Colonel T.E. Lawrence was one of the most flamboyant figures of his era, known throughout the Western world as Lawrence of Arabia. Glory-seeking yet self-effacing, this soldier, archaeologist, spy, and scholar was a war hero whom Winston Churchill called "one of the greatest men of our time." Less well known were his abilities as historian and author, which won him the admiration of such writers as Ezra Pound, W.H. Auden, and Robert Graves.
While stationed on a desolate R.A.F. outpost on the fringes of the Karachi desert in India, Lawrence began his acclaimed translation of The Odyssey....

In this widely praised book, an eminent classicist examines Sophocles' Oedipus Tyrannus in the context of fifth-century B.C. Athens. In attempting to discover what the play meant to Sophocles' contemporaries--and in particular in disentangling Sophocles' ideas from Freud's psychoanalytical interpretations--Bernard Knox casts fresh light on its timeless and universal nature. For this edition, Knox has provided a new preface and a list of suggested readings.
"What a joy it is to welcome this book back in print. As perennial as Sophocles' great play itself, Knox's work has never gone...

"The literature of the classical world that has survived is a pitiful remnant of what once existed...". So begins Bernard Knox's preface to an anthology that introduces the modern reader to the enormous breadth and rich variety of that "pitiful remnant" - the foundation of Western literature and culture, the inspiration for writers from Dante to Shakespeare to T. S. Eliot. However much - or little - of it we may have read, classical literature has shaped our world and how we perceive it. Yet for most of us classical writing is little more than a narrow circle of legendary figures. The names...

Should the ancient Greeks "the oldest dead white European males" be kept alive in our collective memory? Why study them at all if, by passing their destructive ideas to the Romans and eventually to the rest of Europe, they may ultimately be responsible for much of what s wrong with American society? In this supremely lucid and elegant book (The New Yorker), Bernard Knox poses and answers such fundamental questions, helping us to remember the astonishing originality of the ancient Greeks and all that we have learned and continue to learn from them."

The first two chapters of this book isolate and describe the literary phenomenon of the Sophoclean tragic hero. In all but one of the extant Sophoclean dramas, a heroic figure who is compounded of the same literary elements faced a situation which is essentially the same. The demonstration of this recurrent pattern is made not through character-analysis, but through a close examination of the language employed by both the hero and those with whom he contends. The two chapters attempt to present what might, with a slight exaggeration, be called the "formula" of Sophoclean tragedy.

A great...

This volume ranges in time over a very long period and covers the Greeks' most original contributions to intellectual history. It begins and ends with philosophy, but it also includes major sections on historiography and oratory. Although each of these areas had functions which in the modern world would not be considered literary, the ancients made a less sharp distinction between intellectual and artistic production, and the authors included in this volume are some of Europe's most powerful stylists: Plato, Herodotus, Thucydides and Demosthenes.

The emphasis of this volume is on Greek literature produced in the period between the foundation of Alexandria late in the fourth century B.C. and the end of the 'high empire' in the third century A.D. Here we see a shift away from the city states of the Greek mainland to the new centres of culture and power, first Alexandria under the Ptolemies and then imperial Rome, Greek literature, being traditionally cosmopolitan, adapted to these changes with remarkable success, and through the efficiency of the Hellenistic educational system Greek literary culture became the essential mark of an...

Linked by the events of Bernard Knox's remarkable life, the twenty-five chapters of "Essays Ancient and Modern" cover subjects ranging from Hesiod, Homer, and Thucydides to Auden, Forster, and the Spanish Civil War. With a masterful eye for the telling detail, Knox continually reminds us that we share the present with antiquity's living past. A soldier in Italy finds a battered book in the rubble of a bombed-out firehouse-- and opens it to read Virgil's denunciation of war. An illiterate Greek bard composes a garbled Homeric song to celebrate the recent heroism of local partisans. A traveler...