The Aeneid for Boys and Girls relates the compelling tale of Aeneas, the legendary ancestor of Romulus. Aeneas escaped from the burning city of Troy and wandered the Mediterranean for years before settling in Italy. Patterned after the Iliad and the Odyssey, the Aeneid was originally composed as an epic poem by Virgil to glorify the imperial city of Rome.

The Iliad is typically described as one of the greatest war stories of all time. Set during the Trojan War, this timeless story vividly conveys the horror and heroism of men and gods wrestling with towering emotions and battling amid devastation and destruction. Homer's tale is a compassionate view of human life lived under the shadow of suffering and death in the face of an often uncaring divinity. To call it a war story does not begin to describe the emotional sweep of its action and characters in the 10th and final year of the Greek siege of Troy.

The Odyssey centers on the Greek hero Odysseus and his long journey home after the fall of Troy. It takes Odysseus ten years to reach Ithaca after the ten-year Trojan War. Odysseus survives storm and shipwreck, the cave of the Cyclops and the isle of Circe, the lure of the Sirens' song and a trip to the Underworld, only to find his most difficult challenge at home, where treacherous suitors seek to steal his kingdom and his loyal wife, Penelope. The Odyssey is Homers' sequel to the Iliad.

Marcus Tullius Cicero (106-43 B.C.) was one of the most famous Romans in his day, and posterity has been even kinder to him. Cicero was a legend in his own time for his oratory abilities, which he used to persuade fellow Senators and denounce enemies like Catiline and Mark Antony, but he was also one of Rome's most prodigious writers and political philosophers. Alongside Pericles, Cicero was one of antiquity's greatest politicians, and he has remained one of the most influential statesmen in history, relied upon by the Romans of his day, political philosophers like John Locke, Enlightenment...

Alfred Church's Early Britain is a concise but comprehensive book that examines the history of Britain spanning from prehistoric times until the decisive events of the 11th century and the Norman Invasion. It is a must-read for anyone interested in the history of Western Civilization.

Alfred Church's book Carthage, or the Empire of Africa is a comprehensive look at the Carthaginian Empire, tracing its origins and rise across the Mediterranean to the decisive Punic Wars against Rome, a series of three conflicts that made legends out of Hannibal and Scipio Africanus while ultimately determining the fate of several empires.

"A disaster followed, whether accidental or treacherously contrived by the emperor, is uncertain, as authors have given both accounts, worse, however, and more dreadful than any which have ever happened to this city by the violence of fire. It had its beginning in that part of the circus which adjoins the Palatine and Caelian hills, where, amid the shops containing inflammable wares, the conflagration both broke out and instantly became so fierce and so rapid from the wind that it seized in its grasp the entire length of the circus." Among all the natural disasters that struck Rome, one of...

This book does not claim to be a life of Cicero or a history of the last days of the Roman Republic. Still less does it pretend to come into comparison with such a work as Bekker's Gallus, in which on a slender thread of narrative is hung a vast amount of facts relating to the social life of the Romans. I have tried to group round the central figure of Cicero various sketches of men and manners, and so to give my readers some idea of what life actually was in Rome, and the provinces of Rome, during the first six decades--to speak roughly--of the first century B.C.