Ancient & Classical

This monograph is a literary study of Lycophron's Alexandra, whose obscurity, a quality notorious already in antiquity, has long hampered holistic approaches. Through a series of distinct but closely integrated literary studies of major aspects of the...

Its frivolous subject may have been the reason why Malavika and Agni mitra is sometimes considered to be the least significant of the three dramas of Kali dasa, the poet laureate of Indian antiquity who probably lived in the fifth century CE. Yet the...

Ancient Greek Lyrics collects Willis Barnstone's elegant translations of Greek lyric poetry-including the most complete Sappho in English, newly translated. This volume includes a representative sampling of all the significant poets, from Archilochos, in...

Knights was the first play to be produced by Aristophanes on his own behalf. In it, he launched a violent attack on Cleon, the leading politician of the day, on the whole style of leadership that he represented and on a system which seemed to guarantee...

The Rise of Wisdom Moon was composed during the mid-eleventh century by Krishna mishra, an otherwise unknown poet in the service of the Chandella dynasty, whose cultural and religious capital was Khajuraho. The early popularity of Krishna mishra's work...

The second volume of Jina*ratna's thirteenth-century The Epitome of Queen Lilavati completes his story. Embodied souls undergo all too human adventures in a succession of lives, as they advance to final release. The primary purpose of Jain narrative...

Horace's Epodes rank among the most under-valued texts of the early Roman principate. Abrasive in style and riddled with apparent inconsistencies, the Epodes have divided critics from the outset, infuriating and delighting them in equal measure. This...

The Medieval Classic considers how ancient and medieval commentaries on the Aeneid by Servius, Fulgentius, Bernard Silvestris, and others can give us new insights into four twelfth-century Latin epics -- the Ylias by Joseph of Exeter, the Alexandreis by...

The Quartet of Causeries have been handed down as a collection of the most ancient monologue farces in classical Sanskrit. Though stylistically divergent, they share a common plot: the hero is an inept, bungling procurer, who mismanages his client's...

Letters of an imperial tutor.The literary remains of the rhetorician Marcus Cornelius Fronto (ca. AD 100-176) first came to light in 1815, when Cardinal Mai, then prefect of the Ambrosian Library in Milan, discovered that beneath an account of the Acts...

Lucius Annaeus Seneca (4 BCE-65 CE) was a Roman Stoic philosopher, dramatist, statesman, and advisor to the emperor Nero, all during the Silver Age of Latin literature. The Complete Works of Lucius Annaeus Seneca is a fresh and compelling series of new...

This useful edition includes Ferguson's introduction to the history of Greek theatre along with full notes and vocabulary.This useful edition includes Ferguson's introduction to the history of Greek theatre along with full notes and vocabulary.About the...

Eclectic essays on ethics, education, and much else besides.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...

An unrivaled compendium of ancient Roman knowledge.Pliny the Elder, Gaius Plinius Secundus (AD 23-79), a Roman of equestrian rank of Transpadane Gaul (N. Italy), was uncle of Pliny the letter writer. He pursued a career partly military in Germany,...

An unrivaled compendium of ancient Roman knowledge.Pliny the Elder, Gaius Plinius Secundus (AD 23-79), a Roman of equestrian rank of Transpadane Gaul (N. Italy), was uncle of Pliny the letter writer. He pursued a career partly military in Germany,...

Greek lyric poetry encompassed a wide range of types of poem, from elegy to iambos and dithyramb to epinician. It particularly flourished in the Archaic and Classical periods, and some of its practitioners, such as Sappho and Pindar, had significant...

Defense of a poet, and five speeches from after exile.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,...

The first translation, produced by a team of eight scholars, of the Declamations and Preliminary Talks of the sixth-century sophist Choricius of Gaza. Declamations, deliberative or judicial orations on fictitious themes, were the fundamental advanced...

The sophisticated schoolmaster.The importance of Isocrates for the study of Greek civilization of the fourth century BC is indisputable. From 403 to 393 he wrote speeches for Athenian law courts, and then became a teacher of composition for would-be...

The Alexandra attributed to Lykophron is a minor poetic masterpiece. At 1474 lines, it is one of the most important and notoriously difficult Greek poems dating from the Hellenistic period (most likely the early second century BC). Most of the poem...

This book further develops Professor Seaford's innovative work on the study of ritual and money in the developing Greek polis. It employs the concept of the chronotope, which refers to the phenomenon whereby the spatial and temporal frameworks explicit...

The Book of Marvels, a compilation of marvellous events of a grotesque, bizarre or sensational nature, was composed in the second century A.D. by Phlegon of Tralles, a Greek freedman of the Roman emperor Hadrian. This remarkable text is the earliest...

Sanskrit Messenger poems evoke the pain of separated sweethearts through the formula of an estranged lover pleading with a messenger to take a message to his or her beloved. The plea includes a lyrical description of the route the messenger will take and...

The emperor who renounced Christianity.Julian (Flavius Claudius Iulianus) "the Apostate," Roman Emperor, lived AD 331 or 332 to 363. Born and educated in Constantinople as a Christian, after a precarious childhood he devoted himself to literature and ...

This is the only general introduction in English to Aeschylus' Oresteia, one of the most important and most influential of all Greek dramas. It discusses the Greek drama festival and the social and political background of Greek tragedy, and offers a...

Apologies but we at Booksplease don't have a full description for this book.Book InformationISBN 9781524705879Author Henry EliotFormat HardbackPage Count 480Imprint Penguin ClassicsPublisher Penguin Putnam IncWeight(grams) 1622gDimensions(mm) 255mm *...

Jason, in exile in Corinth, is marrying the king's daughter. It looks as though his problems are over, though it's hard on Medea, who has betrayed her family for him, followed him all the way from Colchis, killed for him, and borne him two sons. ...

Before the introduction of antisepsis and inoculation, people commonly died due to unsanitary conditions in the home, or following surgery or childbirth. Between them, the great scientists Louis Pasteur (1822-1893) and Joseph Lister (1827-1912) extended...

The sophisticated schoolmaster.The importance of Isocrates for the study of Greek civilization of the fourth century BC is indisputable. From 403 to 393 he wrote speeches for Athenian law courts, and then became a teacher of composition for would-be...

Book XXI of Livy's history of Rome is one of the most frequently read either in its entirety or in extracts, for it includes Carthaginian campaigns in Spain and Hannibal's momentous crossing of the Alps to invade Italy. P.G. Walsh's edition is...

The ancient Egyptians created a world of supernatural forces so vivid, powerful, and inescapable that controlling their destiny within it was their constant preoccupation. In life, supernatural forces manifested themselves through misfortune and illness,...

The dating of the Phaedrus has been hotly debated: sometimes it has been counted among Plato's earliest works; sometimes with the dialogues of the 'middle' period (Phaedo, Symposium, Republic); sometimes with the late works (e.g. Sophist, Statesman)...

Lysistrata is the third and last of Aristophanes' peace plays. It is a dream of peace, of how the women could help to achieve an honourable settlement, conceived when Athens was going through its blackest, most desperate crisis since the Persian War...

An unrivaled compendium of ancient Roman knowledge.Pliny the Elder, Gaius Plinius Secundus (AD 23-79), a Roman of equestrian rank of Transpadane Gaul (N. Italy), was uncle of Pliny the letter writer. He pursued a career partly military in Germany,...

Spirited verse.Prudentius (Aurelius Prudentius Clemens) was born in AD 348 probably at Caesaraugusta (Saragossa) and lived mostly in northeastern Spain, but visited Rome between 400 and 405. His parents, presumably Christian, had him educated in...

This collection of essays by well-known scholars of Seneca focuses on the multifaceted ways in which Seneca, as philosopher, politician, poet and Roman senator, engaged with the question of ethical selfhood. The contributors explore the main cruces of...

An unrivaled compendium of ancient Roman knowledge.Pliny the Elder, Gaius Plinius Secundus (AD 23-79), a Roman of equestrian rank of Transpadane Gaul (N. Italy), was uncle of Pliny the letter writer. He pursued a career partly military in Germany,...

Latin love elegy is one of the most important poetic genres in the Augustan era, also known as the golden age of Roman literature. This volume brings together leading scholars from Australia, Europe and North America to present and explore the Greek and...

One of the canonical Athenian orators, Lysias was much admired in antiquity. This new critical edition seeks to make the whole surviving corpus of Lysias available to the modern reader. It combines a newly edited text of the speeches preserved in the...

In 885 AD, the Vikings laid siege to Paris, to which a young monk named Abbo, of the abbey of Saint-Germain-des-Pres, stood as witness. Later, he came to make a record of what he saw, heard and believed in a verse chronicle, the "Bella parisiacae urbis"...