anticipated, mitigated, and managed them in their daily lives, from the richest men and women to the poorest. This study is carried out on textual sources from the period, as well as on the Earth's physical records, the natural archives, through which Grey seeks to identify from large-scale patterns to local and microregional experiences of the attitudes of groups and individuals towards the diverse risks with which they lived.

Experiencing Childhood in Ancient Athens: Material Culture, Iconography, Burials, and Social Identity in the 9th to 4th Centuries BCE (Oxford University Press, 2025, 362p., $130.00) is Emma Gooch's exploration of the transformations in the representations of and care for Athenian children from the Homeric to the Classical period. The author catalogs and utilizes a vast array of archaeological, funerary, and iconographic data (objects used by children, imagery of children on vases, etc.), as well as textual sources, to study children in the home and in broader Athenian society, both during life and afterlife. She argues that childhood became an increasingly distinct stage of life in that society, representing, above all, stability, but this did not mean that children themselves gained greater social visibility. Gooch also demonstrates how the wars and political transformations of the period enabled Athenian women to gain greater autonomy in influencing the material culture related to those children.