Bede's theological works were chiefly commentaries, mostly allegorical in method, based with acknowledgment on Jerome, Augustine, Ambrose, Gregory, and others, but bearing his own personality. In another class were works on grammar and one on natural phenomena; special interest in the vexed question of Easter led him to write about the calendar and chronology. But his most admired production is his Ecclesiastical History of the English Nation. Here a clear and simple style united with descriptive powers to produce an elegant work, and the facts diligently collected from good sources make it a valuable account. The Loeb Classical Library edition of Bede's historical works is in two volumes.

Historical also are his Lives of the Abbots of his monastery, the less successful accounts (in verse and prose) of Cuthbert, and the Letter (November 734) to Egbert his pupil, so important for our knowledge about the Church in Northumbria.

The greatest of the Greek orators, Demosthenes has been admired since antiquity for his dynamic style and variety of persuasive techniques, for his "force and effectiveness" and "majesty of utterance" (in Plutarch's words). Especially notable is the way he brings life to speeches by use of vivid detail.

The first of the seven volumes of the Demosthenes edition contains nine famous speeches in which he attempted to rouse athenian alarm about Macedonian ambitions: the three Olynthiacs, the four Philippics, On the Peace, and On the Chersonese. Here too are Philip of Macedon's letter to Athens declaring war and the Answer to Philip's letter.

From the Iliad to Aristophanes, from the gospel of Matthew to Augustine, Greek and Latin texts are constellated with descriptive images of dreams. This cultural history of dreams in antiquity draws on both contemporary post-Freudian science and careful critiques of the ancient texts. Harris takes an elusive subject and writes about it with rigor and precision, reminding us of specificities, contexts, and changing attitudes through history.

One of antiquity's greatest poets, Euripides (ca. 485-406 BCE) has been prized in every age for the pathos, terror, surprising plot twists, and intellectual probing of his dramatic creations. He wrote nearly ninety plays, of which eighteen have come down to us (plus a play of unknown authorship long included with his works). In this new Loeb Classical Library edition of Euripides, David Kovacs presents a freshly edited Greek text and an accurate and graceful translation with explanatory notes.

Cyclops is a satyr play, the only complete example of this genre to survive. Alcestis tells the story of a woman who agrees--in order to save her husband's life--to die in his place. Medea is the quintessential tragedy of revenge: Medea kills her own children, as well as their father's new wife, to punish him for desertion.

In a masterful study Carl Richard explores how the Greek and Roman classics became enshrined in American antebellum culture. For the first time, knowledge of the classics extended beyond aristocratic males to the middle class, women, African Americans, and frontier settlers. The Civil War led to a radical alteration of the educational system in a way that steadily eroded the preeminence of the classics. 

This book is about the Homeric figure Nestor. This study is important because it reveals a level of deliberate irony in the Homeric poems that has hitherto not been suspected, and because Nestor’s role in the poems, which is built on this irony, is a key to the circumstances of the poems’ composition. Interpreted in the context of the Indo-European twin myth, Nestor’s role clearly points beyond itself to the key question in Homeric studies: the circumstances of the poems’ composition.

Homer the Classic is about the reception of Homeric poetry from the fifth through the first century BCE. The aim of this book, which centers on ancient concepts of Homer as the author of a body of poetry that we know as the Iliad and the Odyssey, is not to reassess the oral poetic heritage of Homeric poetry but to show how it became a classic in the days of the Athenian empire and later. This volume is one of two books stemming from six Sather Classical Lectures given in the spring semester of 2002 at the University of California at Berkeley while the author was teaching there as the Sather Professor.

The world has long wished for more of Sappho’s poetry, which exists mostly in tantalizing fragments. This volume is the first collection of essays in English devoted to discussion of a newly recovered Sappho poem and two other incomplete texts on the same papyri. Using different approaches, the contributions demonstrate how the “New Sappho” can be appreciated as a complete, gracefully spare poetic statement regarding the painful inevitability of death and aging.