The present volume contains final versions of papers on the ancient world read at two specialized sessions during the XXIII International Congress of Historical Sciences, held in Poznań on 23–29 August 2022. Due to Covid-19 the Congress, scheduled for the summer of 2020, was twice postponed; when it became possible to organize it, it turned out that—even with online participation—not all the expected contributors would be able to take part in it, the fate which befell, among others, our sessions. Eventually at the first session (‘Appeasing the Civil Wars in the Greco-Roman World’, moderated by Luca Fezzi, Università degli Studi di Padova) four papers were read, at the second (‘Courts and Courtiers in the Ancient East and Mediterranean’, moderated by Ignazio Tantillo, Università di Napoli «L’Orientale») five. One paper, ‘An intellectual answer to the problem of the civil wars?’ by Valentina Arena, having already been promised for a different publication, in this volume the reader will find, respectively, three and five papers of each session, preceded by introductions by the moderators. One more thing. The sessions having been organized as panels, with the papers’ contents serving as starting points of discussions of the sessions’ themes, the final versions of some of the articles differ in important details from what had been heard in Poznań. To preserve that atmosphere of lively discussion the editors refrained from too much tampering with the texts submitted by the authors.