Offers profiles of ancient Greek writers, including Homer, Hesiod, Herodotus, Sophocles, Plato, Aristotle, and Plutarch, and traces the development of Greek literature.

The eminent classical scholar Jacqueline de Romilly offers a compelling reassessment of the intellectual and cultural achievement of the Sophists of classical Athens, who were among the most important and influential thinkers of the ancient world. She provides a vivid reconstruction of their original methods and bold doctrines, arguing that they have been widely misunderstood because of the lack of direct evidence, and she investigates the reasons for their success and for the subsequent reaction against them.

The publication of Jacqueline de Romilly's Histoire et raison chez Thucydide in 1956 virtually transformed scholarship on Thucydides. Rather than mining The Peloponnesian War to speculate on its layers of composition or second-guess its accuracy, it treated it as a work of art deserving rhetorical and aesthetic analysis. Ahead of its time in its sophisticated focus upon the verbal texture of narrative, it proved that a literary approach offered the most productive and nuanced way to study Thucydides. Still in print in the original French, the book has influenced numerous Classicists and historians, and is now available in English for the first time in a careful translation by Elizabeth Trapnell Rawlings. The Cornell edition includes an introduction by Hunter R. Rawlings III and Jeffrey Rusten tracing the context of this book's original publication and its continuing influence on the study of Thucydides. Romilly shows that Thucydides constructs his account of the Peloponnesian War as a profoundly intellectual experience for readers who want to discern the patterns underlying historical events. Employing a commanding logic that exercises total control over the data of history, Thucydides uses rigorous principles of selection, suggestive juxtapositions, and artfully opposed speeches to reveal systematic relationships between plans and outcomes, impose meaning on the smallest events, and insist on the constant battle between intellect and chance. Thucydides' mind found in unity and coherence its ideal of historical truth.

This biography of Alcibiades, the charismatic Athenian statesman and general (c. 450–404 BC) who achieved both renown and infamy during the Peloponnesian War, is both an extraordinary adventure story and a cautionary tale that reveals the dangers that political opportunism and demagoguery pose to democracy. As Jacqueline de Romilly brilliantly documents, Alcibiades's life is one of wanderings and vicissitudes, promises and disappointments, brilliant successes and ruinous defeats. Born into a wealthy and powerful family in Athens, Alcibiades was a student of Socrates and disciple of Pericles, and he seemed destined to dominate the political life of his city—and his tumultuous age. Romilly shows, however, that he was too ambitious. Haunted by financial and sexual intrigues and political plots, Alcibiades was exiled from Athens, sentenced to death, recalled to his homeland, only to be exiled again. He defected from Athens to Sparta and from Sparta to Persia and then from Persia back to Athens, buffeted by scandal after scandal, most of them of his own making. A gifted demagogue and, according to his contemporaries, more handsome than the hero Achilles, Alcibiades is also a strikingly modern figure, whose seductive celebrity and dangerous ambition anticipated current crises of leadership.

The publication of Jacqueline de Romilly's Histoire et raison chez Thucydide in 1956 virtually transformed scholarship on Thucydides. Rather than mining The Peloponnesian War to speculate on its layers of composition or second-guess its accuracy, it treated it as a work of art deserving rhetorical and aesthetic analysis. Ahead of its time in its sophisticated focus upon the verbal texture of narrative, it proved that a literary approach offered the most productive and nuanced way to study Thucydides. Still in print in the original French, the book has influenced numerous Classicists and historians, and is now available in English for the first time in a careful translation by Elizabeth Trapnell Rawlings. The Cornell edition includes an introduction by Hunter R. Rawlings III and Jeffrey Rusten tracing the context of this book's original publication and its continuing influence on the study of Thucydides.

Romilly shows that Thucydides constructs his account of the Peloponnesian War as a profoundly intellectual experience for readers who want to discern the patterns underlying historical events. Employing a commanding logic that exercises total control over the data of history, Thucydides uses rigorous principles of selection, suggestive juxtapositions, and artfully opposed speeches to reveal systematic relationships between plans and outcomes, impose meaning on the smallest events, and insist on the constant battle between intellect and chance. Thucydides' mind found in unity and coherence its ideal of historical truth.

Les Grecs, toujours si jaloux de leur independance, ont toujours ete fiers de proclamer leur obeissance aux lois. De fait, ils ne cherchaient pas a definir leurs droits et leurs libertes par rapport a la cite dont ils faisaient partie et a laquelle ils s'identifiaient: ils demandaient seulement que cette cite elle-meme fut regie par une regle a elle et non point par un homme. La loi etait ainsi le support et le garant de toute leur vie politique. (...)Mais cette loi, dont ils etaient si fiers, n'assumait ce role a leurs yeux que parce qu'elle etait leur oeuvre et tirait son pouvoir d'un consentement initial. Autrement dit, elle n'avait point de garant dont elle put se reclamer: la loi grecque n'etait pas, comme la loi juive par exemple, une loi revelee. Elle etait nee des conventions humaines et des coutumes. (...) Cette double circonstance devait susciter autour de la loi des reflexions des debats, des attaques et des justifications: ainsi s'explique pour une bonne part, le nombre et l'importance des textes grecs relatifs a la loi. En outre, la reflexion fut stimulee par le fait qu'a Athenes, au Y" siecle, avec l'epanouissement de la pensee critique et l'influence des sophistes, toutes les valeurs et toutes les notions furent analysees, definies, contestees, dans un elan intellectuel sans pareil. (...) L'idee de loi ne fait pas exception et la crise qu'elle connut aida tres largement a en preciser les contours.Cette crise, qui est capitale pour l'histoire de la cite grecque comme pour celle des doctrines politiques en general, constitue le sujet du present ouvrage. ].d.R.

Les auteurs tragiques, en s'interrogeant sur le sens des malheurs qu'ils evoquent, sont appeles a exprimer toute une reflexion sur le temps. Chez les trois grands tragiques grecs, on voit cette vision evoluer, en partie sous l'influence de l'experience politique qu'ils vivent. Ce qui etait pensee theologique chez Eschyle devient, chez Sophocle, meditation sur les grandes alternances du devenir et aboutit, chez Euripide, a l'etude psychologique des emotions qui le scandent. En suivant les affirmations generales, frequentes chez ces auteurs, mais aussi les details du style ou de la composition, on peut esperer arriver a une meilleure comprehension des oeuvres, tout en degageant, a travers ces tentatives, certains points de depart d'une reflexion moderne sur le temps.