The writings of the Greeks and Romans form the bedrock of Western culture. Inventing the molds for histories, tragedies, and philosophies, while pioneering radical new forms of epic and poetry, the Greeks and Romans created the literary world we still inhabit today. Writing with verve and insight, distinguished classicist Richard Jenkyns explores a thousand years of classical civilization, carrying readers from the depths of the Greek dark ages through the glittering heights of Rome’s empire. Jenkyns begins with Homer and the birth of epic poetry before exploring the hypnotic poetry of Pindar, Sappho, and others from the Greek dark ages. Later, in Athens’s classical age, Jenkyns shows the radical nature of Sophocles’s choice to portray Ajax as a psychologically wounded warrior, how Aeschylus developed tragedy, and how Herodotus, in “inventing history,” brought to narrative an epic and tragic quality. We meet the strikingly modern figure of Virgil, struggling to mirror epic art in an age of empire, and experience the love poems of Catullus, who imbued verse with obsessive passion as never before. Even St. Paul and other early Christian writers are artfully grounded here in their classical literary context. A dynamic and comprehensive introduction to Greek and Roman literature, Jenkyns’s Classical Literature is essential reading for anyone seeking a deeper understanding of the classics—and the extraordinary origins of Western culture.

Classical Literature: An Introduction provides a series of essays on all the major authors of Greek and Latin literature, as well as on a number of writers less often read. An introductory chapter provides information on important general topics, such as poetic metres, patronage and symposia. The literature is put in historical context, and the material is organized chronologically, but also by genre or author, as appropriate; each section or chapter has suggestions for further reading. The book ranges from Homer to the writers of the later Roman Empire, and includes a glossary, a chronology of literary and political events, and useful maps showing the origins of ancient writers. The collection will be essential for students and others who want a structured and informative introduction to the literature of the classical world.

Traditional and still prevalent accounts of late antique literature draw a clear distinction between 'pagan' and 'Christian' forms of poetry: whereas Christian poetry is taken seriously in terms its contribution to culture and society at large, so-called pagan or secular poetry is largely ignored, as though it has no meaningful part to play within the late antique world. The Myth of Paganism sets out to deconstruct this view of two contrasting poetic traditions and proposes in its place a new integrated model for the understanding of late antique poetry. As the book argues, the poet of Christ and the poet of the Muses were drawn together into an active, often provocative, dialogue about the relationship between Christianity and the Classical tradition and, ultimately, about the meaning of late antiquity itself. An analysis of the poetry of Nonnus of Panopolis, author of both a 'pagan' epic about Dionysus and a Christian translation of St John's Gospel, helps to illustrate this complex dialectic between pagan and Christian voices.

An anthology of classical literature features more than three hundred pieces, representing the foundation of Western literature, as well as commentary that discusses the origins of Greek language, Homer, the fall of Rome, and more.

This volume ranges in time over a very long period and covers the Greeks' most original contributions to intellectual history. It begins and ends with philosophy, but it also includes major sections on historiography and oratory. Although each of these areas had functions which in the modern world would not be considered 'Literary', the ancients made a less sharp distinction between intellectual and artistic production, and the authors included in this volume are some of Europe's most powerful stylists: Plato, Herodotus, Thucydides and Demosthenes.

This accessible one-volume survey of the literature of Greece and Rome covers the period between Homer around 700 BC and Augustine around AD 410. Highlights what is important historically and of continuing interest and value in classical literature. An introduction by the editor presents essential information in a concise, accessible way. Each chapter focuses on a particular genre or area of literature. This structure allows readers to see continuities between different periods and to move easily between the Greek and Roman worlds. Includes extensive quotations in English. A timeline and an index of authors help to make the material as accessible as possible.