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Volume I of the nine-volume Loeb edition of Early Greek Philosophy presents the editors' preface and introductory notes along with essential reference materials including abbreviations, bibliography, concordances, indexes, and glossary.

In Poetics Aristotle (384-322 BCE) treats Greek tragedy and epic. The subject of On the Sublime, attributed to an (unidentifiable) Longinus and probably composed in the first century CE is greatness in writing. On Style, attributed to an (unidentifiable) Demetrius and perhaps composed in the second century BCE, analyzes four literary styles.

Cicero was a prodigious letter writer, and many of his letters have survived. Published in three volumes, "Letters to Friends" contains some 435 letters between Cicero and his friends and acquaintances.

Cast in the form of a dialogue, this title treats subjects as diverse as the divinity of the Sun and the quirks of human digestion while showcasing Virgil as the master of all human knowledge from diction and rhetoric to philosophy and religion.

In Memorabilia and in Oeconomicus, a dialogue about household management, we see the philosopher Socrates through the eyes of his associate, Xenophon. In the Symposium, we obtain insight on life in Athens. Xenophon's Apology is an interesting complement to Plato's account of Socrates' defense at his trial.

Euripides (c. 485-406 BCE) has been prized in every age for his emotional and intellectual drama. Eighteen of his ninety or so plays survive complete, including Medea, Hippolytus, and Bacchae, one of the great masterpieces of the tragic genre. Fragments of his lost plays also survive.

Theocritus (early third century BCE) was the inventor of the bucolic genre, also known as pastoral. The present edition of his work, along with that of his successors Moschus (fl. mid-second century BCE) and Bion (fl. around 100 BCE), replaces the earlier Loeb Classical Library volume of Greek Bucolic Poets by J. M. Edmonds (1912).

Sophocles (497/6-406 BCE), considered one of the world's greatest poets, forged tragedy from the heroic excess of myth and legend. Seven complete plays are extant, including Oedipus Tyrannus, Ajax, Antigone, and Philoctetes. Among many fragments that also survive is a substantial portion of the satyr drama The Searchers.

In Method of Medicine, Galen (129--199 CE) provides a comprehensive and influential account of the principles of treating injury and disease. Enlivening the detailed case studies are many theoretical and polemical discussions, acute social commentary, and personal reflections.

Bite and wit characterize two seminal and stellar authors in the history of satirical writing, Persius (34-62 CE) and Juvenal (writing about sixty years later). The latter especially had a lasting influence on English writers of the Renaissance and succeeding centuries.

First published 1920-1925. Frequently and varyingly republished and reprinted.

The great Athenian philosopher Plato was born in 427 BCE and lived to be eighty. Acknowledged masterpieces among his works are the Symposium, which explores love in its many aspects, from physical desire to pursuit of the beautiful and the good, and the Republic, which concerns righteousness and also treats education, gender, society, and slavery.

Euripides (c. 485-406 BCE) has been prized in every age for his emotional and intellectual drama. Eighteen of his ninety or so plays survive complete, including Medea, Hippolytus, and Bacchae, one of the great masterpieces of the tragic genre. Fragments of his lost plays also survive.

Pliny the Elder (23-79 CE) produced in his Natural History a vast compendium of Roman knowledge. Topics included are the mathematics and metrology of the universe; world geography and ethnography; human anthropology and physiology; zoology; botany, agriculture, and horticulture; medicine; minerals, fine arts, and gemstones.

Menander (?344/3-292/1 BCE), the dominant figure in New Comedy, wrote over 100 plays, of which one complete play, substantial portions of six others, and smaller but interesting fragments have been recovered. The complete play, Dyskolos (The Peevish Fellow), won first prize in Athens in 317 BCE.

Nearly all the works Aristotle (384-322 BCE) prepared for publication are lost; the priceless ones extant are lecture-materials, notes, and memoranda (some are spurious). They can be categorized as practical; logical; physical; metaphysical; on art; other; fragments.

Pliny the Elder (23-79 CE) produced in his Natural History a vast compendium of Roman knowledge. Topics included are the mathematics and metrology of the universe; world geography and ethnography; human anthropology and physiology; zoology; botany, agriculture, and horticulture; medicine; minerals, fine arts, and gemstones.

Brings together, with explanatory notes, the work of the Hellenistic comic playwright, Menander. This volume contains the surviving portions of ten plays, including "Misoumenos" ("The Man She Hated"), which presents the flawed relationship of a soldier and a captive girl.

Describes a series of dinner parties at which the guests quote extensively from Greek literature. This work (which dates to the very end of the 2nd century A.D.) also contains a range of information about different cuisines, the music and entertainments that ornamented banquets, and the intellectual talk that was the heart of Greek conviviality.

The correspondence of Cicero (106-43 BCE) with his brother, Quintus, and with Brutus is a window onto their world. Two invective speeches linked with Cicero are probably anonymous exercises. The Letter to Octavian likely dates from the third or fourth century CE. The Handbook of Electioneering was said to be written by Quintus to Cicero.

Eight works or parts of works were ascribed to Manetho, a third century BCE Egyptian, all on history and religion and all apparently in Greek. They survive only as quoted by other writers and include the spurious Book of Sothis. The Kings of Thebes (in Egypt) and the Old Chronicle are doubtful.

Enquiry into Plants and De Causis Plantarum by Theophrastus (c. 370-c. 285 BCE) are a counterpart to Aristotle's zoological work and the most important botanical work of antiquity now extant. In the former Theophrastus classifies and describes. His On Odours and Weather Signs are minor treatises.

The surviving works of the Roman Emperor Julian "the Apostate" (331 or 332-363 CE) include eight Orations; Misopogon (Beard-hater), assailing the morals of the people of Antioch; more than eighty Letters; and fragments of Against the Galileans, written mainly to show that the Old Testament lacks evidence for the idea of Christianity.

We know more of Marcus Tullius Cicero (106-43 BCE), lawyer, orator, politician and philosopher, than of any other Roman. Besides much else, his work conveys the turmoil of his time, and the part he played in a period that saw the rise and fall of Julius Caesar in a tottering republic.

The classical and Christian worlds meet in Boethius (c. 480-524 CE), the last writer of purely literary Latin from antiquity. His Tractates examine the Trinity and incarnation in Aristotelian terms. His Consolation of Philosophy, a dialogue between himself and Philosophy, is theistic in tone but draws on Greek, especially Neoplatonist, sources.

Claudius Claudianus (c. 370-c. 410 CE) gives us important knowledge of Honorius's time and displays poetic as well as rhetorical skill, command of language, and diversity. A panegyric on the brothers Probinus and Olybrius (consuls together in 395 CE) was followed mostly by epics in hexameters, but also by elegiacs, epistles, epigrams, and idylls.

Demosthenes (384-322 BCE), orator at Athens, was a pleader in law courts who also became a champion of Athenian greatness and Greek resistance to Philip of Macedon. His steadfastness, pungent argument, and control of language gained him early reputation as the best of Greek orators, and his works provide vivid pictures of contemporary life.

In Secret History the Byzantine historian Procopius (late fifth century to after 558 CE) attacks the sixth century CE emperor Justinian and empress Theodora and alleges their ruinous effect on the Roman empire. Procopius' pen is particularly sharp in portraying Theodora's lewdness, duplicity, cruelty, spite, vanity and pride.

Antiphon of Athens, born c. 480 BCE, disliked democracy and was an ardent oligarch. Of his fifteen extant works three concern real murder cases. The others are academic exercises. Andocides of Athens, born c. 440 BCE, disliked the extremes of democracy and oligarchy. Of his four extant speeches Against Alcibiades is doubtful.

Extant early Latin writings from the seventh or sixth to the first century BCE include epic, drama, satire, translation and paraphrase, hymns, stage history and practice, and other works by Ennius, Caecilius, Livius Andronicus, Naevius, Pacuvius, Accius, Lucilius, and other anonymous authors; the Twelve Tables of Roman law; archaic inscriptions.