Ancient & Classical

Those who study the nature of beauty are at once plagued by a singular issue: what does it mean to say something is beautiful? On the one hand, beauty is associated with erotic attraction; on the other, it is the primary category in aesthetics, and it is...

This court epic describes events leading up to the birth of Kumara, the war god who will defeat the demon Taraka. The gods try to use Kama, the Indian Cupid, to make the ascetic god Shiva fall in love with the daughter of the Himalaya mountain. Kama...

Antiquity's satirist supreme.Lucian (ca. AD 120-190), the satirist from Samosata on the Euphrates, started as an apprentice sculptor, turned to rhetoric and visited Italy and Gaul as a successful traveling lecturer before settling in Athens and ...

After becoming popularized by the troubadours of southern France in the twelfth century, the social system of 'courtly love' soon spread. Evidence of the influence of courtly love in the culture and literature of most of western Europe spans centuries...

Ancient expertise on water and warfare.Frontinus, Sextus Iulius, ca. AD 35-103, was a capable Roman civil officer and military commander. Praetor of the city in 70 and consul in 73 or 74, 98 and 100, he was, about the year 76, sent to Britain as governor...

Apologies but we at Booksplease don't have a full description for this book.Book InformationISBN 9781945707087Author College Coloring BooksFormat PaperbackPage Count 60Imprint College Coloring BooksPublisher College Coloring BooksWeight(grams)...

This play was one of the first examples of Indian literature to be seen in Europe; it attracted considerable attention (among others, from Goethe), and indeed pained surprise that such a sophisticated art-form could have developed without the rest of the...

The Garland of Past Lives is a collection of thirty four stories depicting the miraculous deeds performed by the Buddha in his previous rebirths. Composed in the fourth century C.E. by the Buddhist monk Aryashura, the text's accomplished artistry led...

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,...

The text of the Periplous or 'circumnavigation' that survives under the name of Skylax of Karyanda is in fact by an unknown author of the 4th century BC. It describes the coasts of the Mediterranean and Black Sea, naming hundreds of towns with...

This volume presents new texts of Cicero's dialogues on political philosophy, De Re Publica and De Legibus, together with corrected versions of the editor's previously published editions of Cato Maior de Senectute and Laelius de Amicitia. The texts are...

A gathering of poetic blossoms.The Greek Anthology (literally, "Gathering of Flowers") is the name given to a collection of about 4500 short Greek poems (called epigrams but usually not epigrammatic) by about 300 composers. To the collection (called...

These are troubling days for the humanities. In response, a recent proliferation of works defending the humanities has emerged. But, taken together, what are these works really saying, and how persuasive do they prove? The Battle of the Classics...

Apologies but we at Booksplease don't have a full description for this book.Book InformationISBN 9780862920630Author Titus Maccius PlautusFormat PaperbackPage Count 232Imprint Bristol Classical PressPublisher Bloomsbury Publishing PLCWeight(grams)...

Apologies but we at Booksplease don't have a full description for this book.Book InformationISBN 9781628373264Author Grammatiki A KarlaFormat PaperbackPage Count 250Imprint Society of Biblical LiteraturePublisher Society of Biblical...

Ancient Roman word lore.Varro (M. Terentius), 116-27 BC, of Reate, renowned for his vast learning, was an antiquarian, historian, philologist, student of science, agriculturist, and poet. He was a republican who was reconciled to Julius Caesar and was...

A gathering of poetic blossoms.The Greek Anthology (literally, "Gathering of Flowers") is the name given to a collection of about 4500 short Greek poems (called epigrams but usually not epigrammatic) by about 300 composers. To the collection (called...

A Roman farmer on farming.Columella (Lucius Iunius Moderatus) of Gades (Cadiz) lived in the reigns of the first emperors to about AD 70. He moved early in life to Italy where he owned farms and lived near Rome. It is probable that he did military ...

Winner of the 2004 Harold Morton Landon Translation Award from the Academy of American Poets, Charles Martin's blank-verse translation of the Metamorphoses is a "smoothly readable, accurate, charming, subtle yet clear" (Richard Wilbur) version that...

The Buddhist monk Ashva*ghosha composed Life of the Buddha in the first or second century CE probably in Ayodhya. This is the earliest surviving text of the Sanskrit literary genre called kavya and probably provided models for Kali*dasa's more famous...

This book offers a new approach to the study of Homeric epic by combining ancient Greek perceptions of Homer with up-to-date scholarship on traditional poetry. Part I argues that, in the archaic period, the Greeks saw the lliad and Odyssey neither as...

Apologies but we at Booksplease don't have a full description for this book.Book InformationISBN 9781420947649Author AristophanesFormat PaperbackPage Count 102Imprint Digireads.comPublisher Digireads.comWeight(grams) 159gDimensions(mm) 229mm * 152mm * 6mm

Livy Ab Urbe Condita Books I-VBook InformationISBN 9780198146612Author Robert OgilvieFormat HardbackPage Count 416Imprint Oxford University PressPublisher Oxford University PressDimensions(mm) 194mm * 131mm * 29mm

Late antique court poetry.Claudius Claudianus, Latin poet of great affairs, flourished during the joint reigns (AD 394-5 onwards) of the brothers Honorius (Emperor in the West) and Arcadius (in the East). Apparently a native of Greek Alexandria in ...

A comic masterpiece of medieval French literature, Aucassin and Nicolette is categorized by its anonymous author as a "chantefable", or "song-story", and is the only known work of this kind. This edition includes the thirteenth-century French text and a...

Euripides works with a common story pattern - a young man (Hippolytus) becomes the object of a married woman's (Phaedra's) desire, rebuffs her sexual overtures, and is then falsely accused to the woman's husband (Theseus, Hippolytus' father) of rape. To...

Antiquity's most influential mythological handbook.The Library provides in three books a grand summary of traditional Greek mythology and heroic legends. Written in clear and unaffected style, the compendium faithfully follows the Greek literary...

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...

In Euripides' play we see a very different figure from the Herakles of popular imagination. In his account of Herakles' maddened killing of his children, Euripides emphasises the human to the hero's character, presenting him as a loving father. Herakles...

A gathering of poetic blossoms.The Greek Anthology (literally, "Gathering of Flowers") is the name given to a collection of about 4500 short Greek poems (called epigrams but usually not epigrammatic) by about 300 composers. To the collection (called...

The man with the golden mouth.Dio Cocceianus Chrysostomus (AD ca. 40-ca. 120), of Prusa in Bithynia, Asia Minor, inherited with his brothers large properties and debts from his generous father Pasicrates. He became a skilled rhetorician hostile to ...

Satyric is the most thinly attested genre of Greek drama, but it appears to have been the oldest and according to Aristotle formative for tragedy. By the 5th Century BC at Athens it shared most of its compositional elements with tragedy, to which it...

Here are Sappho's songs and poems as English poems, all her famous pieces, all the fragments that can make connected sense, and all the discoveries of 2004 and 2014. These translations set out to be good English poetry first and foremost, and succeed...

The notes are a model of economy... The introduction is quite superb... The volume as a whole is a worthy addition to a series which has already begun to establish high expectations. TIMES HIGHER EDUCATION SUPPLEMENT Chaucer made extensive use of...

The Roman poet Catullus is one of the most popular and frequently studied ancient authors. His poems were written just over two thousand years ago during the chaotic but culturally vibrant final decades of the Republic and deal with themes of passion and...

Refined midnight oil.Aulus Gellius (ca. AD 123-170) is known almost wholly from his Noctes Atticae, "Attic Nights," so called because it was begun during the nights of an Attic winter. The work collects in twenty books (of Book VIII only the index is...

The theme of Euripides' Alcestis blends the primitive folk-tale of the self-sacrificing bride, Alcestis, and of Heracles' heroic struggles with the ogre Death, with a morality tale of "virtue rewarded", in this case twice rewarded. The Alcestis is the...

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...

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...

Clodia Metelli: The Tribune's Sister is the first full-length biography of a Roman aristocrat whose colorful life, as described by her contemporaries, has inspired numerous modern works of popular fiction, art, and poetry. Clodia, widow of the consul...