The Penguin Book of Greek and Latin Lyric Verse Paperback by Translated and Edited by Christopher Childers; Afterword by Glenn W. Most

Product Details

• Publisher: Penguin Classics (2025-08-12)
• Language: English
• Paperback: 1008 pages
• ISBN-13: 9780141392134
• Item Weight: 691.74 grams
• Dimensions: 7.78 x 5.14 x 1.78 cm

A window onto the past, full of fire and life: two immortal traditions as the English language has never seen them before

A Penguin Classic

The poets in this book are philosophers and statesmen; priestesses and warriors; teenage girls, concerned for their birthday celebrations; drunkards and brawlers; grumpy old men and chic young things. They speak of hopes, fears, loves, losses, triumphs and humiliations. Every one of them lived and died between 1,900 and 2,800 years ago. The Penguin Book of Greek and Latin Lyric Verse is a volume without precedent. It brings together the best of two traditions normally treated in isolation, and in doing so tells a captivating story about how literary book-culture emerged out of a society structured by song. The classical vision of lyric poetry as practised by the greatest ancient poets - Sappho and Horace, Bacchylides and Catullus - mingles and interacts with our expansive modern understanding of the lyric as the brief, personal, emotional poetry of a human soul laid bare. Anyone looking for a picture of what ancient poets were up to when they weren't composing national epics, manuals in verse or pieces for the tragic or comic stage - when they were instead singing to the gods, or to their friends, or otherwise opening little verbal windows into their life and times - can find it here. It is a magisterial accomplishment, astonishing in its ambition and thrilling in scope.

About the Author

Glenn W. Most (afterword, introducer) teaches Classics and related fields in the Committee on Social Thought at the University of Chicago; until 2020 he was Professor of Greek Philology at the Scuola Normale Superiore di Pisa.

Christopher Childers (anthology Editor, translator) studied Classics at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and poetry at Johns Hopkins University. He lives in Baltimore, where he teaches Latin, coaches squash and tennis, and watches over his pet fish and budgies.