The Tale of Princess Fatima - the only Arabic epic named for a woman - recounts the thrilling adventures of a legendary warrior known throughout the Middle East. After being abandoned at birth, Princess Fatima, otherwise known as Dhat al-Himma, must rely on strength and cunning to take her to the head of a powerful army. Bitter tribal warfare, stealthy ambushes and globetrotting pursuits will eventually lead Fatima back to face her father, and to confront another fierce warrior woman in a mighty showdown . . . Published in English for the first time, The Tale of Princess Fatima wonderfully recreates medieval Arabia and introduces a formidable new feminist icon.

Animal Fables of the Courtly Mediterranean is a treasure trove of stories and lessons on how to conduct oneself and succeed in life, sometimes through cleverness rather than virtue. They feature human and many animal protagonists, including the two jackals Stephanites and Ichnelates, after whom the book is named, as well as several lion kings. At the heart of this work are tales from the Sanskrit Panchatantra and Mahabharata, to which more were added, both in the original Middle Persian collection and its eighth-century Arabic translation, the widely known Kalila wa-Dimna. In the eleventh century, readers in Constantinople were introduced to these stories through an abbreviated Greek version, translated by Symeon Seth from the Arabic. The new Byzantine Greek text and English translation presented here is a more complete version, originating in twelfth-century Sicily and connected with Admiral Eugenius of Palermo. It contains unique prefaces and reinstates the prologues and stories omitted by Seth.

Eutocius of Ascalon (4th cent. AD) accompanied his edition of the first four books of Apollonius of Perga's Konika with a commentary. His work is relevant to the history of conic sections and important for the textual transmission of Apollonius. This new critical edition contains the first translation into a modern language and complements the Graeco-Arabic edition of the first four books of the Konika (SGA 1-2).

The third book of Lucretius' great poem on the workings of the universe is devoted entirely to expounding the implications of Epicurus' dictum that death does not matter, 'is nothing to us'. The soul is not immortal: it no more exists after the dissolution of the body than it had done before its birth. Only if this fact is accepted can men rid themselves of irrational fears and achieve the state of ataraxia, freedom from mental disturbance, on which the Epicurean definition of pleasure was based. To present this case Lucretius deploys the full range of poetic and rhetorical registers, soberly prohibitive, artfully decorative or passionately emotive as best suits his argument, reinforcing it with vivid and compelling imagery. This new edition has been completely revised, with a considerably enlarged Commentary and a new supplementary introduction taking account of the great amount of new scholarship of the last forty years.

Sing of rage, Goddess, that bane of Akhilleus, Peleus' son, which caused untold pain for Akhaians, sent down throngs of powerful spirits to Aides, war-chiefs rendered the prize of dogs and everysort of bird.

Edward McCrorie's new translation of Homer's classic epic of the Trojan War captures the falling rhythms of a doomed Troy. McCrorie presents the sundry epithets and resonant symbols of Homer's verse style and remains as close to the Greek's meaning as research allows.

The work is an epic with a flexible contemporary feel to it, capturing the wide-ranging tempos of the original. It underscores the honor of soldiers and dwells upon the machinations of "Moira," each man's and woman's portion in life.

Noted Homeric scholar Erwin Cook contributes a substantial introduction and extensive notes written to guide both students and general readers through relevant elements of ancient Greek history and culture. This version of the " Iliad" is ideal for readings and performances.

Nemesianus s didactic poem about hunting, written in 283-84 AD, is based in its structure and conception on Vergil s Georgics, the classical model for the genre. In its presentation of hunting as a leisure sport, the Cynegetica provides an un-heroic counterpoint to earlier hunting poems. This new critical edition includes extensive and detailed philological commentary. It also considers broader questions, such as the relationship to cynegetic literature, genre-related elements, and the author s self-perception."

'Gripping ... A remarkable achievement' TLS On his deathbed in 19 BCE, Vergil asked that his epic, the Aeneid, be burned. If his wishes had been obeyed, western literature - maybe even western civilization - might have taken a different course. The Aeneid has remained a foundational text since the rise of universities, and has been invoked at key points of human history - whether by Saint Augustine to illustrate the fallen nature of the soul, by settlers to justify manifest destiny in North America, or by Mussolini in support of his Fascist regime. In this fresh and fast-paced translation of the Aeneid, Shadi Bartsch brings the poem to the modern reader. Along with the translation, her introduction will guide the reader to a deeper understanding of the epic's enduring influence.

How is the history of antiquity told, and what is the role of narrativity in transforming the image of antiquity? This volume addresses the highly charged intersection between experience, narrative, and history that may be apprehended when we consider the great diversity of narrative practices in literature, the visual arts, and historiography. Individual chapters explore transformations in the imagery, content, stories, and narrative modes of antiquity as they were appropriated in medieval and early modern chronicles, images, and epics.

This collection of essays analyzes the construction of the fall of Rome from a range of perspectives native to different disciplines. Subjects addressed include comparable discourses dating from the earlier history of Rome, the perception of this historical moment by writers living at the time it occurred, and its reception in Byzantium and Western Europe during the Middle Ages."

Cicero saw publication as a means of perpetuating a distinctive image of himself as statesman and orator. He memorialized his spiritual and oratorical self by means of a very solid body of texts. Educationalists and schoolteachers in antiquity relied on Cicero's oratory to supervise the growth of the young into intellectual maturity. By reconstructing the main phases of textual transmission, from the first authorial dissemination of the speeches to the medieval manuscripts, and by re-examining the abundant evidence on Ciceronian scholarship from the first to the sixth century CE, Cicero and Roman Education traces the history of the exegetical tradition on Cicero's oratory and re-assesses the 'didactic' function of the speeches, whose preservation was largely determined by pedagogical factors.

Pliny the Younger's nine-book Epistles is a masterpiece of Roman prose. Often mined as a historical and pedagogical sourcebook, this collection of 'private' letters is now finding recognition as a rich and rewarding work in its own right. The second book is a typically varied yet taut suite of miniatures, including among its twenty letters the trial of Marius Priscus and Pliny's famous portrait of his Laurentine villa. This edition, the first to address a complete book of Epistles in over a century, presents a Latin text together with an introduction and commentary intended for students, teachers and scholars. With clear linguistic explanations and full literary analysis, it invites readers to a fresh appreciation of Pliny's lettered art.

Maxim Gorky was dubbed the father of socialist realism in the Soviet period, but he had forged his career as an internationally known novelist and dramatist some three or more decades earlier. Posing questions that Soviet critics found difficult to confront, the author examines the effects of exile and religion on the content and form of the plays as well as the role played by women, and the personal and political implications of motherhood. All sixteen of Gorky's published plays are covered, and the book explores whether this body of work has themes and styles to unify it. While conflict is central to the core political themes and also infiltrates many aspects of the dramatic style (cartoonish and grotesque), other less expected themes and styles emerge. Viewing the post-revolutionary plays as a development of earlier work leads to a question rarely posed: are the plays written by Gorky in the process of defining the new Party-inspired socialist realism in fact less about socialist realist issues of conformity, and more about Gorky's own painful life experience? And what is equally under the microscope is a search for the monumental style frequently associated with socialist realist theatre: the proposed origins of the spatial grandeur in Gorky's plays come as a surprise.

Lusitanian playwrights who wrote comedias during and after the Dual Monarchy (1580-1640), when the Portuguese and Spanish thrones were united under Habsburg rule, continue to be largely unexplored. This edition highlights the contributions of one of this group's most successful and celebrated members, Jacinto Cordeiro. It describes the sparse critical attention that Cordeiro has received as well as his life, literary career, and historical context. Most importantly, it provides a modern critical edition of Cordeiro's most enduring play, El juramento ante Dios, y lealtad contra el amor, based on a collation of the twenty-one extant witnesses that comprise its textual tradition. Additionally, it includes an in-depth account of the transmission of the play with a stemma that documents the genealogical relationships between extant versions. It also provides an analysis of how Juramento may have been performed for seventeenth-century theatergoers, based on stage directions and performance cues written into the dialogue. In short, this edition introduces modern readers to both Jacinto Cordeiro, a bilingual author who successfully competed in a second language with the giants of Spain's Golden Age, and El juramento ante Dios, a play whose popularity lasted two centuries.

Studies in the Age of Chaucer is the annual yearbook of the New Chaucer Society, publishing articles on the writing of Chaucer and his contemporaries, their antecedents and successors, and their intellectual and social contexts. More generally, articles explore the culture and writing of later medieval Britain (1200-1500). Each SAC volume also includes an annotated bibliography and reviews of Chaucer-related publications.

This collection of papers contains some 60 articles selected from the works of the philologist Ernst Vogt. They dealwith a variety of very different aspects of the study of ancient languages, for example the history of literary forms and genres, Greek literature of the Hellenistic and Roman imperial periods, the history of transmission and reception, or the history of classical philology. All of the texts have been checked and additions or amendments made.

Ammianus is regarded as the greatest historian of late antiquity. Yet his geographic and ethnographic digressions were long underestimated as examples offeigned eruditionand as undue interruptions to the historical narrative. The author of this volume believes that the key to understanding Ammianus s work as a whole lies in his teaching of classical rhetoric, his metaphoric reading of landscapes, and the creation of spaces for memory and counterworlds to the Imperium Romanum. In this way, historical understanding and digressions concerning geographic knowledge must be viewed as interdependent features of the text. The author thus casts a new light on Ammianus s literary achievements."

This collection of essays is a seminal contribution to the establishment of translation theory within the field of Russian literature and culture. It brings together the work of established academics and younger scholars from the United Kingdom, Russia, the United States, Sweden and France in an area of academic study that has been largely neglected in the Anglophone world. The essays in the volume are linked by the conviction that the introduction of any new text into a host culture should always be considered in conjunction with adjustments to prevailing conventions within that culture. The case studies in the collection, which cover literary translation in Russia from the eighteenth century to the twentieth century, demonstrate how Russian culture has interpreted and accommodated translated texts, and how translators and publishers have used translation as a means of responding to the literary, social and political conditions of their times. In integrating research in the area of translated works more closely into the study of Russian literature and culture generally, this publication represents an important development in current research.

As a speechwriter, orator, and politician, Demosthenes captured, embodied, and shaped his time. He was a key player in Athens in the twilight of the city's independence, and is today a primary source for its history and society during that period. The Oxford Handbook of Demosthenes sets out to explore the many facets of his life, work, and time, giving particular weight to elucidating the settings and contexts of his activities, as well as some of the key themes dealt with in his speeches, and thereby illustrating the interplay and mutual influence between his rhetoric and the environment from which it emerged. The volume's thirty-five chapters are authored by experts in the field and offer both comprehensive coverage and an up-to-date reference point for the issues and problems encountered when approaching the speeches in particular: they not only showcase how Demosthenes' rhetoric was profoundly influenced by Athenian reality, but also explore its reception from Demosthenes' own day right up until the present and how his presentation of his world has subsequently shaped our view of it. The wide range of expertise and the different scholarly traditions represented are a vivid demonstration of the richness and diversity of current Demosthenic studies and the contribution the volume makes to enriching our knowledge of the life and work of one of the most prominent figures of ancient Greece will be of significance to a wide readership interested in Athenian history, society, rhetoric, politics, and law.