Unlike some other reproductions of classic texts (1) We have not used OCR(Optical Character Recognition), as this leads to bad quality books with introduced typos. (2) In books where there are images such as portraits, maps, sketches etc We have endeavoured to keep the quality of these images, so they represent accurately the original artefact. Although occasionally there may be certain imperfections with these old texts, we feel they deserve to be made available for future generations to enjoy.

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 accessible edition for students presents Herodotus as one of the most fascinating and colourful authors from the ancient world. Book III of Herodotus’ nine-book work is one of the richest in its exploration of themes, such as the practices and customs of different peoples and the nature of political power, issues still much debated today. This commentary illuminates the geographical and even anthropological scope of Herodotus' history, and enables students to confidently tackle the text in the original Greek. Bringing together a full introduction, text, commentary and translation, Longley makes Herodotus accessible to students of ancient Greek. This guide shows us why Herodotus is still considered the ‘Father of History’.

If you read a work by Cicero or Seneca and then open The Pilgrimage of Egeria, Augustine, or Gregory of Tours, you will soon notice that Late Latin authors quote authorities differently. They provide a perfect example of synthesising two potentially conflicting traditions - "classical" and "biblical". This book examines how the system of direct discourse marking developed over the centuries. It focuses on selecting marking means, presents the dynamics of change and suggests factors that might have been at play. The author guides the reader on the path that goes from the Classical prevalence of inquit to the Late innovative mix of marking words including the very classical inquit, an increased use of dico, the newly recruited ait, and dicens, influenced by biblical translations. The book suggests that Late authors tried to make reading and understanding easier by putting quotative words before quotations and increasing the use of redundant combinations (e.g. "he answered saying").

An analysis of the oldest form of poetry. Sumer, in the southern part of Iraq, created the first literary culture in history, as early as 2500BC. The account is structured around a complete English translation of the fragmentary Lugalbanda poems, narrating the adventures of the eponymous hero. The study reveals a work of a rich and sophisticated poetic imagination and technique, which, far from being in any sense 'primitive', are so complex as to resist much modern literary analysis.

Bound Fast with Letters brings together in one volume many of the significant contributions that Richard H. Rouse and Mary A. Rouse have made over the past forty years to the study of medieval manuscripts through the prism of textual transmission and manuscript production. The eighteen essays collected here address medieval authors, craftsmen, book producers, and patrons of manuscripts from different epochs in the Middle Ages, extending from late antiquity to the early Renaissance, and ranging from North Africa to northern England. Their investigations reveal valuable information about the history of texts and their transmission, and their careful scrutiny of texts and of the physical manuscripts that convey them illuminate the societies that created, read, and preserved these objects. The book begins in Part I with articles on writers from the patristic era through the twelfth century who experimented with, and mastered, various physical forms of presenting ideas in writing. Part II contains essays on patronage and patrons, including Richard de Fournival, Jean de Brienne, Watriquet de Couvin, Pope Clement V, the Counts of Saint-Pol, and Christine de Pizan. Part III, on manuscript producers, discusses the questions, for whom? and by whom? were manuscripts made. The four essays in this section each reflect on a different part of the process of book-making. Throughout, Bound Fast with Letters focuses on the close ties between the physical remains of literate culture-from the wax tablets of the patristic era to the vernacular literature of the wealthy laity of the late Middle Ages-and their social and economic context.

Written in the fourth century BCE, Philebus is likely one of Plato's last Socratic dialogues. It is also famously difficult to read and understand. A multilayered inquiry into the nature of life, Philebus has drawn renewed interest from scholars in recent years. Yet, until now, the only English-language commentary available has been a work published in 1897. This much-needed new commentary, designed especially for philosophers and advanced students of ancient Greek, draws on up-to-date scholarship to expand our understanding of Plato's complex work. In his in-depth introduction, George Rudebusch places the Philebus in historical, philosophical, and linguistic context. As he explains, the dialogue deals with the question of whether a good life consists of pleasure or knowing. Yet its exploration of this question is riddled with ambiguity. With the goal of facilitating comprehension, particularly for students of philosophy, Rudebusch divides his commentary into twenty discrete subarguments. Within this framework, he elucidates the significance-and possible interpretations-of each passage and dissects their philological details. In particular, he analyzes how Plato uses inference indicators (that is, the Greek words for "therefore" and "because") to establish the structure of the arguments, markers difficult to present in translation. A detailed and thorough commentary, this volume is both easy to navigate and conducive to new interpretations of one of Plato's most intriguing dialogues.

What is the role of Hesiod's poetry in the beginnings of Greek philosophy? This book explores the question by going beyond the traditional responses that stress either continuities or discontinuities between myth and philosophy. Instead, this volume attempts a reflexive or response-oriented approach, that highlights the active re-appropriation and renewal of Hesiodic thought by the Presocratic philosophers. Its fifteen contributions offer large scale comparisons, historiographical considerations, thematic and generic approaches, and detailed case studies.

Why devote a Companion to the "mirrors for princes", whose very existence is debated? These texts offer key insights into political thoughts of the past. Their ambiguous, problematic status further enhances their interest. And although recent research has fundamentally challenged established views of these texts, until now there has been no critical introduction to the genre. This volume therefore fills this important gap, while promoting a global historical perspective of different "mirrors for princes" traditions from antiquity to humanism, via Byzantium, Persia, Islam, and the medieval West. This Companion also proposes new avenues of reflection on the anchoring of these texts in their historical realities. Contributors are Makram Abbes, Denise Aigle, Olivier Biaggini, Hugo Bizzarri, Charles F. Briggs, Sylvene Edouard, Jean-Philippe Genet, John R. Lenz, Louise Marlow, Cary J. Nederman, Corinne Peneau, Stephane Pequignot, Noelle-Laetitia Perret, Gunter Prinzing, Volker Reinhardt, Hans-Joachim Schmidt, Tom Stevenson, Karl Ubl, and Steven J. Williams.

"Space Matters!" claimed Doreen Massey and John Allen at the heart of the Spatial Turn developments (1984). Compensating a four-decades shortfall, this collective volume is the first reader in Byzantine spatial studies. It contextualizes the spatial turn in historical studies by means of interdisciplinary dialogue. An introduction offers an up-to-date state of the art. Twenty-nine case studies provide a wide range of different conceptualizations of space in Byzantine culture articulated in a single collection through a variety of topics and approaches. An afterword frames the future challenges of Byzantine spatial studies in a changing world where space is a claim and a precarious social value. Contributors are Ilias Anagnostakis, Alexander Beihammer, Helena Bodin, Darlene L. Brooks Hedstrom, Beatrice Caseau Chevallier, Paolo Cesaretti, Michael J. Decker, Veronica della Dora, Rico Franses, Sauro Gelichi, Adam J. Goldwyn, Basema Hamarneh, Richard Hodges, Brad Hostetler, Adam Izdebski, Liz James, P. Nick Kardulias, Isabel Kimmelfield, Tonia Kiousopoulou, Johannes Koder, Derek Krueger, Tomasz Labuk, Maria Leontsini, Yulia Mantova, Charis Messis, Konstantinos Moustakas, Margaret Mullett, Ingela Nilsson, Robert G. Ousterhout, Georgios Pallis, Myrto Veikou, Joanita Vroom, David Westberg, and Enrico Zanini.

Habent sua fata libelli honors the work of Craig Kallendorf, offering studies in several fields in which he chiefly distinguished himself: the history of the book and reading, the classical tradition and reception studies, Renaissance humanism, and Virgilian scholarship with a special focus on the creative transformation of the Aeneid through the centuries. The volume is rounded out by an appreciation of Craig Kallendorf, including a review of his scholarship and its significance. In addition to the topics mentioned above, the volume's twenty-five contributions are of relevance to those working in the fields of classical philology, Neo-Latin, political philosophy, poetry and poetics, printing and print culture, Romance languages, art history, translation studies, and Renaissance and early modern Europe generally. Contributors: Alessandro Barchiesi, Susanna Braund, Helene Casanova-Robin, Jean-Louis Charlet, Federica Ciccolella, Ingrid De Smet, Margaret Ezell, Edoardo Fumagalli, Julia Gaisser, Lucia Gualdo Rosa, James Hankins, Andrew Laird, Marc Laureys, John Monfasani, Timothy Moore, Colette Nativel, Marianne Pade, Lisa Pon, Wayne Rebhorn, Alden Smith, Sarah Spence, Fabio Stok, Richard Thomas, and Marino Zorzi.

Scholars have long noted the strikingly visual aspects of Statius' poetry. This book advances our understanding of how these visual aspects work through intertextual analysis. In the Thebaid, for instance, Statius repeatedly presents "visual narratives" in the form of linked descriptive (or ekphrastic) passages. These narratives are subject to multiple forms visual interpretation inflected by the intertextual background. Similarly, the Achilleid activates particularly Roman conceptions of masculinity through repeated evocations of Achilles' blush. The Silvae offer a diversity of modes of viewing that evoke Roman conceptions of gender and class.

In this volume, literary scholars and ancient historians from across the globe investigate the creation, manipulation and representation of ancient war landscapes in literature. Landscape can spark armed conflict, dictate its progress and influence the affective experience of its participants. At the same time, warfare transforms landscapes, both physically and in the way in which they are later perceived and experienced. Landscapes of War in Greek and Roman Literature breaks new ground in exploring Greco-Roman literary responses to this complex interrelationship. Drawing on current ideas in cognitive theory, memory studies, ecocriticism and other fields, its individual chapters engage with such questions as: how did the Greeks and Romans represent the effects of war on the natural world? What distinctions did they see between spaces of war and other landscapes? How did they encode different experiences of war in literary representations of landscape? How was memory tied to landscape in wartime or its aftermath? And in what ways did ancient war landscapes shape modern experiences and representations of war? In four sections, contributors explore combatants' perception and experience of war landscapes, the relationship between war and the natural world, symbolic and actual forms of territorial control in a military context, and war landscapes as spaces of memory. Several contributions focus especially on modern intersections of war, landscape and the classical past.

More than any other secular story of the Middle Ages, the tale of Tristan and Isolde fascinated its audience. Adaptations in poetry, prose, and drama were widespread in western European vernacular languages. Visual portrayals of the story appear not only in manuscripts and printed books but in individual pictures and pictorial narratives, and on an amazing array of objects including stained glass, wall paintings, tiles, tapestries, ivory boxes, combs, mirrors, shoes, and misericords. The pan-European and cross-media nature of the surviving medieval evidence is not adequately reflected in current Tristan scholarship, which largely follows disciplinary and linguistic lines. The contributors to Visuality and Materiality in the Story of Tristan and Isolde seek to address this problem by opening a cross-disciplinary dialogue and by proposing a new set of intellectual coordinates-the concepts of materiality and visuality-without losing sight of the historical specificity or the aesthetic character of individual works of art and literature. Their theoretical paradigm allows them to survey the richness of the surviving evidence from a variety of disciplinary approaches, while offering new perspectives on the nature of representation in medieval culture. Enriched by numerous illustrations, this volume is an important examination of the story of Tristan and Isolde in the European context of its visual and textual transmission.

A comedy about tragedy and a play about playmaking, Aristophanes' Frogs (405 BCE) is perhaps the most popular of ancient comedies. This new introduction guides students through the play, its themes and contemporary contexts, and its reception history. Frogs offers sustained engagement with the Athenian literary scene, with the politics of Athens at the end of the Peloponnesian War, and with the religious understanding of the fifth-century city. It presents the earliest direct criticism of theatre and a detailed description of the Underworld, and also dramatizes the place of Mystery cults in the religious life of Athens and shows the political concerns that galvanized the citizens. It is also genuinely funny, showcasing a range of comic techniques, including literary and musical parody, political invective, grotesque distortion, wordplay, prop comedy, and funny costumes. Frogs has inspired literary works by Henry Fielding, George Bernard Shaw, and Tom Stoppard. This book explores all of these features in a series of short chapters designed to be accessible to a new reader of ancient comedy. It proceeds linearly through the play, addressing a range of issues, but paying particular attention to stagecraft and performance. It also offers a bold new interpretation of the play, suggesting that the action of Frogs was not the first time Euripides and Aeschylus had competed against each other.

Sexual violence is one of the oldest and most difficult problems of humankind. Many of the "love stories" in Classical Greek and Roman Myth are tales of rape, a fact that is often casually glossed over in both popular and scholarly treatments of these narratives. Through a careful selection of stories, this book provides a deep exploration of rape in Classical Myth as well as in the works of art and literature that have responded to it through the millennia. The volume offers an essential reading for anyone who wishes to understand sexual violence from different perspectives and through an interdisciplinary approach, which includes Trauma Theory and Evolutionary Psychology.