Twelve Voices from Greece and Rome is a book for all readers who want
to know more about the literature that underpins Western civilization.
Chistopher Pelling and Maria Wyke provide a vibrant and distinctive
introduction to twelve of the greatest authors from ancient Greece and
Rome, writers whose voices still resonate strongly across the centuries:
Homer, Sappho, Herodotus, Euripides, Thucydides, Plato, Caesar, Cicero,
Virgil, Horace, Juvenal, and Tacitus.
To what vital ideas do these authors give voice? And why are we so often
drawn to what they say even in modern times? Twelve Voices
investigates these tantalizing questions, showing how these great
figures from classical antiquity still address some of our most
fundamental concerns in the world today (of war and courage,
dictatorship and democracy, empire, immigration, city life, art,
madness, irrationality, and religious commitment), and express some of
our most personal sentiments (about family and friendship, desire and
separation, grief and happiness).
These twelve classical voices can sound both compellingly familiar and
startlingly alien to the twenty-first century reader. Yet they remain
suggestive and inspiring, despite being rooted in their own times and
places, and have profoundly affected the lives of those prepared to
listen to them right up to the present day.
