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This series provides critical editions of Greek and Latin authors for scholars and advanced students. Each volume contains an introduction, a text with apparatus, and a commentary which discusses in detail textual and other problems.

  • General Editors: J. Diggle, University of Cambridge, G. Kelly, University of Edinburgh, S. P. Oakley, University of Cambridge, L. Prauscello, All Souls College, Oxford, M. D. Reeve, University of Cambridge, D. N. Sedley, University of Cambridge, R. J. Tarrant, Harvard University, Massachusetts, A. J. Woodman, University of Virginia

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20 results in Cambridge Classical Texts and Commentaries

Aristophanes: Knights
  • Edited with Introduction and Notes by Zachary P. Biles, S. Douglas Olson
  • Coming soon
  • Expected online publication date:
    April 2025
    Print publication:
    30 April 2025
  • Aristophanes' Knights was a sensation in its time, famous for its assault on the Athenian politician and demagogue Cleon in the first comic drama devoted to a sustained, open satire of an individual political figure. It is also the first play Aristophanes produced in his own name, and the one that solidified his reputation as a leading comic dramatist. This is the first full-scale commentary on Knights in over a century. The Greek text is based on a fresh analysis of the manuscripts, papyri and other ancient sources. The extensive commentary situates the play in its linguistic, literary and intellectual context and allows full appreciation of its original performance context. Particular attention is paid to the poet's language and to the social and literary traditions of his time, and abundant citations and quotations of parallel passages ranging far beyond the comic poets are offered, with all Greek translated.

‘Anonymus Iamblichi’
  • Edited and translated by Anders Dahl Sørensen
  • Coming soon
  • Expected online publication date:
    February 2025
    Print publication:
    28 February 2025
  • This is a new edition of the fragments of 'Anonymus Iamblichi', the mysterious Greek author excerpted by Iamblichus in chapter 20 of Protrepticus. The fragments are an important but overlooked source for early Greek ethical and political thought. Among other things, they criticize traditional forms of social benefaction, and they offer a strikingly modern approach to the analysis of society and economy revolving around the concept of pistis ('trust'). The text and translation are supplemented by a lengthy introduction, which analyses the language and style of the fragments and explores them in the literary and philosophical context of early Socratic literature. The detailed commentary discusses issues pertaining to text and interpretation.

Cicero: Divinatio in Q. Caecilium
  • Edited with Introduction and Notes by C. B. Watson
  • Coming soon
  • Expected online publication date:
    January 2025
    Print publication:
    31 January 2025
  • This is the first scholarly commentary on Cicero's Divinatio in Caecilium and the first new critical edition in over 100 years. The commentary demonstrates that the Divinatio was atypical of the genre. In both form and content, the speech is styled as a forensic prosecution rather than a pre-trial deliberation. It also functions as an effective piece of literary criticism and a pedagogical treatise to preface the Verrine corpus. Consequently scholars are encouraged to reconsider how published oratory in Rome functioned as teaching aid, personal propaganda, historical record, and literary production. The Divinatio touches on issues with strong resonance for contemporary society: the responsibility of the government to represent and defend marginalised communities, cultural identity and integration in a multi-ethnic society, the perils of persuasive speech, abuses of political and military power, due process of law, and changing notions of intellectual and cultural property.

Catullus: Poem 64
  • Edited by Gail Trimble
  • Coming soon
  • Expected online publication date:
    January 2025
    Print publication:
    31 January 2025
  • Catullus' longest poem, a miniature epic or 'epyllion' that tells two apparently unrelated mythological stories, is a central text in the Roman literary tradition. Allusive, exquisite, and sometimes shocking, it offers a profound exploration of human connection and aesthetic response against a backdrop of universal history. This major new edition addresses the interpretative challenges of the poem on every level of detail. The corrupt text is newly edited, while a line-by-line commentary of unparalleled depth and range integrates discussion of textual and linguistic matters with sophisticated literary criticism and a thoroughgoing awareness both of the poem's cultural and intertextual background and of its subsequent influence and reception. The introduction sets Catullus 64 in context, and an innovative epilogue draws together the threads of an overall interpretation. This book is an essential resource for the study of Latin poetry, and will transform its readers' understanding and appreciation of Catullus 64.

Historia Animalium Book X
  • Aristotle's Endoxon, Topos and Dialectic on On Failure to Reproduce
  • Edited and translated by Lesley Dean-Jones
  • Published online:
    18 May 2023
    Print publication:
    08 June 2023
  • This is the first modern edition of Book X of the Historia Animalium. It argues that the first five chapters are a summary, from the hand of Aristotle, of a medical treatise by a physician practicing in the fourth-century BCE. This gives short shrift to Hippocratic staples such as trapped menses and the wandering womb, and describes a woman's climax during sex in terms that can be easily mapped onto modern accounts. In summarizing the treatise and examining its claims in the last two chapters, Aristotle follows the method described in the Topics for a philosopher embarking on a new field of study. Here we see Aristotle's ruminations over the conundrum of a woman's contribution to conception at an early stage in the development of his theory of reproduction. Far from being an insignificant pseudepigraphon, this is a central text for understanding the development of ancient gynaecology and Aristotelian methodology.

Expositio Notarum
  • Edited with Introduction and Notes by A. C. Dionisotti
  • Published online:
    19 August 2022
    Print publication:
    08 September 2022
  • This is the first edition of a Latin text unlike any other surviving one : at first sight an extensive, jumbled list of words with explanations, on closer inspection a window on the teaching of Latin shorthand in North Africa c. AD 400, when we find notarii, those trained in shorthand, prominently employed everywhere in state and church. The text reveals in detail how that training could relate to literary Latin and the classical Roman past. The single manuscript of it in our possession descends from a copy that must have been in Anglo-Saxon England by AD 700, and we can see how it was used for the earliest Latin glossary from that context. The edition seeks to make this story accessible both in general and in detail, with copious indices for those who may wish to consult it from various viewpoints: classical and later Latin, linguistic and historical.

The Rhesus Attributed to Euripides
  • Edited by Marco Fantuzzi
  • Published online:
    10 December 2020
    Print publication:
    07 January 2021
  • The tragedy Rhesus has come down to us among the plays of Euripides but was probably the work either of fourth-century BC actors or producers heavily rewriting his original play or of a fourth-century author writing in competition. This edition explores the play as a 'postclassical' tragedy, composed when the plays of Aeschylus, Sophocles and Euripides had become the 'classical' canon. Its stylistic mannerisms, cerebral re-use of the motifs and language of fifth-century tragedy, and endemic experimentalism with various models of intertextuality exemplify the anxiety of influence of the Rhesus as a text that 'comes after' fifth-century drama and Book 10 of the Iliad. The anachronistic adaptations of the world of the epic heroes to the new reality of the polis and the irresistible rise of Macedonian power also reveal the Rhesus attempting to be both seriously intertextual with its models and seriously different from them.

The Homeric Hymn to Hermes
  • Edited by Oliver Thomas
  • Published online:
    25 June 2020
    Print publication:
    16 July 2020
  • The Homeric Hymn to Hermes is the longest surviving hymn from early Greece, our fullest source for the god Hermes, and an entertaining narrative of theft, invention, cheekiness, and learning to get along. This study contains a new text of the poem, based on advances in our understanding of its transmission, and a commentary which brings together a range of methodologies to address points of linguistic difficulty, poetic technique, and cultural background. The introduction discusses the possible context for the first performance of the hymn, and makes an original argument about the hymnist's remarkable approach to praise and to the epic tradition. This book will therefore be an essential point of reference for students and scholars interested not only in the Hymn to Hermes but in Greek literature and religion.

Gargilius Martialis: The Agricultural Fragments
  • Edited by James L. Zainaldin
  • Published online:
    13 March 2020
    Print publication:
    02 April 2020
  • In the third century CE, the North African polymath, soldier, and provincial official Q. Gargilius Martialis (died 260) wrote a treatise on the cultivation and medical use of fruits, vegetables, and herbs. The agricultural part of this work survives in a fragmentary state in a single manuscript. Despite this impediment, the agricultural writings are noteworthy for the clear marks both of their meticulous research and of the application of independent judgement and experience. Gargilius furthermore presents his advice in a stylized and literary form that strives for elegance through the use of prose rhythm, rhetorical variatio, and figurative language. The fragments will be valuable for those interested in ancient agriculture, in Greco-Roman authorship on the technai or artes, and in the history and sociolinguistics of Latin. This volume offers a new edition and the first English translation of Gargilius' agricultural fragments as well as an introduction and full-scale commentary.

Venantius Fortunatus: Vita Sancti MartiniPrologue and Books I–II
  • Edited and translated by N. M. Kay
  • Published online:
    04 February 2020
    Print publication:
    13 February 2020
  • This volume provides a new critical text of the Prologue and the first two books of Venantius Fortunatus' Vita Sancti Martini, a work, written in the latter half of the sixth century, which paraphrases in epic verse the famous prose hagiography of St Martin by Sulpicius Severus. This edition offers the first English translation of and the first full commentary on that part of Venantius' poem. Venantius was one of the last writers in a recognisably classical Latin tradition and his Vita affords a fascinating insight into the language and literary culture of his time. It is, however, a deceptively allusive and difficult poem, and the introduction and commentary of this book deal extensively with matters of exegesis, textual criticism, language, metre and much else. It will be valuable for students of the literature and culture of late Latin antiquity, and for those interested in early Christianity and hagiography.

The Annals of Tacitus: Book 4
  • Edited with Introduction and Notes by A. J. Woodman
  • Published online:
    31 July 2018
    Print publication:
    24 May 2018
  • Book 4 of Tacitus' Annals, described by Sir Ronald Syme as 'the best that Tacitus ever wrote', covers the years AD 23–28, the pivotal period in the principate of the emperor Tiberius. Under the malign influence of Sejanus, the henchman who duped him and was loaded with honours, Tiberius withdrew to the island of Capri and was never again seen in Rome, where the treason trials engendered an atmosphere of terror. The volume presents a new text of Book 4, as well as a full commentary on the text, covering textual, literary, linguistic and historical matters. The introduction discusses the relationship between Tacitus and Sallust. The volume completes the sequence which began with commentary on Books 1 and 2 of the Annals by F. R. D. Goodyear (1972, 1981) and was continued by commentary on Book 3 by A. J. Woodman and R. H. Martin (1996) and on Books 5-6 by A. J. Woodman (2016).

Sophocles: Oedipus the King
  • Edited and translated by P. J. Finglass
  • Published online:
    29 March 2018
    Print publication:
    05 April 2018
  • For centuries the myth of Oedipus, the man who unwittingly killed his father and married his mother, has exerted a powerful hold on the human imagination; but no retelling of that myth has ever come close, in passion, drama, and menace to the one that we find in Sophocles' Oedipus the King. This new full-scale edition of that classic play - the first in any language since 1883 - offers a freshly constituted text based on consultation of manuscripts ancient and mediaeval. The Introduction explores the play's dating and production, its creative engagement with pre-Sophoclean versions, its major themes, and its reception during antiquity. The Commentary offers a detailed analysis, line by line and scene by scene, of the play's language, staging, and dramatic impact. The translation incorporated into the commentary ensures that the book will be accessible to all readers interested in what is arguably the greatest Greek tragedy of all.

Dionysius: The Epic Fragments
  • Volume 56
  • Edited and translated by Amin Benaissa
  • Published online:
    01 February 2018
    Print publication:
    11 January 2018
  • The epic poet Dionysius, who probably flourished in the first century CE, is a key transitional figure in the history of Greek poetry, sharing stylistic and thematic tendencies with both the learned Hellenistic tradition and the monumental epic poetry of the later Roman period. His Bassarica is the earliest known poem on the conquest of India by the god Dionysus and was an important model of Nonnus' Dionysiaca. His Gigantias related the battle of the giants against the Olympian gods and legends surrounding it, with particular focus on the figure of Heracles. This is the most comprehensive edition to date of his poetry, expanding the number of fragments available and providing a more reliable text based on a fresh inspection of the papyri. The volume includes a substantial introduction contextualising the poetry, a facing English translation of the text, and a detailed linguistic and literary commentary.

The Annals of Tacitus
  • Books 5–6
  • Tacitus
  • Edited by A. J. Woodman
  • Published online:
    05 January 2017
    Print publication:
    08 December 2016
  • Books 5 and 6 of Tacitus' Annals cover the last years of the emperor Tiberius. Although most of Book 5 is lost, Book 6 survives complete and offers a vivid narrative of the increasingly tyrannical princeps, secluded on the island of Capri; the book ends with his death and obituary notice, one of the most celebrated passages of classical literature. This volume presents a new text of Books 5 and 6, restoring the division between them which was proposed by Lipsius, as well as a full commentary on the text, covering textual, literary, linguistic and historical matters. An Appendix discusses 'The Tacitean Tiberius'. The volume rounds off the sequence which began with commentary on Books 1 and 2 of Tacitus' Annals by F. R. D. Goodyear (1972, 1981) and was continued by commentary on Book 3 by A. J. Woodman and R. H. Martin (1996).

The Colloquia of the Hermeneumata Pseudodositheana
  • Volume 2, Colloquium Harleianum, Colloquium Montepessulanum, Colloquium Celtis, and Fragments
  • Edited by Eleanor Dickey
  • Published online:
    25 November 2020
    Print publication:
    12 February 2015
  • The Colloquia are manuals written to help ancient Greeks and Romans get around in each other's languages; they contain examples of how to conduct activities like shopping, banking, visiting friends, hosting parties, taking oaths, winning lawsuits, using the public baths, having fights, making excuses and going to school. They thus offer a unique glimpse of daily life in the early Roman Empire and are an important resource for understanding ancient culture. They have, however, been unjustly neglected because until now there were no modern editions of the texts, no translations into any modern language, and little understanding of what the Colloquia are and where they come from. This book completes the task begun by Volume 1 of making the Colloquia accessible for the first time, presenting a new edition, translation and commentary of the remaining surviving texts. It is clearly written and will interest students, non-specialists and professional scholars alike.

Diogenes Laertius: Lives of Eminent Philosophers
  • Edited by Tiziano Dorandi
  • Published online:
    05 May 2013
    Print publication:
    09 May 2013
  • This edition presents a radically improved text of Diogenes Laertius' Lives of Eminent Philosophers. The text is accompanied by a full critical apparatus on three levels. A lengthy introduction lists all the manuscripts of the Lives and discusses its transmission in late antiquity, the Middle Ages and the Renaissance. There is also an index of personal names, a bibliography and notes covering several features of the text and its interpretation. Professor Dorandi has used the Nachlaß of Peter Von der Mühll, for the first time in its entirety, to verify and consolidate material that he had previously gathered. This is by far the most detailed and elaborate edition which Diogenes' Lives - a unique work which has had a profound influence on European literature and philosophy - has ever received.

The Colloquia of the Hermeneumata Pseudodositheana
  • Volume 1, Colloquia Monacensia-Einsidlensia, Leidense-Stephani, and Stephani
  • Edited by Eleanor Dickey
  • Published online:
    05 May 2013
    Print publication:
    01 November 2012
  • The Colloquia are manuals written to help ancient Greeks and Romans get around in each other's languages; they contain examples of how to conduct activities like shopping, banking, visiting friends, hosting parties, taking oaths, winning lawsuits, using the public baths, having fights, making excuses and going to school. They thus offer a unique glimpse of daily life in the Early Roman Empire and are an important resource for understanding ancient culture. They have, however, been unjustly neglected because until now there has not been any modern editions of the texts, no translations into any modern language, and little understanding of what the Colloquia are and where they come from. This book makes the Colloquia accessible for the first time by combining a new edition, translation and commentary with a ground-breaking, comprehensive study of their origins. It is clearly written and will interest students, non-specialists and professional scholars alike.

Sophocles: Ajax
  • Sophocles
  • Edited by P. J. Finglass
  • Published online:
    05 June 2012
    Print publication:
    25 August 2011
  • Sophocles' Ajax describes the fall of a mighty warrior denied the honour which he believed was his due. This edition of the play presents a text and critical apparatus which take full advantage of advances in our understanding of Sophoclean manuscripts and scholarship. The introduction and commentary scrutinise all important aspects of the drama - from detailed analysis of style, language, and metre to consideration of wider issues such as ethics, rhetoric, and characterisation. Notorious dramaturgical problems, including the staging of Ajax's suicide, receive particular attention; so too do questions of literary history, such as the date of the play and Sophocles' creative interaction with previous accounts of the myth. The translation which accompanies the commentary ensures that this edition will be accessible to Hellenists of all levels of experience, as well as to readers with a general interest in the history of drama.

Decimus Laberius
  • The Fragments
  • Edited by Costas Panayotakis
  • Published online:
    05 June 2012
    Print publication:
    11 February 2010
  • This is a newly revised, critical text of the fragments attributed to the Roman knight and mimographer Decimus Laberius, a witty and crudely satirical contemporary of Cicero and Caesar. Laberius is perhaps the most celebrated comic playwright of the late Republic, and the fragments of plays attributed to him comprise the overwhelming majority of the extant evidence for what we conventionally call 'the literary Roman mime'. The volume also includes a survey of the characteristics and development of the Roman mime, both as a literary genre and as a type of popular theatrical entertainment, as well as a re-evaluation of the place of Laberius' work within its historical and literary context. This is the first English translation of all the fragments, and the first detailed English commentary on them from a linguistic, metrical, and (wherever possible) theatrical perspective.

Pindar: 'Pythian Eleven'
  • Edited by P. J. Finglass
  • Published online:
    05 August 2015
    Print publication:
    13 December 2007
  • Pindar's Pythian Eleven is a miniature masterpiece: a poem praising a young athlete which presents a vivid and important account of the Agamemnon legend. Yet it contains so many difficulties (of text, metre, dating and interpretation) that even Wilamowitz regarded it as one of Pindar's most obscure poems. This 2007 edition (the first full-scale treatment that the poem had ever received) provides answers to the problems that have prevented proper appreciation of the work. In addition to the full introduction and commentary, the book also has a text based on re-examination of the manuscripts, detailed metrical discussion, and a translation.