Twelve Voices from Greece and Rome is a book for all readers who want to know more about the literature that underpins Western civilization. Chistopher Pelling and Maria Wyke provide a vibrant and distinctive introduction to twelve of the greatest authors from ancient Greece and Rome, writers whose voices still resonate strongly across the centuries: Homer, Sappho, Herodotus, Euripides, Thucydides, Plato, Caesar, Cicero, Virgil, Horace, Juvenal and Tacitus. To what vital ideas do ...

Plutarch: Alexander is the essential companion to Plutarch's Caesar, the life paired with Alexander in Plutarch's Parallel Lives. This new English version of Alexander is followed by an Afterword about Plutarch’s Parallel Lives by the translator, Christopher Pelling, Emeritus Regius Professor of Greek at Oxford University.Plutarch composed his Lives in parallel pairs, and one choice must have seemed obvious: Alexander the Great and Julius Caesar, two domi...

Plutarch: Caesar is the essential companion to Plutarch's Alexander, the life paired with Caesar in Plutarch's Parallel Lives. This new English version of Caesar is followed by an Afterword about Plutarch’s Parallel Lives by the translator, Christopher Pelling, Emeritus Regius Professor of Greek at Oxford University.Plutarch composed his Lives in parallel pairs, and one choice must have seemed obvious: Alexander the Great and Julius Caesar, two dominating...

This study of the ancient historian's work is "excellent . . . [A] rigorous and engaging introduction not only to Herodotus, but to many other Greek authors" ( Times Literary Supplement).In the fifth century BCE, Herodotus wrote the first known Western history to build on the tradition of Homeric storytelling, basing his text on empirical observations and arranging them systematically. Herodotus and the Question Why offers a comprehensive examinati...

Rediscovering E. R. Dodds offers the first comprehensive assessment of a remarkable classical scholar, who was also a poet with extensive links to twentieth-century English and Irish literary culture, the friend of Auden and MacNeice. Dodds was born in Northern Ireland, but made his name as Regius Professor of Greek at Oxford from 1936 to 1960, succeeding Gilbert Murray. Before this he taught at Reading and Birmingham, was active in the Association of University Teachers, or AUT (...

Our knowledge of Greek history rests largely on literary texts - not merely historians (especially Herodotus, Thucylides and Xenephon), but also tragedies, comedies, speeches, biographies and philosophical works. These texts are themselves among the most skilled and highly wrought productions of a brilliant rhetorical culture. How is the historian to use them? This book addresses this problem by taking a series of extended test-cases, and discussing how we should and should not try to expl...

Book VI of the Histories is one of Herodotus' most varied books, beginning with the final collapse of the Ionian Revolt and moving on to the Athenian triumph at Marathon (490 BC); it also includes fascinating material on Sparta, full of court intrigue and culminating in Kleomenes' grisly death, and there is comedy too, with Alkmeon's cramming clothes, boots, and even cheeks with gold dust, then Hippokleides 'dancing away his marriage'. In Herodotus' time, Marathon was already reaching almo...

Maps dominate the modern sense of place and geography. Yet, so far as we can tell, maps were rare in the Greco-Roman world and, when mentioned in sources, are mistrusted and criticized. Today, technological advances have brought to the fore an entirely new set of methods for representing and interacting with space. In contrast to traditional 'topographic' perspectives, the territorial extent of economic and political realms is increasingly conceived though a 'topological' lens, in which th...

This is a collection of studies on ancient (especially Latin) poetry and historiography, concentrating especially on the impact of rhetoric on both genres, and on the importance of considering the literature to illuminate the historical Roman context and the historical context to illuminate the literature. It takes the form of a tribute to Tony Woodman, Gildersleeve Professor of Classics at the University of Virginia, for whom twenty-one scholars have contributed essays reflecting the inte...

Bringing together nine biographies from Plutarch's Parallel Lives series, this edition examines the lives of major figures in Roman history, from Lucullus (118-57 BC), an aristocratic politician and conqueror of Eastern kingdoms, to Otho (32-69 AD), a reckless young noble who consorted with the tyrannical, debauched emperor Nero before briefly becoming a dignified and gracious emperor himself.Ian Scott-Kilvert's and Christopher Pelling's translations are accompanied by a n...

The biographies collected in this volume bring together Plutarch's Lives of those great men who established the city of Rome and consolidated its supremacy, and his Comparisons with their notable Greek counterparts. Here he pairs Romulus, mythical founder of Rome, with Theseus, who brought Athens to power, and compares the admirable Numa and Lycurgus for bringing order to their communities, while Titus Flamininus and Philopoemen are portrayed as champions of freedom. As well as pr...

Plutarch's parallel biographies of the great men in Greek and Roman history are cornerstones of European literature, drawn on by writers and statesmen since the Renaissance, most notably by Shakespeare. This selection provides intimate glimpses into the lives of these men, depicting, as he put it, 'those actions which illuminate the workings of the soul'. We learn why the mild Artaxerxes forced the killer of his usurping brother to undergo the horrific 'death of two boats'; why the noble D...