Craig Williams, PhD
Craig Williams is professor of Classics at the University of Illinois (Urbana-Champaign). Williams received his BA and PhD in classical languages and literatures from Yale University. Thanks to several research fellowships from the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation, Williams has been visiting scholar at the Freie Universität and the Humboldt-Universität in Berlin, Germany. In 2006 he was awarded the Leonard and Claire Tow Endowed Professorship at Brooklyn College. Williams is the author of Roman Homosexuality (2nd edition, Oxford, 2010), Martial, Epigrams: Book Two. Introduction, Text, Translation and Commentary (Oxford, 2004), A Martial Reader: Selections from the Epigrams (Bolchazy-Carducci Publishers, 2011), Reading Roman Friendship (Cambridge, 2012), and numerous articles on Latin poetry and Roman culture.
Books by Craig Williams, PhD
A Martial Reader: Selections from the Epigrams
- 7044
- 978-0-86516-704-9
Martial's more than 1,500 epigrams, published in fifteen books over several decades, have long been valued for the richly varied glimpses they give into the urban landscape in which the comfortable upper classes of Roman society lived at the end of the first century ce. From public bathhouses, latrines, and brothels to private dinner parties with lavish foods and wines, from the amphitheater's violent entertainment and the use and abuse of slaves to coddled lapdogs and parrots who spontaneously exclaim "Hail Caesar!"—all are subjected to Martial's observant eye and witty, sometimes biting commentary. The poems in this volume range from gossip and crude jokes to lofty celebrations of brotherly love and reflections on what makes life livable, illustrating the kaleidoscopic array that is the hallmark of Martial's work.
