Ancient & Classical

Tantalizing quotations from lost tragedies.Aeschylus (ca. 525-456 BC), the dramatist who made Athenian tragedy one of the world's great art forms, witnessed the establishment of democracy at Athens, fought against the Persians at Marathon and probably...

The Allegory of Love is a landmark study of a powerful and influential medieval conception. C. S. Lewis explores the sentiment called 'courtly love' and the allegorical method within which it developed in literature and thought, from its first flowering...

Mary Innes's classic prose translation of one of the supreme masterpieces of Latin literature, Ovid's Metamorphosis. Ovid drew on Greek mythology, Latin folklore and legend from ever further afield to create a series of narrative poems, ingeniously...

This book looks at witnesses to suffering and death in ancient Greek epic (Homer's Iliad) and tragedy. Internal spectators abound in both genres, and have received due scholarly attention. The present monograph covers new ground by dealing with a...

An Oxford Classical texts edition of Ovid's Metamorphoses has been planned for nearly a century, but earlier efforts by D. A. Slater and Franco Munari were not completed, largely because of the size and complexity of the manuscript tradition. Building on...

Socrates without Plato.Xenophon (ca. 430 to ca. 354 BC), a member of a wealthy but politically quietist Athenian family and an admirer of Socrates, left Athens in 401 BC to serve as a mercenary commander for Cyrus the Younger of Persia, then joined the...

The Cambridge Greek Lexicon is based upon principles differing from those of existing Greek lexica. Entries are organised according to meaning, with a view to showing the developing senses of words and the relationships between those senses. Other...

This volume is designed to accompany the OCR A-Level specification in Latin (first teaching September 2016), with practice unseen passages from Livy, the set prose for Paper 1, together with passages from a selection of other writers to support Paper 2,...

First published in 1879 and later revised and enlarged, this work contains an introduction to the Greek language and its dialects. It includes five major sections: letters; syllables and their accentuation; morphology; syntax, including multiple...

Named one of the 100 best nonfiction books of all time by the Modern LibraryAnne Carson's remarkable first book about the paradoxical nature of romantic loveSince it was first published, Eros the Bittersweet, Anne Carson's lyrical meditation on love in...

**Shortlisted for Waterstones Book of the Year**The Penguin Classics Book is a reader's companion to the largest library of classic literature in the world.Spanning 4,000 years from the legends of Ancient Mesopotamia to the poetry of the First World War,...

'With fair-tressed Demeter, the sacred goddess, my song begins, With herself and her slim-ankled daughter, whom Aidoneus once Abducted...' Most people are familiar, at least by repute, with the two great epics of Homer, the Iliad and the Odyssey,...

**SHORTLISTED FOR WATERSTONES BOOK OF THE YEAR 2020** From renowned, Pulitzer Prize-winning literary critic, Michiko Kakutani, comes an inspiring and gorgeously illustrated selection of the life-changing...

A slave who represented his masters in court and negotiations, Aesop relied on allegorical animal stories, collected here in The Complete Fables, to convey his key points. This Penguin Classics edition is translated from the Greek by Olivia and Robert...

The Tain Bo Cuailnge, centre-piece of the eighth-century Ulster cycle of heroic tales, is Ireland's greatest epic. It tells the story of a great cattle-raid, the invasion of Ulster by the armies of Medb and Ailill, queen and king of Connacht, and their...

`However one defines Man, the same definition applies to us all. This is sufficient proof that there is no essential difference within mankind.' (Laws l.29-30) Cicero's The Republic is an impassioned plea for responsible governement written just...

Then they took the flowers of the oak, and the flowers of the broom, and the flowers of the meadowsweet, and from those they conjured up the fairest and most beautiful maiden that anyone had ever seen. Celtic mythology, Arthurian romance, and an...

Homer's best-loved and most accessible poem, recounting the great wandering of Odysseus during his ten-year voyage back home to Ithaca, after the Trojan War. A superb new verse translation, now published in trade paperback, before the standard Penguin...

A Choice of Anglo-Saxon Verse contains the Old English texts of all the major short poems, such as 'The Battle of Maldon', 'The Dream of the Rood', 'The Wanderer' and 'The Seafarer', as well as a generous representation of the many important fragments,...

This new edition of Aristophanes is intended to replace the previous Oxford Classical Text published in 1900-1. Since that date it has been possible to construct a far better picture of the transmission of the text from antiquity to the age of printing...

Meet mythology's fifty fiercest females in this modern retelling of the world's greatest legends. From feminist fairies to bloodsucking temptresses, half-human harpies and protective Vodou goddesses, these are women who go beyond long-haired, smiling...

The master of Old Comedy.Aristophanes of Athens, one of the world's greatest comic dramatists, has been admired since antiquity for his iridescent wit and beguiling fantasy, exuberant language, and brilliant satire of the social, intellectual, and...

'Tell me, Muse, of the man of many turns, who was driven far and wide after he had sacked the sacred city of Troy' Twenty years after setting out to fight in the Trojan War, Odysseus is yet to return home to Ithaca. His household is in disarray: a...

Antiquity's original travel guide.Pausanias, born probably in Lydia in Asia Minor, was a Greek of the second century AD, about 120-180, who traveled widely not only in Asia Minor, Palestine, Egypt, and North Africa, but also in Greece and in Italy,...

Tacitus was the greatest historian of the Roman empire. Born in about AD 55, he served as administrator and leading senator. This career gave him an intimate view of the empire at its highest levels, experience brought to bear on his writing.His major...

"Via Plana" is not just another random collection of unseen exercises, presented to the student in the optimistic hope that somehow, they will muddle through and absorb some of the finer points of Latin grammar along the way. With a new approach, "Via...

The Hsu-Tang Library presents authoritative and eminently readable translations of classical Chinese literature, in bilingual editions, ranging across three millennia and the entire Sinitic world. This anthology opens up new religious and poetic...

Translated by H.F. Cary With an Introduction by Claire Honess. Dante Alighieri (1265-1321) is one of the most important and innovative figures of the European Middle Ages. Writing his Comedy (the epithet 'Divine' was added by later admirers) in exile...

In this ambitious and venturesome book, Peter W. Rose applies the insights of Marxist theory to a number of central Greek literary and philosophical texts. He explores major points in the trajectory from Homer to Plato where the ideology of inherited...

Conventional approaches to the Synoptic gospels argue that the gospel authors acted as literate spokespersons for their religious communities. Whether described as documenting intra-group 'oral traditions' or preserving the collective perspectives of...

Oedipus the King * Aias * Philoctetes * Oedipus at Colonus Sophocles stands as one of the greatest dramatists of all time, and one of the most influential on artists and thinkers over the centuries. In these four tragedies he portrays the extremes of...

Spanning almost seven centuries, this anthology encapsulates the foundation and consolidation of literature written in English, culminating in some of the finest works produced in English in the high Middle Ages. New edition of this widely-used...

This is one of the classic course books for those beginning ancient Greek. Designed to give students a working knowledge of the Greek languages in order to examine the ancient texts with confidence and enjoyment, the text includes some of the more...

This is the first volume of a projected six-volume Commentary on Homer's Iliad, under the General Editorship of professor G. S. Kirk. Professor Kirk himself is the editor of the present volume, which covers the first four Books of Iliad. It consists of...

These translations of "Oedipus the King", "Antigone", "Acharnians" and "Peace", are here reissued in paperback. They are written to be accessible for use in schools and for performance, and contain no Greek text.Author's works include "Roman Comedy"Book...

An essential, refreshingly accessible guide to Greek and Roman drama containing entries for forty plays by all the major dramatists in the classical world - Aeschylus, Sophocles, Euripides, Aristophanes, Menander, Plautus, Terence and Seneca.Features...

Greek Stories is an ideal first reader for students of Classical Greek. It offers 100 self-contained passages of manageable length, chosen for their intrinsic interest and adapted from a wide range of ancient authors. Generous help is given, with a short...

"The classic of all Europe." -T. S. EliotVirgil (Publius Vergilius Maro) was born in 70 BC near Mantua and was educated at Cremona, Milan, and Rome. Slow in speech, shy in manner, thoughtful in mind, weak in health, he went back north for a quiet life...

This is the first commentary on Caesar's Bellum Gallicum to approach it as a literary text. It attempts a contextualized reading of the work through the eyes of a contemporary Roman reader, who was trained in rhetoric, versed in Greek and Roman...

This is the OCR-endorsed edition covering the Latin AS and A-Level (Group 3) prescription of Virgil's Aeneid Book 2, lines 40-249 and the A-Level (Group 4) prescription of Book 2, lines 268-317, 370-558, giving full Latin text, commentary and vocabulary,...