Introducing the work of 20 of the ancient world's greatest authors, this work presents brief, readable essays, fully illustrated with quotations from modern (and some ancient) translations. The writers covered include Homer, Sappho, Herodotus, the Greek tragedians, the comic poets, sexy and subtle love poets such as Catullus, and vicious but witty satirists like Martial and Juvenal.

Peter Jones calls on the ancient Greeks and Romans to cast light on modern problems in this first collection of his columns, which have appeared for over ten years in the "Spectator" and the "Sunday Telegraph." Typical issues on which a light is thrown are women priests, growing old gracefully, how to end strikes, psychotherapy, finding a wife, going on holiday, succeeding in life, ending crime, the purpose of children, why bare feet are bad for sex, the sex-drive of the powerful, the use of alcohol, foretelling the future, and the power of the dead.

Acknowledging that Homer is a poet, not a staff instructor, Albracht works carefully through the Homeric text to produce a persuasive picture of the workings of battle in the "Iliad," in two parts: Part 1 the council of war, marshalling of the troops, the use of chariots, the advance into battle, the standing fight, the massed attack and defence, retreat, flight and pursuit; in Part 2 protection in the field, attack and defence of a fortified camp and the siege and defence of a fortified city. Throughout he offers the reader explanations of the details of the battle narrative.

Peter Jones provides a line-by-line commentary on Homer's Odyssey that explains the factual details, mythological allusions, and Homeric conventions that a student or general reader could not be expected to bring to an initial encounter with the Odyssey. It also illuminates epic style, Homer's methods of composition, the structure of work, and his characterization. The introduction describes the features of oral poetry and looks at the history of the text of the Odyssey.

The commentary based on Richard Lattimore's translation, since it is both widely read and...

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...