Landmarks in Classical Literature

The final volume in the Landmarks in Literature series introduces the work of the greatest writers of Classical Greece and Rome in translation. The book begins with prehistory and the age of the Homeric epics, The Illiad and The Odyssey; and looks at later lyric poets such as Sappho and Pindar. There follows the great age of classical Greece, of miraculous art and pristine democracy, with Sophocles and his fellow-dramatists, the historians Herodotus and Thucydides, and Plato's fascinating Socratic dialogues. After a brief consideration of the next, Hellenistic, period of Greek culture which included the work of the pastoral poet Theocritus, the book moves on to the golden age of Roman literature. Here are the poets and thinkers of late-Republican and early Imperial Rome, a turbulent period of war and grandeur, including Julius Caesar, soldier, historian, and dictator; Cicero, politician, lawyer and letter-writer; the poets Virgil (of The Aeneid), Horace, and Ovid; and Tacitus, the greatest Roman historian.