`The language is refined, the smile not grave, My honest tongue recounts how men behave.' The Satyricon is the most celebrated work of fiction to have survived from the …
'The greatest historian that ever lived' Such was Macaulay's verdict on Thucydides (c. 460-400 BC) and his history of the Peloponnesian War, the momentous struggle between Athens …
The Gallic War, published on the eve of the civil war which led to the end of the Roman Republic, is an autobiographical account written by one of the most famous figures of …
The only work of its kind to survive from classical antiquity, the Library of Apollodorus is a unique guide to Greek mythology, from the origins of the universe to the Trojan War. …
`All over Italy men were conscripted, and weapons requisitioned; money was exacted from towns, and taken from shrines; and all the laws of god and man were overturned.' The …
Phaedra * Oedipus * Medea * Trojan Women * Hercules Furens * Thyestes Seneca's plays are the product of a sensational, frightening, and oppressive period of history. Tutor to the …
The Lives of the Caesars include the biographies of Julius Caesar and the eleven subsequent emperors: Augustus, Tiberius, Gaius Caligula, Claudius, Nero, Galba, Otho, Vitelius, …
Hesiod, who lived in Boetia in the late eighth century BC, is one of the oldest known, and possibly the oldest of Greek poets. His Theogony contains a systematic genealogy of the …
The first philosophers paved the way for the work of Plato and Aristotle - and hence for the whole of Western thought. Aristotle said that philosophy begins with wonder, and the …
'He was atrocious in his brutality, but his lechery was kept hidden... In the end, he erupted into an orgy of crime and ignominy alike' Such is Tacitus' obituary of Tiberius, and …
