An unrivaled compendium of ancient Roman knowledge.

Pliny the Elder, Gaius Plinius Secundus (AD 23–79), a Roman of equestrian rank of Transpadane Gaul (N. Italy), was uncle of Pliny the letter writer. He pursued a career partly military in Germany, partly administrative in Gaul and Spain under the emperor Vespasian, and became prefect of the fleet at Misenum. He died in the eruption of Vesuvius when he went to get a closer view and to rescue friends. Tireless worker, reader, and writer, he was author of works now lost; but his great Natural History in thirty-seven books with its vast collection of facts (and alleged facts) survives—a mine of information despite its uncritical character.

The contents of the books are as follows. Book 1: table of contents of the others and of authorities; 2: mathematical and metrological survey of the universe; 3–6: geography and ethnography of the known world; 7: anthropology and the physiology of man; 8–11: zoology; 12–19: botany, agriculture, and horticulture; 20–27: plant products as used in medicine; 28–32: medical zoology; 33–37: minerals (and medicine), the fine arts, and gemstones.

The Loeb Classical Library edition of Natural History is in ten volumes.

An unrivaled compendium of ancient Roman knowledge.

Pliny the Elder, Gaius Plinius Secundus (AD 23–79), a Roman of equestrian rank of Transpadane Gaul (N. Italy), was uncle of Pliny the letter writer. He pursued a career partly military in Germany, partly administrative in Gaul and Spain under the emperor Vespasian, and became prefect of the fleet at Misenum. He died in the eruption of Vesuvius when he went to get a closer view and to rescue friends. Tireless worker, reader, and writer, he was author of works now lost; but his great Natural History in thirty-seven books with its vast collection of facts (and alleged facts) survives—a mine of information despite its uncritical character.

The contents of the books are as follows. Book 1: table of contents of the others and of authorities; 2: mathematical and metrological survey of the universe; 3–6: geography and ethnography of the known world; 7: anthropology and the physiology of man; 8–11: zoology; 12–19: botany, agriculture, and horticulture; 20–27: plant products as used in medicine; 28–32: medical zoology; 33–37: minerals (and medicine), the fine arts, and gemstones.

The Loeb Classical Library edition of Natural History is in ten volumes.

An unrivaled compendium of ancient Roman knowledge.

Pliny the Elder, Gaius Plinius Secundus (AD 23–79), a Roman of equestrian rank of Transpadane Gaul (N. Italy), was uncle of Pliny the letter writer. He pursued a career partly military in Germany, partly administrative in Gaul and Spain under the emperor Vespasian, and became prefect of the fleet at Misenum. He died in the eruption of Vesuvius when he went to get a closer view and to rescue friends. Tireless worker, reader, and writer, he was author of works now lost; but his great Natural History in thirty-seven books with its vast collection of facts (and alleged facts) survives—a mine of information despite its uncritical character.

The contents of the books are as follows. Book 1: table of contents of the others and of authorities; 2: mathematical and metrological survey of the universe; 3–6: geography and ethnography of the known world; 7: anthropology and the physiology of man; 8–11: zoology; 12–19: botany, agriculture, and horticulture; 20–27: plant products as used in medicine; 28–32: medical zoology; 33–37: minerals (and medicine), the fine arts, and gemstones.

The Loeb Classical Library edition of Natural History is in ten volumes.

An unrivaled compendium of ancient Roman knowledge.

Pliny the Elder, Gaius Plinius Secundus (AD 23–79), a Roman of equestrian rank of Transpadane Gaul (N. Italy), was uncle of Pliny the letter writer. He pursued a career partly military in Germany, partly administrative in Gaul and Spain under the emperor Vespasian, and became prefect of the fleet at Misenum. He died in the eruption of Vesuvius when he went to get a closer view and to rescue friends. Tireless worker, reader, and writer, he was author of works now lost; but his great Natural History in thirty-seven books with its vast collection of facts (and alleged facts) survives—a mine of information despite its uncritical character.

The contents of the books are as follows. Book 1: table of contents of the others and of authorities; 2: mathematical and metrological survey of the universe; 3–6: geography and ethnography of the known world; 7: anthropology and the physiology of man; 8–11: zoology; 12–19: botany, agriculture, and horticulture; 20–27: plant products as used in medicine; 28–32: medical zoology; 33–37: minerals (and medicine), the fine arts, and gemstones.

The Loeb Classical Library edition of Natural History is in ten volumes.

An unrivaled compendium of ancient Roman knowledge.

Pliny the Elder, Gaius Plinius Secundus (AD 23–79), a Roman of equestrian rank of Transpadane Gaul (N. Italy), was uncle of Pliny the letter writer. He pursued a career partly military in Germany, partly administrative in Gaul and Spain under the emperor Vespasian, and became prefect of the fleet at Misenum. He died in the eruption of Vesuvius when he went to get a closer view and to rescue friends. Tireless worker, reader, and writer, he was author of works now lost; but his great Natural History in thirty-seven books with its vast collection of facts (and alleged facts) survives—a mine of information despite its uncritical character.

The contents of the books are as follows. Book 1: table of contents of the others and of authorities; 2: mathematical and metrological survey of the universe; 3–6: geography and ethnography of the known world; 7: anthropology and the physiology of man; 8–11: zoology; 12–19: botany, agriculture, and horticulture; 20–27: plant products as used in medicine; 28–32: medical zoology; 33–37: minerals (and medicine), the fine arts, and gemstones.

The Loeb Classical Library edition of Natural History is in ten volumes.

An unrivaled compendium of ancient Roman knowledge.

Pliny the Elder, Gaius Plinius Secundus (AD 23–79), a Roman of equestrian rank of Transpadane Gaul (N. Italy), was uncle of Pliny the letter writer. He pursued a career partly military in Germany, partly administrative in Gaul and Spain under the emperor Vespasian, and became prefect of the fleet at Misenum. He died in the eruption of Vesuvius when he went to get a closer view and to rescue friends. Tireless worker, reader, and writer, he was author of works now lost; but his great Natural History in thirty-seven books with its vast collection of facts (and alleged facts) survives—a mine of information despite its uncritical character.

The contents of the books are as follows. Book 1: table of contents of the others and of authorities; 2: mathematical and metrological survey of the universe; 3–6: geography and ethnography of the known world; 7: anthropology and the physiology of man; 8–11: zoology; 12–19: botany, agriculture, and horticulture; 20–27: plant products as used in medicine; 28–32: medical zoology; 33–37: minerals (and medicine), the fine arts, and gemstones.

The Loeb Classical Library edition of Natural History is in ten volumes.

An unrivaled compendium of ancient Roman knowledge.

Pliny the Elder, Gaius Plinius Secundus (AD 23–79), a Roman of equestrian rank of Transpadane Gaul (N. Italy), was uncle of Pliny the letter writer. He pursued a career partly military in Germany, partly administrative in Gaul and Spain under the emperor Vespasian, and became prefect of the fleet at Misenum. He died in the eruption of Vesuvius when he went to get a closer view and to rescue friends. Tireless worker, reader, and writer, he was author of works now lost; but his great Natural History in thirty-seven books with its vast collection of facts (and alleged facts) survives—a mine of information despite its uncritical character.

The contents of the books are as follows. Book 1: table of contents of the others and of authorities; 2: mathematical and metrological survey of the universe; 3–6: geography and ethnography of the known world; 7: anthropology and the physiology of man; 8–11: zoology; 12–19: botany, agriculture, and horticulture; 20–27: plant products as used in medicine; 28–32: medical zoology; 33–37: minerals (and medicine), the fine arts, and gemstones.

The Loeb Classical Library edition of Natural History is in ten volumes.

An unrivaled compendium of ancient Roman knowledge.

Pliny the Elder, Gaius Plinius Secundus (AD 23–79), a Roman of equestrian rank of Transpadane Gaul (N. Italy), was uncle of Pliny the letter writer. He pursued a career partly military in Germany, partly administrative in Gaul and Spain under the emperor Vespasian, and became prefect of the fleet at Misenum. He died in the eruption of Vesuvius when he went to get a closer view and to rescue friends. Tireless worker, reader, and writer, he was author of works now lost; but his great Natural History in thirty-seven books with its vast collection of facts (and alleged facts) survives—a mine of information despite its uncritical character.

The contents of the books are as follows. Book 1: table of contents of the others and of authorities; 2: mathematical and metrological survey of the universe; 3–6: geography and ethnography of the known world; 7: anthropology and the physiology of man; 8–11: zoology; 12–19: botany, agriculture, and horticulture; 20–27: plant products as used in medicine; 28–32: medical zoology; 33–37: minerals (and medicine), the fine arts, and gemstones.

The Loeb Classical Library edition of Natural History is in ten volumes.

An unrivaled compendium of ancient Roman knowledge.

Pliny the Elder, Gaius Plinius Secundus (AD 23–79), a Roman of equestrian rank of Transpadane Gaul (N. Italy), was uncle of Pliny the letter writer. He pursued a career partly military in Germany, partly administrative in Gaul and Spain under the emperor Vespasian, and became prefect of the fleet at Misenum. He died in the eruption of Vesuvius when he went to get a closer view and to rescue friends. Tireless worker, reader, and writer, he was author of works now lost; but his great Natural History in thirty-seven books with its vast collection of facts (and alleged facts) survives—a mine of information despite its uncritical character.

The contents of the books are as follows. Book 1: table of contents of the others and of authorities; 2: mathematical and metrological survey of the universe; 3–6: geography and ethnography of the known world; 7: anthropology and the physiology of man; 8–11: zoology; 12–19: botany, agriculture, and horticulture; 20–27: plant products as used in medicine; 28–32: medical zoology; 33–37: minerals (and medicine), the fine arts, and gemstones.

The Loeb Classical Library edition of Natural History is in ten volumes.

An unrivaled compendium of ancient Roman knowledge.

Pliny the Elder, Gaius Plinius Secundus (AD 23–79), a Roman of equestrian rank of Transpadane Gaul (N. Italy), was uncle of Pliny the letter writer. He pursued a career partly military in Germany, partly administrative in Gaul and Spain under the emperor Vespasian, and became prefect of the fleet at Misenum. He died in the eruption of Vesuvius when he went to get a closer view and to rescue friends. Tireless worker, reader, and writer, he was author of works now lost; but his great Natural History in thirty-seven books with its vast collection of facts (and alleged facts) survives—a mine of information despite its uncritical character.

The contents of the books are as follows. Book 1: table of contents of the others and of authorities; 2: mathematical and metrological survey of the universe; 3–6: geography and ethnography of the known world; 7: anthropology and the physiology of man; 8–11: zoology; 12–19: botany, agriculture, and horticulture; 20–27: plant products as used in medicine; 28–32: medical zoology; 33–37: minerals (and medicine), the fine arts, and gemstones.

The Loeb Classical Library edition of Natural History is in ten volumes.

Following nature in pursuit of ethics.

Seneca, Lucius Annaeus, born at Corduba (Cordova) ca. 4 BC, of a prominent and wealthy family, spent an ailing childhood and youth at Rome in an aunt’s care. He became famous in rhetoric, philosophy, money-making, and imperial service. After some disgrace during Claudius’ reign he became tutor and then, in AD 54, advising minister to Nero, some of whose worst misdeeds he did not prevent. Involved (innocently?) in a conspiracy, he killed himself by order in 65. Wealthy, he preached indifference to wealth; evader of pain and death, he preached scorn of both; and there were other contrasts between practice and principle.

We have Seneca’s philosophical or moral essays (ten of them traditionally called Dialogues)—on providence, steadfastness, the happy life, anger, leisure, tranquility, the brevity of life, gift-giving, forgiveness—and treatises on natural phenomena. Also extant are 124 epistles, in which he writes in a relaxed style about moral and ethical questions, relating them to personal experiences; a skit on the official deification of Claudius, Apocolocyntosis (in LCL 15); and nine rhetorical tragedies on ancient Greek themes. Many epistles and all his speeches are lost.

The treatises on natural phenomena, Naturales Quaestiones, are collected in Volumes VII and X of the Loeb Classical Library’s ten-volume edition of Seneca.

Following nature in pursuit of ethics.

Seneca, Lucius Annaeus, born at Corduba (Cordova) ca. 4 BC, of a prominent and wealthy family, spent an ailing childhood and youth at Rome in an aunt’s care. He became famous in rhetoric, philosophy, money-making, and imperial service. After some disgrace during Claudius’ reign he became tutor and then, in AD 54, advising minister to Nero, some of whose worst misdeeds he did not prevent. Involved (innocently?) in a conspiracy, he killed himself by order in 65. Wealthy, he preached indifference to wealth; evader of pain and death, he preached scorn of both; and there were other contrasts between practice and principle.

We have Seneca’s philosophical or moral essays (ten of them traditionally called Dialogues)—on providence, steadfastness, the happy life, anger, leisure, tranquility, the brevity of life, gift-giving, forgiveness—and treatises on natural phenomena. Also extant are 124 epistles, in which he writes in a relaxed style about moral and ethical questions, relating them to personal experiences; a skit on the official deification of Claudius, Apocolocyntosis (in LCL 15); and nine rhetorical tragedies on ancient Greek themes. Many epistles and all his speeches are lost.

The treatises on natural phenomena, Naturales Quaestiones, are collected in Volumes VII and X of the Loeb Classical Library’s ten-volume edition of Seneca.

Little is known about Nefertiti, the Egyptian queen whose name means “a beautiful woman has come.” She was the wife of Akhenaten, the pharaoh who ushered in the dramatic Amarna Age, and she bore him at least six children. She played a prominent role in political and religious affairs, but after Akhenaten’s death she apparently vanished and was soon forgotten.

Yet Nefertiti remains one of the most famous and enigmatic women who ever lived. Her instantly recognizable face adorns a variety of modern artifacts, from expensive jewelry to cheap postcards, t-shirts, and bags, all over the world. She has appeared on page, stage, screen, and opera. In Britain, one woman has spent hundreds of thousands of pounds on plastic surgery in hope of resembling the long-dead royal. This enduring obsession is the result of just one object: the lovely and mysterious Nefertiti bust, created by the sculptor Thutmose and housed in Berlin’s Neues Museum since before World War II.

In Nefertiti’s Face, Egyptologist Joyce Tyldesley tells the story of the bust, from its origins in a busy workshop of the late Bronze Age to its rediscovery and controversial removal to Europe in 1912 and its present status as one of the world’s most treasured artifacts. This wide-ranging history takes us from the temples and tombs of ancient Egypt to wartime Berlin and engages the latest in Pharaonic scholarship. Tyldesley sheds light on both Nefertiti’s life and her improbable afterlife, in which she became famous simply for being famous.

The preeminent lyric poet of ancient Greece.

Of the Greek lyric poets, Pindar (ca. 518–438 BC) was “by far the greatest for the magnificence of his inspiration” in Quintilian’s view; Horace judged him “sure to win Apollo’s laurels.” The esteem of the ancients may help explain why a good portion of his work was carefully preserved. Most of the Greek lyric poets come down to us only in bits and pieces, but nearly a quarter of Pindar’s poems survive complete. William H. Race now brings us, in two volumes, a new edition and translation of the four books of victory odes, along with surviving fragments of Pindar’s other poems.

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.

Race provides brief introductions to each ode and full explanatory footnotes, offering the reader invaluable guidance to these often difficult poems. His Loeb Pindar also contains a helpfully annotated edition and translation of significant fragments, including hymns, paeans, dithyrambs, maiden songs, and dirges.

Alcibiades was one of the most dazzling figures of the Golden Age of Athens. A ward of Pericles and a friend of Socrates, he was spectacularly rich, bewitchingly handsome and charismatic, a skilled general, and a ruthless politician. He was also a serial traitor, infamous for his dizzying changes of loyalty in the Peloponnesian War. Nemesis tells the story of this extraordinary life and the turbulent world that Alcibiades set out to conquer.

David Stuttard recreates ancient Athens at the height of its glory as he follows Alcibiades from childhood to political power. Outraged by Alcibiades’ celebrity lifestyle, his enemies sought every chance to undermine him. Eventually, facing a capital charge of impiety, Alcibiades escaped to the enemy, Sparta. There he traded military intelligence for safety until, suspected of seducing a Spartan queen, he was forced to flee again—this time to Greece’s long-term foes, the Persians. Miraculously, though, he engineered a recall to Athens as Supreme Commander, but—suffering a reversal—he took flight to Thrace, where he lived as a warlord. At last in Anatolia, tracked by his enemies, he died naked and alone in a hail of arrows.

As he follows Alcibiades’ journeys crisscrossing the Mediterranean from mainland Greece to Syracuse, Sardis, and Byzantium, Stuttard weaves together the threads of Alcibiades’ adventures against a backdrop of cultural splendor and international chaos. Navigating often contradictory evidence, Nemesis provides a coherent and spellbinding account of a life that has gripped historians, storytellers, and artists for more than two thousand years.

Major revisions in this widely used text include:
1. Larger typefaces for all Greek paradigms;
2. Greatly expanded vocabularies, both Greek-English and English-Greek;
3. New review exercises for each lesson in both Greek and English;
4. New appendices listing 75 irregular verbs with their principal parts and the prepositions with their meanings. At many points the expositions, notes, and lesson vocabularies are expanded and the English sentences revised.

Plato’s unusual combination of argumentative and creative talents complicates any interpretative approach to his work, as does his choice of Socrates as a major figure. In recent years, scholars have looked more closely at the philosophical importance of the imaginative and literary aspects of Plato’s writing, and have begun to appreciate the methods of the ancient philosophers and commentators who studied Plato and their attitudes to Plato’s appropriation of Socrates.

This study brings together leading philosophical and literary scholars who investigate these new–old approaches and their significance in distancing us from the standard ways of reading Plato. Confronting the standard modern readings more directly, this work attempts to present the outcomes of these investigations to readers in a way that will encourage further exploration and innovative engagement.

Antiquity’s most influential account of life’s Supreme Good.

Aristotle, great Greek philosopher, researcher, reasoner, and writer, born at Stagirus in 384 BC, was the son of a physician. He studied under Plato at Athens and taught there (367–347); subsequently he spent three years at the court of a former pupil in Asia Minor. After some time at Mitylene, in 343–342 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). 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.

The Loeb Classical Library edition of Aristotle is in twenty-three volumes.

A marginalized but persistent figure of Greek tragedy, Niobe, whose many children were killed by Apollo and Artemis, embodies yet problematizes the philosophically charged dialectics between life and death, mourning and melancholy, animation and inanimation, silence and logos. The essays in Niobes present her as a set of complex figurations, an elusive mythical character but also an overdetermined figure who has long exerted a profound influence on various modes of modern thought, especially in the domains of aesthetics, ethics, psychoanalysis, and politics. As a symbol of both exclusion and resistance, Niobe calls for critical attention at a time of global crisis.

Reconstructing the dialogues of Phillis Wheatley, G. W. F. Hegel, Walter Benjamin, Aby Warburg, and others with Niobe as she appears in Aeschylus, Sophocles, Ovid, and the visual arts, a collective of major thinkers—classicists, art historians, and critical theorists—reflect on the space that she can occupy in the humanities today. Inspiring new ways of connecting the classical tradition and ancient tragic discourse with crises and political questions relating to gender, race, and social justice, Niobe insists on living on.

Contributors:  
Barbara Baert, Andrew Benjamin, drea brown, Adriana Cavarero, Rebecca Comay, Mildred Galland-Szymkowiak, John T. Hamilton, Paul A. Kottman, Jacques Lezra, Andres Matlock, Ben Radcliffe, Victoria Rimell, Mario Telò, Mathura Umachandran, Daniel Villegas Vélez 

A Times Higher Education Book of the Week

A virulent strain of antifeminism is thriving online that treats women’s empowerment as a mortal threat to men and to the integrity of Western civilization. Its proponents cite ancient Greek and Latin texts to support their claims—from Ovid’s Ars Amatoria to Seneca and Marcus Aurelius—arguing that they articulate a model of masculinity that sustained generations but is now under siege. Not All Dead White Men reveals that some of the most controversial and consequential debates about the legacy of the ancients are raging not in universities but online.

“A chilling account of trolling, misogyny, racism, and bad history proliferated online by the Alt-Right… Zuckerberg makes a persuasive case for why we need a new, more critical, and less comfortable relationship between the ancient and modern worlds in this important and very timely book.”
—Emily Wilson, translator of The Odyssey

“Explores how ideas about Ancient Greece and Rome are used and misused by antifeminist thinkers today.”
—Time

“Zuckerberg presciently analyzes these communities’…embrace of stoicism as a self-help tool to gain confidence, jobs, and girlfriends. Their adoration of men like Marcus Aurelius, Epictetus, and Ovid…is founded in a limited and distorted interpretation of ancient philosophy…lending heft and authority to sexism and abuse.”
—The Nation

“Traces the application—and misapplication—of classical authors and texts in online communities that see feminism as a threat.”
—Bitch Media