In Vox Latina and Vox Graeca Professor Allen was concerned primarily with the pronunciation of the individual vowels and consonants of classical Latin and Greek. In this major work he analyses in depth and in detail all the prosodic features of these languages: length of vowels and quantity of syllables, accent, pitch, stress and 'rhythm', with special attention to their manifestations in verse. The description and explanation of such features raise theoretical problems of very general importance and Professor Allen devotes the first part of the book to the establishment of the phonetic principles required as a frame of reference for the specific discussions of Latin and Greek. Parallels are cited from a number of other languages, including English. This is a book of permanent importance for students of classical languages and literatures and also for metricians, phoneticians and general linguists.

This is a reissue in paperback of the second edition of Professor Allen's highly successful book on the pronunciation of Latin in Rome in the Golden Age. In the second edition the text of the first edition is reprinted virtually unchanged but is followed by a section of supplementary notes that deal with subsequent developments in the subject. The author also added an appendix on the names of the letters of the Latin alphabet and a select bibliography.

This edition of Professor Allen's highly successful book is on the pronunciation of Attic Greek in classical times. In this third edition, Allen has revised the section on stress in classical Greek, the chapter on quantity has been recast, and the author has added an appendix on the names and letters of the Greek alphabet, to provide a parallel and historical background to the similar appendix in the second edition of his Vox Latina. The total amount of revision since the first edition has made it necessary to reset the whole book, so in addition to the new material, the supplementary notes of the second edition are now incorporated into the main text making this book much more convenient to use.