"Phoenician Women," one of Euripides' later tragedies, is an intriguing play that arguably displays some of his finest dramatic technique. Rich in cast and varied in incident, it is an example of Euripides' experimentation with structure. It dramatises the most fertile mythical tradition of the city of Thebes and its doomed royal family, focusing in particular on the conflict between Eteocles and Polyneices as a result of their father Oedipus' curse, which eventually leads to mutual fratricide. The play was very popular throughout antiquity, and became part of the so-called "Byzantine...

These two books of the "Odyssey" provide an ideal introduction to the poem, illustrating Odysseus' cunning intelligence at its best as he gains acceptance in the court of the Phaeacians, and, above all, the subtly drawn character of Nausicaa. This edition replaces the much used one by G.M. Edwards (1914). It contains text (now unexpurgated) and vocabulary, expanded commentary and new introduction. It is geared very much to the needs of those coming to Homer for the first time with a grasp of the basics of classical Greek, and assumes no previous knowledge of Homeric forms or grammar; an...

Book I of the "Histories" provides a particularly good illustration of the discursiveness and diversity of Herodotus' materials and of the ingenuity with which he develops his narrative and welds it into an artistic whole. Here he deals first with the distant mythological and then in greater detail with more recent history of Greek relations with the Near East, in an attempt to explain the origin of the quarrels between east and west which formed the background to the Persian Wars. This edition contains an introduction, text and annotation on matters of language and content. There is also...