Ancient & Classical

Discusses Aristotle's views on change, natural science, the mind, logic, philosophical method, metaphysics, and ethics, and suggests why the Greek philosopher still provokes controversy.Reviews'An excellent little book. One cannot sufficiently recommend...

Speeches from turbulent times.Cicero (Marcus Tullius, 106-43 BC), Roman lawyer, orator, politician and philosopher, of whom we know more than of any other Roman, lived through the stirring era that saw the rise, dictatorship, and death...

A Companion to Latin Literature gives an authoritative account of Latin literature from its beginnings in the third century BC through to the end of the second century AD. Provides expert overview of the main periods of Latin literary history, major...

Ancient Rome's original archconservative.M. Porcius Cato (234-149 BC), one of the best-known figures of the middle Roman Republic, remains legendary for his political and military career, especially his staunch opposition to Carthage; his modest way of...

In this new translation of the Homeric Hymns, Sarah Ruden employs a melodious and flexible non-rhyming line of eleven syllables, offering a close approximation of Greek hexameter verse in natural English rhythms. The result is a Homeric Hymns marked by...

The princeps Augustus (63 BCE - 14 CE), recognized as the first of the Roman emperors, looms large in the teaching and writing of Roman history. Major political, literary, and artistic developments alike are attributed to him. This book deliberately and...

Challenging the standard view that England emerged as a dominant power and Wales faded into obscurity after Edward I's conquest in 1282, this book considers how Welsh (and British) history became an enduringly potent instrument of political power in the...

A miscellany of mostly imperial verse.This two-volume anthology covers a period of four and a half centuries, beginning with the work of the mime-writer Publilius Syrus who flourished ca. 45 BC and ending with the graphic and charming poem of Rutilius...

A comprehensive account of the language of Ancient Greek civilization in a single volume, with contributions from leading international scholars covering the historical, geographical, sociolinguistic, and literary perspectives of the language. A...

This is the first book-length exploration of the type-scenes of western medieval literature from the ninth to the fifteenth centuries, spanning both the Latinate and Germanic traditions. Type-scenes are the recurring, stock scenes comprising the basic...

Now in Paperback!Muhammad and the Golden BoughReconstructing Arabic MythJaroslav StetkevychConnects pre-Islamic Arabian myth to world mythic traditions.A Choice Outstanding Academic Book"Stetkevych succeeds brilliantly in reconstructing the myth of the...

Reading Sappho considers Sappho's poetry as a powerful, influential voice in the Western cultural tradition. Essays are divided into four sections: "Language and Literary Context," "Homer and Oral Tradition", "Ritual and Social Context", and "Women's...

A major new edition of the so-called Presocratics.The fragments and testimonia of the early Greek philosophers (often labeled the 'Presocratics') have always been not only a fundamental source for understanding archaic Greek culture and ancient...

Antiquity's original didactic poet.Hesiod describes himself as a Boeotian shepherd who heard the Muses call upon him to sing about the gods. His exact dates are unknown, but he has often been considered a younger contemporary of Homer.The first volume of...

Precious snippets of ancient song.The five volumes in the Loeb Classical Library edition of Greek Lyric contain the surviving fragments of solo and choral song. This poetry was not preserved in medieval manuscripts, and few complete poems remain. Later...

Remains of a universal chronicle.Diodorus Siculus, Greek historian of Agyrium in Sicily (ca. 80-20 BC), wrote forty books of world history, called Library of History, in three parts: mythical history of peoples, non-Greek and Greek, to the Trojan War;...

Three foundational Roman poets.The Loeb Classical Library series Fragmentary Republican Latin continues with three highly influential pioneers in the creation and development of Latin poetry.Livius Andronicus (born ca. 292 BC) was regarded by the Romans...

Little, if anything, is known historically of Arthur, yet for centuries the romances of Arthur and his court dominated the imaginative literature of Europe in many languages. The roots of this vast flowering of the Arthurian legend are to be found in...

Apologies but we at Booksplease don't have a full description for this book.Book InformationISBN 9781849668897Author Homer: The Iliad William AllanFormat PaperbackPage Count 128Imprint Bristol Classical PressPublisher Bloomsbury Publishing...

Clouds is a partly revised version of a play that failed when it was first produced. It has always fascinated (and usually shocked) students of philosophy because of its portrayal of Socrates as an atheist and a teacher of dishonest rhetoric, justly...

This is the first instalment of a three-volume commentary in English, compiled by an international team of scholars and first published in Italian under the auspices of the Fondazione Lorenzo Valla. In this volume the commentary by West (Books I-IV) and...

Correspondence of a Church Father.Jerome (Eusebius Sophronius Hieronymus), ca. 345-420, of Stridon, Dalmatia, son of Christian parents, at Rome listened to rhetoricians, legal advocates, and philosophers, and in 360 was baptized by Pope Liberius. He...

The private correspondence of Rome's most prolific public figure.To his dear friend Atticus, Cicero reveals himself as to no other of his correspondents except perhaps his brother. In Cicero's Letters to Atticus we get an intimate look at his motivations...

An understanding of Dante the theologian as distinct from Dante the poet has been neglected in an appreciation of Dante's work as a whole. That is the starting-point of this vital new book. In giving theology fresh centrality, the author argues that...

Funny happenings.The rollicking comedies of Plautus, who brilliantly adapted Greek plays for Roman audiences ca. 205-184 BC, are the earliest Latin works to survive complete and are cornerstones of the European theatrical tradition from Shakespeare and...

Scholars at dinner.In The Learned Banqueters, Athenaeus describes a series of dinner parties at which the guests quote extensively from Greek literature. The work (which dates to the very end of the second century AD) is amusing reading and of ...

Rome's foreign wars, nation by nation.Appian (Appianus) is among our principal sources for the history of the Roman Republic, particularly in the second and first centuries BC, and sometimes our only source, as for the Third Punic War and the destruction...

A royal education.Xenophon (ca. 430 to ca. 354 BC) was a wealthy Athenian and friend of Socrates. He left Athens in 401 and joined an expedition including ten thousand Greeks led by the Persian governor Cyrus against the Persian king. After the...

A radical reexamination of the textual and archaeological evidence about Augustus and the PalatineCaesar Augustus (63 BC-AD 14), who is usually thought of as the first Roman emperor, lived on the Palatine Hill, the place from which the word "palace"...

Beowulf, like The Iliad and The Odyssey, is a foundational work of Western literature that originated in mysterious circumstances. In The Transmission of Beowulf, Leonard Neidorf addresses philological questions that are fundamental to the study of the...

This authoritative history of Latin literature offers a comprehensive survey of the thousand-year period from the origins of Latin as a written language to the early Middle Ages. At once a reference work, a bibliographic guide, a literary study, and a...

"No one can fail to admire the brilliance of the connections Vidal-Naquet suggests ...Audacity has been characteristic of Vidal-Naquet's career from the start; it marked his activities as a historian engage in the political struggle; it is visible at...

Based on the conviction that only translators who write poetry themselves can properly re-create the celebrated and timeless tragedies of Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides, the Greek Tragedy in New Translations series offers new translations that go...

Examining the profusion of ways in which the arts, culture, and thought of Greece and Rome have been transmitted, interpreted, adapted and used, A Companion to Classical Receptions explores the impact of this phenomenon on both ancient and later...

The Oxford Classical Texts, or Scriptorum Classicorum Bibliotheca Oxoniensis, are renowned for their reliability and presentation. The series consists of a text without commentary but with a brief apparatus criticus at the front of each page. There are...

" . . . [captures] the relentless urgency of Lucretius' didacticism, his passionate conviction and proselytizing fervour.' -The Classical ReviewBook InformationISBN 9780253201256Author LucretiusFormat PaperbackPage Count 256Imprint Indiana University...

'If you had asked me why I had joined the militia I should have answered: "To fight against Fascism," and if you had asked me what I was fighting for, I should have answered: "Common decency."' Homage to Catalonia is George Orwell's account of the...

In 1980, Michel Foucault's work makes two decisive turns. On the one hand, as announced at the start of his course at the College de France for that year, Le Gouvernement des vivants, his topic will be the modalities through which power constitutes...

Genealogy of the Pagan Gods by Giovanni Boccaccio (1313-1375) is an ambitious work of humanistic scholarship whose goal is to plunder ancient and medieval literary sources so as to create a massive synthesis of Greek and Roman mythology. The work also...

This sourcebook presents a wealth of material relating to every aspect of Roman spectacles, especially gladiatorial combat and chariot racing. Draws on the words of eye-witnesses and participants, as well as depictions of the games in mosaics and other...