An enchanting story that has inspired generations of writers, including Boccaccio, Shakespeare, Cervantes and Keats

Written towards the end of the second century AD, The Golden Ass tells the story of the many adventures of a young man whose fascination with witchcraft leads him to be transformed into a donkey. The bewitched Lucius passes from owner to owner - encountering a desperate gang of robbers and being forced to perform lewd 'human' tricks on stage - until the Goddess Isis finally breaks the spell and initiates Lucius into her cult. It has long been disputed whether...

In the two centuries covered by this volume, from about AD 250 to 450, the Roman Empire suffered a period of chaos followed by drastic administrative and military reorganization. Simultaneously Christianity emerged as a new religious force, to be first recognized by Constantine and then eventually to become the official religion of the Roman state. The old pagan culture continued to provide the basis for education and the staple literary diet of the leisured classes; but it now had perforce to coexist and indeed to compete with a new, specifically Christian-oriented literature. These and...

'Perfection is finality; finality is death'. The poets and prose writers of the first and early second centuries AD were not deterred by the towering stature of their Augustan predecessors from attempting new and often brilliant variations on the now traditional themes and genres. The so-called 'Silver' Age of Latin literature has tended to be characterized in terms of dismissive or question- begging stereotypes - 'decadent', 'rhetorical', 'baroque', 'mannerist' - as a substitute for close critical argument. From the sympathetic but searching appraisals in this volume the best writers of the...

The sixty years between 43 BC, when Cicero was assassinated, and AD 17, when Ovid died in exile and disgrace, saw an unexampled explosion of literary creativity in Rome. Fresh ground was broken in almost every existing genre, and a new kind of specifically Roman poetry, the personal love-elegy, was born, flourished, and succumbed to its own success. Latin literature now became, in the familiar modern sense of the word, classical: a balanced fusion of what was best and most stimulating in earlier Greek and Roman writing, charged with new and original life by the individual genius of, most...

This volume covers a relatively short span of time, rather less than the first three-quarters of the first century BC; but it was an age of profoundly important developments, with enduring consequences for the subsequent history of Latin literature. Original and innovative in widely differing ways as was the work of Lucretius, Sallust and Caesar in particular, the scene is dominated, historically, by two figures: Cicero and Catullus. Cicero was a politician and a man of affairs as well as a man of latters, whose vast literary output reflects a range of intellectual interests unparalleled...

In the third century BC Rome embarked on the expansion which was ultimately to leave her mistress of the Mediterranean world. As part of that expansion a national literature arose, springing from the union of native linguistic energy with Greek literary forms. Shortly after the middle of the century the first Latin play took the stage; by 100 BC most of the important genres invented by the Greeks - epic, tragedy, comedy, historiography, oratory - were solidly established in their adoptive Roman forms, and a new genre, satire, had been born. The chapters in this volume describe and analyse the...

This is the first self-contained edition of Books VI-VIII of the Odyssey--the account of Odysseus' time among the Phaeacians, and a popular introduction to Homer. While not neglecting matters of language and formulaic composition, the Commentary aims to provide guidance on questions of literary and narrative technique and poetic artistry. The Introduction deals with the problem of Homeric composition in general, and with the place of the Phaeacian books in the poem as a whole. There are also brief sections on Homeric meter and the text.

This is an edition with commentary of six poems by the Roman poet Ovid. These are the letters, as Ovid imagined them, exchanged between three famous pairs of lovers, Paris and Helen of Troy, Hero and Leander, and Acontius and Cydippe. Interest in Ovid has never been more lively than it is today, and this book will have much to offer students at all levels. This is the first commentary in any language since 1898 on these "double" letters. It complements Peter E. Knox's selection of the single epistles in the same series.