The Heroides, a collection of elegiac poems written as letters, fused Ovid's interests in erotics and myth into a new and unique genre, in which experiments with epistolary form and the psychology of first-person narrative would go on to have a profound influence on European literature. This two-volume edition of 1898 remains an essential resource for the poems; but it has long been difficult to obtain. It contains what is still the only detailed commentary in English on the whole collection, as well as extensive discussion of the text and its transmission. It also offers the full text of the...

This edition was designed by R.C. Jebb - one of the greatest classical scholars Britain has ever produced - as a companion to his two-volume monograph Attic Orators from Antiphon to Isaeus (1876). The selection was meticulously made to illustrate the 'successive steps in the process by which a language of most elastic resource was gradually adapted to a certain set of purposes'. The authors represented, with their varied styles, serve to bridge the gap that lies between the prose of Gorgias and Thucydides and that of Demosthenes. At the same time the passages are specifically selected for...

Justus Lipsius' De Constantia (1584) is one of the most important and interesting of sixteenth century Humanist texts. A dialogue in two books, conceived as a philosophical consolation for those suffering through contemporary religious wars, De Constantia proved immensely popular in its day and formed the inspiration for what has become known as 'Neo-stoicism'. This movement advocated the revival of Stoic ethics in a form that would be palatable to a Christian audience. In De Constantia Lipsius deploys Stoic arguments concerning appropriate attitudes towards emotions and external events. He...

John Conington's three-volume edition of The Works of Virgil, begun in 1852, has long been unavailable except in rare second-hand sets. The whole work is now being reissued in six affordable paperbacks, with new introductions setting the commentary in its context. Well into the twentieth century Conington's Virgil remained the sine qua non for school and undergraduate students and their teachers; Conington's commentary is remarkably close and uncompromising in its engagement with the detail of Virgil's Latin, as well as its literary sensitivity; it still has much to offer the modern reader....