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  3. Cambridge Greek and Latin Classics

This series provides texts and commentaries on works of Greek and Latin literature aimed primarily at undergraduate and graduate students of either language. Almost one hundred volumes have been published to date. The commentaries discuss texts as works of literature while providing all the guidance needed by today's student.

  • General Editors: P. E. Easterling, University of Cambridge, Philip Hardie, Trinity College, Cambridge, Richard Hunter, University of Cambridge, S. P. Oakley, University of Cambridge, Oliver Thomas, University of Nottingham, Christopher Whitton, University of Cambridge

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49 results in Cambridge Greek and Latin Classics

Page 1 of 3

Plato: Republic Book I
  • Edited with Introduction and Notes by David Sansone
  • Published online:
    08 November 2024
    Print publication:
    14 September 2023
  • Plato's Republic is a central text in the Western philosophical tradition and also a specimen of its author's exceptional literary and dramatic skill. The first book introduces, and conspicuously fails to answer, the question: What is justice? It also introduces the sophist Thrasymachus, who is quite certain that he knows what justice is, namely that it is nothing other than what the dominant power in the state considers to be in its own interest. The contentious confrontation between Thrasymachus and Socrates sets the stage for Plato's controversial construction of an ideal state in which the true nature of justice will be revealed. The Commentary draws attention to the way Plato anticipates developments in later books, thus serving as an introduction to Republic as a whole. Particular attention is paid to Plato's language and style, so that students of Greek literature as well as philosophy are well served.

Caesar: Bellum Gallicum Book VII
  • Edited with Introduction and Notes by Christopher B. Krebs
  • Published online:
    30 January 2024
    Print publication:
    27 July 2023
  • This is the first commentary on Caesar's Bellum Gallicum to approach it as a literary text. It attempts a contextualized reading of the work through the eyes of a contemporary Roman reader, who was trained in rhetoric, versed in Greek and Roman literature, and familiar with the same political and cultural conventions and discourses as its author. In appreciating Caesar as a writer and situating the seventh book of the Bellum Gallicum within its 'horizon of expectations' and especially its historiographical tradition, it reveals much that rewards careful attention, including: a dramatized narrative, sustained intertextual borrowings and allusions (especially from and to Thucydides and Polybius), (in)direct speeches telling of Rome's second-greatest speaker, and word- and sound-play telling of the leading linguist, not to mention artful technical descriptions that lack parallels in the Roman republic. Ultimately, both author and text emerge as quite different from their grossly generalized reputations.

Virgil: Aeneid Book XI
  • Edited with Introduction and Notes by Scott McGill
  • Published online:
    05 February 2020
    Print publication:
    30 January 2020
  • Virgil's Aeneid XI is an important, yet sometimes overlooked, book which covers the funerals following the fierce fighting in Book X and a council of the Latins before they and the Trojans resume battle after the end of the truce. This edition contains a thorough Introduction which provides context for Book XI both within and beyond the rest of the poem, explores key characters such as Aeneas and Camilla, and deals with issues of metre and textual transmission. The line-by-line Commentary will be indispensable for students and instructors wishing to enhance their understanding of the poem and especially of Virgil's language and syntax. Accessible and comprehensive, the volume will help readers to appreciate features of Virgilian style as well as deepening their engagement with the content and themes of the Aeneid as a whole.

Herodotus: Histories Book VI
  • Edited with Introduction and Notes by Simon Hornblower, Christopher Pelling
  • Published online:
    14 September 2019
    Print publication:
    21 December 2017
  • Book VI of the Histories is one of Herodotus' most varied books, beginning with the final collapse of the Ionian Revolt and moving on to the Athenian triumph at Marathon (490 BC); it also includes fascinating material on Sparta, full of court intrigue and culminating in Kleomenes' grisly death, and there is comedy too, with Alkmeon's cramming clothes, boots, and even cheeks with gold dust, then Hippokleides 'dancing away his marriage'. In Herodotus' time, Marathon was already reaching almost legendary status, commemorated in epigrams and monuments, and in this edition a substantial introduction discusses Herodotus' relation to these other memorials. It also explores the place of the book in the Histories' overall structure, and pays particular attention to Herodotus' treatment of impiety. A new text is then accompanied by a full commentary, covering literary and historical aspects and offering help with translation. The volume is suitable for undergraduates, graduate students, teachers and scholars.

Plato: Symposium
  • Plato
  • Edited by K. J. Dover
  • Published online:
    14 September 2019
    Print publication:
    28 February 1980
  • Plato's Symposium is the most literary of all his works and one which all students of classics are likely to want to read whether or not they are studying Plato's philosophy. But the reader does need help in appreciating both the artistry and the arguments, and in comprehending the social and cultural background against which the 'praise of love' is delivered. Sir Kenneth Dover provides here a sympathetic and modern edition of the kind that is long overdue. It consists of an introduction, the Greek text accompanied by a very abbreviated critical apparatus, and a commentary on the text which is intended to elucidate the Greek, to make the philosophical argument intelligible, and to relate the content of what is said to the concepts and assumptions of contemporary morality and society. An edition for students of Greek in universities and the upper forms of schools.

Greek Lyric
  • A Selection
  • Edited with Introduction and Notes by Felix Budelmann
  • Published online:
    13 September 2019
    Print publication:
    24 May 2018
  • The corpus of Greek lyric holds a twofold attraction. It provides glimpses of the song culture of early Greece in which lyric performance had a central place, and it presents us with some captivating and memorable poetry which has been admired since antiquity. This edition gathers poems by seven of the nine canonical lyricists (Alcman, Alcaeus, Sappho, Stesichorus, Ibycus, Anacreon, Simonides), as well as a number of carmina popularia and carmina convivalia and passages from Timotheus' Persians. Both longer and shorter pieces are included. The introduction discusses major issues in the study of Greek lyric including genre, performance and transmission. The commentary is literary in emphasis but also treats questions of syntax, textual reconstruction, metre and dialect. The volume will be of interest to higher-level undergraduates and graduate students as well as to scholars.

Augustine: Confessions Books V–IX
  • Augustine
  • Edited with Introduction and Notes by Peter White
  • Published online:
    22 August 2019
    Print publication:
    12 September 2019
  • Books V-IX of the Confessions trace five crucial years in the life of Augustine, from his debut as a teacher of rhetoric in North Africa to his baptism as a Christian and the renunciation of a worldly career in Milan. This commentary will be invaluable for those wishing to read his story in the original Latin. Through careful glosses and notes, Augustine's Latin is made accessible to students of patristics and of classics. His extensive quotations from Scripture are translated and explained in light of the variant Bible texts and the interpretative assumptions through which he came to understand them. The unfolding of his career is set against the background of political, cultural, and religious change in the fourth century, and the art with which he created a form of narrative without precedent in earlier Latin literature is illustrated in close detail.

Ovid: Fasti Book 3
  • Edited with Introduction and Notes by S. J. Heyworth
  • Published online:
    29 April 2019
    Print publication:
    16 May 2019
  • Ovid is now firmly established as a central figure in the Latin poetic canon, and his Fasti is his most complex elegy. Drafted alongside the Metamorphoses before the poet's exile, it was only published after the death of Augustus, and involves a wide range of myth, Roman history, religion, astronomy and explication of the calendar. In its aetiology and conversations with gods, it is a Latin equivalent of Callimachus' Aetia. This invaluable new commentary on a central book of the poem explores Ovid's playful inversion of genre, his witty but challenging style of Latin, his use of the elegiac couplet, intertextuality and much more. With a comprehensive introduction providing key background for students and instructors, this guide to Book 3, the first in English for nearly a century, makes use of the latest scholarly research to illuminate Ovid's wide-ranging and amusing account of Roman life.

Xenophon: Anabasis Book III
  • Edited with Introduction and Notes by Luuk Huitink, Tim Rood
  • Published online:
    23 March 2019
    Print publication:
    21 March 2019
  • This is the first comprehensive commentary on a section of Xenophon's Anabasis in English for almost a century. It provides up-to-date guidance on literary, historical and cultural aspects of the Anabasis and will help undergraduate students to read Greek better. It also incorporates recent advances in Xenophontic scholarship and Greek linguistics, showcasing in particular Xenophon's linguistic innovations and varied style. Advanced students and professional scholars will also profit from the sustained attention which this commentary devotes to Xenophon's varied narrative strategies and to the reception of episodes from Anabasis III in antiquity. The introduction and commentary show that Xenophon is just as important (if not more so) to the development of Greek historiography, and of Greek prose in general, as Herodotus and Thucydides.

Herodotus: Histories Book V
  • Herodotus
  • Edited by Simon Hornblower
  • Published online:
    16 October 2018
    Print publication:
    12 December 2013
  • One of the most important works of history in Western literature, by the freshest and liveliest of all classical Greek prose authors, Herodotus's Histories is also a key text for the study of ancient Greece and the Persian Empire. Covering a central and widely studied period of Greek history, Book V not only describes the revolt of the east Greeks against their Persian masters, which led to the great Persian Wars of 490–479 BC, but also provides fascinating material about the mainland Greek states in the sixth century BC. This is an up-to-date edition of and commentary on the Greek text of the book, providing extensive help with the Greek, basic historical information and clear maps, as well as lucid and insightful historical and literary interpretation of the text. The volume is suitable for advanced undergraduates, graduate students, teachers and scholars.

Ovid: Heroides
  • Select Epistles
  • Ovid
  • Edited by Peter E. Knox
  • Published online:
    12 October 2018
    Print publication:
    18 January 1996
  • Ovid's Heroides, a collection of twenty-one epistles in elegiac verse, consists of two groups, the first comprising fourteen poems addressed by heroines of mythology to their absent lovers or husbands. In this edition, Professor Knox offers a commentary on seven of these epistles, addressing problems of language and style, and focusing on the relationship of the Heroides to the classic works of Greek and Roman literature on which Ovid bases his representation of these women. In addition, he has included a commentary on the Epistula Sapphus, a separate poem of doubtful authorship which was composed in the manner of Ovid and is believed by many to be by him. The Introduction provides an account of the genre, a survey of language, style and metre, and an outline of the problems concerning the authenticity of parts of the collection.

Homer: Odyssey Books XIII and XIV
  • Homer
  • Edited by A. M. Bowie
  • Published online:
    12 September 2018
    Print publication:
    09 January 2014
  • The second part of the Odyssey takes epic in new directions, giving significant roles to people of 'lower status' and their way of life: epic notions of the primacy of the aristocrat and the achievements of the Trojan War are submitted to scrutiny. Books XIII and XIV contain some of the subtlest human exchanges in the poem, as Athena and Odysseus spar with each other and Odysseus tests the quiet patience of his swineherd Eumaeus. The principal themes and narrative structures, especially of disguise and recognition, which the second part uses with remarkable economy, are established here. The Introduction also includes a detailed historical account of the Homeric dialect, as well as sections on metre and the text itself. The Commentary on the Greek text pays particular attention to the exposition of unfamiliar linguistic forms and constructions. The literary parts of the Introduction and the Commentary are accessible to all.

Lucretius: De Rerum NaturaBook III
  • 2nd edition
  • Lucretius
  • Edited by E. J. Kenney
  • Published online:
    12 September 2018
    Print publication:
    14 August 2014
  • The third book of Lucretius' great poem on the workings of the universe is devoted entirely to expounding the implications of Epicurus' dictum that death does not matter, 'is nothing to us'. The soul is not immortal: it no more exists after the dissolution of the body than it had done before its birth. Only if this fact is accepted can men rid themselves of irrational fears and achieve the state of ataraxia, freedom from mental disturbance, on which the Epicurean definition of pleasure was based. To present this case Lucretius deploys the full range of poetic and rhetorical registers, soberly prohibitive, artfully decorative or passionately emotive as best suits his argument, reinforcing it with vivid and compelling imagery. This new edition has been completely revised, with a considerably enlarged Commentary and a new supplementary introduction taking account of the great amount of new scholarship of the last forty years.

Juvenal: Satire 6
  • Juvenal
  • Edited by Lindsay Watson, Patricia Watson
  • Published online:
    28 May 2018
    Print publication:
    22 May 2014
  • Juvenal's sixth Satire is a masterpiece of comic hyperbole, an outrageous rant against women and marriage which, in its breadth and density, represents the high point of the misogynistic literature of classical antiquity. The Introduction situates Juvenal within the wider tradition of Roman satire, interrogates afresh the poem's architecture and recurrent themes, shows how Juvenal systematically attributes to his monstrous women the inverse of the Roman wife's canonical virtues, traces the various literary currents which infuse the Satire, and lastly addresses the much-discussed issue of the poetic voice or persona from a sociohistorical as well as a theoretical perspective. Above all, the commentary strives to locate Juvenal in his historical, literary and cultural context, while simultaneously affording assistance with the nuts and bolts of the Latin, and always keeping in view two key questions: what was Juvenal's purpose in writing the Satire? How seriously was it meant to be taken?

Euripides: 'Helen'
  • Euripides
  • Edited by William Allan
  • Published online:
    28 May 2018
    Print publication:
    11 February 2008
  • This up-to-date edition offers a detailed literary and cultural analysis of Euripides' Helen, a work which arguably embodies the variety and dynamism of fifth-century Athenian tragedy more than any other surviving play. The story of an exemplary wife (not an adulteress) who went to Egypt (not to Troy), Euripides' 'new Helen' skilfully transforms and supplants earlier currents of literature and myth. The Introduction elucidates Euripides' treatment of Helen and sets the play in its wider intellectual context. It also discusses questions of genre and reception, rejecting such descriptions as 'tragicomedy' or 'romantic tragedy', and showing how later artists have responded to Euripides' unorthodox heroine and her phantom double. The Commentary's notes on language and style are intended to make Helen fully accessible to readers of Greek at all levels, while the edition as a whole is designed for use by anyone with an interest in Greek tragedy.

Plato: Protagoras
  • Plato
  • Edited by Nicholas Denyer
  • Published online:
    28 May 2018
    Print publication:
    04 September 2008
  • The Protagoras is one of Plato's most entertaining dialogues. It represents Socrates at a gathering of the most celebrated and highest-earning intellectuals of the day, among them the sophist Protagoras. In flamboyant displays of both rhetoric and dialectic, Socrates and Protagoras try to out-argue one another. Their arguments range widely, from political theory to literary criticism, from education to the nature of cowardice; but in view throughout this literary and philosophical masterpiece are the questions of what part knowledge plays in a successful life, and how we may acquire the knowledge that makes for success. This edition contains the first commentary in English on the Greek text for almost a hundred years. The commentary provides the assistance with linguistic, literary and philosophical detail that will enable students and scholars to savour to the full the pleasures of the Protagoras.

Lysias: Selected Speeches
  • Lysias
  • Edited by Christopher Carey
  • Published online:
    28 May 2018
    Print publication:
    25 January 1990
  • The Greek prose writer Lysias is a fascinating source for the study of Athenian law, society and history in the late fifth century BC. Six of his professional legal speeches are selected in this new edition, both for their intrinsic interest and because the language is accessible even to the comparative beginner. In his introduction Dr Carey discusses Lysias' life and place in the evolution of Greek prose style, and the development of Greek rhetoric. He approaches the speeches in terms of their function, as attempts to secure a verdict favourable to the speaker, and assesses how effectively the selection and deployment of arguments promote this end. In the commentary he addresses problems of Lysias' style and syntax, and textual issues where necessary, but the particular focus is always literary: Lysias' use of rhetorical devices, his marshalling of fact and argument and his manipulation of contemporary values and prejudices are examined in detail. These speeches are invaluable historical documents and will be of interest to students of ancient history and civilisation, as well as classicists.

Homer: Iliad Book XXIV
  • Homer
  • Edited by Colin W. Macleod
  • Published online:
    28 May 2018
    Print publication:
    04 March 1982
  • The twenty-fourth book of the Iliad - the account of Priam's ransoming of Hector's body from Achilles - is one of the masterpieces of world literature, a work of interest to a far wider audience than scholars of ancient Greek. In this edition Colin Macleod tries to reach both scholars and Greekless readers alike. In his commentary he gives help to readers unfamiliar with the language of Homer and discusses problems of content and expression, never treating this book in isolation but drawing attention to Homer's artistry and thought in the context of the whole of the Iliad. In his introduction Mr Macleod examines Homer's notion of poetry, his style and language and the architecture and meaning of his work. He tries to show why Book XXIV is a proper conclusion to the Iliad. This is an edition for classical scholars, undergraduates and students in the upper forms of schools. The introduction and substantial parts of the commentary require no knowledge of Greek and should find readers among all who are interested in European literature.

Cicero: De Oratore Book III
  • Marcus Tullius Cicero
  • Edited by David Mankin
  • Published online:
    28 May 2018
    Print publication:
    10 March 2011
  • Cicero's De Oratore is one of the masterpieces of Latin prose. A literary dialogue in the Greek tradition, it was written in 55 BCE in the midst of political turmoil at Rome, but reports a discussion 'concerning the (ideal) orator' that supposedly took place in 90 BCE, just before an earlier crisis. Cicero features eminent orators and statesmen of the past as participants in this discussion, presenting competing views on many topics. This edition of Book III is the first since 1893 to provide a Latin text and full introduction and commentary in English. It is intended to help advanced students and others interested in Roman literature to comprehend the grammar and appreciate the stylistic nuances of Cicero's Latin, to trace the historical, literary, and theoretical background of the topics addressed, and to interpret Book III in relation to the rest of De Oratore and to Cicero's other works.

Horace: Odes IV and Carmen Saeculare
  • Horace
  • Edited by Richard F. Thomas
  • Published online:
    28 May 2018
    Print publication:
    23 June 2011
  • The Carmen Saeculare was composed and published in 17 BCE as Horace was returning to the genre of lyric which he had abandoned six years earlier; the fourth book of Odes is in part a response to this poem, the only commissioned poem we know from the period. The hardening of the political situation, with the Republic a thing of the past and the Augustan succession in the air, threw the problematic issue of praise into fresh relief, and at the same time provided an impulse towards the nostalgia represented by the poet's private world. Professor Thomas provides an introduction and commentary (the first full commentary in English since the nineteenth century) to each of the poems, exploring their status as separate lyric artefacts and their place in the larger web of the book. The edition is intended primarily for upper-level undergraduates and graduate students, but is also important for scholars.

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