Ancient History Lives

During the course of a day we meet twenty-four Athenians from all strata of society—from the slave-girl to the councilman, the vase painter to the naval commander, the housewife to the hoplite—and get to know what the real Athens was like by spending an hour in their company. We encounter a different one of these characters every chapter, with each chapter forming an hour in the life of the ancient city.

Our greatest need is to be recognized—to be seen, loved, and embedded in rich relationships with those around us. But for the last century, we’ve displaced that need with the ease of technology. We’ve dreamed of mastery without relationship (what the premodern world called magic) and abundance without dependence (what Jesus called Mammon). Yet even before a pandemic disrupted that quest, we felt threatened and strangely out of place: lonely, anxious, bored amid endless options, oddly disconnected amid infinite connections.

Passing from lip to ear, the philosophies of Hermes Trismegistus have been passed down through thousands of years. Listen as this tradition continues in this audio compilation of The Kybalion, Corpus Hermeticum, The Emerald Tablets of Thoth the Atlantean, and The Life and Teachings of Hermes Trismegistus. This unprecedented collection will provide the foundation of the Hermetic Philosophy.

Douglas Preston's journalistic explorations have taken him from the haunted country of Italy to the jungles of Honduras. The Lost Tomb brings together an astonishing and compelling collection of true stories about buried treasure, enigmatic murders, lost tombs, bizarre crimes, and other fascinating tales of the past and present.

Over billions of years, ancient fish evolved to walk on land, reptiles transformed into birds that fly, and apelike primates evolved into humans that walk on two legs, talk, and write. For more than a century, paleontologists have traveled the globe to find fossils that show how such changes have happened.

Anubis: The History and Legacy of the Ancient Egyptian God of the Afterlife looks at the god that had such a decisive impact on the Egyptians’ concepts of death and afterlife. You will learn about Anubis like never before.

Amazons - fierce warrior women dwelling on the fringes of the known world - were the mythic archenemies of the ancient Greeks. Heracles and Achilles displayed their valor in duels with Amazon queens, and the Athenians reveled in their victory over a powerful Amazon army. In historical times, Cyrus of Persia, Alexander the Great, and the Roman general Pompey tangled with Amazons.

Plutarch’s Lives remains one of the world’s most profoundly influential literary works. Written at the beginning of the second century, it forms a brilliant social history of the ancient world. His “parallel lives” were originally presented in a series of books that gave an account of one Greek and one Roman life, followed by a comparison of the two. Volume 1 compares Theseus and Romulus, Alcibiades and Coriolanus, and Aristides and Marcus Cato, among others.

Emperor Tiberius: Life and Reign offers a comprehensive and nuanced exploration of one of Rome’s most enigmatic emperors. Tiberius, who ruled from AD 14 to AD 37, has often been portrayed through the lens of his reclusive and autocratic later years, but this book aims to provide a balanced view, shedding light on both his achievements and controversies. From his birth into the prominent Claudian family and his early military successes to his complex relationships with Augustus and his mother Livia, Tiberius’ life is a tapestry of ambition, duty, and personal struggle. His rise to power ...

This epic chronicle by Plutarch (A.D. 46-120) continues with the lives of great Grecians and Romans. These biographies of the men who created the ancient world are brought to life in this new, high-quality recording. Legends such as Caesar, Alexander, Cicero, Demosthenes, and many others come alive as their politics, economy, and their individual stories play out in the time of the ancients. This translation is by John Dryden and is considered by scholars to be the quintessential translation.

A National Book Award finalist for this epic work, Adrienne Mayor delivers a gripping account of Mithradates, the ruthless visionary who began to challenge Rome’s power in 120 B.C. Machiavelli praised his military genius. Kings coveted his secret elixir against poison. Poets celebrated his victories, intrigues, and panache. But until now, no one has told the full story of his incredible life.

Over 1500 years before Leonardo Da Vinci became the Renaissance Man, antiquity had its own in the form of Archimedes, one of the most famous Ancient Greeks. An engineer, mathematician, physicist, scientist and astronomer all rolled into one, Archimedes has been credited for making groundbreaking discoveries, some of which are undoubtedly fact and others that are almost certainly myth.

Two and a half decades ago, Ascended Master Teachers Arten and Pursah appeared to Gary Renard and held a series of conversations with him that elaborated on the teachings of two spiritual classics, The Gospel of Thomas and A Course in Miracles. Gary immortalized what he learned in the books of his best-selling series. This fourth book, a companion to the original trilogy, explores six of the lifetimes in which the incarnations of Jesus and Buddha lived together, beginning in 700 BC when they were known as Saka and Hiroji.

1599 was an epochal year for Shakespeare and England. During that year, Shakespeare wrote four of his most famous plays: Henry the Fifth, Julius Caesar, As You Like It, and, most remarkably, Hamlet; Elizabethans sent off an army to crush an Irish rebellion, weathered an Armada threat from Spain, gambled on a fledgling East India Company, and waited to see who would succeed their aging and childless queen.

Constantine the Great was one of the most pivotal figures in the history of the Roman Empire and the widespread expansion of the Christian religion. This is in no way an understatement; Constantine was not only one of the last truly powerful Roman emperors, but he also successfully reconstituted the whole empire according to his vision of Rome’s future. He played the most significant role in transforming the Empire from a Greco-Roman pagan dominion into a bulwark of the Christian faith, granting for the first time real temporal power for the early Christian church.

The ancient Roman empire was the supreme arena, where emperors had no choice but to fight, to thrill, to dazzle. To rule as a Caesar was to stand as an actor upon the great stage of the world. No biography invites us into the lives of the Caesars more vividly or intimately than that by Gaius Suetonius Tranquillus, written from the centre of Rome and power, in AD 121. Placing each Caesar in the context of the generations that had gone before, and connecting personality with policy, Suetonius injected flesh and blood into their stories.

This volume, aimed at the general audience, presents life and times of the amazing animals that inhabited Earth more than 500 million years ago. The Cambrian Period was a critical time in Earth's history. During this immense span of time nearly every modern group of animals appeared. Although life had been around for more than 2 million millennia, Cambrian rocks preserve the record of the first appearance of complex animals with eyes, protective skeletons, antennae, and complex ecologies.

“This book is a brilliant recollection of lives lived in the past. It will make you think and possibly even trigger those memories that are stored within your own subconscious. That’s what it did for me!” - Annmarie Martin “Kelvin’s calm, empirical, and even skeptical approach to spiritual matters has always impressed me. And in his new book he shares with us memories of dozens of lifetimes using that same rational approach. More importantly, he shares how knowing these past lives makes a difference in the here and now. The stories are entertaining. And you will come away with a ...

How much light is too much light? Satellite pictures show our planet as a brightly glowing orb, and in our era of constant illumination, light pollution has become a major issue. The world’s flora and fauna have evolved to operate in the natural cycle of day and night. But in the last 150 years, we have extended our day—and in doing so have forced out the inhabitants of the night and disrupted the circadian rhythms necessary to sustain all living things, including ourselves.

Lynn Cohick provides an accurate and fulsome picture of the earliest Christian women by examining a wide variety of first-century Jewish and Greco-Roman documents that illuminate their lives. She organizes the book around three major spheres of life: family, religious community, and society in general.