Synopses & Reviews
Virgil lived through the fall of the Roman Republic and the establishment of the Empire. In his poems we see a series of attempts, increasingly ambitious in scale and conception, to combine technical brilliance and beauty with profound meditation on the nature of imperialism and the relation of the individual to the State. From short pastoral poems on love and song he progressed to the heroic myth of the founding of Rome. "The Aeneid", immediately recognised as the greatest masterpiece of Latin literature, has had incalculable influence on European literature in the two thousand years since it was first published.
Synopsis
With the Greekless reader firmly in mind, this text provides a fresh modern translation of Aineias Tacitus' "How to Survive Under Siege", a comprehensive introduction to Aineias and his work, and a full historical commentary.
Synopsis
Aineias Tacticus (mid-fourth century B.C.) is not only the earliest but also the most historically interesting of ancient military writers. Uniquely important, too, as a social commentator, he sheds valuable light on the nature of life and the psychological and strategic preoccupations of a typical Greek city-state at a time dominated by two extraordinarily atypical ones, Athens and Sparta. In Aineias' work we see what conditions were like in a city-state obliged to play a minor and much more passive role in the history of its age -- not laying siege like the big players but suffering it. His practical recommendations derive clearly from accumulated personal experience in the first place; but at the same time he also draws copious illustrative material from both Herodotus and Thucydides.
Synopsis
With the Greekless reader firmly in mind, this text provides a fresh modern translation of Aineias Tacitus' "How to Survive Under Siege", a comprehensive introduction to Aineias and his work, and a full historical commentary.