Greek Roman category: 1023 books

A rollicking attack on war-makers, the farmer-hero makes his famous trip to heaven on a dung beetle to discuss the issues with Zeus.

Aristophanes' "Esslesiazusae", written in the early 4th Century BC, marks a crossroads in his career. Post-dating the Peloponnesian War, it reflects a late change in his writing and a much changed society. This edition includes the complete text.

THE KNIGHTS, dating to about 424 BC, is the fourth play written by Aristophanes.  A masterful Old Comedy satire, the play examines the social and political life of classical Athens during the Peloponnesian War (431-404 BC). Aristophanes (c.446 BC - c.386 BC) was a comic playwright of...

Lysistrata is a comedy by Aristophanes. Originally performed in classical Athens in 411 BC, it is a comic account of one woman's extraordinary mission to end the Peloponnesian War. Lysistrata persuades the women of Greece to withhold sexual privileges from their...

Aristophanes' great anti-war drama glorifies the power of fertility in the face of destruction. Mr. Rudall's new translation recaptures the splendid variety of diction in Aristophanes, so that instead of a heavily poetic presentation the play becomes highly theatrical.

"It is difficult to compare the Aristophanic Comedy to any one form of modern literature, dramatic or other. It perhaps most resembles what we now call burlesque; but it had also very much in it of broad farce and comic opera, and something also (in the hits at the fashions and follies of the...

THE ECCLESIAZUSAE (translated variously as 'women in power' or 'women in council'), group of Athenian women led by Praxagora sneak into the Athenian assembly disguised as men and vote the women of the Republic into power.  In this hilarious farce, the women enforce an odd brand of equality through...

Includes the plays Don Carlos and Mary Stuart Major historical upheavals of the Sixteenth Century illuminate Schiller's increasingly troubled reaction to the present in these two plays. The huge epic Don Carlos (1787), a 'play expressing a view of life', marries the ideological battle between...

Includes the plays Joan of Arc and William Tell Two plays about historical characters whose fame has also raised them to the level of myth. In Joan of Arc (1801), Schiller allows his heroine a more glorious death than her historical execution at the stake, and imbues her with more passion,...

No other poem in all the literature of the world excels or equals the Odyssey in variety of interest.  Its hero is the type of the gallant adventurer, and his journeyings take him into the Fairylands that delight children of a larger growth.  Odysseus was the King of Ithaca, and Ithaca was a tiny...

Euripides' Andromache, a new verse translation by Bruce Van Deventer. After Troy fell to the Greeks, Andromache, the wife of the slain Trojan king Hector, was taken as prize and given to Achilles' son Neoptolemus, as his concubine. He treated her kindly, and in the fullness of time she bore him a son....

This spellbinding, groundbreaking translation reenergizes Aeschylus’ enduring saga of split loyalties, bloody sacrifice, and the efforts to bring peace after generations of strife. The most renowned of Aeschylus’ tragedies and one of the foundational texts of Western literature, the Oresteia...

The formidable talents of Anthony Hecht, one of the most gifted of contemporary American poets, and Helen Bacon, a classical scholar, are here brought to bear on this vibrant translation of Aeschylus much underrated tragedy The Seven Against Thebes. The third and only remaining play in a trilogy dealing...

A giant of eighteenth century literature, William Congreve was an English playwright and poet of the Restoration period. His poetry demonstrates a learned understanding of the classics, raw satirical power and an ironic scrutiny of the affectations of his age. Congreve’s famous plays are celebrated...