Ancient & Classical

Exploring the Language of Poems, Plays and Prose examines how readers interact with literary works, how they understand and are moved by them. Mick Short considers how meanings and effects are generated in the three major literary genres, carying out...

On Obligations (De officiis) was written by Cicero in late 44 BC after the assassination of Julius Caesar to provide principles of behaviour for aspiring politicians. It explores the apparent tensions between honourable conduct and expediency in public...

Three plays by ancient Greece's third great tragedian.One of antiquity's greatest poets, Euripides has been prized in every age for the pathos, terror, and intellectual probing of his dramatic creations. The new Loeb Classical Library edition of his...

The ancient Greek lyric poet Simonides of Keos was the first poet in the Western tradition to take money for poetic composition. From this starting point, Anne Carson launches an exploration, poetic in its own right, of the idea of poetic economy. She...

The Iliad is still the greatest poem about war that our culture has ever produced. For a hundred generations, poets and thinkers in the West have pored over, retold and argued about the events described in this martial epic, even when direct knowledge of...

Bartolome de Las Casas was the first and fiercest critic of Spanish colonialism in the New World. An early traveller to the Americas who sailed on one of Columbus's voyages, Las Casas was so horrified by the wholesale massacre he witnessed that he...

Mordant verse satire.The bite and wit of two of antiquity's best satirists are captured in this Loeb Classical Library edition. Persius (AD 34-62) and Juvenal (writing about sixty years later) were heirs to the style of Latin verse satire developed by...

Apologies but we at Booksplease don't have a full description for this book.Book InformationISBN 9781590306130Author Willis BarnstoneFormat PaperbackPage Count 224Imprint Shambhala Publications IncPublisher Shambhala Publications IncWeight(grams)...

`The language is refined, the smile not grave, My honest tongue recounts how men behave.' The Satyricon is the most celebrated work of fiction to have survived from the ancient world. It can be described as the first realistic novel, the father...

Greek religion is a subject of absorbing interest, essential for the understanding of history and culture, but often puzzling and elusive. This collection of essays ranges over many aspects of Greek civil life, looking at the ways in which religion...

'That was how things stood in the city at the time. With no one in charge, murders were taking place almost every day and the elections could not be held.' Books 36-40 of the Roman History by Cassius Dio (born ca. 163 CE), covers 69-50 BCE, the last...

Seneca's Oedipus is a work of exceptional historical and dramatic interest. It is the only surviving ancient Roman play on one of the most important and enduring myths of European intellectual history. It is poetically experimental, intellectually...

Comparative biographies of distinguished Greeks and Romans.Plutarch (Plutarchus), ca. AD 45-120, was born at Chaeronea in Boeotia in central Greece, studied philosophy at Athens, and, after coming to Rome as a teacher in philosophy, was given consular...

'What is poetry, how many kinds of it are there, and what are their specific effects?' Aristotle's Poetics is the most influential book on poetry ever written. A founding text of European aesthetics and literary criticism, from it stems much of our...

b The most influential of Augustine's works, iCity of God/i played a decisive role in the formation of the Christian West. /b Augustine wrote City of God in the aftermath of the Gothic sack of Rome in AD 410, at a time of rapid Christianization...

'Dreams are products of the mind, and do not come from any external source' Artemidorus' The Interpretation of Dreams (Oneirocritica) is the richest and most vivid pre-Freudian account of dream interpretation, and the only dream-book to have survived...

Beowulf is one of the finest works of vernacular literature from the European Middle Ages and as such is a fitting title to head the Old English family of texts published in the Dumbarton Oaks Medieval Library.But this volume offers something unique. For...

On names, forms, beauty, and lies.Plato, the great philosopher of Athens, was born in 427 BC. In early manhood an admirer of Socrates, he later founded the famous school of philosophy in the grove Academus. Much else recorded of his life is...

This volume offers up-to-date translations of all 21 epistles of Ovid's Heroides. Each letter is accompanied by a preface explaining the mythological background, an essay offering critical remarks on the poem, and discussion of the heroine and her...

This is the OCR-endorsed edition covering the Latin A-Level (Group 2) prescription of Annals XIV, 1-13, giving full Latin text, commentary and vocabulary, with a detailed introduction that also covers the prescribed material to be read in English for A...

In this lively treatment of one of antiquity's most mysterious civilizations, whose history disappeared from the records over 3,000 years ago, Trevor Bryce sheds fresh light on Hittite warriors as well as on the Hittites' social, religious and political...

First published in 1978 and now thoroughly revised, Reading Greek is a best-selling one-year introductory course in ancient Greek for students of any age. It combines the best of modern and traditional language-learning techniques and is used in schools,...

A Treasury of Virtues is a collection of sayings, sermons, and teachings attributed to 'Ali ibn Abi Talib (d. 40/661), the cousin and son-in-law of the Prophet Muhammad, the first Shia Imam and the fourth Sunni Caliph An acknowledged master of Arabic...

Apologies but we at Booksplease don't have a full description for this book.Book InformationISBN 9781645423867Author Intelligent EducationFormat PaperbackPage Count 240Imprint DexterityPublisher DexterityWeight(grams) 281gDimensions(mm) 216mm * 140mm *...

It is hard to overstate the importance of this trilogy of prose romances in the development of the legend of the Holy Grail and in the evolution of Arthurian literature as a whole. They give a crucial new impetus to the story of the Grail by establishing...

A TIMES BOOK OF THE YEAR What is the nature of things? Must I think my own way through the world? What is justice? How can I be me? How should we treat each other? Before the...

Treating ancient plays as living drama. Classical Greek drama is brought vividly to life in this series of new translations. Students are encouraged to engage with the text through detailed commentaries, including suggestions for discussion and analysis...

The first five chapters of the second book of Aristotle's Politics contain a series of criticisms levelled against Plato's Republic. Despite the abundance of studies that have been done on Aristotle's Politics, these chapters have for the most part been...

For students of Middle English, Andrew and Waldron's The Poems of the Pearl Manuscript has been the key edition of the four Pearl poems (the best-known of which is Gawain and the Green Knight) for 30 years. Now, with the changing needs of today's student...

A new collection of 120 passages from Greek authors. The first half contains twenty adapted passages building up to GCSE level, thirty lightly adapted ones for AS, and ten easy unadapted passages to introduce the translation of verse. The second half...

Learn Latin from the Romans is the only introductory Latin textbook to feature texts written by ancient Romans for Latin learners. These texts, the 'colloquia', consist of dialogues and narratives about daily life similar to those found in...

Homer's mythological tales of war and homecoming,the Iliad and the Odyssey, are widely considered to be two of the most influential works in the history of western literature. Yet their author, 'the greatest poet that ever lived' is something of a...

The "Father of History."Herodotus the great Greek historian was born about 484 BC, at Halicarnassus in Caria, Asia Minor, when it was subject to the Persians. He traveled widely in most of Asia Minor, Egypt (as far as Aswan), North Africa, Syria, the...

Ancient Athens' most successful tragedian.Sophocles (497/6-406 BC), with Aeschylus and Euripides, was one of the three great tragic poets of Athens, and is considered one of the world's greatest poets. The subjects of his plays were drawn from...

This is the first volume of a new prose translation of Dante's epic - the first in twenty-five years. Robert Durling's translation brings a new power and accuracy to the rendering of Dante's extraordinary vision of Hell, with its terror, pathos, and...

The Platonic ideal of government.Plato of Athens, who laid the foundations of the Western philosophical tradition and in range and depth ranks among its greatest practitioners, was born to a prosperous and politically active family ca. 427 BC. In early...

This is the eleventh volume in the Oratory of Classical Greece. This series presents all of the surviving speeches from the late fifth and fourth centuries BC in new translations prepared by classical scholars who are at the forefront of the discipline...

The classic account of crisis and conversion.Aurelius Augustine (AD 354-430), one of the most important figures in the development of western Christianity and philosophy, was the son of a pagan, Patricius of Tagaste, and his Christian wife, Monnica...

The complete poems of the priestess Enheduana, the world's first known author, newly translated from the original Sumerian "Helle's translation feels urgent, incandescent, stripped of academic cladding. . . . The growing popularity of Enheduana gives...

Apologies but we at Booksplease don't have a full description for this book.Book InformationISBN 9781590170175Author M. I. FinleyFormat PaperbackPage Count 232Imprint NYRB ClassicsPublisher The New York Review of Books, IncWeight(grams)...