The Attic Orators' have left us a hundred speeches for lawsuits, a body of work that reveals an important connection between evolving rhetoric and the jury trial. The essays in this volume explore that formative linkage, representing the main directions of recent work on the Orators: the emergence of technical manuals and ghost-written speeches for prospective litigants; the technique for adapting documentary evidence to common-sense notions about probable motives and typical characters; and profiling the jury as the ultimate arbiter of values. An Introduction by the editor explores the speechwriter's art in terms of the imagined community. Four essays appear in English here for the first time, and all Greek has been translated.

The sudden and spectacular growth in Dante's popularity in England at the end of the eighteenth century was immensely influential for English writers of the period. But the impact of Dante on English writers has rarely been analysed and its history has been little understood. Byron, Shelley, Keats, Coleridge, Blake, and Wordsworth all wrote and painted while Dante's work - its style, project, and achievement - commanded their attention and provoked their disagreement. The Circle of Our Vision discusses each of these writers in detail, assessing the nature of their engagement with the Divine Comedy and the consequences for their own writing. It explores how these Romantic poets understood Dante, what they valued in his poetry and why, setting them in the context of contemporary commentators, translators, and illustrators, (including Fuseli, Flaxman, and Reynolds) both in England and Europe. Romantic readings of the Divine Comedy are shown to disturb our own ideas about Dante, which are based on Victorian and Modernist assumptions. Pite also presents a reconsideration of the concept of 'influence' in general, using the example of Dante's presence in Romantic poetry to challenge Harold Bloom's belief that the relations between poets are invariably a fight to the death.

Langland's Piers Plowman is a profoundly Christian poem which nevertheless has enjoyed a wide general appeal. Readers - both religious and non-religious - have been drawn by the power of Langland's fictive imagination, the rich variety of imaginary worlds in his great dream-poem. Langland's Fictions examines the construction of the ten dreams which make up the B Text of Pears Plowman, and explores the relation of these dream-fictions to those realities with which the poet was chiefly preoccupied. This relationship is discussed under three main headings: 'fictions of the divided mind', in which the poet's mixed feelings about matters such as the value of learning find expression in imagined scenes and actions; 'fictions of history', in which the main events of salvation history are relived in the parallel worlds of dream; and 'fictions of the self', in which Langland's doubtful sense of his own moral standing as a man and a poet apparently finds expression. This chapter also addresses the controversial question of 'autobiographical elements' in the poem. John Burrow's lively and considered study is a major contribution to our understanding of one of medieval literature's most enduring works.

Cultural Responses to the Persian Wars addresses the huge impact on subsequent culture made by the wars fought between ancient Persia and Greece in the early fifth century BC. It brings together sixteen interdisciplinary essays, mostly by classical scholars, on individual trends within the reception of this period of history, extending from the wars' immediate impact on ancient Greek history to their reception in literature and thought both in antiquity and in the post-Renaisssance world. Extensively illustrated and accessibly written, with a detailed Introduction and bibliographies, this book will interest historians, classicists, and students of both comparative and modern literatures.

As a detailed study of the human animal, described by its author as the raison d'etre of nature, Book Seven of the elder Pliny's Natural History is crucial to the understanding of the work as a whole. In addition, however, it provides a valuable insight into the extraordinary complex of ideas and beliefs current in Pliny's era, many of which have resonances for other eras and cultures. The present study includes a substantial introduction examining the background to Pliny's life, thought, and writing, together with a modern English translation, and a detailed commentary which emphasizes the importance of Book Seven as possibly the most fascinating cultural record surviving from early imperial Rome.

Heralding a new era in literary studies, the Oxford English Literary History breaks the mould of traditional approaches to the canon by focusing on the contexts in which authors wrote and how their work was shaped by the times in which they lived. These are books that every serious student and scholar of the period will need on their shelves.

James Simpson covers both high medieval and Tudor writing, showing how the coming of the Renaissance and Reformation displaced the earlier, hospitably diverse literary culture. Out went the flourishing variousness of medieval writing (Chaucer, Langland, the 'mystery' plays, feminine visionary writing); in came writing - by Wyatt, Surrey, and others - that prized coherence and unity, even while reflecting a sense of what had been lost.

William Dunbar is a poet whose virtuosity is often praised, but rarely analyzed. This first major study of his work to be published in over ten years examines his view of himself as a major poet, or "makar," and the way he handles various poetic genres. It challenges the over-simplified and reductive views purveyed by some critics, that Dunbar is primarily a moralist or no more than a talented virtuoso. New emphasis is placed on the petitions, or begging-poems, and their use for poetic introspection. There is also a particularly full study of Dunbar's under-valued comic poems, and of the modes most congenial to him--notably parody, irony, "flyting" or invective, and black dream-fantasy. Taking account of recent scholarship, Priscilla Bawcutt explores the complex literary traditions available to Dunbar, both in Latin and the vernaculars, including "popular" and alliterative poetry as well as that of Chaucer and his followers. This original, learned, and critically searching book is set to become the leading analysis of one of the most fascinating and accomplished of medieval poets.

Augustine's City of God, written in the aftermath of the Gothic sack of Rome in AD 410, is one of the key works in the formation of Western culture. This book provides a detailed running commentary on the text, with chapters on the political, social, literary, and religious background. Through a close reading of Augustine's masterpiece the author provides an accessible guide to the cosmology, political thought, theory of history, and biblical interpretation of the greatest Christian Latin writer of late antiquity.

If there's a God, which at the moment I DOUBT, I want you to curse him. If there's any justice, I want them - both of them - in a car crash. Her husband's gone and her future isn't bright. Imprisoned in her marital home, Medea can't work, can't sleep and increasingly can't cope. While her child plays, she plots her revenge. This startlingly modern version of Euripides' classic tragedy explores the private fury bubbling under public behaviour and how in today's world a mother, fuelled by anger at her husband's infidelity, might be driven to commit the worst possible crime. The production is written and directed by one of the UK's most exciting and in-demand writers, Mike Bartlett, who has received critical acclaim for his plays including Earthquakes in London; Cock (Olivier Award), a new stage version of Chariots of Fire, and Love Love Love. This programme text coincides with a run at the Headlong Theatre in London from the 27th of September to the 1st of December 2012.

This study focuses on Laches, Protagoras, and the conversation between Socrates and Agathon in the Symposium. For these dialogues the author "proposes a strategy of interpretation that insists on the dialogues' essentially interrogatory character. . . . Stokes argues that we are not entitled to ascribea thesis to Socrates (far less to Plato) unless he unambiguously asserts it as his own belief. . . . For the most part, Stokes argues, Socrates is doing what he claims to be doing: cross-examining his interlocutor. He draws the materials of his own argument from the respondent's explicit admissions and from his own knowledge of the respondent's character, commitments and ways of life.What is shown by such a procedure is not, . . . according to Stokes], that acertain thesis is true or false, but, rather, that a certain sort of person, with certain commitments, can be led, on pain of inconsistency, to assent to theses that at first seem alien to him. Sometimes, as it turns out, these are theses that Socrates also endorses in his own person." "Times Literary Supplement"

Foreword by George C. Schoolfield>

This volume, to which European, American, and Israeli scholars have contributed, is designed to inform students of the Old Testament of the impact of archaeological discovery upon Old Testament study, with particular reference to specific sites. Twenty-five sites are included, in Egypt, Mesopotamia, Anatolia, Syria, and Palestine, and there are three regional studies, of Philistia, the Negeb, and Transjordan. Brief histories of the excavations are given, and the archaeological material is related to the Old Testament in such a way as to bring out points of interest concerning history, geography, chronology, religion, literature, language, law, industry, and the arts. The volumes include bibliographies, illustrations, maps, and a chronological chart.

This book is an anthology of thirteen of the most important articles published on Aeschylus in the last fifty years. It gives roughly equal coverage to the seven surviving plays, and there is also a chapter which places them in the context of Aeschylus' work as a whole. Three articles have< br> been translated into English for the first time, and others have a fresh foreword or postscript by the author. Greek quotations have been translated for the benefit of those reading the plays in English. The editor has supplied a substantial introduction and an index.

HarperCollins is proud to present its new range of best-loved, essential classics. 'Clanless, lawless, homeless is he who is in love with civil war, that brutal ferocious thing.' The epic poem The Iliad begins nine years after the beginning of the Trojan War and describes the great warrior Achilles and the battles and events that take place as he quarrels with the King Agamemnon. Attributed to Homer, The Iliad, along with The Odyssey, is still revered today as the oldest and finest example of Western Literature.

This volume, the first in a major new series which will provide authoritative texts of key non-canonical gospel writings, comprises a critical edition, with full translations, of all the extant manuscripts of the Gospel of Mary. In addition, an extended Introduction discusses the key issues involved in the interpretation of the text, as well as locating it in its proper historical context, while a Commentary explicates points of detail. The gospel has been important in many recent discussions of non-canonical gospels, of early Christian Gnosticism, and of discussions of the figure of Mary Magdalene. The present volume will provide a valuable resource for all future discussions of this important early Christian text.

In this volume, Kieran McGroarty provides a philosophical commentary on a section of the Enneads written by the last great Neoplatonist thinker, Plotinus. The treatise is entitled "Concerning Well-Being" and was written at a late stage in Plotinus' life when he was suffering from an illness that was shortly to kill him. Its main concern is with the good man and how he should pursue the good life. The treatise is therefore central to our understanding of Plotinus' ethical theory, and the commentary seeks to explicate and elucidate that theory. Plotinus' views on how one should live in order to fulfill oneself as a human being are as relevant now as they were in the third century AD. All Greek and Latin is translated, while short summaries introducing the content of each chapter help to make Plotinus' argument clear even to the non-specialist.

The new Early English Text Society edition of The Towneley Plays will serve as a definitive edition for many years to come. It replaces the edition by George England and Alfred W. Pollard, published nearly one hundred years ago by the Early English Text Society. Apart from the corrections of errors in the transcription of the text, the new edition offers a comprehensive introduction, body of notes, and glossary. It also presents the text in a new format, based on an examination of the manuscript, by expanding stanzas attributed to the so-called `Wakefield Master' from nine lines (with some internal rhyme) to thirteen lines. The Townley Plays manuscript dates approximately to the year 1500. The plays is contains are often considered the most interesting and stylistically intricate among all those surviving in extant cycles. By both internal and external evidence they are traceable to the city of Wakefield, where they were apparently performed over much of the sixteenth century. Most notable among the contents of the manuscript is `The Second Shepherds Play', which is widely known apart from the cycle and is included in many literary and dramatic anthologies. The cycle itself contains 32 plays on the subject of salvation history from the Creation to the Last Judgement.

"The poems of the Poetic Edda have waited a long time for a Modern English translation that would do them justice. Here it is at last (Odin be praised!) and well worth the wait. These amazing texts from a 13th-century Icelandic manuscript are of huge historical, mythological and literary importance, containing the lion's share of information that survives today about the gods and heroes of pre-Christian Scandinavians, their unique vision of the beginning and end of the world, etc. Jackson Crawford's modern versions of these poems are authoritative and fluent and often very gripping. With their individual headnotes and complementary general introduction, they supply today's readers with most of what they need to know in order to understand and appreciate the beliefs, motivations, and values of the Vikings." -Dick Ringler, Professor Emeritus of English and Scandinavian Studies at the University of Wisconsin--Madison