Melania the From Rome to Jerusalem explores the richly detailed story of Melania, an early fifth-century Roman Christian aristocrat who renounced her staggering wealth to lead a life of ascetic renunciation. Hers is a tale of "riches to rags." Born to high Roman aristocracy in the late fourth century, Melania encountered numerous difficulties posed by family members, Roman officials, and historical circumstances in disposing of her wealth, property (spread across at least eight Roman provinces), and thousands of slaves. Leaving Rome with her entourage a few years before Alaric the Goth's sack of Rome in 410, she journeyed to Sicily, then to North Africa, finally settling in Jerusalem-all while founding monasteries along the way. Towards the end of her life, she traveled to Constantinople (present-day Istanbul) in an attempt to convert to Christianity her still-pagan uncle, who was on a state mission to the eastern Roman court. Throughout her life, she was accustomed to meet and be assisted by emperors and empresses, bishops, and other high dignitaries. Embracing a fairly extreme asceticism, Melania died in Jerusalem in 439. A new English translation of her Life, composed by a long-time assistant who succeeded her in the direction of the male and female monasteries in Jerusalem, accompanies this biographical study.

Although Phryne is considered the most famous of the many Greek courtesans who flocked to Athens during the fourth century BCE, there have been no modern attempts to reconstruct her life. It was not until the eighteenth century that artistic interest in her developed and her stories were continually reimagined and embellished. Artists and writers have recounted again and again how she served as the model for the Praxiteles' Cnidian Aphrodite, the first monumental female nude in Western art, and how the sight of her naked body won acquittal when she was prosecuted for impiety. However, she left no writings in her own words, and only a handful of fragments related to her have survived from her time. Until now, the primary evidence for her life comes down to us from texts composed hundreds of years after her death, all of them written by men, whose works reflect the changing tastes, experiences, and values of Greeks living under Roman rule. Phryne of Thespiae offers a close analysis of the evidence for sexual labor in classical Athens to find parallels between Phyrne and other Greek courtesans. The result is an innovative biography that examines key moments of Phyrne's life that have been dismissed as male fantasies, arguing that many of them could have plausibly originated in historical events. The portrait that emerges is that of a powerful and socially consequential woman whose wealth and connections helped to shape the society in which she lived.