Homer's "Iliad" is often considered a poem of blunt truthfulness, his characters' motivation pleasingly simple. A closer look, however, reveals a complex interplay of characters who engage in an awful lot of lies. Beginning with Achilles, who hatches a secret plot to destroy his own people, Mark Buchan traces motifs of deception and betrayal throughout the poem. Homer's heroes offer bluster, their passion linked to and explained by their lack of authenticity. Buchan reads Homer's characters between the lies, showing how the plot is structured individual denial and what cannot be said.
Homer's "Iliad" is often considered a poem of blunt truthfulness, his characters' motivation pleasingly simple. A closer look, however, reveals a c...
Pat Getz-Gentle provides a clear and detailed survey of the Cycladic period, an early Bronze Age culture that thrived at the heart of the Aegean. In particular, she emphasises the steps leading to the iconic, reclining folded-arm figure that uniquely defines the Cycladic era. Getz-Gentle also focuses on the personal aesthetics of fifteen carvers, several of whom are identified and discussed in this volume. New to this paperback edition is an expanded bibliography as well an addendum that contains additional works Getz-Gentle has attributed to some of the fifteen Cycladic sculptors she...
Pat Getz-Gentle provides a clear and detailed survey of the Cycladic period, an early Bronze Age culture that thrived at the heart of the Aegean. In p...
Both passionate and artful, learned and bawdy, Catullus is one of the best-known and critically significant poets from classical antiquity. An intriguing aspect of his poetry that has been neglected by scholars is his interest in silence, from the pauses that shape everyday conversation to linguistic taboos and cultural suppressions and the absolute silence of death.
In Silence in Catullus, Benjamin Eldon Stevens offers fresh readings of this Roman poet's most important works, focusing on his purposeful evocations of silence. This deep and varied "poetics of silence" takes on...
Both passionate and artful, learned and bawdy, Catullus is one of the best-known and critically significant poets from classical antiquity. An intrigu...
This lively translation accurately captures the wit and uncensored bawdiness of the epigrams of Martial, who satirized Roman society, both high and low, in the first century CE. His pithy little poems amuse, but also offer vivid insight into the world of patrons and clients, doctors and lawyers, prostitutes, slaves, and social climbers in ancient Rome. The selections cover nearly a third of Martial's 1,500 or so epigrams, augmented by an introduction by historian Marc Kleijwegt and informative notes on literary allusion and wordplay by translator Susan McLean. Finalist, Literary...
This lively translation accurately captures the wit and uncensored bawdiness of the epigrams of Martial, who satirized Roman society, both high and lo...
Ovid's Art of Love (Ars Amatoria) and its sequel Remedies for Love (Remedia Amoris) are among the most notorious poems of the ancient world. In AD 8, the emperor Augustus exiled Ovid to the shores of the Black Sea for "a poem and a mistake." Whatever the mistake may have been, the poem was certainly the Ars Amatoria, which the emperor found a bit too immoral. In exile, Ovid composed Sad Things (Tristia), which included a defense of his life and work as brilliant and cheeky as his controversial love manuals. In a poem addressed to Augustus...
Ovid's Art of Love (Ars Amatoria) and its sequel Remedies for Love (Remedia Amoris) are among the most notorious poems of ...
Oedipus at Colonus is the third in Sophocles' trilogy of plays about the famous king of Thebes and his unhappy family. It dramatizes the mysterious death of Oedipus, by which he is transformed into an immortal hero protecting Athens. This was Sophocles' final play, written in his mid-eighties and produced posthumously. Translator David Mulroy's introduction and notes deepen the reader's understanding of Oedipus' character and the real political tumult that was shaking Athens at the time that Sophocles wrote the play. Oedipus at Colonus is at once a complex study of a tragic...
Oedipus at Colonus is the third in Sophocles' trilogy of plays about the famous king of Thebes and his unhappy family. It dramatizes the myster...
Latin plays were written for audiences whose gender perspectives and expectations were shaped by life in Rome, and the crowds watching the plays included both female citizens and female slaves. Relationships between men and women, ideas of masculinity and femininity, the stock characters of dowered wife and of prostitute-all of these are frequently staged in Roman tragedies and comedies. This is the first book to confront directly the role of women in Roman Republican plays of all genres, as well as to examine the role of gender in the influence of this tradition on later dramatists from...
Latin plays were written for audiences whose gender perspectives and expectations were shaped by life in Rome, and the crowds watching the plays inclu...
The elegists, ancient Rome's most introspective poets, filled their works with vivid, first-person accounts of dreams. Dream, Fantasy, and Visual Art in Roman Elegy examines these varied and visually striking textual dreamscapes, arguing that the poets exploited dynamics of visual representation to allow readers to share in the intensely personal experience of dreaming. By treating dreams as a mode for viewing, an analogy suggested by diverse ancient authors, Emma Scioli extracts new information from the poetry of Propertius, Tibullus, and Ovid about the Roman concept of "seeing"...
The elegists, ancient Rome's most introspective poets, filled their works with vivid, first-person accounts of dreams. Dream, Fantasy, and Visual A...
These three ancient tragedies--Trojan Women, Helen, and Hecuba--dramatize the tragic fates of women in the wake of war. Euripides (480-406 BC) innovatively brought to Greek tragedy the inner lives of his characters. In these plays he delivers powerful portrayals of the suffering of both Greek and Trojan women as they become pawns and prizes of warring men. Francis Blessington combines his work as a poet, translator, and teacher of literature and Greek with his theatrical experience to create fresh and faithful verse translations suitable for the stage, the classroom,...
These three ancient tragedies--Trojan Women, Helen, and Hecuba--dramatize the tragic fates of women in the wake of war. Euripides...
