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.

Going beyond exclusively national perspectives, this volume considers the reception of the ancient Greek poet Sappho and her first Latin translator, Catullus, as a literary pair who transmit poetic culture across the world from the early 20th century to the present. Sappho's and Catullus' reception has shaped a transnational network of poets and intellectuals, helping to define ideas of origins, gender, sexuality and national identities. This book shows that across time and cultures translations and rewritings of Sappho and Catullus articulate modernist poetics of myth and fragmentation, forms of confessionalism and post-modern pastiche. The inquiry focuses on Italian and North American poetry as two central yet understudied hubs of Sappho's and Catullus' modern reception, also linked by a rich mutual intellectual exchange: key case-studies include Giovanni Pascoli, Ezra Pound, H.D., Salvatore Quasimodo, Robert Lowell, Rosita Copioli and Anne Carson, and cover a wide range of unpublished archival material. Texts are analysed and compared through reception and translation theories and inserted within the current debate on the Classics as World Literature, demonstrating how sustained transnational poetic discourse employs the ancient pair to expand notions of literary origins and redefine poetry's relationship to human existence.

This is not a commentary on Juvenal Satire 10 but a critical appreciation of the poem which examines it on its own and in context and tries to make it come alive as a piece of literature, offering one man's close reading of Satire 10 as poetry, and concerned with literary criticism rather than philological minutiae. In line with the recent broadening of insight into Juvenal's writing this book often addresses the issues of distortion and problematizing and covers style, sound and diction as well. Much time is also devoted to intertextuality and to humour, wit and irony. Building on the work of scholars like Martyn, Jenkyns and Schmitz, who see in Juvenal a consistently skilful and sophisticated author, this is a whole book demonstrating a high level of expertise on Juvenal's part sustained throughout; a long poem (rather than intermittent flashes). This investigation of 10 leads to the conclusion that Juvenal is an accomplished poet and provocative satirist, a writer with real focus, who makes every word count, and a final chapter exploring Satires 11 and 12 confirms that assessment. Translation of the Latin and explanation of references are included so that Classics students will find the book easier to use and it will also be accessible to scholars and students interested in satire outside of Classics departments.

This new volume in the Bloomsbury Ancient Comedy Companions series is perfect for students coming to one of Plautus' most whimsical, provocative, and influential plays for the first time, and a useful first point of reference for scholars less familiar with Roman comedy. Menaechmi is a tale of identical twin brothers who are separated as young children and reconnect as adults following a series of misadventures due to mistaken identity. A gluttonous parasite, manipulative courtesan, shrewish wife, crotchety father-in-law, bumbling cook, saucy handmaid, quack doctor, and band of thugs comprise the colourful cast of characters. Each encounter with a misidentified twin destabilizes the status quo and provides valuable insight into Roman domestic and social relationships. The book analyzes the power dynamics at play in the various relationships, especially between master and slave and husband and wife, in order to explore the meaning of freedom and the status of slaves and women in Roman culture and Roman comedy. These fundamental societal concerns gave Plautus' Menaechmi an enduring role in the classical tradition, which is also examined here, including notable adaptations by William Shakespeare, Jean Francois Regnard, Carlo Goldoni and Rodgers and Hart.

David Hadbawnik's astonishing modern translation of the Aeneid has been appearing in excerpts in a number of US publications, but this was the first time that the first half of the sequence hadbeen brought together. This handsome volume presents Hadbawnik's version of the first half of Virgil's great national epic of ancient Rome, with atmospheric illustrations from Carrie Kaser. This hardcover edition is released in 2021, shortly before publication of Volume 2, covering the remaining six books of the epic. These translations are not only full of light, but also speed ... Hadbawnik's Aeneid is not the creative destruction of erasure, but rather the well-crafted impoverishment of something potentially too rich to take in. -Joe Milutis, Jacket2 David Hadbawnik's free translation of the text steers away from the affectations of seamlessness that direct translations attempt, [and] instead shows the self-awareness of the translation as an effort at subsuming and translator's role as appropriator. Hadbawnik uses this awareness to work against a translation of replacement by exposing the tension between the language and the text. -Jonathan Lohr, Actuary Lit Juxtaposed with the gore and horror are Carrie Kaser's amazing illustrations, which evoke both the soft touch of watercolor and the grittiness of smudged charcoal. Deer and sheep graze. Swans, like the ones Venus describes "flock[ing] and sing[ing] in the sky," soar, and some "in a long line look down / at the others," echoing the image of the wandering men of Troy. -Lisa Ampleman, Diagram

The Zhou Changes, better known in the West as I Ching, is one of the masterpieces of world literature. This book, the climax of more than forty years of research in Chinese archaeology, explores the text's origins in the oracle-bone and milfoil divinations of Bronze Age China and how it transformed over the course of the Zhou dynasty into the first of the Chinese classics. The book provides an in-depth survey of the theory and practice of divination to demonstrate how the hexagram and line statements of the text were produced and how they were understood at the time.

This volume explores early modern recreations of myths from Ovid's immensely popular Metamorphoses, focusing on the creative ingenium of artists and writers and on the peculiarities of the various media that were applied. The contributors try to tease out what (pictorial) devices, perspectives, and interpretative markers were used that do not occur in the original text of the Metamorphoses, what aspects were brought to the fore or emphasized, and how these are to be explained. Expounding the whatabouts of these differences, the contributors discuss the underlying literary and artistic problems, challenges, principles and techniques, the requirements of the various literary and artistic media, and the role of the cultural, ideological, religious, and gendered contexts in which these recreations were produced. Contributors are: Noam Andrews, Claudia Cieri Via, Daniel Dornhofer, Leonie Drees-Drylie, Karl A.E. Enenkel, Daniel Fulco, Barbara Hryszko, Gerlinde Huber-Rebenich, Jan L. de Jong, Andrea Lozano-Vasquez, Sabine Lutkemeyer, Morgan J. Macey, Kerstin Maria Pahl, Susanne Scholz, Robert Seidel, and Patricia Zalamea.

From the Greeks to the Arabs and Beyond written by Hans Daiber, is a six volume collection of Daiber's scattered writings, journal articles, essays and encyclopaedia entries on Greek-Syriac-Arabic translations, Islamic theology and Sufism, the history of science, Islam in Europe, manuscripts and the history of oriental studies. It also includes reviews and obituaries. Vol. V and VI are catalogues of newly discovered Arabic manuscript originals and films/offprints from manuscripts related to the topics of the preceding volumes.

Greek and Roman stories of origin, or aetia, provide a fascinating window onto ancient conceptions of time. Aetia pervade ancient literature at all its stages, and connect the past with the present by telling us which aspects of the past survive "even now" or "ever since then". Yet, while the standard aetiological formulae remain surprisingly stable over time, the understanding of time that lies behind stories of origin undergoes profound changes. By studying a broad range of texts and by closely examining select stories of origin from archaic Greece, Hellenistic Greece, Augustan Rome, and early Christian literature, Time in Ancient Stories of Origin traces the changing forms of stories of origin and the underlying changing attitudes to time: to the interaction of the time of gods and men, to historical time, to change and continuity, as well as to a time beyond the present one. Walter provides a model of how to analyse the temporal construction of aetia, by combining close attention to detail with a view towards the larger temporal agenda of each work. In the process, new insights are provided both into some of the best-known aetiological works of antiquity (e.g. by Hesiod, Callimachus, Vergil, Ovid) and lesser-known works (e.g. Ephorus, Prudentius, Orosius). This volume shows that aetia do not merely convey factual information about the continuity of the past, but implicate the present in ever new complex messages about time.

In Reflecting Mirrors, East and West Enrico Boccaccini sheds new light on Mirrors for Princes, the pre-modern genre of advice literature for rulers. A popular genre in the societies that emerged from the Late Antique oecumene, Mirrors for Princes are considered here, for the first time, as a transcultural phenomenon that challenges the dichotomy of the Orient and the Occident. Traditionally, the historiographic tradition has viewed 'European' and 'Middle Eastern' Mirrors as distinct and incommensurable. Analyzing the contents and discourses in four Mirrors, ostensibly separated by space, time and language, Enrico Boccaccini convincingly draws out the surprising continuities between these texts, while also showing how they are embedded in their own historical, literary and political context.