Ingo Gildenhard: 9 books

Looting, despoiling temples, attempted rape and judicial murder: these are just some of the themes of this classic piece of writing by one of the world’s greatest orators. This particular passage is from the second book of Cicero’s Speeches against Verres, who was a former Roman magistrate on...

Love and tragedy dominate book four of Virgil’s most powerful work, building on the violent emotions invoked by the storms, battles, warring gods, and monster-plagued wanderings of the epic’s opening. Destined to be the founder of Roman culture, Aeneas, nudged by the gods, decides to leave his...

Cicero composed his incendiary Philippics only a few months after Rome was rocked by the brutal assassination of Julius Caesar. In the tumultuous aftermath of Caesar’s death, Cicero and Mark Antony found themselves on opposing sides of an increasingly bitter and dangerous battle for control. Philippic...

This extract from Ovid's 'Theban History' recounts the confrontation of Pentheus, king of Thebes, with his divine cousin, Bacchus, the god of wine. Notwithstanding the warnings of the seer Tiresias and the cautionary tale of a character Acoetes (perhaps Bacchus in disguise), who tells of how the god...

The emperor Nero is etched into the Western imagination as one of ancient Rome’s most infamous villains, and Tacitus’ Annals have played a central role in shaping the mainstream historiographical understanding of this flamboyant autocrat. This section of the text plunges us straight into the moral...

This part of Ovid's 'Theban History' recounts the confrontation of Pentheus, king of Thebes, with his divine cousin, Bacchus, the god of wine. Notwithstanding the warnings of the seer Tiresias and the cautionary tale of a character Acoetes (perhaps Bacchus in disguise), who tells of how the god once...

The Classical Tradition: Art, Literature, Thought presents an authoritative, coherent and wide-ranging guide to the afterlife of Greco-Roman antiquity in later Western cultures and a ground-breaking reinterpretation of large aspects of Western culture as a whole from a classical perspective. Features...

In republican times, one of Rome's deadliest enemies was King Mithridates of Pontus. In 66 BCE, after decades of inconclusive struggle, the tribune Manilius proposed a bill that would give supreme command in the war against Mithridates to Pompey the Great, who had just swept the Mediterranean clean...

This groundbreaking volume maps the shifting place and function of marvelous transformations from antiquity to the present day. Shape-shifting, taking animal bodies, miracles, transubstantiation, alchemy, and mutation recur and echo throughout ancient and modern writing and thinking and continue in...