Greek Poetry

Full of tragic heroes, intoxicating love stories, and the unstoppable force of fate, there is no conflict more iconic than the Trojan War. Troy is the story of the epic battle retold by Fry with drama, humor, and vivid emotion. Achilles, Hector, Odysseus, Helen, their lovers, and their mortal enemies all burn bright in Fry's compelling prose. This volume invites you to explore a captivating world with a brilliant storyteller as your guide.

Argonautika is the story of Jason and the Argonauts and their quest for the Golden Fleece. This epic story of gods and goddesses, mythical beasts, thrilling adventures, and narrow escapes may be the oldest surviving Greek myth, which Homer referred to as something "familiar to all." Listen to this masterpiece of classical literature in an all-new translation that captures the timeless magic and quiet humor of this ancient legend.

The earliest surviving works of ancient Greek literature, dating back to the early Archaic period, are the two epic poems the Iliad and the Odyssey. These two epics, along with the Homeric Hymns and the two poems of Hesiod, Theogony and Works and Days, comprised the major foundations of the Greek literary tradition that would continue into the Classical, Hellenistic, and Roman periods. This carefully selected collection contains: The Odyssey ; The Works and Days ; Theogony ; The Complete Poems of Sappho ; Medea ; Antigone ; Agamemnon ; The Choephori ; Eumenides.

The ancient Greeks revered Homer and Hesiod and often cited their names together in theological and theological works. While the two could have been contemporaries, some estimate that Hesiod lived up to 100 years after Homer. Sappho was an ancient Greek poetess and musician. She pioneered song lyrics and the ancient Greeks included her in the canon of nine lyric poets. Plato even numbered her among the Parnassian goddesses, referring to her as the tenth muse.

Are you ready to embark on a journey into the mind of one of history's most intriguing philosophers? Empedocles for Beginners: Understanding the Philosopher of Love and Strife invites you to explore the groundbreaking ideas that have shaped our understanding of the universe for centuries. Uncover the Life of Empedocles: Step into ancient Greece and meet Empedocles, the philosopher who blended science with poetry. Discover how his adventurous life and bold ideas broke new ground and left an indelible mark on Western thought. Understand the Four Elements: Learn about Empedocles’ ...

The Nature of Things was written in the 1st century BC by Roman polymath Lucretius. It is written as a didactic poem, and explains Epicurean physics.

Bound by destiny, Melisto and Rhaskos - Amber and Clay - never meet in the flesh. By the time they do, one of them is a ghost. But the thin line between life and death is just one boundary their unlikely friendship crosses. It takes an army of snarky gods and fearsome goddesses, slaves and masters, mothers and philosophers to help shape their story into a gorgeously distilled, symphonic tour de force.

The award-winning poet Anne Carson reinvents a genre in Autobiography of Red, a stunning work that is both a novel and a poem, both an unconventional recreation of an ancient Greek myth and a wholly original coming-of-age story set in the present.

This amazing collection of poetry from the famous Greek Anthology spans over 1,500 years of ancient Greek and Byzantine history. The selections in this recording were chosen and translated by famed classicist J. W. Mackail.

McKinley introduces his readers to over thirty authors of the ancient classics, illuminating who they were, the times they lived in, and their works that have come down to us through the millennia. In the process, we are introduced to the world-changing historical events of antiquity from the Greco-Persian Wars to the centuries of conquests that built the Roman Empire. Rather than reading second-hand accounts, we share the experience through the words of the men who lived and wrote this history, from Thucydides to Julius Caesar. We read multiple original accounts of decisive events such as ...

Setting aside the streamlining, modernizing approach of many recent translations, Mendelsohn artfully reproduces the epic’s formal qualities – meter, enjambment, alliteration, assonance – and in so doing restores to Homer’s masterwork its archaic grandeur. His expansive six-beat line, far closer to the original than that of other recent translations, allows him to capture each of Homer’s verses line for line, without sacrificing the amplitude and shadings of the original.

Sometimes I look at them wielding motionless swords, brows disfigured in permanent rage, mouths open to scream curses that no one will hear. Sometimes I look at the men who tried to kill me. "The Secret Face" is the first poetry collection from Elektra Flowers. Touching on eternal themes of love, belonging, alienation, and the raw emotions that come from living in the modern world. Poems featured include: "Medusa," a poem from the perspective of the Greek goddess, reflecting on the men she's turned to stone. "Opportunity," an elegy to the Mars rover. "The Ballerina," a vision set in a ...

In his latest book of poems, Manolis celebrates the “imperfect perfection of the imperfect chaos,” energetic and lucid philosophic meditations on the mysteries of being human. Übermensch is derived from one of Nietzsche’s most challenging and frequently misunderstood concepts, the Superman or Overman. Nietzsche believed that we are capable of being better than we are, possessing more understanding, more compassion, greater wisdom and more awareness which allows humanism to fill the void left by the absence of God. As Virgil led Dante on his midlife journey, the Übermensch is our ...

ANTONY FOSTIERIS belongs to the poets of the seventies. His poetic language stands out for its clarity and tone of familiarity. It is a dense and talkative language in which the poet formulates his craft based on a combination and spherical approach to his internal and external worlds. The main characteristic of his poetry is the combination of emotional and aesthetic elements with philosophical meditation. He is a crafty poet, a great image creator, who exploits the multiple meanings of words. Dense, glossy, glamorous, precise as a clock mechanism, whose tick sounds like a heartbeat, ...

In this amazing collection, Manolis introduces us to the life work of Greek poet, Yannis Ritsos. This translated collection paints the poetry of a man's life and as such it captures the great magnitude of that life lived. From the sea-soaked childhood through the impatient adventures of a naïve summer youth and shattered innocence. The reader can follow the poet, Ritsos, through the heartache of life to experience the shifting of his voice into a maturity that is cynical and painful but edged with truth. And all is enveloped in the metaphor of nature, upon the backdrop of a Greece, painted...

For years I’ve prepared myself for that big moment the miracle of the century, on the other hand you have to admit I’m one of a kind in my field — but, God, what happened, who betrayed me, where they found all the proof? The procedure was quick the district attorney to the point, “are you him?” he asked me, “him” I answered is there any worst charge?

In Vernal Equinox, his third volume of poetry from Ekstasis, the Greek emigre poet Manolis is at his most intimately eloquent and passionately exuberant. As with Ovid, as with Neruda, the quotidian and the ordinary is transcended by Eros. The poems in this volume are taut, lyrical and informed by a powerful and subtle music, infused by un-sentimental directness and sensual precision. Working within the domain of consciously reduced perceptions, Manolis pushes language to its outer edge, locating the sayable within the shifting tumult of the real. Moment to moment the poems move through the ...

The poet Titos Patrikios at 93 years of age certainly can feel content with his many years in poetry from 1940ies to today an eighty year long career of artistic activity; his voluminous work has endured time, has been read and re-read, has received positive comments and reviews as well as criticisms. He has never shied away from showing up anywhere he’s been invited, indeed he has become an icon in the Athens poetic circles and the social dimension of his poetry has been, and still is, a point of reference for both its political overtones, its cultural foundation but also its technical ...

From Seferis’ speech at the Swedish Academy I belong to a small country. A rocky promontory in the Mediterranean, it has nothing to distinguish it but the efforts of its people, the sea, and the light of the sun. It is a small country, but its tradition is immense and has been handed down through the centuries without interruption. The Greek language has never ceased to be spoken. It has undergone the changes that all living things experience, but there has never been a gap. This tradition is characterized by love of the human; justice is its norm. In the tightly organized classical ...

The idea of sexual fluidity may seem new, but it is at least as old as the ancient Greeks, who wrote about queer experiences with remarkable frankness, wit, and insight. How to Be Queer is an infatuating collection of these writings about desire, love, and lust between men, between women, and between humans and gods, in lucid and lively new translations.