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Cambridge is one of the world’s leading publishers of research in classical studies, with a list that covers all aspects of enquiry into the ancient world. Our books are at the forefront of the discipline and have been recognised for their broad-ranging, thought-provoking scholarship. Our publishing spans the full range of classical enquiry and pedagogy: critical editions of ancient texts, commentaries, literary and historical analysis, classical archaeology, theoretical perspectives, reception studies, course texts, companions and source books.
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Classical Studies - Journals blog

  • Transplanting kingship
  • 14 April 2025, Ory Amitay and Beatrice Pestarino
  • Once upon a time in Paphos, so tells Plutarch (Mor. 340d), Alexander the Great decided that  the reigning king was unjust and wicked, and removed him from...
  • A History of Archaeology at Sparta
  • 21 March 2025, Thomas Clements
  • The Annual of the British School at Athens (ABSA) has long been a preferred repository of research on Sparta. This introduction provides a brief history of...

Classical Studies - Books blog

  • A book about the European Art Market and the First World War
  • 23 April 2025, Maddalena Alvi
  • ‘What about looting? Was there looting during the First World War?’ – I smile at the question from the young man who eagerly awaits confirmation of his supposition. The post A book about the European Art Market and the First World War first appeared on Fifteen Eighty Four | Cambridge University Press....
  • Moving along the First Global Empire
  • 14 March 2025, Adolfo Polo y La Borda
  • We live now in a time in which more and more people vouch for building up walls and barriers to deter the movement of people as it is seen with suspicion; as The post Moving along the First Global Empire first appeared on Fifteen Eighty Four | Cambridge University Press....


Color Us Greek

While it’s too much to imagine that those endlessly fascinating Greek ancestors of ours were color-blind, they most certainly were keen on marking difference, linguistically and geographically. But what about “racially?” What was “blackness” to a citizen of Ancient Greece, and what did the blackness of Sub-Saharan Africans, in fact, signify? And what in the world did an “Ethiopian” such as Memnon, whose people were favored by the gods, appear to be physically in the Greek imagination? Speculation about such complex matters has never elicited more energetic speculation and wishful thinking from scholars, journalists, and filmmakers than today, who inevitably read Greek attitudes toward physical differences through the lens of black-white race relations in the West today. Which is why Sarah Derbew’s Untangling Blackness in Greek Antiquity is a most welcome corrective to the school of Afrocentricity that would paint even Greek-descended Cleopatra black. Bringing deep learning and calm, convincing reasoning to a politically-loaded subject is always difficult. But Professor Derbew accomplishes this task with eloquence, grace, and hard-hitting analytical skills that make this book must reading for all of us who long to know how racial differences manifested themselves in the sublime culture from which we all descend.

Henry Louis Gates, Jr.
Harvard University