Monarchy, i.e. a political order characterized by a single ruler, was a frequent occurrence in the ancient world. The way it was embedded in the several cultures however varied deeply. Whereas in the Ancient Near East and in the Germanic kingdoms of Late Antiquity monarchy was the normal and accepted way of organizing political power, among the Greeks and Romans monarchic regimes were essentially precarious and developed as secondary formations within political orders that were radically different and incompatible with it in structural and normative terms, such as the Greek polis and the Roman respublica. These conditions in their turn produced fundamental differences in the way monarchy was understood and represented in the different cultural contexts and in different periods.

Such differences can best be observed by way of historical comparison, which is the purpose of the series Studies in Ancient Monarchies. The series intends to include works that facilitate comparison by the explicit recourse to methods from the social and literary sciences, discussing various different cases or focusing on one particular monarchy, in order to contribute to a broader debate on monarchy as a specific phenomenon of ancient politics and culture.