The Comedies
10 best books like The Comedies (Terence): Metamorphoses, Prometheus Bound and Other Plays, The Sixteen Satires, The Way Things are, The Civil War, Four Comedies, Heroides, The Poems, Four Tragedies and Octavia (Thyestes, Phaedra, Troades, Oedipus, Octavia), The History of Rome, Books 6-10: Rome and Italy
Prized through the ages for its splendor and its savage, sophisticated wit, The Metamorphoses is a masterpiece of Western culture--the first attempt to link all the Greek myths, before and after Homer, in a cohesive whole, to the Roman myths of Ovid's day. Horace Gregory, in this modern translation,...
| Author | Aeschylus |
| ISBN | 0140441123 |
This is a review of Prometheus Bound. Reviews of other plays in the same book are found elsewhere (see below)
Peter Paul Rubens
Prometheus, discoursing on his gifts to mankind:
... At first
Mindless, I gave them mind and reason. - What I say
Is not censure...
| Author | Juvenal |
| ISBN | 0140447040 |
Perhaps more than any other writer, Juvenal (c. AD 55-138) captures the splendour, the squalor, and the sheer energy of everyday Roman life. In The Sixteen Satires he evokes a fascinating world of whores, fortune-tellers, boozy politicians, slick lawyers, shameless sycophants, ageing flirts and...
ALL MATTER?
NEVER MIND!
-Bertrand Russell’s Grandmother
(Mocking his Materialist Philosophy)
When I was in my late teens I had a stunning Lucretian prise de conscience that utterly knocked the wind out of my youthful sails. It seemed the overwhelming answer to Eliot’s...
| Author | Gaius Julius Caesar |
| ISBN | 0140441875 |
A military leader of legendary genius, Caesar was also a great writer, recording the events of his life with incomparable immediacy and power. The Civil War is a tense and gripping depiction of his struggle with Pompey over the leadership of Republican Rome - a conflict that spanned the entire Roman...
| Author | Plautus |
| ISBN | 0192838962 |
Plautus was the single greatest influence on Western comedy. In fact, Shakespeare's Comedy of Errors and Moliere's the Miser are two subsequent classics directly based on Plautine originals. Plautus himself borrowed from the Greeks, but his jokes, rapid dialogue, bawdy humor, and irreverent characterizations...
In the twenty-one poems of the Heroides, Ovid gave voice to the heroines and heroes of epic and myth. These deeply moving literary epistles reveal the happiness and torment of love, as the writers tell of their pain at separation, forgiveness of infidelity or anger at betrayal. The faithful Penelope...
| Author | Propertius |
| ISBN | 0192835734 |
Toujours dans la veine des poètes latins, après un Catulle tout à la fois impétueux et tendre, après un Tibulle irénique et volage, voici Properce, passionnément fidèle et attaché à sa Cynthie, et terriblement voluptueux. C'est sans doute de ces trois auteurs le plus vivant, le...
| Author | Seneca |
| ISBN | 0140441743 |
Based on the legends used in Greek drama, Seneca's plays are notable for the exuberant ruthlessness with which disastrous events are foretold and then pursued to their tragic and often bloodthirsty ends. Thyestes depicts the menace of an ancestral curse hanging over two feuding brothers, while Phaedra...
Books VI-X of Livy's monumental work trace Rome's fortunes from its near collapse after defeat by the Gauls in 386 bc to its emergence, in a matter of decades, as the premier power in Italy, having conquered the city-state of Samnium in 293 bc. In this fascinating history, events are described not simply...
| Author | Plautus |
| ISBN | 0140441360 |
Brilliantly adapting Greek New Comedy for Roman audiences, the sublime comedies of Plautus (c. 254 -184 bc ) are the earliest surviving complete works of Latin literature. The four plays collected here reveal a playwright in his prime, exploring classic themes and developing standard characters...
| Author | Menander |
| ISBN | 0192839837 |
The greatest writer of Greek New Comedy and the founding father of European comedy, Menander (c.341-290 BC) wrote over one hundred plays, of which only one complete play and substantial fragments of others survive. Until the twentieth century he was known to us only by short quotations in ancient authors....
