Classical Languages

Aeschylus (ca. 525–456 BCE), the dramatist who made Athenian tragedy one of the world’s great art forms, witnessed the establishment of democracy at Athens and fought against the Persians at Marathon. He won the tragic prize at the City Dionysia thirteen times between ca. 499 and 458, and in his later years was probably victorious almost every time he put on a production, though Sophocles beat him at least once. Of his total of about eighty plays, seven survive complete. The third volume of this edition collects all the major fragments of lost Aeschylean plays. ~Publisher
Learn more about Greek theater and Aeschylus.

In History of Animals Aristotle analyzes "differences"--in parts, activities, modes of life, and character--across the animal kingdom, in preparation for establishing their causes, which are the concern of his other zoological works. Over 500 species of animals are considered: shellfish, insects, birds, fish, reptiles, amphibians, and mammals--including human beings. ~Publisher
Learn more about Aristotle and Greek philosophy.

Aristotle, great Greek philosopher, researcher, reasoner, and writer, born at Stagirus in 384 BCE, was the son of Nicomachus, a physician, and Phaestis. He studied under Plato at Athens and taught there (367–347); subsequently he spent three years at the court of a former pupil, Hermeias, in Asia Minor and at this time married Pythias, one of Hermeias’s relations. After some time at Mitylene, in 343–2 he was appointed by King Philip of Macedon to be tutor of his teen-aged son Alexander. After Philip’s death in 336, Aristotle became head of his own school (of ’Peripatetics’), the Lyceum at Athens. Because of anti-Macedonian feeling there after Alexander’s death in 323, he withdrew to Chalcis in Euboea, where he died in 322.
Nearly all the works Aristotle prepared for publication are lost; the priceless ones extant are lecture-materials, notes, and memoranda (some are spurious). ~Publisher
Learn more about Greek Philosophy and Aristotle.

Nearly all the works Aristotle prepared for publication are lost; the priceless ones extant are lecture-materials, notes, and memoranda (some are spurious). They can be categorized as follows: I Practical: Nicomachean Ethics; Great Ethics (Magna Moralia); Eudemian Ethics; Politics; Economics (on the good of the family); On Virtues and Vices. II Logical: Categories; Analytics (Prior and Posterior); Interpretation; Refutations used by Sophists; Topica. III Physical: Twenty-six works (some suspect) including astronomy, generation and destruction, the senses, memory, sleep, dreams, life, facts about animals, etc. IV Metaphysics: on being as being. V Art: Rhetoric and Poetics. VI Other works including the Constitution of Athens; more works also of doubtful authorship. VII Fragments of various works such as dialogues on philosophy and literature; and of treatises on rhetoric, politics and metaphysics. ~Publisher.
Learn more about Greek Philosophy and Aristotle.

8/2013

7/2013

Hippocrates, said to have been born in Cos in or before 460 BCE, learned medicine and philosophy; travelled widely as a medical doctor and teacher; was consulted by King Perdiccas of Macedon and Artaxerxes of Persia; and died perhaps at Larissa. Apparently he rejected superstition in favor of inductive reasoning and the study of real medicine as subject to natural laws, in general and in individual people as patients for treatment by medicines and surgery. Of the roughly 70 works in the 'Hippocratic Collection' many are not by Hippocrates; even the famous oath may not be his. But he was undeniably the 'Father of Medicine'. ~Publisher.
Read what the Roman physician Galen had to say about Hippocrates. You may also consult the modern essay on Hippocrates by Ann Ellis Hanson of the Univ. of Michigan. Also learn more about Hippocrates in the newly acquired Encyclopedia of Ancient Natural Scientists, in the library's reference collection (Ref. Q 124.95 .E53 2008).

The works attributed to Homer include the two oldest and greatest European epic poems, the Odyssey and Iliad. These texts have long stood in the Loeb Classical Library with a faithful and literate prose translation by A. T. Murray. George Dimock now brings the Loeb’s Odyssey up to date, with a rendering that retains Murray’s admirable style but is worded for today’s readers. The two-volume edition includes a new introduction, notes, and index. ~Publisher.
Try reading an interactive edition of Homer's Odyssey, with grammatical and bibliographical annotations.
*

Ovid (Publius Ovidius Naso, 43 BCE–17 CE), born at Sulmo, studied rhetoric and law at Rome. Later he did considerable public service there, and otherwise devoted himself to poetry and to society. Famous at first, he offended the emperor Augustus by his Ars Amatoria, and was banished because of this work and some other reason unknown to us, and dwelt in the cold and primitive town of Tomis on the Black Sea. He continued writing poetry, a kindly man, leading a temperate life. He died in exile. ~Publisher.
Read more about Ovid from the Perseus Project website.

Like Simonides and Bacchylides, Pindar wrote elaborate odes in honor of prize-winning athletes for public performance by singers, dancers, and musicians. His forty-five victory odes celebrate triumphs in athletic contests at the four great Panhellenic festivals: the Olympic, Pythian (at Delphi), Nemean, and Isthmian games. In these complex poems, Pindar commemorates the achievement of athletes and powerful rulers against the backdrop of divine favor, human failure, heroic legend, and the moral ideals of aristocratic Greek society. Readers have long savored them for their rich poetic language and imagery, moral maxims, and vivid portrayals of sacred myths.
Read more about Pindar from the Harper's Dictionary of Classical Literature & Antiquities.
*

Plato, the great philosopher of Athens, was born in 427 BCE. In early manhood an admirer of Socrates, he later founded the famous school of philosophy in the grove Academus. Much else recorded of his life is uncertain; that he left Athens for a time after Socrates’ execution is probable; that later he went to Cyrene, Egypt, and Sicily is possible; that he was wealthy is likely; that he was critical of ’advanced’ democracy is obvious. He lived to be 80 years old. Linguistic tests including those of computer science still try to establish the order of his extant philosophical dialogues, written in splendid prose and revealing Socrates’ mind fused with Plato’s thought. ~Publisher.
Read more about Plato in the online journal, Plato.
*

The great masterpiece in ten books, The Republic, concerns righteousness (and involves education, equality of the sexes, the structure of society, and abolition of slavery). ~Publisher
Read more about Plato and his philosophy in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy online.

Plotinus (204/5-270 CE) was the first and greatest of Neoplatonic philosophers. His writings were edited by his disciple Porphyry, who published them many years after his master’s death in six sets of nine treatises each (the Enneads).
Read more about the philosophy of Plotinus at The Radical Academy website.

Procopius, born at Caesarea in Palestine late in the 5th century, became a lawyer. In 527 CE he was made legal adviser and secretary of Belisarius, commander against the Persians, and went with Belisarius again in 533 against the Vandals and in 535 against the Ostrogoths. Sometime after 540 he returned to Constantinople. He may have been that Procopius who was prefect of Constantinople in 562, but the date of his death (after 558) is unknown.

Procopius’s History of the Wars in 8 books recounts the Persian Wars of emperors Justinus and Justinian down to 550 (2 books); the Vandalic War and after-events in Africa 532–546 (2 books); the Gothic War against the Ostrogoths in Sicily and Italy 536–552 (3 books); and a sketch of events to 554 (1 book). The whole consists largely of military history, with much information about peoples and places as well, and about special events. He was a diligent, careful, judicious narrator of facts and developments and shows good powers of description. He is just to the empire’s enemies and boldly criticises emperor Justinian. Other works by Procopius are the Anecdota or Secret History—vehement attacks on Justinian, Theodora, and others; and The Buildings of Justinian (down to 558 CE) including roads and bridges as well as churches, forts, hospitals, and so on in various parts of the empire. ~Publisher.
Read about Procopius and an edition of his Secret History edited by Richard Atwater (author of the children's book Mr. Popper's Penguins) from the Isidore-of-Seville Classical Library.

Tacitus (Cornelius), famous Roman historian, was born in 55, 56 or 57 CE and lived to about 120. He became an orator, married in 77 a daughter of Julius Agricola before Agricola went to Britain, was quaestor in 81 or 82, a senator under the Flavian emperors, and a praetor in 88. After four years’ absence he experienced the terrors of Emperor Domitian’s last years and turned to historical writing. He was a consul in 97. Close friend of the younger Pliny, with him he successfully prosecuted Marius Priscus.

Tacitus is renowned for his development of a pregnant concise style, character study, and psychological analysis, and for the often terrible story which he brilliantly tells. As a historian of the early Roman empire he is paramount. ~Publisher
Listen to BBC host Melvin Bragg's 45-minute radio show on "Tacitus and the Decadence of Rome," aired originally in 2008. His guests are Catherine Edwards, Ellen O'Gorman, and Maria Wyke.
*

Electronic Book.
Herodotus, the worldwide ethnographer and historian of the Persian Wars, provides a striking demonstration of how the account of past events of national history and the description of foreign peoples participate in the rhetoric of shaping attitudes about the present. This book studies the narrative of the Histories in order to uncover the political message communicated to a Greek audience of the fifth century B.C.

Thucydides of Athens, one of the greatest of historians, was born about 471 BCE. He saw the rise of Athens to greatness under the inspired leadership of Pericles. In 430, the second year of the Peloponnesian War, he caught and survived the horrible plague which he described so graphically. Later, as general in 423 he failed to save Amphipolis from the enemy and was disgraced. He tells about this, not in volumes of self-justification, but in one sentence of his history of the war—that it befell him to be an exile for twenty years. He then lived probably on his property in Thrace, but was able to observe both sides in certain campaigns of the war, and returned to Athens after her defeat in 404. ~Publisher.
Ready what Sir Richard Claverhouse Jebb & John Malcolm Mitchell have to say about Thucydides in the highly regarded eleventh edition of the Encyclopedia Britannica (1911). Claverhouse is described as "acknowledged to be one of the most brilliant classical scholars of his time." Mitchell, somewhat less remarkable, is mentioned in the Britannica as a "sometimes scholar of Queen's College, Oxford."
*

Virgil (Publius Vergilius Maro) was born in 70 BCE near Mantua and was educated at Cremona, Milan and Rome. Slow in speech, shy in manner, thoughtful in mind, weak in health, he went back north for a quiet life. Influenced by the group of poets there, he may have written some of the doubtful poems included in our Virgilian manuscripts. All his undoubted extant work is written in his perfect hexameters. Earliest comes the collection of ten pleasingly artificial bucolic poems, the Eclogues, which imitated freely Theocritus’s idylls. They deal with pastoral life and love. Before 29 BCE came one of the best of all didactic works, the four books of Georgics on tillage, trees, cattle, and bees. Virgil’s remaining years were spent in composing his great, not wholly finished, epic the Aeneid, on the traditional theme of Rome’s origins through Aeneas of Troy. Inspired by the Emperor Augustus’s rule, the poem is Homeric in metre and method but influenced also by later Greek and Roman literature, philosophy, and learning, and deeply Roman in spirit. Virgil died in 19 BCE at Brundisium on his way home from Greece, where he had intended to round off the Aeneid. He had left in Rome a request that all its twelve books should be destroyed if he were to die then, but they were published by the executors of his will. ~Publisher
The Virgil Project presents the text of the Aeneid, including grammar and syntax assistance, online concordance, and commentary to the text all on one easily navigable page.
*