Launching a much-needed new series discussing each comedy that survives from the ancient world, this volume is a vital companion to Terence's earliest comedy, Andria, highlighting its context, themes, staging and legacy. Ideal for students it assumes no knowledge of Latin, but is helpful also for scholars wanting a quick introduction. This will be the first port of call for anyone studying or researching the play. Though Andria launched Terence's career as a dramatist at Rome, it has attracted comparatively little attention from modern critics. It is nevertheless a play of great interest, not least for the sensitivity with which it portrays family relationships and for its influence on later dramatists. It also presents students of Roman comedy with all the features that came to characterize Terence's particular version of traditional comedy, and it raises all the interpretive questions that have dogged the study of Terence for generations. This volume will use a close reading of the play to explore the central issues in understanding Terence's style of play-making and its legacy.

In this new volume, Jan Haywood and Naoise Mac Sweeney investigate the position of Homer's Iliad within the wider Trojan War tradition through a series of detailed case studies. From ancient Mesopotamia to twenty-first century America, these examples are drawn from a range of historical and cultural contexts; and from Athenian pot paintings to twelfth-century German scholarship, they engage with a range of different media and genres. Inspired by the dialogues inherent in the process of reception, the book adopts a dialogic structure. In each chapter, paired essays by Haywood and Mac Sweeney offer contrasting authorial voices addressing a single theme, thereby drawing out connections and dissonances between a diverse suite of classical and post-classical Iliadic receptions. The resulting book offers new insights, both into individual instances of Iliadic reception in particular historical contexts, but also into the workings of a complex story tradition. The centrality of the Iliad within the wider Trojan War tradition is shown to be a function of conscious engagement not only with Iliadic content, but also with Iliadic status and the iconic idea of the Homeric.

This study examines how Tacitus' representation of speech determines the roles of speakers within the political sphere, and explores the possibility of politically effective speech in the principate. It argues against the traditional scholarly view that Tacitus refuses to offer a positive view of senatorial power in the principate: while senators did experience limitations and changes to what they could achieve in public life, they could aim to create a dimension of political power and efficacy through speeches intended to create and sustain relations which would in turn determine the roles played by both senators or an emperor. Ellen O'Gorman traces Tacitus' own charting of these modes of speech, from flattery and aggression to advice, praise, and censure, and explores how different modes of speech in his histories should be evaluated: not according to how they conform to pre-existing political stances, but as they engender different political worlds in the present and future. The volume goes beyond literary analysis of the texts to create a new framework for studying this essential period in ancient Roman history, much in the same way that Tacitus himself recasts the political authority and presence of senatorial speakers as narrative and historical analysis.

Lysias was the leading Athenian speech-writer of his generation (403-380 BC), whose speeches form a leading source for all aspects of the history of Athenian society during this period. The current volume focuses on speeches that are important particularly as political texts, during an unusually eventful post-imperial period which saw Athens coming to terms with the aftermath of its eventual defeat in the Peloponnesian War (431-404) plus two traumatic if temporary oligarchic coups (the Four Hundred in 411, and especially the Thirty in 404/3). The speeches are widely read today, not least because of their simplicity of linguistic style. This simplicity is often deceptive, however, and one of the aims of this commentary is to help the reader assess the rhetorical strategies of each of the speeches and the often highly tendentious manipulation of argument. This volume includes the text of speeches 12 to 16 (reproduced from Christopher Carey's 2007 Oxford Classical Texts edition, including the apparatus criticus), with a new facing English translation. Each speech receives an extensive introduction, covering general questions of interpretation and broad issues of rhetorical strategy, while in the lemmatic section of the commentary individual phrases are examined in detail, providing a close reading of the Greek text. To maximize accessibility, the Greek lemmata are accompanied by translations, and individual Greek terms are mostly transliterated. This is a continuation of the projected multi-volume commentary on the speeches and fragments begun with the publication of speeches 1 to 11 in 2007, which will be the first full commentary on Lysias in modern times.

The definitive global anthology of writings about dragons, from Ancient Egypt to the modern day Since the earliest moments of human history, dragons have occupied a place in our imaginations. Bringer of night in Ancient Egypt; mortal enemy of the elephant in South Asia; slain by a god in Sanskrit hymn. In the Book of Revelation, there is the Leviathan; in Loch Ness, a monster. Their crushing coils and their treasure hoards are found throughout literature and language: in the Old English of Beowulf, in the Elvish of Tolkien, in the far-flung travels of Marco Polo. The Penguin Book of Dragons is the definitive collection of all this and more: two thousand years of legend and lore about the menace and majesty of dragons.

This is the first volume dedicated to Plautus' perennially popular comedy Casina that analyses the play for a student audience and assumes no knowledge of Latin. It launches a much-needed new series of books, each discussing a comedy that survives from the ancient world. Four chapters highlight the play's historical context, themes, performance and reception, including its reflection of recent societal trends in marriage and property ownership by women after the Punic Wars, and its complex dynamics on stage. It is ideal for students, but helpful also for scholars wanting a brief introduction to the play. Casina pits a husband (Lysidamus) and wife (Cleostrata) against each other in a struggle for control of a 16-year-old slave named Casina. Cleostrata cleverly plots to frustrate the efforts of her lascivious elderly husband, staging a cross-dressing 'marriage' that culminates in his complete humiliation. The play provides rich insights into relationships within the Roman family. This volume analyses how Casina addresses such issues as women's status and property rights, the distribution of power within a Roman household, and sexual violence, all within a compellingly meta-comic framework from which Cleostrata emerges as a surprising comic hero. It also examines the play's enduring popularity and relevance.