Books in the Oxford Approaches to Classical Literature series

Presents the story of Caesar's contest with the Pompeian party through nineteen months of the civil war. This work offers an account of the troubled Roman empire near the turn to the common era. It shows the brilliance for which Caesar's oratory, like his generalship, was known. It includes maps, an explanation of technical terms and a glossary.

In this, the first book-length discussion of Cicero's Catilinarians, D. H. Berry considers how the speeches should be interpreted as literature. Can we treat them as representing what Cicero actually said? Or do we have to read them merely as political pamphlets from a later time?

This introduction considers how Ovid defined and shaped his narrative 'Metamorphoses', its cultural context, and its vivid depictions of the cruelty of jealous gods, the pathos of human love, and the imaginative fantasy of flight, monsters, magic, and illusion.

This title introduce readers to 'The Symposium' by contextualizing it in Greek literature in general and the Platonic corpus in particular, and, with necessary brevity, to the main outlines of its reception and influence.

Aristophanes is widely credited with having elevated the classical art of comedy to the level of legitimacy and recognition that only tragedy had hitherto achieved. This book provides an invaluable companion to one of Aristophanes' most cherished works, Frogs.

Xenophon's Anabasis, or The Expedition of Cyrus, is one of the most famous survival stories ever written and the most important autobiographical work to have survived from ancient Greece. This book places the Anabasis in its historical and literary context and opens up for the reader different ways of interpreting its major themes.

Horace's Odes are one of the greatest achievements of Latin literature. Richard Tarrant situates the Odes in the context of Horace's poetic career and defines their relationship to earlier literature. A number of poems are analyzed in detail, illustrating Horace's range of subject matter and his characteristic techniques of form and structure.