Ancient & Classical

Laughing with Medusa explores a series of interlinking questions, including: Does history's self-positioning as the successor of myth result in the exclusion of alternative narratives of the past? How does feminism exclude itself from certain historical...

The best available introduction to the political thought of Augustine, if not to Christian political thought in general. Included are generous selections from City of God, as well as from many lesser-known writings of Augustine.About the AuthorPaul...

Although Classical Athenian ideology did not permit women to exercise legal, economic, and social autonomy, the tragedies of Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides often represent them as influential social and moral forces in their own right. Scholars have...

The heroines of Greek tragedy presented in the plays by Aeschylus, Sophocles and Euripides have long captivated audiences and critics. In this volume each of the eleven chapters discusses one of the heroines: Clytemnestra, Hecuba, Medea, Iphigenia,...

Though there was not even a word for, or a concept of, disability in Antiquity, a considerable part of the population experienced physical or mental conditions that put them at a disadvantage. Drawing on a wide variety of sources, from literary texts and...

Propertius (ca. 54 b.c.--ca. 2 b.c.) was a Roman poet who composed four compelling books of elegies in the chaotic years surrounding Rome's transition from republic to empire. The first three of these books revolve mostly around a tormented love affair...

It may seem odd to devote an entire book, however short, to a lost epic of which hardly any fragments (as normally defined) survive. The existence of a late prose summary of the epic's contents hardly dispels that oddness. One (rather long) word may...

This translation of the fourth book of the Chronicle of Fredegar with its Continuations, has Latin and English on opposite pages.About the AuthorWallace-Hadrill /f J. /i M. /r trans.Book InformationISBN 9780313227417Format HardbackPage Count 330Imprint...

Antiquity's most prolific and influential medical writer and practitioner.Galen of Pergamum (129-?199/216), physician to the court of the emperor Marcus Aurelius, was a philosopher, scientist, and medical historian, a theoretician and practitioner, who...

Helen of Troy: From Homer to Hollywood is a comprehensive literary biography of Helen of Troy, which explores the ways in which her story has been told and retold in almost every century from the ancient world to the modern day. Takes readers on an epic...

Aristotle Categoriae et Liber de InterpretationeBook InformationISBN 9780198145073Author L. Minio-PaluelloFormat HardbackPage Count 120Imprint Oxford University PressPublisher Oxford University PressDimensions(mm) 195mm * 130mm * 12mm

A selection from the two volumes of Iambi et Elegi Graeci.Book InformationISBN 9780198145899Author the late M. L. WestPage Count 306Imprint Oxford University PressPublisher Oxford University PressDimensions(mm) 194mm * 130mm * 23mm

Challenging many established narratives of literary history, this book investigates how the earliest known Greek poets (seventh to fifth centuries BCE) signposted their debts to their predecessors and prior traditions - placing markers in their works for...

A Companion to Sophocles presents the first comprehensive collection of essays in decades to address all aspects of the life, works, and critical reception of Sophocles. First collection of its kind to provide introductory essays to the fragments of...

Titus Lucretius Carus was probably born in the early first century B.C., and died in the year 55. Little is known of his life, although two tantalizing bits of gossip were passed on by St. Jerome: that he was poisoned by a madness-inducing aphrodisiac...

This book is a successor to the commentaries by Nisbet and Hubbard on Odes I and II, but it takes critical note of the abundant recent writing on Horace. It starts from the precise interpretation of the Latin; attention is paid to the nuances implied by...

The Batrachomyomachia (Battle of the Frogs and Mice) is a Hellenistic pastiche of Homer's Iliad which was often attributed to Homer himself by later commentators. As a parody of epic battle narrative it is quite unlike anything else that survives in full...

Many modern readers believe that, in his dramas, Euripides was questioning the nature and sometimes even the existence of the gods. In Euripides and the Gods, eminent classicist Mary K. Lefkowitz shows that the tragedian is not undermining ancient...

More than a school of philosophy with a defined set of beliefs and convictions, classical Cynicism represents an unconventional sect of philosophers and a way of life. This is a complete account of classical Cynicism from its beginnings in the Socratic...

In the field of classical studies, the psychoanalytic construction of the unconscious is rarely regarded as a fruitful methodological concept. Commonly understood as a modern conceptual invention rather than the discovery of a psychic reality, the notion...

Apologies but we at Booksplease don't have a full description for this book.Book InformationISBN 9780809005277Author AristotleFormat PaperbackPage Count 118Imprint Hill & WangPublisher Hill & Wang

"Classics and the Bible" looks at story-patterns and themes which Greek and Latin literature shares with the Hebrew scriptures and the New Testament. Direct influence or a common source can explain some similarities, but uncannily parallel plots and...

Three tactical treatises.Aeneas was perhaps a general, and certainly author of several didactic military works of which the sole survivor is that on defense against siege. From it we can deduce that he was a Peloponnesian of the fourth century BC who...

Philip II was not only the father of Alexander the Great, but in many respects was also the father of his son's incredible career. It was the father who unified Macedonia into the first European nation and who created the army with which his son...

This new volume in the Bloomsbury Ancient Comedy Companions series is perfect for students coming to one of Plautus' most whimsical, provocative, and influential plays for the first time, and a useful first point of reference for scholars less familiar...

Laughter in stitches.The era of Old Comedy (ca. 485 - ca. 380 BC), when theatrical comedy was created and established, is best known through the extant plays of Aristophanes, but there were many other poets whose comedies survive only in fragments. This...

Sophocles' Electra deals with the famous story of Orestes' vengeance on his mother Clytemnestra for her murder of his father Agamemnon. This book discusses whether the matricide is a just and final act of violence, or whether Sophocles ironically implies...

A Choice Outstanding Academic BookThe "Homeric Question" has vexed Classicists for generations. Was the author of the Iliad and the Odyssey a single individual who created the poems at a particular moment in history? Or does the name "Homer" hide the...

The preeminent orator of ancient Athens.Demosthenes (384-322 BC), orator at Athens, was a pleader in law courts who later became also a statesman, champion of the past greatness of his city and the present resistance of Greece to Philip of Macedon's...

A Companion to Greek Architecture provides an expansive overview of the topic, including design, engineering, and construction as well as theory, reception, and lasting impact. Covers both sacred and secular structures and complexes, with particular...

Maria Plaza sets out to analyse the function of humour in the Roman satirists Horace, Persius, and Juvenal. Her starting point is that satire is driven by two motives, which are to a certain extent opposed: to display humour, and to promote a serious...

Starting from the conviction that Latin literature gains from being viewed as performance, the author sees the creation of different characters or "masks" in Latin literature as a result of the Greco-Roman training in rhetoric. She treats the texts of...

Ptolemy I, whose epithet was Savior, was in many respects the most successful of all of Alexander the Great's successors. He created the longest lasting of the Hellenistic kingdoms that rose in the aftermath of the great conqueror's death, ending with...

A new edition of the Latin text, with a facing English prose translation, of one of Rome's most notorious and ferocious plays. The lengthy, useful introduction examines all aspects of the play's literary and thematic features, placing it firmly within...

Laura Slatkin's influential and widely admired book, here published in a second edition together with six additional essays, explores the superficially minor role of Thetis in the Iliad. Highly charged allusions reverberate through the narrative and...

The standard view in scholarship is that disease in Lucretius' De rerum natura is mainly a problem to be solved and then dispensed with. However, a closer reading suggests that things are more layered and complex than they appear at first sight: just as...

In fourteenth-century Italy, literacy became accessible to a significantly larger portion of the lay population (allegedly between 60 and 80 percent in Florence) and provided a crucial means for the vernacularization and secularization of learning, and...

'We certainly need in English a book devoted to Plautus alone and here we have it.' Phoenix This reissue of virtually the only book in English devoted to the work of the Roman comedy writer Plautus (c. 254-184 BC) includes a new preface and additional...

Born in 70 BCE, the Roman poet Vergil came of age during a period of literary experimentalism among Latin authors. These authors introduced new Greek verse forms and metres into the existing repertoire of Latin poetic genres and measures, foremost among...

It is generally assumed that whatever else has changed about the human condition since the dawn of civilization, basic human emotions - love, fear, anger, envy, shame - have remained constant. David Konstan, however, argues that the emotions of the...