A Lincoln book that says something new is a rarity. Conversations with Lincoln is just such a book. In it Charles M. Segal has collected and presented more than one hundred interviews with Lincoln as President-elect and President. As a revelation of the intimate, human side of Abraham Lincoln, it will be a source of endless fascination to every reader interested in the Civil War era. This is a wide-ranging and engaging volume. The conversations collected here (between 1860 and 1865) range from brief remarks to extended discussions. Mr. Segal introduces each interview and the personalities involved. The collection is arranged chronologically, giving a rich picture of the Lincoln presidency. Charles M. Segal was born in Montreal, attended college there, and served in the Royal Canadian Air Force. He holds degrees from Skidmore College and Union College. After World War II, he became a reporter and a foreign correspondent for a number of papers in Canada and the United States. After settling in the U.S., he began his serious study of Lincoln and the Civil War. David Donald is Charles Warren Professor of American History Emeritus at Harvard University

A Lincoln book that says something new is a rarity. "Conversations with Lincoln" is just such a book. In it Charles M. Segal has collected and presented more than one hundred interviews with Lincoln as President-elect and President. As a revelation of the intimate, human side of Abraham Lincoln, it will be a source of endless fascination to every reader interested in the Civil War era. This is a wide-ranging and engaging volume. The conversations collected here (between 1860 and 1865) range from brief remarks to extended discussions. Mr. Segal introduces each interview and the personalities involved. The collection is arranged chronologically, giving a rich picture of the Lincoln presidency. Charles M. Segal was born in Montreal, attended college there, and served in the Royal Canadian Air Force. He holds degrees from Skidmore College and Union College. After World War II, he became a reporter and a foreign correspondent for a number of papers in Canada and the United States. After settling in the U.S., he began his serious study of Lincoln and the Civil War. David Donald is Charles Warren Professor of American History Emeritus at Harvard University

This close reading of Seneca's most influential tragedy explores the question of how poetic language produces the impression of an individual self, a full personality with a conscious and unconscious emotional life. Originally published in 1986. The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.

Combining historical and philological method with contemporary literary analysis, this study of Pindar's longest and most elaborate victory ode, the Fourth Pythian, traces the underlying mythical patterns, implicit poetics, and processes of mythopoesis that animate his poetry Originally published in 1986. The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.

Combining historical and philological method with contemporary literary analysis, this study of Pindar's longest and most elaborate victory ode, the Fourth Pythian, traces the underlying mythical patterns, implicit poetics, and processes of mythopoesis that animate his poetry

Originally published in 1986.

The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These paperback editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.

Collected in this volume are fifteen essays, previously published in a wide variety of journals, on the pastoral poetry of Theocritus and Virgil.

Originally published in 1981.

The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These paperback editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.

Euripides' Bakkhai is the staple of the canon of Greek tragedy and is required or strongly recommended reading for most undergraduate Classics majors. It also surfaces quite often in non-classics courses focusing on tragedy because its structure and thematics offer exemplary models of the classic tragic elements. The plot of Bakkhai centers around the actions of Pentheus, King of Thebes, who refused to recognise the god Dionysus or permit Thebans to worship him. In revenge, Dionysus drove Pentheus mad, made him cross-dress as a maenad, sent him to worship the god he had spurned, and made his mother, Agave, mistake him for a wild beast and rip him to shreds. Gibbons, a prize-winning poet, and Segal, a renowned classicist, are both leaders in their professions and are well-suited to take on this central text of Greek tragedy. This edition includes an introduction, a new translation, notes on the text, and a glossary.

Oedipus, the former ruler of Thebes, has died. Now, when his young daughter Antigone defies her uncle, Kreon, the new ruler, because he has prohibited the burial of her dead brother, she and he enact a primal conflict between young and old, woman and man, individual and ruler, family and state, courageous and self-sacrificing reverence for the gods of the earth and perhaps self-serving allegiance to the gods of the sky.
Echoing through western culture for more than two millennia, Sophocles' Antigone has been a touchstone of thinking about human conflict and human tragedy, the role of the divine in human life, and the degree to which men and women are the creators of their own destiny. This exciting translation of the play is extremely faithful to the Greek, eminently playable, and poetically powerful.
For readers, actors, students, teachers, and theatrical directors, this affordable paperback edition of one of the greatest plays in the history of the western world provides the best combination of contemporary, powerful language, along with superb background and notes on meaning, interpretation, and ancient beliefs, attitudes, and contexts.
"Sophocles' text is inexhaustibly actual. It is also, at many points, challenging and remote from us. The Gibbons-Segal translation, with its rich annotations, conveys both the difficulties and the formidable immediacy. The choral odes, so vital to Sophocles' purpose, have never been rendered with finer energy and insight. Across more than two thousand years, a great dark music sounds for us."
--George Steiner, Churchill College, Cambridge
"Produces a language that is easy to read and easy to speak.... Enthusiastically recommended."--Library Journal Starred Review]

This close reading of Seneca's most influential tragedy explores the question of how poetic language produces the impression of an individual self, a full personality with a conscious and unconscious emotional life. Originally published in 1986. The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.

Collected in this volume are fifteen essays, previously published in a wide variety of journals, on the pastoral poetry of Theocritus and Virgil. Originally published in 1981. The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.

In his play "Bacchae," Euripides chooses as his central figure the god who crosses the boundaries among god, man, and beast, between reality and imagination, and between art and madness. In so doing, he explores what in tragedy is able to reach beyond the social, ritual, and historical context from which tragedy itself rises. Charles Segal's reading of Euripides' "Bacchae" builds gradually from concrete details of cult, setting, and imagery to the work's implications for the nature of myth, language, and theater. This volume presents the argument that the Dionysiac poetics of the play characterize a world view and an art form that can admit logical contradictions and hold them in suspension.

In a fresh interpretation of Lucretius's On the Nature of Things, Charles Segal reveals this great poetical account of Epicurean philosophy as an important and profound document for the history of Western attitudes toward death. He shows that this poem, aimed at promoting spiritual tranquillity, confronts two anxieties about death not addressed in Epicurus's abstract treatment--the fear of the process of dying and the fear of nothingness. Lucretius, Segal argues, deals more specifically with the body in dying because he draws on the Roman concern with corporeality as well as on the rich traditions of epic and tragic poetry on mortality. Segal explains how Lucretius's sensitivity to the vulnerability of the body's boundaries connects the deaths of individuals with the deaths of worlds, thereby placing human death into the poem's larger context of creative and destructive energies in the universe. The controversial ending of the poem, which describes the plague at Athens, is thus the natural culmination of a theme developed over the course of the work. Originally published in 1990. The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.

In a fresh interpretation of Lucretius's "On the Nature of Things," Charles Segal reveals this great poetical account of Epicurean philosophy as an important and profound document for the history of Western attitudes toward death. He shows that this poem, aimed at promoting spiritual tranquillity, confronts two anxieties about death not addressed in Epicurus's abstract treatment--the fear of the process of dying and the fear of nothingness. Lucretius, Segal argues, deals more specifically with the body in dying because he draws on the Roman concern with corporeality as well as on the rich traditions of epic and tragic poetry on mortality.

Segal explains how Lucretius's sensitivity to the vulnerability of the body's boundaries connects the deaths of individuals with the deaths of worlds, thereby placing human death into the poem's larger context of creative and destructive energies in the universe. The controversial ending of the poem, which describes the plague at Athens, is thus the natural culmination of a theme developed over the course of the work.

Originally published in 1990.

The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These paperback editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.

One of the special charms of the Odyssey, according to Charles Segal, is the way it transports readers to fascinating places. Yet despite the appeal of its narrative, the Odyssey is fully understood only when its style, design, and mythical patterns are taken into account as well. Bringing a new richness to interpretation of this epic, Segal looks closely at key forms of social and personal organization which Odysseus encounters in his voyages. Segal also considers such topics as the relationship between bard and audience, the implications of the Odyssey's self-consciousness about its own poetics, and Homer's treatment of the nature of poetry.

Drawing on comprehensive analyses of all of Sophocles' plays, Charles Segal examines Sophocles both as a great dramatic poet and as a serious thinker. He shows how Sophoclean tragedy reflects the human condition in its constant and tragic struggle for order and civilized life against the ever-present threat of savagery and chaotic violence. For this edition Segal also provides a new preface discussing recent developments in the study of Sophocles.

"A very important book about Sophocles, one which uses new techniques of analysis. Everyone, including Sophoclean experts, can learn a very great deal from it". -- Bernard M. W. Knox, Professor Emeritus of Classics and Director Emeritus of the for Hellenic Studies at Harvard University

This generous selection of published essays by the distinguished classicist Charles Segal represents over twenty years of critical inquiry into the questions of what Greek tragedy is and what it means for modern-day readers. Taken together, the essays reflect profound changes in the study of Greek tragedy in the United States during this period-in particular, the increasing emphasis on myth, psychoanalytic interpretation, structuralism, and semiotics.

In this landmark collection of essays, renowned classicist Charles Segal offers detailed analyses of major texts from archaic and early classical Greek poetry; in particular, works of Alcman, Mimnermus, Sappho, Pindar, Bacchylides, and Corinna. Segal provides close readings of the texts, and then studies the literary form and language of early Greek lyric, the poets' conception of their aims and their art, the use of mythical paradigms, and the relation of the poems to their social context. A recurrent theme is the recognition of the fragility and brevity of mortal happiness and the consciousness of how the immortality conferred by poetry resists the ever-threatening presence of death and oblivion, fixing in permanent form the passing moments of joy and beauty. This is an essential book for students and scholars of ancient Greek poetry.

Much has been written about the heroic figures of Sophocles' powerful dramas. Now Charles Segal focuses our attention not on individual heroes and heroines, but on the world that inspired and motivated their actions--a universe of family, city, nature, and the supernatural. He shows how these ancient masterpieces offer insight into the abiding question of tragedy: how one can make sense of a world that involves so much apparently meaningless violence and suffering. In a series of engagingly written interconnected essays, Segal studies five of Sophocles' seven extant plays: Ajax, Oedipus Tyrannus, Philoctetes, Antigone, and the often neglected Trachinian Women. He examines the language and structure of the plays from several interpretive perspectives, drawing both on traditional philological analysis and on current literary and cultural theory. He pays particular attention to the mythic and ritual backgrounds of the plays, noting Sophocles' reinterpretation of the ancient myths. His delineation of the heroes and their tragedies encompasses their relations with city and family, conflicts between men and women, defiance of social institutions, and the interaction of society, nature, and the gods. Segal's analysis sheds new light on Sophocles' plays--among the most widely read works of classical literature--and on their implications for Greek views on the gods, moral life, and sexuality.