"The Greek myths are the founding narratives of Western civilization: to understand them is to know the origins of philosophy, literature, art, science, law, and more. Indeed, as Luc Ferry shows in this masterful book, they remain a great store of wisdom, as relevant to our lives today as ever before. No mere legends or clichés ("Herculean task," "Pandora's box," "Achilles heel," etc.), these classic stories offer profound and manifold lessons, providing...

A beautiful gift edition of Thomas Bulfinch's classic retelling of famous myths and folk legends, with interpretive essays by Princeton classics professor Richard P. Martin.

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...

Odysseus--soldier, sailor, trickster, and everyman--is one of the most recognizable characters in world literature. His arduous, ten-year journey home after the Trojan War, the subject of Homer's Odyssey, is the most accessible tale to survive from ancient Greece, and its impact is still felt today across many different cultures. This lively free verse translation, from one of today's leading Homeric scholars, preserves the clarity and simplicity...

Of Euripides' roughly ninety-two plays, only seventeen tragedies survive. Both ridiculed and lauded during his life, Euripides now stands as one of the greatest innovators of Greek drama. Collected here are ten of Euripides' most important tragedies in prose translation by Edward P. Coleridge. In the first play in this collection, "The Alcestis", Euripides expands upon the myth of Princess Alcestis at the time of her death. "Medea", tells the horrific...

Arthurian legends have long been the source of countless popular tales. "Sir Gawain and the Green Knight" is one of the best known and most widely read. During King Arthur's New Year's celebration, a mysterious knight, with green clothes and horse, arrives with a challenge to the knights of the round table-any one of them may swing at the Green Knight with an axe if he too is willing to take a blow one year and one day after. Gawain, one of Arthur's...

'There's an infectious enthusiasm and self-deprecating authority to Fiennes's insights and he's a most agreeable companion.' Guardian on Footnotes The Greek myths have held a place in the popular imagination for centuries. Yet while the stories may not have changed, their original setting has. Fiennes travels to the sites of some of the most famous Greek myths, on the trail of hope, beauty and a new way of seeing what we have done to our world....

This edition includes a modern introduction and a list of suggested further reading. Plato's ambitious dialogue Timaeus and the unfinished Critias were meant to be part of a trilogy that would outline a proper and sufficiently detailed natural philosophy and cosmology. The Timaeus is Plato's spirited response to the cosmogony and physics of the "atheist" Atomist philosophers Leucippus and Democritus. The Critias presents what might be a famous Platonic...

The four tragedies collected in this volume all focus on a central character, once powerful, brought down by betrayal, jealousy, guilt and hatred. The first playwright to depict suffering without a reference to gods, Euripides (484 - 407 BC) made his characters speak in human terms and face the consequences of their actions.

Since the first edition of Approaches to Greek Myth was, published in 1990, interest in Greek mythology has surged. There was no simple agreement on the subject of "myth" in classical antiquity, and there remains none today. Is myth a narrative or a performance? Can myth be, separated from its context? What did myths mean to ancient Greeks and what do they mean today? Here, Lowell Edmunds brings together practitioners of eight of the most important...