The Acts of the Apostles is one of the very few surviving ancient texts to give us a picture of the world from the point of view of those outside the elite of the dominant culture. It offers a valuable perspective on the way the Roman Empire worked, and on the civic life in the eastern provinces, which cannot be matched from any other source. Acts is also our only source for the beginning of the process by which Christianity was transformed from a Jewish sect into a new religion, with a well-established structure, its own sacred literature and a distinctive form of religious cult....

Propertius' celebration of his love for Cynthia broke new ground in Latin poetry: sensuous, passionate, witty, yet complex and allusive. The appeal of his 'Monobiblos' (Book I) is direct and immediate but his profound grasp of the violent and contradictory emotions of the relationship pushed his language into new areas and new forms. So he is a difficult and important poet, with the kind of difficulty that appeals to modern readers. This edition is designed to serve two different kinds of readers. For those who are not Latin specialists there is an elegant but literal translation alongside...

Homer's mighty epic, the Iliad, is the first work of western literature
and one of the defining masterpieces of our culture. The purpose of
this new line-by-line commentary is to help as wide an audience as
possible to understand and appreciate the poem through the best of
recent scholarship on the man and his work.

Peter Jones has
selected three of the most widely used translations on which to base
his commentary, those of E.V. Rieu (revised and updated by Peter
Jones), Martin Hammond, and Richmond Lattimore.
There is a useful
introduction to the whole...