Böcker i Cambridge Library Collection - Classics-serien

Revised by Adolf Michaelis, the third edition of German philologist Otto Jahn's Greek text of Sophocles' Electra was published in 1882. Sophocles (c.496-406 BCE) wrote his great tragedy towards the end of his career; it is one of only seven of his estimated 123 works to survive. Taking place in Argos, the play portrays the revenge taken by Electra and Orestes, following the murder of their father Agamemnon, on their mother Clytemnestra and stepfather Aegisthus. Jahn (1813-69), who also produced a renowned scholarly biography of Mozart, was Professor of archaeology at Leipzig - until his removal for involvement in the 1848 uprisings - then Director of the Academic Art Museum at Bonn, and Professor of Archaeology at Berlin. This highly regarded edition, with extensive critical apparatus and commentary throughout, remains an authoritative resource for readers interested in the history of philology, textual criticism, and Classical Greek literature.

Maurice Platnauer (1887-1974) published this seminal study of the metrical practices of the great Augustan elegists in 1951, and it is yet to be superseded. Principal of Brasenose College, Oxford, between 1956 and 1960, Platnauer examined every conceivable aspect of the versification of the three principal Latin elegiac poets, Tibullus, Propertius and Ovid, scrutinising in turn their prosody, word use and idiom. The book contains numerous tables of statistics comparing the frequency of various metrical and idiomatic usages among the three authors, including the placement of caesuras, use of elision, dactylic opening feet and polysyllabic line endings. This wealth of technical detail is offset by Platnauer's keen appreciation of the ultimate poetic purpose of these prosodic investigations: he explicitly hopes that the book will prove to be of use not only to teachers, but also to the 'not yet quite extinct genera' of writers of Latin verse.

Sir James Frazer (1854-1941) is best remembered today for The Golden Bough, widely considered to be one of the most important early texts in the fields of psychology and anthropology. Originally a classical scholar, Frazer also published this five-volume edition of Ovid's Fasti in 1929. It contains the text and a parallel English translation, with commentary on the six books, indexes, illustrations, and plans. Frazer's interest in Ovid's unfinished final poem arose from his wide-ranging studies of ancient literature and the origins of myth. The work describes the origins of the Roman calendar with its sacred days, and ranges from the deeds of major gods and heroes to the strange rites involved in placating the goddess of mildew. Volume 5 contains indexes to the translation and commentary, 88 plates, and maps of Rome. Other works by Frazer are also reissued in the Cambridge Library Collection.