Brock's great strength, as anyone who knows and has profited from his Vorarbeiten and other articles over the years will agree, is the close and thoughtful dissection of individual poetic and prose texts and the elucidation of their relationship one to another. To have the benefits of this sort of intelligent and subtle analysis set out at length, and with its purview extended beyond the original endpoint of Plato, is therefore an unqualified plus. -- David Whitehead, Queen's University Belfast Bryn Mawr Classical Review Roger Brock's subtle, important and lucidly written book is the first full-length study of a pervasive aspect of ancient Greek public life: its political imagery. By examining some of the ancient world's greatest poetic and prose texts from this new angle, he convincingly traces and explains changes in attitudes over the well-documented centuries between Homer and Aristotle. -- Professor Simon Hornblower, All Souls College, Oxford University, UK In this timely and stimulating book Roger Brock studies the importance of metaphor and other forms of imagery in the language and thought of ancient Greek politics. Deftly combining typological and historical analysis, Brock uncovers the historical shifts and continuities in the cultural models that political imagery articulates and the shared values to which ancient Greek political discourse appeals. This is a much-needed and comprehensive study of an important and neglected topic. -- Douglas Cairns Douglas Cairns, Professor of Classics, University of Edinburgh We get so used to our familiar metaphors that they are hard-wired into the ways we think about the world; but historians rarely use the images of another culture to illuminate the various ways in which that society could think. That is what Brock delivers here, covering a vast range of Greek literature and teasing out insight after insight into the assumptions that writers and audiences shared. It is a marvellous way of doing history, and Brock does it with magisterial authority. A top-rate scholarly achievement. -- Professor Christopher Pelling, Christ Church College, Oxford University, UK