"The first female translator of the epic into English in over sixty years, Stephanie McCarter addresses accuracy in translation and its representation of women, gendered dynamics of power, and sexual violence in Ovid's classic. Ovid's Metamorphoses is an epic poem, but one that upturns almost every convention. There is no main hero, no central conflict, and no sustained objective. What it is about (power, defiance, art, love, abuse, grief, rape, war,...

Plato's brilliant dialogues, written in the fourth century B.C., rank among Western civilization's most important philosophical works. Presented as a series of probing conversations between Socrates and his students and fellow citizens, they form a magnificent dialectical quest that examines enduring political, ethical, metaphysical, and epistemological issues. Here, in one inexpensive edition, are six of Plato's remarkable and revelatory dialogues,...

"Martha C. Nussbaum, Recipient of the 2012 Prince of Asturias Award for Social Sciences" Martha C. Nussbaum is the Ernst Freund Distinguished Service Professor of Law and Ethics at the Law School and in the Philosophy Department at the University of Chicago. She is the author of many books, including Not for Profit: Why Democracy Needs the Humanities (Princeton). The Epicureans, Skeptics, and Stoics practiced philosophy not as a detached intellectual...

James M. May is professor of classics, the Kenneth O. Bjork Distinguished Professor, and former provost and dean at St. Olaf College. An award-winning teacher, he is a widely recognized expert on Cicero and classical rhetoric and has written and edited many books on these topics. He lives in Northfield, Minnesota. Timeless techniques of effective public speaking from ancient Rome's greatest orator All of us are faced countless times with the challenge...

In his clear preface, Gilbert Murray says with truth that The Trojan Women, valued by the usage of the stage, is not a perfect play. It is only the crying of one of the great wrongs of the world wrought into music. Yet it is one of the greater dramas of the elder world. In one situation, with little movement, with few figures, it flashes out a great dramatic lesson, the infinite pathos of a successful wrong. It has in it the very soul of the tragic....

One of the lesser known plays of the Greek tragedian Sophocles, "Electra" tells the tale of a young daughter's revenge for her father's death. Electra is one of the daughters of "Agamemnon," the leader of the Greeks during the Trojan War. He was killed by his wife's lover, and Electra wishes to avenge Agamemnon with the help of her twin brother Orestes. When she receives word that he is dead, Electra laments and fears she will not be able to avenge...

Roman poet, satirist and dramatist Horace was born in southern Italy in 65 BC. Uncommonly for one born to poor parents, Horace studied literature and philosophy in Athens until he became a staff officer in Brutus' army, where he served as a military tribune until the army was defeated in 42 BC. He soon returned to Rome, purchased the post of scribe, and it was here that he began writing verse and struck up a friendship with the poet Virgil. Horace...

Along with Sophocles and Euripides, Aristophanes is considered one of the three great Greek playwrights. Only eleven of his nearly forty plays survive in their entirety to this day. Of his extant works Aristophanes's "Lysistrata" is considered one of his finest and one of the truly great comedies from classical antiquity. Central to the work is the vow by the women of Greece to withhold sex from their husbands until they end the brutal war between...

This edition includes a modern introduction and a list of suggested further reading. While in prison awaiting a brutal execution, Boethius produced arguably the most famous work of early medieval philosophy and literature, the celebrated Consolation of Philosophy. In alternating sections of prose and poetry, Boethius describes the circumstances of his rapid fall from the upper echelons of society and power. In a conversation with lady Philosophy,...

Aeschylus was the first of the three ancient Greek tragedians whose plays can still be read or performed, the others being Sophocles and Euripides. He is often described as the father of tragedy: our knowledge of the genre begins with his work and our understanding of earlier tragedies is largely based on inferences from his surviving plays. Only seven of his estimated seventy to ninety plays have survived into modern times. Fragments of some other...