The 78 letters in this Anthology are selected both for their intrinsic interest, and to illustrate the range of functions letters performed in the ancient world. Dating from between c. 500 BC and c. 400 AD, they include naive and high-style, 'real' and 'fictitious', and classical and patristic items.
A commentary on the six surviving speeches of the fifth-century BC orator Antiphon.
Book VIII of Herodotus' Histories covers the early part of the unsuccessful invasion of Greece by Xerxes, king of Persia. Its centre-piece is the unexpected but crucial Greek naval victory at Salamis. This edition provides all the help required by a reader with little experience of Greek.
Tacitus' Histories covers the sequence of civil wars that erupted in AD 68-9 across the Roman Empire after the Emperor Nero committed suicide. This edition includes an introduction, a Latin text and a commentary providing grammatical help and elucidating the historical context and literary artistry of the author.
This volume contains an introduction discussing Xenophon's views on government in the context of his general political thought and a commentary aimed primarily at students on the Greek text of each of the three works included - the Hiero (On Tyranny), the Constitution of the Spartans, and the pseudonymous Constitution of the Athenians.
This book provides an English commentary on the Greek text of this important work, giving full assistance with literary, linguistic and philosophical questions. The last such edition of the Protagoras was first published over a century ago.
Book IX represents the conclusion and climax to Herodotus' Histories. This commentary, the first in English solely on Book IX in over a century, provides a Greek text with detailed philological, literary, and historical notes that incorporate the results of recent scholarly research on Greek history and historiography.
Professor Sommerstein presents here a freshly constituted text, with introduction and commentary, of Eumenides, the final play in Aeschylus' Oresteia trilogy.
This volume presents the Latin text, with introduction and commentary, of the biography of the emperor Claudius by the Roman writer Suetonius. The commentary provides context for the information given in the text and also explains the author's method of composition and provides help with difficult grammatical points.
Books XVII and XVIII of the Odyssey feature, among other episodes, the disguised Odysseus' penetration of his home after an absence of twenty years and his first encounter with his wife. The commentary provides linguistic and syntactical guidance suitable for upper-level students along with detailed consideration of Homer's compositional and narrative techniques, his literary artistry and the poem's central themes. An extensive introduction considers questions of formulaic composition, the nature of the poem's audience and the context of its performance, and isolates the concerns most prominent in the poem's second half and in Books XVII and XVIII in particular. Here too are considered the roles of Penelope and Telemachus, questions of disguise and recognition, and the institution of hospitality flaunted by the suitors in Odysseus' halls. Brief sections also discuss Homeric metre and the transmission of the text.
When in 80 BC Sextus Roscius was prosecuted for murdering his father, Cicero took on the defense. His speech, pinning responsibility on the men behind the prosecution, won him a career-making victory, establishing his reputation. This 2010 volume provides a Latin text and commentary for this brilliant, innovative speech.
This 1996 book provides a commentary on selected texts of Plato concerned with poetry: the Ion and relevant sections of the Republic. It was the first commentary to present these texts together in one volume, and the first in English on Republic 2 and 3 and Ion for nearly 100 years.
Introduction and commentary designed for advanced students. Written for the most part after the success of the Thebaid, the Silvae present a dialogue between the life of court politics and that of cultured withdrawal, delicately and allusively exploring the competing values of courtly service and private life.
Cicero's De Oratore is one of the masterpieces of Latin prose. A literary dialogue in the Greek tradition, it was written in 55 BCE in the midst of political turmoil at Rome, but reports a discussion 'concerning the (ideal) orator' that supposedly took place in 90 BCE, just before an earlier crisis. Cicero features eminent orators and statesmen of the past as participants in this discussion, presenting competing views on many topics. This edition of Book III is the first since 1893 to provide a Latin text and full introduction and commentary in English. It is intended to help advanced students and others interested in Roman literature to comprehend the grammar and appreciate the stylistic nuances of Cicero's Latin, to trace the historical, literary, and theoretical background of the topics addressed, and to interpret Book III in relation to the rest of De Oratore and to Cicero's other works.
Plutarch's essay 'How to Study Poetry' offers a set of reading practices intended to remove the potential damage that poetry can do to the moral health of young readers. It opens a window on to a world of ancient education and scholarship which can seem rather alien to those brought up in the highly sophisticated world of modern literary theory and criticism. The full Introduction and Commentary, by two of the world's leading scholars in the field, trace the origins and intellectual affiliations of Plutarch's method and fully illustrate the background to each of his examples. As such this book may serve as an introduction to the whole subject of ancient reading practices and literary criticism. The Commentary also pays particular attention to grammar, syntax and style, and sets this essay within the context of Plutarch's thought and writing more generally.
The sixth book of the Iliad includes the exchanges between Diomedes and Glaucus, and Hector and Hecuba, Paris, Helen and Andromache. The Commentary, which is suitable for undergraduates at all levels, discusses points of morphology, syntax, and prosody, and there is a comprehensive Introduction, including a section on reception.
When in 80 BC Sextus Roscius was prosecuted for murdering his father, Cicero took on the defense. His speech, pinning responsibility on the men behind the prosecution, won him a career-making victory, establishing his reputation. This 2010 volume provides a Latin text and commentary for this brilliant, innovative speech.
For eight centuries after his death Menander was the third most popular poet in the Greek-speaking world, and his plays, through Roman imitations and adaptations, engendered a tradition of European light drama that extends to our own day. But it is only since 1844 that some of the actual texts of Menander's plays have been rediscovered, mostly in Egyptian papyri. Two of these have given us four-fifths of the script of Samia (The Woman from Samos), a play of deception and misunderstanding in which a marriage that everyone desires almost fails to happen, two women and a baby are almost ruined, and a loving father almost loses his only son, because the people at home and the people abroad have both been doing things behind each other's backs - but somehow everything ends happily after all. This is the first full-scale edition with English commentary and is suitable for upper-level students.
Terence's Hecyra raises social, literary and theatrical issues of great interest to modern students of Roman comedy and, indeed, of Roman culture more broadly. The play pays strikingly close attention to the domestic problems of women and experiments boldly with traditional comic forms, not only in its creation of anticipatory suspense, but through its variations on traditional situations and roles and its metatheatrical qualities. In addition, Terence's response in his prologues to the play's two putative failures is important, if tendentious, evidence for the mechanics of theatrical performance in the second century, especially the conjunction of theatrical and gladiatorial shows. This edition opens the play's many interpretive challenges to wider scrutiny while remaining attentive to the linguistic needs of students at all levels.
One of the most important works of history in Western literature, by the freshest and liveliest of all classical Greek prose authors, Herodotus's Histories is also a key text for the study of ancient Greece and the Persian Empire. Covering a central and widely studied period of Greek history, Book V not only describes the revolt of the east Greeks against their Persian masters, which led to the great Persian Wars of 490-479 BC, but also provides fascinating material about the mainland Greek states in the sixth century BC. This is an up-to-date edition of and commentary on the Greek text of the book, providing extensive help with the Greek, basic historical information and clear maps, as well as lucid and insightful historical and literary interpretation of the text. The volume is suitable for advanced undergraduates, graduate students, teachers and scholars.
Pliny the Younger's nine-book Epistles is a masterpiece of Roman prose. Often mined as a historical and pedagogical sourcebook, this collection of 'private' letters is now finding recognition as a rich and rewarding work in its own right. The second book is a typically varied yet taut suite of miniatures, including among its twenty letters the trial of Marius Priscus and Pliny's famous portrait of his Laurentine villa. This edition, the first to address a complete book of Epistles in over a century, presents a Latin text together with an introduction and commentary intended for students, teachers and scholars. With clear linguistic explanations and full literary analysis, it invites readers to a fresh appreciation of Pliny's lettered art.
When Ovid, already renowned for his love poetry, the Metamorphoses and other works, was exiled by Augustus to Tomis on the Black Sea in AD 8, he continued to write. After five books of Tristia, he composed a collection of verse letters, the Epistulae ex Ponto, in which he appeals to his friends and supporters in Rome, lamenting his lot and begging for their help in mitigating it. In these epistolary elegies his inventiveness flourishes no less than before and his imaginative self-fashioning is as ingenious and engaging as ever, although in a minor key. This commentary on Book I assists intermediate and advanced students in understanding Ovid's language and style, while guiding them in the appreciation of his poetic art. The introduction examines the literary background of the Epistulae ex Ponto, their relation to Ovid's earlier works, and their special interest and appeal to readers of Augustan poetry.
Juvenal's sixth Satire is a masterpiece of comic hyperbole, an outrageous rant against women and marriage which, in its breadth and density, represents the high point of the misogynistic literature of classical antiquity. The Introduction situates Juvenal within the wider tradition of Roman satire, interrogates afresh the poem's architecture and recurrent themes, shows how Juvenal systematically attributes to his monstrous women the inverse of the Roman wife's canonical virtues, traces the various literary currents which infuse the Satire, and lastly addresses the much-discussed issue of the poetic voice or persona from a sociohistorical as well as a theoretical perspective. Above all, the commentary strives to locate Juvenal in his historical, literary and cultural context, while simultaneously affording assistance with the nuts and bolts of the Latin, and always keeping in view two key questions: what was Juvenal's purpose in writing the Satire? How seriously was it meant to be taken?
The first commentary in English on the Agricola for almost half a century. Particular attention is paid to the understanding of Tacitus' Latin, but a whole range of generic, historical, textual and narrative topics is covered; it will be suitable for advanced undergraduates and graduate students as well as scholars.
Valerius Flaccus' Argonautica is one of the most significant surviving works of Flavian epic, which has recently become much more popular as a field of study and teaching in Latin literature. This is the first commentary in English directly tailored to the needs of graduate and advanced undergraduate students. It provides an introduction to the major themes of the poem and the structure and content of Book III in particular which can function as an overview of the key features of Flavian epic. The detailed commentary on Book III discusses linguistic issues, intertextual and mythical allusions and thematic strands. The book consists of two major episodes in the adventures of Jason and the Argonauts which can be read together or independently of each other.
A new interpretation of the most widely read play of Euripides from antiquity to the Renaissance. This edition offers new textual suggestions, and gives detailed guidance on problems of language and literary interpretation. It will be useful for upper-level undergraduates and graduate students, as well as being of interest to scholars.
New text and full commentary for one of Herodotus' most varied books, covering the collapse of the Ionian Revolt and the glorious victory at Marathon, as well as court intrigue at Sparta, Kleomenes' grisly death, and Hippokleides' 'dancing away his marriage'. Suitable for undergraduate and graduate students, teachers and scholars.
New text and full commentary for one of Herodotus' most varied books, covering the collapse of the Ionian Revolt and the glorious victory at Marathon, as well as court intrigue at Sparta, Kleomenes' grisly death, and Hippokleides' 'dancing away his marriage'. Suitable for undergraduate and graduate students, teachers and scholars.
An up-to-date commentary on a pivotal section of Xenophon's Anabasis aimed at undergraduates. Advanced students and scholars will profit from its incorporation of recent developments in Xenophontic scholarship and Greek linguistics. Offers new insights into Xenophon's diction and narrative technique and into the reception of Anabasis in antiquity.
In this book Lucan recounts the decisive victory of Julius Caesar over Pompey at the Battle of Pharsalus in 48 BCE. This edition guides students and scholars through the work and offers generous help with appreciating Lucan's sometimes difficult Latin and his poetic achievement.
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